Palestinian Authority encourages children to weaponize toys yet enraged when fighting Palestinian child soldiers
The Palestinian Authority complains about having to fight Palestinian child soldiers in its effort to retain power from armed gangs, but it encourages Palestinian children to become terrorists at the very same time.
At an event celebrating the 60th anniversary of Fatah's first terror attack, the PA's ruling party had a girl chant a poem hailing the children of Gaza for being true fighters and calling for them to teach others how to become terrorists. Specifically, the girl called for children to turn their seemingly innocent toys and possessions, such as bicycles, ribbons, and baby bottles, into weapons in the fight against Israel.
Girl: "Students of the Gaza Strip, teach us a bit of what you know, for we have forgotten. Teach us how to be men, for we have men who have turned into dough. Teach us how the stone becomes a precious diamond in the hands of the children. How the child's bicycle turns into a mine and the silk ribbon turns into an ambush. How the spout of the baby bottle, when placed under arrest, turns into a knife."
[Official PA TV, Jan. 5, 2025]
The way the PA has indoctrinated children to commit terror has come back to haunt it. In its fight to take back control from armed gangs and terrorists in PA cities, it is furious at having to face Palestinian children fighters who are being used by the gangs. The spokesman for the PA Security Forces expressed appall in the PA's official daily about how "criminals used children for surveillance, for moving ammunition from place to place, and for throwing locally-made pipe bombs at Security Forces personnel." Ironically, this was in the same week that PA TV encouraged children to turn "the spout of the baby bottle…into a knife."
It must be stressed that the PA's fighting against armed gangs for a few weeks did not mean that it was fighting terror. It was fighting for internal control. In the same way, the PA's criticism of the use of child soldiers by gangs means more about its desire to maintain power than it does about its care for children.