SINCE the Hamas uprising against the Israeli occupation and siege of Gaza on 7 October 2023, the Israeli war of reprisal and genocide has killed over 72,000 Palestinians of whom 21,000 were innocent children, a crime against humanity which has appalled the whole world.
Overshadowed by this inhuman slaughter are the murder by the Israel Occupation Force (IOF) and settlers on the West Bank of 235 Palestinian children and teenagers killed by Israeli forces where the IOF military rules of engagement have been junked and impunity is now the norm.
‘The widespread and unprecedented killing of Palestinian children and teenagers in the West Bank is the result of Israel’s policy that allows the killing of Palestinians without accountability,’ said Yuli Novak, the executive director of the human rights group B’Tselem, which published a report on Monday titled ‘Unshielded Childhood’. It focuses on 54 Palestinian children and teenagers killed by Israeli forces in 2025 alone.
‘The system does not merely back the shooters – it effectively gives them a licence to kill,’ Novak said, pointing to recent remarks by Maj Gen Avi Bluth, the head of the Israeli army’s central command, deployed in the West Bank, claiming ‘we are killing like we haven’t killed since 1967’.
According to data from another human rights organisation, Yesh Din, no Israeli has been indicted for the killing of a Palestinian since October 2023.
In a separate report last week, a UN independent international commission of inquiry found that: ‘Israeli authorities and security forces have deliberately targeted Palestinian children resulting in genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes in the Gaza Strip, and war crimes in the West Bank.’
‘The evidence shows that Palestinian children have been deliberately targeted and killed by the Israeli security forces,’ said Srinivasan Muralidhar, chair of the commission. Even after the partly observed Gaza ceasefire last October, Muralidhar said: ‘Children continue to be killed and seriously injured, with continued disregard by Israel for the ceasefire and for the protection owed to Palestinian children under international law.’
However, all the IOF killing, settler violence and terror, ethnic cleansing, dividing walls and roads, and forced displacement in the West Bank are not isolated and disjointed campaigns on unrelated incidents, but is a rapidly developing government policy of annexing the whole of the West Bank in its entirety, a report by Peace Now and Kerem Navot revealed yesterday.
Titled ‘Annus Mirabilis: Actions by the Israeli Government to Annex the West Bank, 2023–2025,’ the report has revealed that the current Israeli government has advanced de facto annexation of the West Bank at an ‘unprecedented pace’.
It documents the measures advanced by the Israeli government during this period and demonstrates how they form a single, systematic government policy aiming to deepen Israeli control over the West Bank and advancing de facto annexation.
For the first time, instead of focusing on isolated developments such as settlement construction, outpost authorisation, or state land declarations, the report consolidates all government actions and demonstrates that they constitute a single policy.
According to the two organisations, the process of annexing the West Bank is taking place through hundreds of administrative, budgetary, planning decisions, and violent actions.
Risking further military defeats by Iran after the US military attacked 85 sites in Iran overnight on Tuesday which immediately missiled US military bases in Bahrain and Kuwait, US president Trump is claiming his right to takeover Greenland from a fellow NATO member.
However, now is the time for the working class to force their trade union leaders to mobilise and take general strike actions in the imperialist countries to bring down their pro-Israel governments and go forward to socialist governments which will immediately recognise a Palestinian state and provide all the material, political and financial support for their struggle for an independent State of Palestine. Now is the time for mass actions to defeat imperialism and go forward to worldwide socialism!
