On September 13, 2025, the Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant published "What the Wounds Are Telling Us" by Maud Effting and Willem Feenstra:

"Doctors in Gaza observed a disturbing pattern: children with a single gunshot wound to the head or chest, a sign that they had been deliberately targeted."

The investigation won the European Press Prize 2026 and is widely shared, often with its opening image: an X-ray of a 4-year-old girl, "Mira," with a bullet lodged in her skull (image credit: Dr. Mimi Syed). The article contains many graphic photographs of injured children; this page links to it rather than reproducing them.

• De Volkskrant spoke with 17 international doctors and a nurse (from the US, UK, Canada, Australia and the Netherlands) who worked at six hospitals and four clinics in Gaza since October 2023.
• Fifteen of them reported treating children aged 15 and under with a single gunshot wound to the head or chest — at least 114 children by the most conservative count, between late 2023 and mid-2025. Most died.
• Eyewitnesses told the doctors the bullets mostly came from Israeli snipers or drones.
• Former Dutch army commander Mart de Kruif said that with more than a hundred cases, the chance these were accidental hits is negligible.
• Nine doctors described wounds possibly caused by fragmentation weapons.
• The IDF responded to the newspaper but did not answer questions about shooting at children; it said it neither possesses nor uses fragmentation weapons (as reported by de Volkskrant).

• Conservative counting: children the doctors were unsure about were excluded, as were children with gunshot wounds anywhere else on the body (including two boys shot in both head and chest).
• Documentation where possible: photos, X-rays, medical notes and diary excerpts; the newspaper saw images of dozens of children.
• Experienced, named witnesses: doctors who had worked in other war zones and could compare.
• Transparency about limits: the article says some counts were from memory and that duplicates cannot be entirely ruled out.
• Right of reply: the IDF was asked.
• A related 2024 case held up under challenge: when Dr. Feroze Sidhwa (also in this investigation) published CT scans of children shot in the head in the New York Times, critics claimed they were fabricated. The Times said it held photographs corroborating the scans and that any implication they were fabricated "is simply false."

1. "Single shot to head or chest = deliberate targeting" is an assumption, not a finding. A small child's body is mostly head and torso, and a child sheltering behind a wall or window exposes mainly the head. A stray or ricocheting bullet that hits a small child is therefore fairly likely to hit those areas. Neither the article nor the expert quoted addresses this.
2. No comparison group. Doctors were asked only to count head and chest cases. Without knowing how many children they saw shot elsewhere on the body, there is no way to show head and chest wounds were unusually common.
3. Who fired is secondhand. The attribution to Israeli snipers and drones comes from what families and patients told the doctors. No ballistic or weapon evidence is reported, and Hamas and other armed groups were also firing in the same urban areas, often from among civilians.
4. How the doctors were selected is unclear. If they were approached because they had spoken about such cases, the count reflects who was asked as much as how often it happened.
5. Some counts are from memory, and duplicates are possible (stated by the article itself).
6. The images have been disputed before. The "Mira" X-ray comes from the same doctor who supplied the 2024 New York Times images that critics (including Israel Hayom and the New York Sun) called manipulated; the Times stood by them. This page cannot assess radiology and records both positions.

• The doctors' observations are well corroborated. Several surgeons, independently, describe 1–2 mm entry wounds with severe internal damage, especially in children; one removed a 2 mm tungsten cube from a patient. (The Guardian 2024; AOAV 2026)
• Israel does field munitions designed to disperse small tungsten fragments — e.g. Elbit's MPR-500 bomb (marketed as releasing 26,000 pre-formed tungsten fragments; Amnesty identified one at an April 2024 Rafah strike site) and M329/M339 tank rounds, which medical experts judged the "likely" cause of injuries at Al-Aqsa Hospital. (AOAV 2026)
• Which weapon caused which wound is probable, not confirmed in any specific case; more exotic claims (e.g. "DIME" weapons causing guillotine-like amputations) remain unconfirmed. (AOAV 2026)
• The IDF's denial, as reported ("neither possesses nor uses fragmentation weapons"), is hard to reconcile with the MPR-500 evidence. We have only the newspaper's paraphrase; the IDF may have meant a narrower category.
• Legality: fragmentation munitions are not banned as such; the legal and ethical question is their use in densely populated areas.