Hamas Video Shows 15-Year-Old Fighting IDF

Hamas child recruitment is again under scrutiny after the terror group’s military wing reportedly published a video honoring Zahib Labad, a 15-year-old operative who fought against IDF forces in Gaza.

According to the report, Hamas released the video “in honor” of Labad as a “martyr.” The group’s own material presented him not only as a child, but as a military operative in its ranks. Already at age 15, he reportedly served in a combat role, planted explosives, and fired an RPG at IDF forces.

After Labad was killed in combat against the IDF, the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza listed him as a “child killed by Israel.” That classification is technically based on his age. However, Hamas’s own military-wing material tells a much darker story: a child was placed into battle, used as a combatant, and then turned into a casualty headline against Israel.

The Tanakh says, “They have built the high places of Topheth… to burn their sons and their daughters in the fire.” The verse speaks to a brutal moral inversion: leaders sacrificing children for an ideology. Hamas’s use of a 15-year-old fighter reflects that same corruption of duty, childhood, and human life.

Hamas Child Recruitment

The case of Zahib Labad exposes how Hamas turns children into weapons and then uses their deaths as propaganda. The terror group cannot send minors into battle and then present every resulting casualty as proof that Israel targets children.

This distinction matters. A 15-year-old remains a child. That is exactly why Hamas’s conduct is so damning. The moral outrage should begin with the organization that recruited him, armed him, trained him, and sent him against soldiers with explosives and an RPG.

International child-protection standards treat the recruitment and use of children by armed groups as a grave violation. Hamas’s own video, according to the report, appears to confirm the very abuse it would rather hide behind casualty statistics.

The “Gazan Child” Narrative

The phrase “Gazan child” often appears in global discourse without context. In many cases, it evokes an innocent civilian killed in war. But the Labad case shows how Hamas manipulates that category, blurring the line between child victim and child combatant in order to accuse Israel.

When audiences are told that Israel kills children in Gaza, Zahib Labad’s case should be part of the answer. Not because his age should be dismissed, but because Hamas exploited that age. The tragedy is not only that a child died. The tragedy is that Hamas put a child into combat and then used his death to attack Israel’s legitimacy.

This also matters for diplomacy. “Kushner To Meet Hamas Leaders In Cairo, Reports Claim” reported that Saudi and Al Jazeera sources said Jared Kushner may meet Hamas leaders in Cairo with mediators from Qatar, Egypt, and Turkey. Any diplomatic track involving Hamas must confront the reality shown here: this is not a normal political faction. It is a terror movement that militarizes children and then markets their deaths.

Covenant Against The Sacrifice Of Children

The United States and Israel share a covenantal understanding that children must be protected from evil, not fed into it. Both nations, at their best, recognize that moral clarity begins with defending innocent life and refusing to let terror groups turn human beings into tools of war.

That shared American-Israeli conviction matters in Gaza. Israel faces a battlefield where Hamas hides behind civilians, embeds in neighborhoods, and, according to its own propaganda, celebrates a 15-year-old who planted explosives and fired an RPG. America’s role in any future Gaza diplomacy must begin with that fact, not with illusions about Hamas moderation.

The Labad case is therefore not only about one teenager. It is about the machinery that turned him into a fighter, counted him as a child casualty, and expected the world not to notice the contradiction.

Hamas did not protect Zahib Labad’s childhood. It consumed it. That is the story behind the headline, and it is one the world must not ignore.

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