Israel has majorly escalated its campaign of shooting and killing children in the occupied West Bank since October, a UN report says, as Israel carries out its deadliest campaign in the West Bank on record amid its genocide of Gaza.
In the 10 months since last October, Israeli forces tripled the number of Palestinian children they shot and killed in the West Bank than they did in the previous 10 months, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) for the Occupied Palestinian Territory.
The group says that Israeli forces have killed 115 Palestinian children with live ammunition since October, versus 39 killed by Israel in the prior 10-month period — with the latter death toll already a high number on its own. Meanwhile, 1,411 Palestinian children have been injured by Israeli gunfire, compared to 615 in the 10 months before October.
In all, 143 Palestinian children have been killed in the West Bank amid Israel’s increasing violence since October, an increase of roughly 250 percent compared to the previous period, UNICEF has reported. Israeli forces have caused a record death toll in the last 10 months in the West Bank — which is not governed by Hamas like Gaza is — killing over 600 Palestinians since October.
This includes people like 10-year-old Amr Mohammad Ghaleb Najar, who Israeli forces shot in the head and killed in the West Bank in March; 15-year-old Basil Abu al-Waf and 8-year-old Adam Samer al-Ghoul, who Israel killed while they were playing outside in the Jenin refugee camp during an Israeli raid on November 29; and 15-year-old boys Mahmoud Amjad Ismail Hamadneh and Osama Mohammad Naim Abdulatif Hujair who were killed separately by Israeli forces in Jenin in May.
The UN office also noted a recent incident in which Israeli settlers broke the legs of two 15-year-old Palestinian boys and urinated on them. They handcuffed the boys and left them to suffer until a local noticed them and called an ambulance.
It is seemingly a policy of Israeli forces to target children with their guns. Many foreign doctors on medical trips to Gaza have noted that they have seen and treated many children shot in the head or heart by snipers.
“I have two children that I have photographs of that were shot so perfectly in the chest, I couldn’t put my stethoscope over their heart more accurately, and directly on the side of the head, in the same child,” Mark Perlmutter, an American orthopedic surgeon who recently volunteered in Gaza, told CBS in July. “No toddler gets shot twice by mistake by the ‘world’s best sniper.’ And they’re dead-center shots.”
The U.S. has sent billions of dollars’ worth of weapons that Israeli forces are using to carry out such atrocities. Just last week in the U.S.’s massive $20 billion sale to Israel, for instance, the U.S. provided Israel with yet more tank ammunition — the type of weapon that Israeli forces used to kill 6-year-old Hind Rajab and her 15-year-old cousin, Layan Hamada, in Gaza in January.
Humanitarian groups have said that Israeli soldiers routinely shoot Palestinian children in the West Bank as well — even though international law specifies that militaries must do everything they can to avoid civilian casualties.
“In the occupied West Bank, Israeli soldiers routinely shoot children in the head, chest or abdomen, all areas from which a child will quickly bleed out if they aren’t killed instantly. Many of these children are shot by Israeli forces from great distances, sometimes upwards of 500ft, which is something only a trained military sniper would be capable of,” Miranda Cleland, an advocacy officer for Defense for Children International Palestine, told The Guardian in April.
This practice extends past the current genocide in Gaza; in June of last year, Israeli forces shot and killed a 2-year-old Palestinian boy in the West Bank while he was in the car with his father.
Further, top Israeli officials endorse targeting children. In March, during Ramadan, Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir praised an Israeli officer who shot and killed a 12-year-old boy in the West Bank, saying that the child was a terrorist. The Israeli officer shot the boy directly in the heart, his family said.
Israel’s violence against children has been extreme, and in June, the UN added Israel to an international list of children’s rights violators due to its slaughter of Palestinian children amid its genocide and beyond. In 2023, Israel was the single largest violator of children in the world.
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