Killings of Palestinian children are soaring in the West Bank. Advocates say it happens with impunity

WARNING: This story contains disturbing content.

When Israeli soldiers mistakenly killed three unarmed Israeli hostages — who were waving white flags — amid its offensive in Gaza last week, the Israeli military quickly put the situation under review and said what happened was “against our rules of engagement.”

But human rights groups saythere is little accountability when Israeli forces kill Palestinian children during operations in the occupied West Bank.

There have been more than 100 such killings this year — the highest toll on record, according to the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), which began tracking casualties in 2005. The previous record of 36 killings was set last year — a number that was surpassed in September of this year.

These organizations warn Israeli authorities aren’t abiding by international protocols to protect children when carrying out military operations, and they say lethal force is often a disproportionate response to the actual threat posed by children in most cases.

It’s “very rare” for a member of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) to face consequences for the killing of Palestinian civilians, said Ori Givati, advocacy director at Breaking the Silence, an organization started by IDF veterans who are against Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories.

The IDF did not respond to questions submitted by CBC News for this article in time for publication. An offer by the IDF to speak with an Israeli official, on background, was not followed up on after multiple emails.

Givati, a former combat soldier, said the IDF always finds a way to justify its actions as an “operational error” or “not intentional,” adding the lack of any real consequences for the killings or abuse of Palestinians has created a “permissive” atmosphere to use lethal force against civilians — including children.

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Killings blamed on counterterrorism activities

Among the children killed in the West Bank this year were two boys — eight-year-old Adam Samer Al-Ghoul and 15-year-old Basil Suleiman Abu Al-Wafa — who were shot to death during an Israeli raid in the Jenin refugee camp last month.

Videos circulating on social media appeared to show Al-Ghoul and Al-Wafa being shot, in separate incidents.

In a statement to CBC News at the time, the IDF didn’t acknowledge any involvement in the killings of the two boys but said its soldiers were carrying out “counterterrorist activity” and that “explosive devices were hurled at the forces who responded with fire toward the terrorists and hit them.”

Because the West Bank is under occupation and is not in a “wartime situation,” Israel can’t justify killing civilians “by claiming it’s in the name of counterterrorism,” said Bill Van Esveld, an associate director for children’s rights at Human Rights Watch (HRW).

In a report released in August, HRW examined the killings of Palestinian teenagers by Israeli forces in the West Bank between November 2022 and March 2023. The victims in three incidents detailed in the report involved groups of children throwing rocks and/or Molotov cocktails from a distance at armoured military vehicles.

According to Van Esveld, that is not a significant enough threat to warrant soldiers “spraying the whole area with automatic gunfire,” which is what witnesses allege happened in the incidents HRW documented.

Van Esveld said the military has policies that allow soldiers to “basically shoot first and ask questions later.”

Since 2021, Israel has permitted its forces to shoot at Palestinians who have thrown rocks or firebombs at cars — even if the perpetrators are running away and no longer pose an immediate threat — if other efforts to make an arrest fail.

Even when a minor is actively involved in conflict, they “should be treated as a victim” under international protocols, said Khalid Quzmar, the director of Defense for Children International — Palestine (DCI-P).

Israel has ratified the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflict, as well as the Geneva Conventions, which are the international humanitarian laws that regulate conduct in armed conflict. Both of these treaties state that children taking part in hostilities are to be protected — even though they also prohibit non-state armed factions from recruiting children under age 18.

Quzmar, a lawyer, has worked with DCI-P for more than two decades to defend and support Palestinian children in the Israeli military court system and document alleged abuses and killings by Israeli forces.

In 2021, the Israeli government designated DCI-P and five other Palestinian human rights groups as terrorist organizations. DCI-P rejected the designation and said, at the time, it was an “unjust action by Israeli authorities to criminalize and eliminate our lawful human rights and child protection work.”

The Oct. 7 attacks and Israel’s war on Hamas in Gaza, Quzmar said, have given Israeli soldiers, as well as Israeli settlers, in the occupied West Bank a “free hand … to do what they would like.”

More than half of the killings of Palestinian children in the territory this year have occurred since Oct. 7, according to OCHA’s records.

Chain reaction

Quzmar said the odds of a child being killed, injured or arrested by Israeli forces is so high that his organization often warns the children it works with to avoid leaving their neighbourhoods because they could be at risk of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

One example is that of two-and-a-half-year-old child Mohammed al-Tamimi, who was shot in the head by Israeli gunfire in June while buckled into the seat of a parked vehicle. The Israeli military blamed his death on confusion following the sound of gunfire in the area.

In this case, the IDF acknowledged its culpability in the killing of al-Tamimi. After an initial investigation, the Israeli military said it would reprimand one of the officers involved in the killing. The military said it hadn’t yet decided whether to proceed with a criminal investigation into the child’s death. It’s unclear whether the Israeli military followed through with any further investigation.

But a study by the Israeli human rights organization Yesh Din found less than one per cent of complaints against Israeli forces members ended in an indictment between 2017 and 2021.

During those years, there were more than 400 complaints related to Israeli soldiers killing Palestinians during military operations — but ultimately only three investigations resulted in indictments, the organization found. The sentences handed down in those cases were “very lenient,” Yesh Din reported, and involved only community service for short periods of time.

Palestinian civilians, including children, are basically seen as “legitimate targets” of Israeli military operations, Breaking the Silence’s Givati said, due to the dehumanizing conditions imposed on them under the Israeli occupation of the West Bank.

“As soldiers in occupied territories, we are not trained properly to operate as a policing force in the West Bank, which is what the military is at this moment when we have military law and a military occupation,” he said.

Adding to that, Givati said, is that many IDF soldiers are in their late teens and early 20s, and are conscripted into mandatory military service, with little knowledge of the situation in the West Bank.

“We give them all the power [but] almost zero education about the reality about what occupation is, about the Palestinians, about the fact that they have to protect Palestinians as well, not only [Israeli West Bank] settlers,” he said.

But he suggested there could be a chain reaction if the military started holding specific soldiers or officials accountable for the killings of Palestinian civilians in operations in the occupied territories — something that may have repercussions across Israeli society.

“That will very quickly lead us to ask very big questions about the occupation in the broader perspective,” he said. “We will [have] questions that we will not have good answers for if we want to continue the occupation, which is what Israel is currently pursuing.”

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