In the early days of 2024, media platforms circulated the story of an Israeli officer who had kidnapped a baby girl from Gaza after her entire family was murdered. The officer took the baby to Israel only for him to be killed in combat. One tweet said that officer Harel Itach had kidnapped the child and brought her to Israel. The child’s identity and whereabouts were not known. A friend of the Israeli officer spoke about the kidnapping incident after the announcement that the officer had been killed as a result of his injuries during clashes in Gaza on December 22.

Following the spread of this news, the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor issued a statement calling on Israel to hand over Palestinian children who were abducted by the Israeli army and forcibly transferred out of the Gaza Strip during the war that has been ongoing since 7 October.

Meanwhile, there are also widespread reports of Palestinian families who have lost contact with their children. This is particularly the case in areas where Israeli ground incursions have taken place. Hundreds of Palestinian families have reported the loss of their boys and girls whose fate was difficult to verify due to the ongoing Israeli incursion in Gaza.

In parallel, with reports of more than 7,000 Palestinians missing, the difficulty of removing rubble, the lack of communication and internet in most of the Gaza Strip,and the dispersion of families due to forced displacement, social media pages began to circulate calls to adopt children from Gaza abroad as a means of salvation.

Is the case of the baby girl an isolated incident perpetrated by an unruly element, or is it an approach adopted in the context of trafficking children for illegal adoption as an additional means of warfare against children and their families in Gaza? Furthermore, the following questions need to be asked: How did the Israeli officer get the child from Gaza to Israel? Was it done in secret or was it done with the knowledge of other members of the Israeli army? Who was the child with at the time of the abduction? Is there any proof of their identity? Who is the child’s current place of residence? Did she have any injuries at the time of her abduction and what was the fate of her family? Has she received necessary medical care? What will happen to this baby? Will she be reunited with those who have remained in the Gaza Strip? If so, by what means? Who is authorized to do so?

The Crime of Illegal Adoption

International studies and UN reports indicate that the phenomenon of child trafficking for illegal adoption spreads during wars. In this context, during the years of war in Lebanon, there were cases of the disappearance of children who were later found to have been illegally adopted internationally.

Research work carried out by Badael between 2014 and 2019 showed that the chaos and wars that Lebanon experienced led to the disappearance of many children in illegal circumstances, and it was later revealed that they were victims of child trafficking for the purpose of international adoption. This is confirmed by the testimonies of those adopted who returned to try to find out where they came from. These testimonies confirm the involvement of armed parties in the processing of trafficking activities, either directly, by facilitating or by turning a blind eye in exchange for a financial contribution, leading to the issuing of false birth certificates and passports. These testimonies, in addition to the photographs in the possession of Badael, document the involvement of local parties and armies that have launched wars in Lebanon.

Amal (a pseudonym) says that it was when her father was about to die that she found out about the fact that she had been adopted from Lebanon in Syria. She was taken from Lebanon to Damascus in Syria when she was a newborn baby. Sometime in February 1976, she received a Syrian birth certificate.

Amal tried hard to find out about her origins and the circumstances that led to her adoption after her father’s funeral. She later discovered that in the winter of 1976, she was taken across the border to a hospital in Damascus with about twenty boys and girls from Lebanon, protected by Lebanese and Syrian fighters. A few days later, families were discharged from the Damascus hospital, each with one child.

The study conducted by Badael also indicates that during the occupation of Lebanon, the Israeli army and its collaborators facilitated the movement of children across the southern border for the purpose of trafficking. There is also similar evidence of the disappearance of children for adoption in the aftermath of the Tal al-Zaatar massacre in Lebanon.

Israeli Discretion

Back to the case of the baby girl, it must be emphasized that this is not the first time that Israel has been accused of sending Palestinian children to European countries for adoption: this has been uncovered in the 1970s and perhaps keeps on happening up to the present. This practice occurred despite the fact that this sort of international adoption process contravenes the Israeli Adoption Law, amended in 1981, which prohibits sending children for adoption outside the country and requires that they be adopted by a family of the same religion and nationality.

In 2019, the Arab representative in the Knesset, Ahmed Tibi, submitted an interrogation regarding the adoption practices, and the Israeli government admitted that dozens of Palestinian children were sent to European countries, especially Sweden and the Netherlands, to be adopted. However, the Israeli government concealed the mechanisms, the means,and the motives for sending Palestinian children to Europe and refused to reveal the real numbers, the processes used, and the compensation that it received.

At the beginning of the 19th century, separating children from their families and communities through placement in residential schools and then through adoption was practiced by the colonizers as a tool of war to eliminate the Indigenous Peoples in Canada. The baby girl incident may have been a continuation of the colonizer’s war against the indigenous people of Palestine.