Israel’s increasing airstrikes on the West Bank have killed 55 Palestinians — 24 of them children — in the past year.

Around 9:30 p.m. in late February, a white Mazda pulled up near a game cafe in the Jenin refugee camp on the northern edge of the West Bank, where a crowd of boys and young men often gathered to socialize.

As the car stopped, a few people walked by on the narrow street. Two motorbikes weaved past in different directions. “Everything was fine at the time,” according to an eyewitness sitting nearby in the camp’s main square.

Then the car erupted in a ball of flame. Two missiles fired from an Israeli drone had hit the Mazda in quick succession, as shown in a video the Israeli Air Force posted that night.

According to the IAF, the strike killed Yasser Hanoun, described as “a wanted terrorist.”

But Hanoun was not the only fatality: 16-year old Said Raed Said Jaradat, who was near the vehicle when it was hit, sustained shrapnel wounds all over his body, according to documentation collected by Defense for Children International-Palestine. He died from his injuries at 1 a.m. the next morning.

Jaradat is one of 24 children killed in Israel’s airstrikes on the West Bank since last summer, when the Israeli forces began deploying drones, planes, and helicopters to carry out attacks in the occupied territory for the first time in decades.

  • @hark
    6•17 days ago

    Hamas is a terrorist organization. You’d think Israel, as an internationally-recognized country, would be better than a terrorist organization, but apparently not. In fact, Israel has been more brutal and less reasonable than even Hamas in many cases.

    Then you jump to comparing the GDP of Gaza, which has the entire weight of Israel and the west sitting on it, with the GDP of Israel which has the full backing of the west. Kind of hard to produce things when you’ve got a neighboring country hell-bent on ethnically cleansing all of your land and the most powerful countries in the world funding them to carry it out.

    • @[email protected]English
      -2•17 days ago

      I wouldn’t think Israel would be better, because the whole fighting strategy of guerilla terrorist organizations like Hamas is to make it impossible to fight cleanly. That’s why they meet up in residential locations surrounded by women and children, and set up resources in schools, hospitals, etc.

      This strategy isn’t unique to Hamas, it’s used by pretty much every group around the world who are fighting civil wars from a weaker position.

      I’m not saying that the reason they’re poor isn’t because of Israel, I’m simply saying that they are poor as fuck and therefore the funding for their terrorism is coming from elsewhere.