On February 7, Saddam Rajab, 10, died in a hospital in the occupied West Bank after being killed by an Israeli soldier a few days earlier. Saddam stood in the street in front of his house when Israeli soldiers invaded his village near Tulkarem and started to shoot.
Video surveillance images show the moment when he was shot. He fell to the ground, tightening his abdomen and curling in a fetal position. The first hospital to which he was transported was unable to treat him and therefore had to be transferred to another to Nablus. On the way, the ambulance was held for hours at a checkpoint where an Israeli soldier narrated the father of Saddam, saying: “I am the one who shot your son. God wants it, he will die.
Saddam is one of the 13 Palestinian children that the Israeli army has killed in the occupied West Bank since the beginning of the year. The number of deaths of children murdered by Israeli soldiers and settlers in occupied West Bank has exceeded 220 since January 2023.
The story of Saddam – like the stories of other victims of Palestinian children – has never made the headlines of the international newspapers. There was no reaction from the international community to its murder. Indeed, Palestinian children experience relentless dehumanization.
This is apparent even in the few stories that put themselves under the media spotlights, as the case of Hind Rajab, six, who was killed by the Israeli army in Gaza on January 29, 2024, almost exactly a year before Saddam is not shot. With his aunt, uncle and cousins, Hind was trying to evacuate from Gaza City to a car when surrounded by Israeli forces, who shot them.
While his relatives were killed, Hind survived the first shot and managed to get in touch with Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRC). The published recording of his telephone calls to the PRCs asking for help while the Israeli tanks closed on his shocked world.
The ambulance that was sent to save it never returned, and Hind’s calls to PRCs have stopped. Almost two weeks later, Hind’s bodies, his relatives and the two ambulance workers, Yusuf Zeino and Ahmed Al-Madhoun, were found. Subsequent investigations have shown that the Israeli army shot the ambulance and the car in which Hind was stuck, despite their contact details.
While the history of the brutal death of Hind made the headlines of international newspapers – a rare case among the more than 17,000 children killed in Gaza – there have still been attempts to dehumanize and refuse it the status of child victim. For example, during the report on the student camp of Columbia University which appointed a building after her, CNN explained that “Hind’s Hall” was a reference to a “woman” who was killed in Gaza.
Another particularly blatant example of refusing the status of child of a Palestinian child is a January 2024 report of Sky News, in which a diffuser said: “Accidentally, a wandering ball found its way in the coming van, And who killed a three -year -old three or young woman. ” This “young woman” was a Palestinian child named Ruqaya Ahmad Odeh Jahalin, who was shot dead by Israeli soldiers while he was sitting in a taxi with his family in the West Bank.
These examples illustrate what Nadera Palestinian, Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, described as “unleashing”. She invented the term to expose dehumanization that accompanies violence against children in a colonial context. In occupied and colonized Palestine, Palestinian children are stripped of their childhood in order to justify the brutality inflicted on it.
For decades, Palestinian children have been described by the Israeli regime and the West either as less than other children or not at all children; They have often been assimilated to adults who have the potential to be “terrorists”. In this way, they are considered intrinsically dangerous and have denied the status of “the child” and the connotation of the innocence offered there.
Unleashing not only covers the murder and mutilation of Palestinian children; It also facilitates their removal, their detention and their abuse in Israeli prisons.
Last year, Ayham Al Salaymeh, a 14 -year -old Palestinian boy from Silwan, Jerusalem, became the youngest Palestinian to serve a prison sentence in an Israeli prison. Ayham had been arrested two years ago and had been accused of having threw stones on illegal Israeli settlers.
He was interviewed and placed under house arrest for two years, before being sentenced under the new Israeli legislation which allows the imprisonment of Palestinian children for capital crimes classified as “terrorism”. Israel is the only country in the world that systematically pursues and imprisoned children.
The Israeli media regularly mark Palestinian children like Ayham as potential security threats, endocrine minors or human shields, in order to justify their imprisonment and torture.
While the genocide extends through Palestine, horrible reality is that more Palestinian children and adults will be killed by the Israeli army while the world looks. Their murders will not be covered by the Western public media, no segment will interview their families with collages of photos of their childhood, and there will be no declarations of condemnation of the world leaders. Palestinian children were actually stripped of their childhood and with him, their humanity.
The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Tel Aviv Tribune.
