Apartheid Israel has killed 115,000 Palestinian children since 1980

Its western backers are accomplices to genocide by their own standards

According to the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem there have been 10,555 Palestinians directly killed by Apartheid Israel since 2000, and 2,270 have been children. But that is a huge undercount of the full death toll from Israel’s military attacks and economic strangulation of the West Bank and Gaza strip over the past 56 years they have been under military occupation. In fact, colonization, the systematic dispossession of Palestinians by European settlers, goes back decades earlier than the occupation.  

A better way to capture the impact of everything Apartheid Israel has done to Palestinians is to compare child mortality rates and deaths in each. Israel, the occupying power which is right next door, is legally responsible for the well being of the people under its occupation. As the International Committee of the Red Cross put it

To the fullest extent of the means available to it, the occupying power must ensure sufficient hygiene and public health standards, as well as the provision of food and medical care to the population under occupation.

Israel has occupied the West Bank and Gaza since 1967. If Israel had followed international law as applied to occupying powers then there would, for decades now, be negligible difference between the child mortality rate in Apartheid Israel and in the occupied territories that are right on Israel’s border.  

In fact, according to UNICEF’s data, the Palestinian mortality rate for children under five years of age has consistently been 4 - 5 times higher than in Israel. Since 1980, UNICEF has annual data listed for child mortality and child deaths for both Israel and the “State of Palestine” (Gaza and the West Bank). So it is easy to calculate how many “extra’ Palestinian child deaths there have been each year due to the differential in child mortality rates. From 1980 until 2021 there have been  115,371 excess Palestinian child deaths. 

UNICEF and other UN agencies that supposedly dispense objective data and assessments have shown bias in support of US imperialism. So that is one reason to suspect the estimate of 115,000 since 1980 is too low. Additionally, Israel's savagery does not simply impact children. UNICEF's data simply makes its impact easy to estimate for children.

Genocide is an emotionally charged word that’s very easily politicized. But the western establishment stood united behind international tribunal rulings that the killing of 8000 people in Srebrenica (though it was possibly about 3000) was an act of genocide. By its own standards, the westen establishment has been a key accomplice to genocide in Palestine for decades.