AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL REPORTS 72 ISRAELI CHILDREN KILLED BY PALESTINIANS.

14624 does not want you to know that Palestinians have killed Israeli children.

[link to web.amnesty.org]




KILLINGS OF ISRAELI CHILDREN

Seventy two Israeli children have been killed in attacks by armed Palestinians since the beginning of the intifada. A high percentage of the victims (some 70%) were killed by suicide bombings and the rest were killed in shooting and other attacks.

In the past 18 months there has been a marked increase in attacks on Israeli civilians, both in Israel and in settlements or roads leading to settlements in the Occupied Territories, and an increasingly high number of victims have been children.

In the first seven months of 2002 alone, 36 children (17 in the Occupied Territories and 19 in Israel) were killed, the equivalent of the total number of Israeli children killed during the whole of the previous year.(13) Amnesty International has repeatedly called on Palestinian armed groups to end attacks on civilians, which can never be justified, immediately and unconditionally.(14)

Children killed in suicide attacks

On 1 June 2001 a suicide bomber blew himself up among a group of young people waiting to enter the Dolphinarium night club in Tel Aviv, killing 21 people, 20 of them civilians, where 12 were aged under 18. About 120 others were wounded. This was the bloodiest attack by Palestinian armed groups on Israeli civilians for several years. The ‘Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, claimed responsibility for the attack two days later in a statement faxed to foreign media in which the suicide bomber was named as 20-year-old Said Hutari, originally from Qalqilya, resident in Jordan. The statement expressed pride for the attack and pledged to carry out further attacks. By choosing to target such a place, the entrance to a discothèque on a Friday night, the attacker meant to kill and harm as many civilians as possible and must have anticipated that many children would be among the victims.

Most of the victims who were killed in the attack had immigrated to Israel in recent years from the former Soviet Union. They were: Raisa Namirovsky (15), from Netanya and her neighbour and friend Maria Tagilchev (14 years), outside whose school a car bomb had exploded two days earlier; Yevgenia Keren Dorfman, (15 years), who sustained serious brain damage in the explosion and died after 18 days; Katherine Kastanada Talker (15 years) a student from Ramat Gan; 16-year-old Yulia Nelimov, whose 18-year-old sister Yelena was also killed; Irina Nepomneschi, a 16-year-old business administration student from Bat Yam; Anya Kazachkov and her friend Mariana Medvedenko, both aged 16; Marina Berkovski from Tel Aviv, who went to the nightclub to celebrate her 17th birthday; and 16-year-old Aleksei Lupalu, who had immigrated from Ukraine just six months earlier.

" I looked at them, they were all laughing" recalls the owner of the a kiosk located just 15 meters from the club "the boys were flirting with they girls. They were all in a good mood, they looked like angels, dressed so nice."(15)


Just over two months after the Dolphinarium bombing, another major suicide attack was carried out on 9 August in the Sbarro Pizzeria, at a busy intersection in the heart of West Jerusalem. A man walked into the pizzeria during a crowded lunch hour and detonated a powerful bomb packed with nails, killing 14 civilians, including seven children, and injuring more than 100. Both the groups Islamic Jihad and Hamas claimed responsibility for the attack, which killed: 16-year-old Michal Raziel and her 15-year-old long-term friend Malka Roth; the two girls had stopped for lunch at the pizzeria on their way to Talpiot, to take part in activities of the youth movement of which they were both members; five members of the Schijveschuurder family, from Neria, were killed in the attack and two others were injured: Tzira and Mordechai Schijveschuurder were killed along with their daughters Ra'aya and Hemda (ages 14 and two), and their four-year-old son Avraham Yitzhak; two other daughters were injured. The family had come to spend the day in Jerusalem, to relax from the tension of the frequent shootings near their home in Neria settlement in the West Bank.

"The last time I was my brother Avraham Yitzhak," recalled Haya Schijveschuurder from her bed in hospital, "he was lying on a stretcher in an ambulance. He had a bandage on his face. He was four years old"

"We were hungry, so Mommy said we could go to a restaurant to eat. In that restaurant, you have to pay first and only afterwards you sit down to eat. When were at the cash register, we suddenly heard an explosion. I ran out as fast as I could. I didn’t look at anything. I just ran out. A medic, I don’t know his name, took me to an ambulance and that is where I saw Avraham Yitzhak for the last time."(16)


Eight-year-old Tamara Shimashvili from Jerusalem was killed with her mother, Lily. Her father was in Moscow at the time of the bombing. Lily and Tamara had arrived in Israel only eight months earlier from Moscow, to join the rest of their family. Yocheved Shoshan, aged 10, had gone with her mother and her sisters, Rachel and Michal, to have lunch at the pizzeria. They were seated on the second floor, but Yocheved and Michal had gone back downstairs, where the explosion occurred, to order another slice of pizza. Yocheved was killed instantly in the explosion and Michal was seriously wounded.

On 16 February 2002, a suicide bomber strapped with nail-studded explosives blew himself up in a pizzeria in the shopping mall of Karnei Shomron, an Israeli settlement in the West Bank, killing three teenagers: Keren Shatzki, 14, who had gone to the local Yuvalim Mall to meet up with friends and eat pizza; Nehemia Amar, 15, had gone to the pizza restaurant with his older brother Moshe; when the bomb detonated, Moshe had just left his brother for a minute; and 16-year-old Rachel Thaler, who never recovered from the critical head injury she sustained in the bombing and never regained consciousness until her death on 27 February, 12 days after the attack. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) claimed responsibility for this attack.

Twelve people were killed and more than 50 people were injured by a suicide bomber on the evening of 2 March 2002 near a synagogue in the orthodox Beit Yisrael neighbourhood of Jerusalem. The bomb was detonated next to a group of women waiting, with their baby carriages, for their husbands to leave the nearby synagogue following sundown prayers marking the end of the Sabbath. Seven of those killed included two sisters, six-year-old Shiraz Nehmad and her two-year-old sister Liran, whose parents also died in the attack; their cousins Lidor and Oriah Ilan, aged 12 years and 18 months, and Shaul and Avraham Eliahu Nehmad, aged 15 and 17. Avraham Eliahu lost an arm and suffered severe internal injuries in the explosion and never regained consciousness. He died of his injuries on 20 June. A seven-month-old baby, Ya'akov Avraham was also killed with his mother, 23-year-old Tzofia Eliahu. They lived in the Beit Yisrael neighbourhood and on Saturday, Tzofia went with her two children, two-year-old Shira and the baby Ya'akov, to the home of her sister, who lived nearby and they went for a walk.

When we came back Yaakov started crying, and Tzofia lifted him from the baby carriage, her sister Livnat said. Livnat continued walking with Shira and the carriage, when the explosion occurred. I looked back, and I didn't see Tzofia and Ya'akov - I just saw fire."(17)

The al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade claimed responsibility for the attack.

Children killed in other attacks

Israeli children have been killed in targeted shootings or as a result of other attacks on civilian targets such as private houses, cars or public buses.

Shalhevet Pass was 10 months old when she was shot by a Palestinian sniper from a hill opposite the entrance to the Israeli settlement of Avraham Avinu, in Hebron, on 26 March 2001. She was shot in the head as her parents tried to protect her. According to the Israeli authorities one of the bullets penetrated the baby’s head, passing through the skull and then hitting her father’s leg. On 16 August 2002 the IDF announced to the media that it had arrested the man responsible for her killing.

Five-month-old Yehuda Shoham, from the Israeli settlement of Shilo in the West Bank, was seriously wounded in the head by a rock thrown by Palestinians through the windscreen of his familys car near his home on 5 June 2001. He suffered severe brain damage and remained unconscious and attached to a respirator in hospital, where he died on 11 June.

Two teenagers, 16-year-old Shoshana Ben-Yishai and 14-year-old Menashe Regev were both killed on 4 November 2001 when a gunman belonging to Islamic Jihad fired at a commuter bus at the French Hill junction in northern Jerusalem. Forty five people were injured in the attack.

Avia Malka, a nine-month-old baby, was killed by two Palestinians who shot and threw grenades at cars and pedestrians in Netanya on 9 March 2002. One other person was killed and about 50 people were injured, several of them seriously. The al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade claimed responsibility for the attack.

On 27 April 2002, three armed men attacked residents of Adora, an Israeli settlement in the West Bank. In the bedroom of one house a gunman killed five-year old Danielle Shefi as she hid under a bed, and wounded her mother Shiri, her brothers Uriel, aged four and Eliad, aged two. Elsewhere in the settlement, they also killed three adults. The Izz-al-Din al-Qassam Brigades (the military wing of Hamas) claimed responsibility for what it described as an "heroic and daring operation."(18)