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.Recommended Stories list of 4 itemsend of listPublished 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 t …
