No, Israel isn’t deliberately killing children in Gaza

In every war, children perish. It’s the worst thing about conflict, this dragging of innocents into the swirling maelstrom of tensions they don’t even understand. In Iraq, almost 10,000 kids were maimed or killed between 2008 and 2023. In the war in Syria, a child was injured or killed every eight hours for ten infernal years. So unimaginable was the suffering of kids in the Congo wars of recent years that that benighted nation came to be called ‘the epicentre of child suffering’.

And so it is in the clash between Israel and Hamas. Children in Gaza are dying in this ghastly war Hamas started with its fascistic pogrom against the Jewish state on 7 October last year. Yet there’s something new and strange in the discussion of child suffering in Gaza. In this war, the agony of the guiltless ones is not seen as accidental, as an awful byproduct of the fierce fighting.