Israel has tripled the number of children it kills by shooting in the West Bank

According to a UN report, Israel has massively escalated its campaign of shooting and killing children in the occupied West Bank since October. In the wake of the genocide in the Gaza Strip, Israel is currently conducting the deadliest campaign on record in the West Bank.

In the 10 months since last October, Israeli forces in the West Bank have tripled the number of Palestinian children they have shot and killed compared to the previous 10 months, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) for the Occupied Palestinian Territory.

The group says Israeli forces have killed 115 Palestinian children with live ammunition since October, compared to 39 children in the previous ten months – although the death toll alone is high. Meanwhile, 1,411 Palestinian children have been injured by Israeli gunfire, compared to 615 in the ten months before October.

In total, 143 Palestinian children have been killed in the West Bank since October amid Israel's escalating violence, an increase of around 250 percent from the previous period, UNICEF reported. Israeli forces have inflicted a record number of deaths in the West Bank – which, unlike Gaza, is not governed by Hamas – over the past ten months, killing more than 600 Palestinians since October.

They include people like 10-year-old Amr Mohammad Ghaleb Najar, who was shot in the head by Israeli forces in the West Bank in March; 15-year-old Basil Abu al-Waf and 8-year-old Adam Samer al-Ghoul, who Israel killed in an Israeli raid on November 29 as they played outside the Jenin refugee camp; and 15-year-old boys Mahmoud Amjad Ismail Hamadneh and Osama Mohammad Naim Abdulatif Hujair, who were killed separately by Israeli forces in Jenin in May.

The UN office also reported a recent incident in which Israeli settlers broke the legs of two 15-year-old Palestinian boys and urinated on them. They handcuffed the boys and left them to suffer until a local resident noticed them and called an ambulance.

It appears to be a strategy of the Israeli military to target children with weapons. Many foreign doctors on medical trips to Gaza have reported seeing and treating many children who have been shot in the head or heart by snipers.

“I have photographs of two children shot so perfectly in the chest that I couldn't hold my stethoscope more accurately over their heart, and right on the side of the head, on the same child,” said Mark Perlmutter, an American orthopedic surgeon who recently volunteered in Gaza. CBS in July. “No toddler will accidentally be shot twice by the 'world's best sniper.' And they are direct hits.”

The US has supplied billions of dollars worth of weapons that Israeli forces use to commit such atrocities. Just last week, for example, the US supplied Israel with even more tank ammunition – the kind of weapon that Israeli forces used to kill six-year-old Hind Rajab and her 15-year-old cousin Layan Hamada in Gaza in January – as part of a massive $20 billion sale to Israel.

According to humanitarian groups, Israeli soldiers also regularly shoot Palestinian children in the West Bank, even though international law requires the military to do everything in its power to avoid civilian casualties.

“In the occupied West Bank, Israeli soldiers routinely shoot children in the head, chest or abdomen, all areas where a child will quickly bleed to death if not killed immediately. Many of these children are shot by Israeli forces from long distances, sometimes over 150 meters, something only a trained military sniper would be able to do,” said Miranda Cleland, an advocacy representative with Defense for Children International Palestine. The Guardian in April.

This practice goes beyond the current genocide in the Gaza Strip; in June last year, Israeli forces shot dead a two-year-old Palestinian boy in the West Bank as he sat in a car with his father.

In addition, senior Israeli officials have been specifically targeting children. In March, during Ramadan, Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir praised an Israeli officer who shot and killed a 12-year-old boy in the West Bank, calling the child a terrorist. The Israeli officer shot the boy directly in the heart, his family said.

Israel's violence against children was extreme, and in June the UN placed Israel on an international list of child rights violators for slaughtering Palestinian children during the genocide and beyond. In 2023, Israel was the world's biggest child molester.