# Child deaths surge amid ‘Gazafication’ of West Bank, report says

**Emma Graham-Harrison and Quique Kierszenbaum**  
Tammun  
Mon 10 Mar 2025 10.53 EDT  
Last modified on Tue 11 Mar 2025 04.44 EDT

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Israel has brought the military tactics of its war in Gaza to the occupied West Bank, where Palestinians face mass forced displacements, a surge in airstrikes, and a sharp rise in attacks on children and other civilians, a Palestinian-Israeli rights group has said.

Israeli airstrikes in the West Bank since 7 October 2023, the beginning of the Gaza war triggered by Hamas’s attack on southern Israel, have killed more Palestinians than during the violence of the second intifada of the 2000s, with children killed at a rate unprecedented during the territory’s occupation, according to data collected by B’tselem over more than two decades.

Military operations launched in three West Bank refugee camps in January also forced 40,000 people from their homes, the largest displacement since Israel’s occupation began in 1967. Israel’s defence minister, Israel Katz, said troops would remain “for the coming year”, meaning residents would not be allowed back in that time.

Israel says its operations target militant Palestinian groups. The refugee camps are historically home to fighters who consider themselves armed resistance.

“Israel’s complete disregard for international law in the war in Gaza is now being replicated to the West Bank,” said B’Tselem’s executive director, Yuli Novak. “Its activity there, as yet on a smaller scale than in Gaza, is already causing indiscriminate and disproportionate killing and destruction.”

The parents of a boy shot when he went to buy bread and the uncle of two children, aged five and eight, who were killed in an airstrike are among relatives of six child victims who told the Guardian about how attacks documented by B’tselem have shattered their lives.

Rigd Gasser, father of 14-year-old Ahmad Rashid Jazar, said his son was hit in the chest by a single bullet on 19 January while leaving a shop in his home village of Sebastia, where he had been on an errand to get bread.

Gasser was in a cafe when he heard the gunshots and rushed out when he heard calls for help. “I got closer and recognised my son. I knew him by his clothes, his body was all covered in blood,” he said. “Since the beginning of the war, they  have been coming here every day. They launch raids in the morning and evening.”

Israel sent a surge of troops, including tanks, to the West Bank after the Gaza ceasefire began in January. Military operations in the three refugee camps – Jenin, Tulkarm and Nur Shams – came on top of what had been Israel’s deadliest bombing campaign in the occupied territory. In the 17 months since 7 October 2023, B’tselem documented 64 airstrikes that killed 261 Palestinians, including both militant and civilian casualties and at least 41 minors.

That is more than three times the total toll from airstrikes during the second intifada, which lasted more than four years, when B’tselem recorded 78 deaths including 10 children between 2000 and the end of 2004.

The group’s report described the increased use of airstrikes as being part of a “broader conceptual and operational shift” in Israeli military tactics that puts civilians at greater risk. The Israeli military did not immediately respond to questions.

Muhammad Khreiwish’s niece and nephew were among the youngest victims. Sham Abu Zahara, eight, and Karam Abu Zahara, five, were killed with both their parents and another uncle on 3 October 2024, when an airstrike targeted a cafe in Tulkarm.

The cafe was on the ground floor of an apartment building, and the Abu Zahara family lived next door. Khreiwish was arriving to visit his sister Saja when an explosion threw him off his bike. As people raced away from the site, he ran in to look for the family.

Inside he was met by a horrific scene. “I found pieces of bodies that I couldn’t recognise, and then I saw my niece,” he said. He called for help but she had been killed immediately. All he could do was wrap her shattered body and take it to the hospital morgue.

The strike killed 18 people and at least six of them, or a third of the total, were civilians, B’tselem investigators found.

The Abu Zahara siblings were two of 180 children killed by Israeli forces over the 17 months since the Gaza war began, the deadliest period in the West Bank of Israel’s nearly 60-year-long occupation according to B’tselem.

Until 2023 the most dangerous time for Palestinian children in the West Bank was the second intifada, when B’tselem documented 246 children killed in 63 months – a rate of killing half current levels from all Israeli operations.

B’tselem said looser rules of engagement were one reason for the rise in child deaths. The Israeli military has expanded its “open fire” rules, with soldiers now allowed to shoot to kill targets including anyone they suspect is “messing with the ground”, Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported.

The cousins Reda Basharat, eight, and Hamza Basharat, 10, were killed near home by a drone strike on 8 January. The children could not go school that morning because Israeli forces had launched a raid near their village, Tammun, and so roads were closed, Hamza’s mother, Eman Basharat, said.

As Israeli forces advanced the Shabs fled from their home in Nur Shams refugee camp to the house of their son, which has since been demolished. Soldiers broke into the building and told them to leave immediately, with no time to pack.

So they moved again to a nearby Kafr al-Labad town where they have found temporary, basic shelter in al-Diah wedding hall. They only have two bathrooms for 14 people, and just drapes separating crowded sleeping areas.

Even so, the families sheltering there are terrified they will have to leave after Ramadan, as it will be needed again for weddings once the holy month is finished.

“People here are kind, but in my home I am more comfortable,” Fatma Shab, 63, said. “Even just being able to go to my closet to choose some clothes to wear. Now I’m just wearing what I have on, there are no choices.”

She said she did not know if she would see the house she built with her husband for their retirement again. “It’s just a short distance away, but I can’t go home. In Gaza they were forced out and killed, and here now it’s the same.”
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