‘Missing’ Palestinian girl spotlights Israel’s record of child abduction

Social media is abuzz over the fate of Doha Talat, an eight-year-old Palestinian girl who apparently went missing in Gaza’s Rafah after coming into contact with Israeli soldiers in July.

The girl first appeared in a photo shared by one Ido Zahar, a soldier from Israel's 432nd Tzabar Battalion, according to Younis Tirawi, a Palestinian journalist who reported on the details of the incident.

Shortly after, the Israeli soldier deleted the post and deactivated his Instagram account.

When Tirawi contacted the soldier for an interview request, he was met with a stark response: “No story. No face. No nothing. Please delete this completely from everywhere.”

Doha’s whereabouts have been unknown since.

However, this is not the first time Israeli forces have been accused of child abductions.

Repeat ‘offenders’

In January, a few months after Israel launched its genocidal war on Gaza, an Israeli officer admitted on a radio broadcast that an army captain had taken a Palestinian baby from Gaza to an unidentified place in Israel.

Israel did not respond publicly to any of the allegations of kidnapping, and the Army Radio clip was deleted after it spread online.

The incident in January sparked widespread outrage on social media at the time, with many drawing parallels to Israel’s troubling history of abductions, notably the infamous “Yemenite Children Affair”.

Dark past of abductions

During Israel’s formative years in the 1950s, hundreds of newborns and children of Jewish immigrants to Israel, mostly from Yemen as well as other Arab and Balkan countries, disappeared from hospitals shortly after being born. The mystery has been dubbed the “Yemenite Children Affair.”

The children who were allegedly kidnapped belonged to Mizrahi communities — Jews from the Middle East who were regarded as uneducated, poor and more religious by the European (Ashkenazi) Jews who sought to mould them to fit into their vision of a modern Israel, according to critics.

The families allege that Israeli authorities abducted their babies and illegally put them up for adoption or sold them to childless European Jews, both in Israel and abroad.

Although there are over 1,000 officially documented cases, the number of those who went missing could reach as high as 4,500, according to some estimates.

In December 2016, over 200,000 documents containing the personal files of the missing children were released from the State Archives.

Despite pleas by the victims’ families for an investigation, the claims were denied by Israel for decades — until 2016, when Benjamin Netanyahu’s government acknowledged the non-consensual seizure of “hundreds” of children from their families. Nonetheless, an official apology by the Israeli government is pending.

Some victims managed to reconnect with their families through genealogy databases that traced them back to parents who had submitted their DNA in hopes of a reunion.

However, the fate of others who were declared to have died remains a lingering mystery for their parents.

AMRAM, an Israeli non-profit organisation that has catalogued testimonies from victims’ families, says on its website: “That is exactly the question the State of Israel should answer. These children’s parents were told they died without being shown a body or a grave.”

Missing children in Gaza

On January 2, Euro-Med released a report collecting testimonies from Palestinian families whose children went missing since October 7, from areas where Israeli ground incursions took place at the time.

“While most of the missing are thought to have perished beneath the debris of houses hit by Israeli airstrikes, some are believed to be lost on the streets, or have vanished from neighbourhoods where Israeli army ground incursions took place,” the Geneva-based human rights monitor wrote.

In one of the testimonies to Euro-Med, Rushdi al Zhaza, who had been released from Israeli custody, recounted that his wife and two children went missing after being detained a month ago from their home in Gaza City's Zaytoun neighbourhood.

Al Zhaza stated the soldiers forcibly snatched the children from their mother, tied her up when she protested, removed her headscarf, and abducted her and the children.

Weeks later, Al Zhaza was released without any information on his family's whereabouts or condition.

At least 17,000 children are estimated to be unaccompanied or separated from their parents in Gaza, according to the latest data provided by the United Nations.

An unknown number of Palestinian women and children, including girls, have reportedly gone missing after contact with the Israeli army in Gaza, according to a UN report released on February 19.

“There are disturbing reports of at least one female infant forcibly transferred by the Israeli army into Israel, and of children being separated from their parents, whose whereabouts remain unknown,” the report cited the experts as saying.

The act of “forcibly transferring children of the group to another group” is considered a form of genocide according to The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948.

The unlawful deportation or transfer of children is also classified as a war crime under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court and constitutes a grave violation of the Geneva Conventions.

Israel, as a signatory to both the Genocide Convention and the Geneva Conventions, is bound by these international legal frameworks.