Just the Facts: Child Fatalities

  • A total of 67 Palestinian children were killed in the Gaza Strip and 2 children were killed in Israel in the May 2021 violence.
  • 15 Palestinian nuclear and extended families lost at least 3, and usually more, of their members in the Israeli bombing in the first week of the conflict.
  • Wiping out entire families in bombings was a strategy of the Israeli military in 2014. In the 51 days of the 2014 war, UN figures show 142 Palestinian families were erased (742 people in total).
  • There have been a total of 73 Palestinian child fatalities since the start of the year.
  • Since 2005, 6 major military offensives in Gaza have killed at least 1,000 Palestinian children.
  • Since Israel targeted the sole power plant in Gaza in 2014, leaving it inoperable, homes rely on candles and kerosene stoves, which has led to fires that have taken the lives of several children.
  • DCIP has documented 73 settler attacks against children since January 2015.
  • 781 Palestinian children were killed by Israeli military and police forces, settlers, and private security guards from 2011 to 2020.
  • Between 2015 and 2019, DCIP confirmed Israeli forces and settlers killed at least 159 Palestinian children in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip.
  • At least 134 Palestinian children were killed by Israeli forces with live ammunition or crowd-control weapons.
  • 521 Palestinian children below the age of 9 died as a result of Israeli settler or military actions between 2000 and 2019.

This week’s Just the Facts comes from:

Learning More

You can start by reading the New York Times front page story “They Were Only Children” by Mona El-Naggar, Adam Rasgon, and Mona Boshnaq.  ​To go deeper, we are developing an extensive list of Additional Resources at the bottom of this week’s entry as well as a YouTube playlist on the subject.