Early on the morning of Aug. 17, a Palestinian youth was beaten unconscious by a mob of Israeli teenagers in West Jerusalem’s Zion Square. The assailants were teenagers, some as young as 13, and many more youths allegedly stood around and watched. One perpetrator told the press that as far as he is concerned, the victim should die because “he is an Arab."  

In a separate incident the night before, a Molotov cocktail was hurled at a Palestinian taxi driving in the West Bank, injuring the family in it, including a 4-year-old child. The primary suspects in what has been deemed a “terror attack” by Israeli leaders are adolescents from an Israeli settlement of Bat Ayin. 

Just last week, two more separate nationalist-motivated hate crimes were committed in Jerusalem when Israeli teenagers decided to beat up Palestinians just for being Palestinian.

While Israelis and Palestinians are no strangers to conflict, and Israeli attacks against Palestinians in the West Bank and Jerusalem have become an increasingly common phenomenon, these incidents appear especially troubling because of the perpetrators' ages, the nature of the crimes and their frequency. According to a new study on the impact that exposure to ethnic and political violence has on children’s behavior, this should not necessarily come as a surprise.