United Nations reports record violations against children in conflicts, and government forces are the main perpetrators
Nearly 25,000 children caught in conflict were victims of a record number of violations last year, including murder, rape and recruitment to fight, and for the first time, government forces – not armed groups – were the main perpetrators, a new UN report says.
Secretary-General António Guterres’ annual report, released this week, contains a blacklist of child abusers: government forces from eight countries and 67 armed groups from 16 countries and territories.
The number of violations – which also include kidnappings, attacks on schools and hospitals, and denial of humanitarian access to help them – rose for the fourth year in a row to 38,558, according to the report, which is based on verified data from the United Nations. It said 24,174 children, a third of whom were girls, were affected, with several thousand exposed to multiple violations.
“The scale and persistence of these violations require more than just recognition, they require resolve,” said UN Special Representative for Children in Armed Conflict, Vanessa Fraser, in an analysis of the report.
She urged the 193 UN member states to confront the findings and “recognize that protecting children is not an aspiration but an obligation, and that decisions taken today will shape the future they may or may not live to claim.”
For the first time since the United Nations allowed monitoring of violations against children in conflict 30 years ago, the report said that “government forces were responsible for the majority of grave violations.”
The Israeli army and its security forces top the 2025 list, with 12,445 violations. Followed by Congo, which recorded 4,114 violations, and Myanmar, Somalia, and armed groups in Nigeria, all of which committed more than 2,000 violations. Government forces from Sudan, South Sudan, Syria and Russian armed forces in Ukraine are also blacklisted.
The blacklist also includes Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which carried out surprise attacks on October 7, 2023 in southern Israel that killed about 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and ignited the war in Gaza. The United Nations says Israeli settlers were responsible for 326 serious violations last year, and Guterres warned that if these attacks continue, settlers could be blacklisted.
The report says that government forces were the “main culprit” in the killing of 6,266 children – an increase of 34% over last year – as well as the injury of 7,958 children.
The United Nations said it had verified the killing of 2,668 Palestinian children at the hands of Israeli forces in Gaza and 55 Palestinian children in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The report said that the United Nations received reports of the killing of an additional 4,588 children in Gaza and the injury of 346 Israeli children, and is now in the process of verifying them.
Guterres said he was “appalled by the scale of grave violations against children” in the Palestinian territories and Israel, “deeply concerned by the astonishing increase in grave violations” committed by Israeli forces, and “deeply concerned by the astonishing rise in attacks carried out by Israeli settlers” affecting children without accountability.
The UN Secretary-General urged Israel to develop and sign a plan with the United Nations to end the killing and maiming of children and attacks on schools and hospitals, with time-bound commitments.
Israel’s UN Ambassador Danny Danon accused Guterres of blurring “the fundamental difference between a democratic state fighting for its survival and murderous terrorist organizations” such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad instead of standing with the victims of the October 7, 2023, attacks. He said this would be Guterres’ legacy – “one of the greatest moral failures in the history of the United Nations.”
Fraser, the special representative for children in conflict, told reporters on Thursday that there were a number of reasons why government forces were responsible for more violations this year. This includes “the impunity we are seeing towards international law” and changes in warfare from battlefields to densely populated settings with new weapons such as drones and explosives covering a wide area, she added.
“Children have been affected while fleeing fighting, searching for food, water or medical care, or moving through areas heavily contaminated by explosive remnants of war, often contributing to lifelong disabilities,” she said in the report’s analysis.
The United Nations said it had verified the recruitment and use of 6,607 children in conflicts, with the highest numbers in Congo, Nigeria, Haiti, Somalia and Colombia. She added that 5,129 young people were kidnapped, most of them in Nigeria, Congo, Somalia, Myanmar and Mozambique.
It reported that 1,783 children were victims of rape and sexual violence, with the largest number in Congo, Nigeria, Somalia, Sudan, and Haiti.
