Al Jazeera English's Fault Lines Investigates Israeli Military Shootings of Children in Gaza
Al Jazeera English's award-winning documentary programme, Fault Lines, releases a harrowing investigation on 27 March 2025 called Kids Under Fire. It documents the systematic shooting of children in Gaza by Israeli forces.
Since Israel's war on Gaza began in October 2023, foreign journalists have been barred from independent access. However, only doctors have been granted repeated entry.
Over several months, Fault Lines spoke with 20 American physicians who volunteered in Gaza's hospitals. They describe an unmistakable pattern—children arriving at emergency rooms with gunshot wounds, often to the head and chest. Many of them did not survive.
Kids Under Fire provides overwhelming evidence of different cases of children being intentionally shot. Physicians who served at different hospitals, at different times, recount treating dozens of children with nearly identical injuries.
The documentary also explores how the U.S. is complicit in this violence. Doctors who witnessed these killings firsthand say that when they met with American lawmakers, they were met with indifference—if not outright skepticism.
Under the Leahy Law, U.S. military aid is prohibited from reaching foreign military units accused of human rights violations. Former State Department official Charles Blaha, who oversaw human rights vetting, admits in the film that he signed off on a process that never once held Israel accountable.
Tim Rieser, a senior foreign policy advisor who helped draft the Leahy Law, says: 'There's probably not a unit in the Israeli army that either hasn't been trained and or received equipment from the United States. But It is the only country that we are aware of that the law has been so consistently not applied to.'
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