Russell's remarks came days after UNICEF spokesperson James Elder also urged an end to what he called a "war on children."
The charity Save the Children and others say at least 20,000 children are among the more than 67,000 Palestinians killed by Israeli forces in Gaza over the past two years. That's one child every hour in what the UN agency for Palestinian refugees last year reported was a higher child death toll than in the previous four years of all the world's armed conflicts combined.
Using Gaza Health Ministry data—which have been deemed generally accurate by experts including Israeli intelligence officials—Western media outlets including The Washington Post and The Guardian have published lists of more than 18,000 Palestinian children killed in Gaza since October 2023.
Experts, including the authors of multiple peer-reviewed studies in the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet, say the actual death toll is much higher, and will likely not be known for some time, as thousands of missing people are presumed dead and buried beneath the rubble of bombed buildings in a territory in which 90% of all homes have been destroyed.
According to the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, nearly 7 in 10 Palestinians killed in Gaza between November 2023 and April 2024 were women and children. As Israeli officials continued to push specious claims of a historically low civilian-to-combatant kill ratio in Gaza, leaked classified Israel Defense Forces intelligence files revealed that 5 in 6 Palestinians—83%—killed by the IDF through the first 19 months of the war were, in fact, civilians.
While Israel claims it is waging its war with unparalleled effort to avoid harming civilians, facts on the ground paint a very different—and very bloody—picture. According to many Palestinian and international doctors and nurses who worked in Gaza, Israeli forces deliberately shot children with intent to kill, often aiming at their heads and chests. IDF troops have repeatedly admitted to being ordered to fire live bullets and artillery shells into crowds of starving aid-seeking civilians, including children.
Israeli troops have also admitted to being ordered to shoot to kill “anyone who enters” a so-called “kill zone” in central Gaza, including children. One IDF soldier even boasted online about how “fun” it is to kill Palestinian children, while another said in a video uploaded to social media that “we are looking for babies, but there are no babies left"—so instead he "killed a girl that was 12."
This Palestinian girl survived an Israeli bullet in the head. (Photo by Dr. Mimi Syed via de Volksrant)
Following the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, IDF commanders dramatically loosened rules of engagement, effectively allowing an unlimited number of civilians to be killed when targeting a single Hamas member, no matter how low-ranking. Combined with the use of artificial intelligence to rapidly select targets and the use of US-supplied 1,000- and 2,000-pound bombs that can level entire city blocks, wholesale massacres of dozens or more Palestinians ensued.
Last year, UN Secretary-General António Guterres for the first time added Israel to his so-called “List of Shame” of countries that kill and injure children during wars and other armed conflicts.
A handful of Gaza's child victims are known the world over, like Hind Rajab, the 5-year-old girl who was seriously wounded in January 2024 Israeli tank attack on her family's Kia hatchback but survived, surrounded by half a dozen slain relatives and under heavy fire, before being killed along with the paramedics sent to save her. Some Israelis and their US supporters denied that Hind Rajab ever existed, part of a wider pattern of denial—a recurring theme throughout history's genocides.
But largely due to the sheer scale of slaughter, most of the children killed by Israeli bombs, bullets, and blockade will remain nameless statistics to the world, despite the best efforts of Gaza officials and international activists to record and remember them. In September 2024, for example, the Gaza Health Ministry published a 649-page database of Palestinians killed by Israel. The first 14 pages of the document were filled with the names of babies. Last May, it took 24 hours for participants at a Harvard University vigil to read aloud the names of nearly 12,000 children killed in Gaza.
Some—like a 9-year-old girl who was pulled from the rubble of her family home in Khan Younis after a December 2023 Israeli airstrike that killed her father and her only brother—have even argued that people killed quickly by Israeli bombs and bullets were the "lucky" ones, as many survivors faced unspeakable physical and psychological trauma. Thousands of children have had one or more limbs amputated, often without anesthesia, due to the systematic obliteration of Gaza's healthcare infrastructure and a "complete siege" for which former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant is wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC).
Israel is using the siege as a weapon to deliberately starve Palestinians in Gaza, with children often the worst affected by a famine that's killed at least 470 people and likely many more, while starving hundreds of thousands of others. Like Gallant, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is also a fugitive from the ICC, wanted for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes including murder and forced starvation.
" Famine persists in Gaza City and is spreading to the south, where children are already living in dire conditions," UNICEF's Russell said Wednesday. "The crisis of malnutrition, especially among infants, remains shocking. Months without adequate food have caused lasting harm to children’s growth and development."
Muhammad Zakariya Ayyoub al-Matouq, a 1-year-old Palestinian boy from Gaza City, faces life-threatening malnutrition as the humanitarian situation worsens due to ongoing Israeli attacks and blockade, on July 21, 2025. (Photo by Ahmed Jihad Ibrahim Al-arini/Anadolu via Getty Images)
Thousands of Palestinian children have also lost one or both parents to Israeli attacks. Some have seen their entire families wiped out in airstrikes. A new acronym has even been coined to describe some of these orphans: WCNSF, or “wounded child, no surviving family.”
All this killing, maiming, starving, orphaning, and forced displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian minors has wrought what one mother there called the "complete psychological destruction" of Gaza's children. A December 2024 study found that nearly all children in Gaza believed their deaths were imminent—and nearly half of them wanted to die.
To end the physical and psychic suffering of Gaza's children, Russell and others are imploring Israel to end the war—a prospect that now seems closer than ever to being realized amid reportedly fruitful ceasefire talks.
“UNICEF welcomes all efforts to end the war and chart a path towards peace in Gaza and the region," Russell said. "Any plan must lead to a ceasefire, the release of hostages, and the safe, rapid, and unimpeded passage of humanitarian relief—through all available crossings and routes—at the scale desperately needed by all Gazans, especially children."
“Every child killed is an irreplaceable loss," Russell added. "For the sake of all children in Gaza, this war must end now.”
This Palestinian girl survived an Israeli bullet in the head. (Photo by Dr. Mimi Syed via de Volksrant)
Muhammad Zakariya Ayyoub al-Matouq, a 1-year-old Palestinian boy from Gaza City, faces life-threatening malnutrition as the humanitarian situation worsens due to ongoing Israeli attacks and blockade, on July 21, 2025. (Photo by Ahmed Jihad Ibrahim Al-arini/Anadolu via Getty Images)
Palestinian children take part in a graduation ceremony at al-Wafa Orphan Village in Khan Younis, Gaza on August 18, 2025. (Photo: Abdallah Alattar/Anadolu via Getty Images)