Israeli forces and settlers are killing one Palestinian child every two days on average in the occupied West Bank, a children’s rights group has reported, amid Israel’s intensifying violence against Palestinians in the last year.
Defense for Children International Palestine (DCIP) released a report on Monday documenting that, between October 7, 2023, and the end of July of 2024, Israeli forces and settlers killed 141 children in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem.
This amounts to 20 percent of the total number of Palestinian children killed by Israeli forces and settlers in the last nearly quarter century, the group finds — an escalation of “Israel’s decades-long de facto policy of shooting to kill.”
According to an analysis by DCIP, most of the children killed by Israelis in the last year were killed by live ammunition, “usually a single bullet to the head or torso,” according to the report. Some were shot in the back, the group noted. In 43 percent of cases in the report, Israeli forces deliberately blocked paramedics and ambulances from reaching injured children.
Israeli forces and settlers targeted and killed these children across a variety of situations. In one case, Israeli snipers killed a child who was throwing stones at an Israeli military vehicle after occupation forces surrounded a Palestinian residents’ house; in another, Israeli forces shot and killed a child who was walking to school.
“Israeli forces have made clear their contempt for Palestinian children’s lives in their deliberate and systematic disregard for international law and even their own policies permitting the use of live ammunition in circumstances not justified under international law,” the report says. “Not a single Israeli soldier has been held accountable for killing any of the Palestinian children included in this report despite widespread and systematic evidence of unlawful killings.”
Even after the killings, Israeli forces continue tormenting the families of the dead. Israeli officials have confiscated and withheld the bodies of 18 Palestinian children killed by Israeli forces documented by the report.
This includes the body of 4-year-old Ruqaya Ahmad Odeh Jahalin, who was shot in the back by Israeli forces in January. She had just passed an Israeli checkpoint in a taxi with her mother when a car behind theirs did not stop at the checkpoint, and Israeli forces opened fire on the vehicles. Israeli officials held her body for 10 days.
DCIP notes that Israel is the only country in the world to have legalized a policy of confiscating human remains.
Israeli forces have also mutilated the bodies of Palestinians they’ve killed. Last week, the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights posted video of an incident in which Israeli forces used a bulldozer to desecrate the body of a 17-year-old boy, Majed Fida Abu Zeina, who they killed in Far’a refugee camp amid Israel’s West Bank invasion.
According to the group, Israeli forces shot him and blocked paramedics from reaching him, leaving him to bleed for an hour and a half. Then, Israeli forces used a bulldozer to tear open the boy’s abdomen before dragging his body along the road and discarding his body on the hill, leaving it unrecognizable.
These killings come as Israel has escalated its violence in the occupied West Bank amid its genocide in Gaza. Since October, Israeli forces have killed at least 692 Palestinians in the West Bank, with this year on track to exceed last year’s record death toll in the occupied territory.
“The horrific mutilation of a child’s body by a bulldozer, after that child was reportedly left to bleed to death, should shock the conscience of all those who respect human rights and dignity,” said Ibrahim Hooper, communications director for Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). “This is the type of brutality that the Biden administration continues to enable and excuse.”
Truthout Is Preparing to Meet Trump’s Agenda With Resistance at Every Turn
Dear Truthout Community,
If you feel rage, despondency, confusion and deep fear today, you are not alone. We’re feeling it too. We are heartsick. Facing down Trump’s fascist agenda, we are desperately worried about the most vulnerable people among us, including our loved ones and everyone in the Truthout community, and our minds are racing a million miles a minute to try to map out all that needs to be done.
We must give ourselves space to grieve and feel our fear, feel our rage, and keep in the forefront of our mind the stark truth that millions of real human lives are on the line. And simultaneously, we’ve got to get to work, take stock of our resources, and prepare to throw ourselves full force into the movement.
Journalism is a linchpin of that movement. Even as we are reeling, we’re summoning up all the energy we can to face down what’s coming, because we know that one of the sharpest weapons against fascism is publishing the truth.
There are many terrifying planks to the Trump agenda, and we plan to devote ourselves to reporting thoroughly on each one and, crucially, covering the movements resisting them. We also recognize that Trump is a dire threat to journalism itself, and that we must take this seriously from the outset.
Last week, the four of us sat down to have some hard but necessary conversations about Truthout under a Trump presidency. How would we defend our publication from an avalanche of far right lawsuits that seek to bankrupt us? How would we keep our reporters safe if they need to cover outbreaks of political violence, or if they are targeted by authorities? How will we urgently produce the practical analysis, tools and movement coverage that you need right now — breaking through our normal routines to meet a terrifying moment in ways that best serve you?
It will be a tough, scary four years to produce social justice-driven journalism. We need to deliver news, strategy, liberatory ideas, tools and movement-sparking solutions with a force that we never have had to before. And at the same time, we desperately need to protect our ability to do so.
We know this is such a painful moment and donations may understandably be the last thing on your mind. But we must ask for your support, which is needed in a new and urgent way.
We promise we will kick into an even higher gear to give you truthful news that cuts against the disinformation and vitriol and hate and violence. We promise to publish analyses that will serve the needs of the movements we all rely on to survive the next four years, and even build for the future. We promise to be responsive, to recognize you as members of our community with a vital stake and voice in this work.
Please dig deep if you can, but a donation of any amount will be a truly meaningful and tangible action in this cataclysmic historical moment. We are presently looking for 182 new monthly donors in the next 24 hours.
We’re with you. Let’s do all we can to move forward together.
With love, rage, and solidarity,
Maya, Negin, Saima, and Ziggy