The British newspaper The Guardian reported on Saturday that Israel's killing of children in the occupied West Bank has become a common occurrence since the Israeli occupation army escalated its aggression in the occupied territories after October 7, 2023. The report indicated that the situation has worsened since the ceasefire in Gaza came into effect on January 19, 2025.

The article was accompanied by surveillance camera footage showing the moment an Israeli soldier shot 12-year-old Ayman Nassar al-Haimouni in Hebron. Al-Haimouni was killed on February 21 while visiting relatives in the Jabal Juhar area south of Hebron. He was shot in the chest and later pronounced dead in hospital.

According to the Guardian, Israeli forces have killed two children a week in the West Bank since the beginning of 2025, a rate slightly higher than the average for 2024, when 93 Palestinian children were killed.

Human rights activists fear the death toll will continue to rise as the Israeli military applies tactics used in Gaza to the West Bank, including the displacement of tens of thousands of residents, the destruction of neighborhoods and relaxed rules of engagement that dictate when soldiers can open fire.

The Israeli military did not respond to inquiries about Hemoni’s killing, the newspaper reported. In some previous cases, military investigations have been made public under media pressure, but they have rarely led to accountability. In 2019, a soldier received just one month of community service for killing a 14-year-old boy in Gaza. Still, such consequences remain extremely rare.

The Israeli human rights organization Yesh Din says the chance of an Israeli soldier being prosecuted for killing a Palestinian is just 0.4 percent — meaning only one in 219 cases results in legal action.

Meanwhile, Defense for Children International - Palestine said on Saturday that the failure to hold Israeli soldiers accountable has effectively given them a green light to commit further abuses in the West Bank.

Iyad Abu Qutaish, Accountability Program Director at Defense for Children International, said that Israeli forces have killed 16 Palestinian children in the West Bank since the beginning of the year, even though none of them posed a real threat. Abu Qutaish also pointed to the increasing frequency of Israeli soldiers delaying ambulances carrying wounded Palestinians and assaulting their families, describing this as a disturbing pattern in the army’s behavior.

It is noteworthy that on February 10, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz said that the Israeli army expanded the open-fire orders in the occupied West Bank, which led to an increase in the number of Palestinian civilian martyrs.

She added, quoting commanders of units in the Israeli army, that the Central Command has decisions to implement the open-fire mechanism it used in the Gaza Strip to kill any unarmed Palestinian, whether suspected or not, in the West Bank.

The newspaper explained that "the broad opening fire orders made it easy for soldiers to pull the trigger at the behest of the commander of the Central Command (of the Israeli army) Avi Balut."

It also quoted Israeli soldiers who participated in the military operation in the West Bank as saying that Balut allowed shooting to kill Palestinians without resorting to arrest.

The soldiers explained that the recent increase in the number of unarmed Palestinian deaths in the West Bank was "unusual," and attributed it to Balut's decision that allowed them to shoot and kill any Palestinian suspected of planting explosive devices or "tampering with the land."