NABLUS, January 15 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) – Mohamed Al-Madhoun is a 16-year-old Palestinian boy living in the Al-Sheikh Radwan district, Gaza City. Al-Madhoun decided along with other two friends of the same age to infiltrate into the illegal Jewish settlement of Dugit.

Backed with just knives, the three young would-be resistance activists were arrested by Israeli occupation forces earlier last month.

The three boys were tortured and their bodies were deformed beyond recognition only to be killed in cold blood. To cover up for their crimes, the Israeli occupation forces handed over the bodies to their families after four days.

But the death toll of other unarmed Palestinians younger than 18 killed by Israeli soldiers in 2002 raised up to 115, an increase of more than 50 percent from the previous year.

The toll underlines the Israeli army’s failure to quell riots without killing civilians, particularly minors.

Most of the youngsters killed in 2002 were stone-throwers or bystanders hit by Israeli army fire, the Washington Times said Wednesday, January 15.

The Palestinian fighters, who target Israeli civilians, killed 36 Israeli minors in bombings and shootings last year, claimed the American agency.

Saying its soldiers operate in a hostile environment under threat from Palestinian militias, the Israeli government contends that gunmen often take cover behind civilians, and that children and teens are sent to the front lines by adults trying to win the world’s sympathy by provoking casualties among the young.

But these claims were rubbished earlier in the day by both Palestinian President Yasser Arafat’s Fatah group and the Islamic resistance movement Hamas.

In exclusive statements to IslamOnline, Abdel Aziz Al-Rantissi, a Hamas politburo member, said that Palestinian children who attempted to attack Jewish settlements were armed with nothing but knives.

“And it is not logical that Hamas wants to see those children slain for the fun of it.”

The Hamas official added that the Israeli occupation forces want to justify their killing of the Palestinian children in cold blood, noting that the death toll of Palestinian children since the start of Al-Aqsa Intifada, which entered its third year, had risen to up to 600 children.

“We are fully aware of your noble goals and that you are determined to avenge your colleagues who had been brutally slain at the hands of the Israeli troops,” Rantissi passionately told Palestinian children.

Last week, Hamas issued a statement in which it lashed out at the phenomenon of younger martyrs as a “national catastrophe”, calling on all of mosque Imams and school teachers to handle the problem and raise the awareness of the children without harming the “jihad spirits of this younger generation”.

In the Gaza Strip, the number of Palestinian children killed in the Israeli operations since the beginning of the intifada hit 196, out of the total number of deaths for the period that are estimated by the Palestinian human rights group Al-Mizan Center at 726 martyrs.

The Fatah Organization slammed the demands to allow the children to carry out martyrdom operations.

“To use the children in Palestinian martyrdom operations against Israel smacks of ridiculing with their fates to the advantage of narrow-minded interests” said a statement of the Fatah group last week.

Fatah lashed out at this phenomenon as harming “the Palestinian people’s image and shows a coarse blackmail of the innocence of children.”

However, Israeli human rights activists say Israeli soldiers often receive vague open-fire orders and are not punished if they overreact.

“There is no culture of deliberately shooting children. There is a culture of impunity,” the Washington Times quoted Lior Yavneh of the human rights group B’tselem.

Palestinians charge that the Israeli army does nothing to prevent killings of civilians because it wants to instill fear among Palestinians.

“The rate of Palestinian children killed at the hands of Israeli soldiers is alarming and requires immediate international intervention,” said Saeb Erakat, a Cabinet minister in the Palestinian Authority.

On the Palestinian side, 2,014 persons have died and on the Israeli side, 713 since September 2000.