Children account for more than one in three of the more than 32,000 people killed in Israel’s months-long assault on Gaza,
according to the Palestinian health ministry. Tens of thousands more young people have suffered severe injuries, including amputations. Nine doctors gave
the Guardian accounts of working in
Gaza hospitals this year, all but one of them foreign volunteers. Their common assessment was that most of the dead and wounded children they treated were hit by shrapnel or burned during Israel’s extensive bombardment of residential neighbourhoods, in some cases wiping out entire families. Others were killed or injured by collapsing buildings with still
more missing under the rubble.
But doctors also reported treating a steady stream of children, elderly people and others who were clearly not combatants with single bullet wounds to the head or chest. Some of the physicians said that the types and locations of the wounds, and accounts of Palestinians who brought children to the hospital, led them to believe the victims were directly targeted by Israeli troops. Eyewitness accounts and video recordings appear to back up claims that Israeli soldiers have fired on civilians, including children, outside of combat with Hamas or other armed groups. In some cases, witnesses describe coming under fire while waving white flags. Haaretz
reported on Saturday that Israel routinely fires on civilians in areas its military has declared a “combat zone”.
Although doctors were shocked at the number of child victims, they said they believed the shootings were part of a broader pattern of targeting Palestinian civilians, including elderly people. “The vast majority of people we saw were not combatants,” said Ahmad. “There was an elderly woman who was on the back of a donkey cart when she was shot. The bullet lodged in her spine and she was paralysed from the waist down and also her lung collapsed. She was somewhere between 60 and 70 years old.”
The groups say it is extremely difficult at this stage to quantify the scale of such shootings in Gaza, not least because their own staff are often displaced and under attack. But Miranda Cleland of Defense for
Children International Palestine said that over the years there had been a “clear pattern of Israeli forces targeting Palestinian children with deadly force in situations where the children posed no threat to soldiers”. “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,” she said.
One former Israeli army sniper, who did not want to be named, told the Guardian that the IDF’s open-fire regulations were so broad that a soldier has extensive leeway to shoot at anyone once an area is declared a combat zone. “The problem is the regulations that enable soldiers who just want to shoot Palestinians. In my experience, most soldiers who pull a trigger only want to kill those who should be killed but there are those who regard all the Arabs as the enemy and find any reason to shoot or no reason at all,” he said, adding that a system of impunity protects such soldiers.
“Even if they are outside the regulations, the system will protect them. The army will cover up. The other soldiers in the unit will not object or they will celebrate another dead Arab. There’s no accountability so even the loosest regulations have no real meaning.”
The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem has
described the IDF’s open-fire regulations as “no more than a semblance of legality” in part because they are “repeatedly violated”. “Other than a handful of cases, usually involving low-ranking soldiers, no one has been put on trial for harming Palestinians,” the group said.
“This is not a normal war. The war in Ukraine has killed 500 kids in two years and the war in Gaza has killed over 10,000 in less than five months. We have seen wars before but this is something that is a dark stain on our shared humanity.”
www.alhaq.org
www.amnesty.org
