From 2008 to October 6, 2023, 1,434 Palestinian children were reportedly killed, with another 32,175 injured, mostly at the hands of Israeli occupation forces. Of these, 1,025 children were killed in Gaza alone.
Today, almost a month after the start of the war, the fifth in fifteen years, around three thousand six hundred have already died.
The numbers on the consequences on Palestinian children over the last 15 years are summarized in the latest report by the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese.
Between 2019 and 2022, 1,679 Palestinian children and 15 Israeli children suffered permanent physical injuries – the report reads -. An average of 500-700 Palestinian children are estimated to be detained by Israeli occupation forces each year, with an estimated 13,000 mostly arbitrarily detained, interrogated, tried in military courts and imprisoned since 2000.
«Today’s hell cannot obscure the violence of recent decades – writes Albanese -. To address the crisis, it is imperative to understand what caused it. This is not to justify or minimize the heinous crimes against Israeli civilians on October 7; rather it forces us to face that horror in the context of what came before it.”
To understand the context, numbers help us.
Of the two million people who inhabited the Strip before the war, about half are minors, and being thirteen, fourteen, fifteen years old in Gaza today means that all you know is the Hamas regime, the blockade Israeli, and a cycle of wars, rubble and reconstruction. In Gaza, anyone who is a teenager today has never experienced anything else. All they know is this little strip of land in an endless cycle of violence and death. Captivity mixed with a feeling of revenge, the ingredients that make the soil of radicalization fertile.
This is one of the keys with which to interpret the ongoing conflict today. Imagining, hoping, that the war will end tomorrow, where to start to break the vicious circle of ferocity. Where do we start from to interrupt the automatism that has made violence the only response to violence? And before that: what wasn’t done in previous wars, when the fire ceased and the conflict seemed over but evidently wasn’t?
In 2016, less than two years after the end of the war that devastated the Gaza Strip in the summer of 2014, Ocha, the United Nations Agency for the Coordination of Humanitarian Actions, organized a conference on the risk of radicalization youth.
The combination of insecurity, captivity and unmet humanitarian needs, UN officials said, were creating the conditions for the extremism of the younger generations.
The delegates started from a fact: in 2016, given that freedom of movement was practically non-existent, 90% of the 260,000 students in the schools managed in the Strip by UNRWA, the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, had never left the Gaza Strip throughout their lives.
«When I look at the region, I sense the risk of radicalization of desperate young people», said Pierre Krähenbühl, Commissioner General of UNRWA, «I think of Gaza, of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, where the military government and the occupation define every aspect of public and private life, from restrictions on movement to punitive house demolitions and illegal settlement expansion. There is no way to quantify the cumulative human cost of the occupation.” The concerns were combined with appeals to the international community, UNRWA was already in a deep economic crisis, the responses of donors and governments were already highly incomplete and translated into the daily lives of citizens and children it meant less access to basic necessities , fewer schools, in a word less hope for the future in an area where the youth unemployment rate already reached 60%. The appeals for donations have remained almost unheard, and the underfunding has increasingly weakened the population, because UNRWA, in Gaza in particular, is not just a humanitarian agency, but is an artery of the life of the Palestinians who, from those aid, depend almost entirely.
The data and statistics on the childhood of Palestinian children in Gaza and the West Bank are a worrying snapshot of the present and should be an alarming reminder for the future. The latest report from Save the Children, from a few days ago, brings together pre-war and current data. The Occupied Palestinian Territories – the researchers write – are among the list of the 10 worst countries for children to live in. Let this comparison suffice: in 2021, Afghanistan and the Occupied Palestinian Territories recorded the highest number of children killed or maimed due to conflict. “The economic, social and political situation of over fifty years of occupation by Israel, combined with ongoing conflicts, have continued to have serious implications for minors,” reads the report: overall in all the occupied Palestinian territories, two and a half million people need humanitarian assistance, one million two hundred thousand are children. In the Gaza Strip the situation, even before the war, was alarming, especially from a health point of view. Children who needed medical care had to request special permission to leave the Strip, and in the first six months of 2023, 400 children in Gaza alone were unable to receive the care they needed in the West Bank.
Two children a day unable to be treated for serious, chronic illnesses. No specialist visits, no surgery, no access to urgent or life-saving drugs.
Things are no better in the West Bank, where more than a million children have no freedom of movement. A mobility hindered by Israeli checkpoints, by restrictions, by regular threats from settlers, by the fear of violence at checkpoints. From the terror of arrests. According to the latest data from Save the Children, between 500 and 1000 minors are held in Israeli prisons, almost half of whom were injured at the time of arrest. Education is no better. Half a million Palestinian boys and girls do not have access to quality education. Schools risk being demolished, equipment confiscated, and the Israeli armed forces often raid near or inside schools using tear gas. More than 80 schools in the West Bank face the daily presence of Israeli forces, and more than 58 schools are currently under a demolition or stop-use order. Translated into the daily lives of Palestinian children it means a constant increase in school dropouts.
For different reasons – the siege, the wars, the Hamas regime in Gaza, the violence of the settlers and the limitations on mobility in the West Bank – a generation of young Palestinians is growing up, losing faith in the value of politics, compromise and diplomacy and international aid.
A generation that grows up in an intermittency of wars.
Unresolved conflicts not only have not dissipated with the passage of time, but have worsened in the absence of just solutions.
Probably this war, like the previous ones, will demonstrate that there is no military solution to the problem of Gaza, because the problem of Gaza is not only to eradicate Hamas, its armed wing, and the organization of power, bureaucracy and welfare that he expressed in the Strip for sixteen years. Finding a solution for Gaza and for the security of the State of Israel means finding the formula to break the vicious cycle of violence. Every clash over the last fifteen years, every new cycle of attacks, has pushed an increasing number of young people towards radical fringes and extremist groups.
And, on the other hand, a life of deprivation and hardship, spent between living the war and trying to forget it, between mourning the dead and the cult of martyrdom that derives from it, has historically led to fomenting new cycles of radicalization.
Saving Palestinian children from exposure to the risk of extremism is the challenge of the international community but also the internal challenge of the state of Israel which is thinking today about fighting an enemy in the present, without asking what will become of Gaza tomorrow, what will be the future of Strip, how to avoid being another generation that associates daily life with war, death and revenge.
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