Abdul Rahman reports on data detailing Israel’s killing, wounding, starving and imprisonment of children in the past six months.
Medic carries an injured Palestinian child into Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City following an Israeli airstrike on Oct. 11, 2023. (Atia Darwish, Palestinian News & Information Agency — Wafa — for APAimages, CC BY-SA 3.0)
By Abdul Rahman
Peoples Dispatch
Israel has killed 14,350 Palestinian children between Oct. 7 and April 4. This means children account for 44 percent of all Palestinians killed in Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS) said ahead of Palestinian Child’s Day.
Women and children constitute nearly 70 percent of over 7,000 additional persons missing in the same period, and the majority of the over 75,000 Palestinians who are wounded are women and children.
Out of a total of 455 Palestinians killed in the occupied West Bank by the Israeli forces in the same period, 117 were children.
[See: Chris Hedges: The Death of Amr]
Over 17,000 Palestinian children have also been orphaned or separated from their parents as a result of Israel’s genocidal attacks, according to UNICEF data, after either both or one of their parents were killed in the Israeli bombings and ground offensives since Oct. 7.
Palestinians celebrate Child’s Day on April 5 every year. Human rights groups such as Defense of Children International Palestine, Palestinian Network for Children’s Rights (PNCR) and others mark the day as International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian Children in order to highlight Israel’s systematic crimes against them.
Israel Starves Palestinian Children to Death
At least 31 Palestinian children have been starved to death in Gaza in the last couple of months. The starvation is a product of the deliberate blockade and restrictions imposed by the Israeli forces on the delivery and distribution of food and other humanitarian aid in the besieged territory. The entire population of Gaza is now facing acute levels of food insecurity.
The around 20,000 children born since Oct. 7 in Gaza are now at severe risk of malnutrition. The prolonged lack of nutrition has raised the possibility of stunted growth for the children of Gaza.
A large number of pregnant women in Gaza are deprived of adequate medical care as well, due to the genocide and Israel’s repeated attacks on the health facilities and workers.
Spokesperson for the Ministry of Health in Gaza:
– The Israeli occupation is carrying out a genocide, making Gaza uninhabitable.
– Since the onset of the war, the Israeli occupation has been waging a systematic campaign against the health system, aiming to force civilians to… pic.twitter.com/CLtDRHrrab— Quds News Network (@QudsNen) April 7, 2024
According to the PCBS, by the middle of this year, there would be around 2.4 million children below the age of 18 in the occupied Palestinian territories, 43 percent of the total Palestinian population in West Bank and Gaza. The population of children in Palestine is almost equally divided between the West Bank (over 1.3 million) and Gaza (over 1 million).
Around 816,000 children in Gaza need psychological assistance due to trauma caused by the ongoing genocide. Around 620,000 have been out of school, with eight out of 10 schools destroyed by the invading Israeli forces in indiscriminate bombings on civilian infrastructures and deliberate acts of sabotage. Another 133 schoolsare used as temporary shelters for displaced people.
Child Prisoners
Since Oct. 7, Israeli forces detained over 500 Palestinian children, although some have since been released. However, there are still over 200 Palestinian children in various Israeli jails. Forty one Palestinian child prisoners are being held as administrative detainees, according to the human rights and prisoner support group Addameer.
Palestinians children detained by the Israeli forces have often been subjected to torture and abuse both during their arrests and in the prison. In a large number of cases, Palestinian children have been treated like criminals when arrested by Israeli forces — blindfolded and with their hands tied. They are often tried in military courts.
In a report submitted last year by Francesca Albanese, U.N. special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, said that over “10,000 Palestinian children have experienced institutionalized ill treatment during arrests, prosecutions, sentencing and consequent traumas on themselves and their families.”
Some children released from Israeli prison recently have also testified that they were isolated in the prison and tortured and severely beaten, Addameer said.
Abdul Rahman is a correspondent for Peoples Dispatch.
This article is from Peoples Dispatch.
Views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
Ms. Albanese’s report from this year ( March 25, 2024) on the current genocide in Gaza states that Palestinian children are detained and tortured, sometimes to death, as copied and pasted here, from that report-
29. Israeli forces have detained thousands of Palestinians, mostly men and young boys,
often refusing to disclose their whereabouts.79 Many of them have been severely mistreated,
including through torture at times leading to death.
I encourage everyone to simply look up UN Report ” Anatomy of a Genocide” which lists things that you definitely will not
read much about elsewhere, if at all. They cut off their own nose to spite their face. Their own future damned by these heinous acts,
along with the rest of ours. I was thinking things sure do change a lot in 80 years or so, but maybe they do not change at all.
“We know that we are of God, and that the whole world
is in the power of the evil one” (1 Jn.5.19).
Secretary of Defense,
after over thirty-three thousand Palestinians killed, seventy-five
thousand wounded, over seven thousand rotting under bombed rubble,
no food or water allowed if Israeli troops can stop it; and Lloyd Austin III
pompously pontificates that “there’s no evidence of genocide in Gaza.”
American-Israeli government deeply in the power of the evil one.
Nothing has been learned from the Nazi; we have today a testimony that the western culture never believed in human rights, peace, respect, diversity; the only thing they believe is their version of truth, their perception of superiority, the homogenization of cultures under one banner, theirs. Nazi wanted homogenization. Nothing changes in the west, hedonism has become not the mean to reach an end but the end itself. Violence is the only mean to solve internal problems, inefficiency, lack of holistic intelligence, cultural narcissism and incapacity to adapt and tolerate other different cultures and their ability to thrive.
We often ask ourselves “we are the alien intelligent form of life?”, but would you, an intelligent form of life that has transcended and overcome, violence, prejudice, unipolarism, xenophobia, materialism… ever wanted to visit a planet in which the dominant culture is like the western one?
What impede worldwide humanity to move forward is the western culture, we are the problem and not the solution.
We are the neanderthals, strong, clever, but incapable of adapting to new circumstances. Atlantis is not an historical event, it is rather a prophecy that explain the fate of a technological advanced culture, so reliant to it, so proud of it, so dependent on it, that has failed to recognize its limits and shortcoming has human beings, that has alienated itself from the human dimension and reality, and had been swallowed by the ocean (the unknown, the unconscious)
Who invented the mealy-mouthed term “food insecurity”? Is it too much to use plain English when describing children and adults who go to bed hungry? Who are being deliberately starved?
This will define Israel, and Zionism, forever.
Israel’s an artificial state that’s gone berserk. Over 90% of Jewish Israeli citizens essentially approve of the genocidal land-grab the Netanyahu regime is carrying out in Gaza.
Absolutely nothing has worked to curtail the creepy Zionist sadists from murdering over 33,000 Palestinians — massive non-violent protests haven’t done squat, ICJ rulings have done nothing, UN resolutions have no effect — perhaps the only thing these Israeli supremacists in Tel Aviv will react to or respond to is force and violence being directed against Tel Aviv. It’s a last resort, but as mentioned, absolutely nothing has stemmed the tide of innocent Palestinian bloodshed.
If anyone lifted a finger against Tel Aviv, or any other part of Israel, you can be sure that the U.S. and the rest of the Zionist counterfeit empire would be on it as quickly as flies on a fresh turd…and the entire world knows it! As we have seen for the past six months, no one is willing to risk giving Israel a serious bloody nose on behalf of the Palestinians, thereby risking being drawn into a military conflict with Uncle Sam and friends. Unfortunately, this problem is far larger than just Israel!
So let’s just let another 40,000+ Palestinians be murdered by the creepy Zionist sadists over the next five months. Pakistan is the Islamic nuke deterrent to Israel’s nukes. NOTHING has worked. The U.S. and its iron bathtubs in the oceans and seas are sitting ducks. The U.S. public would tire very quickly if Washington decided to put an American invasionary force into Iran.
Believe me, I share your frustration over the slaughtered Palestinians and the fact that the slaughter has continued, unabated, for six months…it reflects horribly on all of us as human beings! And I surely don’t want to see “another 40,000+ Palestinians murdered by the creepy Zionist sadists over the next five months.” However, the cold, hard fact remains, that nothing has worked and, to this point, no one in a position to do so is willing to use significant military force against Israel. Which means, alas, that the slaughter will continue with no end in sight. Unfortunately, the leaders in Israel, the U.S. and beyond responsible for the slaughter remain primitive, warlike primates and, as we have seen, there is no reasoning with these creatures!
If it weren’t for the US stopping the world from intervening, Israel wouldn’t have dared commit such extreme barbarity!
It has become a rogue state – far far worse than any other on the planet, and is risking it whole existance. It’s an all or nothing gamble, which I and millions of other people around the world, hope will fail.
Cartographers around the world need to start redrawing their maps of Palestine, and removing all reference to Israel.
100% agree, I think if that were to happen they would use their nukes and that would be the end of that.
We can thank Truman and & Eisenhower for allowing these satanic monsters to acquire the end of days bomb..
I believe it was LBJ who ultimately turned a blind eye to the Israeli nuclear weapons program.
We can’t just let another 40,000+ Palestinians be murdered by the Zionists over the next five months. Pakistan is the Islamic nuke deterrent to Israel’s nukes. NOTHING has worked.
“The Apollo Affair was a 1965 incident in which a US company, NUMEC, in the Pittsburgh suburbs of Apollo and Parks Township, Pennsylvania was investigated for losing 200–600 pounds (91–272 kg) of highly enriched uranium, with suspicions that it had gone to Israel’s nuclear weapons program.”
Truman and Eisenhower didn’t exactly allow our Zionist friends to acquire nuclear weapons; there is a fair amount of evidence that suggests that they, shall we say, helped themselves to 206 pounds of highly enriched uranium that miraculously found its way to Israel’s nuclear weapons program! Zalman Shapiro, who just happened to be president of NUMEC at the time, was a hard-core Zionist who had “business interests and contacts with high-ranking government officials in Israel, including a contract to build nuclear-powered generators for Israel”…funny how it always seems to roll that way!