Children are the most helpless victims of the bloodshed in Israel and the occupied territories, Khaled Amayreh reports The 22 March "targeted assassination" of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the founder and spiritual leader of Hamas and a 68-year-old paraplegic, triggered condemnations of Israel throughout the world. An equally ugly aspect of Israel's crackdown on Palestinians, though one that has drawn less attention, has been its "open season" on Palestinian children. Israel, calculating that the Zionist-controlled media in the West would succeed in obfuscating the issue, denies vehemently that its army targets Palestinian children. However, it is painfully clear that Palestinian children are killed and injured almost on a daily basis by Israeli soldiers. Even in cases where the children were not deliberately targeted, Israel has carried out its policies with the knowledge that they would likely leave Palestinian children dead, as "collateral damage". As an Arab poet once said, "If you didn't know, it is a calamity. If you did know, the calamity is even bigger." The latest killing took place at the Balata refugee camp, east of Nablus, on Saturday 27 March. An Israeli soldier, reportedly a sniper, coolly shot seven-year-old Khaled Maher Walweel. When shot, the boy was sitting in the second storey of his home. The bullet pierced the window, hitting the boy in the neck. A few minutes later, the boy's uncle was carrying a badly wounded Khaled into the street, with his distraught mother wailing for her dying son. The Israeli soldiers were not content to stop at simply shooting the boy inside his home. They also held up the ambulance taking him to the hospital for more than five minutes, as Walweel bled to death. The murder of a young boy, who posed no threat whatsoever to Israeli troops, raised no eyebrows in Israel, neither in the government nor in the media, and of course not in the military establishment. In its rundown on the day's clashes in the occupied territories, Israel's state-controlled radio station emotionlessly stated: "The Palestinians reported a boy was killed." There was no condemnation, no expression of guilt. No denunciation of terror acts either. After all, Khaled was an Arab, just another name added to the list of the nearly 500 Palestinian children and minors killed by the Israeli Defence Forces or paramilitary settlers during the current Intifada. Instead, the Israeli media and army were immersed in sanctimonious concern for the fate of a Palestinian boy the Israeli army has claimed was dispatched by a Palestinian resistance group to blow himself up in the midst of Israeli soldiers at a roadblock south of Nablus. The boy, identified as Husam Abdu, was shown on TV screens around the world with an explosive belt strapped to his waist. The Israeli army, which inexplicably had TV cameras in place two hours in advance of the event, repeated the story always used in such circumstances, gravely reporting that the boy was promised that he would have sex with 72 virgins in heaven after his death. An Israeli army spokesman also claimed that unnamed militant groups offered the boy 100 Israeli shekels ($22) as a more worldly incentive. The story seemed suspicious from the very beginning, prompting Palestinian leaders to accuse Israel of "fabricating this theatrical play". "We know for sure this is a fabricated story from A to Z. Would you believe that a 13 or 14-year-old would agree to blow up himself in return for a hundred shekels which he would receive after his death?" asked Ya'acob Shahin, director-general at the Palestinian Ministry of Information. He accused Israel of being hell-bent on seeking to justify slaughtering Palestinian children by painting them as terrorists and potential suicide bombers. "Their goal is to besmirch Palestinian childhood so that when they slaughter the children, the world won't feel sorry for them." Samir Khiwairah, a Nablus journalist and friend of Abdu's family, told Al-Ahram Weekly that the boy's mental capacity to distinguish things is very low. "I don't completely rule out the possibility that some evil person gave him the explosive belt and told them he would become a hero ... but this is a very remote possibility." Khiwairah said the Israeli army has a history of "fabricating and concocting stories" for the purpose of vilifying the Palestinians. The Israeli army did not return phone calls asking why Abdu would accept a hundred shekels to commit suicide and what good the money could possibly do for him after his death. The army also declined to explain why it had TV cameras ready at the roadblock more than two hours before the event. The utterly hypocritical concern about Abdu's life was too much for some independent Israeli journalists, like Gideon Levy in Ha'aretz. Levy pointed out in a 28 March article that the fate of a Palestinian child only tugged on the heartstrings of Israelis when it served their political purposes. "The hundreds of children who have been killed, the thousands who have been crippled, and the hundreds of thousands who live under conditions of siege and poverty, and are exposed every day to violence and humiliation ... all this has failed to move the Israeli public ... just the child with the belt has." While rightly denouncing as the use of children as suicide bombers in the conflict, Levy nonetheless blamed Israel for terrorising Palestinian children. "Every brutal house search in the middle of the night and every contact with soldiers is a source of trauma. There is no Palestinian child who has not seen a house destroyed, an assassination operation, severe harassment or violence. They live in constant fear -- that any moment soldiers will come, the tanks will enter and crush, the bulldozers will come and destroy, and the helicopter will fire a missile. Their fears are left untreated, just as their health and physical development are left unattended. As an occupier, we bear the responsibility for all of this." The abuse of children for warfare and for public relations purposes by both sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict underscores the brazen ugliness of this war. According to the Jerusalem-based Human Rights Monitoring Group (HRMG), the Israeli army and paramilitary Jewish settlers have killed 263 Palestinian children under 14 years of age and 235 minors from 15 to 18 years old during the Al-Aqsa Intifada. The total number of Palestinians killed by Israel since the outbreak of the Intifada is estimated at 2,670, while tens of thousands have been injured. The number of Israelis killed by Palestinians during the same period is 838, including soldiers, settlers and civilians. Roughly 100 Israeli children and minors have been killed during the conflict.
