Israel’s occupation army killed a child in the West Bank on 15 December. Then, after his funeral, an Israeli settler murdered another child on 16 December. And this military-settler murdering spree is just business as usual amid Israel’s accelerating ethnic cleansing of the occupied Palestinian territory.
Most media outlets that bothered to cover this (you’ll struggle to find Western media doing so) focused on the children being teenagers, as both were 16 years old. But such framing takes focus away from the fact that they were still children.
The apparent reasoning behind these children’s assassinations, meanwhile, was that they were ‘throwing stones‘.
If you’re an Israeli illegally occupying the West Bank, you can kill Palestinians, burn their homes and trees, throw stones, kill their animals and beat them with impunity.
If you’re a Palestinian child resisting occupation with a rock, you’re executed.
“Where’s the apartheid?” https://t.co/0sdkmH5mVx
— Assal Rad (@AssalRad) December 16, 2025
The hypocrisy is indeed clear to anyone paying attention.
Apartheid and ethnic cleansing for the 21st century
As Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem has pointed out:
Israel has also been advancing the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in the West Bank since October 2023.
The close cooperation between the military and settlers has made killing, destruction and expulsion part of daily life.
And it explains that:
In the past two years, more than 44 such communities across the West Bank have been uprooted. Human rights activists – particularly Palestinians – face ongoing harassment and frequent arbitrary arrests by Israeli forces…
All of this is part of Israel’s broader policy of oppression and dispossession of Palestinians, carried out within the framework of the ethnic cleansing it is implementing in the West Bank.
Israel is currently holding around 3,500 people in detention in the West Bank “without charges or trial“.
On top of this week’s murders, meanwhile, recent days also saw settlers attack:
a nine-month pregnant Palestinian woman and her children
Last Saturday, 13 December, three Israeli settler teens attacked a nine-month pregnant Palestinian woman and her children in Jaffa. According to the Israeli police, the attackers are settler youth from the West Bank.
The three are apparently linked to the local “garin torani” or… pic.twitter.com/WKnEuraTsC
— B’Tselem בצלם بتسيلم (@btselem) December 16, 2025
B’Tselem stresses that:
Israel’s apartheid regime, which controls the entire area between the river and the sea, and is working in various ways to entrench Jewish supremacy. Violence, dispossession, seizure of space, cultural and political repression and systemic discrimination are all viewed as legitimate tools in Israel.
Western nations supporting the genocidal Israeli regime avoid using the word apartheid. But that’s exactly what it is.
Dehumanisation is key to the propaganda
“Behind the smokescreen” of the so-called ‘ceasefire’ in Gaza, B’Tselem says, Israel’s destruction continues. The occupation army has murdered around 400 people since 10 October, almost none of whom were fighters. And amid Israel’s ongoing blockade, a newborn baby has just frozen to death in Gaza.
Israel’s genocide requires dehumanisation of Palestinians, as all genocides do. It needs talk of “human animals” and ‘exterminating roaches and rats‘ to normalise its mass murder. It feeds off collective fear and trauma, nurturing a lack of empathy.
In this reality, even many Israelis who dislike wanted war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu live in a bubble of propaganda where key words like ‘ethnic cleansing’, ‘settler-colonialism’, ‘apartheid’, and ‘genocide’ don’t figure. A 15 December Times of Israel article, for example, called for:
the resolute protection of life, the defense and dissemination of fundamental humanity… [and] serious punitive consequences for those who incite and enable murder… to turn back the rising tide of murderous inhumanity
But the mention of Israel’s own criminals and actions, well into a globally-recognised genocide that has killed over 20,000 children, appears as just a weak footnote. Minimising this barbarity, the author can only call for Israel:
to minimize the loss of noncombatant life in Gaza.
That’s what Israel claims to have been doing all along. But that hasn’t stopped it cutting thousands of children’s lives tragically short.
The Western mainstream media, meanwhile, hasn’t done much better. It has shamefully played along – for ‘impartiality’ reasons – with the minimisation of Palestinian children’s suffering.
The facts speak for themselves, but the propaganda countering them is powerful. So everyone who cares about the sanctity of life, and especially the lives of children, must keep speaking out.
Featured image via the Canary
By Ed Sykes
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