Evidence

This claim originates directly from an AFP wire report titled "Killing of Palestinian children and teens by Israel surges in West Bank," which was republished by numerous outlets including France24, Arab News, Al-Monitor, The Express Tribune, and Middle East Eye. The article explicitly attributes the figure of 235 children and teenagers killed by Israeli forces and settlers in the West Bank since 7 October 2023 (through June of the following year) to B'Tselem, an established Israeli human rights organization that has tracked Palestinian casualties for decades, and notes that five of these deaths were attributed specifically to settlers. The report also references a seven-month-old infant, Sam Fahd Abou Haikal, whose death and grieving grandmother are described in the AFP piece. Separately, the Palestinian Authority's Colonisation and Wall Resistance Commission reported a higher figure of 250 deaths for the same period, indicating some variance between monitoring bodies but general agreement on the scale and trend. Earlier UNICEF and UN OCHA reporting from 2024 corroborates the broader trend of a sharp rise in child casualties in the West Bank since October 2023, though with different (earlier, lower) cumulative counts consistent with the ongoing nature of the conflict.