Beyond October 7: Hamas’ Atrocities Against Gazan Children and Civilians

The American left and the LGBTQ alliance love Hamas, but they seem not to know or care that Hamas is a brutal, repressive terrorist organization that would consume the very leftists who support it. While October 7, 2023 was horrific and dominated news headlines, the mainstream media remains relatively quiet about the atrocities Hamas commits against the very people it claims to be protecting.

Hamas and allied Palestinian factions have repeatedly deployed minors as suicide bombers and stone-throwers, launched incendiary kites and balloons across the Gaza border to provoke an Israeli response, organized mass protests that placed children in the path of live fire, and positioned military operations and weapons within schools, hospitals, and refugee camps, using civilian casualties to draw international sympathy and shift blame onto Israel.

Human Rights Watch documented Hamas’s role in a suicide bombing near the Ariel settlement in August 2003 by 17-year-old Khamis Gerwan, and documented similar attacks carried out by Islamic Jihad using minors in 2002 and 2004. The Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers’ 2004 Global Report found that children were used as messengers, couriers, and in some cases fighters and suicide bombers in attacks on Israeli soldiers and civilians, with Fatah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the PFLP all implicated.

Sixteen-year-old Hussam Abdo was captured at an Israeli checkpoint near Nablus wearing an explosive belt in March 2004; a week earlier, at the same checkpoint, soldiers had captured a bomb in the possession of 12-year-old Abdullah Quran, according to Human Rights Watch’s reporting on the case.

The Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers reported that senior Hamas figure Abd al-Aziz al-Rantisi declared in March 2003 that “a 16-year-old is a man, a holy warrior engaged in jihad.” Rights groups cited the statement as evidence of the gap between Hamas’s stated policy and its actual practice.

Writing in Inside Terrorism, terrorism scholar Bruce Hoffman argued that terrorist violence is fundamentally political in its aims and is intended to communicate a message to a target audience. Security researchers at the Center for Homeland Defense and Security later applied this framework specifically to Hamas’s escalation tactics. They concluded that Hamas’s leadership calculates the timing and framing of violence against Israel to shape the surrounding narrative war.

Palestinian stone-throwing became a large-scale, organized tactic starting with the First Intifada in 1987; B’Tselem’s fatality tables record Palestinian minors killed by Israeli security forces throughout that uprising. In June 2015, four Palestinians, three of them minors, were convicted and sentenced to seven to eight years for hurling large rocks at a car that severely injured a woman, and Israel’s security cabinet that year approved measures including a minimum four-year prison sentence for rock and firebomb throwers and imprisonment and fines for minors aged 14 to 18.

During the Great March of Return in 2018, hundreds of protesters approached the border fence with Molotov cocktails, explosives, and burning tires, and the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs recorded that of 195 Palestinians killed by Israeli forces during the demonstrations through March 2019, 41 were under age 18.

The Great March of Return also introduced incendiary kites and balloons, launched from Gaza starting in May 2018, exploiting westward winds to carry them into Israel. By mid-June 2018, protesters had launched more than 600 kites and balloons, igniting over 400 fires and burning more than 3,200 hectares of farmland and forest, according to analysis published by an operations-research scholar at Brock University; within two months, the toll had grown to roughly 4,300 acres burned across more than 250 individual fires, per Times of Israel reporting.

An academic study published in Security and Defence Quarterly examined the tactic as a deliberate Hamas adaptation following the loss of momentum in the border protests, providing a low-cost method of provocation that let the group claim a symbolic victory without matching Israel’s technological capabilities. An 18-year-old participant in the campaign told ABC News Australia that the intent was to provoke the Israelis further, describing how a burning rag was attached to a kite for that purpose.

During the same 2018 protests, the IDF accused Hamas of sending a 7-year-old girl to the Gaza security fence, stating that Hamas cynically uses women and children by sending them to the fence and endangering their lives, though the army did not provide immediate evidence for the specific claim. State Department human rights reporting notes the Israeli government’s position that many protesters killed at the fence were Hamas operatives or people encouraged by Hamas to protest there, and documents that Hamas at times instigated violence at the fence. A UN Commission of Inquiry report released in June 2026 prompted Israel to state that the commission had ignored Hamas’s use of Palestinian children as human shields and pawns of war.

During the 2014 Gaza War, a UN Headquarters Board of Inquiry found that weapons had been discovered inside a UNRWA school in Gaza on three separate occasions and concluded it was highly likely that a Palestinian armed group had used the premises to hide weapons. Then-UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said he was dismayed that Palestinian militant groups would put UN schools at risk this way.

Israel has continued making similar accusations regarding UN facilities in the current war, including photographs showing rocket-launching sites positioned near UNRWA schools. Hamas MP Fathi Hammad stated in a February 2008 speech, translated and archived by MEMRI, that the Palestinian people had formed human shields of women, children, the elderly, and fighters to challenge what he called the Zionist bombing machine.

Israel and the United States have separately asserted that Hamas built a command complex beneath Gaza’s largest hospital, Al-Shifa. CNN journalists who visited an exposed tunnel shaft on the hospital grounds in November 2023 confirmed the presence of a substantial underground structure, describing a shaft roughly 10 meters deep.

Israeli forces located the tunnel by following air-conditioning ducts and electrical and water lines running from the hospital, and finding underground bunkers, living quarters, and a room equipped with computers and communications equipment. The report noted that Hamas fighters in civilian clothing had been observed inside the hospital as far back as 2008, and that Hamas held press conferences there during the 2014 war.

Since October 2023, Hamas has systematically used human shields, with some areas of Rafah booby-trapped in nearly every home and hospitals and schools regularly used as command centers. UN Watch’s legal rebuttal to the UN Commission of Inquiry argues that the commission ignores Hamas’s openly acknowledged human-shield strategy, including the use of mosques, schools, residential buildings, and hospitals to conceal tunnels and weapons.

A 2019 analysis by the NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence describes the strategic logic behind this practice as a calculated two-sided bet. If the IDF limits strikes to avoid civilian casualties, Hamas’s military assets survive intact. If the IDF strikes anyway and civilians die, Hamas uses the resulting casualties to accuse Israel of war crimes and pursue sanctions through international bodies, a tactic the report characterizes as a form of lawfare, using the legal system itself to delegitimize an adversary.

The same report traces the strategy back to 2007, when Hamas took control of Gaza, and finds it has continued as a core element of Hamas’s operational planning in every major confrontation since. A sharper version of this argument comes from the Hudson Institute, whose analysts argue that Hamas’s approach goes beyond using civilians as shields and amounts to actively maximizing casualties among its own population, on the theory that global outrage generated by Palestinian deaths functions as a strategic asset that battlefield victories alone cannot provide.

Legal analysts have described the combination of rocket and mortar attacks aimed at Israeli civilian centers with the simultaneous positioning of launchers and command infrastructure inside populated Palestinian areas as a double violation of the laws of armed conflict.

The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court separately criminalizes the deliberate targeting of civilians and the use of civilian presence to render military objectives immune from attack, meaning the same operational pattern, firing on civilian population centers while sheltering behind Gaza’s own civilian population, can constitute two distinct war crimes rather than one.

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