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...because the spiritual purity of 15-and-younger boys disarms explosives?
You may feel this is brilliant journalism, but nothing in it really addresses child soldiers, which have a sordid history in islamic extremism even without touching on Hamas' deathcult tendencies. Child soldiers aren't merely 'are they big enough to carry a gun', which can be well below 10, but 'are they old enough to throw stone-heavy grenades,' which is even less. A preteen can easily be a child soldier, and even a cutoff of 6 is being arbitrary in terms of 'can they provide militarily-useful tasks.'
Nor does anything in the article address the nature of Hamas's influence in the information space, which is not only in the form of influence on intermediaries (by controlling access to Gaza) but also on the locals reporting to those intermediaries (by threats of retaliation).
Nor does the article- or you- make any effort to clear for selection bias on head/body shot children. For the article, there's only 8 cited speakers and the doctors who have the internal medicine specialty to be spending time on children shot in the head are, by the nature of their specialty, not going to be the medical experts handling walking-wounded children who got shot in the arm or non-critical parts of the leg but who don't rise to their need.
You say this...
...but the data doesn't uniquely shed light on possible Israeli misconduct. The data doesn't uniquely shed light on any misconduct. The data doesn't even demonstrate a pattern, because the data is depicted without time, context, or even attribution.
Heck, the data doesn't even provide an actual number of children shot.
Most of the article- the vast majority of the article- isn't even about gunshots. It's about malnutrition, psychological harm, baby mortality, and other things.
There are only 8 speakers cited with stories of children being shot. Given the relative range differentials between the Israeli small arms users and Palestinians, it would seem reasonable that a 'the Israelis are deliberately targeting children' to rely on snipers (shooting individual targets from range with precision), rather than closer-range options (pistol-executions) or mid-range-but-less-accurate fires.
On a very basic breakdown of -Attribution of who done it -Attribution of child-soldier era child -Characterized as single shot -Characterized as a sniper (single shot, single targets)
We have
Claim 1: 6 children, ages 6-12, single shots to skull
Attribution: None Child-soldier age: Yes Characterized as single shot: Yes Sniper characterized: No (no claim of a sniper context, or how a sniper would be responsible for a singular group)
Claim 2: Pediatric gunshot-wound patients
Attribution: None Child-solder Age: Unclear Characterized as single shot: No (gunshot-wound patients is plural patients, not claiming all patients had a single gunshot wound) Sniper characterized: No
Claim 3: Several children with high-velocity bullet wounds in head and chest
Attribution: None Child-soldier age: Unclear Characterized as single shot: No Sniper characterized: No ('high-velocity bullet' does not imply sniper, and no basis of what this means is provided)
Claim 4: 4-5 year old children, all shot in head with single shot, all delivered at once
Attribution: None Child-soldier age: No Characterized as single shot: Yes Sniper characterized: No (Additionally, group delivery implies no risk in taking the time to load all individuals, supporting a close-killing, not snipers)
Claim 5: Child shot in the jaw
Attribution: None Child-solder age: Unclear Characterized as single shot: Yes Sniper characterized: No (Not in nature of delivery or precision)
Claim 6 Father + Brother claiming children (3 and 5) were shot by snipers in house after rumored Israeli pullout
Attribution: None (Israeli attribution is of the rumor of an Israeli pullout from a neighborhood; the sniper is not attributed) Child-soldier Age: No Characterized as single shot: Yes Sniper characterized: Yes
Claim 7 18-month little girl with gunshot wound to the head
Attribution: none Child-soldier age: No Characterized as single shot: Yes Sniper characterized: No
Claim 8 (Dr. 'Many' children, on almost daily occurrence, with nonfatal gunshot wounds to head
Attribution: none Child-solder age: Unclear Characterization as single-shot: No Snipe characterized: No (Not in nature of delivery or precision)
So of our 8 claims- claims that are clearly selected for shock impact to print and thus are probably at the bounds of what even the NYT would consider worth reporting- we have...
8 Claims
Attributions to Israeli Shooters: 0
Characterization of Non-Child Soldier Age Victims: 3
Characterization of single shots: 5
Sniper characterized: 1
So when you say this...
This is assuming a conclusion not supported by the data.
No evidence, or even claim, is made that it was Israelis in particular shooting the children. That may be the insinuation, but nothing in the article elevates the Israelis over other factors or actors, including...
-Revenge killings / crimes of passion targeting a family
-Armed criminals attempting to silence witnesses of a crime
-Suicide by traumatized children (see lower article on psychological trauma)
-Resource-shortage/'mercy' murders by caretakers unable to afford the children (see lower article on inability to care for children)
-Cross fire from other combatants
-Deliberate fire by other combatants*
*This is the due reminder that Hamas deliberately works to get Palestinians killed, uses human shields for military positions, and done the shooting themselves on occasion... and that the current conflict wouldn't be occuring if they weren't willingness to plan and execute theatrical murder of children for propaganda effects
And this is if the claims made are to be taken at face value, and not reflective of other data compromise issues such as selection bias (if Dr. Farah is the sort of doctor who can help children shot in the head, he's not going to be given the children who were shot less severely who other, less specialized, people can care for) or other issues of unintentional or intentional bias, or examples of outright deception.
(This is the due reminder that any Gazan medical center data that relies on the Gazan ministries is using Hamas-approved and provided data. This includes conflating gazan civilian and gazan combatant casualties, and exagerating claimed losses.)
And this doesn't even approach whether incidents which would be Israel were results of laws-of-war-acceptable action, which the article doesn't even try to address from any perspective. Naturally the Hamas-institutional data would not exactly be publicizing how many children who have been shot were shot in the context of being belligerents in the current conflict.
And this doesn't go into data collection issues, such as how the relevant medical authorities were picked, the lack of cross-reference to any sort of objective data sets (or even unobjective data sets), and the rather blunt use of emotive language and framings for what ends with a rather direct policy advocacy stance which itself would imply the selection of data was driven to justify the policy rather than the other way around.
So, as far as brilliant research goes, nah. Not really.
That Hamas is utilizing 8 year old child soldiers to lob grenades is a level of propaganda that the IDF hasn’t even reached yet. There has been no information coming out of Israel that Hamas is using preteen child soldiers in their operations, neither is there drone or other footage which would immediately shift public opinion in favor of Israel. This isn’t happening.
This is not true. Emergency nurses will deal with children shot in all places. As would surgeons, parademics, and critical care doctors. Any child shot is going to see these professionals. There’s not some “child shot in the head super-specialist” at these clinics. I mean, maybe neurosurgeon, but that’s not even a listed specialty in the article. Who do you believe is the lower specialty on whom they drop off the children only merely shot in the abdomen or thigh?
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