Child deaths in Gaza pass 20,000 with no soldier prosecuted
An analysis in the Israeli press puts the number of under-18s killed since October 2023 above 20,000, an average of about 28 a day, and argues that military inquiries are opened mainly where foreign attention has already fallen. More than 2,000 families have been struck off Gaza's civil registry altogether.
More than 20,000 Palestinian children under the age of 18 have been killed in Gaza since the war began, according to an analysis published on Saturday by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. Set against the length of the war, the figure works out at an average of about 28 children a day.
The analysis is chiefly about what happens after such deaths. It examined how the Israeli military has handled several of the killings that drew notice abroad, among them the death of a five-year-old girl in a car in Gaza City in January 2024 and the killing of a paramedic in Rafah, and concluded that whatever discipline follows is likely to be slight.
Its central claim is that the army's inquiries are directed less at establishing responsibility than at protecting the institution's standing and answering criticism of its use of fire in populated areas. Cases that attracted little or no coverage outside the country, it said, have largely gone without any criminal investigation being opened at all, though the circumstances resemble those of the cases that did.
No soldier or officer has yet been prosecuted over indiscriminate attacks on Palestinian civilians, the newspaper said, across nearly three years in which whole residential blocks and much of the territory's civilian infrastructure have been destroyed.
One measure it cited of what that has cost is administrative rather than military: more than 2,000 Palestinian family lines have been removed in their entirety from Gaza's civil registry, every member recorded as dead. The health ministry's running count stands at 73,417 people killed and 174,360 wounded since October 2023, with more still under the rubble.