Top Palestinian Children’s Rights Group Shutters After Being Targeted By Israel

A top Palestinian children’s rights group has announced that it has been forced to shut down due to Israel’s recent attacks and bans on human rights organizations, removing a critical voice shining light on Israel’s atrocities against children in Gaza and the West Bank.

Defense for Children International-Palestine (DCIP) announced that it has ceased operations on Tuesday. “After 35 years of defending Palestinian children’s rights, we are not able to overcome operational challenges resulting from Israel’s targeted criminalization of Palestinian human rights organizations,” the group said.

Israel has relentlessly attacked and vilified human rights groups for decades, and in 2024, passed legislation mandating that humanitarian groups providing aid to Palestinians in Gaza to register their groups with Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism or be forced to end their operations.

As part of the registration, Israel has mandated that groups must provide lists of all of their Palestinian employees “in order to rule out any links to terrorism” or be banned starting January 1, 2026.

DCIP was one of the groups targeted by this new law, which human rights experts condemned as yet another genocidal move to deprive Palestinians in Gaza of basic, life-supporting services.

The children’s group has faced decades of opposition from both Israel and the U.S. In February 2021, DCIP reported that Israeli authorities raped a 15-year-old Palestinian boy in prison, and shared their findings with the U.S. State Department, Palestinian think tank Al-Shabaka reported last month. The State Department brought it up with Israel, which then raided DCIP’s offices and designated the organization as a “terrorist” group.

Even as Israel has taken extreme steps to bar humanitarian groups, the U.S. has pushed to go even further, seeking to sanction numerous groups — including DCIP — out of existence.

DCIP has been critical for its reports shining a light on the atrocities committed by Israeli forces and settlers against Palestinian children, who have suffered immensely under Israel’s genocide and barbaric settler colonialism in the occupied West Bank.

“Palestinian children are living through genocide, apartheid, military occupation, and the rapid expansion of illegal Israeli settlements. They are imprisoned in Israel’s torture dungeons, buried under the rubble, and adapting to lifelong disabilities. They deserve protection and the fulfillment of all their human rights,” said DCIP in its statement on its closure.

As part of its work, DCIP published regular reports on Israel’s detention of Palestinian children, documenting recent upward trends as Israel escalates its collective punishment of Palestinians. Last month, DCIP reported that, for the first time since DCIP began monitoring in 2008, the proportion of Palestinian children in Israeli detention who were being held without charges surpassed 50 percent, with 180 children being held without charge or trial.

This is roughly 51 percent of the 351 children held by Israel in prison, with many others being held for arbitrary reasons. DCIP previously reported on Israel’s systematic starvation and torture of children in prisons, as well as the “relentless violence” wrought by Israeli soldiers upon Palestinian children.

DCIP regularly published stories of children detained, attacked, or killed by Israeli forces. Its last story was on Adam Sayed Saleh Beit Dahman, a 15-year-old Palestinian boy who was shot and killed by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank in March. The soldiers shot him in the pelvis, and beat him after shooting him, while blocking an ambulance from reaching him for 30 minutes. He was eventually brought to the hospital and declared dead an hour and a half after being shot, according to DCIP.