After doctors accuse Israel of shooting Gazan kids, experts see need for a second opinion
The evidence behind a New York Times essay suggesting troops targeted children is less clear-cut than it seems, and there is reason to question the piece’s scathingly anti-IDF author
Reporter at The Times of Israel
On January 30, as Israeli and Thai hostages were being released from Hamas captivity amid chaotic mobs, John Spencer, a leading international expert on urban warfare, watched the proceedings while focusing on one specific detail: the weapons held by Hamas gunmen.
“They were carrying M16 and M4 rifles which use 5.56 mm bullets, the same rifles that Israeli soldiers use,” Spencer told The Times of Israel by email.
To Spencer, head of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point in the US, the terrorists’ use of the same weapon as the IDF cast serious doubts on the allegation made in an essay in The New York Times three months earlier implying that Israeli soldiers were deliberately targeting children during the 15-month Gaza war.
Attached to the essay were X-ray pictures appearing to show 5.56-millimeter rounds lodged in children’s heads and necks.
“It could be that the terrorists were shooting the children,” Spencer said.
Hamas has a long history of exploiting and harming minors, as well as noncombatant adults, to advance its political goals—through tactics such as training children as suicide bombers and soldiers, forcing them to construct tunnels in perilous conditions, using them as human shields, or intentionally killing them.
Over months of war, as Gaza’s civilians have been brutalized and displaced by deadly crossfire, Israel has been nearly universally blamed as the aggressor, repeatedly tarred in cases where there is little evidence beyond the reality of fighting. In some instances, however, the facts show that Hamas or other Gazan terror groups are actually to blame.
Perhaps the most well-known such incident occurred in the opening weeks of the war, when an Islamic Jihad rocket slammed into Gaza’s Al-Ahli Hospital, killing scores of people. With no evidence but the claims of Hamas officials, Israel was still widely blamed for both the attack and a wildly inflated death toll.
Other cases, though, are less clear-cut, like that of Ahmed Shaddad Halmy Brikeh, a 13-year-old boy who appeared on the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry’s monthly fatality list as a victim of “Israeli aggression” in August.
But nine months earlier, Brikeh’s cousin reported online that the teen was shot dead by Hamas gunmen while trying to obtain food from a humanitarian aid shipment.
“He was killed by a shot in the head,” the cousin wrote on December 24, 2023.
Throughout the war, Hamas has repeatedly been found to use civilians as human shields, and to hide military infrastructure in hospitals and humanitarian facilities. Israel says the cynical strategy has put the lives of innocent Gazans at risk as it fights Hamas, a key factor in turning the tide of international public opinion against Israel.
“Hamas wants every and anybody who died to be counted as Israel’s fault, including killing people themselves,” Spencer said.
‘Insane to make definitive statement’
The IDF began its military operations in Gaza after the Hamas-led massacre on October 7, 2023, when over 5,000 terrorists stormed across the border into Israel, murdering 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages, while carrying out other atrocities including rape and torture.
According to data released by the Israel National Council for the Child, 38 children were killed during the Hamas-led terrorist onslaught in southern Israel. Three of those children were under the age of 3, and another four were under 6. Some were shot to death at close range or burned alive while trying to hide from the marauders.
In contrast, there have been no reliable direct accounts of Israeli soldiers deliberately targeting Gazan children, though many have been killed unintentionally.
Nonetheless, foreign doctors volunteering in Gaza have repeatedly accused Israeli soldiers of systematically targeting children in response to kids being brought to hospitals with single bullet wounds to the head or chest.
In April 2024 and again in October, the doctors were given high-profile platforms in the Guardian and New York Times to lay out the accusations, though they only had secondhand knowledge of the circumstances of the shooting and incomplete forensic evidence.
“That is the insanity of making a definitive statement that any child with a gunshot wound was shot purposefully by an IDF soldier when there are many other possibilities and no way to know who shot the kid or what was the context of the injury,” said Spencer.
In The New York Times on October 9, 2024, Dr. Feroze Sidhwa wrote in an opinion piece that while volunteering at the European Hospital in Gaza in February and April last year, he saw 13 children who had been shot in the head or the chest.
“At the time, I assumed this had to be the work of a particularly sadistic soldier located nearby,” the California-based surgeon wrote in the op-ed, which gathered the experiences of 65 volunteer medical staff in Gaza.
While the piece does not explicitly accuse Israel of targeting children, the newspaper said it still reached out to the IDF for comment, which “responded with a statement that did not directly answer whether or not the military had investigated reports of shootings of preteen children, or if any disciplinary action had been taken against soldiers for firing at children.”
An April 2, 2024, article in the Guardian quoting nine foreign doctors in Gaza made similar claims, largely based on secondhand accounts regarding the faraway source of sniper fire. “Some of the physicians said that the types and locations of the wounds, and accounts of Palestinians who brought children to the hospital, led them to believe the victims were directly targeted by Israeli troops,” the Guardian reported.
Tellingly, the article credulously reported on a conspiracy theory regarding swarms of quadcopters mounted with guns, a rumor likely born of confusion regarding the source of gunfire when surveillance drones are seen.
In response to an inquiry by The Times of Israel, an IDF spokesperson said that “the claim that the IDF deliberately targets civilians, including children, is entirely unfounded and is categorically rejected by the IDF.”
Spencer, a former infantryman who entered Gaza four times during the war to observe the Israeli military’s operations, said it was likely some soldiers had disobeyed protocols, though there is no evidence any of them took wanton aim at Gazan children.
“There’s no military in the world that has no soldiers within the ranks that aren’t doing wrong things,” he said.
During the war, some Israeli soldiers posted videos on social media about their military exploits. In one, a soldier says that he is blowing up a neighborhood in Gaza in retribution for a kibbutz in Israel that was destroyed during the Hamas-led massacre.
The Israel Defense Forces’ top lawyer, Maj. Gen. Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi, issued a warning to commanders in February 2024 against illegal actions carried out by troops in the Gaza Strip.
She mentioned unjustified use of force, including against detainees, looting, and destruction of civilian property contrary to protocols, as incidents that “cross the criminal threshold.”
Sadistic soldiers seeking revenge?
In a teleconference interview with The Times of Israel in December, Sidhwa sharpened his accusations and claimed that Israeli soldiers were intentionally targeting children.
“It’s not a decision that’s being made by the Israeli military,” Sidhwa charged. “It is a decision that is being made by individual soldiers.” But he admitted that “there’s no way of proving” his allegation.
The lack of concrete evidence did not stop Sidhwa from alleging in an October 2 letter to the Biden administration that children in Gaza were “suffer[ing] violence that must have been deliberately directed at them,” and claiming it was “impossible” Israel’s civilian and military leaders were unaware.
Though the letter called for an arms embargo on both Israel and armed Palestinian groups, it ended with the statement that “every day that we continue supplying weapons and munitions to Israel is another day that women are shredded by our bombs and children are murdered with our bullets.”
During the interview, Sidhwa speculated about the mindsets of Israelis and of soldiers in Gaza in an attempt to build a case against them, calling into question his role as a reliable source of information.
The US doctor claimed Israeli soldiers, some of whom “happen to be violent sadists,” were out for blood due to accounts of Hamas atrocities during the October 7, 2023, onslaught, some of which he contended had been fabricated.
The result, he said, was that Gazan children were being targeted by “individual angry soldiers who are either playing out their most sadistic impulses or they’re still angry about October 7.”
“Israel is seeped in propaganda about what actually happened on October 7,” he alleged. “It’s very widely believed that [babies] were bound up and burned alive on October 7. None of those things happened, but the fact that they are widely believed means that there are probably plenty of soldiers who think that it’s justified to shoot Palestinian children.”
Accompanying The Times’ article were three photos of X-rays purporting to show intact bullets lodged in two children’s heads and one child’s neck.
“A single X-ray view cannot provide a medical professional with enough information to determine etiology of the injury,” said Dr. Tyler Reynolds, an American trauma surgeon with 13 years of military and civilian experience who stated that he was not speaking on behalf of any institution. “In these images, the projectile may be inside or outside the skull.”
Two of the images reflect what appear to be 5.56 mm bullets, said Dr. Gavin Harris, assistant professor of Medicine, Division of Pulmonary, Allergy, and Critical Care Medicine at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, who has a degree in military history and personal firearms experience.
The 5.56mm rounds are standard issue for IDF infantry units, including sharpshooters but not snipers. They are also used by Hamas, which is partially armed with stolen Israeli weapons.
“The shots could have been from friendly fire, from the accidental discharge of a weapon of a friend or family member, homicide or suicide,” said Reynolds. “There is nothing that a medical professional can glean from a case series of opinions without verifiable data.”
After the article received a considerable number of objections, Times opinion editor Kathleen Kingsbury responded that a second round of experts examined the images and also found them credible, though she misidentified them as CT scans.
Sidhwa showed The Times of Israel actual CT scans that he said were connected to one of the children seen in the X-ray photos. He pointed out the bullet and the blood “that comes in with the bullet,” saying that this was a “completely normal CT scan of someone who’s been shot in the head.”
The New York Times did not respond to two Times of Israel inquiries for comment.
Killed, but not targeted
The Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza claims over 48,000 Palestinians have been killed in the fighting, around a third of whom it says were minors, a category that could also include teen operatives. The figures cannot be verified and have been called into question.
Israel says it has killed some 20,000 combatants in battle as of January and another 1,000 terrorists inside Israel on and just after October 7.
The IDF admits that civilians have been killed, but says it seeks to minimize civilian fatalities and stresses that Hamas uses Gaza’s civilians as human shields, fighting from civilian areas including homes, hospitals, schools, and mosques.
“I am reasonably sure children were killed in the battle space as a result of IDF action,” said Jacob Stoil, research professor of Middle East security at the US Army Strategic Studies Institute, who emphasized that he was speaking from his personal research and not on behalf of the US Army or any other institution.
“But from my broader knowledge of rules of engagement and how the IDF operates, I would find it extremely unlikely that the IDF deliberately targeted children,” he added.
An Israeli soldier who served in northern Gaza from October to December 2023 told The Times of Israel that since Hamas terrorists do not wear uniforms, “it’s very hard to differentiate them from civilians, especially when it’s very fast.”
“I did see children who were killed because they suddenly ran out from a place where there were Hamas terrorists,” said the soldier, who was interviewed in November on condition of anonymity.
Stoil called Gaza an “incredibly difficult” urban operating environment.
“There was a high density of civilians in the battle space and no real ability to evacuate them because there’s no place for them to go,” he said.
When the IDF targeted “what they thought was hostile or threatening movement, some of that was, unfortunately and tragically, civilians who were in the battle space, including children,” Stoil said.
According to Spencer and other experts, collateral damage in war is inevitable.
“There’s no such thing as a bloodless war,” he said.
But the former American soldier noted that during the fighting, Israel implemented strategies to “protect civilians including evacuations, notification techniques, and facial recognition technologies.”
Hamas, he added, “acted to get as many Gazans killed as possible.”
