Report: Israel “Systematically” Uses Palestinian Children as Human Shields

“In 2024, Israel’s genocidal campaign against Palestinians in Gaza reached catastrophic proportions. Relentless aerial bombardments, ground invasions, and siege tactics deliberately targeted Palestinian civilians, leaving children to suffer the most,” DCIP’s report says.

The number of Palestinian children detained in Israeli prisons also reached a record high in 2024, the group said.

In the occupied West Bank, Israeli soldiers and settlers killed one Palestinian child every four days this year, “an escalation made possible by decades of impunity,” the group said.

Israel’s violence included using children as human shields “systematically” this year, as DCIP has documented throughout the genocide.

This includes an incident in March in which Israeli tanks surrounded a group of Palestinian children waiting in line for aid in Gaza City. Soldiers stripped the children and tied them up, depriving them of food and water and forcing them for an entire day to walk in front of tanks and in front of buildings that the military wanted to enter, as DCIP found.

Israeli forces’ weaponization of starvation, meanwhile, has put children, especially newborns and children with disabilities, at heightened risk, with babies as young as two months old starving to death, the group said; in August, Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor found that Israel killed 210 newborn babies a month on average in Gaza since the beginning of the genocide.