“Bombs falling, hospitals destroyed, children killed [and] the world is silent,” Rachael Cummings, Save the Children’s humanitarian director in Gaza, said. “No aid, no safety, no future.”
The organisation said in a statement the war’s resumption is “a death sentence for Gaza’s children”. More than 17,900 children have been killed since the war began in October 2023, according to Gaza’s Government Media Office.
“Children are being killed in their sleep in tents, they are being starved and attacked. The only way to ensure children and families are protected is through a definitive ceasefire,” Save the Children said.
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Al Jazeera’s Hind Khoudary, reporting from Deir el-Balah, said people in Gaza were left “terrified, helpless and devastated” following the attacks amid the Israeli blockade of aid and electricity cuts.
“People are starving. They do not have access to food. The water desalination plant that was providing water for 500,000 Palestinians is not working [due to Israel cutting off electricity],” she said. “With all this happening, Palestinians wake up to a massive series of attacks in different areas of Gaza.”
Deliberately targeting children
A report commissioned by the United Nations said Israel is “deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the physical destruction of Palestinians as a group”. The March 13 report from the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory examines what it calls Israel’s “systematic use of sexual, reproductive and other forms of gender-based violence since 7 October 2023”.
The commission’s report is not the first time that international organisations and lawmakers have called attention to Israel’s violence against Palestinian mothers and children. In March 2024, Philippe Lazzarini, the commissioner-general of the UN agency Unrwa, wrote on X: “This is a war on children. It is a war on their childhood and their future.” The numbers are “staggering” he said. More children had been killed in Gaza in four months than in all global conflicts in the previous four years.
This has continued throughout Israel’s assault on Gaza. Between October 7 2023 and January 15 2025, children made up at least 18,000 of the 46,707 Palestinians killed in Gaza, according to data collected by the Gaza health ministry. Both figures are likely to be underestimates, as so many bodies remain buried under the rubble.
Most children have been killed by direct military strikes. Israel has dropped an estimated 85,000 tonnes of explosives on Gaza, killing Palestinians through direct hits, building collapses, fires and inhalation of toxic substances. Doctors have also reported evidence of children being killed in drone attacks and by snipers, including by shots to the head and chest.
Killed by design
Palestinian children are being killed by design. This has been explicitly articulated by the Israeli state.
Itamar Ben-Gvir, who was last week reappointed to the Netanyahu government as police minister, has publicly defended the army’s “open-fire” directive declaring: “We cannot have women and children getting close to the border … anyone who gets near must get a bullet in the head.” In January, MP and deputy speaker of the Knesset, Nissim Vaturi, said every child born in Gaza is “already a terrorist, from the moment of his birth”.
Palestinian children in Gaza have been telling their stories to a global audience. The killing, injury and starvation they are testifying to has proved a powerful counternarrative to the idea that Israel is simply “defending itself”. International humanitarian law states that: “Children affected by armed conflict are entitled to special respect and protection.”
But in Gaza, children are being killed in their thousands.
SOURCE: INDEPENDENT PRESS AND NEWS AGENCIES
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