Israel has started bombing Gaza again and there are horrifying reports that their snipers are deliberately targeting children.
On August 24, four-year-old Mira Al-Darini had just woken up to a hot summer morning in a crowded displacement camp, located between a local prison and the mediterranean sea in Khan Younis, when the sound of Israeli military tanks and gunfire erupted. Panic ensued. Mira was standing outside her family’s tent, clutching a sandwich her mother made for breakfast when a bullet struck her in the head.
…Suddenly, Mira’s entire face was covered in blood, and we knew our daughter was shot in the head.” Witnesses said Mira was fired at by an Israeli military drone armed with a gun.
…
The Darini family’s story is part of a broader pattern of the Israeli military deliberately targeting children. Kids make up over a third of the death toll in Gaza, according to the Ministry of Health there. Nearly 16,000 children have been killed. However, the figure is almost certainly an undercount, as many children remain missing or under the rubble.
While most children have been killed by indiscriminate bombing, the doctors we spoke to say it’s nearly impossible to tell how many have been killed by snipers, foot soldiers with rifles, or quadcopters armed with guns. “Part of the Israeli military campaign of genocide has been to attack that very infrastructure that creates a record of who was killed and how,” said Miranda Cleland, an advocacy officer at Defense for Children International – Palestine. Cleland works with researchers on the ground in Gaza who had to stop collecting data because they were being bombed and had to evacuate their homes.
“The target at the end of a scope is unmistakable,” Dr. Mark Perlmutter told us, “They are a young human being, and when that trigger gets pulled on that target, it is not by accident. At all. Ever.” Currently in Gaza serving at Nasser Hospital, Perlmutter is an orthopedic hand surgeon from North Carolina who volunteered at the European Gaza Hospital in Khan Younis last spring.
…The Israeli military shooting Palestinian children is by no means new or unique to the escalating catastrophe in Gaza, yet the scale of the shootings over the last seventeen months is on an entirely different level. Between October 7, 2023 and July 2024, the Israeli military killed 141 Palestinian children in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem; 116 of those were shot with live ammunition, according to the Defense for Children International – Palestine. “That comes out to about one child every two days,” Cleland said. “Ninety percent of those children were killed with live ammunition.” Numbers for Gaza are not available, in part because the Israeli military has destroyed its healthcare system.
“Israeli forces have killed so many children in Gaza that it is most likely we will never know all of their names,” Cleland added. “I think it will be a long time until we really understand the scale of how many children were killed and injured in Gaza, and that’s even before we get into the details of how many children were shot with live ammunition.”
Even with the callous disregard for human life that has characterized the actions of Israel in Gaza and the Occupied Territories in the West Bank, I still find it hard to credit this report that Israeli snipers deliberately shot at children. I cannot comprehend that any human being, even a hardened soldier who unthinkingly follows orders to shoot and kill on sight, would deliberately fire at a child who appears in the field of view of their weapon. And yet that is what we are told is happening.
If true, it is a war crime of horrific proportions.
dehumanization is a hell of a drug…
I… I don’t even know what to say aside from that…
“I still find it hard to credit this report that Israeli snipers deliberately shot at children”
Suggests you’ve not met many snipers. Or Israelis.
You know what shocks me? When I find out that there are people who haven’t known that Israeli snipers have been targeting Palestinian children for years.
Israeli snipers targeted children, health workers and journalists in Gaza protests, UN says (from 2019)
Under more “normal” circumstances, they generally prefer to aim for people’s knees, because crippling someone for life puts more of a strain on society than killing them outright. It’s a game for them -- they compete to see who can score the most “knees”. They’re not just following orders, they’re having fun.
’42 Knees in One Day’: Israeli Snipers Open Up About Shooting Gaza Protesters (from 2020 -- this was also reported in Haaretz if you want an Israeli source, but it’s paywalled.)
‘Shoot to maim’: How Israel created a generation on crutches in Gaza (from 2019)
I’ve been reading these sorts of reports for as long as I can remember. The only reason I can’t easily find more earlier examples is because they’ve completely swamped in the search results by the recent ones -- there was a huge amount of reporting around this last year.
It’s written in the torah.
I know I’ll be called anti-semitic for saying this. But it’s written that you clear the holy land of all others. Including children. Including infants suckling.
The Christian bible is just as horrific. The problem is not being Jewish. The problem is fundamentalism utterly divorced from humanism.
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Samuel%2015%3A3&version=NIV
Of course most Jewish people are disgusted by this. But this is where the right find there justification.
*their*
Don’t hassle me it’s late at night.
Speaking of late at night; that is not from the Torah, but elsewhere in the Hebrew bible. But it’s a thing.
That’s four.
Four blank lines, i assume from the same perpetrator?
Bye bye.
Honestly there’s a lot about that whole situation that’s hard to parse. I don’t have any experience with the idea that I might walk down the road and pass bombed out homes and businesses on my way to get groceries. Or that the store might not have any. Or that the store isn’t even there and I’m getting food from somewhere else. Or sometimes not at all.
I don’t have any experience with people dying all around me. Or being anywhere near the kind of blind hatred that could cause any of this to still be going on over three years later. It is clearly not about October 7th anymore and hasn’t been for years now.
The only part of this I have any experience with is people lying to me about genocide. In the US, we did that to native American populations. But around all the lies there was still at least some honesty about it. The information that’s come out in the last couple decades about horrific boarding schools and mass graves for natives was news to me but the Trail of Tears was taught in my history classes.
Whatever it looks like to come out on the other side of this, Israel will have a lot to remember. And much of it won’t sit well with any of their future population without an awful lot of propaganda (some version of “Manifest Destiny” to continue the American comparison).
When genocide rises to the level of kill-em-all (aka holocaust) then of course they’re going to be exterminating the children too. I mean, they could instead capture the children, keep them in a cell until they turn 18, and then kill them, but that would be just plain weird.
It’s one of those things which decent people shy away from thinking about even while they’re discussing it, but of course it’s a necessarily true and significant part of the situation,
A USMC-veteran friend of mine says he went to Vietnam with the understanding that children of Communists would grow up to be Communists, so it was his duty to prevent that.
He still had that attitude when medevacked out a year and a half later, and only changed it a couple of years later, stateside. He claims a high body count; I never felt mean enough to ask how many were kids.
sonof@#2,
It is true I have not met any snipers but I have met many Israelis (the world of physics has a lot of them) and I cannot imagine any of them deliberately gunning down a child.
@Mano,13: that’s a description of your imagination, not their attitudes.
For this to be going on, it doesn’t require all or even many Israelis to be able themselves , personally, to kill a defenseless child. It merely requires enough Israelis to be comfortable that it’s happening in their name. Because they clearly are.
And in the current police state you live in, if you even ASKED them if they’d be ok with it, you risk being branded a terrorist, disappeared off the street and kept in foreign jail until deportation.
Fun fact: jovial sex therapist Dr Ruth Westheimer was an IDF sniper.
(is the three post rule still being enforced?)
Personal opinion: I can’t imagine our host being so petty as to enforce the three-post limit for three posts and a correction. Whereas I can imagine his new third rule was introduced for a reason.
USAans should be familiar with this attitude. What the Israelis are doing to the Palestinians is basically what our ancestors did (and are still doing) to the Native Americans. In both cases, the goal is extermination and taking over any of their land that we have any use for.
Unfortunately, it’s been clear for decades that this is where things were headed.
The title needs the word “still”
I cannot imagine any of them deliberately gunning down a child.
My friend Stephen Zimmerman, RIP, used to tell a joke:
Q: “how can you shoot women and kids?”
A: “just lead them a bit less”
He also said that snipers in Vietnam also served as artillery spotters. So if they saw a village that had any signs of weapons, they’d call artillery to flatten it. The sniper corrects the artillery fire by observing its fall and calling adjustments. He used to say he had 19 confirmed kills and a dozen villages.
They pick snipers for being borderline sociopathic.
sonofrojblake @#14,
I know my own blog rules, I read all the comments, and I do know how to count up to four so I do not need any prompting from you or anyone else as to whom to ban. Remember that I also wrote that I “reserve the right to make exceptions to the rules at any time, if I feel it is warranted.”
My main aim is to get rid of people who are obnoxious and act like jerks and so will use my judgment when I feel it is warranted to make exceptions to the rules for good faith violations.