'No accountability' Israeli attacks on children in West Bank surge

Mohammad was 12, a football-mad teenager who spent his days dreaming of a career on the pitch and his last minutes practicing ball skills. Ghassan was 14, a quiet, generous teenager who ran errands for elderly relatives, with an adoring six-year-old brother who stuck to him like a shadow.

- Emma Graham-Harrison, Quique Kierszenbaum and Suflan Taha Deir Abu Mash'al

Both boys were shot dead last summer by Israeli soldiers, the victims of an unprecedented surge in attacks on children in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.

In the year since the Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October 2023, Israeli troops and settlers have killed 171 Palestinian children there, equivalent to one death almost every other day, according to UN data. More than 1,000 others have been injured.

The youngest victim was a four-year-old girl, shot dead when she and her mother were sitting in a taxi near a checkpoint in January. Officially there is no war in the occupied West Bank, and the scale of death in Gaza has overshadowed the losses there. But children are dying in greater numbers than at any time since the Israeli army seized control of the area in 1967.

"In the course of last year there was an extremely concerning increase in children killed in conflict-related violence in the West Bank, and we already see the trend is continuing," said Jonathan Crickx, a spokesperson for Unicef Palestine.

"Unicef wants to ring the alarm bell that children are being killed and seriously injured on a regular basis, mostly by live ammunition."

The UN only counts child victims whose name, age and cause of death it has verified.

No soldier has been charged over any of the shootings, and the Israeli military did not directly address the surge in child casualties when approached for comment.

In a statement, it said children in the occupied West Bank often participate in riots where stones, molotov cocktails and explosives are thrown, and "in terrorist activities against security forces and Israeli citizens".

When a Palestinian is killed, the Israeli military does not launch a criminal investigation if "there is no apparent suspicion of wrongdoing" by the Israel Defense Forces, or when the target was taking part in activity that "had a clearly combat nature", the statement added.