Palestinian Child Soldiers: The Untold Story
For the first time, the United Nations’ annual report on children in combat this year mentions the Palestinian Arabs.
It does not name the organizations – including Hamas (Islamic Resistance Movement), Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Al-Aksa Martyrs Brigade of Fatah – violating international law by recruiting or duping children into being combatants. And the report falsely equates Arab youngsters who were accidental casualties of Israeli counter-terrorism with Israeli children who were intentional victims of Palestinian terrorists.
In any case, the report by the U.N.’s Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict, Undersecretary General Olara Otunnu, received little news coverage. What notice was paid—including a Washington Post editorial and interviews with Otunnu on National Public Radio’s “Talk of the Nation” and Public Broadcasting Service’s “News Hour with Jim Lehrer”—omitted the study’s unprecedented, though oblique, reference to the Palestinian conflict with Israel.
A Geneva Convention prohibits the use of children under 15 in war. A U.N. treaty adopted by the United States and more than 100 other countries puts the age at 18. Yet incitement, recruitment or duping of children by Palestinian terrorist groups and the Palestinian Authority itself has been common during the past four and a half years of violence.
On February 9, Otunnu reported to the Security Council that 54 offending parties around the world exploit more than 250,000 children as soldiers; bearers of ammunition, explosives, and other supplies; spies; and as sex slaves. His report conceded that “the continued Israeli-Palestinian conflict has had a deep impact on the lives of children. Both Palestinian and Israeli children have been exposed to high levels of violence, including killing, maiming and injury.”
It added that “in several instances, Palestinian children have been wounded or killed while on the premises of schools run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East.” Israeli children “have been among the victims of Palestinian suicide bombing and other violence ....”
Otunnu was more forthright when discussing last year’s report, although that document itself did not mention Palestinian use of child combatants or targeting of Israeli children. He stressed that “children have been used as suicide bombers and children have been killed by suicide bombings. I call on the Palestinian Authority to do everything within their power to stop all participation by children in the conflict.” The PA did not heed him, of course.
The Washington Post took belated notice of this year’s U.N. study in an April 12 editorial headlined “Children in Combat.” The Post observed that Otunnu had mentioned as leading offenders the Janjaweed in Sudan, Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, and the Communist Party of Nepal.
But the editorial neither mentioned the undersecretary general’s reference to Palestinian-Israeli violence nor reminded readers that Palestinian terrorist groups recurrently use children as smugglers of weapons, explosives, and even as witting or unwitting suicide bombers.
In the first 18 months of the second intifada, from September 2000 to February 2002, at least 16 Palestinian Arabs under the age of 18 had attempted suicide bombings. Many others tried to infiltrate Jewish communities in the disputed territories, some dying in the process.
Palestinian use of children as combatants continued, and continued to be celebrated by many in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. In a televised meeting to mark International Children’s Day on June 1, 2003 the former Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat encouraged a group of youngsters to become shahid – “martyrs” for Allah in the war against the Jews.
Palestinian television, radio, newspapers, school curriculum, and mosque speakers have regularly incited children to embrace violent struggle against Israel. PA summer camps for children have included “sports” such as weapons training and combat infiltration.
In such an atmosphere, the IDF caught a 16-year-old boy with a suicide bomb strapped under his clothes at the Hawara checkpoint near Nablus in March 2004. An 11-year-old boy was arrested the same month in the Gaza Strip carrying a bomb meant to be detonated by remote control when he neared soldiers at a checkpoint; terrorists had paid the child a few shekels to “deliver a package”.
The day The Post editorial appeared, Israel Defense Forces troops arrested a 15-year-old boy attempting to carry five pipe bombs through the Hawara checkpoint. Two days earlier, The Post reported that Israeli soldiers shot and killed three Arab boys – 14, 15, and 16 years old, respectively – in an area of the Gaza Strip known for weapons smuggling.
“There is much that the United Nations cannot be expected to do,” the editorial intoned, “but it can focus attention on human rights issues, particularly in lawless places where nobody else has much influence.” Otunnu, the newspaper said, has been working to pressure those who “send children into battle, particularly in the kinds of places where neither the laws of war nor generally accepted standards have penetrated.”
Why weren’t the West Bank and Gaza Strip identified as such places? Why weren’t Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the Al-Aksa Martyrs Brigade of Fatah specifically named by The Post, even if the United Nations did not?
Perhaps the only comprehensive American news article about Otunnu’s report and subsequent U.N. debate over whether to call for punishment of violators was Cox News Service’s detailed March 25 report, “U.N. Considers Sanctions Against Countries Using Child Soldiers.” It mentioned “Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories,” but that reference was deleted when the story appeared in next day’s Austin American-Statesman. A United Press International February 10 dispatch on Otunnu’s report and a UPI February 24 account of the U.N. discussion of it were silent on Palestinian children combatants. So was the February 16 interview with Otunnu on NPR and the March 10 interview on PBS, though both otherwise covered the subject in some detail.
The United Nations names those governments and organizations exploiting more than 250,000 children world-wide as combatants and support “troops”—except in the case of the Palestinian Arabs, then the crimes are obscured by generalities and false equivalence. Most major news media ignore the story altogether; those few paying attention black out the Palestinians. When all this is considered, one can’t help but notice these curious and overlapping derelictions of duty.
Eric Rozenman is a contributing writer for TAE Online
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