GAZA STRIP, July 2 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) – Abdul-Samad Shamalekh, killed June 21 by the Israeli occupation forces, was the 116^th Palestinian child killed by the Israeli forces in Gaza since September 28, 2000, an Israeli newspaper reported Tuesday, July 2.

Shamalekh, 10, who was supposed to start Grade 4 after the summer vacation, went to his family’s plot of land to pick eggplants and cucumbers the day he was killed. There was shooting early in the morning on that Friday, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported, which prompted Abdul-Samad and his brother Mohammed to run to the fields and see what was happening. The boys also wanted to pick several kilos of vegetables and bring them in the cart to their father, so he could sell them in the market, the paper added.

Rumors had reached the city that an Israeli bulldozer had begun to destroy and clear out the farm plots in the area.

Just after 9 am, about half an hour after the children left the house, word reached the parents that Mohammed was wounded. Then they were told that it was Abdul-Samad and that he had been rushed to the hospital. The parents found his dead body at the hospital with a bullet in his head.

According to figures compiled by the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, 450 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli forces during the Intifada. These figures do not include those who mounted offensives against Israeli army positions or settlements and were killed during these attacks. The numbers do include armed Palestinian civilians or security personnel who responded to Israeli attacks against residential neighborhoods in the Gaza Strip, said Haartez. According to these strict criteria, 1,398 people were killed by the Israeli forces fire in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the Intifada as of June 18. (Since then, 8 more were killed in Gaza and at least 15 in the West Bank.)

Of these 1,398 fatalities, 253 were children. This does not include Shamalekh, a 17-year old from Rafah, seven children killed by Israeli fire during the past 10 days in the West Bank, and another child who died when his house collapsed after the forces destroyed an adjacent home, Haaretz reported.

Among the Palestinian dead are 77 women, including 18 in the Gaza Strip.

The proportion of children among those killed in Gaza is much higher than in the West Bank - 26 percent of the fatalities in Gaza were children, compared to 15 percent in the West Bank, the paper added.

The Palestinian Center for Human Rights attributes this to the higher population density in the Gaza Strip, to the fact that children make up over 50 percent of this crowded region, and to the close proximity of Israeli army bases to Palestinian communities, according to Ha’aretz.

But the Center's analysts believe that the high number of child victims primarily indicates that Israeli forces have often fired at civilians and residential areas without using the means at their disposal to confirm that their fire is indeed directed precisely "at the sources of [Palestinian] fire."