Israel kills children routinely in West Bank

A Palestinian child of the village of Jinba, two days after a large-scale attack conducted by Israeli settlers and soldiers, Masafer Yatta, southern West Bank, 30 March 2025.
Yahel Gazit ActiveStills

Israel is subjecting Palestinian children in the occupied West Bank to a campaign of systematic ethnic cleansing, a human rights group has said.

Since the beginning of the year, Israel has killed 20 children in the West Bank.

In the latest case – on Sunday – Israeli soldiers shot three Palestinian children, including two with American citizenship – in the town of Turmusaya. One of the three died as a result.

The town’s mayor said the three boys were picking green almonds from a field near Route 60 – a highway used by Israeli settlers that crosses the West Bank.

Palestinian American Amer Rabee, 14, was killed by Israeli fire.

Israeli soldiers shot his 15-year-old friend Ayoub Jabar, also an American citizen, and he was placed in intensive care following the attack. Their friend Abdulrahman Shihada, 15, was hospitalized as well.

The Israeli army called the three children “terrorists” in a post on X that shows a few seconds of grainy footage that allegedly captures the moment they were shot. The Israeli army did not even try to claim that the boys had thrown anything other than rocks.

Israeli soldiers “identified three terrorists who hurled rocks toward the highway, thus endangering civilians driving,” the army stated.

“The soldiers opened fire toward the terrorists who were endangering civilians, eliminating one terrorist and hitting two additional terrorists.”

The 10-second footage shows three figures near a field, one of whom appears to throw something.

Amer’s father said the “video is not accurate” and contains no evidence that his son had even thrown rocks.

“There were six bullets in his body, two in his heart, two in his shoulder, and two in his face,” Amer’s father told a reporter with the French news agency AFP.

US citizenship provides no protection

Amer had grown up in the United States and moved to the occupied West Bank as a child. He was planning on moving back to the US after he completed his high school studies, where four of his siblings live.

The Washington Post said he was buried next to Omar Qateen, a Palestinian American who was shot and killed by Israeli police in 2023. Qateen was 27.

Many Palestinian Americans live in the town of Turmusaya. But their US citizenship doesn’t protect them from Israeli attacks, killings and encroachments on their land, or settler pogroms.

“The US embassy turns a blind eye,” Amer’s father told AFP.

“Many attendees at the funeral were US citizens, but residents also said they were angry at the US government for providing Israel with arms and political support, and attempts to displace them from their homes,” The Washington Post reported.

The US State Department apparently accepted Israel’s version of the killing.

“We acknowledge the IDF [Israeli military] initial statement that expressed that this incident occurred during a counter-terrorism operation and that Israel is investigating,” the State Department told the AFP.

The State Department made no further comment supposedly “out of respect for the privacy of the family.”

US administrations have repeatedly looked away following the killing of American citizens by the Israeli army and accepted Israel’s version of events without conducting their own investigations – even in the cases of children, students, activists and high profile journalists.

Shot in the chest

Also this month, the Israeli army shot and killed 16-year-old Omar Amer Zyoud in the northern West Bank.

An Israeli soldier in a heavily armored military vehicle shot Omar from a distance of about 80 meters (262 feet) on 2 April, according to Defense for Children International - Palestine.

He was near a school by the entrance of the Palestinian town of Silat al-Harithiya, northwest of Jenin. Omar was allegedly throwing stones and “explosive devices” alongside other youth at two military vehicles.

The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem recently reported that “neither stones nor improvised explosives cause significant harm to the armored vehicles in which the forces are transported.”

Omar was shot in the chest by the Israeli military. When two Palestinians tried to approach the child to aid him, including another child, Israeli forces shot at them as well, wounding both.

“Israeli soldiers continue targeting children with deadly force with no accountability because world leaders allow them to act without consequence,” said Ayed Abu Eqtaish, accountability program director at DCIP.

“Routine”

Israel’s killing of children has become “routine” in the West Bank, B’Tselem said.

“Palestinian children in the northern occupied West Bank, particularly Jenin, are enduring a systematic campaign of ethnic cleansing at the hands of Israeli forces,” DCIP recently said.

This is part of what B’Tselem is calling the “Gaza Doctrine” – the army’s replication of tactics it used during the Gaza genocide in the West Bank.

B’Tselem cited airstrikes, mass displacements and wanton killings as manifestations of this “Gazaification” of the West Bank.

But another element appears to be the routine killing of children.

“Since the war in Gaza broke out, Israel has loosened its restrictions on the use of lethal force in the West Bank, deploying an increasingly deadly open-fire policy,” B’Tselem said.

The number of children killed in the West Bank since 7 October 2023 – over 190 – is many times higher than the yearly average over the previous decade.

Soldiers are encouraged by a loose policy where lethal fire is permitted in “real and immediate” life-threatening situations, B’Tselem said.

But the level of such supposed threats are determined by soldiers in the field, who can retroactively claim danger without evidence or any root in reality. This approach has been repeatedly rubber-stamped by Israeli court rulings.

“In some cases, the military deliberately creates situations in which it can claim legal justification for shooting,” B’Tselem added.

“Focusing on the exact moment the trigger is pulled allows the military to evade responsibility, even when minors are involved.”

For example, soldiers would shoot at Palestinians before they even cast a stone, but rather as they are supposedly getting ready to. This would supposedly “‘catch them in the act’ in order to shoot with supposed ‘legal justification,’ instead of trying to arrest them or remove them with non-lethal measures and prevent the killing [of a teenager],” B’Tselem added.

Loose policy is also backed up by little to no accountability against soldiers who kill children.

“The probability of an Israeli soldier facing prosecution for killing Palestinians is just 0.4 percent,” the Israeli watchdog Yesh Din reported in February.

Israel’s wonton killing of children in the West Bank is a symptom of its systematic killing of children in Gaza since 7 October 2023.

Since the start of its genocide, Israel has killed some 17,500 children in Gaza.

That’s more than one child every hour for nearly 550 days.

It’s an “undeniable pattern,” Josh Rushing, the Emmy Award-winning senior correspondent for Fault Lines, told The Electronic Intifada livestream, about Israel’s deliberate killing of children in Gaza. Rushing was speaking about the Al Jazeera program’s new documentary “Kids Under Fire” – featuring testimonies by foreign doctors who treated injuries of children in the Gaza Strip.