Palestinian news agency Wafa reported yesterday that Israeli forces shot at Fadi Suleiman, a 15-year-old Palestinian boy in the West Bank. Suleiman later succumbed to his injuries. On 22nd January, two people, an Israeli settler and a soldier, shot 17-year-old Palestinian-American teenager Tawfic Abdel Jabbar in the head and killed him – also in the West Bank. The Israeli police said that the two people shot at someone they believed was throwing rocks. Jabbar’s family dismissed the allegation, with his father adding to NBC News: “You're gonna shoot… because a guy threw a rock?"

Last July, Israeli forces killed a 14-year-old boy in the West Bank, identified as Faris Abu Samra, who was reportedly throwing stones. The West Bank is currently occupied by Israel in settlements that the United Nations recognizes as illegal. “We remind Israel that, pending the dismantlement of its unlawful occupation, Palestinians in the occupied Palestinian territory must be treated as protected persons, not enemies or terrorists,” UN experts said in a press release. Still, last October, Israeli forces killed 12-year-old Ahmad Abdulnaser Adnan Rabi, who was marching with other Palestinian youth in a demonstration. Last November, an 8-year-old boy and a teenager were killed in the West Bank, when Israeli forces carried out a raid in a Jenin refugee camp. “During IDF activity in the Jenin Camp, a number of suspects hurled explosive devices toward IDF soldiers. The soldiers responded with live fire toward the suspects and hits were identified,” the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) spokesperson told CBC News. But in another instance where a 16-year-old boy was killed, the IDF said that they shot at “suspects” who threw paint bottles and rocks.

“Eighty-five Palestinian children have been killed [in the West Bank] in the past 12 weeks – more than double the number of children killed in all of 2022 – amid increased military and law enforcement operations,” UNICEF spokesman Jonathan Crick said. Some are suspects, others are “mistakenly” hit while under suspicion.

This is by no means recent. In 2015, Mohammad al-Kasbeh, a 17 year-old Palestinian boy, threw a rock at an IDF tank’s windshield. The soldier in it, Yisrael Shomer, stepped out of the vehicle and shot into al-Kasbeh’s back as he ran away, killing him. “[A] subordinate soldier who was with Shomer at the time of the shooting testified to Military Police investigators that neither man was in immediate danger, and that his commander failed to follow the protocol for arresting suspects. Furthermore, while Shomer claimed that the boy was holding an object, the soldier testified that that the boy held nothing,” +972 Magazine reported. Most infamously, a picture of 14-year-old Faris Odeh remains immortalized as a symbol of Palestinian resistance – in which he’s preparing to throw a stone, standing in the way of giant Israeli tanks during the second Intifada. Odeh was killed in 2000, ten days after the picture was taken, prompting the David and Goliath analogy from sociologist Judith Bessant.

The list goes on and on – not just of killings but of beatings, arrests, detentions, and interrogations of children. Human Rights Watch noted that Israeli authorities detain Palestinian children under abusive conditions. “Palestinian children are treated in ways that would terrify and traumatize an adult… Screams, threats, and beatings are no way for the police to treat a child or to get accurate information from them,” said Sari Bashi, Israel and Palestine country director. Hundreds of other children have been detained in the past and tried in military courts (the “only children in the world” to be systematically prosecuted as such, according to Save the Children). They have been forced to confess “to any occasion in his life when he picked up a stone, or thought about it, or was with someone who threw a stone, or knew someone who threw a stone or thought about throwing a stone,” as Rachel Kushner reports in n+1, and sometimes, through signatures in Hebrew documents they can’t read, to stone-throwing. They’re not asked if they threw stones, but why.

Many are forced to identify adults through screaming and withholding of food, water, and sleep. They are then traumatized after release, prone to night terrors, bed-wetting, and dropping out of school, The Independent reported. But a majority go on to be convicted to harsh sentences. Ahmad Manasra, who was arrested when he was 13, is serving a nine-and-a-half year sentence – and has developed Schizophrenia and diminished eyesight as a result of solitary confinement for 23 hours of the day, Time reported. A majority are also imprisoned inside Israel, alongside adults – in violation of parts of the Geneva Conventions – which makes it difficult for their parents to visit them. And, sometimes, their sentences are longer than those of Israeli soldiers who kill people.

According to The Guardian, “Israel routinely prosecutes Palestinian children as young as 12 and the Israeli legal system treats Palestinians as adults when they turn 16, but Israelis become adults only at 18.” Some are as young as five-years-old. One boy, Al-Hasan Muhtaseb, told The Guardian, "I was asked: 'Did you throw stones? Did you hurt the soldiers or hit their vehicles? How close were you to the soldiers? Why were you throwing stones?',” adding that he was forced to confess and that there was no other child there and that he was afraid. “Every time I closed my eyes, a soldier kicked me in the legs with his heavy boots,” another boy said.

Each incident forms part of a larger pattern of the racialized “adultification,” as it’s been called, of children from ethnic and racial minorities. The phenomenon was first described in the context of Black children in America. The scholars Davis and Marsh define it as “when notions of innocence and vulnerability are not afforded to certain children. This is determined by people and institutions who hold power over them. When adultification occurs outside of the home it is always founded within discrimination and bias.” This is purportedly to “rationalize” violence perpetrated against such children. America’s Black Holocaust Museum notes, “Adultification bias is a stereotype based on the ways in which adults perceive children and their childlike behavior. It’s rooted in anti-Black racism that goes back to chattel slavery — as enslaved Black children were used for their labor, often working in the field with no recreation or means of gaining an education. This stereotype often treats Black children like they do not deserve to play. They need less nurturing, protection, support, and comfort.” Moreover, the bias is used to treat children as more aggressive or deviant and worthy of treatment meted out to adults. Reports have identified this phenomenon as prevalent among Indian Muslim children too.

In the context of occupation, this manifests as excessive policing of children, who are detained, tried, and punished as adults on suspicions of terrorism or extremism. “Increasing engagement of Palestinian youth in violent and non-violent activism has made them a target for the Israeli military forces. For security personnel and much of the leadership, children of the ‘other’ are commonly considered to belong to the enemy, making the difference between adults and minors almost irrelevant,” one paper notes, drawing on the idea of adultification. “Israel’s framing of Palestinian children as ‘human shields’ or ‘terrorists’ to justify the violence against them and their parents is profoundly dehumanising,” said Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, in a report to the General Assembly. “Palestinian children are seen less as children and more as Arabs… They are as dehumanised as the adults, dehumanised and feared by Israeli society,” said a Palestinian lawyer representing children. “[O]fficially there has been no childhood in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The word ‘child’ is never used in military announcements: they refer to either an infant or a youth, but never a child. So a ten-year old boy shot by the military forces is reported to be a ‘young man of ten’,” noted Anton Shammas, in the New York Review of Books. The media is complicit in this framing too. Recently, a Sky News reporter referred to the killing of a toddler as that of a “3 or 4-year-old young lady.”

To understand this adultification of children to justify their killing and incarceration, we must delve into how the very idea of innocence is flawed. Innocence has always been racialized and gendered – with White children and women perceived as the most innocent, and thus the most deserving of care and protection. This, in turn, leads to other children (and women) treated as less deserving of sympathy, less innocent, and importantly, a threat to the real innocent children and women. Journalist Naomi Klein noted that Israel has been bestowed the mantle of Whiteness as reparations for what Jews went through. Extending that logic, it means that Israeli children, too, are perceived as White, and Palestinian children are accordingly subject to the repressive logic of Whiteness (and protecting Whiteness from the other). As Joseph Massad, Associate Professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at Columbia University, wrote, “What is it about Jewish and Arab children that privileges the first and spurns the second in the speeches of President Barack Obama, let alone in the Western media more generally? Are Jewish children smarter, prettier, whiter? Are they deserving of sympathy and solidarity, denied to Arab children, because they are innocent and unsullied by the guilt of their parents, themselves often referred to as ‘the children of Israel’? Or, is it that Arab children are dangerous, threatening, guilty, even dark and ugly, a situation that can only lead to Arabopaedophobia – the Western fear of Arab children?”

Already, the psychological costs of being a child in Palestine are too much. Growing up in an atmosphere of repression and occupation, children resort to stone-throwing sometimes as entertainment, other times as a small act of resistance – and agency – where they have few other avenues. Palestinian children also adopt a high level of political consciousness in response to life under occupation. And as one article in the American Philosophical Association points, it’s difficult to claim innocence when the definition is so malleable and when the stereotypes associated with innocence don’t apply to the landscape – which makes it easy for Palestinian children who throw stones to be reconfigured as “combatants.”

Arguing against the figure of innocence in Palestine, Funambulist magazine notes, “The passage from childhood to teenage or adulthood is characterized by the loss of this innocence. By definition, the ‘corruption’ of the child can only come from causes that are external to her/him. In this sense, nobody in Gaza can be said to still be innocent: the hospitals where children of Gaza are born depend on the will of the Israeli army for their construction, electricity, supplies and general functioning (i.e. whether it is being bombed like they currently are).”

And for that, many regard these children as not innocent children at all, but as “terrorists.” One such conference seemed to equate children who throw stones with child soldiers to justify trying them in juvenile military courts – despite the fact that international courts have frequently focused on the adults who recruited children as soldiers in other conflicts.

That’s how we end up in a situation where Palestinian children cannot claim innocent childhood like their Israeli – or White – counterparts. And that’s perhaps why the ongoing bombardment, despite its catastrophic toll on children, continues with little respite. As Palestinian writer Hala Alyan puts it: “These days, everyone is trying to write about the children… We are up at night, combing through the flickering light of our phones, trying to find the metaphor, the clip, the photograph to prove a child is a child. It is an unbearable task.”