Shame!

Palestinians killed in Israeli attacks in Gaza

- BT TISARANEE GUNASEKARA

On 15 July 2025, a group of Jewish Israeli teens gathered in Tel Aviv to burn their draft papers. Israel has a conscript army and every Israeli Jewish citizen over 18 years has to undergo fixed-term military service and remain as reservists until the age of 40. The teens burning their draft papers face imprisonment, but for them the alternative is infinitely worse. As one of them said, “There is a genocide. You don’t enlist into an army that is committing genocide” (https://www.youtube.com/shorts/9zzbb_Ac-W8).

The war in which these teens are refusing to participate is killing an average of 28 Palestinian children a day (including babies and infants), according to UNICEF. It has also birthed a new acronym: WCSF - Wounded Child; no Surviving Family.

Ten-year-old Amir was one of the (on-average) 28 children killed on 28 May 2025. He was seeking food from an aid station run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a shadowy organisation entrusted by the US and Israel to deliver uncooked food (but no water) to starving Palestinians in Israeli-blockaded Gaza. Amir belongs in another UN statistic — the almost 1,000 Palestinians killed in the vicinity of the GHF sites while seeking food aid. As Bob Geldof told the Sky News, “They are dangling food in front of starving, panicked, exhausted mothers and while they arrive for this tiny amount of foods, this pantomime outfit the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, Humanitarian Front I would call it, then they are shot...”