Israel’s good at playing the victim, but they’ve slain nearly 20,000 children over the past 700 days

• Over 19,400 children have been killed in Gaza since October 2023, with Israeli forces averaging one child death every 52 minutes—a pace that defies the laws of war and the most basic standards of human decency.
• Israel’s so-called “safe zones” are death traps, where families fleeing bombardment are met with fresh waves of airstrikes, starvation, and disease, exposing the lie of humanitarian corridors.
• Famine is now a weapon of war, with 641,000 Gazans—nearly a third of the population—facing catastrophic hunger, and children under five dying from malnutrition at rates that evoke medieval sieges, not modern warfare.
• The targeting of journalists, hospitals, and schools reveals a pattern: Israel is not just fighting Hamas. It is erasing the witnesses, the healers, and the next generation of Palestinians.
• International law has been rendered meaningless, as Israeli leaders openly call for the destruction of Gaza’s infrastructure—water, electricity, food—while the U.S. blocks ceasefire resolutions and continues to arm the assault.
• A legal reckoning may be coming, as South Africa and other nations push for war crimes charges at the International Criminal Court, armed with videos of bombed hospitals, starving infants, and Israeli officials calling for ethnic cleansing.

The arithmetic of annihilation: How Israel turned Gaza into a graveyard for children

It’s an easy cop-out to blame Hamas for all the carnage in Gaza, but the Israeli military must be held responsible for war crime actions they have deliberately taken and bragged about.

One child every 52 minutes. That’s the pace of war crimes that Israel has maintained since October 7, 2023. On that day, a Hamas attack killed 1,200 Israelis—a crime against humanity that demanded justice, not vengeance. Yet what followed was not a targeted counter-terrorism operation but a campaign of collective punishment so extreme it has redefined the boundaries of modern warfare. The numbers, compiled by Gaza’s health ministry and verified by the United Nations, tell a story of industrial-scale slaughter: 19,424 children dead, 1,000 of them infants under a year old. Another 42,011 wounded, many with injuries so severe—amputations, burns, crushed limbs—that they will carry the scars of this war for the rest of their shortened lives.

Tess Ingram, a communications manager for Unicef, does not mince words: “The suffering of children in the Gaza Strip is not accidental.” This is not the unfortunate byproduct of a war gone awry. It is the result of deliberate choices—where to drop the bombs, which neighborhoods to flatten, how long to cut off food and water before allowing a trickle of aid to stave off the worst of the starvation. Israeli officials have openly declared their intent to reduce Gaza to a wasteland.

In November 2023, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant announced, “We are fighting human animals, and we act accordingly.” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to turn Gaza into a “deserted island.” And so they have. Satellite images show entire city blocks reduced to rubble. Hospitals—once places of refuge—have been bombed into oblivion. Schools, where children should be learning arithmetic, now teach lessons in survival. Even the so-called “humanitarian zones” designated by Israel have become kill boxes. In May 2024, an airstrike on a displacement camp in Rafah, packed with families who had fled earlier bombardments, killed 45 people in a single blast. “Safe” is a lie. “Humanitarian” is a joke.

The cruelty is not just in the killing but in the method. Israel has weaponized starvation, a tactic so ancient it predates gunpowder. By sealing off Gaza’s borders, restricting aid convoys, and systematically destroying bakeries, farms, and water desalination plants, Israeli forces have engineered a famine of biblical proportions. More than half of Gaza’s population—1.97 million people—now faces “emergency” levels of hunger. For 641,000 of them, the situation is even direr: they are in “catastrophic” famine conditions, the highest level on the global hunger scale. Children are dying not from bullets but from the slow unraveling of their bodies, their ribs pressing against skin, their immune systems too weak to fight off diseases that should have been eradicated decades ago. Unicef reports that 35% of starvation deaths in Gaza are children.

Malnutrition rates among those under five have skyrocketed, with stunting and wasting—conditions that permanently damage a child’s body and brain—becoming endemic. “The collapse of essential services is leaving the youngest and most vulnerable fighting for survival,” Ingram warns. “Without immediate and increased access to food and nutrition treatments, this recurring nightmare will deepen, and more children will starve. A fate that is entirely preventable.”

And yet, the world does nothing or censors dissent against Israel, as Israeli military propaganda blames Hamas for all the deaths and suffering.

The propaganda war: How lies justify genocide

From the moment Hamas launched its October 7 attack, Israel and its allies in the West have waged a second war—a war of narratives, where truth is the first casualty. The goal? To paint Palestinians not as victims of occupation but as subhuman monsters deserving of annihilation. Within days of the assault, Israeli officials and pro-Israel media outlets began circulating claims so grotesque they seemed designed to shock the conscience: Hamas fighters had baked babies in ovens. They had raped women en masse. They had beheaded infants. These stories spread like wildfire, repeated by politicians, amplified by pundits, and embraced by a public primed to believe the worst about Palestinians. There was just one problem: None of it was true.

Investigations by international journalists, including teams from The New York Times and BBC, found no evidence to support the most sensational claims. The “40 beheaded babies” story, which former Israeli Defense Forces spokesman Jonathan Conricus admitted was based on “what we heard from the soldiers,” collapsed under scrutiny. The “mass rape” allegations, while real instances of sexual violence in conflict must always be taken seriously, were inflated beyond recognition, with Israeli media airing footage of Palestinian detainees being sexually humiliated by their captors—hardly the actions of a military claiming the moral high ground. Yet the damage was done. The lies had served their purpose: to dehumanize Palestinians in the eyes of the world, to make their suffering seem justified, even necessary.

The propaganda raged on. When Israeli forces bombed the Ahli Arab Hospital in October 2023, killing hundreds of civilians, Israeli officials immediately blamed a misfired Hamas rocket—despite evidence to the contrary. When Reuters and AP journalists were killed in an airstrike on their office building, Israel called it a “legitimate target” because Hamas “might” have been nearby. And when 200 Palestinian health workers were arrested, beaten, and stripped naked in front of their colleagues, Israeli authorities dismissed it as “standard procedure.” At least 234 journalists and photo-journalists have been targeted and killed in this time, often being tagged as Hamas without any due process or evidence.

The result is a world where Palestinian life is valued less than Israeli life, where the killing of a child in Tel Aviv sparks global outrage, but the killing of 19,400 children in Gaza is met with shrugs and excuses. “But Hamas started it.” “They use human shields.” “What about the hostages?” These are the refrains of those who would rather look away than confront the reality: Israel is not fighting a war. It is committing a genocide.

Sources include:

MiddleEastEye.net

MiddleEastEye.net

Enoch, Brighteon.ai