Terror Groups in Gaza Keep Confirming Their Own Child Soldiers
New disclosures identify minors as young as 12 in the ranks of Gaza terror groups, reinforcing years of evidence that Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad recruit, train, and use children
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Open-source researchers Salo Aizenberg and Gabriel Epstein have spent recent months mining Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s own martyrdom notices and casualty lists — and identifying Palestinian minors the terror groups themselves have claimed as fighters, including children as young as 12.
Salo Aizenberg, who sits on the board of HonestReporting and has written on Gaza casualty data for NGO Monitor and UN Watch, has documented dozens of such cases in recent months. Among them: Khalil Al-Dhaifi, a 12-year-old whom Hamas’s own casualty list and family photos tie to a fighter, killed in Gaza’s Al-Shati area on September 26, 2025; and Hamza Al-Kurd, initially reported as a child killed by the IDF at a petroleum station in Deir al-Balah on July 12, 2025, whom Aizenberg’s subsequent findings identify as a combatant.
Epstein, a senior policy associate at the Israel Policy Forum, has focused on PIJ’s own serial releases of the names of its dead commanders — releases that have turned up fighters moonlighting as nurses, journalists, and lawyers. Among his findings: Saleh Atef Al-Zamili, listed by PIJ as a 16-year-old member of a rocket unit in its Rafah Brigade, killed alongside his brothers Nael and Muhammad in an October 2023 strike on their family’s home east of Rafah — a strike the independent monitor Airwars still classifies as civilian harm.
Such after-the-fact admissions are not new. Palestinian Islamic Jihad and its military wing publicly commemorated Ahmad Adel Mousa al-Shaer as one of three of the movement’s “mujahideen” killed on May 14, 2018, during the Great March of Return protests along the Gaza border.
UN Reports Document a Pattern
UN Secretary-General reports have tracked a version of this pattern for years. The Secretary-General’s 2020 report, covering 2019, stated that Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s al-Quds Brigades and Hamas’s al-Qassam Brigades organized weeklong camps for adults and children as young as 14, exposing participants to military content and activities. A later report covering 2023 documented similar camps involving children.
Separate Secretary-General reports have verified actual recruitment: three 17-year-old boys in 2018, one case attributed to PIJ’s al-Quds Brigades and one to Hamas’s al-Qassam Brigades, and two boys recruited by the al-Qassam Brigades during 2020.
The nonbinding Paris Principles, a set of UN child-protection guidelines rather than a legal standard, define a “child associated with an armed force or armed group” broadly — anyone under 18 recruited or used in any capacity, not only in direct combat but also as a messenger, porter, or in a support role.
Terror Groups Defend Use of Child Soldiers
At a 2021 press conference launching its “Vanguard of Liberation” camps, a Hamas spokesperson defended the group’s use of children at its military summer camps, saying “the youth have a significant role” and citing international law’s guarantee of self-defense.
A 2021 Palestinian Islamic Jihad recruitment poster advertised its own camps to teenagers between the ages of 14 and 17. FDD’s Long War Journal reported that photographs from the camps appeared to show some younger children participating as well, including in an exercise simulating the abduction of an Israeli soldier — though the younger participants’ ages were not independently verified.
The Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, drawing on material published by Hamas’s own camp organizers, reported that Hamas’s 2018 “Pioneers of the Liberation” camps operated at several al-Qassam Brigades facilities across Gaza. Documented activities included weapons drills, theoretical instruction, and exercises the center described as “tests of courage,” including passing through fire. Photographs showed some apparently young children in uniform bearing the al-Qassam Brigades insignia, though their exact ages were not established.
A Generation at Risk
The systematic exposure of children to military training, radical ideology, and armed-group culture represents what child protection experts describe as a form of exploitation. These children face trauma, loss of educational opportunities, risk of death or injury, and stigmatization. As the UN handbook emphasizes, the consequences can be devastating: “violence places at risk not only their health, but also their ability to learn and grow into adults who can create sound families and communities.”
Any child young enough to be killed by the IDF is old enough to fight back. (See the recent UN report on the IDF targeting civilian children).
Golda Meir said there will be peace when the Arabs love their children more than they hate us.