António Guterres, the U.N. secretary-general, released the annual United Nations report on children and armed conflict on June 17, and for the second straight year, the “list of shame” included Israeli armed and security forces.
The U.N. chief’s report states that the global body verified “the killing of 1,259 Palestinian children—662 boys, 597 girls,” in Gaza, “and the process of attribution is ongoing.” The United Nations received reports of the deaths of an additional 4,470 children in the Gaza Strip in 2024, which are pending verification, per the new report.
The next day, on June 18, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs released a “reported impact snapshot” of Gaza, which states that 15,613 children have been killed in the Strip since Oct. 7, 2023. That figure overcounts—by about 92%—the verified number of children in Gaza who have died, per Guterress’s report. (OCHA’s figure counts since Oct. 7, 2023, while the secretary-general’s report covers the year of 2024.)
If the United Nations verified each of the 4,470 “pending” verifications, that would bring the total detailed in Guterres’s report to about 37% of the total that OCHA claimed had been killed.
JNS asked the United Nations why it continues to publish statistics like the one from OCHA when it has more reliable numbers, like those which Virginia Gamba, special representative of the U.N. secretary-general for children and armed conflict, compiled and which appear in Guterres’s report.
“Regarding the conflict in Gaza, we have always been very transparent as to the source of the casualty figures as being from the local Ministry of Health, which is the only and most thorough source out there,” Stéphane Dujarric, a spokesman for Guterres, told JNS of the Hamas-run ministry in Gaza. “As we’ve also said numerous times, we have found over the years that data reported by this source was broadly accurate.”
All of the data in the new report, which Gamba’s office produced, “for Gaza or anywhere else around the world, is verified by the United Nations as per monitoring and reporting standards, in accordance with her mandate,” the longtime U.N. spokesman and former ABC journalist told JNS.
“Therefore, and her office makes it clear, they represent only the tip of the iceberg or a minimum, often due to access and security constraints,” Dujarric told JNS. “Actual numbers are likely much higher, and the United Nations continues to work through large numbers of reported cases to verify those.”
JNS ran its math by Dujarric and asked why Tom Fletcher, U.N. under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator, wouldn’t want to used the number that Guterres, his boss, published, and why the U.N secretary-general wouldn’t direct his employee—who has said Israel is guilty of genocide—to use the verified statistic rather than one that appeared to overcount by 92%.
“I will give you the same answer I gave,” Dujarric said, before pasting the same 141 words again.
‘Highest numbers’
The United Nations, which has long singled the Jewish state out for criticism, found in the new report that there were the “highest numbers” of verified “grave violations” against children, 8,554, in Israel and what it calls the “occupied Palestinian territory.”
“Verified grave violations were attributed to Israeli armed and security forces (7,188), unidentified perpetrators (43), Israeli settlers (42), individual Palestinian perpetrators (11), Palestinian Authority Security Forces (7), Hezbollah (3) and the armed forces of the Islamic Republic of Iran (1),” per the report. “In addition, the process of attribution of responsibility relating to 1,259 verified violations is ongoing.”
The United Nations said that it is aware of “reports of the use of human shields by Hamas’s Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades and other Palestinian armed groups in the Gaza Strip” but that it “verified the use of 27 Palestinian boys by Israeli armed and security forces as human shields during operations in the West Bank (5) and in the Gaza Strip (22).” (The United Nations, and some other global organizations refer to Judea and Samaria as the “West Bank.”)
In a section titled “developments and concerns,” the report devotes 380 words to discussing how “appalled” he is by the “intensity of grave violations” against children in Israel and “occupied Palestinian territory,” how he is “deeply alarmed” by “escalating” violence in Judea and Samaria and by the Israeli military’s “continued increase in grave violations” and “alarmed” by attacks by Israeli “settlers” against Palestinian children.
The secretary-general then calls on Hamas and “other Palestinian armed groups” to “release unconditionally all hostages, alive or dead, in a dignified manner and to facilitate access for humanitarian actors.”
“I am shocked by reports that children held hostage were subjected to violence,” he states. “I call upon Palestinian armed groups to protect schools and hospitals, including protected persons in relation to schools and/or hospitals, and refrain from using them for military purposes.”
‘Which were combatants’
The report compiles violations of the rights of children under 18-years-old in 20 conflict zones globally. The report also cites Congo, Myanmar, Russia, Somalia, South Sudan and Sudan as state actors that it says commit grave violations against children, and it places Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, both based in Gaza, and Yemen’s Houthis on the blacklist as non-state actors.
Israel agreed in late 2022 to develop an action plan to reduce harm against Palestinian children but cut off ties with the U.N. office overseeing children in armed conflict after the Jewish state was placed on the grave violator list last year, a senior U.N. official told JNS in 2024. A senior U.N. official told JNS last week that Israel has ignored repeated communications from Gamba’s office in the interim.
The United Nations defines “grave” violations as killing or maiming children, recruiting children for or using them in armed forces and armed groups, raping or committing other sexual violence against or abducting children, attacking schools or hospitals and denying humanitarian access to children.
OCHA publishes casualty numbers, seemingly unchallenged, provided by the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health. Other U.N. agencies and officials parrot those figures to international media.
Gamba’s office says that it uses a more rigorous process to verify the deaths of children, which, it has clarified, does not distinguish between innocent children versus teenagers 17 and under actively fighting for Hamas. The reporting and verification mechanisms that Gamba’s office uses are laid out in U.N. Security Council resolutions.
“It is the humanitarians that are supposed to deliver” information on casualties in conflict zones, according to a senior U.N. official, who briefed reporters about the report on Thursday. “We all know that the information provided from Gaza comes from the Health Ministry of Gaza, and that is the one that is provided to OCHA and the other bodies.”
The U.N. official said that the Hamas-run health ministry “might tell us how many casualties, but they will not tell us which were combatants, which were not combatants or an age desegregation.”
Humanitarian agencies, including the non-governmental organizations, also provide information, the official said, but “the figures are widely different.”
In this year’s report, Guterres calls on “Palestinian armed groups” to “cease indiscriminate attacks from densely populated areas in the Gaza Strip towards Israeli civilian population centers.”
The violation figures in the report make no qualification for Hamas’s well-documented usage of the Gazan population as human shields, and how that strategy might add to the killing and maiming of Gazan children. (The report said that the United Nations is aware of reports Hamas uses human shields.)
Danny Danon, the Israeli U.N. ambassador, stated on Friday that the report turns “a blind eye to terrorism inflicted on Israeli children,” including Kfir and Ariel Bibas, who were murdered in Hamas captivity, and 12 Druze children killed in the Israeli village of Majdal Shams in July 2024 by a Hezbollah rocket.
Guterres’s report “shamefully places Israel at the top of the list of ‘violators’—while turning a blind eye to terrorism inflicted on Israeli children,” Danon stated. “Hamas, which routinely uses children as human shields, gets off easy.”
“This is a vile and dishonest report, signed off by the U.N. secretary-general, equating Israel, a nation viciously attacked, with murderous terrorist organizations,” the Israeli envoy stated. “The exclusion of Israeli children murdered by terrorists exposes the U.N.’s appalling hypocrisy and indifference.”
“We understand that the United Nations will not prioritize the safety of Israeli children,” he added. “That’s why we will continue to defend them—ourselves.”