The Israeli war on Gaza is a war on Palestinian children. This was as true on 7 October as it is today.
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.
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.
Dr. Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of six books. His latest book, co-edited with Ilan Pappé, is Our Vision for Liberation: Engaged Palestinian Leaders and Intellectuals Speak Out. His other books include My Father was a Freedom Fighter and The Last Earth. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA). His website is www.ramzybaroud.net.
