By Mohamed Harees –

Lukman Harees

“All murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.” ~ Voltaire (Writer, philosopher, 1694 – 1778, France)

In 2012, the UN General Assembly proclaimed 1 June as the Global Day of Parents, to be observed annually in honour of parents throughout the world. Emphasizing the critical role of parents in rearing children, the Global Day of Parents recognizes that the family has the primary responsibility for nurturing and protecting children. Children should grow up in a family environment and an atmosphere of happiness, love, and understanding for the full and harmonious development of their personality. In the UK, the first week of June is designated as Child Safety Week, which focuses on educating children on different approaches to accident prevention and how they can keep themselves safe.

However,  making a mockery of these so-called laudable dedicated days for protecting children, it is an outright shame and a grave insult to human dignity that the world has been turning a blind eye to grave human rights violations against children, which are mounting by the minute in the Gaza Strip. Children represent their community’s dreams for their futures. Killing a large number of children in Gaza is not simply forcible depopulation. It is an effort to destabilise communities and crush their hopes for liberation and the right of return as mandated by the UN. Palestinian children are being killed by design. This has been explicitly articulated by the Israeli state.  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.

Itamar Ben-Gvir, the vicious police minister in Netanyahu’s government, 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”. An Israeli MP Moshe Saada claimed it was becoming increasingly clear to Israelis that “all Gazans must be destroyed”. Former Israeli Knesset member, Moshe Feiglin, in an interview with Channel 14, said that Gaza should be both occupied and settled, asserting that “not a single child should remain” in the besieged enclave.

In a different type of interview, the prominent Israeli politician Yair Golan, a former Israel Defense Forces (IDF) deputy chief of staff, however told the Israeli public radio station Reshet Bet that Israel was becoming a pariah state. “A sane country doesn’t fight against civilians, doesn’t kill babies as a hobby, and doesn’t set the goal of expelling a population”. The comments have, of course, sparked a domestic uproar. What made Golan’s remarks, also the leader of the center-left opposition party, rare was their focus on the plight of Gaza’s civilians. The controversy that followed has underscored how little the war’s impact on Palestinians has factored into the conversation in Israel, in contrast to the rest of the world. For many Jewish Israelis, it is hard to fathom that their children, most of whom must enlist in Israel’s military, could be committing the crimes that Golan described.

Golan is not the first public figure to have made such comments about Israel’s conduct in Gaza. Former defence minister and military chief of staff Moshe Yaalon accused Israel of ethnic cleansing during a major operation in 2024. Zehava Galon, a former leader of a dovish political party, highlighted the deaths of thousands of children at a recent protest in Tel Aviv. But unlike them, Golan has his political future at stake, lending more weight to his words. Instead of triggering introspection, these remarks prompted a media debate over Golan himself and the damage his remarks might cause to Israel.

The story of Hind Rajab, a five-year-old Palestinian girl in the Gaza Strip who was killed in January 2024 by Israeli occupation forces during their brutal invasion of the Gaza Strip, when their vehicle was shelled, was heartbreaking. It also killed six of her family members and two paramedics coming to her rescue. After the discovery of her body, many pro-Palestinian figures criticised Western media outlets for stating that Rajab had been “found dead” without attributing her death to Israel, contrasting it with the sympathetic coverage of the deaths of children in the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Rajab’s mother was critical of the Israeli army after the confirmed death of her daughter, stating, “How many more mothers are you waiting to feel this pain? How many more children do you want to get killed?”. UK Journalist Owen Jones argued in an August 2024 editorial that Rajab’s killing fit into a pattern of other Israeli atrocities; he wrote, “After each atrocity it perpetrates, the Israeli state has a standard modus operandi: deny, deflect, deceive, and wait for attention to move elsewhere”.

There are no winners in a war where thousands of children are killed, as the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child said, expressing outrage at the profound suffering of children. Despite the protection that should be provided to all children by international law, there have been devastating reports of acts that are forbidden by international humanitarian law, including killing, maiming, injuring, abduction, forcible displacement, deprivation of medical care, food, and water.  Gaza has become the deadliest place in the world to be a child.

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 report alleges deliberate acts have been aimed against mothers and children, including the destruction of Gaza’s main fertility clinic, Basma IVF clinic, which it said amounted to “a genocidal act under the Rome Statute and Genocide Convention”. It concluded that “this was done with the intent to destroy the Palestinians in Gaza as a group, in whole or in part, and that this is the only inference that could reasonably be drawn from the acts in question”.

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. Thousands of children in Gaza are at risk of imminent death after a nearly three-month total Israeli blockade on the besieged enclave, which has spread famine, as the United Nations relief chief warns. That has put 14,000 babies at risk of dying in the ‘next 48 hours’. Israeli attacks continue to kill dozens of Palestinians, including many children, each day, while what’s left of infrastructure and aid supplies are being destroyed.

Not just through killing by bombarding; in April 2024, a report published in the science journal Frontiers found that more than 90% of children in Gaza were affected by infectious diseases. There have also been multiple infant deaths from hypothermia as displaced families attempt to survive winter conditions. Israel’s destruction of medical and other infrastructure in the Strip has resulted in “indirect deaths” by communicable illness and noncommunicable conditions. Humanitarian actors are being forced to evacuate their offices and abandon warehouses full of aid. If this does not stop, a polio vaccine rollout may become impossible. The abnormally high child death rate is partly due to demographics. About 47% of Gaza’s population was under 18 years of age at the end of 2022. Children are generally more “susceptible to dehydration, diarrhoea, disease, and malnutrition” according to Unicef, which says the nutritional needs for infants under 23 months “are greater per kilogram of bodyweight than at any other time of life”. But the problem with these arguments is that they make child mortality rates in Gaza appear as a simple reflection of natural factors. They are not. They are a direct consequence of Israel’s military aggression in Gaza.

Israel has systematically used powerful explosives in densely populated areas and, through AI tracking systems such as “Where’s Daddy?”, deliberately targeted Palestinians in their family homes. Given the deep evidence base about childhood health, the logical outcome of using starvation as a method of war, actively denying aid, and destroying infrastructures that enable life is that children will die disproportionately.

The war on children in Gaza stands as a stark reminder of our collective responsibility. A generation of children is enduring the brutal violation of their rights and the destruction of their futures. Palestinian children in Gaza have been telling their stories to a global audience. The killing, injury, and starvation they are testifying to have proved a powerful counternarrative to the idea that Israel is simply “defending itself”. Self-defence is not an excuse to commit genocide. Self-defence must conform to international humanitarian law, which requires an armed force to meet the criteria of necessity, proportionality, and distinction. Israel’s actions fail the tests of humanitarian law.

Thankfully, there are winds of change. Millions are protesting against their governments’ silence! Who could have imagined 19 months ago that it would take more than a year and a half of slaughtering and starving Gaza’s children for the first cracks to appear in what has been a rock-solid wall of support for Israel from Western establishments? For example, the British establishment’s financial daily, the Financial Times, was the first to break ranks recently to condemn “the West’s shameful silence” in the face of Israel’s murderous assault on the tiny enclave. A dozen Tory MPs and peers in the House of Lords, all formerly staunch defenders of Israel too, urged British PM Keir Starmer to immediately recognise a Palestinian State.

As BTSelem, Israeli Human Rights body says, “The era of impunity for Israeli decision-makers is over. he International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor’s request to issue arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on suspicion of committing war crimes in Gaza signals Israel’s rapid decline into a moral abyss. The Israeli violence directed at Palestinians to perpetuate the occupation is state violence and is inherent to the Israeli apartheid regime. This is true in the West Bank, in the Gaza Strip, and everywhere else. The ICC intervention and ICJ rulings are a chance for us, Israelis, to realize what we should have understood long ago: that upholding a regime of supremacy, violence and oppression necessarily involves crimes and severe violations of human rights”. Recently, the UK, Canada, and France jointly decided to impose limited sanctions on Israel. Although laudable, it is too little, too late. More needs to be done without delay.

Article 27 of the UNCRC says that children and young people should be able to live in a way that helps them reach their full physical, mental, spiritual, moral, and social potential. For this to happen, they should have access to adequate food and housing. The UN has accused Israel of severe breaches of a global treaty protecting children’s rights, saying its military actions in Gaza have had a catastrophic impact on children and are among the worst violations in recent history. There is no justification for actions that defy international humanitarian law as well as international human rights law, including the Conventions on the Rights of the Child and the Convention on Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

Gaza must be one of the most heartbreaking places on earth for humanitarians. Every small effort to save a child’s life is undone by fierce devastation. In Gaza, the reality for over a million children is fear, utter deprivation, and unimaginable suffering. Every day without action steals another day from Gaza’s children. Every delay costs more lives. This war should haunt every one of us. Gaza’s children cannot wait. Where are the voices speaking out for the countless babies, children, and mothers in Gaza who face daily loss and devastation… Are they not deemed worthy of their attention and support? Are they not civilised enough to be seen and heard?

There is a way to stop these crimes from degenerating further. But it will require Western politicians and journalists, particularly(knowing the influence the West has on Israel), to find far more courage than they have dared muster so far. It will need more than rhetorical flourishes. It will need more than public handwringing. This isn’t just about politics or religion. It’s about humanity. It’s about refusing to accept that one life is more valuable than another because of race, ethnicity, or creed. The time for complacency is over. The question we must ask ourselves is this: What side of history do we want to be on? We must use our voices, our political capital, and our diplomatic leverage to pressurize our governments to use their power and influence to immediately push for a ceasefire and the entry of aid at scale.

By allowing ourselves to become desensitized to a genocide and baby killing, documented so thoroughly in real time, we run the risk of losing our collective humanity; when scenes coming out of the ongoing massacre in Gaza do not galvanise us because it does not “concern” us, we are paving the way for a detachment that will eventually trickle down into our day-to-day lives!