By John Pickard
B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights organisation, has produced a new report, called Unshielded Childhood, about the huge number of Palestinian children and teenagers who have been killed by Israel in the West Bank since October 2023. The following is the introductory part of that report, outlining the background:
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Since October 2023, Israel has been waging an extensive assault on all aspects of Palestinian existence in the West Bank. This includes a broad, systematic violation of human rights, first among them the most basic right – to life.
Lethal, unbridled violence employed by the Israeli regime’s armed forces, including the military and settler militias, has led to an unprecedent increase in the killing of Palestinians, and particularly the killing of children and teenagers by Israeli forces.
Over the course of two years and eight months, from 7 October 2023 to 7 June 2026, Israeli forces killed 235 Palestinian children and teenagers in the West Bank. Five others were killed by settlers. In 2025 alone, the year that is the focus of this investigation, Israeli forces killed 54 Palestinian children and teenagers in the West Bank.
The unprecedented scale of killing of Palestinian children and teenagers by Israeli forces is the result of a reckless open-fire policy, expanded to be even more permissive than in the past, that is currently being implemented in the West Bank. Those responsible do not try to hide this policy; rather, they give it full systemic backing, as reflected in the remarks of Central Command Chief Avi Bluth, who publicly boasted that “we are killing like we haven’t killed since 1967.”
Bluth’s claim that “96% of those killed were involved in terrorism” – an allegation exposed as a brazen lie by documentation of the circumstances of death in B’Tselem’s list of Palestinian fatalities – also reflects the Israeli system’s routine identification of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces as “terrorists” or “terror operatives”, including civilians who were not members of an armed organization and posed no danger at the time they were killed.
This identification creates, de facto, systemic impunity for killing. The Israeli system does not stop at justifying these killings after the fact. It also refrains almost entirely from holding the perpetrators accountable.
Not a single indictment for a Palestinian killed
According to data from the human rights organization Yesh Din, since the start of the war in October 2023, no indictments are known to have been filed in cases involving killings in the West Bank.
Yet the immunity guaranteed in advance and the absence of any real demand for accountability after these crimes are committed are not confined to the legal sphere. They are also reflected in “public impunity” that stems from the Israeli public’s indifference to the killing of Palestinian children.
In this context, the sharp rise in the killing of children in the West Bank by Israeli forces cannot be separated from the more than 21,000 Palestinian children that Israel has killed as part of its genocidal assault on the Gaza Strip since October 2023.
The fact that even this inconceivable number has not led to public demands for a change in the policy of killing shows how far the dehumanization of Palestinians has gone in Israeli eyes. These processes are what enables a reality of killing children as a routine matter…
The full report from B’Tselem can downloaded to read from here. Feature picture shows part of front page of report.
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From the point of view of socialists in the British labour movement – and indeed, for anyone with an ounce of humanity – the contents of this report are shocking. But what is equally appalling is the complete absence of any sense of outrage among the big majority of UK politicians, including, disgracefully, the leadership of the Labour Party.
In all of the self-righteous and lying speeches and interviews Keir Starmer has done since his resignation as Labour leader, he has emphasised repeatedly his opposition to antisemitism, but there has not been one single occasion when he has mentioned the plight of Palestinians, bombed back to the Stone-Age in Gaza and suffering ongoing ethnic cleansing in the West Bank.
History will judge Starmer as an apologist and a facilitator for war crimes and genocide. It remains to be seen if Andy Burnham, the incoming Labour leader, will be any different to his predecessor on this issue.
