October 1 has been recognized as the day of solidarity and sympathy with Palestinian Children in Iranian calendar.
The recognition was to commemorate Muhammad al-Durrah, the 12-year-old Palestinian child who lived in Bureij, near Gaza, and was killed by direct shooting in 2000 while sheltering beside his father from Israeli gunfire.
Mohammad was a fifth-grader working with his father who was a carpenter in Gaza. They were walking to shopping when they were caught in crossfire between the Zionist regime armed forces and Palestinians.
The father and the son took shelter behind a block, but the father, Jamal, couldn’t convince Israeli troops to give them opportunity to go out of the scene. The Israeli forces, instead, responded the father’s cries with a bullet in his son’s body.
Mohammad was born to a family descended from a Ramla family exiled by the Zionist regime from their ancestral lands.
His blood is still a symbol of intifada after 22 years and Palestinians and their friend nations commemorate Mohammad’s murder every year.
The second intifada was instigated by the then Zionist Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s desecration and continued for five years until a ceasefire was reached in Sharm El-Sheikh.
As many as 4,412 Palestinians were killed during this intifada and over 50,000 were injured. Al-Durrah’s footage was filmed by Talal Abu Rahma, a Palestinian television cameraman freelancing for France 2, and was widely spread throughout the world.
The disproportion of population, especially the population of children and young people, between Palestinian and Zionist communities has always been a source of great concern for the Zionist regime. Therefore, the Zionist regime has been planning to reduce the population of Palestine and increase that of the occupied lands.
Killing, arresting and prisoning Palestinian children has always been an undeclared program of the Zionist regime to reduce the Palestinian population.
However, Palestinian authorities have been aware of the plot and have tried to keep the population advantage. So that the population of Palestinians has grown more in comparison to the population of the occupied lands.
The under-18 population of Palestine was 2,350,000 people in 2022, which accounts for 43.9 percent of total Palestinian population.
From 2000 until the end of 2021, about 3,000 Palestinian children have been killed and tens of thousands have been injured.
Still, 160 Palestinian children are in captivity in the prisons of the Zionist regime, which is in contrast with any international law and conventions on children’s rights.
Palestine’s information ministry has announced that 700 to 1,000 Palestinian children are arrested on a yearly basis, but the number has increased to 2,000 in 2016.
Even there are Palestinian infants in the prisons of the Zionist regime and have to remain there because their mothers are in jail.