Israeli forces carried out an “unprecedented assault” on Palestinian children in Gaza and the occupied West Bank in 2024, a children’s rights group has said, including repeatedly using children as human shields amid Israel’s genocide.
Israeli forces have killed over 17,500 children in Gaza since October 2023, according to Gaza health officials, with the true death toll likely far higher as children dying due to disease, starvation, or being trapped under the rubble are going uncounted by officials who have lost access. An estimated 35,000 children have lost one or both parents.
Meanwhile, thousands of Palestinian children have sustained critical injuries or have been left with permanent disabilities as a result of Israeli massacres, as Defense for Children International-Palestine (DCIP) wrote in its end-of-year report.
Gaza’s health system was already weakened before the genocide due to decades of Israeli occupation, and is now almost completely inaccessible for children needing emergency or long term care — much less services like preventative care.
This year, the risk of polio spreading among children in Gaza emerged due to Israel’s disease campaign, with one 10-month-old paralyzed from the disease and Israel preventing humanitarian groups from finishing their vaccination campaign in north Gaza. Other diseases, like chickenpox and scabies, raged through displacement camps that were overcrowded due to Israel’s mass expulsion campaign.
“In 2024, Israel’s genocidal campaign against Palestinians in Gaza reached catastrophic proportions. Relentless aerial bombardments, ground invasions, and siege tactics deliberately targeted Palestinian civilians, leaving children to suffer the most,” DCIP’s report says.
The number of Palestinian children detained in Israeli prisons also reached a record high in 2024, the group said.
In the occupied West Bank, Israeli soldiers and settlers killed one Palestinian child every four days this year, “an escalation made possible by decades of impunity,” the group said.
Israel’s violence included using children as human shields “systematically” this year, as DCIP has documented throughout the genocide.
This includes an incident in March in which Israeli tanks surrounded a group of Palestinian children waiting in line for aid in Gaza City. Soldiers stripped the children and tied them up, depriving them of food and water and forcing them for an entire day to walk in front of tanks and in front of buildings that the military wanted to enter, as DCIP found.
Israeli forces’ weaponization of starvation, meanwhile, has put children, especially newborns and children with disabilities, at heightened risk, with babies as young as two months old starving to death, the group said; in August, Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor found that Israel killed 210 newborn babies a month on average in Gaza since the beginning of the genocide.
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