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War & Peace
Volunteer Doctors Describe How Israeli Troops 'Deliberately Targeted' Gaza Children
Former Royal Netherlands Army Commander Lt. Gen. Mart de Kruif told de Volkskrant's Maud Effting and Willem Feenstra that such wounds mean that the victims were all but certainly shot on purpose.
"Just think about how small the head is compared to the rest of the body," he said. "If you’re seeing a high number of gunshot wounds to the chest area and the head, that’s not collateral damage—that’s deliberate targeting.”
Dr. Mimi Syed, a US emergency physician who volunteered for two four-week rotations at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis and al-Aqsa Martyrs Government Hospital in Deir al-Balah, described one 4-year-old victim, a girl named Mira.
“They said she’d been shot by a quadcopter [drone] while walking around in the humanitarian zone declared by Israel," Syed told de Volkskrant. "I was told to just let her die by my colleagues. The assessment was, unfortunately, that there wasn’t much we could do. But she was still moving a little bit. She was very young. A little girl. I just couldn’t look away. There was something in her face that struck me. So I took a chance.”
Working with colleagues, Syed saved Mira. Seeing so many similar injuries, she thought: "I have to document this. I realized—these are war crimes.”
Syed documented 18 children with single-shot wounds to the head or chest.
Mira, a Palestinian girl from Gaza, survived a single gunshot wound to her head. (Photo: Dr. Mimi Syed via de Volkskrant)
Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, a 43-year-old California trauma surgeon, described his first day volunteering at European Hospital in Gaza in March 2024. Sidhwa—who has previously described seeing children as young as 3 years old being deliberately targeted in numerous interviews and his own writing—told de Volkskrant that he saw four boys under age 10 with identical head wounds within 48 hours of his arrival.
"I thought: What the hell?" he said. "How is it possible that, in this small hospital, four children are lying here with gunshot wounds to the head—all admitted within the past 48 hours?"
Over the following 13 days, Sidhwa saw nine more children with similar single gunshot wounds to the head and chest by Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers, who pride themselves on being some of the world's best-trained marksmen. Israel and the US have frequently described the IDF as the "most moral army" in the world.
"I started to wonder if my hospital was near some crazy sniper," he said. "Or a drone team killing children just for fun."
Numerous previous investigations have documented IDF soldiers deliberate targeting of Palestinian children in Gaza. In July, the BBC examined the cases of more than 160 Palestinian children who were shot by IDF troops in Gaza and found that in 95 cases, the child was shot in the head or chest.
"Some of the cases we looked at like children were allegedly shot while fleeing battle zones, but many others were shot while playing outside their tents in humanitarian zones and some in areas the IDF themselves had marked as evacuation corridors," BBC noted.
IDF officials deny that Israeli troops deliberately target children and have even claimed that Hamas may be shooting them in a new iteration of the age-old blood libel against Jews. Israeli and US officials have also claimed that hundreds of Palestinians have starved to death in Gaza not because of Israel's near-total blockade on humanitarian relief but because Hamas is stealing the aid—even as IDF officers have refuted the theft allegations.
Israeli troops have admitted to being ordered to shoot to kill "anyone who enters" a so-called "kill zone" in central Gaza, including children.
Other IDF whistleblowers have described orders to open fire on Gazan civilians including children with live bullets and artillery at aid distribution centers.
“We’re killing their wives, their children, their cats, their dogs," one IDF officer said earlier this year. "We’re destroying their houses and pissing on their graves.”
One IDF soldier even boasted online about how "fun" it is to kill Palestinian children, while another is heard saying in a video uploaded to social media that “we are looking for babies, but there are no babies left"—so instead "I killed a girl that was 12."
Yet another IDF soldier proudly claimed: “I just went to Gaza, and there were two little girls playing football. So, what did I do? I took my weapon and shot them in the head.”
Operating under loosened rules of engagement that effectively permit the killing of an unlimited number of civilians when targeting even a single low-ranking Hamas member, Israeli troops have killed more than 20,000 Palestinian children and disabled over 21,000 others in Gaza since October 2023, according to Gaza officials, United Nations agencies, and international humanitarian groups.
The use of artificial intelligence to rapidly select targets, as well as dropping fragmentation, incendiary, and 1,000- and 2,000-pound bombs—many supplied by the US—has exacerbated the civilian casualty crisis and contributed to an unprecedented surge in amputations, often performed without anesthesia.
So many wounded Gazan children have also been orphaned that medical professionals have coined a grim new acronym to describe them: WCNSF—wounded child, no surviving family.
According to Gaza and United Nations officials, more than 1,500 medical professionals have also been killed in Gaza since October 2023, many of them while working, including the paramedics who were killed while trying to rescue Hind Rajab, a 5-year-old girl massacred along with six relatives while trying to flee to safety last year.
Hundreds of thousands of Palestinian children are also being deliberately starved in a US-backed Israeli war of conquest and occupation that is increasingly viewed by the world as genocidal, and that has left at least 238,500 Gazans dead, maimed, or missing. Last week, former IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi acknowledged that Israel has killed or wounded 10% of Gaza's pre-war population of approximately 2.2 million.
Early in the war, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) called Gaza “the world’s most dangerous place to be a child.” Last year, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres for the first time added Israel to his so-called “List of Shame” of countries that kill and injure children during wars and other armed conflicts.
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