GAZA, (PIC)
Barefoot, six-year-old As’ad Hamid wanders among the tents of displaced persons in Khan Yunis, carrying a water jug back to his family after a grueling journey that took him at least three hours.
As’ad is one of over a million Palestinian children in the Gaza Strip, all of whom have become victims of the ongoing Israeli genocide that has been affecting Gaza for more than 13 months. He knows nothing about World Children’s Day, observed today (November 20 each year), but he is aware that he has been suffering for months, that he is starving, lacks shoes, and has been deprived of the joy of what should have been his first school year. His fear does not cease with each airstrike and flyover of Israeli planes, which have killed several of his relatives and neighbors.
As’ad tells the Palestinian Information Center: “We lost everything. I want nothing but for the war to stop. I want to return to my home in Gaza.”
Today, November 20, marks the anniversary of the United Nations General Assembly’s adoption in 1954 of the principle that children everywhere should enjoy their full human rights, regardless of their gender, race, or color. On the same day in 1959, the General Assembly adopted the “Declaration of the Rights of the Child,” which was also the date in 1989 when the “Convention on the Rights of the Child” was adopted, emphasizing the need to respect and protect children’s lives and their human dignity.
While these legal texts sound good, in reality, they have no value or role in protecting the children of Gaza. Before the eyes of the entire world, Israel violates the rights of children in Gaza, with thousands of them becoming martyrs, injured, missing, or orphaned, having lost one or both parents.
Systematic targeting
The Protection Center for Human Rights states that this occasion comes amid organized and systematic Israeli escalation against Gazan children. It highlights that children in the Gaza Strip are subjected to serious violations of their fundamental rights by Israeli occupation forces, who deliberately target them with killings, injuries, arrests, displacement, restrictions on freedom of movement, and deprivation of the right to education, housing, nutritious food, and clean water.
The bitter harvest
According to Ismail Thawabteh, Director General of the Government Media Office in Gaza, the Israeli genocide has resulted in the martyrdom of 17,492 children, including 211 infants who were born and died during the genocide. He reported that among the child martyrs, 825 were under one year old. Thawabteh noted that there are 35,060 children living without their parents or without one of them, and 3,500 children are at risk of death due to malnutrition and food shortages.
Children in Gaza have not been spared from brutal Israeli arrest and torture campaigns. Since October 7, 2023, occupation forces have arrested dozens of children under inhumane conditions that lack the basic elements of human dignity guaranteed by international treaties, according to the Protection Center.
Occupation as the cause of children’s suffering
The center asserts that Israeli military occupation forces have been and remain a primary cause of Palestinian children’s suffering. They continue to systematically target Gazan children with military attacks without prior warning, sometimes destroying residential buildings knowing that dozens of children are inside.
The occupation forces have deliberately directed their attacks at shelters housing thousands of children.
Ten-year-old Naif Abu Hamada lost his parents and two siblings in the first month of the war on Gaza due to an Israeli airstrike that targeted them in northern Gaza. He fled with his grandparents and two siblings to Khan Yunis in southern Gaza.
On the morning of Thursday, November 14, he spoke about his suffering from displacement and his sadness and longing for his parents, in a testimony published by the Palestinian Center for Human Rights. The following day, he became the next victim when he accompanied his grandmother to eastern Rafah in an attempt to obtain a bag of flour, only to be targeted by an Israeli airstrike, becoming a martyr and a witness to the tragedies that Gazan children endure before the eyes of the entire world.
