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As reported by ISM (International Solidarity Movement) this morning, a 10-Year old shot dead at Nil’in.

July 29th, 2008

A 10 year old boy called Ahmed Ussam Yusef Mousa (above) was shot dead at approximately 6pm near the Palestinian village of Nil’in. He was shot once in the head at close range with live ammunition.

According to eye witnesses a group of youths attempted to remove coils of razor wire from land belonging to the village. Without warning, they were fired upon and Ahmed was killed. Israeli newspaper Maariv reported in March that the Israeli authorities have given a new order to border police operating along the apartheid wall surrounding Jerusalem. They can now open fire directly on Palestinians who try to demonstrate near the barrier. But sniping is forbidden if there are Israeli or foreign citizens amongst demonstrators.

Demonstrations have been held almost every day for the past few weeks as near Nil’in against Israel’s Apartheid Wall, declared illegal by the International Court in the Hague in 2004. The wall will deprive the village of almost 2,500 Dunums of agricultural land, and put the existence of the entirely community in doubt.

The Israeli Army and Border Police have been increasingly ill-disciplined and violent in response to the demonstrations.

Link above for the rest of the article

Six other children below the age of 18 (among 11 total deaths) have been murdered during demonstrations against Israel’s Apartheid Wall.

Israeli soldier’s attitudes toward Palestinian children are becoming more well-known.

This material, quoted by Lawrence of Cyberia is about Israel’s targeting of civilians especially children in the West Bank and Gaza. Here you have an occupying military force colonizing Palestinian lands, and Israeli soldiers given orders to take out civilians who protest it including children.

Palestinian deaths during the first and second Intifadas were not unintentional collateral damage. It was terrorist murdering by an occupying force.

Israel’s claim that its soldiers adhere to a doctrine of “purity of arms” in dealing with the Palestinian civilian population has been going on for a long time. In the first intifada, Ehud Barak was the IDF’s Deputy Chief of Staff, and proclaimed: “We do not want children to be shot under any circumstances … When you see a child you don’t shoot.” That was untrue then, just as Bradley Burston’s insinuation that Palestinian civilian deaths aren’t intentional is a lie now:

The Swedish “Save the Children” organization estimated that “23,600 to 29,900 children required medical treatment for their beating injuries in the first two years of the [first] intifida,” with nearly one‐third sustaining broken bones. Nearly one‐third of the beaten children were aged ten and under. It also states that 6,500 to 8,000 children were wounded by gunfire during the first two years of the Intifada. Researchers investigated 66 of the 106 recorded cases of “child gunshot deaths.” They concluded that: almost all of them “were hit by directed, not random or ricochet gunfire”; nearly twenty percent suffered multiple gunshot wounds; twelve percent were shot from behind; fifteen percent of the children were ten years of age or younger; “most children were not participating in a stone throwing demonstration when shot dead”; and “nearly one fifth of the children were shot dead while at home or within ten meters of their homes.”

-cited in The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy (chapter 2, end note 49); by Mearsheimer and Walt.

That’s how the IDF killed Palestinian civilians – children – during the first intifada. Not through a careless use of missiles or the occasional errant tank shell, but by individual Israeli soldiers pointing their guns at children in the Occupied Territories – even children under ten, even children who had turned their backs and were running away – and shooting them dead.

And the IDF’s record in the second intifada is much worse. Firstly, because the IDF announced in March 2003 that it would no longer routinely investigate the deaths of civilians killed by Israeli soldiers, but would allow individual Israeli officers in the field to decide whether to call in the Military Police whenever their troops killed a civilian, or to simply declare the killing an “unfortunate incident of death”, which required no investigation. A policy that has had the following, entirely predictable, result:

The IDF effectively grants immunity to soldiers who open fire illegally. Since the beginning of the intifada, the IDF has ceased to automatically open an investigation into every case in which a Palestinian is killed by IDF fire. The decision as to whether to open a Military Police investigation into each incident is now made by the Judge Advocate General’s office, based on the results of the field de-briefings, which are also carried out by the army itself. In one case that was exposed by B’Tselem, it was clear that an eleven-year-old child had died as a result of the violation of procedures and illegal shooting. Despite this, the Judge Advocate General’s office decided not to request a Military Police investigation. In addition, the investigations that are opened are generally protracted and based primarily on soldiers’ testimonies, while completely ignoring the Palestinian eyewitnesses.

This policy has unavoidably resulted in a situation in which shooting at innocent Palestinians has practically become a routine. (B’Tselem)

And secondly, because at the very beginning of the second intifada, the IDF issued extremely broad open fire regulations, concerning who might be considered a legitimate target:

Sniper: “They forbid us to shoot at children”.
Journalist: “How do they say this?”
Sniper: “You don’t shoot a child who is 12 or younger”.
Journalist: “That is, a child of 12 or older is allowed?”
Sniper: “Twelve and up is allowed. He’s not a child anymore, he’s already after his bar mitzvah. Something like that”.
Journalist: “Thirteen is bar mitzvah age”.
Sniper: “Twelve and up, you’re allowed to shoot. That’s what they tell us”.
Journalist: “Under international law, a child is defined as someone up to the age of 18.”
Sniper: “Up until 18 is a child?”
Journalist: “So, according to the IDF, it is 12?”
Sniper: “According to what the IDF says to its soldiers. I don’t know if this is what the IDF says to the media.”

— Amira Hass’ interview with an IDF sharpshooter, explaining why so many Palestinian children were killed in the first weeks of the intifada, when the IDF was largely confronted by stonethrowers. Published in Ha’aretz, Don’t shoot till you can see they’re over the age of 12, 20 November 2000.

Other evidence of Israeli soldiers targeting children is given in statistics reported by Alison Weir who operates the site: If Americans Knew:

The first suicide bombing in the second intifadah was on Dec. 22 (no Israelis died in it). By that time, 86 Palestinian children (<18 years of age) had been killed by Israelis  (LINK). The first Israeli child was killed on Jan. 17, 2001 (LINK). By that time, at least 90 Palestinian children had been killed by Israeli armed forces.

Before a single suicide bomber had entered Israel after the start of the Second Intifada, sometimes called, after Sharon’s provocative visit to the Temple Mount, the al Aqsa Intifada, during its first month, 27 Palestinian children had been killed by Israeli Defense Forces in the West Bank and Gaza, the youngest only four months of age, and the majority due to gunshot wounds to the head. Numerous children were also wounded. In the first three months alone, 159 children lost an eye presumably to rubber bullets shot from IDF rifles. Clearly the IDF were intentionally targeting these children, aiming at their heads with either rubber bullets or real bullets in the case of the child kills. We are talking here about a trained, mechanized army versus civilians, children participating in the Intifada, the nonviolent resistance instituted by child and teenage Palestinian boys and girls. To be fair, we did hear that an Israeli soldier lost his eye from a rock thrown by a Palestinian boy from a pretty IDF spokeswoman, but it was the only such incident reported in three years.

In addition to these children, many more innocent adult civilians were killed in the month before suicide bombings commenced. If terrorism is the intentional killing of civilians, then clearly, Israel’s armed forces were deep into terrorism, the state sponsored type, long before the Palestinians engaged in it to any degree. As a people fighting a military occupation, it would seem that the ultimate cause of all of these horrors on both sides rests with Israel and the purpose for which it continues its long occupation, the colonization of Palestinian lands.

Rami Khouri, the Palestinian editor of the Beirut newspaper, the Daily Star, provided this cynical report to statements by Olmert professing his concern for Palestinian children (Ehud Olmert’s Profound Ethics and Deep Lies):

“For anyone interested in the facts about the impact of Israeli policies on Palestinian children, a good place to start is the carefully checked data disseminated by the Palestinian Nongovernmental Organization Network (www.palestinemonitor.org). Their data is compiled and verified on the ground by the Ramallah-based Health Development Information and Policy Institute, which has been honored by the World Health Organization for its work in promoting Palestinian health needs. So these people know what they are talking about when it comes to health conditions on the ground in Israeli-occupied Palestine. Some of the facts they provide are as follows.

In just the first two years of the second intifada, from September 2000 to November 2002:

  • 383 Palestinian children (under the age of 18) were killed by the Israeli army and Israeli settlers, i.e. almost 19% of the total Palestinians killed; those figures have increased since then.
  • Approximately 36% of total Palestinians injured (estimated at more than 41,000) are children; 86 of these children were under the age of ten; 21 infants under the age of 12 months have been killed.
  • 245 Palestinian students and school children have been killed; 2,610 pupils have been wounded on their way to or from school.
  • The Israeli policy of widespread closure has paralyzed the Palestinian health system, with children particularly vulnerable to this policy of collective punishment. Internal closures have severely disrupted health plans which affect over 500,000 children, including vaccination programs, dental examinations and early diagnosis for children when starting schools.
  • During the first two months of the intifada, the rate of upper respiratory infections in children increased from 20% to 40%. Almost 60% of children in Gaza suffer parasitic infections.
  • An overwhelming number of Palestinian children show symptoms of trauma such as sleep disorders, nervousness, decrease in appetite and weight, feelings of hopelessness and frustration, and abnormal thoughts of death.
  • There have been 36 cases of Palestinian women in labor delayed at checkpoints and refused permission to reach medical facilities or for ambulances to reach them. At least 14 of these women gave birth at the checkpoint with eight of the births resulting in the death of the newborn infants.

The Israeli army killing of Palestinian children continues apace. In its annual report May 16, the respected global human rights organization Amnesty International accused the Israeli army of killing 190 Palestinians, including 50 children, last year (2005).”

Today, we learn that the toll on Palestinian children continues to mount.