New report by Israeli rights group exposes systemic killing of Palestinian minors in West Bank

JENIN, Palestine (MNTV) – The Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem released a report on Sunday detailing the cases of 54 Palestinian children and teenagers killed by Israeli forces in the West Bank in 2025, describing the rate of child fatalities as the highest since Israel’s occupation of the territory began in 1967.

According to the report, from 7 October 2023 through 28 June 2026, Israeli forces killed 1,086 Palestinians in the West Bank, with 241 of them — nearly one in four — being children and teenagers.

The organization’s investigation into each of the 54 cases from 2025 found that the vast majority of those killed were unarmed and posed no lethal threat at the time of their deaths.

Military claims questioned

Even in the small number of cases where Israeli authorities claimed minors were armed or posed a threat, serious questions remain.

The Israeli military alleged that two of those killed were carrying firearms and that four others had thrown improvised explosive devices.

However, the military’s own track record of classifying Palestinians killed as “terrorists” or “terror operatives” — a practice B’Tselem’s documentation has repeatedly challenged — casts doubt on the reliability of these characterizations.

The organization noted that Maj. Gen. Avi Bluth’s claim that 96 percent of those killed in the West Bank were involved in terrorism was contradicted by B’Tselem’s own findings on the circumstances of each death.

Crucially, even if one accepts these claims at face value, international law does not grant security forces an automatic license to use lethal force against children.

The use of deadly force must be a last resort, strictly proportionate and necessary to counter an imminent threat to life.

Shooting to kill a child — even one allegedly carrying a weapon — without exhausting all other options raises profound legal and moral questions that Israel has shown little interest in answering.

The fact that these were minors, some as young as 10, demands an even higher threshold of restraint and accountability, neither of which appears to have been met.

By contrast, at least 21 of the children killed were not involved in any confrontation at all, even when clashes were occurring nearby.

Thirteen were shot while throwing stones — in some cases at armored vehicles — with no injuries to Israeli forces reported.

Seven children were killed in airstrikes.

In 12 cases, the military claimed the minors had thrown Molotov cocktails, IEDs, or stones, but B’Tselem’s investigation could neither verify nor refute these assertions, underscoring the difficulty of independently confirming military accounts in an environment where Israel controls the flow of information and rarely subjects its own claims to scrutiny.

A policy, not aberration

The report places responsibility not on rogue individuals but on what it describes as a deliberate expansion of Israel’s open-fire policy.

B’Tselem pointed to Bluth’s public statements boasting that Israel is killing Palestinians in the West Bank at a rate unseen since 1967, presenting high casualty figures as a military achievement rather than a cause for concern.

“The widespread, unprecedented killing of Palestinian children and teenagers in the West Bank is the result of a broader Israeli policy that enables the killing of Palestinians with virtually no accountability,” said B’Tselem Executive Director Yuli Novak.

“The system does not merely back those who pull the trigger — it effectively grants them a license to kill.”

The report traces the escalation to the end of 2021, when the Israeli military reportedly eased its rules of engagement to permit lethal fire against stone throwers, including those fleeing who no longer posed a danger.

The killing rate more than doubled from 16 children in 2021 to 34 in 2022.

After 7 October 2023, B’Tselem says the rules were expanded further still, fueled by what the organization described as a desire for revenge and the growing dehumanization of Palestinians in Israeli public discourse.

Total impunity

Despite the scale of the killings, B’Tselem reported that it is not aware of a single indictment filed in Israel since October 2023 in connection with the killing of Palestinians in the West Bank, citing data from the human rights organization Yesh Din.

The absence of legal accountability, the report argues, is compounded by what it calls “public impunity” — a broad indifference among the Israeli public to the deaths of Palestinian children.

The investigation also documented patterns of denied medical access. In nearly a quarter of the 2025 cases, Israeli forces delayed or entirely prevented medical teams and local residents from reaching wounded children.

In at least nine cases, soldiers fired live rounds to keep people away from the injured. In some instances, soldiers removed the wounded themselves, and it remains unknown whether any medical treatment was provided before the victims were declared dead.

The denial of urgent medical care to wounded children raises its own set of grave questions under international humanitarian law, regardless of the circumstances in which they were injured.

As of early June 2026, Israel was still withholding the bodies of 18 of the 54 children and teenagers killed in 2025, preventing families from burying their dead — a practice B’Tselem says violates international law and causes immense suffering.

Youngest victims

Among the youngest victims documented in 2025 and the first half of 2026 were two brothers, aged five and six, killed in the town of Tamun, and a seven-month-old baby in Hebron, all struck when Israeli forces fired at the vehicles their families were traveling in.

No military justification can credibly explain the killing of a seven-month-old infant.

B’Tselem framed the West Bank killings as inseparable from the broader genocide in Gaza, where more than 21,000 Palestinian children have been killed since October 2023.

The organization argued that international inaction in the face of the Gaza toll has effectively signaled to Israel that a similar approach in the West Bank will face no consequences.

“As long as Israel continues to enjoy near-total impunity in the world,” the organization warned, “the lives of Palestinians — including children — will remain unprotected and exposed.”