People can pretend that adult refugees are secretly soldiers in diguise, and use that to justify slaughtering innocents. People are doing it on lemmy as we speak.

You cannot soundly argue the same for children.

I think he was just trying to head off any criticism for daring to suggest moderation and diplomacy in the face of people howling vengeance for the deaths of Israeli children while acknowledging that Palestinian children are and have been dying from Israel's retaliation.

Yeah, but there are few political vehicles as effective as "won't somebody PLEASE think of the children!"