Please note: The following excerpt is drawn from my forthcoming book, The Elephant in the Middle East: The Spiritual Battle Christians Often Miss Behind the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. Complete sources, citations, and references are documented within the book itself.

No child is born a hater; no baby longs to kill. It is only through years of indoctrination in hatred that innocent hearts are twisted into instruments of violence. Let’s return to the interview I began this book with — notice carefully how Dr. Sam Harris explains things to Piers Morgan:

What I am going to say should be obvious to everyone which is that we have a vast number of people in the Muslim Community worldwide, not just in the occupied territories or in Gaza, who are powerfully deranged by religious symbols and their religious identity, which is to say it is the most important thing to them, more important even than the deaths of their own children. We’re talking about a culture — and I’m not talking about just Palestinians, I’m talking about the Muslim community worldwide in dozens of countries — that has produced a seemingly unending supply of suicide bombers over the last 50 years. We’re talking about societies where phenomena that should be impossible are simply expected – literally rigging children to explode. Think of how deranging that is for an army, a police force, an NGO, or anyone to have to imagine that a child isn’t simply a child but a child might, in fact, under certain circumstances be a bomb. I mean, that is the situation we’re in. We’re talking about a society — and now I am talking about Gaza and the West Bank in particular — where in their schools they teach six-year-olds the love of martyrdom. The literal aspiration to die as a martyr and the hatred of Jews.

(Sam Harris on Piers Morgan Uncensored)

Like many other Islamic military forces, Hamas has long exploited the use of child soldiers in its fight against Israel, seeing them as both expendable and strategically useful. On the one hand, they provide cheap and available manpower. On the other hand, their deaths serve as powerful propaganda tools. When fighters under the age of 18 are killed in combat, the Palestinian Ministry of Health — which is effectively controlled by Hamas — reports them simply as “children” who were killed by Israel Defence Forces (IDF), with no mention of their military involvement. International media outlets then amplify these reports, painting a one-sided image of Israeli “aggression” against “innocent” minors.

The most radicalized population on the planet are young people in Gaza. From the time they are born to the time they die, they are taught to hate and kill the Jews.

(Sen. Lindsey Graham)

But the tragic reality is more complex. These kids are not only youth and teenagers recruited, radicalized, and trained by Hamas to serve as combatants, but many are also sent — often with no choice — by their own parents.

According to a TV interview with Palestinian scholar Mahmoud al-Shajrawi, Palestinian mothers have “five, six, 10 and even 15 children,” and are willing to “sacrifice one, two or three as martyrs.” This, he said, would be considered zakat (mandatory Islamic charity) paid by the family for the sake of “teaching the Zionist enemy a lesson.” In other words, Islam practices modern-day child sacrifice.

In an interview on Hamas’s Al-Aqsa TV channel, Umm Osama, wife of Hamas MP Khalil Al-Hayya, said that she, her husband and her children all prayed that Allah would grant them martyrdom: “Women in Palestine play a great role in raising their children and in encouraging them to wage Jihad for the sake of Allah.” The mother “instills in her children the love of Jihad and martyrdom for the sake of Allah,” she went on. She added: “I am constantly praying: ‘Allah, make the end of our days be in martyrdom.’ I pray for this even for my husband and my children. None of us want to die in our beds. We pray that Allah will grant us Paradise….Palestine is Islamic, and not an Islamic emirate, from the river to the sea, that unites the Palestinians. Jews have no right in it.”

This cynical strategy reveals not only the brutal sophistication of Islamic jihadist methods but also the deep moral corruption of Islamic theology that allows it to sacrifice its own children for political and ideological gain.

Analyses of Palestinian Authority (PA) school textbooks reveal deeply troubling patterns of antisemitism, incitement, and historical revisionism. A 2021 report by the EU-funded Georg Eckert Institute concluded that the PA curriculum “sends the message that the Jews as a collective are dangerous and deceptive, and demonises them,” adding that the material “must be characterised as anti-Semitic.” In geography lessons, maps consistently omit Israel, replacing it with a “Palestine” that stretches from the [Jordan] River to the [Mediterranean] Sea.

Even more disturbingly, children are taught to admire and emulate terrorists. Dalal Mughrabi, who led the 1978 Coastal Road Massacre that killed 38 Israeli civilians (including 13 children), is portrayed in PA textbooks as a national heroine “immortal in our hearts and minds.” Such content presents martyrdom as a noble aspiration and violence as a sacred duty.

An in-depth 2025 analysis by the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (IMPACT-se) found that the most recent Palestinian children’s curriculum “promotes violence, glorifies terrorism, promotes jihad and martyrdom, spreads antisemitic rhetoric, vilifies Israel, and denies its existence” — even after EU-mandated revisions.

Mathematics lessons teach arithmetic using examples of martyrs and jihadist operations. Language exercises feature passages describing the killing of Israelis. Children are praised for aspiring to die as martyrs. A 2023 report submitted to the U.S. Congress summarized: “Children are taught to read with passages that describe suicide bombings and the gruesome murders…and explicitly refer to Jews as ‘enemies of Islam in all times and places.'”

In Gaza, where Hamas governs with an iron fist, indoctrination begins at the earliest stages of education. Classrooms are used to glorify Hamas militants and to dehumanize Jews. A firsthand account by former U.S. Congressman Ted Deutch reported: “A generation of Palestinian children were being taught at an early age to reject living peacefully with Israel… raised on a steady curriculum of violent rejectionism.”

Furthermore, according to The Washington Institute for Near East Policy: “The Palestinian Authority is pursuing a policy that intentionally places children in the line of Israeli fire.”

In her courageous article titled “In Defense of Palestine’s Children,” London-based Lebanese columnist Hoda Husseini viciously condemned the Palestinian leadership. “Are we so lacking in any means,” she asks, “that we can do nothing but gamble with children’s lives by pushing them to confront Israel?” She ponders, “What kind of enlightened independence will rise on the blood of the children, while the leaders [of Hamas], their children and grandchildren, are sheltered?”

UNRWA’s Role in Institutionalized Hate

Education provided by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) — largely funded by Western democracies — has also been implicated in promoting antisemitism.

A comprehensive report documented hundreds of pages of incendiary content and identified dozens of UNRWA-employed educators who publicly celebrated terrorist acts on social media — many of whom were actively involved in the October 7 massacre.

Who do you think is actually fighting Hamas’s wars? Certainly not its leaders — those billionaires living comfortably in Qatar. They send teenagers to face the IDF, using them as expendable cannon fodder. It’s a win-win for Hamas: they get cheap soldiers, and when those young lives are lost, they parade the tragedy before the empathetic yet naïve world crying, “Israel kills children.”

The moral ethics of Islamists are fundamentally different from those of the so-called “enlightened” West. What the West views as barbaric, Islamists often celebrate as virtuous — martyrdom, vengeance, and conquest are framed as holy duties, not moral evils.

Using Palestinian children as child soldiers is not just a war crime — it is the epitome of evil in the name of religion and represents one of the darkest, most cynical expressions of Islamism — a tragic peak of moral corruption. I cannot help but think of Jesus’ words:

Whoever causes one of these little ones…to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened around his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea.

(Matthew 18:6)

The dark spirit once worshiped as Molech — who demanded the sacrifice of children for his own honor, glory, and military triumph — still lives on today in spiritual ideologies that sacrifice children on the altar of religion.

This was a brief excerpt from my book, “The Elephant in the Middle East: The Spiritual Battle Christians Often Miss Behind the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict“: