International community failed to protect Gaza children

This is an analytical note presented by an American author and human rights activist on the international community’s failure to protect children, with a case study of children in Gaza as victims of Israeli violence.

It has been said that the current genocide in Gaza is the most widely publicized genocide in history. This, of course, is due to social media, where anyone with a phone and internet connection can spread information around the world in seconds. And despite the illusion of ceasefire, the genocide continues to this day.

Official Palestinian estimates are that about 70,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel in two years of genocide. Some estimates, however, put that total as much as ten times higher. The brutality is astounding.

Perhaps most astounding is the toll this has taken on children. According to a report from ‘Save the Children’ of September 5 of this year, at least 20,000 children have been killed by Israel. I’ll quote from that report: “At least 1,009 of the children killed were under age one, with nearly half (450) of these babies born and killed during the war. At least 42,011 children have been injured, according to the Ministry of Health, with the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities reporting at least 21,000 children left permanently disabled. Thousands more are missing or presumed buried under rubble.” Any person with any sense of morality must be horrified by these numbers.

But it doesn’t end there. The report goes on: “Israeli forces have intensified their bombardment across the Gaza Strip, damaging 97% of schools, 94% of hospitals and killing children who are seven times more likely to die from blast injuries than adults. Their bodies are more vulnerable to trauma, and they often suffer distinct types of injuries that require specialist treatment tailored to their physiology and development.”

The damage is not only physical. For those that survive, psychological damage is acute. A report by Al Jazeera from October 31 of this year states the following: “Psychologists warn that more than 80 percent of Gaza’s children now show symptoms of severe trauma.” The report details the suffering of a few children. One, a fifteen-year-old boy, now suffers from high blood pressure, chronic diarrhoea, and kidney failure, all resulting from the traumatic experiences he has witnessed. Another is 8-year-old Lana, who “…survived an Israeli air strike that collapsed the roof of their home. She developed vitiligo, a chronic skin condition that causes the loss of skin, hair, and eye colour, as a result of exposure to the smoke and chemicals from the missiles. ‘Many doctors have tried to treat her, but without success,’ her father said. ‘She panics every time she hears an explosion.’” She, like the 15-year-old boy mentioned above, is suffering from both physical and psychological trauma.

A UNICEF report from October 26 of this year summed up the situation: “One million children have endured the daily horrors of surviving in the world’s most dangerous place to be a child, leaving them with wounds of fear, loss and grief.”

What is the world’s responsibility to these children, these 20,000 who have been killed and the tens of thousands who will have to live with lifelong physical and mental challenges? A report from the Middle East Monitor of November 10 said the following: “The right to protection is proclaimed for every child around the world, yet international institutions remain silent in the face of Gaza’s devastation. The same bodies that declare children’s rights to be universal fall silent when it comes to Palestinian children. This silence threatens not only Gaza, but the future of children everywhere. Because when rights are applied selectively, they are no longer ‘universal’, and they lose their credibility.”

The report continues: “On 20 November 1989, the UN General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Rights of the Child, promising universal rights for all children: to life, to protection, to education, to health. On paper, every child is equal. But in Gaza, where dozens of children are killed or injured every single day, the claim of universality is reduced to an empty slogan.

“When war broke out in Ukraine, the international community mobilized immediately. Funds were opened, schools were prepared for refugees, and the media kept the issue at the center of attention for weeks. In Palestine, however, the same childhood, the same rights, are ignored. This silence proves that children’s rights operate differently depending on geography.” I might add that those rights also differ depending on race.

In Canada, where I live, the government offered to admit first 1,000 Palestinians from Gaza, and later increased the cap to 5,000. To date, less than 1,000 Palestinians from Gaza have arrived in Canada, and the Canadian government has done little to assist them in arriving. Most of those desperate refugees have had to pay human traffickers to get them out of Gaza and to Canada.

Compare this to the Ukrainian refugees admitted to Canada. To date, 298,128 Ukrainian refugees have been brought to Canada, thanks in part to the Canadian government’s untiring efforts to assist them. Nearly 1,000,000 applications have been approved.

In a recent study performed by myself, Meray Sadek and Neela Hassan, we found that, as Professor Sadek wrote, “the more a refugee resembles Canadian ideals—white, Western, liberal—the more likely they are to be seen, heard, and helped. The system is not designed to recognize displacement that isn’t tied to a specific nation-state, which makes their suffering legally and politically invisible.

So “…compassion in Canada’s refugee system is conditional. It’s most readily extended to those who fit Canadian norms in terms of race, religion, language, or lifestyle. Those who don’t fit are often framed as burdens, threats, or ungrateful.”

Let’s look at other examples of how children in war zones have been assisted by world governments, and compare them to how those same governments treat Palestinian children.

A report in the Times Colonist of September 2 of this year, states the following: “One year after a devastating rocket attack on Ukraine’s largest children’s hospital that killed four and injured a dozen, the century-old facility is getting ready to reopen — with help from the Canadian Red Cross.” A report from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) of April of this year, stated the following: “The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), with financial support from the Government of Latvia, has completed the renovation of Preschool Education Institution No. 19 and the kitchen block of the Chernihiv Regional Children’s Hospital. These facilities are among the war-damaged sites restored under the ‘Latvia for Chernihiv: Restoring Social Infrastructure’ project.”

The United States has been complicit in the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza from day one, and in August cancelled all visitor visas for anyone coming from Gaza. According to a BBC report, the “Palestine Children’s Relief Fund said in a statement that the decision ‘will have a devastating and irreversible impact on our ability to bring injured and critically ill children from Gaza to the United States for lifesaving medical treatment’”. According to an August 17 report on the German news site DW, this cancellation came “after the US-based charity HEAL Palestine last week said it had brought 11 critically wounded Gazan children, together with their caregivers and siblings, to the US for medical treatment.” This humanitarian trip drew the attention of Laura Loomer, a far-right influencer, who claimed, without evidence, that some of these medical visas were issued to people who were ‘pro-Hamas’. Based on that, the U.S. cancelled all visas.

The so-called ceasefire, which is nothing more than a slight easing of Israel’s savage bombing, was supposed to enable food and medicine to flood into Gaza. This has not happened. According to Oxfam on October 29 of this year, “With a fragile ceasefire agreement now in peril, Oxfam and other aid groups are ready to scale up to deliver more food, clean water, and medicine to millions of Palestinians in need. Despite overwhelming needs, the Israeli government is still allowing just a small fraction of the humanitarian aid needed into Gaza.”

Let us look for a moment at the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Article 25, section one, reads, in part, as follows: “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services….” Section two includes this phrase: “Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance.”

The entry of food, water and medical supplies should not have been part of the ceasefire agreement; the world should have demanded an end to the Israeli blockade that deprived the people of Gaza of those life-essential supplies the very day that blockade began. History will not treat kindly countries and their leaders who stood by and allowed this atrocity to be committed against men, women and children. Schools will teach about this period the same way the Holocaust is taught: savage, racist leaders of one country slaughtered hundreds of thousands of defenseless people of another. And to that will be added the fact that many developed nations not only allowed it to happen, but were complicit in these war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Can anyone see pictures of dead children, including babies, burned, dismembered and almost unrecognizable, and not condemn the people responsible? Can anyone view scenes of children, so thin from lack of food that their bones are exposed, and not want to stop this atrocity? Where, we must ask, are the so-called leaders of ‘civilized’ society? We can expect nothing of humanity from U.S. President Donald Trump; he has shown his disdain for suffering people at home and globally. But what of Canada’s Mark Carney? Britian’s Keir Starmer? France’s Emmanuel Macron? These countries recently ‘officially’ recognized Palestine, mainly following the ongoing demands of their citizens. According to the Harvard Law Review, “Recognition of statehood is ‘a formal acknowledgment by another state that an entity possesses the qualifications for statehood,’ including a defined territory, permanent population, government control, and capacity to engage in international relations. It enables diplomatic and related benefits under domestic and international law, and promotes the legitimacy of the recognized state with third parties.” Canada, Britain and France, and all the 157 of the 193 member states of the United Nations that recognize Palestine must insist, through all diplomatic means including extremely punishing sanctions, that Israel end the starvation and bombing of children and adults in Palestine.

The world has failed the Palestinians for over 75 years, and that failure has been glaringly obvious to the entire world since October of 2023. We must work unceasingly for justice for the Palestinians, and to hold accountable all those responsible for their suffering.

By Robert Fantina (American Author and Human Rights Activist)