Occupation soldiers assault a Palestinian child in because of his clothes.

Palestinians shared on social media scenes showing Israeli occupation soldiers assaulting a Palestinian child two weeks ago, inside a store in the city of Hebron in the southern West Bank. 

Surveillance cameras in the Jaber neighborhood in central Hebron documented the occupation forces forcing the child to take off his shirt and ripping it, and threatening the child not to speak before one of the soldiers slapped him, indicating to the owner of the grocery store where the incident occurred to remain silent under the threat. 

The soldier who ordered the child to take off his black shirt seemed to be angry at the drawing he was carrying, which was a white rifle. 

The child, who was accompanied by another younger child, took shelter with a woman who appeared to be his mother, while the occupation soldiers were inside the store in full military gear and weapons. 

The scene received great reactions on social media. One foreign activist on the X platform said, “Israelis are torturing and bullying a child for no reason. Israel is a terrible place.” While another condemned the Israeli apartheid system. 

While the cities and towns of the West Bank are witnessing an Israeli military escalation since the beginning of the aggression on the Gaza Strip, last year was considered the bloodiest ever for children in the West Bank, including Jerusalem, according to a previous testimony by the UNICEF Regional Director for the Middle East and North Africa.

At the end of 2023, Adele Khader, a UN official at UNICEF, issued a statement in which she said that while the world “watches in horror” the situation in the Gaza Strip, children in the West Bank are living “a nightmare of their own.”

She added, “Living with an almost constant feeling of fear and sadness is very common for affected children.” 

Many children reported that fear had become part of their daily lives, with many feelings frightened even while walking to school or playing outside due to the threat of gunfire and other conflict-related violence.”

In the last 12 weeks of 2023 alone, 83 children were martyred in the West Bank, which represents more than double the number of children martyred in the entire year of 2022, amid increasing military operations. More than 576 others were injured, while reports indicate that the detention of children continues.