“The Target is Unmistakable”: The Shooting of Gaza’s Children

American doctors who volunteered in Gaza report witnessing a disturbing pattern of children being shot by Israeli snipers.

Two Palestinian children amidst the rubble in Khan Younis, Gaza. January 2025. Source: still from the film “Kids Under Fire” (Mohammed Ibaida).

Drop Site News is publishing this story in collaboration with our colleagues at Fault Lines, Al Jazeera English's award-winning documentary news program.

On August 24, four-year-old Mira Al-Darini had just woken up to a hot summer morning in a crowded displacement camp, located between a local prison and the mediterranean sea in Khan Younis, when the sound of Israeli military tanks and gunfire erupted. Panic ensued. Mira was standing outside her family’s tent, clutching a sandwich her mother made for breakfast when a bullet struck her in the head.

“It was her older sister's birthday, ” Israa Haboush, Mira’s mother, told Al Jazeera’s documentary program Fault Lines. “[The kids] were happy and said, ‘Get up Mama. Let's make a cake for Rahaf's birthday.’ Suddenly, Mira’s entire face was covered in blood, and we knew our daughter was shot in the head.” Witnesses said Mira was fired at by an Israeli military drone armed with a gun.

Mira’s father, Mohammed Al-Darini, rushed her to two hospitals, carrying her in his arms on the back of a stranger’s motorbike—first to Kuwait Hospital in Rafah and then to Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, one of Gaza’s largest hospitals, which was bombed on Sunday by the Israeli military. On their way, Mira was all but gone. When they arrived at the hospital, she was triaged and labelled black—no hope for life.

Dr. Mimi Syed, an American emergency medicine physician, was volunteering at the ER that morning. When Mira came under Syed’s care, she noticed some faint movement. “I started to examine her and one of my colleagues came and said, ‘No, don't waste your time,’” she recalled in an interview at her home in Washington State. “But what I noticed about her was she was still moving. I felt like I could still save her.”

Dr. Syed immediately intubated Mira and used one of the few well-worn blades she had on hand. Due to restrictions imposed by Israel on medical supplies brought into Gaza, resources are scarce. The bullet was eventually removed from Mira’s skull and, against all odds, she survived.

This was Mira’s second brush with death, Mohammed told Fault Lines’ team in Gaza. Last year when the family was fleeing south, an Israeli missile had fired on them, killing one of her aunts. Another aunt lost her leg. This time, “she was between life and death” Mohammed recalled.

Today, Mira undergoes physical therapy when she can. She is slowly learning to walk again, but her future remains uncertain. As she grows, she will need more surgeries and procedures, which her family is working to help her receive, overcoming seemingly insurmountable obstacles. While receiving physical therapy at a local clinic in January 2025, the building next door was bombed. Mira survived, yet again, but her mother, Israa, lost her leg. Her continued treatment is something Gaza’s decimated healthcare system may never be able to provide.

In the months that Fault Lines reported its new documentary Kids Under Fire, Mira’s life continued to change. Mira's story exemplifies the precarious nature of life for hundreds of thousands of children in Gaza, where surviving one attack is no guarantee of safety from the next. In Gaza’s overcrowded and strained hospitals, a chilling pattern has emerged. Fault Lines spoke to twenty American doctors who have volunteered in hospitals across Gaza since the war began in October 2023, and they say they’ve treated many children with gunshots—often fatal.

Pattern of Gunshots in Children

Mohammed still holds on to a grim keepsake from the day Mira was shot: the bullet that struck his four year old daughter in the skull, “This is the bullet that ruined my daughter’s life,” he said, “and it represents that awful day when it all happened.”

“More and more, I started to see children with penetrating injuries like gunshot wounds. After five, six, seven, eight, I came to the realization that somebody is shooting children,” said Dr. Tammy Abughnaim, an American emergency physician from Chicago. “I didn't want to believe that children were being shot. Nobody wants to believe that. Nobody wants to think that other humans are capable of annihilating children in that way.” Dr. Abughnaim traveled to Gaza twice last year, working at Al-Aqsa Hospital and then at Nasser Hospital.

The Darini family’s story is part of a broader pattern of the Israeli military deliberately targeting children. Kids make up over a third of the death toll in Gaza, according to the Ministry of Health there. Nearly 16,000 children have been killed. However, the figure is almost certainly an undercount, as many children remain missing or under the rubble.

While most children have been killed by indiscriminate bombing, the doctors we spoke to say it’s nearly impossible to tell how many have been killed by snipers, foot soldiers with rifles, or quadcopters armed with guns. “Part of the Israeli military campaign of genocide has been to attack that very infrastructure that creates a record of who was killed and how,” said Miranda Cleland, an advocacy officer at Defense for Children International - Palestine. Cleland works with researchers on the ground in Gaza who had to stop collecting data because they were being bombed and had to evacuate their homes.

“The target at the end of a scope is unmistakable,” Dr. Mark Perlmutter told us, “They are a young human being, and when that trigger gets pulled on that target, it is not by accident. At all. Ever.” Currently in Gaza serving at Nasser Hospital, Perlmutter is an orthopedic hand surgeon from North Carolina who volunteered at the European Gaza Hospital in Khan Younis last spring.

Broken System of Checks and Balances

The United States funnels billions of dollars in assistance to Israel annually. Over the past seven decades, Israel has received about $124 billion in American military assistance. That makes it the largest recipient of U.S. funding since World War II.

“There’s probably not a unit in the Israeli army that hasn’t received U.S. training or equipment,” says Tim Rieser, a senior foreign policy advisor to former Senator Patrick Leahy. This aid is governed by the Leahy Law, first introduced in 1997 as part of the Foreign Operations Appropriations Act that governs U.S. foreign aid.

The Leahy Law, when applied, prohibits U.S. assistance to foreign military units credibly implicated in human rights violations such as rape, torture and extrajudicial killing. When it comes to Israel, however, the law has been rendered toothless and its enforcement is practically non-existent. Rieser, who helped to draft the law, believes that cases of children shot in Gaza should trigger use of the Leahy Law.

“It's been a huge frustration for Senator Leahy and for myself, because we've seen how the law has been applied effectively in other countries where embassies really took it seriously,” Rieser told us, “and that's the real shame of this, because there's so obviously a need for the law to be applied in Gaza and the West Bank, because it might help deter future abuses.”

Israel is not the only country that receives vast amounts of untraceable assistance— large lump sums that are not earmarked for specific purposes—but it’s the only country that has a special vetting process called the Israel Leahy Vetting Forum (ILVF). In 2020, when the ILVF was instituted, State Department bureaus and the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem spent months negotiating their “standard operating procedures,” according to Charles Blaha, a former State Department official who ran the Office of Security and Human Rights from 2016 until his retirement in 2023. Blaha describes the forum as riddled with loopholes. Even if credible allegations are raised, Blaha explained, they get buried under layers of bureaucracy.

“It’s a very elaborate, byzantine, complicated, delay-ridden, [and] high level process,” Blaha told us, which is a major reason the State Department has not found that “a single Israeli unit had ever committed a gross violation of human rights.” He added, “I signed off on that. I signed off. I believed, at the time, that the State Department would implement that process in good faith. And I believed, at the time, in the Israeli military justice system. Both of those beliefs turned out to be incorrect.”

In its nearly five years of existence, the vetting forum has never found a single Israeli military unit ineligible for assistance. For Blaha, who once put his faith in this system, the resulting lack of political will has been devastating. “I didn't think it would come to these thousands and thousands of deaths.”

The Scale May Never Be Known

The Israeli military shooting Palestinian children is by no means new or unique to the escalating catastrophe in Gaza, yet the scale of the shootings over the last seventeen months is on an entirely different level. Between October 7, 2023 and July 2024, the Israeli military killed 141 Palestinian children in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem; 116 of those were shot with live ammunition, according to the Defense for Children International - Palestine. “That comes out to about one child every two days,” Cleland said. “Ninety percent of those children were killed with live ammunition.” Numbers for Gaza are not available, in part because the Israeli military has destroyed its healthcare system.

“Israeli forces have killed so many children in Gaza that it is most likely we will never know all of their names,” Cleland added. “I think it will be a long time until we really understand the scale of how many children were killed and injured in Gaza, and that's even before we get into the details of how many children were shot with live ammunition.”

Josh Rushing, Mehr Sher, Media Town in Gaza and Laila Al-Arian contributed reporting.