Terror Strikes on Children

Anna Geifman
Solomonia
08 April '11

"There is a “Qassam generation”–kids who over the last eight years have been growing under the rockets, terrorism being the hallmark of their daily life. A Sderot child is aware of the location of every bomb shelter on his way to a local store; some prefer to walk forty minutes to school every morning instead of ten because the circuitous route has better protection; others argue that the safest way is to run all the way."

Terrorism today is not what it was a century ago—or ever. Its patterns changed—from assassinations aimed to punish specific targets to what perpetrators called “motiveless terror” against civilians. Presently, unnoticed by most, they focus on the creation of “fear zones.” They do so by intentionally targeting children.

In a cross-border raid from Lebanon on May 15, 1974 gunmen from the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), affiliated with the PLO, took 102 students and their teachers hostage in the northern Israeli town of Ma’alot, which the children from Safed visited during a school trip. Some managed to escape by jumping out the windows, but when the IDF special unit assaulted the building, the terrorists detonated hand grenades and sprayed the 14-16-year olds with machine-gun fire, killing 21 and wounding 66. On June 1, 2001 an Arab suicide bomber blasted himself and yet another 21 Israeli teenagers in the “Delphinarium” disco in Tel Aviv. In 2002 the Chechen terrorists have chosen the Moscow Dubrovka theater as their site during the “Nord-Ost” musical based on the novel The Two Captains by Veniamin Kaverin, a favorite travel adventure story for the young audience.

On September 1, 2004, amid the “Day of Knowledge” festivities, at least 32 heavily-armed, masked terrorists held hostage 1,200 children, their relatives, and their teachers inside School No. 1 in the town of Beslan, North Ossetia, in the former USSR. This terrorist act yielded at least 334 dead, among them 186 children; over 700 were wounded. Violence against children soared to a new level.

(Read full "Terror Strikes on Children")

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