The bloodiest face of its genocide: Israel has killed 2,100 Palestinian infants and toddlers in Gaza
Palestinian women mourn over an infant killed in an Israeli air strike on her home north of Nuseirat, in the central Gaza strip, 19 July 2024
Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor reports on 14 August 2024:
The Israeli army has killed 2,100 Palestinian infants and toddlers under the age of two, out of the about 17,000 children it has killed in the Gaza Strip since the start of its genocide on 7 October 2023.
The number of Palestinian children—whether infants or children in general—killed by the Israeli army is horrifying, and the rate of their killing is unprecedented in the history of modern wars. It also represents a dangerous trend based on the dehumanisation of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Israel’s military targets Palestinians and their children daily, methodically, and widely in the most heinous and brutal ways possible, and virtually without pause for 10 consecutive months.
Due to the Israeli bombing of homes, buildings, residential neighbourhoods, shelter centres, and displacement tents, many children have lost their heads and limbs. This is a flagrant violation of the rules of distinction, proportionality, military necessity, i.e. the legal and moral obligation to take the necessary precautions to minimise the deaths of civilians and children.
The Euro-Med Monitor field team documented today, Tuesday 13 August, the killing of four-day-old twins Aser and Aysal Muhammad Abu al-Qumsan. The twins were killed this morning, along with their mother Juman and their grandmother, in an Israeli bombing that targeted a residential flat in Deir al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip.
After leaving the apartment to obtain a birth certificate for his two newborn children, the father of the infants returned to discover that all of his family members—including the twins’ grandmother—had been killed in an Israeli attack on the building.
Despite its advanced technological capabilities, the Israeli army targets houses and shelter centres knowing full well that they house civilians, including women and children. Nevertheless, it bombs these targets with highly destructive bombs and missiles, aiming to cause as many civilian deaths and severe injuries as possible. This is demonstrated by the Israeli army’s systematic, widespread, and repeated targeting of civilians in the Gaza Strip, as well as its use of highly destructive and indiscriminate weapons, particularly against areas with dense populations of civilians.
The case of the two babies Aser and Aysal are not unique; daily reports of child victims, including infants, are made in the Strip.
Twins Aser and Aysal killed with their father holding their birth certificates, 14 August 2024
The systematic killings of Palestinian civilians, who make up at least 92% of the total number of deaths due to the genocide, will have a negative impact on the population growth rates and reproductive capacity for generations to come.
One of the most notable testimonies has been from 42-year-old Abdul Hafez Al-Najjar, the father of a child named Ahmed, who was among the many victims of an Israeli massacre on 26 May. The massacre targeted displaced people living in tents in the Barksat area, west of Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip. Ahmed, along with three of his brothers and their mother, was among a host of other victims that were all beheaded and killed. Ahmed’s father told the Euro-Med team: “My child Ahmed was very beautiful. He was a year and a half old. He was beheaded in the Israeli bombing. His head was separated from his body. When I saw him, I felt distressed. He was buried without his head.”
According to the Euro-Med Monitor team, an Israeli airstrike on Rafah’s Al-Salam neighbourhood, in the southern Gaza Strip, killed another set of twin infants on 3 March. Six-month-old Wissam and Naeem Abu Anza were killed by the strike, along with their father and 11 other family members.