January has been a tragic month for Palestinian children and adolescents in the West Bank. Israeli security forces have killed seven. The youngest was 14 years old and the oldest, 17. The NGO Save the Children does not remember such a hard month since 2015.
“Children pay a heavy price for a conflict they do not control,” explains Janson Lee, director of Save the Children in the West Bank. “It is unacceptable,” he adds. International law protects children in a special way and they must always be safe from violence”.
On January 28, a 13-year-old Palestinian boy armed with a pistol wounded two Israelis in East Jerusalem before being shot, but not fatally.
A day earlier, another 21-year-old Palestinian youth killed seven Jews in a synagogue, also in East Jerusalem. It was the worst attack suffered by the Jewish community since 2011. The Palestinians celebrated it. The terrorist's father, who was killed, was proud of him.
The day before this tragedy, Thursday January 26, ten Palestinians were killed during an Israeli military operation in Jenin, a refugee camp in the northern West Bank.
The spiral of violence has accelerated since the spring of two years ago. Nearly 300 Palestinians, including 66 minors, lost their lives between May and June 2021 in clashes with Israeli forces. In those incidents, 16 Israelis also died, two of them minors.
The trigger that caused the explosion was the order to evict six families from the Sheikh Jarrá neighborhood in East Jerusalem, an area that Israel annexed in 1980, but which the UN considers Palestinian territory. Violence spilled over into mixed-population neighborhoods inside Israel.
Palestinian children, who until then had been mainly the victims of Israeli bombardments in Gaza, began to die in greater numbers as a result of direct clashes with the Israeli army, police and settlers.
This is the case of the 13-year-old boy who was injured last week while trying to kill two Israelis. He lived in Silwan, another Palestinian neighborhood in East Jerusalem where the threat of eviction is permanent. The Israeli settlers denounce their neighbors for having built their houses without a building permit, a permit that, in any case, as the UN maintains, is impossible to obtain if you are not a Jew.
The 13-year-old terrorist's aunt's house was demolished a few years ago. It was one of 20,000 Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem that, according to the Israeli organization Peace Now, face demolition for lacking a license.
Now it will be the house of the 13-year-old boy that will be demolished. It is the punishment that Israel imposes on the families of the terrorists, even if they are minors.
In addition to the young people killed in the Sheikh Jarrá conflict, 18 more Palestinian children died in 2021. Last year there were 44.
2022 was the worst year in the West Bank since 2005. 154 Palestinians were killed. Defense for Children International, a Palestinian NGO, assures that more than 500 children between the ages of 12 and 17 were detained and prosecuted by the Israeli military courts, most of them for attacking soldiers with stones, who respond, in many cases, with real fire.
The Israeli organization B'Tselem maintains that "the Israeli military and police routinely shoot and kill Palestinians who do not pose a danger."
There are more and more minors trapped in violence. "They have nothing to lose," explains Gasan Hamdan, coordinator of the Palestinian Medical Relief Society, a humanitarian organization in Nablus, a city that, along with Jenin, is leading the violent resistance against the Israeli occupation.
“There is no hope for the young people here,” adds Hamdan. It is difficult for them to leave Nablus. There are more and more military controls and the settlers are more aggressive”.
Living conditions worsen for young Palestinians in the West Bank. Unemployment affects 43% of those between 20 and 29 years of age. Those who do find employment are usually as cheap labor in Israel or the settlements. The Palestinian economy is so precarious that the jobs it offers young people are informal and of low quality.
These young people, like so many others in the Middle East and North Africa, have stopped believing in institutions. "Palestinian youth no longer feel represented by the Palestinian Authority," explains Raed Debiy, Professor of Political Science at An-Najah University in Nablus. "They consider her corrupt and an accomplice of Israel."
Since the Oslo Accords of 1995, the Palestinian Authority has collaborated with Israel on security matters. Despite all the armed clashes since then, this collaboration continues to this day.
Largely because of this, but also because of corruption and the failure of his own state project, Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas has lost authority. He is 87 years old and seems increasingly distant. Palestine has not held elections since 2006 for fear that the Islamist Hamas movement will win them.
Hamas has its armed wing (Al Qasam), as does Islamic Jihad (Al Quds) and Al Fatah, the party of Mahmoud Abbas (Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades).
These groups, however, "are no longer a reference for young people", according to Professor Debiy. The old Palestinian armed struggle does not inspire the new generations, although the principles of jihad and martyrdom remain. “They are willing to die,” Debiy says. The martyrs are still heroes. They represent purity.
Young people take advantage of the power vacuum left by Mahmud Abás to create their own armed groups or act alone. In 2021 the Jenin Brigades appeared and last year, the Lions' Den in Nablus.
The Palestinian Authority no longer enters the center of Jenin or the old city of Nablus. A fierce and unequal battle raged between the narrow Ottoman streets of this city in the northern West Bank last August. The Israeli army had cornered Ibrahim Nabulsi, an 18-year-old youth, leader of the lions, and killed him in a house that is now a pilgrimage site.
Nabulsi's memory is celebrated on Instagram and Tik Tok, mausoleums of Palestinian youth.
Israeli forces face lone wolves, many of whom are minors. Avigdor Haselkorn, an Israeli security analyst, consider them to be part of a Palestinian shadow army. Although they are not integrated into a command structure, they obey, according to him, anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist slogans that the networks make available to any interested party.
Haselkorn applauds Prime Minister Beniamin Netanyahu's decision to make gun ownership easier. He believes that Israeli society must be better armed. "It is the first step to create a shadow army, like the Palestinian one."
Netanyahu rules with support from the extreme right, ultra-religious parties and radical settlers. It has had to cede control of the police and management of the settlements to them, a policy that Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International describe as apartheid.
Likewise, Netanyahu is attempting a justice reform that will end the independence of judges and legal advisors in each ministry. The rule of law will be weakened and the colonization of the West Bank will have even fewer legal constraints.
Janson Lee, the director of Save the Children in the West Bank, fears that the proliferation of weapons in Israel and the impunity with which the security forces use them will lead to the death of even more children. "The culture of impunity - he says - will only serve to accelerate the cycles of violence."
Michelle Bachelet, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, denounces "total impunity in the occupied territories" and calls for an investigation of each violent death and the use of live ammunition against minors.
B'Tselem maintains that no Israeli will be tried for excessive use of force against Palestinians, even children. "It will not happen because violence is the system to consolidate Jewish supremacy in the territories controlled by Israel," says his spokeswoman Dror Sadot.
"No one will be prosecuted for these unjustified crimes," he adds. It will not be the one who pulled the trigger, nor the commanders who gave the order, nor the legal advisors who have authorized the strategy of opening fire, nor the military chiefs or political leaders.
"A child is a child and their right to life must be protected by each side," says Adele Khodr, UNICEF's director for the Middle East and North Africa. “Children should never be the target. They should never be put in danger or exposed to violence.”
But this is precisely what is happening more and more often in the West Bank.
