Children Emerge as Key Players in Mideast Conflict

They are children of the conflict, caught in a verbal cross-fire nearly as intense as the battles that have been raging outside their homes in Israel and the Palestinian territories.

They are Muhanad, 14, who watched graphic television images of a 12-year-old Palestinian boy killed by Israeli gunfire and, wanting to avenge his death, took a taxi to the front lines to hurl stones at Israeli soldiers.

They are Mohammed, 12, who is afraid to walk to school because the only route takes him past edgy Israeli troops guarding a Jewish settlement southwest of this Palestinian-controlled city.

And they are Almog, 7, an Israeli boy whose bedroom wall was pierced by bullets last month in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Gilo. Almog says some children he knows have grown used to the nightly exchanges of gunfire nearby.

“But me,” he says solemnly, “not so much.”

As the wave of violent unrest continues--having claimed more than 160 lives, almost all of them Arab--children have emerged as central players in the upheaval, and in the emotional tug of war over public opinion.

To an alarming extent, young people--as combatants, bystanders and victims--have become the most visible faces of the more than 5-week-old uprising, accounting for nearly a third of the fatalities and about a fifth of the injuries to date, according to various statistics.

As the fighting bursts into civilian neighborhoods like Gilo on Jerusalem’s southern edge, Israeli children as well as Palestinian are touched directly by the violence. Almog, whose last name is Haimovitch, is afraid to stay home alone, for instance, and he and his older sisters, whose bedrooms face the Palestinian village of Beit Jala, are sleeping together in a room on the far side of the apartment.

Even among those less directly affected, psychologists, doctors and parents report, there are increasing cases of anxiety among young children in Israel and the Palestinian areas. Many exhibit such classic stress symptoms as stomachaches, nightmares and bed-wetting.

Most of the fighting takes place in the Palestinian areas, however, and it is young Palestinians--bystanders and participants--who are most often directly exposed to the violence.

Thousands of young Palestinians, including Muhanad and nearly every one of his male friends, he says, have taken part in stone-throwing confrontations with Israeli soldiers. Muhanad has seen another boy, also 14, shot in the head and killed, and his 15-year-old cousin, Hazem, was shot to death last week. Many other children, even those who try to avoid the violence, say they know of friends or relatives who have been hurt or slain in the battles.

Now, stung by criticism from human rights groups and others that it has used excessive force in the clashes, especially against children, Israel has gone on the offensive, accusing the Palestinian Authority and parents of cynically exploiting young people and deliberately exposing them to danger.

Israeli officials say Palestinian children are actively encouraged to confront troops with rocks and firebombs and become “human shields” for Palestinian gunmen stationed at the rear of the rioting crowds.

Weapons Skills at Summer Camp

At the recent Middle East summit in Egypt, Israeli officials handed out copies of videotapes showing Palestinian children shouting anti-Israeli slogans and participating in summer camps where they learn such skills as assembling automatic rifles.

“They don’t think twice about sacrificing their children,” said Lt. Col. Gerson Golumb, a top Israeli army officer at the Gush Etzion base near Bethlehem. “And to lie about it is their first option. We are fighting someone who doesn’t care about his children, someone who wants casualties and lies. They force us to hurt their children.”

Palestinian officials and parents react with outrage to such remarks. They accuse Israel of deliberately targeting young people at the demonstrations, and then trying to dehumanize Palestinians by portraying them as people who do not care if their children are killed or injured.

“Israel is trying to hide from the consequences of its own doing,” said Mustafa Barghouti, a Palestinian physician and political activist. “They are attacking Palestinian parents in order to hide the fact that their soldiers are shooting to kill, and to kill children.”

In a London news conference Wednesday, Amnesty International strongly criticized Israel for using excessive force, far out of proportion to the threat posed to its soldiers, in trying to put down the unrest. A pattern of human rights violations could even leave Israel open to charges of war crimes, the organization suggested.

“Response must follow proportionality,” said Claudio Cordone, the group’s research director and a member of a delegation that just returned from the region. “If a kid is throwing stones at you but not posing any other risk, you don’t shoot him.”

Amnesty faulted the Palestinians for lagging in their investigation into the mob killings of two Israeli reservists in the West Bank city of Ramallah last month, and for not doing enough to keep young children away from the bloody clashes.

The Palestinian Authority and its police “have the responsibility to safeguard life,” especially those of Palestinian children, the Amnesty delegation said.

Some Palestinians, however, say they cannot protect children who are forced to walk through or near the angry protests that erupt these days at every conceivable hot spot.

Trip to School a Passage of Fear

Twelve-year-old Mohammed, whose last name is Hilu, is such a child. Each school day, he shoulders his colorful Sega backpack and confronts the most frightening part of his day: the walk to class that takes him past Israeli soldiers guarding the Jewish settlement of Netzarim near his home.

“We walk as fast as we can, on the other side of the street,” Mohammed said quietly as he prepared to set off with his cousins one recent morning. “We get afraid they will shoot us.”

He spoke in the living room of his family’s apartment, heavily damaged by Israeli gunfire the week before. Southwest of an Israeli army post and southeast of the Jewish settlement, the building has come under frequent fire in the past, his father said, but never so badly, with the walls now riddled with bullets from both directions.

During the recent shooting, Mohammed said, his family raced to find refuge in the building’s stairwell. They were frightened but not hurt, he said. As he spoke, his cousin Iman, 3, toddled about the apartment, collecting shrapnel.

Other Palestinians admit that they can’t control teenage sons whose own anger and experience make them want to join in a battle they see as a struggle for their land and people, sometimes against the will of their parents.

Muhanad’s mother, Kafa abu Daff, said her son was deeply upset by the death of Mohammed Durra, the 12-year-old Gaza boy whose final, desperate moments, caught on videotape, provided one of the most heart-rending images of the conflict. And he was angered by the death of a family friend, a Palestinian policeman, in the fighting the same day, she said.

The next morning, Muhanad, an eighth-grader with a short, trendy haircut, defied his parents’ orders to stay away from the clashes. He paid a taxi driver a single Israeli shekel--about 25 cents--to drive him the short distance from his home in this city to the Netzarim junction where both the child and the policeman were killed.

There, armed with a slingshot fashioned from two shoelaces and a small piece of cloth, he climbed to a roof overlooking an Israeli army post and joined other boys in lobbing rocks and Molotov cocktails at the soldiers, who fired back with rubber bullets and standard ammunition.

Watching TV that afternoon, Kafa abu Daff saw her son among the rioters and screamed. “I saw the Israelis shoot, and I saw him go down,” she said. Muhanad, the sixth of her 13 children, was not hurt.

‘Who Will Tell . . . About Our Situation?’

Now, after days of arguing, she has stopped trying to keep him from going to Netzarim, which he does nearly every day after school. His desire to be there, to join his peers in an uneven battle with the soldiers, grows out of his own experience of the Israeli occupation, and his own anger, his mother said.

Besides, she said, “my son is not better than the others,” the youths who have died in the conflict.

“If he wants to go, then I need to encourage the way he feels about his homeland,” she said. “If I keep my son away, and others keep theirs also, who will tell the world about our situation?”

His father still disapproves, Muhanad said. “But I feel proud that I am doing something for my land,” he said.

Other Palestinian parents, even bereaved ones such as Iman Jawarish, said they enthusiastically support their children’s desire to play a role in the uprising.

Receiving condolences one recent day in the Aida refugee camp near Bethlehem, Jawarish, 33, insisted that she was happy that her son Muayed, 13, shot in the head by Israeli soldiers, had died fighting for the Palestinian cause.

“I told him to go fight the Israelis,” Jawarish said, sipping bitter coffee as she sat with female relatives in a mourning ritual. “But he would go even if I didn’t tell him; every Palestinian knows he has to fight.”

The message of struggle and conflict is echoed in the dingy walls and jammed hallways of Gaza’s Shifa Hospital, where a constant stream of visitors crowds about each new casualty. On a recent day, a fourth-grade class trooped up the steps, past banners congratulating the “martyrs” and the “strugglers” of the uprising, and on to the bedside of a wounded 17-year-old.

There, the children accepted candy from the boy’s mother and gaped at his wounds before heading off to the room of another young victim, a 15-year-old shot the same day.

“We want to show that we support this intifada,” said teacher Jihad abu Shammalah, using the Arabic word for uprising. “It is important for our students to show that they are part of this nation and of the national struggle.”

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Times staff writer Tracy Wilkinson and researcher Batsheva Sobelman of The Times’ Jerusalem Bureau contributed to this report.

* RABIN REMEMBERED

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