not evidence of snipers
A myth from the Gaza war gets repeated so often it's worth addressing in a post. The claim that IDF snipers routinely targeted children in the Gaza war is not plausible. The available evidence does not support this claim. It spreads because people don't understand the reality of precision shooting and combat.
Several foreign doctors have claimed that wound patterns were evidence of snipers. For instance, they said to reporters that children with gunshot wounds to the head or testicles showed they were targeted by snipers. They also claimed being hit multiple times in the same part of the body was evidence of snipers.
Expertise in medicine is not expertise in shooting or forensic investigation. These doctors are misinterpreting wound patterns. They may be spreading misinformation on purpose or may just not understand how wounds correspond with events on the battlefield.
There's also the issue of ideologically motivated reasoning. Look into who the doctors who said these things are, there's social media for a lot of them online that shows their extremist political biases, which is a factor worth considering.
Being a fascist city-state, Gaza tightly controls information and uses information warfare to spin up the easily suckered and overly gullible. Doctors operating in Gaza are there only as long as Hamas allows them to be.
If IDF snipers were routinely hitting children in the head or testicles, that would mean IDF has the most accurate sniper corps in the history of shooting. Is Annie Oakley even a Jewish name?
Snipers aim for center of mass because hitting heads at combat distances is incredibly difficult. Head shots might be used in very specific situations like if a target in body armor has a bomb vest or something, but you are very likely to miss multiple times.
Snipers operating in warzones know headshots would waste a lot of ammo on missing and would not do that while on missions. That'd be extremely dangerous.
US sniper training sometimes includes an exercise where they paint chickens different colors. A sniper has to hit his or her assigned chicken. Chickens are about the side of an adult head and move erratically like heads. The point of the exercise is to show foolish headshots are. You will miss. There's a reason we hunt birds with shotguns rather than rifles.
In the many, many times we've discussed this issue on this sub, someone will say something about the knee shooting at the right to return protests. IDF snipers engaged people throwing molotov cocktails and bricks by aiming for their lower legs rather than center of mass in order to stop them without killing them. What people don't understand is this was at very short ranges, and that movements of legs are actually quite predictable compared to heads. Watch how people move sometime. I is possible to consistently hit within 2 inches of the knee at 25 yards with a scoped rifle. Not easy, but not a trained sniper with a good rifle and glass could do that more often than not.
Hitting heads- let alone children's heads- in combat at ranges of 100 to 400 yards, yeah, that's a real different situation. Head bob around all over the place. In combat, there are a limited number of sniper rifles with a limited amount of ammo. If you waste ammo, you won't be on the long gun too long. Stunts get dudes killed.
Children with gunshot wounds to the head are much more likely to have been hiding behind cover during a firefight and poked their heads up. Hundreds and thousands of rounds from both IDF and Hamas flying around. And kids stick their heads up.
Multiple rifle rounds to the same body part are far more likely to be from automatic weapons fire. Think about it. If a person were hit by a sniper round, they would fall down faster than a sniper could take another shot. I would suspect wound patterns like this indicate heavy machinegun fire, perhaps at distance, spraying bullets across a horizontal plane at a high rate of fire.
There are aspects of combat people need to be real about. In combat, nobody's checking IDs to make sure everyone is an adult. You see shapes and shadows moving. Total chaos.
In most warzones, children are evacuated or sent to bomb shelters. This is the responsible thing for adults who care about their children to do. Hamas routinely uses minors in combat roles. And famously doesn't allow civilians in the largest bomb shelter in the world they built for themselves.
Left to their own devices, children will run around combat zones to see the action and collect souvenirs. In Japan in WWII, packs of feral kids would chase American planes to see how close they could get and even waved at pilots during firebombing missions. It is up to adults to prevent them from doing that because it's extremely hazardous.
The deaths of children in Gaza by gunshots, while tragic, is not evidence of being targeted by snipers. There is also no evidence which side fired the rounds that hit them. Enemy gets a say in a gunfight too.