Israel murders Palestinian children as a matter of state policy. This claim can be demonstrated easily and is supported by the latest findings of a Human Rights Watch report. The question is: why?
When the police or army shoot a child anywhere in the world it can usually be argued at least in theory that the killing was an unfortunate and tragic mistake. But when thousands of children are killed and wounded in a systematic &ldquoroutine&rdquo and comparable method within a relatively short period of time there has to be something very deliberate about it.
In a recent report &mdash &ldquoWest Bank: Spike in Israeli Killings of Palestinian Children&rdquo &mdash HRW reaches a strong conclusion based on an exhaustive examination of medical data eyewitness accounts video footage and field research the latter pertaining to four specific cases.
One is the case of Mahmoud Al-Sadi a 17-year-old Palestinian boy from the Jenin Refugee Camp. He was killed last November 320 meters away from fighting between invading Israeli forces and Jenin resistance fighters. Mahmoud was on his way to school and carried nothing that could be seen from the soldiers&rsquo point of view as threatening or suspicious.
The story of the Jenin boy is typical and is repeated often throughout the occupied West Bank sometimes daily. The predictable outcome as HRW puts it is that these killings are followed with &ldquovirtually no recourse for accountability&rdquo.
As of 22 August 34 Palestinian children in the West Bank have been killed in 2023 adding yet more tragic numbers to a foreboding year that promises to be the most violent since 2005. This year &ldquoalready surpasses 2022 annual figures and the highest figure since 2005&rdquo in terms of casualties reported Tor Wennesland the UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East during a UN briefing on 21 August.
These statistics among other factors &mdash including the expansion of illegal Israeli Jewish settlements in the West Bank &mdash &ldquothreatens to worsen the plight of the most vulnerable Palestinians&rdquo according to Wennesland.
Those &ldquomost vulnerable Palestinians&rdquo however exist beyond the realm of statistics. When Israeli soldiers killed 2-year-old toddler Mohammed Tamimi on 5 June the little boy’s name was added to an ever-expanding roll call of shame. The memory of the infant however like the memory of all other Palestinian children is etched into the collective consciousness of all Palestinians. It deepens their pain but also compels their struggle and their resistance.
For Palestinians the killing of their children is not a random act of a military that lacks discipline and fears no repercussions. Palestinians know that the Israeli war on children is an intrinsic component of the larger Israeli war on every single one of them.
Of course Israel does not declare officially that it is targeting Palestinian children on purpose. That would be a public relations disaster. Some Israeli officials in the past however have let their guard down offering a strange and troubling logic.
Palestinian children are &ldquolittle snakes&rdquo wrote Israeli politician Ayelet Shaked in 2015. In a Facebook post published in the Washington Post Shaked called for the killing of &ldquothe mothers of the [Palestinian] martyrs.&rdquo In doing so she declared war on all Palestinians. &ldquoThey should follow their sons&rdquo she wrote &ldquonothing could be more just.&rdquo Shortly afterwards Shaked rather ironically became Israel’s justice minister.
But not all Israeli officials are candid about the killing of Palestinian children and even their mothers. Data collected by international rights groups however leaves no doubt that the nature of the killings is part of a comprehensive strategy developed by the Israeli military. &ldquoIn all cases&rdquo recently investigated by HRW &ldquoIsraeli forces shot the children’s upper bodies.&rdquo This was done without the &ldquoissuing of warnings or using common less lethal measures.&rdquo
Specifically the killing of Palestinian children is a centralized and deliberate Israeli military strategy. The same twisted logic now applied to the West Bank has already been used in the besieged Gaza Strip. UN figures show that in the Israeli war against the Palestinians in Gaza in 2008-9 333 Palestinian children were killed other estimates put the figure at 410. In the 2012 Israeli offensive against Gaza 47 children were killed in 2014 there were 578 killed in 2021 it was 66 and in 2022 17 children were killed in the besieged territory by Israeli soldiers.
Between 2018 and 2020 59 Palestinian children were killed in what was known as the &ldquoMarch of Return&rdquo protests that took place at the fence separating Israel from the Gaza Strip. All the children were killed from a distance by Israeli snipers.
When the numbers of dead and wounded children are tallied they are in the thousands. According to the UN there were precisely 8700 Palestinian child casualties between 2015 and 2022.
Even the callous and often dehumanizing term &ldquocollateral damage&rdquo cannot justify such statistics. And although the war on Palestinian children is clearly intentional protracted and ongoing not a single Israeli military or government official has ever been held accountable in an international court. Moreover the UN &ldquoList of Shame for Killing Children&rdquo has never branded Israel although other countries have been &ldquonamed and shamed&rdquo for far fewer crimes against children.
As the killing of children is perceived &mdash according to the twisted logic of the likes of Shaked &mdash to be functional for Israel given the absence of any accountability the occupation state finds no reason or urgency to end its war on Palestinian children. And with the constant loosening of the rules of military engagement in Israel and the terrifyingly genocidal language used by its extreme far-right ministers and their massive constituency more Palestinian children are likely to lose their lives in the near future.
Despite this the most that UN officials and rights groups seem to be able to do now is to count the alarming number of child casualties. Alas no number is large enough to dissuade Israel from killing Palestinians including children.
The problem for Palestinians is not just that of Israel’s violence but also the lack of international will to hold Israel accountable. Accountability requires unity decisiveness of will and action. This task should be a priority for all countries that genuinely care about Palestinians and universal human rights. Without such collective action Palestinian children will continue to be killed in large numbers and in the most brutal ways a tragedy that will continue to pain in fact shame us all.
– Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the Editor of the Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of five books. His latest is &lsquoThese Chains Will Be Broken: Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons&rsquo. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA) and also at the Afro-Middle East Center (AMEC).
