If you only cry for Palestinian children, you've been duped.

"Think of the children" is the Palestinians' favorite propaganda strategy.

Children train in weapons-use in the Gaza Strip during Summer 2021. (photo: Hamas)

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Ten days ago, a UN “humanitarian” chief issued a claim so dramatic it bordered on self-parody: “14,000 babies could die in the next 48 hours if aid does not reach them.”

This week’s headlines followed suit: “Gazan children wait for food in long lines as starvation looms.” And: “Palestinian ambassador holds back tears while citing 1,300 child deaths.” Numbers no one can confirm, accusations no one can verify — but the performance is powerful enough to bypass both.

Meanwhile, on October 7, 2023, hundreds of Israeli children were murdered, kidnapped, or maimed in a single day — by Palestinians. And the world? It cried crocodile tears, then went back to tweeting about the “poor Palestinian children.”

Let’s be clear: The term “Palestinian children” is not a humanitarian reference anymore. It’s a political weapon — a photo-op, a hashtag, a bullet-point in a blood libel.

And yet, there are children in Israel too.

But you wouldn’t know it from watching the news or following the social media swarm, where the death or suffering of an Israeli child barely registers. The entire emotional universe of the Israeli-Palestinian conversation has been constructed as if there is only one side with children, only one side with innocence, only one side that bleeds.

It’s a grotesque gaslighting campaign dressed in the language of compassion.

Palestinian propaganda has long (and deeply) understood something the West still hasn’t grasped: When you cannot win wars with weapons, win them with emotions. And what is more effective than children?

Thus, Palestinian leaders have turned “childhood” into a shield, a sword, and a slogan.

And make no mistake — those who manipulate this narrative are not helping Palestinian children. They are helping their jailers: kleptocrats, theocrats, and terrorists who use children not as a cause to be protected, but as currency to be spent. As one Palestinian journalist, Ihab al-Jariri, bravely put it: “Those who encourage children to stab Jews from behind a keyboard should do it themselves first.”

You are not helping Palestinians by promoting a fabricated nationalist cause engineered to exploit them. You are helping those who trade in the blood of children. And if you become a messenger for their narrative — by repeating these emotionally manipulative half-truths — you are no different from the Hamas terrorist who forces a hostage to recite a scripted message for their family, meant not to inform, but to break.

If you want to see the difference in how Israelis and Palestinians value children, watch “One Life,” a film about Nicholas Winton, the “British Schindler” who rescued hundreds of Jewish children from Nazi Czechoslovakia.

In scene after scene, Jewish parents make the ultimate sacrifice: desperately queuing for papers, for money, for a seat on a train that would save their children but doom themselves. The heartbreak was unbearable, the love beyond comprehension. They died so their children could live.

Contrast this with Palestinian parents at “resistance” rallies declaring, “I would sacrifice my son for Palestine!” And they do.

This is not metaphor. It is policy. In Gaza and the West Bank, teen boys are weaponized by ideology, pushed into knife attacks, shootings, and suicide missions. Their deaths are then polished and paraded as martyrdom — useful additions to a propaganda war designed to make Israel look like a child-murdering monster.

Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir once said, “Peace will come when the Arabs love their children more than they hate us.” That line was dismissed by some as inflammatory. But decades later, it is painfully prophetic.

After October 7th, Israeli schools updated their bomb shelter drills. In some cities, children have 15 seconds to reach safety once a siren sounds indicating an incoming rocket (launched indiscriminately at Israeli population centers). Teachers sing jingles to keep kindergarteners calm while running toward underground bunkers. This is not war fiction; it is daily life in Israel.

Dozens of Israeli children were murdered on October 7th. Some were burned alive. Others were kidnapped and murdered in Hamas tunnels. Their names are not trending. Their faces do not appear on protest posters (and when they did, they were torn down). Why?

Is it because they’re the wrong kind of children? Are Israeli children too inconvenient for your narrative?

We Israelis love our children. We do not send them to die; we send them to live. If they must fight, it is because their enemies have already arrived at their door.

Meanwhile, in Gaza, children are trained in weapons use at Hamas-run summer camps. Their school textbooks praise martyrdom. Their playgrounds are next to rocket launchers. Their deaths are not an accident; they are a strategy.

Westerners, eager to feel righteous, project their values onto people who do not share them. They assume all parents are like them. But not all cultures are the same. In Israel, we mourn our dead and shield our young. In Gaza, the dead are put on parade, and the young are turned into future martyrs.

This is not “both-sides-ism.” This is a tragic moral asymmetry.

If you’re not calling this out, you’re complicit in it. The people who scream about “genocide” in Gaza are silent about actual genocides in Sudan, Syria, and China. Why? Because those places don’t offer the thrill of hating Jews. Let’s call it what it is: emotional antisemitism, dressed in the language of humanitarianism.

And let’s remember that the Palestinians started this war. They invaded Israel on October 7th with medieval savagery — killing children in front of their parents, and parents in front of their children. That was the spark. Everything since has been fire. And yet, the world blames the firefighter, not the arsonist.

Palestinian children have died in this war. That is tragic. But let us not confuse tragedy with murder. There is a difference between targeting civilians and fighting a war in an area where terrorists hide behind civilians. Hamas and other Palestinian factions deliberately embed themselves in schools, hospitals, and apartment buildings. Why? Because dead civilians, especially dead children, are bad PR for Israel.

This is their calculus: They shoot from behind a baby and count on you to only see the baby.

It works, because many in the West are too emotionally susceptible, historically illiterate, or ideologically possessed to ask the obvious: Why are there no bomb shelters in Gaza?

Billions of dollars have flowed into Gaza. Not one bomb shelter has been built. That is not incompetence. That is policy.

There is a reason the Palestinians have never had a figure like Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi, or Mandela. The reason is simple: Palestinians do not fight for peace or freedom. They fight for destruction.

Their goal is not a state; it is the elimination of the Jewish state precisely because it is Jewish. Their currency is not progress; it is perpetual, self-induced victimhood. Their cult is not life; it is death. And their most precious weapon is not a gun or a rocket; it is naive Western sympathy.

If you’re truly concerned about “the children of Gaza,” you should be the first to demand the dismantling of Hamas. You should be calling for the arrest of those who hide behind the innocent. You should be outraged that humanitarian aid is stolen, that international funding props up terror regimes, that Palestinian leaders profit off the blood of their own people.

Instead, many in the West scream “Ceasefire!” while Hamas refuses one. They chant “Free Palestine!” while Hamas imprisons Palestinians who do not submit to their terror. They yell “Save the children!” while ignoring the ones being raised to die.

In Israel, we don’t have the luxury of pretending everyone is “just like us.” We live surrounded by enemies who teach their children to hate ours. That’s not bigotry. That’s reality. And we teach our children to see clearly — to mourn their friends, to love their people, to stand ready when evil comes knocking.

So don’t talk about “Palestinian children” unless you are also talking about Israeli children. Don’t cry for the one while ignoring the other. Don’t dare lecture Israelis about morality while you prop up a culture that sends its children to die and calls it “victory.”

This war, like all others, has victims on all sides. But sympathy is not the same as stupidity. And compassion must never become a weapon used against truth.

It’s time to stop pretending this is just a misunderstanding or a tragic case of “two sides caught in endless conflict.” The portrayal of “Palestinian children” as passive victims of Israeli cruelty isn’t just misleading; it’s psychological warfare.

The image of a suffering child isn’t being shown to stop the war. It’s being shown to stop Israel from fighting it. It is a calculated form of emotional blackmail, meant to neutralize military resolve, demoralize supporters, and guilt-trip the West into funding the very groups that engineer this suffering in the first place. It’s not about empathy; it’s about leverage.

We’ve seen the playbook before: the teddy bear on the rubble, the crying child in the bombed-out hospital, the weeping parent cursing the sky. What’s rarely shown is the rocket launcher beside the hospital, or the tunnel under the school, or the parent praising their “martyr” child on television.

This is not humanitarianism. This is psychological manipulation with a kill switch.

And if you don’t believe it’s part of the strategy, consider this: Hamas issues media guidelines to Gazans on what to post after Israeli airstrikes — only show civilians, never show militants, and always frame Israel as targeting innocents. Because they know: If they can control the image, they can control the narrative.

And the moment you buy into that without context, without questions, without acknowledging the Palestinians’ role in this theater of cruelty, you become part of their wicked performance.

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