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It hardly matters what day you check out which news report when it comes to Gaza or now Lebanon. Amid the accounts of chaos and further destruction, there are always the children, even if often hidden away in the odd paragraph somewhere in the piece. Take a typical New York Times report on October 11th about how the Israelis were extending their devastating bombing campaign in Lebanon to the very heart of that country's capital, Beirut. Deep in that piece was this paragraph: "In Beirut, residents were still absorbing the shock and horror of Thursday's airstrikes, with many fearing the death toll could rise. Samira Ali Sbheiteh, 71, said the attack hit an apartment building where her cousin Fatima, her cousin's husband, Abbas Khalsa, and their two young children had been living. 'We still have no news about them,' she said." And yes, like so many other children in Lebanon, and especially in Gaza in the last year, they could be dead.
Here, the day after that Times report, was an all too typical paragraph from the British Guardian on the latest grim developments in Gaza: "Airstrikes overnight on Friday on Jabalia destroyed an entire building and severely damaged several more, according to medics and first responders, who are still recovering missing people from under the rubble and ruins created by a 20-metre deep impact crater. At least six women and seven children were among the dead, and a strike in another part of Jabalia in the early hours of Saturday killed two parents and injured their baby, the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory said."
And sadly, that's simply been the norm. In fact, the group Save the Children claims that there is no more deadly place to be a child on Earth today than Gaza where at least 11,300 kids have been identified as being killed (30% younger than five and 710 of them less than a year old) in the last year. And sadly, that's guaranteed to be, at best, a partial count.
Worse yet, Gaza and Lebanon are anything but alone. As TomDispatch regular Nick Turse explains all too vividly today, this world is anything but safe for children to grow up in. In fact, it may be growing more unsafe by the month and, the remarkable Turse aside, it's strange how few people even notice what an increasingly dangerous place this planet is for our children. Tom
"Will You Bring My Dad and Give Me My Hand Back?"
War Is Not Healthy for Children and Other Living Things
By Nick Turse
"War is not healthy for children and other living things," reads a poster titled "Primer" created by the late artist Lorraine Schneider for an art show at New York's Pratt Institute in 1965. Printed in childlike lowercase letters, the words interspersed between the leaves of a simply rendered sunflower, it was an early response to America's war in Vietnam. "She just wanted to make something that nobody could argue with," recalled Schneider's youngest daughter, Elisa Kleven, in an article published earlier this year. Six decades later, Schneider's hypothesis has consistently been borne out.
According to Save the Children, about 468 million children -- about one of every six young people on this planet -- live in areas affected by armed conflict. Verified attacks on children have tripled since 2010. Last year, global conflicts killed three times as many children as in 2022. "Killings and injuries of civilians have become a daily occurrence," U.N. human rights chief Volker Turk commented in June when he announced the 2023 figures. "Children shot at. Hospitals bombed. Heavy artillery launched on entire communities."
It took four decades for the United Nations Security Council to catch up to Schneider. In 2005, that global body identified -- and condemned -- six grave violations against children in times of war: killing or maiming; recruitment into or use by armed forces and armed groups; attacks on schools or hospitals; rape or other grave acts of sexual violence; abduction; and the denial of humanitarian access to them. Naming and shaming, however, has its limits. Between 2005 and 2023, more than 347,000 grave violations against youngsters were verified across more than 30 conflict zones in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America, according to UNICEF, the U.N. agency for children. The actual number is undoubtedly far higher.
From the extreme damage explosive weapons do to tiny bodies to the lasting effects of acute deprivation on developing brains, children are particularly vulnerable in times of conflict. And once subjected to war, they carry its scars, physical and mental, for a lifetime. A recent study by Italian researchers emphasized what Schneider intuitively knew -- that "war inflicts severe violations on the fundamental human rights of children." The complex trauma of war, they found, "poses a grave threat to the emotional and cognitive development of children, increasing the risk of physical and mental illnesses, disabilities, social problems, and intergenerational consequences."
Despite such knowledge, the world continues to fail children in times of conflict. The United States was, for instance, one of the members of the U.N. Security Council that condemned those six grave wartime violations against children. Yet the Biden administration has greenlit tens of billions of dollars in weapons sales to Israel, while U.S. munitions have repeatedly been used in attacks on schools, that have become shelters, predominantly for women and children, in the Gaza Strip. "Make no mistake, the United States is fully, fully, fully supportive of Israel," President Joe Biden said recently, even though his administration acknowledged the likelihood that Israel had used American weaponry in Gaza in violation of international law.
And Gaza is just one conflict zone where, at this very moment, children are suffering mightily. Let TomDispatch offer you a hellscape tour of this planet, a few stops in a world of war to glimpse just what today's conflicts are doing to the children trapped by them.
Gaza
The Gaza Strip is the most dangerous place on Earth to be a child, according to UNICEF. Israel has killed around 17,000 children there since the current Gaza War began in October 2023, according to local authorities. And almost as horrific, about 26,000 kids have reportedly lost one or both parents. At least 19,000 of them are now orphans or are otherwise without a caregiver. One million children in Gaza have also been displaced from their homes since October 2023.
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