Russia and Israel both kill children. Shame both, Mr Guterres
Mourners carry the body of Palestinian boy Mohammad al-Tamimi who died of his wounds after being shot by Israeli forces [Mohammed Torokman/Reuters]
Little Mohammad al-Tamimi must have been excited.
Twilight on June 2 was slowly slipping into night when the two-and-a-half-year-old toddler, with a shock of light brown hair, got into his father’s car parked outside their home in Nabi Saleh, a village northwest of Ramallah in the occupied West Bank.
Haitham al-Tamimi and his son were headed to a niece’s birthday party. Sweet treats, family and fun were on the menu. Moments later, the car was engulfed by bullets fired by Israeli soldiers stationed at a nearby checkpoint.
Mohammad’s mother, Marwa, rushed out of the house. “My husband was trying to drive the car to move it away from the direction of the shooting,” she said. All the frantic while, a wounded Haitham cried out for his badly injured son: “Hamoudi, Hamoudi.”
Mohammad had been shot in the head. “I was sure he was killed. It was clear because I saw his head was bleeding,” Marwa remembered.
Mohammad was airlifted to a Tel Aviv hospital. Four days later – strapped to a tangle of tubes and monitors – he was dead. His father survived.
At first, predictably, Israeli officials blamed “Palestinian crossfire” for the shooting of two innocents. Then, their story shifted. Now, it was “unclear” who was responsible. An “investigation” was opened. Finally, an admission: an Israeli soldier had shot the pair.
Mohammad al-Tamimi’s killing was a “mistake”, an Israeli official said. Another lethal “mistake” in a catalogue of lethal “mistakes” Israeli soldiers have made again and again that have claimed the lives of Palestinian after Palestinian – young and old.
And like the litany of “mistake”-prone Israeli soldiers, the gunman who blasted a bullet into Mohammad al-Tamimi’s skull will not be punished for killing a child.
Twenty-seven Palestinian children in Gaza and the West Bank have already been killed by Israeli forces this year. Mohammad al-Tamimi was the youngest. In 2022, 42 Palestinian children were killed and 933 injured by the Israeli military. In 2021, Israeli forces killed 78 Palestinian children and injured another 982.
Among the living, four out of five Palestinian children in the Gaza Strip suffer from chronic depression, sadness and fear caused by the 16-year Israeli blockade of the besieged territory.
By any humane measure, those figures are a breathtaking reflection of Israel’s long, shameful record of killing and maiming Palestinian children in body, mind and spirit.
Although accurate, “shameful” is not the word United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is eager to use to describe the horror of what happened to Mohammad al-Tamini and other Palestinian kids Israeli soldiers have disfigured and killed year after year.
That hypocrisy was made plain last week when, despite the entreaties of a slew of human rights organisations, Guterres chose, once more, not to include Israel in its “list of shame” – a blacklist of “parties to armed conflict who commit grave violations against children”.