In addition, 19,199 have been wounded, many with life-altering injuries.

A physician working in Gaza last summer reported to HRW, “We are talking about a huge number of traumatic amputations, especially in children, leaving children with permanent disabilities. Also, many children who were wounded by shrapnel all over their faces and bodies, and I have seen children lose their eyesight due to injuries.”

Leila al-Kafarna, a mother of three with an injured husband continually expelled from place to place in Gaza, told HRW: “I carried my husband on my back, and we kept walking on foot through the sand and gunfire over our heads and planes dropping leaflets. Our children screamed along the way. It felt like the whole world ran and screamed with fear.”

Al-Kafarna continued,

” We finally felt a bit relieved and on October 20, Malek, my 13-year-old son, and I went to the market…. We went there for four consecutive days, waiting in line to get our [food] coupon, and it was on our fourth day that the attack happened.

We were there for an hour-and-a-half. Suddenly, I felt something was off. I took Malek’s hand and told him we needed to leave, and that was when I heard something breaking from the walls. I looked up as the missile [munition] was hitting the supermarket, and I lost consciousness…. We were thrown away by the impact and surrounded by rubble. There were people and bodies around and on top of us. Body parts were everywhere.

I woke up with a fire near my face, like a meter away, and I was still holding my son’s arm, so I started running, thinking I’m running with my son…. I was screaming at him to run fast before they bomb again, and then I felt like my son was light, as if there was no weight on the arm. So, I looked and didn’t see my son anywhere near me, and that was when I discovered that I was holding only his arm.

I put the arm down and ran back, and I saw my son running and screaming “Allah, Allah,” and he started telling me to forgive him for any day he treated me badly, as if he was saying goodbye. Malek then fainted.”

One of the nearly 20,000 wounded school children, Malek lost his arm.

Although my headline says that the dead students did not go back to school this fall, actually none of the Gaza Strip’s 625,000 students could go back to school this year. That includes 45,000 first-graders.

Because Israel damaged or destroyed most of the schools and all the universities. All of them. A few months ago, a panel of UN experts said, “With more than 80% of schools in Gaza damaged or destroyed, it may be reasonable to ask if there is an intentional effort to comprehensively destroy the Palestinian education system, an action known as ‘scholasticide.'”

“School Year,” Digital, Midjourney / Clip2Comic, 2024.

The Palestinian Ministry of Education said that the Israeli Air Force conducted air strikes against 341 Gazan schools, universities, and university annex buildings, and against 65 schools of the UN Relief and Works Agency. Of these, 138 were badly damaged and 77 were completely destroyed.

Although the Israeli authorities represent these school buildings as secret headquarters of the Qassam Brigades militants, a moment’s reflection would be sufficient to conclude that this is a damned lie. Eighty percent of the schools in Gaza were Qassam Brigades HQs? That’s ridiculous. They were grade schools. Students were learning the multiplication tables and English grammar. European and American aid workers familiar with these institutions flatly deny the sinister Israeli cover story. It is the same with hospitals, where the Washington Post and the Associated Press did their own investigations and found that there is no evidence whatsoever to back Israeli claims that Hamas was using them for military purposes. The way you can tell that Netanyahu, his cronies and spokesmen are lying is that their lips are moving.

Al Jazeera quotes a Palestinian mother, Lina, who said, “I miss being a mother with children in school. Now, I am in a tent, struggling to find water and figuring out how to cook on the fire. This is a monotonous, terrifying routine with the ongoing war, bombings and displacement from one place to another.”

During the past year the Israeli military has also killed 561 Palestinian school teachers, and has wounded 3,729, most of them in Gaza.

The few remaining structures are now used to house refugees, so the students are living in their partially destroyed schools with their relatives instead of studying with them. The Israeli Air Force occasionally bombs these schools-cum-shelters, killing more civilians. The presence of a single militant from the Qassam Brigades can justify rubbing out 20 innocent civilians in his vicinity according to the Israeli rules of engagement, the most horrendous among the OECD states. NATO would never permit this behavior and has cut off military cooperation with Israel over its unconcern with minimizing civilian deaths.

UNICEF explains, ‘To respond to this situation, UNICEF and its partners have established 39 Temporary Learning Spaces in the Gaza Strip serving over 12,400 students. In addition, recreational activities, emergency learning kits, and Mental Health and Psycho-Social Support (MHPSS) are being offered to children, youth, caregivers, and teachers in shelters.”

UNICEF Middle East and North Africa Regional Director Adele Khodr said, “We must find ways to restart learning and rebuild schools to uphold the right to education of the next generations in the State of Palestine. Children need stability to cope with the trauma they have experienced, and the opportunity to develop and reach their full potential.” Children are not able to interact with one another and have no structured learning, threatening long-term cognitive development, which is worsened by water shortages and malnutrition.

UNICEF’s efforts are hampered by an 88% budget shortfall. While the US sent $20 billion in weaponry to Israel for the ongoing butchery, it gave UNICEF $1.5 bn last year for its work with children all around the world. UNICEF needed on the order of $3 billion just for Gaza this year. You can donate here. It is tax deductible.

Palestinians are the most literate of the Arabs because the United Nations has educated Palestinian refugee children for decades. Israel’s attempt to destroy the UN Relief and Works Agency and the constant restrictions it puts on agencies like UNICEF, along with its scholasticide in Gaza, are attempts to turn the Palestinians into illiterate dummies who are easily controlled and deprived of all their rights, to erase their very identity as a people.

Scholasticide is genocide.

It doesn’t matter to people in Gaza who wins the US presidential election. Trump tells Netanyahu to “finish the job.” The “job” is creating more amputees like 13-year-old Malek.

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 Türk 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.

In addition, Israel is committing “scholasticide,” the deliberate and systematic destruction of the Palestinian education system in Gaza, according to a recent report by the Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, a Palestinian advocacy group. More than 659,000 children there have been out of school since the beginning of the war. The conflict in Gaza will set children’s education back by years and risks creating a generation of permanently traumatized Palestinians, according to a new study by the University of Cambridge, the Centre for Lebanese Studies, and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East.

Buy the Book

Even before the current war, an estimated 800,000 children in Gaza — about 75% of the kids there — were in need of mental health and psychosocial support. Now, UNICEF estimates that more than one million of them — in effect, every kid in the Gaza Strip — needs such services. In short, you can no longer be a healthy child there.

Lebanon

Over four days in late September, as Israel ramped up its war in Lebanon, about 140,000 children in that Mediterranean nation were displaced. Many arrived at shelters showing signs of deep distress, according to Save the Children staff. “Children are telling us that it feels like danger is everywhere, and they can never be safe. Every loud sound makes them jump now,” said Jennifer Moorehead, Save the Children’s country director in Lebanon. “Many children’s lives, rights and futures have already been turned upside down and now their capacity to cope with this escalating crisis has been eroded.”

All schools in that country have been closed, adversely affecting every one of its 1.5 million children. More than 890 children have also been injured in Israeli strikes over the last year, the vast majority — more than 690 — since August 20th, according to the Lebanese Ministry of Public Health. Given that Israel has recently extended attacks from the south of the country to the Lebanese capital, Beirut, they will undoubtedly be joined by all too many others.

Sudan

Children have suffered mightily since heavy fighting erupted in Khartoum, Sudan’s capital, in April 2023 between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces. More than 18,000 people have reportedly been killed and close to 10 million have been forced to flee their homes since the civil war there began. Almost half of the displaced Sudanese are — yes! — children, more than 4.6 million of them, making the conflict there the largest child displacement crisis in the world.

More than 16 million Sudanese children are also facing severe food shortages. In the small town of Tawila in that country’s North Darfur state, at least 10 children die of hunger every day, according to a report last month in the Guardian. The population of the town has ballooned as tens of thousands fled El Fasher, North Darfur’s besieged capital. “We anticipate that the exact number of children dying of hunger is much higher,” Aisha Hussien Yagoub, the head of the health authority for the local government in Tawila told the Guardian. “Many of those displaced from El Fasher are living far from our clinic and are unable to reach it.”

More than 10 million Sudanese children, or 50% of that country’s kids, have been within about three miles of the frontlines of the conflict at some point over the past year. According to Save the Children, this marks the highest rate of exposure in the world. In addition, last year, there was a five-fold increase in grave violations of Sudanese children’s rights compared to 2022.

Syria

More than 30,200 children have been killed since the Syrian Civil War began in 2011, according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights. Another 5,200 children were forcibly disappeared or are under arrest.

However little noticed, Syria remains the world’s largest refugee crisis. More than 14 million Syrians have been forced from their homes. More than 7.2 million of them are now estimated to be internally displaced in a country where nine in 10 people exist below the poverty line. An entire generation of children has lived under the constant threat of violence and emotional trauma since 2011. It’s been the only life they’ve ever known.

“Services have already collapsed after 14 years of conflict,” Rasha Muhrez, Save the Children’s Response Director in Syria, said last month. “The humanitarian crisis in Syria is at a record level.” More than two-thirds of the population of Syria, including about 7.5 million children, require humanitarian assistance. Nearly half of the 5.5 million school-aged children — 2.4 million between the ages of five and 17 — remain out of school, according to UNICEF. About 7,000 schools have been destroyed or damaged.

Recently, Human Rights Watch sounded the alarm about the recruitment of children, “apparently for eventual transfer to armed groups,” by a youth organization affiliated with the Kurdish-led Autonomous Administration for North and East Syria and the U.S.-backed Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, its military wing.

Ukraine

Child casualties in Ukraine jumped nearly 40% in the first half of this year, bringing the total number of children killed or injured in nearly 900 days of war there to about 2,200, according to Save the Children. “This year, violence has escalated with a new intensity, with missiles, drones, and bombs causing an alarming rise in children being injured or killed in daylight blasts,” said Stephane Moissaing, Deputy Country Director for Save the Children in Ukraine. “The suffering for families will not stop as long as explosive weapons are sweeping through populated towns and villages across Ukraine.”

There are already 2.9 million Ukrainian children in need of assistance — and the situation is poised to grow worse in the months ahead. Repeated Russian attacks on the country’s infrastructure could result in power outages of up to 18 hours a day this winter, leaving many of Ukraine’s children freezing and without access to critical services. “The lack of power and all its knock-on effects this winter could have a devastating impact not only on children’s physical health but on their mental well-being and education,” said Munir Mammadzade, UNICEF representative to Ukraine. “Children’s lives are consumed by thoughts of survival, not childhood.”

Ukraine also estimates that Russian authorities have forcibly removed almost 20,000 children from occupied territories there since the February 2022 invasion. A Financial Times investigation found that Ukrainian children who were abducted and taken to Russia early in the war were put up for adoption on a Russian government-linked website. One of them was shown with a false Russian identity. Another was listed using a Russian version of their Ukrainian name. There was no mention of the children’s Ukrainian backgrounds.

West and Central Africa

Conflicts have been raging in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) for decades. World Vision has called the long-running violence there “one of the worst child protection crises in the world.” A 2023 U.N. report on children and armed conflict documented 3,377 grave violations against children in the DRC. Of these, 46% involved the recruitment of children — some as young as five — by armed groups.

Violence and intercommunity tensions in the DRC have forced 1,457 schools to close this year alone, affecting more than 500,000 children. And sadly, that country is no anomaly. In May, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, or OCHA, reported that more than 5,700 schools in Burkina Faso had been closed due to insecurity, depriving more than 800,000 children of their educations. And by mid-2024, conflicts had shuttered more than 14,300 schools in 24 African countries, according to the Norwegian Refugee Council. That marks an increase of 1,100 closures compared to 2023. The 2024 closures were clustered in West and Central Africa, mainly in Burkina Faso, the DRC, Cameroon, Chad, Nigeria, and Niger. They have affected an estimated 2.8 million children.

“Education is under siege in West and Central Africa. The deliberate targeting of schools and the systemic denial of education because of conflict is nothing short of a catastrophe. Every day that a child is kept out of school is a day stolen from their future and from the future of their communities,” said Hassane Hamadou, the Norwegian Refugee Council’s Regional Director for West and Central Africa. “We urgently call on all parties to conflict to cease attacks on and occupation of schools and ensure that education is protected and prioritized.”

Feet of Clay

It’s been six decades since Lorraine Schneider unveiled her poster and her common-sense wisdom to the world. She’s been proven right at every turn, in every conflict across the entire planet. Everywhere that children (not to mention other living things) have been exposed to war, they have suffered. Children have been killed and maimed. They have been physically, psychologically, and educationally stunted, as well as emotionally wounded. They have been harmed, assaulted, and deprived. Their bodies have been torn apart. Their minds – the literal architecture of their brains – have been warped by war.

In the conflict zones mentioned above and so many others — from Myanmar to Yemen — the world is failing its children. What they have lost can never be “found” again. Survivors can go on, but there is no going back.

Schneider’s mother, Eva Art, was a self-taught sculptor who escaped pogroms in Ukraine by joining relatives in the United States as a child. She lost touch with her family during World War II, according to her daughter Kleven, and later discovered that her relatives had been killed, their entire shtetl (or small Jewish town) wiped out. To cope with her grief, Art made clay figurines of the dead of her hometown: a boy and his dog, an elderly woman knitting, a mother cradling a baby. And today, the better part of 100 years after the young Art was forced from her home by violence, children continue to suffer in the very same ways — and continue to turn to clay for solace.

Israa Al-Qahwaji, a mental health and psychosocial support coordinator for Save the Children in Gaza, shared the story of a young boy who survived an airstrike that resulted in the amputation of one of his hands, while also killing his father and destroying his home. In shock and emotionally withdrawn, the boy was unable to talk about the trauma. However, various therapeutic techniques allowed him to begin to open up, according to Al-Qahwaji. The child began to talk about games he could no longer play and how losing his hand had changed his relationship with his friends. In one therapy session, he was asked to mold something out of clay to represent a wish. With his remaining hand, he carefully shaped a house. After finishing the exercise, he turned to the counselor with a question that left Al-Qahwaji emotionally overwhelmed. “Now,” the boy asked, “will you bring my dad and give me my hand back?”

Copyright 2024 Nick Turse

Via Tomdispatch.com

On 17 August, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called for a seven-day ceasefire to allow children in Gaza to be vaccinated against polio. “I am appealing to all parties to provide concrete assurances right away, guaranteeing humanitarian pauses for the campaign,” he said.

The first such case of the devastating disease was discovered in the town of Deir Al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip. “It is scientifically known that for every 200 virus infections, only one will show the full symptoms of polio, while the remaining cases may present mild symptoms such as a cold or a slight fever,” said Palestinian Health Minister Majed Abu Ramadan on the same day.

This means that the virus may have spread to all parts of the Gaza Strip, where the entire healthcare system has been largely destroyed by the Israeli bombardment. And yet, the ten-month-old Palestinian baby who was first to contract the poliovirus, like hundreds of thousands of other children in the enclave, was not vaccinated against the disease.

To prevent an even greater disaster in war-stricken Gaza, the World Health Organisation (WHO), along with the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), said that they have to vaccinate 640,000 children throughout Gaza very quickly.

This is a difficult task, as the vast majority of Palestinians in Gaza are crammed into unsafe refugee camps, massive tent encampments.

These are mostly in central Gaza, with no access to clean water or electricity. They are surrounded by over 330,000 tons of waste, which has further contaminated already undrinkable water. It is this, say the experts, that may be the cause of the poliovirus.

The challenge of saving Gaza’s children is complicated by the fact that Israeli bombs continue to be dropped on every part of the Palestinian territory, including the so-called “safe zones”, which were declared by the occupation state soon after the start of the war and a number of occasions since.

The other problem is that Gaza has, for months, subsisted without electricity. Without an efficiently-cooled storage system, the majority of the vaccines could become unusable.

Israel’s bombs are leaving Gaza’s children with life-changing injuries – Cartoon [Sabaaneh/Middle East Monitor

However, there is more to the suffering of Gaza’s children than the lack of vaccinations. As of 19 August, at least 16,480 children had been killed as a direct result of the war, in addition to thousands more who remain missing, presumed dead, under the rubble of their homes and other civilian infrastructure destroyed by Israel. Those killed, according to the Palestinian Minister of Health in Gaza, include 115 babies.

Many Palestinian children have starved to death.

“At least 3,500 children in Gaza are facing [the same fate] amid a lack of food and malnutrition under Israeli restrictions on the delivery of food,” explained a ministry spokesman. Moreover, more than 17,000 children in Gaza have lost either one or both parents since the start of the war last October.

One of the main reasons why Gaza’s children account for a major segment of the victims of the war is that homes, schools and displacement shelters have been the main targets of the relentless Israeli bombardment. According to UN experts in April, “More than 80 per cent of schools in Gaza [have been] damaged or destroyed.” They added that, “It may be reasonable to ask if there is an intentional effort to comprehensively destroy the Palestinian education system, an action known as ‘scholasticide’.”

The trend of targeting schools continues. On 18 August, Palestine’s Education Minister, Amjad Barham, said that over 90 per cent of all Gaza schools have been destroyed, the official Palestinian news agency, WAFA, reported. Of the 309 schools in the territory, 290 have been destroyed as a result of Israeli bombing. This has left 630,000 students with no access to education.

While homes and schools can be rebuilt, the precious lives of children who have been killed cannot be restored. According to the Palestinian Ministry of Education, as of 2 July, 8,572 students in Gaza and 100 in the occupied West Bank had been killed by the Israeli army, with 14,089 students in Gaza and 494 in the West Bank wounded.

These are the worst losses suffered by Palestinian children within a relatively brief period of time since the Nakba, the destruction of the Palestinian homeland in 1948.

And the tragedy worsens by the day.

No child, let alone a whole generation of children, should endure this much suffering, regardless of the political reasoning or context. International and humanitarian law has designated a “special respect and protection” for children during times of armed conflict, the international humanitarian law databases of the Red Cross resolve. These laws may apply to Palestinian children in theory, but certainly not in practice.

The betrayal of the children of Palestine by the international community shall stain the collective consciousness of humankind for decades to come. This is indeed a war on Palestinian children, a war that must stop before a whole generation of Palestinian children is completely erased.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor or Informed Comment.

Middle East Monitor

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

The UN High Commissioner’s office gave several examples of these massive bombs being dropped when there was no sign of an obvious military target. It wasn’t that, as some Israel apologists suggest, “people get killed in war,” or that you can’t kill off Hamas without breaking a few eggs. The pilots weren’t always aiming for Hamas operatives. They were trying to destroy Palestinian society.

17,000 lost children. Jesus of Nazareth told a parable (Luke 15:3-7) to explain to the “Pharisees and tax collectors” why he hung out with sinners and the disreputable. It goes, “Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it? And when he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders and rejoices. And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and neighbors, saying to them, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found my lost sheep.’ Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance.”

Likewise, which parent with several kids who lost one would not drop everything, give the care of its siblings to a relative, and go frantically looking for the lost child?

In 2000, the US House of Representatives even encouraged communities to join the Amber Alert program for abducted children, so that alerts are sent out by the Emergency Alert System, Google, Facebook and other means. We do this as communities for a single child.

How frantic would we be at the news of 17,000 lost little children?

The 17,000 separated from their families are scavenging for food and forced to drink dirty water. Many of them have chronic diarrhea and are developing diseases like hepatitis. They are frightened and grieving, and deeply traumatized. Some are suffering from malnutrition and will suffer permanent cognitive and affective damage from which they will never recover. Some are wounded or amputees.

This little girl describes her life:

Middle East Eye Video: “Gaza Child Separated from Family”

“All the people died. Everyone. Two homes were levelled on our street. We got scared, and stopped going home. We want to go back to our homes. They struck our houses and we had to flee, uncle. We were scared. We want to go home. We want a ceasefire. We are tired of sheltering in these schools while the bombing is ongoing. We get scared.”

Play it with the sound turned up so you can hear it in her voice.

Then there are the children who have lost the adults in their family, and have formed tiny bands to fend for themselves, the tweens taking care of the infants and toddlers.

NBC News: “A story of survival: 13-year-old takes care of seven siblings amid the war in Gaza “

Here is the YouTube transcript of this tale of children in Rafah, translated from Arabic:

The little boy, Mohammad Ali Yazji says, “This is Mayar, and this is Tulin, and this is Youssef, and this is Zaher, and this is Suwar. And this is Ward, and this is Fatima, and this is Mays.”

The little girl says. “I’m with my little sister, who keeps crying while I wash her clothes. Her clothes are dirty and my mother has been martyred, and my father is in Gaza [City], not able to get the message to us. We don’t know what to do.

Mohammad Ali says, “I’m sitting here, making milk for my little sister. trying to feed her since I haven’t fed her milk since the morning. She’s crying because she’s hungry and there’s no one to nurse her.

“I mean, I feel it. I mean, no one understands her. My mother used to, you know, when she got hungry she would feed her. She knew how to quieten her when she cried.

“I don’t know how to do any of this. I mean, this is my little sister, and when I see her, I feel so sorry for her. I don’t know what to do for her. At least bring us milk and Pampers. Where should I get this stuff.

“Ah, from this hunger… she cries out of hunger.

“Go pigeon, don’t take too long, go to sleep, go to sleep, go to sleep.

“To sleep.

“I’m not sure if there’s anyone left in our family alive except for my uncle. When I saw the international aid, I mean, people know that our father is missing and our mother has been martyred, but they bring us little help or not at all. At most, we get light aid locally.

“Every day we get a can of beans or a can of chickpeas, maybe, or we get a few vegetables, a little financial aid

“I go to bring them something so they forget the war and do not get bored — a toy to play with, and, I mean, to bring them something to forget the hurt.

“We are supposed to have a father and a mother, but now there’s nobody, and when we sleep, all my siblings, they sit there, and every time there’s a noise, they start crying and screaming. There’s nobody to make them feel safe.”

Six month old Tulin, whose name means “moonbeam,” fell ill with gastroenteritis.

This video report was from NBC News Digital. It was produced by Ala’a Ibrahim, edited by Jacob Condon, with Jonathan Rinkerman the production manager, Marshall Crook the senior producer, and Rachel Morehouse the executive producer. God bless their souls. I’m not sure it was ever aired. The major networks haven’t covered the Palestinian side of the Gaza War for the most part.

As for the children dead under rubble, it should be remembered that the UN High Commissioner on Human Rights has found instances where the Israeli Air Force (IAF) dropped 2,000-pound bombs on residential apartment buildings, flattening them and spreading destruction all along their quarter mile blast radius. It takes most adults about 5 minutes to walk a quarter of a mile. Imagine your neighborhood. If you walked for five minutes, how many houses or apartment buildings would you pass? Imagine them all blown to smithereens.

Children and others trapped under the rubble of destroyed buildings could not be rescued in Gaza, as they might be in most cities in the United States. The Israelis have limited the import of earth moving equipment since they slapped an extensive economic siege on Gaza in 2007. And the IAF has targeted such equipment in its air raids over the past eight months.

Children who were alive under the rubble couldn’t be gotten out, no matter how frantic their parents or relatives or neighbor were. They died slowly of lack of water. After about three days of not drinking anything, most people die of renal failure. They would have been parched, whimpering, head hammering, in the dark, alone. Some of the 4,000 who were not immediately turned into red mist by the Israeli bombs died like that.

( Middle East Monitor ) – The ongoing conflict in occupied Palestine has had a major effect on the mental well-being of Palestinian children. The trauma of living in a war-ravaged region, enduring displacement and witnessing extreme violence can result in a variety of mental health concerns, such as anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and behavioural issues. Furthermore, children who have endured these traumas may grapple with feelings of despair, fear and anger. Childhood innocence is under siege.

It is thus crucial for Palestinian children to obtain the necessary support and resources to assist them in managing the mental health consequences of the conflict. UNICEF has identified the Gaza Strip as the most perilous location for children globally. Women and children make up over 70 per cent of the casualties resulting from Israel’s offensive since 7 October. From birth, Palestinian children have been subjected to an Israeli siege and blockade, enduring conditions of poverty and violence.

The predicament of minors in the Gaza Strip was already critical prior to 7 October due to the siege imposed by Israel since 2006 and additional structural obstacles. The majority of children in the Gaza Strip have endured distressing circumstances since last October. These include bereavement, extensive devastation, forced displacement and a serious lack of food, water and medication. Inadequate playgrounds and secure spaces, as well as school closures, are additional contributors to children developing mental health and psychosocial problems.

The solitary psychiatric hospital in Gaza has been targeted by Israel, and the activities of the other six community mental health clinics that serve thousands of patients throughout the enclave have been interrupted as a result of air strikes. In an effort to detect children who are suffering from mass depression, mutism, bedwetting and suicidal thoughts, some medical professionals have attempted to maintain contact with youngsters via the use of WhatsApp.

The present conflict has had an influence on children’s mental health that cannot be compared to the condition that existed before the crisis. This is due to the fact that the level of intensity of the hostilities and the destruction of infrastructure has been unparalleled. To put this into perspective, prior to 7 October, the Gaza Strip was already experiencing a significant number of mental health concerns. Approximately 54 per cent of Palestinian boys and 46.5 per cent of Palestinian girls between the ages of 6 and 12 were found to have emotional and behavioural issues, according to a survey conducted in 2017.

In 2022, Save the Children revealed that 80 per cent of the youngsters who participated in the research had signs of mental distress.

Two-thirds of the children there were engaging in self-harming, and about half of them admitted to having considered ending their own lives. Before 7 October, the availability of mental health care in Gaza was restricted and often subject to social stigma. As a consequence, families and community members did not give priority to mental health and psychological support (MHPSS).

Dr. Mamoun Mobayed, a consultant psychiatrist, and director of treatment and rehabilitation at Qatar’s Behavioural Healthcare Centre, stated that children suffer from the enduring consequences of wartime conditions during their sleep. Nightmares are experienced frequently, and some individuals may suffer from nocturnal enuresis as a consequence of these nightmares. A year ago, Palestinian-American psychologist Dr Iman Farajallah found in her study on the impacts of war on Palestinian children that children who survive such wars often suffer serious psychological, emotional and behavioural repercussions. Ninety-five per cent of Gaza Strip children, according to her study, showed signs of trauma, sadness and worry. Farajallah believes that the solution to the Palestine issue is not to be found in psychology but rather in a peaceful political resolution.

France 24 English Video: “‘Gaza remains hell on earth for children and their families’, Unicef Spokesperson tells FRANCE24”

The ongoing conflict in Israel and Palestine is having a severe impact on children’s mental and physical well-being, confirms UNICEF. UN officials report many children killed and countless more suffering from anxiety and displacement. “The violence is taking a huge toll on children’s mental health,” said Jonathan Crickx, UNICEF’s chief of communication in Palestine. “We’ve received accounts of children who are deeply worried and anxious.” The UNICEF official urged all parties to ensure that children receive the specific protection that international humanitarian and human rights law guarantees them and to provide them with unequivocal protection. Additionally, the UN body demands an urgent cessation of hostilities.

The conditions necessary to deliver humanitarian aid to children in Gaza are not only unfulfilled, but also deteriorating. The prolonged embargo and continuous shelling in Gaza have severely strained the mental health of children, pushing it to its limits. The victims have endured indescribable psychological trauma resulting from acts of violence, severe bodily suffering such as amputations, and the profound loss of their families, homes and educational institutions. More than one million children in Gaza require mental health assistance.

UNICEF reports that Israel has caused the deaths of more than 13,000 children in Gaza since 7 October. In addition, it should be noted that there are other children who are experiencing acute malnutrition and are so weak that they lack the energy to even produce tears. “Our children have experienced various wars,” explained one of the mothers in Gaza. “They were already struggling with resilience, and now coping has become extremely challenging. The children are frightened, angry and can’t stop crying. Many adults are reacting the same way. This is overwhelming for adults, let alone children.”

According to Save the Children in Gaza, if the war is not stopped, there will be additional long-lasting psychological damage to children, with diminishing chances for recovery. Amal, a mother of four children in Gaza between the ages of 7 and 14, said that, “Some of my kids can no longer focus on simple tasks. They forget what I’ve just told them and can’t recall recent events. I wouldn’t even say their mental health has declined, it has been destroyed.”

This is total psychological devastation. 

Children in Gaza are bearing the brunt of the war’s consequences at a disproportionate rate. Brain development may be altered irrevocably as a result of childhood traumas, although the repercussions might not become evident until much later in life. During childhood, the brain undergoes critical developmental periods. Anacker explained that too much stress from grief, anxiety, or a lack of social and emotional interaction during these times can alter brain function. “There’s no effective way to completely reverse the effects of childhood trauma in adulthood, that’s why it’s essential to protect children from stress during these critical stages of development.”

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has cautioned on numerous occasions that children are affected “disproportionately” by contemporary conflicts. Children residing in regions affected by brutal conflict endure profound psychological anguish.

According to Taha et al., the Education Above All Foundation (EAA), a non-profit organisation based in Qatar, is providing psychosocial assistance to a total of 35,000 children, 15,000 caregivers and 1,000 frontline workers in Gaza. In addition, Save the Children is supplying leisure packs and creating secure educational environments for children who have been relocated or are in precarious situations. Organisations such as UNICEF are creating areas where children may participate in physical activities, group games, sketching and communication with experts who provide care. These endeavours are essential in tackling the mental health emergency among youngsters in Gaza.

There are considerable obstacles in providing mental health services to children, owing to a myriad of circumstances. Insufficient understanding among healthcare practitioners, a scarcity of mental health experts and constraints on foreign aid imposed by Israel sometimes result in untreated mental health illnesses. What’s more, the distribution of resources to tackle pressing emergencies, such as the shortage of essential supplies, increases the intricacy of providing mental health interventions for children in Gaza. The declining healthcare infrastructure and lack of protected zones due to ongoing bombardment exacerbate the challenges of addressing the mental health crisis among young people in Gaza.

In conclusion, the relentless conflict in Gaza has subjected Palestinian children to profound and enduring psychological trauma.

These young lives are marred by experiences of violence, loss and deprivation, which have a severe impact on their mental health and overall development. It is imperative that international efforts are intensified to provide comprehensive mental health support and protection to these vulnerable children. Without a peaceful resolution and substantial humanitarian aid, the psychological scars inflicted by the conflict will likely persist into adulthood, perpetuating a cycle of suffering and instability. Ensuring the mental well-being of Palestinian children is not only a moral obligation, but also a crucial step towards building a future where peace and stability can prevail.

 

 

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.

Middle East Monitor

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

600,000 is only a little less than the population of Boston within city limits. Imagine Boston as populated only by children. Then imagine them all, every one, as injured by shrapnel, or suffering gastrointestinal and liver diseases, or as wasting away with hunger from lack of food. And imagine the monster that puts this many children in this box deliberately.

Israeli airstrikes on Rafah have continued daily, often killing or wounding children. Since Israel has destroyed the hospital system, children have to have operations or limbs amputated without anesthesia or antibiotics.

It should be underlined that these injuries, maladies and food deficits have been imposed on these children by Israeli military policy, which displays a reckless disregard for civilian welfare. Israeli rules of engagement, the most inhumane in the world, permit 15 to 20 civilian deaths per militant killed. Typically in warfare 3 persons are wounded for every one killed, so this ROE likely must be interpreted as allowing the wounding of 45 to 60 civilians in each strike on a member of the Hamas paramilitary.

The UN reports from the Gaza Ministry of Health that since October 7, “34,622 Palestinians were killed in Gaza and 77,867 Palestinians were injured.” Some 70% of the killed have been women and children.

The UN adds, “Between the afternoons of 1 and 3 May, according to the Ministry of Health (MoH) in Gaza, 54 Palestinians were killed and 102 injured, including 26 killed and 51 injured in the last 24 hours.”

In addition, according to the UN, Palestinian civil defense estimates that a further 10,000 bodies lie under the rubble of the apartment buildings that Israeli airstrikes destroyed, knowing that families were inside them. The Israelis have destroyed all the equipment that could be used to retrieve the bodies, which are decomposing in the heat. Decomposing corpses leaking into ground water pose a dire threat of disease outbreaks.

CBC’s Matt Galloway interviewed Nyka Alexander, a communications officer with the UN’s World Health Organization. Alexander explained what it meant for over a million people to be forced suddenly down to Rafah (which had a population of about 300,000 before the Israeli assault). He described people sleeping rough or in makeshift tents amidst mountains of garbage and open air toilets. Jaundice, an inflammation of the liver is spreading in the population, including among children. Flies land on feces and then on food, which can’t be washed except in dirty water.

Alexander said, “Imagine all the sidewalks covered in tents and in these makeshift shelters. Imagine the streets flowing with greeny, bluey, black water that is feces mixed with garbage. Imagine there’s no garbage cans, there’s no garbage collection. There’s just piles of garbage . . . The flies are everywhere as well, and they’re very aggressive. They want to go in your eyes, they want to go in your mouth. From a public health point of view, it’s a really disastrous situation.”

Reuters Video: “Waste is piling up in Gaza, bringing misery and hazards | REUTERS”

As for starvation and sickness, the UN says that between 27 April and 2 May the Israeli military impeded or denied 60% of attempted aid deliveries in the north of Gaza. In southern Gaza, of aid and food deliveries requiring coordination, a third were impeded or denied by the Israeli authorities. All this interference in deliveries of food and medicine by Israel comes at a time when US AID says that famine is already inevitable.

This week Doctors without Borders underlined the ways in which the Israeli military has cruelly denied key medical equipment to the children and women they have wounded with their bombs:

“Delivering lifesaving supplies into Gaza is nearly impossible amidst Israeli authorities’ blockades, delays, and restrictions on humanitarian aid and essential medical supplies, explains Mari Carmen Viñoles, head of emergency programmes at Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF).

An oxygen concentrator is a medical device that filters out the nitrogen in air, delivering purified oxygen to patients. For malnourished children with severe anaemia, injured people with severe blood loss and newborns with breathing difficulties, this device can be the difference between life and death.

But despite being essential to our patients’ survival, we have no idea if or when an oxygen concentrator will reach a hospital in Gaza, Palestine.

As Israeli authorities maintain full control over the entry and exit points into Gaza, they have repeatedly refused our requests to bring in biomedical equipment such as oxygen concentrators.

Without this simple device, our medical teams in Gaza are forced to witness their patients die from entirely preventable causes.”

The petty and cruel denial of medical equipment to the civilian Gaza population has been a mark of the current extremist Israeli government. The Israelis have also just ignored requests to bring in solar-powered medical equipment. It can’t be shipped without approval and lots of procedures can’t be done without it. The Israeli authorities have told bald-faced lies about there being no limit to the entry of humanitarian goods into the Strip, a claim that Doctors without Borders called “absurd.”

Concerned governments should impose targeted sanctions and suspend arms transfers to press the Israeli government to ensure access to humanitarian aid and basic services in Gaza, in accordance with Israel’s obligations under international law and the recent International Court of Justice order in South Africa’s genocide case.

“The Israeli government’s use of starvation as a weapon of war has proven deadly for children in Gaza,” said Omar Shakir, Israel and Palestine director at Human Rights Watch. “Israel needs to end this war crime, stop this suffering, and allow humanitarian aid to reach all of Gaza unhindered.”

A United Nations-coordinated partnership of 15 international organizations and UN agencies investigating the hunger crisis in Gaza reported on March 18, 2024, that “all evidence points towards a major acceleration of death and malnutrition.” The partnership said that in northern Gaza, where 70 percent of the population is estimated to be experiencing catastrophic hunger, famine could occur anytime between mid-March and May.

Gaza’s Health Ministry reported as of April 1, that 32 people, including 28 children, had died of malnutrition and dehydration at hospitals in northern Gaza. Save the Children confirmed on April 2 the deaths from starvation and disease of 27 children. Earlier in March, World Health Organisation (WHO) officials found “children dying of starvation” in northern Gaza’s Kamal Adwan and al-Awda hospitals. In southern Gaza, where aid is more accessible but still grossly inadequate, UN agencies in mid-February said that 5 percent of children under age 2 were found to be acutely malnourished.

Human Rights Watch in March interviewed a doctor in northern Gaza, a volunteer doctor who has since left Gaza, the parents of two infants who doctors said died of starvation-related complications in both mother and child, and the parents of four other children suffering from malnutrition and dehydration.

Human Rights Watch reviewed the death certificate for one of the children, and photos of two of the children in critical condition that showed signs of emaciation. All had been treated at Kamal Adwan hospital in Beit Lahia, northern Gaza.

Human Rights Watch health advisers also reviewed verified pictures and videos online of three other evidently emaciated children who died and four others in critical condition who also showed signs of emaciation.

Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, who heads Kamal Adwan hospital’s pediatrics unit, told Human Rights Watch on April 4 that 26 children had died after experiencing starvation-related complications in his hospital alone. He said that at least 16 of the children who died were under 5 months old, at least 10 were between 1 and 8 years old, and that a 73-year-old man suffering from malnutrition had also died. 

Dr. Safiya said one of the infants died at just two days old after being born severely dehydrated, apparently exacerbated by his mother’s poor health: “[She] had no milk to give him.”

Nour al-Huda, an 11-year-old girl with cystic fibrosis, was admitted to Kamal Adwan hospital on March 15. Doctors there told her mother that Nour was suffering from malnutrition, dehydration, and an infection in her lungs, and administered her oxygen and a saline solution. “Nour al-Huda now weighs 18 kilograms [about 40 pounds],” her mother told Human Rights Watch. “I can see her chest bones sticking out.”

International humanitarian law prohibits the starvation of civilians as a method of warfare. The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court provides that intentionally starving civilians by “depriving them of objects indispensable to their survival, including willfully impeding relief supplies,” is a war crime.

Since the Hamas-led October 7, 2023, attacks in Israel, the Israeli government has deliberately blocked the delivery of aid, food, and fuel into Gaza, while impeding humanitarian assistance and depriving civilians of the means to survive. Israeli officials ordering or carrying out these actions are committing collective punishment against the civilian population and the starvation of civilians as a method of warfare, both of which are war crimes.

Israeli government actions that undermine the ability of the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) to carry out its recognized role in distributing aid in Gaza have exacerbated the effects of the restrictions.

A doctor who volunteered at the European hospital in Khan Younis in southern Gaza for two weeks in late January said that medical staff were forced to treat patients with limited medical supplies. He described the difficulty of treating malnutrition and dehydration, lacking essential items such as glucose, electrolytes, and feeding tubes. He said that one patient’s mother, desperate for solutions, resorted to crushing potatoes to create a makeshift liquid for tube feeding. Despite its nutritional inadequacy, the doctor said, “I ended up telling my other patients to find potatoes and do the same.”

On January 26, the International Court of Justice, in a case brought by South Africa, ordered provisional measures, including requiring Israel to “take immediate and effective measures to enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian aid” and other actions to comply with the 1948 Genocide Convention. On March 28, the court indicated that Israel had not complied with this order and imposed a more detailed provisional measure requiring the government to ensure the unimpeded provision of basic services and aid in full cooperation with the UN, while noting that “famine is setting in.”

MSNBC Video added by IC: “Death by starvation is slow and cruel’: famine is projected to take hold of Gaza within weeks”

Governments should impose targeted sanctions, including travel bans and asset freezes, against officials and individuals responsible for the continued commission of the war crimes of collective punishment, deliberate obstruction of humanitarian aid and using starvation of civilians as a weapon of war.

Several countries have responded to the Israeli government’s unlawful restrictions on assistance by airdropping aid. The United States also pledged to build a temporary seaport in Gaza. However, aid groups and UN officials have said such efforts are inadequate to prevent a famine. Another attempt to deliver aid by sea was halted after an Israeli attack on aid workers on April 1.

On April 4, the Israeli cabinet agreed to several measures to increase the amount of aid entering Gaza, apparently following pressure from the US government.

“Governments outraged by the Israeli government starving civilians in Gaza should not be looking for band-aid solutions to this humanitarian crisis,” Shakir said. “Israel’s announcement that it will increase aid shows that outside pressure works. Israel’s allies like the US, UK, France, and Germany need to press for full-throttle aid delivery by immediately suspending their arms transfers.”

Starvation in Gaza

Prior to the current hostilities, 1.2 million of Gaza’s then-2.2 million people were estimated to be facing acute food insecurity, and over 80 percent were reliant on humanitarian aid. Israel maintains overarching control over Gaza, including over the movement of people and goods, territorial waters, airspace, the infrastructure upon which Gaza relies, and the population registry. This leaves Gaza’s population, whom Israel has subjected to an unlawful closure for more than 16 years, almost entirely dependent on Israel for access to fuel, electricity, medicine, food, and other essential commodities.

Nonetheless, before October 7, large amounts of humanitarian assistance reached the population. “Before this crisis, there was enough food in Gaza to feed the population,” said WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. “Malnutrition was a rare occurrence. Now, people are dying, and many more are sick.”

The WHO reported that the number of children under age 5 who are acutely malnourished has jumped from 0.8 percent before the hostilities in Gaza to between 12.4 and 16.5 percent in northern Gaza. Oxfam said on April 3 that since January, people in northern Gaza have been forced to survive on an average of 245 calories a day, “less than a can of fava beans.”

According to a nutrition vulnerability analysis conducted in March by the Global Nutrition Cluster, a network of humanitarian organizations chaired by UNICEF, 90 percent of children ages 6-23 months and pregnant and breastfeeding women across Gaza faced “severe food poverty,” eating two or fewer food groups each day.

Children with preexisting health conditions are particularly vulnerable to the devastating effects of malnutrition, which significantly weakens immunity. And starvation, even for survivors, leads to lasting harm, especially in children, causing stunted growth, cognitive issues, and developmental delays.

Gaza’s Health Ministry announced on March 8 that about 60,000 pregnant women in Gaza suffered from malnutrition, dehydration and inadequate health care. Poor nutrition during pregnancy harms both the baby and the mother, increasing the risk of miscarriages, fetal deaths, compromised immune system development, growth impacts, and maternal mortality.

Older people are also at particular risk of malnutrition, which increases mortality among those with acute or chronic illnesses. HelpAge International reported that even before October, 45 percent of older people in Gaza were going to bed hungry at least once a week, with 6 percent hungry every night.

The impact on Gaza’s population of the Israeli government’s use of starvation as a weapon of war is compounded by the near-total collapse of the healthcare system. Out of Gaza’s 36 hospitals, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), only 10 are operational, none of them fully, both as a result of the Israeli military’s repeated, apparently unlawful attacks on medical facilities, personnel, and transport, as well as the severe restrictions on the entry of fuel and other supplies.

Accounts from Gaza

On March 19, Andrea De Domenico, head of OCHA in the occupied Palestinian territory, visited Kamal Adwan hospital, where he said about 15 malnourished children arrive daily due to shortages in food, water, and proper sanitation. He described dire conditions at the hospital, noting damage to certain areas and its reliance on a single generator.

Among the cases that Human Rights Watch investigated:

• A man from Beit Lahia said his infant son, Abdelaziz, died just hours after his severely malnourished mother gave birth to him in Kamal Adwan hospital on February 24. He shared Abdelaziz’s death certificate with Human Rights Watch, which said that Abdelaziz was born premature. His father said that the hospital staff hooked Abdelaziz up to a ventilator because he was having trouble breathing, but that the ventilator stopped working after the hospital ran out of the necessary fuel a few hours later. “Abdelaziz died immediately,” he said. He expressed concern for his wife, who had been surviving on legumes and canned food, emphasizing their ongoing struggle to access adequate nourishment.
• The father of newborn twin girls said that one of his babies, Joud, died at Kamal Adwan hospital on March 2 after suffering from malnutrition, eight days after she was born. He said that he struggled to feed his family prior to the girls’ birth, but that they only had bread to eat, without meat or protein. He said that after the twins’ birth, his wife could not produce milk to breastfeed the girls and that store-bought milk was scarce. He described Joud’s deteriorating condition, saying that her “limbs became very cold, and she was breathing very slowly.” His mother-in-law accompanied Joud to the hospital, where she later passed away. The father expressed concern for the health of the surviving twin.
• Fadi, a 6-year-old boy from al-Nasser neighborhood in Gaza City, has cystic fibrosis, a genetic disorder that causes damage to the lungs. Fadi’s mother said that because of the Israeli blockade, she struggled to obtain the necessary medication and provide adequate nourishment. By mid-January, Fadi’s health had deteriorated to the point where he could no longer walk, prompting his hospitalization. “Fadi weighed 30 kilograms [about 66 pounds] before the war, now he is 12 [about 26 pounds],” she said. Fadi was evacuated from Kamal Adwan hospital on March 23 and was receiving treatment at a hospital in Cairo, a relative said on March 28.
• Wissam Hammad, the uncle of 5-year-old Muhammad, who has cerebral palsy and is lactose and gluten-intolerant and can only eat blended food, had great difficulties in securing food for him:

Most of his food should be fruit and vegetables, which is what I try to buy. But all I can find and afford are oranges. The problem is that he cannot chew, so we need to break down the food for him. Everything is very expensive.

• Dr. Ahmed Shahin, a pediatrician, said that before he could leave Gaza on November 16, Osman, his 14-year-old son with cerebral palsy, who uses a gastrostomy feeding tube, had lost seven kilograms (about 15 pounds) since the beginning of the hostilities because they lacked access to both the specific food he needed—such as vegetables—and electricity to blend his food.

Obstacles to Aid Delivery

Ongoing Israeli bombardment and ground operations, lack of security assurances from Israel, widespread infrastructure damage, and communications disruptions make it difficult to distribute the little aid that does get into Gaza. Humanitarian organizations have reported that Israeli forces have attacked their aid convoys and workers. Israeli forces have also shot at and shelled people congregating to collect aid, killing and injuring hundreds.

An Israeli government spokesperson stated on March 18 that aid entering Gaza faced no limits apart from security concerns. Other officials have blamed the UN for distribution delays and accused Hamas of aid diversion or the Gaza police of failing to secure convoys. On March 29, the Israeli Defense Ministry’s body governing civilian affairs in the Palestinian territories, COGAT, disputed the March 18 UN-supported humanitarian report warning of an imminent famine, and said that it “does not reflect the full situation.” COGAT denied that the Israeli government was purposely starving Gaza’s civilian population. Human Rights Watch wrote to COGAT on April 2 seeking comment on our findings, but did not receive a response as of the time of publication.

However, OCHA reported on April 8 that only one of four food aid missions that require coordination in Gaza were facilitated by Israeli authorities in March. Only nine World Food Programme aid shipments have made it to the north since January 1, the most recent of which was 18 truckloads on March 17. The World Food Programme said at least 300 trucks are needed every day for the north alone.

The United States has resorted to airdropping food into Gaza and plans to build a floating pier at sea to deliver aid, a proposal criticized by 26 nongovernmental organizations, including Human Rights Watch, as “risky, expensive, and ineffective.” UN Humanitarian Coordinator Jamie McGoldrick has stressed that road transport is the only viable solution for increasing aid flow.

The restrictions on aid delivery make accessing food for people requiring a specific diet particularly difficult. Several representatives of humanitarian organizations said that they have been unable to provide food for children on special diets or to reach them. A Palestine Children’s Relief Fund staff member said they could only provide baby formula and could not respond to the needs of children with specific diet requirements. Medical Aid for Palestine said the special food items they had in storage ran out quickly, and since then, they have been unable to find and provide those in need with specialized food items:

Assistance is barely coming in: a quarter of the population is at risk of famine. Under these circumstances, people with disabilities and [people in vulnerable situations] suffer the most. When you speak about food, it’s hard to support people who need a specific diet and medical assistance.

Following an Israeli airstrike in central Gaza on April 1, 2024, which hit three marked vehicles from the international food organization World Central Kitchen and killed seven aid workers from several countries, Cyprus announced that ships carrying around 240 tons of aid for Gaza would turn back. World Central Kitchen, Project Hope, and ANERA, all providers of food aid, suspended their Gaza operations in light of the attack, and the United Arab Emirates paused its involvement in a maritime aid corridor.

Via Human Rights Watch

Some 70% of people in Gaza are forced to drink contaminated water or water with too much salt in it, which is a health hazard, according to Doctors without Borders (MSF). Although each person needs about 3 liters a day of drinking water, and needs four times that for hygiene and other purposes, entire families are getting only 3 liters a day, according to MSf. There is an estimated one toilet for every 500 people.

There is a severe risk of a massive spike in infant mortality from dirty water, not to mention malnutrition from insufficient food being allowed into the Strip.

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reports on a seldom-considered issue concerning the Israeli assault on the civilians of Gaza, which is the water and sanitation catastrophe. The Israeli government of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu forced over a million Palestinians of Gaza into the far south of the Strip, Rafah, which is only 20% of its land area. Although the Israelis said that this zone would be safe for noncombatants, they have been bombing it in recent days and say they will invade it. Some two-thirds of the Palestinians so far ethnically cleansed from their homes in the north and center of the Strip have congregated in Rafah.

Although most press reporting has considered mainly the deaths of Palestinian civilians from Israeli bombardment, which have risen to over 27,000, some 70% of them women and children, the deaths from malnutrition and dirty water, i.e. from poor sanitation, have not been reported with the same clarity. Israel has destroyed the Gaza hospital system on the phony pretext that medical complexes are “power centers” and sites of militant Hamas activity. There is no compelling evidence that this narrative is true, and in some instances it has been debunked by US newspapers of record.

Hosny Muhannad, spokesman for the Gaza Municipality, explained to al-Arabi al-Jadid that “the scorched earth policy followed by the [Israeli] occupation [government] during its aggression against the Gaza Strip led to the cessation of many basic service sectors, including the work of municipalities, including repairing main and secondary roads, rainwater drainage, and wastewater drainage from the streets.”

The ground water in Gaza is heavily polluted with sewage and industrial waste. Because of climate change and the rising Mediterranean, salt water has leaked into the aquifer. Only 4% of ground water in Gaza is believed by international health experts to be potable.

Al Jazeera English Video: “Gaza’s water crisis: Destruction and desperation”

Clean water came from three desalinization plants, but the Israelis closed them after October 7 and only restored their production after severe pressure from the Biden administration. However, they deliver water through pipelines. Many of the pipelines don’t work because there is not enough fuel to operate their pumps. Other pipelines have been broken by intensive Israeli bombing.

Neither the some 150,000 remaining Palestinians in North Gaza nor the 1.4 million crowded into Gaza have clean water and sanitation. All 2.25 million Palestinians in Gaza need assistance in these areas.

The UN reports, “Currently only 5.7 per cent of water is being produced from all the water sources in Gaza, compared to pre-war production levels. Safe drinking water and water for domestic use, including personal hygiene, remains very limited.”

There had been 284 groundwater wells. As noted, the water they yielded was problematic. It has a high salt content, which can cause dehydration, and it is often polluted. In ordinary times people could boil it, but people living in tents and shelters without sufficient fuel cannot reliably boil their water. Only 17% of the wells are operating. Some 39 were destroyed by Israeli bombing, and 93 have been damaged.

Needless to say, Gaza City, Rafah and other municipalities cannot run wastewater treatment centers in the midst of this war, in which Israeli pilots and tank commanders have deliberately targeted civilian buildings and infrastructure. None of the wastewater treatment systems are operative. They have either been damaged by bombing, or don’t have enough fuel. There isn’t enough power for solid waste management.

Muhannad told Al-Arabi al-Jadid, “the repeated Israeli targeting of streets and intersections, and the repeated attacks on the already exhausted infrastructure, which caused great destruction in it and hindered its ability to deal with weather depressions and rainwater, which have become traffic obstacles for private vehicles, ambulances, and civil defense”

The bombed out streets are pockmarked so rain water and sewage is standing in these holes.

Gaza is afloat in piss and shit. That is a cholera and hepatitis epidemic waiting to happen.

Infants and toddlers are extremely vulnerable to dehydration from diarrhea, and there is almost certainly an epidemic of dead babies as a result of these unsanitary conditions. Although bombing has killed perhaps 8,000 children (probably many more), the lack of water and lack of clean water will potentially kill many thousands more.

It should be remembered that one reason given by al-Qaeda for the 9/11 attacks was that US policy in Iraq in the 1990s was to deny the country chlorine imports for water purification, resulting in thousands of deaths of infants.

OCHA notes, “Two out of out of three desalination plans are partially operating: the Middle Area plant produces an average of 750 cubic metres per day and is distributed via water trucking and the South Gaza desalination plant produces 1,700 cubic metres per day; around 600 cubic metres are distributed via water trucking and 1,100 cubic metres via the water network. The UAE’s small desalination plant located on the Egyptian side of Rafah, operates at full capacity, providing 2,400 cubic metres per day, following the construction of a 3-kilometre transmission line.”

That is 4,850 cubic meters of water per day, or 4,850,000 liters. Each individual needs on the order of 12 liters per day of water for drinking, food, hygiene and cooking purposes, according to the World Health Organization. The 2.2 million Palestinians therefore need about 26.4 million liters a day of water. They are only getting 18% of that from the desalinization plants, assuming it can be distributed to them, which is the only really potable water to be had.

h/t WHO .

The groundwater is dirty. Some refugees are reduced to cupping their hands amidst the sewage in the streets and drinking from it.

The reason I question whether the water from the remaining desalinization plants is even being reliably distributed is that OCHA says this: “Mekorot Connections: Two of the three water pipelines are not functioning (the Mentar pipeline since the beginning of the conflict, and the Bani Suhaila pipeline since 18 December. The Bani Saeed pipeline is functioning, but is currently producing 6,000 cubic metres per day, which is only 42 per cent of its full capacity. Plans are in place to repair the Bani Suheila pipeline, but there are challenges for safe access, communication, and coordination of repair activities.”

OCHA notes anecdotal reports from aid workers and medical personnel of a rise of hepatitis A cases in Gaza.

Since the building materials for constructing toilets and repairing the sewage system are considered dual use by the Israeli authorities (i.e. they could be used by Hamas for its own infrastructure), they are not being let in at the requisite rate. UNICEF tried to construct 80 family latrines this week. But “the sanitation coverage remains very low. WASH partners continue to construct family latrines, but the lack of cement, wood and other construction materials slows down the progress.”

Finally, OCHA says, “The crisis is exacerbated by a fuel shortage, hindering sewage station operation and leading to environmental and public health concerns. The situation is worsened by continuous restricted access to essential sanitation supplies and services in Gaza.”