Providing urgent and immediate protection for Palestinian children

The practices of the Israeli occupation against Palestinian children are escalating, and the extremist occupation government is committing all forms of genocide, starvation, and deliberate killing within the ethnic cleansing war waged by the occupying state. It has become necessary to work to provide urgent and immediate protection for Palestinian children, in light of the systematic targeting of them by the occupation, coinciding with the International Children's Day, which falls on the twentieth of November of each year.

The international community must not exclude Palestinian children from international protection, as they suffer from many calamities, especially with the escalation of inhumane and disastrous practices and the violation of their most basic rights, most importantly the right to life. The latest statistics on the number of child martyrs reflect the hideousness of the ongoing genocidal war that targets innocent people without discrimination, especially children who pay the highest price.

Children in Gaza are facing a real threat, with hundreds of thousands estimated to be suffering from severe shortages of food and clean drinking water. Palestinian children in the West Bank are subjected to arrest and military trials that violate their basic rights, with 85% of them handcuffed and blindfolded, and many arrested at night, in flagrant violation of all international norms and agreements, including the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which guarantees special protection for children from arrest and violence. Some 70 Palestinians, including children, are under house arrest as a result of the increased restrictions since October 2023.

The racist law passed by the Israeli Knesset in November 2024, which allows the detention of Palestinian children under the age of 14 if they are convicted of “terrorist” crimes, as they call them, or similar activities, including murder, constitutes a serious escalation against their rights and increases their suffering, in addition to the disastrous consequences of banning UNRWA activities on the services provided to children, whether health, education or living.

The international community must take urgent action to ensure that the occupying state respects all international covenants and treaties, most notably the Convention on the Rights of the Child, as children in the Gaza Strip are the ones paying the heavy price for the ongoing occupation aggression since October 7, 2023, in full view of the world, which is still unable to stop this genocide. The bodies of children in the Gaza Strip have been exposed to various weapons, including missiles and bombs, and the most hideous forms of killing and destruction, in addition to the dozens who have been killed by hunger, thirst and disease as a result of the siege, and thousands of them have become orphans.

Palestinian childhood is still being robbed in light of the continued brutal aggression of the occupation against the Palestinian people and the violation of the rights of Palestinian children, in a clear challenge to the International Convention on the Rights of the Child, and all the special rights it includes that are binding on all countries and governments. These numbers are not just statistics, but rather reflect human suffering that requires action from the international community to save children, guarantee their basic rights, and assume its legal and moral responsibilities towards these crimes.

International organizations and countries of the world must move to ensure relief for children and their families, prevent famine, facilitate the evacuation of the injured and sick for treatment in hospitals outside the Strip, provide health and humanitarian services, and the importance of working hard to end this genocide and save human life that is at risk of extinction, end the longest occupation on earth, build a just and secure future for the children of Palestine, and hold the leaders of the occupation and its soldiers accountable for the crimes and massacres committed against them before the international judiciary.