Why Israel Deliberately Kills Palestinian Babies, and for What Purpose?
A United Nations investigative team has found a pattern of Israeli military attacks in Gaza that consciously target children and infants for mass extermination, deeming the violence unleashed by Israeli forces as unjustified and vastly disproportionate in scale.
Citing a report from Russia Today, the chair of the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Justice S. Muralidhar, disclosed forensic and medical evidence indicating that Palestinian babies were deliberately shot in the head and neck to cause maximum damage. Israeli forces used advanced quadcopter drones equipped with thermal imaging cameras, enabling them to clearly distinguish children from adults, and fired small cubic pellets that function like cluster munitions to destroy the internal organs of infants.
“When you shoot a 10-day-old baby in the head while it is suckling on its mother, you simply cannot label that baby an enemy of the State of Israel and justify such an attack,” Muralidhar condemned during an exclusive interview with RT India. The former chief justice of the Odisha High Court added that some Israeli soldiers have even admitted on television broadcasts to targeting children using quadcopters and receiving praise from their commanders. “So it becomes very clear… that babies are a special target,” Muralidhar stressed.
The UN body also rejected the Israeli military’s pretext of Hamas’s presence in hospitals and schools to legalise their military operations. “The excuse that Hamas may be using hospitals and schools as bases to launch its attacks does not justify the total destruction of 97 percent of all schools in Gaza,” Muralidhar continued. The latest Gaza war began with a Hamas attack on southern Israel on 7 October 2023, which killed around 1,200 people and took more than 250 hostages. Israel’s retaliatory military operation has since devastated much of the territory, killing over 73,000 Palestinians and wounding more than 173,000, according to local health authorities.
Muralidhar explained that one element of genocide clearly visible on the ground is the systematic effort to prevent births, with pregnant women targeted and left to suffer from malnutrition. Hospital equipment was deliberately destroyed while patients were still inside the buildings, and the Israeli military blocked the entry of emergency medicines and new medical supplies. “So one can clearly see a pattern that reproductive health is being targeted. Newborn babies are being targeted,” he stated, adding that orphanages have also been attacked, leaving more than 58,000 children orphaned over the past two years.