President Asif Ali Zardari on Thursday called on influential countries and the international community to impose a “meaningful cost” on Israel for crimes against Palestinian children and to prevent the recurrence of crimes that were exposed in a recent United Nations inquiry.

Israeli authorities and security forces deliberately targeted Palestinian children, resulting in genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes in Gaza, and war crimes in the occupied West Bank, the independent UN inquiry said on Tuesday. The report by the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel examined violations against Palestinian children since the start of the conflict between Israel and Hamas on October 7, 2023.

Around 30% of those killed in the Gaza conflict were children, the report found. The UN commission said that Palestinian children were deliberately targeted and killed during the war, including after a ceasefire came into effect in October 2025. It said this was a key element establishing genocidal intent by Israeli authorities and security forces to destroy the Palestinian group, in whole or in part, in Gaza.

Responding to the inquiry’s findings, the president said in a post on X that he was “deeply disturbed” by them.

“The reported killing of over 20,000 children is a stain on our collective conscience. Pakistan strongly condemns these atrocities and calls for immediate accountability.

“The international community, particularly influential countries, must impose a meaningful cost on Israel for these crimes and take effective measures to prevent their recurrence,” the president said.

He also called for an end to the violence and the protection of Palestinian children in accordance with international law.

Child deaths

The report found that the proportion of children killed was higher than in previous conflicts. Between October 7, 2023 and October 7, 2025, at least 20,179 children were killed, around 30% of the overall death toll. By comparison, in hostilities in Gaza in 2008–2009 and 2014, children made up approximately 24% of conflict-related fatalities, the report said.

Israeli forces continued to use high-payload munitions and weapons with wide-area effects in densely populated residential areas despite mounting child casualties, the commission said. “This indicates that such attacks, which killed children in such high numbers, were intentional,” it said.

Read: Dutch report documenting Israeli shootings of Palestinian children in Gaza wins European Press Prize

It said it believed children were targeted collectively because the Israeli security forces considered the civilian population as a whole to be associated with Hamas and other armed groups.

Conditions imposed by Israel in Gaza, including widespread attacks, repeated displacement and starvation caused by the blockade of aid, food and medicine, severely harmed children’s health and development, resulting in preventable deaths and trauma, the report said.

Read More: UNICEF calls Gaza ceasefire a’deadly illusion’

The inquiry also found that attacks on healthcare and reproductive facilities impacted the survival of newborns and reported increases in miscarriages, and that nearly all children in Gaza were reported to require psychological support.