By Joel Margolis, JNS
No one knows how many tens of thousands of children the terror group has militarized during its radical reign. What is clear is that the applicable international authorities have failed to protect them.
The military goal of U.S. President Donald Trump’s 20-point Gaza ceasefire plan is to disarm Hamas and demilitarize Gaza. So far, however, Hamas has taken the opportunity to refurbish its battered military machine. The terrorist organization is reportedly conscripting more soldiers, despite their lack of fitness to serve. Apparently, the recruiters are dipping deeper into Gaza’s vast population of youths.
For decades, Hamas has operated military training camps where boys ages 10 to 17 learn to haul explosives, shoot weapons and even kidnap Israelis. During the Gaza war, Hamas’s armed forces have absorbed around 30,000 children. Hamas defends the abhorrent practice as a valid form of “resistance.”
The juvenile combatants offer three military advantages. They increase Hamas’s firepower, constrain Israel’s freedom to return fire and create a false pretext to blame Israel if they get killed.
International law requires combatants such as Hamas to protect children from the dangers of direct or indirect roles in armed conflicts. Recruiting children under 15 to engage in such hostilities is a war crime, according to the Geneva Convention and the Rome Statute. Recruiting children under 18 is a “grave violation” of the Convention on the Rights of the Child and customary international law, standards that apply in both peacetime and war. The more Hamas accumulates child soldiers to replenish its depleted troop strength, the more it compounds the illegality.
Prosecuting Hamas for recruiting underage fighters would be relatively easy. Evidence of the atrocity is plentiful in Hamas’s own documents, and the whereabouts of the culpable parties are well known. All five of Hamas’s top commanders live as guests of the government of Qatar.
If the International Criminal Court in The Hague issued arrest warrants for these five, the United States could pressure Qatar to extradite them for trial. The ICC has already convicted other warlords for the same crime.
Last year, the court issued arrest warrants for two Gaza-based Hamas leaders who subsequently died in battle. The warrants listed various war crimes but unaccountably ignored Hamas’s weaponization of children.
The United Nations takes a similarly indifferent approach to Hamas’s child exploitation. The agency that investigates breaches of the international child protection laws is the U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF), which publishes findings of deficiencies in periodic “bulletins,” one for each of several suspect countries. The bulletins pursue paths of “engagement” (U.N. resolutions, “action plans,” “field visits” and/or “recommendations”) to coax violators into compliance.
In the case of Hamas, UNICEF’s engagement is barely visible. Certain UNICEF bulletins covering the “State of Palestine” between 2010 and today mentioned incidents where Hamas enlisted individual children, and a few of those bulletins voiced “concern” about the wrongdoing. UNICEF’s third-quarter 2015 bulletin went further, observing that one Hamas military training camp held more than 25,000 males aged 15 to 21. However, the finding produced no attempt at engagement, despite the widespread and systemic nature of the offense.
UNICEF bulletins provide the evidentiary support for a higher-level U.N. document called the Secretary-General’s Annual Report on Children and Armed Conflict. The discovery of Hamas’s massive training camp violation in 2015 should have prompted repudiation in the Secretary-General’s annual report of 2016. However, the 2016 report didn’t even raise the issue.
In its annual report of 2024, the Secretary-General properly “blacklisted” Hamas for killing Israeli children in the Oct. 7 invasion. In addition, the report finally acknowledged the existence of the military training camps.
The authors specifically recognized that the malevolent gatherings “exposed” children to “military content and activities.” Astonishingly, they didn’t call for the camps to be closed.
No one knows how many tens of thousands of children Hamas has militarized during its radical reign. What is clear is that the applicable international authorities have failed to protect them. The best hope for the young victims is for rule-of-law nations like the United States to penalize Hamas-supporting regimes like Qatar. The sanctions could impose financial restrictions, trade embargoes, suspensions from political organizations and/or travel bans. Maybe then the terrorists would stop turning kids into cannon fodder.
