235 Palestinian children killed in the West Bank since 2023
An Israeli rights group's figures put the rate at about seven a month, against roughly one a month in the seventeen years before the Gaza war.
Israeli forces and settlers have killed 235 Palestinian children and teenagers in the occupied West Bank since 7 October 2023, on figures kept by the Israeli rights group B'Tselem and set out on Saturday in a report by the French news agency AFP. Five of the deaths are attributed to settlers and the rest to Israeli forces.
What the count establishes is a change of rate. Over the seventeen years from 2005 to 2021, the same group's records show roughly one Palestinian child or teenager killed by Israeli forces each month. Since October 2023 the average has run at about seven a month.
A Palestinian government body, the Colonisation and Wall Resistance Commission, puts the number higher over the same period, at 250.
Fifty-four children and teenagers were killed last year on B'Tselem's count. The youngest was two years old, and most of the rest were aged between 14 and 17.
A number of them were shot in circumstances where they were not what anyone was aiming at. Sam Abu Haikal was seven months old in June this year when Israeli troops opened fire on the car his family was in at Hebron, and he was hit in the face. His mother was holding him on her lap. Dania Abu Haikal, 28, a university lecturer, was wounded by the same burst, a round entering through her cheek and leaving through her ear; she carried the scar when she spoke to the agency's reporters at her home in Bethlehem, holding a soft toy that had been her son's. "Why would anyone shoot an infant?" she asked.
The way the deaths divide is not the way the West Bank is usually described. Settler violence is the part of it that gets recorded, denounced and occasionally prosecuted, and five of the 235 are laid at settlers' door. The other 230 were caused by the state's own soldiers, in a territory where the army's declared work is policing rather than war.
The seventeen-year baseline is the part of the figures that is hardest to argue with. One child killed a month is a sequence of separate incidents, each with its own account and its own dispute over what happened. Seven a month is not a sequence. It is a rate, and a rate is produced by how forces are told to operate rather than by what occurs in front of any one of them.