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.”