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TARGETING
CHILDREN IS THE REAL FACE TO THE ZIONIST OCCUPATION
The numbers of the children, who martyred, are staggering, one in five Palestinian dead is a child. The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) says at least 408 Palestinian children have been killed since the beginning of the intifada in September 2000. Nearly half were killed in the Gaza strip, and most of those died in two refugee camps in the south, Khan Yunis and Rafah. The PCHR says they were victims of "indiscriminate shooting, excessive force, a shoot-to-kill policy and the deliberate targeting of children. Children continue to die. In the middle of the second intifada, a soldier at West Bank checkpoint shot dead a four-year-old boy, Ghassan Kabaha, and wounded his two young sisters with a burst of machinegun fire from his armored vehicle. The rate of killing since the beginning of the second intifada has increased sharply, almost every day the army has continued to fire heavy machineguns into Khan Yunis or Rafah. The Zionist army claimed that it is difficult to distinguish between youths, men and children, but the statistics show that nearly a quarter of the children killed were under 12. Last year alone, 50 children under the age of eight were shot dead or blown up by the Zionist army in Gaza: eight, one of whom was two months old, were slaughtered when a one-tone bomb was dropped on a block of flats to kill a lone Hamas leader, Sheikh Salah Mustafa Shihada. But the children were not "collateral damage" in the assassination of Hamas Shihada, or caught in crossfire. In the same context, Yesterday, Two Palestinian children were killed Friday at noon in the northern Gaza Strip town of Beit Lahia when OF troops opened fire at a group of Palestinian children playing in the open. Dr. Muaweyah Hasanin, Director General of Emergency Services at the PA Health Ministry, said that ambulances rushed to the scene and found that two children have been killed in the aggression. The boys, aged 12 and 8, were shot while they were playing with other children at the site of the evacuated colony of Dugit when OF troops stationed to the north of the Gaza Strip opened their machinegun fire at the children. An OF spokesman confirmed that soldiers shot at several Palestinians who were spotted crawling in a suspicious manner' toward the fence near the town of Beit Lahia.
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