A bullet hole in Al-Far'a refugee camp after the Israeli killing of 14-year-old Maher Abdullah Ahmad Jawabra on December 23, 2023

                                                                                       Photo: Wahaj Bani Moufleh/Activestills

Defense for Children International–Palestine has just this month released Targeting Childhood, a new report documenting, through a series of case studies, how since October 7, 2023 Israeli forces and settlers have been systematically and unrelentingly killing Palestinian children, in most cases using live ammunition. The report’s overview states that, “On average, Israeli forces have killed a Palestinian child in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, every two days since October 7, 2023" through July 31 of this year. This frequency represents an alarming escalation of what the report names as Israel’s “de facto policy of shooting to kill.” What does this escalation look like in percentages? According to the report, “20% of all of the Palestinian children killed by Israeli forces and settlers in the occupied West Bank in more than two decades were killed in the last ten months.”

The report makes visible what mainstream media has, for the most part, continued to ignore or silence: Israel’s Gaza-ification of the West Bank, a process which Hagai El-Ad, former director of B’tselem, the Israeli human rights organization, named as such, in a New Yorker interview as early as November 2023. That process has intensified over the intervening months as Israel has launched its cynically named “Operation Summer Camps” and is using “lethal war-like tactics” in the West Bank, according to the UN’s humanitarian agency: drones, bombs, bulldozers. (See related stories in Breaking the Stories). Reports like Targeting Childhood are critical resources for us to use as we refuse to be silent and continue our advocacy for Palestinian rights and lives.

This is a section of the UCCPIN September 2024 E-Newsletter. To read the entire newsletter, follow this link.