‘There are risks’: E India judge behind damning UN report on Gaza children
Before he exposed Israel’s deliberate targeting of Gaza children, Srinivasan Muralidhar took on Indian authorities over religious riots and disappearances — at a personal cost
Before he exposed Israel’s deliberate targeting of Gaza children, Srinivasan Muralidhar took on Indian authorities over religious riots and disappearances — at a personal cost. New Delhi, India – In 2020, the Indian government transferred Srinivasan Muralidhar, a judge in New Delhi, to another court in the middle of the night in an alleged move to stop him from acting against a politician from the governing party. Six years later, the 64-year-old retired judge finds himself behind the most far-reaching United Nations investigation yet into Israel’s killing of Palestinian children in Gaza. Published on June 23, the 94-page report by the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel examined alleged Israeli violations against Palestinian children from the beginning of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza in October 2023 to October 2025. The commission, currently chaired by Muralidhar, was established by the UN Human Rights Council in May 2021. It is mandated to investigate alleged violations of international law and examine the “root causes” of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Muralidhar joined the commission in November. The commission found that Israel killed at least 20,179 Palestinian children in two years of the war, accounting for nearly 30 percent of all Palestinian deaths. The report also documented more than 44,000 children injured and an estimated 58,000 children orphaned during the war. It outlined a pattern of snipers and precision drone strikes targeting children, a blockade of humanitarian aid that fuelled starvation and disease as immunisation rates fell and a systematic targeting of maternity and neonatal facilities that endangered Gaza’s newborns. The report also documented allegations of sexual violence, arbitrary detentions and torture of Palestinian children, particularly in the occupied West Bank. ‘Deliberately targeted and killed’ The commission recommended that UN member states halt arms transfers to Israel that “have involved or could involve the commission of genocide” and arrest Israeli officials wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC), who include Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “The evidence shows that Palestinian children have been deliberately targeted and killed by the Israeli security forces,” Muralidhar said. Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs rejected the report in its entirety, calling it a “libellous sham” and describing the UN commission as a mechanism designed to “vilify” the country. The report, it said, “completely erases Israeli children who were brutally murdered, kidnapped and targeted by Hamas while ignoring Hamas’s cynical use of Palestinian children as human shields and pawns of war”. Meanwhile, inflammatory rhetoric targeting Palestinian children has come from top Israeli leaders since the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led attacks on southern Israel, including Knesset Deputy Speaker Nissim Vaturi, who said days after those attacks: “Don’t leave a single child there. Expel all the remaining ones, … so they have no chance of recovery.” In a report released in September, the UN commission found reasonable grounds to conclude that Israeli authorities were committing genocidal acts against Palestinians in Gaza.
The BriefWire