The Guardian view on the children of Gaza: when 17,000 die, it’s more than a mistake- Israel’s military blamed the deaths of six Palestinian children on Sunday on a technical error. But a staggering toll continues to mount

A Palestinian boy mourns over the body of his friend who was killed as he queued for water in a refugee camp on Sunday. Photograph: Abdel Kareem Hana/AP

On Sunday, an Israeli strike killed six Palestinian children – and four adults – as they queued for water in a refugee camp. The deaths of children may be the most terrible part of any war. It is not only the suffering of the innocent and powerless, and the unimaginable pain of surviving parents – as dreadful as those are – but the knowledge of lives ended when they had barely begun, of futures that should have stretched long into the distance severed in an instant.

As shocking as Sunday’s deaths were, they are commonplace in Gaza: a classroom-worth of children have been killed each day since the war began. What marked them out was that so many deaths happened at once and publicly; and that Israel’s military felt obliged to acknowledge its responsibility – though without any great contrition. It claimed that a “technical error with the munition” caused it to miss its intended target and added that it “regrets any harm to uninvolved civilians”.

What does this bloodless, bureaucratic language have to do with the bloody deaths of six already traumatised children? These deaths were not a mistake. They were a tragedy – like those of the 10 children killed days before, as they queued outside a clinic. The Israeli military said, again, that it regretted any harm to civilians. And yet the bodies of children pile up. Children killed as they sheltered in former schools; children killed as they fled Israeli forces; children killed as they slept at home.

Gaza’s ministry of health says that more than 17,000 of the 58,000 Palestinians killed are children. Israel says that it seeks to minimise harm to civilians. The death toll belies that and Israeli intelligence sources told reporters last year that at times they were permitted to kill up to 20 civilians to take out even junior militants – with the preference being to attack targets when they were at home, because it was easier.

Those six thirsty children should not have needed to queue for water due to what the UN calls a human-made drought. Human Rights Watch believes that thousands of Palestinians have died due to Israel’s deliberate pattern of actions to deprive them of water, which it alleges amounts to the crime against humanity of extermination as well as acts of genocide. Those 10 hungry children should not have required nutritional supplements, but Israel continues to choke off aid and civilians are starving. Unrwa says that a tenth of the children screened in their clinics are malnourished.

Tens of thousands of children have been seriously injured; many are amputees. As of February last year, around 17,000 had been identified as unaccompanied or separated from their families. The very young are among those least able to cope with hunger and ... READ MORE  https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jul/15/the-guardian-view-on-the-children-of-gaza-when-17000-die-its-more-than-a-mistake

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