This lie, otherwise is called “blood libel”, historically is the one which most often was used to cause harm to Jews. The claim is that Jews ritually kill babies or children in order to use their blood for baking bread. The claim originate in 12th century and the later part of the claim was added in 16th or 17th century.

There has never been any evidence supporting the lie – actually Torah forbid human sacrifice, and no blood is allowed to be consumed. In many cases later investigation refuted the accusation. Still more than 150 pogroms resulted from the blood libel, almost always causing murder of Jews (often including women and children).

So far, to my knowledge, the last time the blood libel incited a full scale pogrom was Kielce pogrom of 1946, which resulted in murder of 42 Jews and was initiated by a boy who claimed that Jews have kidnapped him, while in reality he spent a few days in a neighboring village. It may happen that the situation was engineered by secret service.

Nowadays the lie is well and thriving, with hardly any anti-semitic/anti-Istrael gathering going on without a slogan depicturing Jews/Israeli as “murders of children”.

There are three main rationalization the people who use the appellation bring up:

1. During the wars Israel conducted during the time of its existence some children were killed. While every death of a child is a tragedy, in every war civilian population, including children are killed. The figures show that the proportion of children between killed in the wars led by Israel is at least twice as little as the proportion of children in the population, which would not be the case if the Israeli military would purposely target children or even acting indiscriminate.
2. One can point to a number of minors held at Israeli prisons. On the one hand, being detained is very far from being murdered. On the other hand, the minors held in the Israeli prisons are detained for activity which is criminal in Israel. There is hardly any country in the world which does not hold some underage criminals in detention.
3. In many cases the Palestinian Arabs organisations encourage minors to conduct acts of terror against Israelis. Sometimes, in attempt to prevent or mitigate consequences of such an attack the terrorist is killed. In the case when the terrorist was minor, this is often presented by media as a case of “killing a child”. It is quite clear that those cases should be equated to the death of a child solder, in which responsibility falls to the party which recruited the child, i.e. to the terrorist organisation.