Description
Since 2023, international humanitarian agencies have highlighted the deleterious effect of Israel’s military campaign to remove Hamas operatives, with a particular focus on the number of women and children maimed or killed. Indeed, Palestinian children have long suffered under the settler colonial rule of Israel as second class citizens. This paper analyses how power and violence coexist with generational-based violence, as wielded by the Israeli state against children, both before and after the current military campaign. Notions of childhood and adulthood are mobilized and re-ordered by state actors at will to arbitrarily police the boundary between innocence and culpability. By framing children as criminals or potential terrorists, the state legitimizes punitive, often illegal, measures, including arrests, detentions, and violence. This analysis offers a deeper understanding of how the occupation enforces systems of control and the production of different child subjects, including the illegal detention of children and as human shields.
