Human rights critics repeatedly accuse Israel of denying Palestinian children their rights and childhood, and of flouting international legal norms. However, not only is this narrative premised on a romanticized and essentializing concept of childhood, it also lets the legal discourse of child rights off the hook too easily. Drawing on critical scholarship on childhood, law, and human rights, as well as on hundreds of previously unexamined primary sources (many of which are not in the public domain), this paper sheds light on the growing complicity of the child rights discourse in Israeli state violence. I argue that this discourse, like human rights and law more broadly, easily lends itself to competing interpretations and applications, including those operating in the service of state domination. This paper thus examines how Israel, in the name of international legal norms and “Palestinian children’s best interests,” has sought to subjugate Palestinian minds, bodies, and interactions. Far from simply denying Palestinians their childhood, Israel has in fact increasingly imposed on them a legally enshrined model of childhood that works to their detriment. If the child rights discourse and its supposedly universal model of childhood are thus implicated in state violence, then what does this say about the role of their longtime advocates: liberal human rights actors – NGOs, UN bodies, and scholars? This paper demonstrates how the human rights community has repeatedly, if unwittingly, marginalized Palestinian children while legitimizing Israeli harshness and punitiveness toward Palestinian adults. Human rights critics of Israel, I argue, have not only failed to recognize how the child rights framework ends up harming Palestinians, but have also, in multiple ways, contributed to this harm. From these troubling findings, this paper aims to draw lessons about the limitations and pitfalls of law and human rights, and specifically the legal language of child rights, in and beyond the Palestine/Israel context.