MORE than 150 teens and younger children have been killed by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank since Hamas’s attack on southern Israel last October, it was reported today.
Amnesty International said that most of the dead were killed during the nearly daily raids carried out by the Israelis using disproportionate and unlawful force.
Amjad Hamadneh lost his teenage son Mahmoud when the boy’s school dismissed students at the start of a May raid.
“He didn’t do anything. He didn’t make a single mistake,” says Mr Hamadneh, whose son was one of two teens killed that morning by a sniper.
“If he’d been a freedom fighter or was carrying a weapon, I would not be so emotional,” says his father, an unemployed construction worker. “But he only had his books and a pencil case.”
It is clear from statements by the Israeli military, resistance groups and families in the West Bank that a number of the Palestinian teens killed in recent months were resistance fighters. But many appear to have been random targets.
The Israeli army said that it has stepped up raids since October 7 to apprehend Palestinians suspected of carrying out attacks in the West Bank.
Video from a neighbour’s security system, shared on social media, shows how teenager Issa Jallad was killed by an Israeli armoured vehicle on a June afternoon as he rode a motorbike with a friend.
The Israeli army said that its soldiers had spotted two “militants” handling a powerful explosive device. When the pair tried to flee, troops opened fire and “neutralised them.”
But an Israeli human rights group B’Tselem says that its review of multiple security camera videos showed Jallad and his friend posed no threat.
The occupied West Bank was already seeing deadly clashes before October 7. But Israeli forces, which police about three million Palestinians while assigned to protect 500,000 Jewish settlers, have significantly stepped up raids in the months since.
Youths represent almost a quarter of the nearly 700 Palestinians slain in the West Bank since the war began, the most since the violent uprising known as the second intifada in the early 2000s.
More than 20 Israeli civilians and soldiers have been killed in the territory since October.
An Israeli military spokesman said the country’s army makes great efforts to avoid harming civilians during raids and “does not target civilians, period.” He said that human rights groups focus on a few outlier cases.
