A child runs along the beach in Deir al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip on December 10, 2025. (Photo: Bashar Taleb / AFP)
2026/2/14- Union for Justice Foundation
The year 2025 marked another tragic year in which Palestinian children faced genocide, starvation, torture, forced displacement, enforced disappearance, and ongoing extermination at the hands of occupation forces and settlers.
According to documentation collected by the “Union for Justice Foundation,” the ongoing genocide perpetrated by “Israel” in Gaza, in parallel with escalating repression in the West Bank, has systematically stripped Palestinian children of their rights to life, safety, health, and childhood.
Despite overwhelming evidence of mass atrocity crimes, world leaders continued to shield “Israel” from accountability. As a result, Palestinian children remained unprotected while occupation army forces used starvation as a weapon of war, escalated torture in detention centers, forcibly disappeared children in Gaza, and killed and maimed children throughout the occupied territory with complete impunity.
The “Union for Justice Foundation” stated: “Israeli forces killed, maimed, tortured, starved, abducted, and displaced Palestinian children on every single day of 2025. There was not a single moment of safety for any Palestinian child, representing the culmination of decades of impunity enjoyed by occupation army forces and Israeli authorities, who have faced no consequences whatsoever for their crimes against children.”
Childhood in the Crosshairs: A Year of Killing, Maiming, and Enforced Disappearance of Palestine’s Children
Last year, 2025, Israeli forces and settlers killed 65 Palestinian children in the occupied West Bank, according to documentation collected by the Union for Justice.
In the West Bank, occupation forces continue to regularly use live ammunition to carry out deadly raids throughout the West Bank, resulting in the deliberate and indiscriminate killing of children. Eight-year-old Jannat Mator was shot in the head while standing inside her home in Hebron, attempting to pull her younger brother away from the window during a raid by occupation forces; she now faces permanent loss of vision. As for Amr Ali Ahmad Qubaa (13 years old), he was shot seven times after unknowingly approaching an occupation army military site; soldiers prevented paramedics and his father from reaching him for 40 minutes while he was still alive, and access to Amr was only permitted after he had been killed.
Occupation forces also enable and protect settlers who illegally occupy the West Bank. In one case, a settler deliberately rammed his vehicle into Ahmad Wissam Ahmad Odeh (16 years old), causing internal bleeding and a severe head injury. While Ahmad was receiving emergency care, occupation army forces stormed the clinic and threatened and intimidated medical staff and patients.
According to monitoring by the Union for Justice Foundation, Israeli forces continue to withhold the bodies of at least 62 Palestinian children since June 2016. Only six of them have been returned to their families, while the bodies of 56 children remain withheld by the occupation authorities. This practice constitutes collective punishment, violates international humanitarian law, and deprives families of the fundamental right to bury their children with dignity.
In September 2019, the Israeli Supreme Court upheld the state’s authority to confiscate the bodies of Palestinians following multiple legal challenges. Months later, on 27 November 2019, Defense Minister Naftali Bennett ordered the “retention of all bodies of Palestinians accused of attacking Israelis indefinitely.”
In Gaza, the scale of killing, maiming, and the extermination of entire Palestinian families remained catastrophic in 2025. These horrors are embodied in the story of the four children of the Hassouna family. Their nightmare began when occupation army snipers killed their parents, forcing them to survive for two days without food or water beside the bodies of their parents, which were being mauled by stray dogs, until relatives rescued them. Lina, 14 years old, was shot in the chest during the rescue operation and survived multiple surgeries; afterward, she and her siblings continued to face profound psychological trauma. Their current guardian, who now cares for them, is also responsible for 23 other children.
Even the few children evacuated from Gaza face catastrophic injuries, deep psychological trauma, and unbearable uncertainty about their future. Majd Falafel (15 years old), who survived an explosive gunshot wound to the face and months of rudimentary surgeries in besieged hospitals, arrived in Egypt emaciated, unable to chew, and terrified of removing the mask concealing his disfigured face; he continues to await the specialized care he urgently requires.
As for Hanan (four years old) and Musk Deqi (two years old), who lost their limbs in an occupation army airstrike that killed their mother, they face a similar suspended fate; their aunt tends to their wounds in Egypt while doctors explain that the prosthetics and long-term rehabilitation the girls need are unavailable, leaving them stranded away from their homeland without a clear path to recovery or family reunification. For these children, evacuation did not bring safety or stability, but rather a different kind of uncertainty, suspended between the trauma they survived in Gaza and a future no one can promise them.
These stories represent only a small fraction of the children; thousands more remain missing beneath the rubble, in tents, in prisons, and in scattered displacement areas across the Gaza Strip.
Starvation and the Deliberate Destruction of Life-Sustaining Systems
Israel’s use of starvation as a weapon reached unprecedented levels in 2025 as Israeli authorities continued to impose a comprehensive blockade on the Gaza Strip. Food, water, medicine, fuel, and electricity were systematically denied, while agricultural lands, bakeries, mills, water networks, and hospitals were deliberately destroyed.
The Union for Justice Foundation published reports detailing Israel’s deliberate use of starvation to inflict systematic and chronic malnutrition on Palestinian children and newborns in Gaza. The Foundation found that this policy constitutes torture under international law and forms part of a broader genocidal strategy against Palestinians in Gaza.
Infants and newborns were among the most vulnerable groups. During the cold winter months, forty-day-old Adam Shubair nearly died from hypothermia after repeated forced displacements forced his family to live in an unheated tent. Fifty-five-day-old Sham Al-Shanbari died when freezing temperatures overcame her malnourished body after the occupation destroyed their home and surrounding civilian infrastructure. During the summer, after enduring months of siege, infants and newborns were unable to obtain the nutrition or medical care they required in their first days of life, and many were even unable to breastfeed due to their mothers’ malnutrition.
Inside occupation prisons, there is a severe lack of adequate food and water among detained Palestinian children. The year 2025 witnessed the death of the first Palestinian child ever inside Israeli prisons, according to documentation by the Union for Justice Foundation. Walid Khaled Abdullah Ahmad (17 years old) died inside Megiddo Prison, and the autopsy results revealed severe muscle and fat wasting, untreated infections, dehydration, scabies, and injuries resulting from violent physical trauma—clear evidence that Walid had been subjected to starvation and systematic abuse for months until he collapsed and died.
Across Gaza and within the prison system, the deliberate deprivation of resources essential for life is engineered to break the bodies of Palestinian children, extinguish hope, and dismantle the conditions necessary for Palestinian life.
Escalation and Expansion of Administrative Detention Against Palestinian Children
Israeli forces dangerously escalated their campaign to detain Palestinian children without charge or trial in 2025, according to documentation collected by the Union for Justice Foundation. Month after month, the number and proportion of Palestinian children held in administrative detention grew to unprecedented record levels.
Last year, Israeli forces placed the youngest recorded Palestinian child in administrative detention. Israeli forces arrested Muin Ghassan Fahd Salalat (14 years old) from his home in Beit Fajjar, south of Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank, during a pre-dawn raid on 19 February, and issued against him a four-month administrative detention order on 2 March, according to documentation by the Union for Justice Foundation. Muin is the youngest Palestinian child placed under an administrative detention order since the Foundation began monitoring child administrative detainees.
The arbitrary deprivation of Palestinian children’s right to liberty through the use of administrative detention—imprisoning individuals for prolonged periods without charge or trial, often based on secret evidence—amounts to arbitrary detention.
Administrative detention orders are issued by the Israeli regional military commander or an authorized military officer and may last up to six months, but there is no limit to the number of times the order may be renewed. These orders are approved by military court judges to create the illusion of independent legal oversight; however, Israeli military courts fail to meet international standards of independence and impartiality because military judges are active-duty or reserve officers in the Israeli army.
As of 30 September 2025, there were 350 Palestinian children detained in Israeli prisons, according to the latest available data from the Israeli Prison Service. Of these, 168 children, or 48 percent of the total, are held in administrative detention without charge or trial—the highest number and highest proportion recorded since the Union for Justice Foundation began legal monitoring. The Prison Service, which usually issues detainee data quarterly, delayed for more than a month in releasing the third-quarter data for 2025.
According to Prison Service data monitored by the Union for Justice Foundation, in September 2023, only 15 percent of all detained Palestinian children were held in administrative detention.
Lawyers representing Palestinian detainees continue to face increasing obstacles in providing legal representation, including the prevention and cancellation of scheduled visits, prolonged delays extending for months, and the prohibition of bringing in even basic materials. Lawyers are also prevented from conveying simple messages from families, and children who sought to transmit messages to their families through a lawyer have been beaten. In addition, occupation authorities completely suspended family visits for Palestinian detainees following 7 October 2023.
Under international law, including Article 37(d) of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, every child has the right to prompt access to legal assistance and to challenge the legality of their detention before a court. Furthermore, the occupation’s deliberate obstruction of this right violates the most basic standards of international humanitarian law and human rights law.
It is clear that the Israeli occupation has no intention of maintaining its detention system in accordance with international law. Instead, its treatment of Palestinian prisoners amounts to collective punishment, through the deliberate imposition of degrading conditions and restricting access to food, medicine, and communication with the outside world. It stands alone as the only entity in the world that systematically prosecutes between 500 and 700 children in military courts each year, while systematically depriving them of the fundamental right to a fair trial.
Between Physical Torture and Psychological Blackmail: The Occupation’s Policy to Break Children’s Will
During 2025, Israeli forces escalated the widespread practice of torture and ill-treatment of Palestinian children at every stage of the arrest process to extreme levels. During arrest, interrogation, and detention, children described being routinely slapped, beaten, kicked, verbally harassed, struck with rifle butts, and stepped on.
Israeli forces routinely place Palestinian children in solitary confinement for days or weeks. Solitary cells are typically small, filthy, and without natural light. Children described being held in windowless rooms with rough gray walls, foul-smelling toilets, and dirty mattresses on the floor. Some cells were kept in complete darkness, while others were flooded with bright light day and night, causing disorientation and psychological distress.
Israeli authorities interrogated 94 percent of detained Palestinian children without the presence of a family member. Eighty-nine percent of children were not informed of the reason for their arrest. Occupation forces use coercive methods, including the use of informants (“birds”), leading children to make self-incriminating statements or even false confessions unintentionally.
In Gaza, Israeli occupation forces abducted children while they were seeking food or desperately needed humanitarian aid, then transferred them to “Sde Teiman,” a military detention camp of the occupation army, where children were stripped of their clothes, starved, beaten, and held in cages. Children reported being subjected to electric shocks, beaten with sticks, and detained in the notorious “disco room,” where soldiers play loud music for hours and assault detainees randomly.
Fares Ibrahim Fares Abu Jabal (16 years old) was suspended by his hands for an entire week after soldiers fabricated an image showing his mother and sister being raped. Mahmoud Hani Mohammed Al-Majayda (17 years old) was severely beaten to the point that his shoulder was dislocated, denied medical care, and placed in solitary confinement where he developed scabies and blisters across his body. Mahmoud attempted suicide twice and said after his release: “The prison is inside me. I wake up in terror as if I am still trapped behind those walls.”
The arrest of Palestinians has nothing to do with security, law, or justice. It is a system designed to physically and psychologically mutilate a generation of Palestinians in an attempt to suppress any effort to resist the Israeli apartheid system or demand their basic rights. It seeks to break the hope, spirit, and identity of Palestinian children in an attempt to ensure that the Palestinians’ right to self-determination is never realized.
Children Without a Trace: The Terror of Enforced Disappearance Tearing Apart Palestinian Families in Gaza
The sudden rise in cases of enforced disappearance was one of the most dangerous developments in 2025. As Israeli forces abducted children, often while they were searching for aid, families were left without information or the ability to locate their children.
According to documentation by legal and human rights institutions in the Gaza Strip, the whereabouts of 30 boys (12–17 years old) were lost in circumstances that raise strong suspicions of enforced disappearance by Israeli occupation forces. According to families’ testimonies to these institutions, ongoing searches in medical facilities and morgues yielded no results, while occupation authorities confirmed the presence of only one child among the missing in their military custody, leaving the fate of the rest unknown.
Families desperately searched for their missing sons, moving between hospitals, morgues, and displacement centers in Gaza, without finding any trace of them. The father of Haitham Mohammed Jamil Al-Masri (17 years old), who has been missing for nearly two years and is believed to be detained in one of the occupation’s prisons, suffered two strokes while searching for answers. The father asked: “How can my son be with me one moment and then disappear like this? My heart is full of despair and I feel lost. He is just a child; he has nothing to do with all this.”
The enforced disappearance of Palestinian children constitutes a grave violation of international law. As long as Israeli occupation authorities refuse to disclose the identities, locations, and conditions of children detained from Gaza, Palestinian families remain trapped in a cycle of terror and uncertainty, forced to live with the unbearable question of whether their children are alive, injured, or killed.
Between Absent Laws and Tragic Reality: A Call for Accountability and Our Efforts for Justice
The past year has tragically revealed that the crisis facing Palestinian children does not lie in the absence of legal texts, but in the absence of their enforcement. International protections exist, and international obligations are clear, yet the international community continues to provide cover for the Israeli occupation while its forces implement policies of starvation, torture, enforced disappearance, and killing against children with unprecedented brutality.
Accountability cannot remain merely theoretical slogans; the time has come for the international community to act seriously.
During 2025, the Union for Justice Foundation intensified its efforts by participating in dozens of advocacy events, providing specialized training to legal and human rights researchers, and contributing to conveying the facts through international media. The Foundation’s team led briefings, workshops, and digital seminars addressing issues of starvation, torture, and military detention to ensure that the issue of Palestinian children remains at the forefront of political and public discussions.
But awareness alone is not enough; Palestinian children deserve safety, justice, and a future free from occupation, and they deserve a world that possesses the will to enforce the laws that were created in the first place to protect them.
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