Defense for Children International declares that Israel regularly commits “extrajudicial or willful killings” of Palestinian children… Children in a village were regularly targeted; some of this targeting was to punish their parents for political activism… 85 children from the village had been arrested over the years, 10 of them under 15. “More than 500 villagers had also been wounded, and five people were killed.”
On Wednesday, Israeli forces killed Mohammad, the 11th Palestinian child victim of Israel in the West Bank in 2021. A few days before they had killed a 17-year-old. Today, they shot dead a 20-year-old participating in Mohammad’s funeral march. Also today, Israeli soldiers broke into and ransacked the local Defense for Children International office. Tuesday, Israeli forces killed a 41-year-old Palestinian man. In the middle of all this, the House advanced a bill to give Israel billions of Americans’ tax dollars.
Sujoud’s story is unique in its details, but many Palestinian children in the West Bank have had similar haunting experiences with Israeli settlers, soldiers, or another form of the inescapable presence of the occupation.
Childhood in the Gaza Strip is unlike anywhere else in the world. Here, thanks to Israel, a ten-year-old has already experienced the violence of three wars and has spent his entire life under brutal blockade.
The Israeli police ran over him, beat him, and instead of calling an ambulance, they arrested him – because he had a Palestinian flag on his bicycle.
In unprecedented actions, the front pages of the New York Times and the Israeli daily newspaper Ha’aretz featured photos of the 67 children in Gaza who were killed by Israeli airstrikes this month. Some Israel partisans called this a ‘blood libel.’
The massacre early Sunday was “one of the most horrific crimes” Israel has committed during its ongoing war against the people of Gaza, according to Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor.
As Israel continues its attacks on Gaza, and Gazan resistance fighters retaliate, the death toll continues to rise; Israeli rhetoric grows more hawkish; the US stands solidly by Israel’s side.
Nisreen Hassan’s children are doing their best to cope in her absence. However, the realization that she has been taken away from them becomes very sharp. The practice of arresting Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza and then imprisoning them inside Israel violates international law. The Fourth Geneva Convention stipulates that people living in an occupied territory may only be detained within that territory.
Israeli airstrikes have killed at least 20 Palestinians in Gaza today, the violence coming on the heels of a crackdown on Jerusalem’s Palestinians in which hundreds have been hospitalized.