Partial post, click on link for full story. It doesn't claim that no children have been killed by the IDF, they are at war after all. But there is at least one account, with names and witnesses provided where a Palestinian child was shot by Hamas. Nothing is as clear cut as some people think,.
After doctors accuse Israel of shooting Gazan kids, experts see need for a second opinion
The evidence behind a New York Times essay suggesting troops targeted children is less clear-cut than it seems, and there is reason to question the piece’s scathingly anti-IDF author
On January 30, as Israeli and Thai hostages were being released from Hamas captivity amid chaotic mobs, John Spencer, a leading international expert on urban warfare, watched the proceedings while focusing on one specific detail: the weapons held by Hamas gunmen.
“They were carrying M16 and M4 rifles which use 5.56 mm bullets, the same rifles that Israeli soldiers use,” Spencer told The Times of Israel by email.
To Spencer, head of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point in the US, the terrorists’ use of the same weapon as the IDF cast serious doubts on the allegation made in an essay in The New York Times three months earlier implying that Israeli soldiers were deliberately targeting children during the 15-month Gaza war.
Attached to the essay were X-ray pictures appearing to show 5.56-millimeter rounds lodged in children’s heads and necks.
“It could be that the terrorists were shooting the children,” Spencer said.
Hamas has a long history of exploiting and harming minors, as well as noncombatant adults, to advance its political goals—through tactics such as training children as suicide bombers and soldiers, forcing them to construct tunnels in perilous conditions, using them as human shields, or intentionally killing them.
Over months of war, as Gaza’s civilians have been brutalized and displaced by deadly crossfire, Israel has been nearly universally blamed as the aggressor, repeatedly tarred in cases where there is little evidence beyond the reality of fighting. In some instances, however, the facts show that Hamas or other Gazan terror groups are actually to blame.
Perhaps the most well-known such incident occurred in the opening weeks of the war, when an Islamic Jihad rocket slammed into Gaza’s Al-Ahli Hospital, killing scores of people. With no evidence but the claims of Hamas officials, Israel was still widely blamed for both the attack and a wildly inflated death toll.
Other cases, though, are less clear-cut, like that of Ahmed Shaddad Halmy Brikeh, a
13-year-old boy who appeared on the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry’s monthly fatality list as a victim of “Israeli aggression” in August.
But nine months earlier, Brikeh’s cousin reported online that the teen was shot dead by Hamas gunmen while trying to obtain food from a humanitarian aid shipment.
“He was killed by a shot in the head,” the cousin wrote on December 24, 2023.
Throughout the war, Hamas has repeatedly been found to use civilians as human shields, and to hide military infrastructure in hospitals and humanitarian facilities. Israel says the cynical strategy has put the lives of innocent Gazans at risk as it fights Hamas, a key factor in turning the tide of international public opinion against Israel.
“Hamas wants every and anybody who died to be counted as Israel’s fault, including killing people themselves,” Spencer said.
‘Insane to make definitive statement’
The IDF began its military operations in Gaza after the Hamas-led massacre on October 7, 2023, when over 5,000 terrorists stormed across the border into Israel, murdering 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages, while carrying out other atrocities including rape and torture.
According to data released by the Israel National Council for the Child, 38 children were killed during the Hamas-led terrorist onslaught in southern Israel. Three of those children were under the age of 3, and another four were under 6. Some were shot to death at close range or burned alive while trying to hide from the marauders.
In contrast, there have been no reliable direct accounts of Israeli soldiers deliberately targeting Gazan children, though many have been killed unintentionally.
Nonetheless, foreign doctors volunteering in Gaza have repeatedly accused Israeli soldiers of systematically targeting children in response to kids being brought to hospitals with single bullet wounds to the head or chest.
In April 2024 and again in October, the doctors were given high-profile platforms in the Guardian and New York Times to lay out the accusations, though they only had secondhand knowledge of the circumstances of the shooting and incomplete forensic evidence.
“That is the insanity of making a definitive statement that any child with a gunshot wound was shot purposefully by an IDF soldier when there are many other possibilities and no way to know who shot the kid or what was the context of the injury,” said Spencer.
In
The New York Times on October 9, 2024, Dr. Feroze Sidhwa wrote in an opinion piece that while volunteering at the European Hospital in Gaza in February and April last year, he saw 13 children who had been shot in the head or the chest.
“At the time, I assumed this had to be the work of a particularly sadistic soldier located nearby,” the California-based surgeon wrote in the op-ed, which gathered the experiences of 65 volunteer medical staff in Gaza.
While the piece does not explicitly accuse Israel of targeting children, the newspaper said it still reached out to the IDF for comment, which “responded with a statement that did not directly answer whether or not the military had investigated reports of shootings of preteen children, or if any disciplinary action had been taken against soldiers for firing at children.”
