Content warning: this article describes and references graphic violence against children in Gaza, including images of children who died of starvation.
Originally published: October, 2024 Updated details and statistics: June, 2026
A headshot is not a stray bullet.
Doctors who have volunteered in Gaza keep coming home with the same story — one most of us will never be shown.
Children, some barely old enough for school, arriving at hospitals with a single bullet wound to the head.
One doctor said he treated five of them in a single night.
When he mentioned it in a group chat with other physicians who had rotated through Gaza, the replies came back the same: multiple children, every night, bullets in their skulls.
This was intentional. IDF snipers aimed at a child’s head and pulled the trigger.
The Doctors Are Telling Us
This isn’t a rumor passed between strangers. Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, an American trauma surgeon, went on Democracy Now to talk about an essay he and dozens of other doctors, nurses, and paramedics published in The New York Times.
They described what they treated with their own hands — CT scans of small children shot through the head, or through the left side of the chest, where the heart is.
The Times said the images of the patients themselves were too graphic to print.
Sit with that. Not a building hit from the air. Not shrapnel. A child, held in someone’s sights, and shot in the head or the heart.
A UNICEF worker who visited field hospitals in Gaza put names and ages to it.
At a hospital in Khan Younis, she met a 14-year-old boy named Yousef.
He had been detained, strip-searched, and told he was free to leave.
As he walked away, he was shot.
“I personally wish that Americans could see more of what it looks like when a child is shot in the head, when a child is flayed open by bombs. I think it would make us think a little bit more about what we do in the world.”
His father was killed, and a bullet tore through Yousef’s pelvis, leaving wounds that would need reconstructive surgery.
In the same two weeks she met a 9-year-old girl with open blast wounds, a 16-year-old orphan with a broken leg, a 13-year-old recovering from an arm amputation done without anesthetic, and a 10-year-old boy who had been shot in the head while buying herbs.
He died the next day.
Those were five children one worker happened to meet, in one stretch of weeks.
The full toll is almost too large to fathom: by early 2026, UNICEF counted more than 21,000 children killed in Gaza and over 44,000 wounded — and those are only the ones we can document.
What it Does to the Ones Who Live
The children who survive don’t walk away whole.
One international broadcast showed a young boy outside a refugee camp that had just been bombed — again.
He was furious, trying to explain what he’d seen, and then he broke down sobbing as he described helping to carry a decapitated body.
No child should ever have to see, much less help carry a decapitated human being. There’s a word for deliberately harming civilians, and it is terrorism.
A mother told a reporter her little girl’s hair had fallen out from the stress of the war. The girl cried and said she just wanted to be able to wear ribbons in her hair again someday.
Volunteers do what they can.
The Gaza Free Circus brings clowns, games, and movies into the displacement camps, trying to give orphaned and frightened kids a few minutes of being children again.
It is a small, stubborn act of love in a place built for despair.
“Destroying Hamas” is Not What This is
Benjamin Netanyahu says the goal of the war is to wipe out Hamas.
But you don’t destroy Hamas by shooting children in the head and starving their younger siblings.
You manufacture it.
Every parent killed, every sibling maimed, every kid who watches home turn to rubble — that is how you grow a generation with nothing left to lose.
When the man running the war refuses to see something that obvious, you have to ask whether the outcome is the point.
Netanyahu has spoken of an Israel stretching “from the river to the sea.” Palestine sits in the way of that map.
Hind Rajab
If there was a single moment the world could no longer pretend, it was Hind.
In January 2024, five-year-old Hind Rajab was in a car with her aunt, uncle, and three cousins, trying to flee Gaza City.
An Israeli tank opened fire. Five of her relatives were killed. Only Hind and her 15-year-old cousin, Layan, were left alive inside the car.
Layan called the Palestine Red Crescent — Gaza’s version of 911 — and begged for help.
While she was on the phone, an Israeli tank pulled up next to the car.
Layan was telling the operator about the tank’s approach, when the rapid firing of a tank’s weapon interrupted her.
Layan screamed, fell silent, and stopped responding to the Red Crescent operator.
Tiny Hind, hiding in the back seat among the bodies of her dead relatives, picked up the phone.
For hours, a dispatcher stayed on the line with her, working with rescuers to find her.
Hind’s small voice on the recording is haunting.
You can hear the fear in her voice when she tells the operator that a tank has pulled up right next to the car.
An ambulance was sent — its route coordinated with the Israeli military, who knew exactly who was coming and why.
When the ambulance reached her, the tank opened fire again.
It killed Hind. It killed the two paramedics who came to save her.
Investigators who later examined the bullet-riddled car counted 335 rounds.
This happened during the spring campus protests, when students across the country were being arrested for refusing to look away.
Some of them occupied a building at Columbia University and renamed it “Hind’s Hall.”
They understood what too many adults still won’t say out loud: the killing of these children is not an accident. It is a choice.
It is no longer only advocates saying so.
In September 2025, the UN’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry concluded that Israel committed genocide in Gaza — and named the killing of Hind Rajab as one example.
Despite the UN’s conclusion, there are people in America who continue to deny that Israel is doing anything wrong.
“Israel has a right to defend itself,” they say.
How is the killing of newborn babies “self defense?”
The Slower Killing
Some children die in an instant. Others die slowly, on purpose.
Israel’s blockade choked off food, clean water, and medicine, and children starved to death.
Doctors amputated kids’ limbs with no anesthesia. Women had C-sections with nothing for the pain.
The pictures are unbearable.
They look like images from another century — the kind humanity swore it would never permit again.
Some people get angry when that comparison is made. The small bodies make the comparison anyway.
==Graphic image warning: the photographs in this drop-down are of children who died of starvation. Do not open if you will find them too disturbing.==
The Lie
You will hear that the IDF is “the most moral army in the world.”
That it does “everything possible” to spare civilians.
That the more than 72,000 Palestinians killed — tens of thousands of them women and children, and that’s before you count the dead still buried in the rubble, or the many the UN and independent researchers believe were never recorded at all — are somehow Hamas’s fault for “hiding” in schools and hospitals.
Anyone who tells you that is lying.
A familiar phrase was repeated by news anchors throughout the genocide: “Hamas is using Palestinians as human shields.”
But as Resist Hate reported in coverage of the IDF’s Lavender and Where’s Daddy AI programs, the military had guidelines limiting the number of civilian casualties based on a target’s level of involvement in Hamas. Those limits increased dramatically before they were seemingly ignored.
The Witnesses are Being Killed too
Israel hasn’t only killed civilians and children. It has killed the people whose job is to show the rest of the world what is happening.
More journalists have been killed in Gaza than in every other recent war combined. The Committee to Protect Journalists has documented more than 250 journalists and media workers killed in Gaza since the war began, with many more cases still under investigation.
Other organizations provide even higher estimates
Aid workers, too. Seven World Central Kitchen staff were killed in an airstrike on their clearly marked vehicles — on a route the IDF itself had approved.
No one is safe in Gaza. Not the reporters. Not the medics.
Not the children, who are dying in a war most of them are far too young to understand.
A ceasefire took hold in October 2025. The bombing slowed; it never fully stopped.
UNICEF has counted more than 200 children killed since then — roughly one child, somewhere in Gaza, every single day, during what the world keeps calling calm.
We can’t unsee this — and we shouldn’t try.
The least we can do, the very least, is refuse to call murder by any other name.
