IDF Veteran Decries Impunity for Troops Killing Record Number of West Bank Children

Even before Israel's obliteration of the Gaza Strip killed, maimed, or left missing around 30,000 children—and counting—Israeli occupation forces were killing Palestinian minors in record numbers in the West Bank with impunity, a situation one former Israel Defense Forces combat soldier described in detail on Wednesday.

According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), 499 Palestinians including 108 minors—104 boys and four girls—were killed by Israeli bombs, bullets, and so-called "less lethal" projectiles between January 1 and December 7 of this year. That's the highest number since OCHA began tracking such casualties in 2005 and shatters the previous record of 36 minors killed in 2022.

Ori Givati, advocacy director at Breaking the Silence—a whistleblower organization of Israel Defense Forces (IDF) veterans opposing their country's illegal occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem—told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in an article published Wednesday that it's "very rare" for Israeli troops to face punishment for killing any Palestinian civilian.

Givati said the IDF evades accountability by classifying incidents of civilian harm as unintentional or "operational errors."

He also said that Palestinian civilians including children are viewed by the IDF as "legitimate targets" due to generations of oppression and dehumanization by Israel.

A report published in August by Human Rights Watch (HRW) found that "the Israeli military and border police forces are killing Palestinian children with virtually no recourse for accountability."

Some of the children highlighted in the report were killed after throwing rocks or Molotov cocktails at heavily armored IDF vehicles.

Bill Van Esveld, an associate director for children's rights at HRW, told CBC that these minors did not pose a serious enough threat to Israeli troops to justify their "spraying the whole area with automatic gunfire" in response.

Last month, IDF troops shot and killed two children—one of them 8 or 9 years old—as they were running away during a raid on the Jenin refugee camp. An IDF spokesperson said Israeli troops opened fire with live rounds after "explosives" were thrown at them by one of the children; CCTV footage showed the slain boy holding an object about the size of a firecracker.

Critics have noted that Israel has a legal obligation under the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflict and the Geneva Conventions to treat all minors—even those taking part in hostilities—as protected victims.

Under the Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions of 1949, clarified by United Nations General Assembly Resolution 37/43, all Palestinians have the legal right to violently resist Israeli occupation. The 1982 resolution reaffirmed "the legitimacy of the struggle of peoples for independence, territorial integrity, national unity, and liberation from colonial and foreign domination and foreign occupation by all available means, including armed struggle."

Givati also blamed IDF training for the high number of Palestinian child casualties, explaining that "as soldiers in occupied territories, we are not trained properly to operate as a policing force in the West Bank, which is what the military is at this moment when we have military law and a military occupation."

The veteran said there is danger of a chain reaction if the IDF started holding soldiers accountable for harming Palestinian civilians.

"That will very quickly lead us to ask very big questions about the occupation in the broader perspective," he said. "We will [have] questions that we will not have good answers for if we want to continue the occupation, which is what Israel is currently pursuing."