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June 12 (UPI) -- The United Nations' annual Children in Armed Conflict report will for the first time list Israel and Hamas as perpetrators of violations of the rights of children. The report, due out Thursday, found a 155% jump in "grave violations" against minors in the Israel-Hamas conflict, singling out Israel Defense Forces' killing and maiming of children and attacks on schools and hospitals and Hamas and Islamic Jihad for killing, injuring and abducting children.
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U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said the war had seen an "appalling, dramatic increase and unprecedented scale and intensity of grave violations against children" across the region, with children in Gaza suffering the most.
But he said he was deeply disturbed by "brutal acts of terror" against children perpetrated by the Palestinian armed group in the Oct. 7 attacks in which 38 children were killed and 42 taken hostage and that investigating reports of sexual violence was critical.
"Some 19,887 Palestinian children were reported killed or maimed" in Gaza and the West Bank, according to the report which stresses that it has yet to verify those numbers.
The U.N. said it had, however, corroborated more than 8,000 serious violations against 4,247 Palestinian children and 113 Israeli children in 2023, noting that it was working through a 2,000-case backlog of reports of killed and injured children.
"Most incidents were caused by the use of explosive weapons in populated areas by Israeli armed and security forces," said the report said.
Unidentified perpertrators were responsible for a further 58 violations, Israeli settlers for 51, Islamic Jihad for 21, lone Palestinians for 13 while Palestinian Authority Security Forces was alleged to have been the perpetrator in one incident.
Informed of Israel's addition to the blacklist in advance, Israeli officials reacted angrily with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu saying the U.N. had "put itself on the blacklist of history when it joined the supporters of the Hamas murderers. The IDF is the most moral army in the world and no delusional decision by the U.N. will change that."
Israeli ambassador to the U.N. Gilad Erdan took to social media, calling lumping the IDF in with countries and organizations that harm children "simply outrageous and wrong because Hamas has been using children for terrorism and uses schools and hospitals as military compounds."
"The only one being blacklisted is the secretary-general who incentivizes and encourages terrorism and is motivated by hatred towards Israel," Erdan wrote in a post on X.
The U.N. report said the Israel-Hamas breaches were part of a wider pattern of killing and wounding of children across all conflicts around the world, including in Ukraine and Sudan, with a "shocking" 21% overall increase in "grave violations" of their rights.
The Sudanese Armed Forces and the rival Rapid Support Forces were blacklisted for killing and injuring children and attacking schools and hospitals, with RSF additionally sanctioned for using child soldiers and sexual violence.
Serious violations against children jumped almost five-fold after the civil war erupted in April 2023.
Russia's armed forces and affiliated armed groups fighting in Ukraine were on the U.N. list for the second straight year for killing 80 Ukrainian children and maiming 419, mostly with explosive weapons.
The U.N. Security Council is set to convene to discuss the report June 26.
Blacklisted governments and groups have the opportunity to have their names removed from the list by coming up and implementing a plan of action to address violations.
