Analysis of life narratives of 20 West Bank Palestinians who grew up during First Intifada revealed an experience of having "lost childhood'. This experience included various aspects categorized into "lost child-friendliness" and "lost childlikeness". Participants attributed their sense of lost childhood to having grown up in the context of large-scale, unavoidable, inescapable, harsh and instrumental political violence. The author suggests that the Palestinian participants' understanding that they lost their childhood when still children biologically and legally might best be accounted for within a theoretical framework seeing childhood as subjective in the ontological sense, but objective in the epistemic sense. (Contains 1 figure)