‘There was no mercy, even on children’: trauma in the West Bank after Israeli raids

Israel accused of using a 10-year-old girl as a human shield as it carried out its devastating attack on the occupied Palestinian territory When Israeli soldiers arrived at the modest house along an alleyway in Nur Shams camp on Wednesday night, they sent the women and four of the children out into the street, but kept hold of Malak Shihab.

They took the muzzle off their dog and it went straight up to the slight 10-year-old girl and sniffed her. Terrified, she pleaded to be with her mother, but the soldiers seemed to have just one phrase in accented Arabic: “Open the doors.”

The platoon pushed her up to each of the doors in her aunt’s house, according to Malak’s account, while they remained braced behind her ready to fire at whoever might be inside. One door wouldn’t open, and in her desperation to obey, the girl remembers hammering on it with her head.

Each time the troops have moved in, more children in Nur Shams have been exposed to violence. In the last raid, nine months ago, Malak fainted from the smoke from a blast outside the family home. So this time, her father, Mohammed, sent her, her mother and siblings to his sister’s house. But she was no safer there.