A 12-year-old Palestinian boy was shot while lighting a firework. ‘Cases like these happen quite regularly, but no one’s hearing about them,’ according to the Israeli rights group B’Tselem
Israel is using deadly force against children in the West Bank
“The depth of the horror surpasses our ability to describe it,” James Elder, a spokesperson with the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef), said after travelling the length of Gaza this week. There is nothing left: Republicans who called for Gaza to be turned into a “parking lot” have got their wish. Amid the ruins, a traumatized and trapped population are being starved to death; an entire generation is seeing their future destroyed. “Starvation is used as a weapon of war,” the EU foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, said this week. “Israel is provoking famine.”
While the world’s attention is on Gaza, life for Palestinians in the West Bank is also growing increasingly precarious. There has been a surge in settler violence and a spike in unlawful lethal force from Israeli forces. More than 400 Palestinians from East Jerusalem and the West Bank have been killed by Israeli fire since 7 October, according to the Palestinian health ministry. The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem has said that about 100 of these deaths have been children: most of whom posed no credible threat to heavily armed soldiers from one of the most powerful militaries in the world.
One of those children was Rami Al-Halhouli, a 12-year-old who was recently shot dead by Israeli border police while lighting fireworks to celebrate Ramadan. The police, who still have Rami’s body, have said that the child was aiming the firework at them –but did not provide any evidence of this. The far-right Israeli minister Itamar Ben-Gvir celebrated the shooting, calling the 12-year-old a “terrorist” and the officer who shot him a hero.
Perhaps you think it’s OK for an Israeli soldier to shoot a boy dead because he was playing with a firework. Perhaps you can find a way to justify this to yourself. Still, the uncomfortable fact remains that there are plenty of documented cases which show Israeli soldiers firing at Palestinians without any provocation. “Cases like these happen quite regularly, but no one’s hearing about them,” said Dror Sadot, a spokesperson for B’Tselem. “The military will say that it is opening an investigation. And this investigation will last for years, probably without any media covering it. And then it will be washed down the drain.” Under 1% of any investigations into the Israeli military using excessive force against Palestinians end in an indictment.
Unless you’ve been to the occupied Palestinian territories, I don’t think it’s possible to wrap your head around the way in which Palestinians are treated by Israel. Not just the impunity with which they can be killed but the dehumanization and humiliation that is part of everyday life. I remember visiting my father’s village in the West Bank when I was six and carrying spare clothes whenever we left the village in case a curfew was imposed by Israel and we couldn’t return. My diary from the time skips from eating ice-cream to being shot at with teargas by Israeli soldiers.
Unless you have experienced it yourself, I think it’s hard for some people in the west to understand the extent to which Palestinian lives are policed and controlled by Israel. We are constantly told that the situation is far too complex to parse, but when you go there, when you see how people live, it doesn’t feel complex at all.
“It’s made to sound as though you need a degree in Middle Eastern studies or some such, a PhD, to really understand what’s happening,” the acclaimed author Ta-Nehisi Coates said after he visited Israel and Palestine last year. “But I understood the first day … I was in a territory where your mobility is inhibited, where your voting rights are inhibited, where your right to the water is inhibited, where your right to housing is inhibited. And it’s all inhibited based on ethnicity. And that sounded extremely, extremely familiar to me.”
Amid the horrors unfolding in Gaza there is a narrative being advanced that this is all about Hamas and 7 October. It is important not to lose sight of the fact that this is not just about Hamas – who do not govern the West Bank – and history did not start on 7 October. What is happening has been a very long time in the making.
Twenty-one years ago, in 2003, American peace activist Rachel Corrie went to Gaza to defend homes in Rafah from being demolished by Israeli forces. “I couldn’t even believe that a place like this existed,” Corrie wrote in her diaries. “[N]o amount of reading, attendance at conferences, documentary viewing and word of mouth could have prepared me for the reality of the situation here. You just can’t imagine it unless you see it … Just want to write to my Mom and tell her that I’m witnessing this chronic, insidious genocide and I’m really scared, and questioning my fundamental belief in the goodness of human nature. This has to stop. I think it is a good idea for us all to drop everything and devote our lives to making this stop.”
A couple of weeks after writing that, 23-year-old Corrie was crushed to death by an Israeli soldier driving a US-made bulldozer. Nobody was ever held accountable for her death. Nobody will ever be held accountable for 12-year-old Rami’s death either.
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