If it true, there are a few possible explanations. Unfortunately, one of them is the possibility that the children, as Muslim extremists are known to do, are using children as suicide bombers. The IDF is in an impossible situation because literally any person or any vehicle can be a threat to detonate. IDF shot and killed three of their own who were only looking for help because they have no idea if the people running toward them are suicide bombers.
Unfortunately, children have been used as a tool for decades. Below is an excerpt from a NY Times article regarding the Iran-Iraq War. It'll make you sick to your stomach.
Terence Smith, a former foreign correspondent and chief White House correspondent for The New York Times, is editor of the Washington
Talk page. By Terence Smith
HEIR TICKET TO PARADISE IS the blood-red headband and the small metal key that they wear into battle. ''Sar Allah,'' (''Warriors of God''), some of the headbands read in Farsi script, identifying the wearers as divinely designated martyrs who will use their keys to go directly to heaven if killed in the holy war against Iraq declared by their leader, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomei ni. The headbands and the keys are worn by young boys, aged 12 to 17, who are recruited by local clergy or simply rounded up in the villages of Iran, given an intensive indoctrination in the Shiite tradition of martyrdom, and then sent weaponless into battle against Iraqi armor. Often bound together in groups of 20 by ropes to prevent the fainthearted from deserting, they hurl themselves on barbed wire or march into Iraqi mine fields in the face of withering machine-gun fire to clear the way for Iranian tanks. Across the back of their khaki-colored shirts is stenciled the slogan: ''I have the special permission of the Imam to enter heaven.''
In dozens of interviews conducted by this reporter in recent weeks with Iranian exiles, academics and government and intelligence officials in the United States and Europe, the blind faith of these teen-age martyrs was frequently cited as symbolic of the fanaticism that is part of life today in the Islamic Republic of Iran. An East European journalist who witnessed one of these human-wave assaults, in which tens of thousands of young Iranians have gone willingly to their deaths, could hardly believe what he was seeing, as first one boy, and then another, detonated a mine and was hurled into the air by the explosion. ''We have so few tanks,'' an Iranian officer explained to the journalist, without apology.
www.nytimes.com
www.jpost.com
