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‘Children shot, stabbed and pepper-sprayed in occupied West Bank’, UNICEF says

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Israeli soldiers use tear gas to Palestinians protesting during the raid in Nablus city of West Bank, Palestine on May 3, 2026. [Nedal Eshtayah – Anadolu Agency]

Israeli forces and armed Jewish settlers are carrying out increasingly coordinated attacks on Palestinian children across the occupied West Bank, with documented incidents including shootings, stabbings, beatings and the use of pepper spray, the UN’s children’s agency has said.

Speaking to reporters in Geneva on Tuesday, UNICEF spokesperson James Elder said: “We’re seeing attacks become increasingly coordinated. Documented incidents include children shot, stabbed, children beaten and children pepper-sprayed.”

At least 70 Palestinian children have been killed in the occupied West Bank since January 2025 — an average of one a week — and a further 850 have been injured, the vast majority by live Israeli ammunition, according to UNICEF figures.

The agency said March 2026 had recorded the highest number of Palestinians injured by settler attacks in the past 20 years. “All this comes amid historic levels of settler attacks,” Elder said.

Recalling a recent visit to the occupied territory, the UNICEF spokesperson described meeting an eight-year-old Palestinian boy who had been beaten with a piece of wood during a settler attack and hospitalised for head injuries. The boy’s mother, he said, “had both her arms broken when she reached across to protect her four-month-old baby, putting therefore her arms between her baby and the attacker’s club.”

READ: Palestinian children injured in Israeli raids, as illegal settlers step up attacks in West Bank

Elder also highlighted a sharp increase in attacks targeting Palestinian education, including the killing, injury and detention of students and the demolition of schools by Israeli forces. “Schools, which should be places of safety and stability, are increasingly becoming places of panic,” he said.

The spokesperson described accompanying Palestinian schoolchildren on their journey to class in an effort to help them avoid being attacked. “It’s interesting to watch them walk… They don’t walk in a straight line because they’re constantly looking over their shoulder,” he said. “This is a walk to school. It’s become a walk through fear.”

UNICEF also reported a “sharp rise” in the arrest and detention of Palestinian children by Israeli occupation forces. Some 347 Palestinian children are currently being held in Israeli military detention “for alleged security-related offences” — the highest figure in eight years, Elder said.

“Alarmingly, more than half of these children, 180, are held under administrative detention and without the procedural safeguards, including detention without regular access to legal counsel and the right to challenge detention,” Elder added.

Administrative detention is a system inherited from the British Mandate era that allows the Israeli military to hold Palestinians indefinitely without charge or trial, on the basis of secret evidence.

Turning to the Gaza Strip, Elder said the UN had documented the killing of at least 229 Palestinian children and the injury of 260 more since the October 2025 ceasefire — agreed after nearly two years of Israel’s genocidal assault on the besieged enclave.

Dr Reinhilde Van de Weerdt, the World Health Organization’s representative in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, told the same briefing that some 10,000 children in Gaza are now living with life-changing injuries.

An estimated 43,000 of the 172,000 Palestinians injured in Gaza since October 2023 have sustained such trauma — including injuries to limbs, the spinal cord or the brain — she said. Almost 2,500 people have been injured since the October 2025 ceasefire alone.

“Of the 2,277 people that have had a limb amputated, less than 25 per cent have been fitted with permanent prosthetics,” Van de Weerdt said, blaming a severe shortage of prosthetics inside the Strip.

READ: Illegal Israeli settlers attack Palestinians in 13 locations across occupied West Bank

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