“It doesn’t matter if they are children.”
That’s Ex-Israeli Intelligence Chief Aharon Haliva’s brutally honest assessment of the 50,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza. His remarks were recorded shortly after Israel reached that bloody milestone in March of this year. He resigned from the IDF’s Military Intelligence Directorate a year earlier in response to the security failures surrounding Hamas’ October 7th massacre.
That means he was not speaking officially.
But he was speaking candidly. And his blunt admission suggests something other than physical proximity to a suspected member Hamas is at play when the IDF kills underage non-combatants in bunches.
It’s been clear since the end of December 2023 that there is no meaningful restriction on the number of children Israel’s soldiers and pilots can kill, maim and orphan. The IDF set a heady pace during the five weeks, killing one child every ten minutes. Nearly nine thousand children were killed during the first eleven weeks of bombing.
On December 5, 2023, the IDF reassured the public (particularly in the US) it was only killing two civilians per Hamas fighter. The Times Of Israel also cited unnamed officials who claimed “the IDF was deploying high-tech mapping software to try to reduce noncombatant deaths.”
Those assurances didn’t match the reality reported by the BBC just the day before. It introduced the world to the acronym “WCNSF.” It’s shorthand for “Wounded Child No Surviving Family” and it’s assigned during triage because injured children without parents, siblings or legal guardians require specific attention and additional resources.
Obviously, Gazans do not have the infrastructure or resources to care for a generation of battle-scarred orphans. Imagine the trauma of being Injured, trapped and then pulled from a collapsed apartment building, only to discover your mother, father and siblings are dead. That’s exactly what happened to Noor, a 14 year-old Palestinian girl who became a WCNSF twenty months after the BBC’s story first aired:
On August 6, at around 3:00 a.m., an Israeli airstrike hit the apartment where my sister Somaiya, 35, her husband Anas, 35, and their daughters Noor, 14, Hoor, 13, and Sham, 9, were staying. The airstrike killed my sister’s family except for Noor, who survived with an arm fracture that required surgery. When Noor was admitted to the hospital on August 8 and rushed to the operating room, she called out to her parents, who were gone forever.
Her story comes via her uncle “Yousef,” a Gaza-based coordinator for the American Friends Service Committee (the Quakers). She does still have an uncle, though, which sets her apart from other WCNSFs who have lost their uncles, aunts, cousins and grandparents.
One hundred thirty-two members of the Abu Naser family died on October 29, 2023, when the family-owned apartment building was struck by the IDF, which said the intended target was an “enemy spotter” on the roof. NPR asked for visual evidence to back up the claim. The IDF declined. Even if there was one spotter on the roof, does that warrant destroying an entire building? Is there another way to neutralize one spotter on the roof of a multi-family apartment building? Could bullets be used instead of bombs?
Hellbound and Down 