Concerned governments should impose targeted sanctions and suspend arms transfers to press the Israeli government to ensure access to humanitarian aid and basic services in Gaza, in accordance with Israel’s obligations under international law and the recent International Court of Justice order in South Africa’s genocide case.

“The Israeli government’s use of starvation as a weapon of war has proven deadly for children in Gaza,” said Omar Shakir, Israel and Palestine director at Human Rights Watch. “Israel needs to end this war crime, stop this suffering, and allow humanitarian aid to reach all of Gaza unhindered.”

A United Nations-coordinated partnership of 15 international organizations and UN agencies investigating the hunger crisis in Gaza reported on March 18, 2024, that “all evidence points towards a major acceleration of death and malnutrition.” The partnership said that in northern Gaza, where 70 percent of the population is estimated to be experiencing catastrophic hunger, famine could occur anytime between mid-March and May.

Gaza’s Health Ministry reported as of April 1, that 32 people, including 28 children, had died of malnutrition and dehydration at hospitals in northern Gaza. Save the Children confirmed on April 2 the deaths from starvation and disease of 27 children. Earlier in March, World Health Organisation (WHO) officials found “children dying of starvation” in northern Gaza’s Kamal Adwan and al-Awda hospitals. In southern Gaza, where aid is more accessible but still grossly inadequate, UN agencies in mid-February said that 5 percent of children under age 2 were found to be acutely malnourished.

Human Rights Watch in March interviewed a doctor in northern Gaza, a volunteer doctor who has since left Gaza, the parents of two infants who doctors said died of starvation-related complications in both mother and child, and the parents of four other children suffering from malnutrition and dehydration.

Human Rights Watch reviewed the death certificate for one of the children, and photos of two of the children in critical condition that showed signs of emaciation. All had been treated at Kamal Adwan hospital in Beit Lahia, northern Gaza.

Human Rights Watch health advisers also reviewed verified pictures and videos online of three other evidently emaciated children who died and four others in critical condition who also showed signs of emaciation.

Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, who heads Kamal Adwan hospital’s pediatrics unit, told Human Rights Watch on April 4 that 26 children had died after experiencing starvation-related complications in his hospital alone. He said that at least 16 of the children who died were under 5 months old, at least 10 were between 1 and 8 years old, and that a 73-year-old man suffering from malnutrition had also died. 

Dr. Safiya said one of the infants died at just two days old after being born severely dehydrated, apparently exacerbated by his mother’s poor health: “[She] had no milk to give him.”

Nour al-Huda, an 11-year-old girl with cystic fibrosis, was admitted to Kamal Adwan hospital on March 15. Doctors there told her mother that Nour was suffering from malnutrition, dehydration, and an infection in her lungs, and administered her oxygen and a saline solution. “Nour al-Huda now weighs 18 kilograms [about 40 pounds],” her mother told Human Rights Watch. “I can see her chest bones sticking out.”

International humanitarian law prohibits the starvation of civilians as a method of warfare. The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court provides that intentionally starving civilians by “depriving them of objects indispensable to their survival, including willfully impeding relief supplies,” is a war crime.

Since the Hamas-led October 7, 2023, attacks in Israel, the Israeli government has deliberately blocked the delivery of aid, food, and fuel into Gaza, while impeding humanitarian assistance and depriving civilians of the means to survive. Israeli officials ordering or carrying out these actions are committing collective punishment against the civilian population and the starvation of civilians as a method of warfare, both of which are war crimes.

Israeli government actions that undermine the ability of the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) to carry out its recognized role in distributing aid in Gaza have exacerbated the effects of the restrictions.

A doctor who volunteered at the European hospital in Khan Younis in southern Gaza for two weeks in late January said that medical staff were forced to treat patients with limited medical supplies. He described the difficulty of treating malnutrition and dehydration, lacking essential items such as glucose, electrolytes, and feeding tubes. He said that one patient’s mother, desperate for solutions, resorted to crushing potatoes to create a makeshift liquid for tube feeding. Despite its nutritional inadequacy, the doctor said, “I ended up telling my other patients to find potatoes and do the same.”

On January 26, the International Court of Justice, in a case brought by South Africa, ordered provisional measures, including requiring Israel to “take immediate and effective measures to enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian aid” and other actions to comply with the 1948 Genocide Convention. On March 28, the court indicated that Israel had not complied with this order and imposed a more detailed provisional measure requiring the government to ensure the unimpeded provision of basic services and aid in full cooperation with the UN, while noting that “famine is setting in.”

MSNBC Video added by IC: “Death by starvation is slow and cruel’: famine is projected to take hold of Gaza within weeks”

Governments should impose targeted sanctions, including travel bans and asset freezes, against officials and individuals responsible for the continued commission of the war crimes of collective punishment, deliberate obstruction of humanitarian aid and using starvation of civilians as a weapon of war.

Several countries have responded to the Israeli government’s unlawful restrictions on assistance by airdropping aid. The United States also pledged to build a temporary seaport in Gaza. However, aid groups and UN officials have said such efforts are inadequate to prevent a famine. Another attempt to deliver aid by sea was halted after an Israeli attack on aid workers on April 1.

On April 4, the Israeli cabinet agreed to several measures to increase the amount of aid entering Gaza, apparently following pressure from the US government.

“Governments outraged by the Israeli government starving civilians in Gaza should not be looking for band-aid solutions to this humanitarian crisis,” Shakir said. “Israel’s announcement that it will increase aid shows that outside pressure works. Israel’s allies like the US, UK, France, and Germany need to press for full-throttle aid delivery by immediately suspending their arms transfers.”

Starvation in Gaza

Prior to the current hostilities, 1.2 million of Gaza’s then-2.2 million people were estimated to be facing acute food insecurity, and over 80 percent were reliant on humanitarian aid. Israel maintains overarching control over Gaza, including over the movement of people and goods, territorial waters, airspace, the infrastructure upon which Gaza relies, and the population registry. This leaves Gaza’s population, whom Israel has subjected to an unlawful closure for more than 16 years, almost entirely dependent on Israel for access to fuel, electricity, medicine, food, and other essential commodities.

Nonetheless, before October 7, large amounts of humanitarian assistance reached the population. “Before this crisis, there was enough food in Gaza to feed the population,” said WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. “Malnutrition was a rare occurrence. Now, people are dying, and many more are sick.”

The WHO reported that the number of children under age 5 who are acutely malnourished has jumped from 0.8 percent before the hostilities in Gaza to between 12.4 and 16.5 percent in northern Gaza. Oxfam said on April 3 that since January, people in northern Gaza have been forced to survive on an average of 245 calories a day, “less than a can of fava beans.”

According to a nutrition vulnerability analysis conducted in March by the Global Nutrition Cluster, a network of humanitarian organizations chaired by UNICEF, 90 percent of children ages 6-23 months and pregnant and breastfeeding women across Gaza faced “severe food poverty,” eating two or fewer food groups each day.

Children with preexisting health conditions are particularly vulnerable to the devastating effects of malnutrition, which significantly weakens immunity. And starvation, even for survivors, leads to lasting harm, especially in children, causing stunted growth, cognitive issues, and developmental delays.

Gaza’s Health Ministry announced on March 8 that about 60,000 pregnant women in Gaza suffered from malnutrition, dehydration and inadequate health care. Poor nutrition during pregnancy harms both the baby and the mother, increasing the risk of miscarriages, fetal deaths, compromised immune system development, growth impacts, and maternal mortality.

Older people are also at particular risk of malnutrition, which increases mortality among those with acute or chronic illnesses. HelpAge International reported that even before October, 45 percent of older people in Gaza were going to bed hungry at least once a week, with 6 percent hungry every night.

The impact on Gaza’s population of the Israeli government’s use of starvation as a weapon of war is compounded by the near-total collapse of the healthcare system. Out of Gaza’s 36 hospitals, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), only 10 are operational, none of them fully, both as a result of the Israeli military’s repeated, apparently unlawful attacks on medical facilities, personnel, and transport, as well as the severe restrictions on the entry of fuel and other supplies.

Accounts from Gaza

On March 19, Andrea De Domenico, head of OCHA in the occupied Palestinian territory, visited Kamal Adwan hospital, where he said about 15 malnourished children arrive daily due to shortages in food, water, and proper sanitation. He described dire conditions at the hospital, noting damage to certain areas and its reliance on a single generator.

Among the cases that Human Rights Watch investigated:

• A man from Beit Lahia said his infant son, Abdelaziz, died just hours after his severely malnourished mother gave birth to him in Kamal Adwan hospital on February 24. He shared Abdelaziz’s death certificate with Human Rights Watch, which said that Abdelaziz was born premature. His father said that the hospital staff hooked Abdelaziz up to a ventilator because he was having trouble breathing, but that the ventilator stopped working after the hospital ran out of the necessary fuel a few hours later. “Abdelaziz died immediately,” he said. He expressed concern for his wife, who had been surviving on legumes and canned food, emphasizing their ongoing struggle to access adequate nourishment.
• The father of newborn twin girls said that one of his babies, Joud, died at Kamal Adwan hospital on March 2 after suffering from malnutrition, eight days after she was born. He said that he struggled to feed his family prior to the girls’ birth, but that they only had bread to eat, without meat or protein. He said that after the twins’ birth, his wife could not produce milk to breastfeed the girls and that store-bought milk was scarce. He described Joud’s deteriorating condition, saying that her “limbs became very cold, and she was breathing very slowly.” His mother-in-law accompanied Joud to the hospital, where she later passed away. The father expressed concern for the health of the surviving twin.
• Fadi, a 6-year-old boy from al-Nasser neighborhood in Gaza City, has cystic fibrosis, a genetic disorder that causes damage to the lungs. Fadi’s mother said that because of the Israeli blockade, she struggled to obtain the necessary medication and provide adequate nourishment. By mid-January, Fadi’s health had deteriorated to the point where he could no longer walk, prompting his hospitalization. “Fadi weighed 30 kilograms [about 66 pounds] before the war, now he is 12 [about 26 pounds],” she said. Fadi was evacuated from Kamal Adwan hospital on March 23 and was receiving treatment at a hospital in Cairo, a relative said on March 28.
• Wissam Hammad, the uncle of 5-year-old Muhammad, who has cerebral palsy and is lactose and gluten-intolerant and can only eat blended food, had great difficulties in securing food for him:

Most of his food should be fruit and vegetables, which is what I try to buy. But all I can find and afford are oranges. The problem is that he cannot chew, so we need to break down the food for him. Everything is very expensive.

• Dr. Ahmed Shahin, a pediatrician, said that before he could leave Gaza on November 16, Osman, his 14-year-old son with cerebral palsy, who uses a gastrostomy feeding tube, had lost seven kilograms (about 15 pounds) since the beginning of the hostilities because they lacked access to both the specific food he needed—such as vegetables—and electricity to blend his food.

Obstacles to Aid Delivery

Ongoing Israeli bombardment and ground operations, lack of security assurances from Israel, widespread infrastructure damage, and communications disruptions make it difficult to distribute the little aid that does get into Gaza. Humanitarian organizations have reported that Israeli forces have attacked their aid convoys and workers. Israeli forces have also shot at and shelled people congregating to collect aid, killing and injuring hundreds.

An Israeli government spokesperson stated on March 18 that aid entering Gaza faced no limits apart from security concerns. Other officials have blamed the UN for distribution delays and accused Hamas of aid diversion or the Gaza police of failing to secure convoys. On March 29, the Israeli Defense Ministry’s body governing civilian affairs in the Palestinian territories, COGAT, disputed the March 18 UN-supported humanitarian report warning of an imminent famine, and said that it “does not reflect the full situation.” COGAT denied that the Israeli government was purposely starving Gaza’s civilian population. Human Rights Watch wrote to COGAT on April 2 seeking comment on our findings, but did not receive a response as of the time of publication.

However, OCHA reported on April 8 that only one of four food aid missions that require coordination in Gaza were facilitated by Israeli authorities in March. Only nine World Food Programme aid shipments have made it to the north since January 1, the most recent of which was 18 truckloads on March 17. The World Food Programme said at least 300 trucks are needed every day for the north alone.

The United States has resorted to airdropping food into Gaza and plans to build a floating pier at sea to deliver aid, a proposal criticized by 26 nongovernmental organizations, including Human Rights Watch, as “risky, expensive, and ineffective.” UN Humanitarian Coordinator Jamie McGoldrick has stressed that road transport is the only viable solution for increasing aid flow.

The restrictions on aid delivery make accessing food for people requiring a specific diet particularly difficult. Several representatives of humanitarian organizations said that they have been unable to provide food for children on special diets or to reach them. A Palestine Children’s Relief Fund staff member said they could only provide baby formula and could not respond to the needs of children with specific diet requirements. Medical Aid for Palestine said the special food items they had in storage ran out quickly, and since then, they have been unable to find and provide those in need with specialized food items:

Assistance is barely coming in: a quarter of the population is at risk of famine. Under these circumstances, people with disabilities and [people in vulnerable situations] suffer the most. When you speak about food, it’s hard to support people who need a specific diet and medical assistance.

Following an Israeli airstrike in central Gaza on April 1, 2024, which hit three marked vehicles from the international food organization World Central Kitchen and killed seven aid workers from several countries, Cyprus announced that ships carrying around 240 tons of aid for Gaza would turn back. World Central Kitchen, Project Hope, and ANERA, all providers of food aid, suspended their Gaza operations in light of the attack, and the United Arab Emirates paused its involvement in a maritime aid corridor.

Via Human Rights Watch

Some 70% of people in Gaza are forced to drink contaminated water or water with too much salt in it, which is a health hazard, according to Doctors without Borders (MSF). Although each person needs about 3 liters a day of drinking water, and needs four times that for hygiene and other purposes, entire families are getting only 3 liters a day, according to MSf. There is an estimated one toilet for every 500 people.

There is a severe risk of a massive spike in infant mortality from dirty water, not to mention malnutrition from insufficient food being allowed into the Strip.

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reports on a seldom-considered issue concerning the Israeli assault on the civilians of Gaza, which is the water and sanitation catastrophe. The Israeli government of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu forced over a million Palestinians of Gaza into the far south of the Strip, Rafah, which is only 20% of its land area. Although the Israelis said that this zone would be safe for noncombatants, they have been bombing it in recent days and say they will invade it. Some two-thirds of the Palestinians so far ethnically cleansed from their homes in the north and center of the Strip have congregated in Rafah.

Although most press reporting has considered mainly the deaths of Palestinian civilians from Israeli bombardment, which have risen to over 27,000, some 70% of them women and children, the deaths from malnutrition and dirty water, i.e. from poor sanitation, have not been reported with the same clarity. Israel has destroyed the Gaza hospital system on the phony pretext that medical complexes are “power centers” and sites of militant Hamas activity. There is no compelling evidence that this narrative is true, and in some instances it has been debunked by US newspapers of record.

Hosny Muhannad, spokesman for the Gaza Municipality, explained to al-Arabi al-Jadid that “the scorched earth policy followed by the [Israeli] occupation [government] during its aggression against the Gaza Strip led to the cessation of many basic service sectors, including the work of municipalities, including repairing main and secondary roads, rainwater drainage, and wastewater drainage from the streets.”

The ground water in Gaza is heavily polluted with sewage and industrial waste. Because of climate change and the rising Mediterranean, salt water has leaked into the aquifer. Only 4% of ground water in Gaza is believed by international health experts to be potable.

Al Jazeera English Video: “Gaza’s water crisis: Destruction and desperation”

Clean water came from three desalinization plants, but the Israelis closed them after October 7 and only restored their production after severe pressure from the Biden administration. However, they deliver water through pipelines. Many of the pipelines don’t work because there is not enough fuel to operate their pumps. Other pipelines have been broken by intensive Israeli bombing.

Neither the some 150,000 remaining Palestinians in North Gaza nor the 1.4 million crowded into Gaza have clean water and sanitation. All 2.25 million Palestinians in Gaza need assistance in these areas.

The UN reports, “Currently only 5.7 per cent of water is being produced from all the water sources in Gaza, compared to pre-war production levels. Safe drinking water and water for domestic use, including personal hygiene, remains very limited.”

There had been 284 groundwater wells. As noted, the water they yielded was problematic. It has a high salt content, which can cause dehydration, and it is often polluted. In ordinary times people could boil it, but people living in tents and shelters without sufficient fuel cannot reliably boil their water. Only 17% of the wells are operating. Some 39 were destroyed by Israeli bombing, and 93 have been damaged.

Needless to say, Gaza City, Rafah and other municipalities cannot run wastewater treatment centers in the midst of this war, in which Israeli pilots and tank commanders have deliberately targeted civilian buildings and infrastructure. None of the wastewater treatment systems are operative. They have either been damaged by bombing, or don’t have enough fuel. There isn’t enough power for solid waste management.

Muhannad told Al-Arabi al-Jadid, “the repeated Israeli targeting of streets and intersections, and the repeated attacks on the already exhausted infrastructure, which caused great destruction in it and hindered its ability to deal with weather depressions and rainwater, which have become traffic obstacles for private vehicles, ambulances, and civil defense”

The bombed out streets are pockmarked so rain water and sewage is standing in these holes.

Gaza is afloat in piss and shit. That is a cholera and hepatitis epidemic waiting to happen.

Infants and toddlers are extremely vulnerable to dehydration from diarrhea, and there is almost certainly an epidemic of dead babies as a result of these unsanitary conditions. Although bombing has killed perhaps 8,000 children (probably many more), the lack of water and lack of clean water will potentially kill many thousands more.

It should be remembered that one reason given by al-Qaeda for the 9/11 attacks was that US policy in Iraq in the 1990s was to deny the country chlorine imports for water purification, resulting in thousands of deaths of infants.

OCHA notes, “Two out of out of three desalination plans are partially operating: the Middle Area plant produces an average of 750 cubic metres per day and is distributed via water trucking and the South Gaza desalination plant produces 1,700 cubic metres per day; around 600 cubic metres are distributed via water trucking and 1,100 cubic metres via the water network. The UAE’s small desalination plant located on the Egyptian side of Rafah, operates at full capacity, providing 2,400 cubic metres per day, following the construction of a 3-kilometre transmission line.”

That is 4,850 cubic meters of water per day, or 4,850,000 liters. Each individual needs on the order of 12 liters per day of water for drinking, food, hygiene and cooking purposes, according to the World Health Organization. The 2.2 million Palestinians therefore need about 26.4 million liters a day of water. They are only getting 18% of that from the desalinization plants, assuming it can be distributed to them, which is the only really potable water to be had.

h/t WHO .

The groundwater is dirty. Some refugees are reduced to cupping their hands amidst the sewage in the streets and drinking from it.

The reason I question whether the water from the remaining desalinization plants is even being reliably distributed is that OCHA says this: “Mekorot Connections: Two of the three water pipelines are not functioning (the Mentar pipeline since the beginning of the conflict, and the Bani Suhaila pipeline since 18 December. The Bani Saeed pipeline is functioning, but is currently producing 6,000 cubic metres per day, which is only 42 per cent of its full capacity. Plans are in place to repair the Bani Suheila pipeline, but there are challenges for safe access, communication, and coordination of repair activities.”

OCHA notes anecdotal reports from aid workers and medical personnel of a rise of hepatitis A cases in Gaza.

Since the building materials for constructing toilets and repairing the sewage system are considered dual use by the Israeli authorities (i.e. they could be used by Hamas for its own infrastructure), they are not being let in at the requisite rate. UNICEF tried to construct 80 family latrines this week. But “the sanitation coverage remains very low. WASH partners continue to construct family latrines, but the lack of cement, wood and other construction materials slows down the progress.”

Finally, OCHA says, “The crisis is exacerbated by a fuel shortage, hindering sewage station operation and leading to environmental and public health concerns. The situation is worsened by continuous restricted access to essential sanitation supplies and services in Gaza.”

OCHA adds that these killings brought deaths to 23,968 and injuries to 60,000 since October 7.

There is also a key bullet point on their infographic that floored me. OCHA says that the Israeli campaign has left 378,000 people at catastrophic phase 5 levels of starvation.

US AID explains that Phase 5 levels of starvation indicate that “acute malnutrition levels exceed 30 percent, and more than 2 per 1,000 people are dying each day.”

Given that 378,000 people are being categorized by the UN as at phase 5, this definition suggests that 756 Palestinians in Gaza are dying of hunger each day, which comes to a projected 22,680 deaths from starvation over the next month.

Since half of the people in Gaza are minors, that would be roughly 11,000 children murdered by denial of food. These projections are inexact and contingent, but would hold true if the amount of food aid allowed into the Gaza Strip by the Israelis does not increase dramatically in the next weeks.

Breaking: Starvation has reached unprecedented levels… Thousands in western Gaza city rushed out upon hearing of a food truck's arrival, only to be fired upon by the Israeli army. #GazaGenocide pic.twitter.com/WTDXaL0bwQ

— Ramy Abdu| رامي عبده (@RamAbdu) January 14, 2024

This policy is deliberate. As the South African complaint against Israel for genocide noted, “On 9 October 2023, Defence Minister Yoav Gallant in an Israeli Army ‘situation update’ advised that Israel was ‘imposing a complete siege on Gaza. No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.” The complaint also quoted Israeli Minister of Energy and Infrastructure Israel Katz, who posted on X on 12 October 2023, “Humanitarian aid to Gaza? No electrical switch will be turned on, no water hydrant will be opened and no fuel truck will enter until the Israeli abductees are returned home. Humanitarianism for humanitarianism. And no one will preach us morality.”

Aljazeera English Video: “Gaza humanitarian crisis: UN warns risk of famine increasing every day”

Even the Palestinian children who don’t die of hunger will be permanently damaged by prolonged acute malnutrition, defined as an inadequate energy or protein intake. An article by Valeria Dipasquale et al. in Nutrients points out that “Acute malnutrition has been recognized as causing reduction in the numbers of neurons, synapses, dendritic arborizations, and myelinations, all of which resulting in decreased brain size. The cerebral cortex is thinned and brain growth slowed. Delays in global function, motor function, and memory have been associated with malnutrition. The effects on the developing brain may be irreversible after the age of 3–4 years.”

Yes, the fascist government of PM Binyamin Netanyahu is making war on the brains of Palestinian children, who risk cognitive impairment. The longer this starvation-siege continues, the more likely it is that the effects on small children will be irreversible.

It should also be remembered that some 94 percent of water available on a regular basis in Gaza is not potable, and so many children and adults are contracting gastrointestinal diseases and suffering from diarrhea. Infants and toddlers can easily die of dehydration in these circumstances.

Dipasquale et al. write, “Organ systems are variably impaired in acute malnutrition. Cellular immunity is affected because of atrophy of the thymus, lymph nodes, and tonsils . . . Consequently, the susceptibility to invasive infections (urinary, gastrointestinal infections, septicemia, etc.) is increased ”

It is precisely in the crowded conditions of southern Gaza, into which the Israeli government has forcibly displaced over a million people, that respiratory and gastrointestinal diseases proliferate. By starving the population, Netanyahu is virtually guaranteeing disease outbreaks. We are likely to see a massive spike in infant mortality from disease and weakened immune systems, quite apart from children dying of hunger.

Despite a Difficult Year, Children’s Rights Made Progress

( Middle East Monitor ) – Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a symptom or syndrome that occurs after seeing, directly experiencing or hearing a stressful and traumatic factor (trauma) that can lead to the death of the affected person. One of its factors is a person’s direct experience of the violent death of a family member or close friend. This disorder may also occur as a result of repeated exposure to the horrific details of an incident (trauma); likewise, police officers who are exposed to the details of criminal cases.

The injured person feels fear and helplessness in relation to these experiences, and often shows disturbed and restless behaviour. War and killings also cause trauma to survivors. Trauma is a psychological term that comes from the Greek word meaning wound and is known as a psychological injury. This occurs after being in a very stressful or uncomfortable situation. Being in such a situation makes you think that you have no security and that you are always in danger. As such, you feel helpless and constantly anxious.

The destructive war of the Israeli regime against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip continues with heavy bombing by fighters and the targeting of homes, hospitals, schools and other civilian infrastructure. International organisations and experts have said that this is a “text-book case of genocide”. At the time of writing, more than 11,000 Palestinians have been killed and over 70 per cent of the victims are children and women. Worldwide demonstrations demand a ceasefire.

However, it is now important to consider the trauma inflicted on the people of Gaza; they will suffer from it for the rest of their lives, and most people, especially children, will suffer from PTSD. This could seriously jeopardise the future mental health of the Palestinians in the enclave. In this regard, three painful psychological traumas caused by the attacks of the Israeli regime against the people of this region can be mentioned in particular.

Many cannot be sure if their loved ones are safe or not, or even still alive

For a start, there is the crisis of not knowing the whereabouts and fate of relatives. In a month of war, the Israeli regime has tried to cut off internet access for Gaza, as well as telephone links. Many Palestinians have been unable to discover the whereabouts, fate and health status of their relatives, friends and acquaintances under heavy Israeli bombardment. Many cannot be sure if their loved ones are safe or not, or even still alive. To put it more simply, they are anxious that they may have lost their loved ones and they still don’t know about it. Moreover, a large number of Palestinians have been forced to move from the north to the south of Gaza. This has also caused difficulties in finding out about relatives and friends.

Then there is the exposure of Palestinian children to horrific images in Gaza Strip as a result of Israeli air and artillery attacks, which causes severe shock. This is something that even adults cannot bear, leading to anxiety and serious mental and psychological damage. They see the dead bodies of their family around them, and see themselves as helpless with an uncertain future. They do not imagine any safe place and their psychological security has been lost.

The Guardian: “A safe space for Gaza’s children: ‘They still have dreams for the future’

We have probably all seen images of parents clutching their dead child, which have gone viral on social media. The parents feel unable to be separated from their child. It is a shocking image that touches the heart of every decent human being. With more than 4,000 children killed so far, if one or both parents have survived they will face serious mental issues in the shape of deep trauma to their souls.

According to UNICEF, more than half a million children in Syria under the age of five are stunted due to chronic malnutrition. Moreover, 2.4 million children within the country and 750,000 displaced beyond its borders do not go to school as a result of their displacement. The number of children who have suffered mental and psychological injuries due to constant exposure to violence, shock and trauma has doubled. Undoubtedly, this case will apply more strongly to the people of Gaza, especially the surviving children.

The people of Gaza are Palestinians, most of them refugees or descendants of refugees who were forced to move to Gaza from other areas of historic Palestine since 1948. They have been practically held in a concentration camp and separated from their home towns and villages like a severed limb, with no way out of this situation because Israel does not allow them to exercise their legitimate right to return to their homes. As a result of this particular trauma, some people in Gaza will lose their sense of psychological security and feel threatened and helpless.

Psychological trauma can leave a person with distressing feelings, memories and anxiety that won’t go away. It can also cause numbness, disconnection and a lack of trust in others. People have to endure these severe traumas, even after the war ends, and many will definitely suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. This will have long-term negative political, economic, cultural and psychological effects, with the main consequence being a sense of the need for revenge that will stay with them for the rest of their lives.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor or Informed Comment.

Middle East Monitor

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(The Conversation) – In 1903, a local mob killed 49 Jews, including several children, and raped and wounded 600 others, in the city of Kishinev, then part of the Russian Empire. These three days of violence later became known as the Kishinev pogrom.

A few days later, the Jewish-Russian poet Hayim Nahman Bialik published a Hebrew poem that every Israeli school child still knows today.

I am a scholar of the Holocaust and genocide. When thinking about the unfolding Israel-Hamas war, I am reminded of this Bialik poem, “On the Slaughter.” It laments Jewish helplessness and victimhood – and condemns apathy to violence, including the murder of children.

Bialik writes:

“And damned be he who says: Avenge!
Such vengeance, for the blood of a small child,
Satan has yet to devise.”

Hamas militants killed approximately 30 Israeli children when they attacked civilians on Oct. 7, 2023, killing more than 1,400 people altogether. At least 20 Israeli children remain hostage in Gaza.

Today: “2 mothers share how they’re protecting their kids in Israel and Gaza”

Since Oct. 7, Israeli airstrikes have killed more than 2,000 Palestinian children and more than 8,000 people overall, according to the Hamas-run Ministry of Health in Gaza.

Israel’s attacks on Gaza began intensifying on Oct. 28, as Israeli ground forces entered Gaza.

Both sides in this war have focused on the deaths and kidnapping of children, sharing images and videos of the children as a testament to the other side’s cruelty.

Particularly, Hamas’ slaughter of Israeli children evokes collective Jewish memories of pogroms and the Holocaust – and the attempt to annihilate the Jewish people.

For Palestinians, too, the killing of their children represents both the injustice of Israeli rule and occupation, and the perceived attempt to stop Palestinians from having their own country. The collective Palestinian memory of the Nakba in 1948, when Israeli forces killed thousands of Palestinians and pushed out 750,000 people from their homes, is replete with tales of children who lost both their homeland and their parents.

A new kind of protection

Bialik ended up emigrating to what was then called Palestine in 1924, and today he is considered Israel’s national poet.

Bialik wrote a longer poem, titled “In The City of Slaughter,” in 1904, after he visited the site of the Kishinev pogrom. Bialik fumed against Jewish men for hiding, instead of protecting their wives and daughters from rape.

Bialik called for a new type of warlike Jewish manhood. If neither God nor the authorities could protect them from slaughter, Jews had to create a state of their own – and Jewish men had to learn to fight and kill.

Over the next four decades, the numbers of slaughtered Jews, including children, piled up.

In the Holocaust, Nazis and their collaborators killed an estimated 1.5 million Jewish children.

It was this kind of violence against defenseless innocents that the establishment of Israel in 1948 was supposed to prevent.

‘Never again’

Most Jews who emigrated to Israel in the late 1940s were Holocaust survivors. They had experienced precisely the kind of defenselessness that Israel said it would never allow to happen again. Their sense of vulnerability and their memory of victimization were transmitted from one generation to another.

The popular slogan “never again,” referring to the Holocaust, meant what Bialik had intended: not only the prevention of violence against Jewish people, but a new breed of tough and brave Jewish fighters, prepared to die for their new homeland.

Israel’s failure to protect its people is partially why the Oct. 7 attacks were so shocking to the Israeli public.

The Israeli military’s delayed response left people in the attacked communities feeling utter helplessness. The intentional cruelty of Hamas’ killings, often videotaped and live-streamed, reminded Israelis of past anti-Jewish violence.

Children in Gaza

In the Gaza Strip, meanwhile, half of the population is younger than 18.

In 2014, Israel airstrikes, coming in response to intense rocket fire from Gaza, killed over 500 Palestinian children. The Israeli government described the children’s deaths as unfortunate, but unavoidable. The reasoning is that bombing presumed Hamas targets was much less risky and costly, in terms of Israeli lives, than a ground incursion into Gaza.

Since Oct. 7, Israel has carried out unprecedentedly massive aerial bombardments of Gaza.

NBC News: “‘This is increasingly becoming a children’s crisis’ in Gaza: UNICEF spokesperson ”

The images of dead and mutilated Palestinian children have served to mute some people’s criticism of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks on Israelis – and to heighten other people’s sense of Palestinian innocence and Israeli brutality.

There are two major difference between this round of killing and previous ones, most prominently in 2014.

First, this time the violence began with the slaughter of over 1,400 Israelis.

Second, Israel’s current bombing campaign has killed more Palestinians, including children, than at any other time in the past.

Hamas’ slaughter of Jewish children is now being reciprocated by what the Israel Defense Forces says are unintended – but certain – killings of even larger numbers of Palestinian children.

Children are the ultimate victims

Both sides in the Israel-Hamas war are now flaunting and weaponizing their child victims to support their political causes.

For the Israelis and their supporters, the murder and kidnapping of children shows the inhumanity of Hamas and its supporters – and fuels calls for violent retribution.

For Palestinians and their supporters, Israel’s killing of even more children in Gaza helps wipe away Hamas’ crimes and exposes Israel’s alleged intent to kill all Palestinians.

Many people have flooded social media with images and videos of killed Palestinian and Israeli children, as well as bloody crime scenes where they were killed.

People have plastered posters of kidnapped Israeli children across the streets in American and European cities – and have videotaped those who tear them down.

But in Israel, at least, the media has mostly avoided showing images of both Jewish and Palestinian child victims. Showing kidnapped or killed Israeli children is considered demoralizing, and showing killed Palestinian children is considered to be enemy propaganda. In Gaza, people have been photographed and recorded carrying and mourning dead children, wrapped in blood-stained white cloth.

Is this Satan’s vengeance for the violence of men? In his deepest hour of despair, Bialik never hoped for more violence as a response to a massacre. As he wrote 120 years ago:

“If there is justice – May it appear at once!
But if it appears
Only after I had been eradicated under the sky –
May its throne be toppled forever!
And may Heaven rot in everlasting evil.”

Omer Bartov, Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Brown University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

( Tomdispatch.com ) – When humans embrace the dehumanization of others, we release our ugliest, most destructive selves. Dehumanization is a perverse force that propagates violence and justifies the lust for war and its atrocities.

On August 6, 1945, Sakue Shimohira was 10 years old when an atomic blast obliterated her home in Hiroshima, Japan, burning her mother into an unrecognizable block of ash. Afterward, the only feature that could identify her was a single gold tooth.

Sakue struggled to survive in Hiroshima’s post-apocalyptic, postwar landscape, while her older sister soon fell into despair and threw herself in front of a train. When the American soldiers of the occupying army arrived, Sakue remembered that they constructed an airstrip in front of the shack where she was living. “There were skeletons all over the area,” she said, “so when they built the airstrip, the bones were crushed into dust.”

The American soldiers handed out chewing gum and chocolate to orphans like her. Some of the Japanese children quickly learned how to say “hello” in English, but Sakue confronted the soldiers in her native Japanese. “Why?” she insisted. “Why did you kill my family? Why did they deserve to die?” She added, “Of course, they didn’t understand Japanese. They just smiled at me. ‘Give them back to me!’ I shouted.”

Recalling such memories so many decades later, Sakue’s face still reveals how that historically disastrous bombing blotted out her inner light. As she put it, “I carried this pain that I couldn’t talk about. Even today, I can’t say my sister’s name aloud. It hurts too much.”

Dehumanization and People Living Under the Mushroom Cloud

In recent years, I’ve traveled to Japan numerous times with university students to study the legacy of the first and only use of atomic weapons as World War II ended. In that way, my students and I became moral witnesses to the consequences of the terror for people under those mushroom clouds that shattered, incinerated, and flattened the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

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But in my own country, the United States, the continuing specter of nuclear catastrophe generally fails to pierce a commonplace apathy toward such weaponry. Instead, most Americans hold war’s ultimate horror at arm’s length, while rationalizing the way our country and so many others on this planet all too regularly lurch into such conflicts as the only right and just way to address human greed, tyranny, and fear.

Almost 80 years after those first atomic blasts, Americans have yet to seriously reckon with how easily we learned to rationalize such structural violence. Meanwhile, our country continues to pour endless money into the wasteful creation, stockpiling, maintenance, and now the “modernization” of those weapons of mass, even global, destruction. In his poignant diagnosis, psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton concluded that we developed a deep “psychic numbing,” while becoming detached and morally disengaged from the growing possibility that such weaponry could, in the end, create a “nuclear winter” and destroy humanity.     

In Japan, my students and I have had the distinct privilege of meeting atomic bomb survivors, or hibakusha as they are known there. One hibakusha, an elderly, somewhat stern man, told us that he was outside of the city of Nagasaki with his brother when the second bomb exploded. The two boys rushed into the city to search for their father and finally found his body near his workplace, burned (like Sakue’s mother) almost beyond recognition.

We listened as his testimony viscerally evoked that horror from so long ago as if it had only taken place days earlier. He remembered how, as a child, when he tried to prepare the body for burial, he touched his father’s head and the skull crumbled beneath his fingers, while parts of the brain oozed into his hands.

In those precious moments in Japan when my students and I heard the stories of hibakusha, we could also ask questions. “Do you hate Americans?” the students often asked. “What kind of assistance was there for you and other hibakusha in the terrible aftermath of months and years after the war?” And we would thank them for sharing their painful and invaluable stories with us, but it never felt like enough. So many of them have a single request: that we take their words back to the United States with us and share them with others here.

During our conversation with that elderly man in Nagasaki, one moment was particularly unforgettable. Despite the harsh struggle and war-time brutalization he endured as a child, the elder we now experienced was a soul of deep reflection and humane philosophical searching. During the question-and-answer period following his testimony, he told us about his life-long struggle to understand what had happened to him and why. He mentioned a book that helped him better grasp how the world arrived at such a place of inhumanity and violence, historian John Dower’s award-winning history, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War.

“I know that book!” I blurted out. He stared at me, and I stared back. Dower’s history had also deeply impacted my life and thought, so I felt a sudden powerful connection with that hibakusha and was simultaneously rendered speechless after my outburst, overwhelmed and amazed by the journey that man had taken in his life to meet me then and there.

Two Truths About War and Dehumanization

Dower’s investigation helped me better understand two truths about violence. First, dehumanization always precedes and paves the way for the horrors of war. Human beings won’t kill other humans if they truly believe their lives are as worthy as their own. In his book, Dower vividly exposes the dehumanizing, racist imagery that enveloped both the United States and Japan in the early 1940s. The Japanese were portrayed here as “vermin” and “apes,” “inferior men and women,” “primitive and childish” creatures. They were “the Yellow Peril” or “the menacing Asian horde.” Versions of such tropes of dehumanization lubricated the eruption of violence that followed and have emerged repeatedly in human history. 

And it wasn’t just the Americans. Japanese cartoons from the era depicted Westerners as a kind of vermin like lice, caricatured President Franklin Delano Roosevelt as a demon, and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and FDR as “debauched ogres” looming over Mount Fuji, a sacred symbol of Japan. American cartoons typically drew Japanese bodies in bright yellow.

I remember my mother, who grew up in California during that war, remarking on a Japanese flag I brought home from one of my trips. “That was such a symbol of hatred when I was a child,” she told me. And such dehumanization paved the way for devastating violence as the only possible solution. Both sides plummeted into “victimage rhetoric” that portrayed the “enemy” as barbaric, irrational, and irredeemably violent, while “we” were moral, rational, and sensible. Tragically, this way of thinking justified the horrors to come. Given such an enemy, only through colossal destruction could we save the world, or so people came to think.

Dower’s book reveals a second truth about violence as well: dehumanization does more than just enable war. It also generates an annihilating energy all its own through which the atrocity-laden destruction of war multiplies exponentially. In the case of the Pacific front in World War II, violence begat ever greater violence and the hunger for it grew ever deeper and more insatiable until there was a veritable “frenzy of violence” on both sides in the final year of that war. More than half of all American deaths occurred in that single year and that was when the kamikaze, or suicide plane, became “the consummate symbol of the pure spirit of the Japanese” to “turn back the demonic onslaught.”

Meanwhile, the Americans abandoned precision bombing and initiated the full-scale firebombing of Japanese cities. The firebombing of Tokyo in March 1945 burned to death more than 100,000 civilians in a single night. More than 60 cities were similarly targeted, killing hundreds of thousands of Japanese in a final paroxysm of violence that preceded Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Today’s Escalation of the Drumbeats of Dehumanization

In these terrible recent days, we again can hear the drumbeats of dehumanization in Ukraine, Israel, and the Gaza Strip, as grief explodes in the face of unimaginable violence, loss, injury, and the sort of pain that rips at the very fabric of our world. Human beings are once again being described as “animals.” The other side is pure “evil.” The only remedy for such a conflict, people imagine, is to wipe the enemy out and achieve “full victory.” Indescribable destructive force against the other is rationalized as necessary because of the terrible violence wreaked on us.

But we won’t find our way out of such a morass of violence through more of the same, or through the further dehumanization of people we call our enemy. In the end, dehumanization destroys us, too, even if we don’t realize it. The perennial question facing the world is this: Is there a way for us to move toward a greater rehumanization?

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In reality, we don’t have to accept psychic numbing or endless dehumanization and violence as the only possible responses to our broken world. We can glimpse a different way forward when we turn our attention to people whose experiences of horrific violence, amazingly enough, didn’t destroy them. Instead, their awareness was crystalized, leaving them with so much to share with the rest of us about the deep, irreplaceable importance of every human being and the immeasurable value of our fragile planet.

Along with the remarkable hibakusha I’ve been privileged to meet, I also have come to know U.S. veterans of war with the same astonishing kinds of awareness. I wrote a book about them and their struggles to remain human in a world all too saturated with violence titled And Then Your Soul is Gone: Moral Injury and U.S. War Culture.

Imagining a Different Veterans Day

As Veterans Day approaches, I’m thinking about those veterans I respect so dearly who have themselves come through such crucibles of horror. Many live with the deep despair that accompanies military moral injuries. Yet they refuse to give up on life, hope, and the belief that there could be a different way forward. They remind me of Sakue who, in the end, offered this reflection: “There are two kinds of courage.  One type of courage is the courage to die. I chose the courage to live.”

American veteran and former Iraq War medic Jenny Pacanowski witnessed that conflict’s calamitous effects on Iraqi children. She shared her agony with a military chaplain, asking him, “Why would God do this to the children of Iraq, to the soldiers, to the medics who only want to bring healing?” The chaplain responded, “God works in mysterious ways.”

Such a facile response made her deeply angry. It was as though her soul could no longer occupy her physical body and left her to float above it, connected by only the most fragile tether, as she screamed in anger and sorrow. That was close to 20 years ago. As she told me, “To truly reintegrate, and invite my soul back into my body, I needed to tell my story in a secure space.” Today, Jenny is like a comet blazing a trail to support the peace-building activities of women veterans.

Recently, I was introduced to the poetry of Vietnam War veteran Doug Rawlings. He was in his early twenties when he was drafted and sent to Vietnam. Returning to the United States, like so many others, he was “confused, angry, and lost.” But he’s been writing poetry for more than 50 years and, in his most recent collection, he explains, “Most of us do not want to be vulnerable, especially men, and, exponentially, veterans. However, the vulnerability in the poet invites vulnerability in the reader/listener.”

One of Rawlings’ poems speaks to me strongly in this painful moment on our planet. Near the U.S. Army base at Long Binh in what was then South Vietnam, there was “a beautiful if dilapidated French villa.” During the war, it was repurposed as an orphanage. A hand-painted sign in front of it read in English: “Please don’t shoot the orphans.” 

In response to that memory, Rawlings wrote:

“Imagine all the interstates in and out of our cities
Clogged with cars brought to a standstill by
‘Please don’t shoot the orphans’ plastered on placards

Their drivers stumbling out of their seats
Onto the median strips crisscrossing this land
Of the mobile and free to question

If not just for a minute
How their own busy lives can possibly be
Intertwined with the lives of orphans

Their hearts in their mouths when they realize

The hands on their steering wheels
The fingers dancing across their radio dials

Hold the answer to those questions”

The answer is directly in front of us if only we would pay attention. Please don’t kidnap, maim, starve, or deny water, electricity, or healthcare to children anywhere. Don’t separate them from their parents, drown, bomb, rape, burn, imprison, shoot, bury in rubble, use as human shields, or kill the children. Please, do not find ways to justify such horrors. Instead, look them squarely in the eye and decide that you will demand an alternative.

If we are to remain human on this planet in this devastating moment, there is — or at least, should be — no other way. 

Copyright 2023 Kelly Denton-Borhaug

Via Tomdispatch.com

End Systematic Impunity for Unlawful Lethal Force

( Human Rights Watch ) – (Jerusalem) – The Israeli military and border police forces are killing Palestinian children with virtually no recourse for accountability.

Last year, 2022, was the deadliest year for Palestinian children in the West Bank in 15 years, and 2023 is on track to meet or exceed 2022 levels. Israeli forces had killed at least 34 Palestinian children in the West Bank as of August 22. Human Rights Watch investigated four fatal shootings of Palestinian children by Israeli forces between November 2022 and March 2023.

“Israeli forces are gunning down Palestinian children living under occupation with increasing frequency,” said Bill Van Esveld, associate children’s rights director at Human Rights Watch. “Unless Israel’s allies, particularly the United States, pressure Israel to change course, more Palestinian children will be killed.”

Human Rights Watch researchers, in documenting the four killings, interviewed in person seven witnesses, nine family members, and other residents, lawyers, doctors, staff and fieldworkers at Palestinian and Israeli rights groups, and reviewed CCTV and videos posted on social media, statements by Israeli security agencies, medical records, and news reports.

Human Rights Watch investigated the case of Mahmoud al-Sadi, 17, killed by Israeli forces as he walked to school near the Jenin refugee camp on November 21, 2022. The Israeli military did not address his killing specifically but said its forces had been conducting arrest raids in the camp, during which they exchanged fire with Palestinian fighters. However, the nearest exchange of fire occurred at one of the alleged fighter’s homes, about 320 meters away from where Mahmoud was shot, based on residents’ statements.

Mahmoud stood by the side of a road, waiting for the sounds of shooting in the distance to stop, and was not holding any weapon or projectile, a witness said and a security-camera video that Human Rights Watch reviewed showed. After the distant shooting had stopped and the Israeli forces were withdrawing, a single shot fired from an Israeli military vehicle roughly 100 meters away struck Mahmoud, the witness said. No Palestinian fighters were in the area, the witness said. Mahmoud was killed a block away from the street where Israeli forces killed the journalist Shireen Abu Aqla on May 11, 2022.

In the other cases investigated, the security forces killed boys after they had joined other youths confronting Israeli forces with stones, Molotov cocktails, or fireworks. While these projectiles can seriously injure or kill, in these cases, Israeli forces fired repeatedly at chest-level, hitting multiple children, and killed children in situations where they do not appear to have been posing a threat of grievous injury or death, which is the standard for the use of lethal force by law enforcement officers under international norms. That would make these killings unlawful.

Mohammed al-Sleem, 17, was shot in the back while running from Israeli soldiers after a group of friends he was with threw rocks, and allegedly Molotov cocktails, at military vehicles that had entered a village near his hometown of Azzun in the northern West Bank. Three other children were shot and wounded with automatic gunfire while running away.

An Israeli officer shot Wadea Abu Ramuz, 17, from behind while he was with a group of youths throwing rocks and launching fireworks at Border Police vehicles in East Jerusalem at around 10 p.m. on January 25, 2023, two witnesses said. Another boy in the group was shot and wounded. Security forces shackled Wadea to his hospital bed, beat and prevented his relatives from visiting him, withheld his body for months after he died, and required his family to bury him quietly at night.

In all cases, Israeli forces shot the children’s upper bodies, without, according to witnesses, issuing warnings or using common, less-lethal measures such as tear gas, concussion grenades, or rubber-coated bullets. Adam Ayyad, 15, was fatally shot from behind in Deheisheh refugee camp on January 3 while with a group of boys throwing stones and at least one Molotov cocktail at Israeli forces. The soldier also shot and wounded a 13-year-old boy, witnesses said.

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported in January that since “December 2021, soldiers are allowed to shoot at Palestinians who are fleeing if they had previously thrown stones or Molotov cocktails.” Human Rights Watch wrote to the Israeli military and police on August 7 with questions about the four cases and the forces’ rules of engagement. The police responded, but the military did not . The police rules of engagement permit the use of firearms against persons who are throwing stones, Molotov cocktails or fireworks only if there is an “imminent risk to life or bodily integrity.” The police also stated that they could not provide information about the case of Wadea Abu Ramuz because it was under investigation.

Israeli authorities have used excessive force against Palestinians in policing situations for decades. The authorities have routinely failed to hold their forces accountable when security forces kill Palestinians, including children, in circumstances in which the use of lethal force was not justified under international norms. From 2017 to 2021, fewer than one percent of complaints of violations by Israeli military forces against Palestinians, including killings and other abuses, resulted in indictments, the Israeli rights group Yesh Din reported.

Israeli forces killed at least 614 Palestinians whom the UN classified as civilians in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank during this period. But only three soldiers were convicted for killing Palestinians, according to Yesh Din, and all received short sentences of military community service. The Israeli rights group B’Tselem, which for decades filed documented complaints about killings to the Israeli military, has deemed the Israeli law enforcement system a “whitewash mechanism.” In 2021, out of 4,401 complaints to the department of internal police investigations, which include complaints by Israeli citizens, just 1.2 percent resulted in indictments, according to the state comptroller.

The killings take place in a context in which Israeli authorities are committing the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution against Palestinians, including children, as Human Rights Watch and other rights groups have documented. The then International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, opened a formal investigation in 2021 into serious crimes committed in Palestine.

The UN Secretary-General is mandated by the Security Council to annually list military forces and armed groups responsible for grave violations against children in armed conflict. Between 2015 and 2022, the UN attributed over 8,700 child casualties to Israeli forces, yet Israel has never been listed. The reports have repeatedly listed other forces that killed and injured far fewer children than Israel did.

The stigma attached to the Secretary-General’s “list of shame” is considerable, and parties named must create and carry out an action plan of reforms to end the abuses in order to be removed from the list. The UN missed an opportunity to protect children by omitting Israel, Human Rights Watch said. The Secretary-General should use objective criteria to determine the list for 2023.

“Palestinian children live a reality of apartheid and structural violence, where they could be gunned down at any time without any serious prospect of accountability,” Van Esveld said. “Israel’s allies should confront this ugly reality and create real pressure for accountability.”

Mahmoud al-Sadi, Jenin refugee camp

Israeli forces killed Mahmoud al-Sadi, 17, while he was walking to school in Wadi Burqin, near the Jenin refugee camp, at around 9:30 a.m. on November 21, 2022. The Israeli military did not address or announce any intention to investigate Mahmoud’s killing, but said its forces were conducting arrest raids and exchanged fire with Palestinian fighters. There were no reports that Israeli troops were injured.

The exchanges of fire occurred when Israeli forces surrounded the family homes of two alleged fighters, and the nearest home was about 320 meters from where Mahmoud was shot. Residents identified the building to Human Rights Watch, and videos posted on social media show fighting at the same building.

Mahmoud had dropped off his sisters, ages 8 and 10, at their elementary school and was walking to his secondary school with other students, when “all of a sudden there’s [the sounds of] shooting in the distance, we didn’t know where, and people say the [Israeli] military is present,” said a classmate who was walking with Mahmoud. Mahmoud waited for safety on the side of a street. A security-camera video, which Human Rights Watch viewed, showed him wearing his school backpack, standing alone, and not holding any weapon or rock, just before he took a step into the street and was shot, his father and the classmate said.

The shooting in the distance had stopped and the military was withdrawing when Mahmoud’s classmate said he heard a gunshot. Mahmoud stepped toward him, said he had been hit, and fell down. The witness and other boys saw a stationary Israeli military vehicle roughly 100 meters up the street, which then drove away. Human Rights Watch visited the site and found that if the shooter had been in this vehicle, they would have had a clear view of Mahmoud. A medical intake report for Mahmoud from Ibn Sina Hospital in Jenin at 9:50 a.m. records a single bullet wound and hemorrhagic shock.

No armed Palestinians or other Israeli forces were in the area at the time, said the classmate and reports by news media and rights groups, raising concerns that the Israeli forces may have deliberately targeted him even though he was unarmed and not engaging in violent activity. The intentional or reckless use of lethal force against a person who poses no imminent threat to life by the security forces of an occupying power carrying out policing operations would be unlawful. The “willful killing” of members of the population of an occupied territory is a war crime.

After the killing, the Israeli military cancelled Mahmoud’s father’s permit to enter Israel, where he worked. It took three months and 8,000 NIS (US$2,200) in lawyers’ fees to obtain a new permit, Mahmoud’s father told Human Rights Watch. The Israeli military views relatives as aggrieved “potential avengers” and automatically cancels their work permits as a security measure, harming them through a blanket policy that offers no meaningful individual assessments.

Wadea Abu Ramuz, East Jerusalem

At around 10 p.m. on January 25, 2023, an Israeli officer shot Wadea Abu Ramouz, 17, in the back as he was with a group of youths who were throwing stones and launching fireworks at Border Police vehicles on the main street in the Ein el-Lowzeh area of Silwan, a neighborhood in occupied East Jerusalem, two witnesses said. Human Rights Watch visited the site where the youths had gathered, on a hillside about 30 meters from where the Border Police vehicles were passing below on the neighborhood’s main street.

The witnesses did not see whether Wadea had launched fireworks or threw stones. The officer who shot Wadea was positioned further up the hillside behind them, a witness said. A second child was also shot and subsequently released from the hospital. His family declined to speak with Human Rights Watch.

Israeli medics provided first aid and took Wadea to Shaarei Tzedek hospital in West Jerusalem. No Israeli authority informed Wadea’s family of where he had been taken, relatives told Human Rights Watch. The family called the Israeli emergency service, the police, and visited two hospitals before going to Shaarei Tzedek, where Palestinian hospital staff informally told the family that a “critical case” whom they suspected was Wadea, had been admitted.

Blocked by the police from entering, the family “stayed in the parking lot all night,” a relative said. At 4:30 a.m., “as a favor to us, [a hospital staff member] sneaked an article of [Wadea’s] clothing to the front gate, to let us confirm that it was him.”

Israeli police at the hospital refused to allow Wadea’s parents to see him on the basis that he was a “detained criminal suspect,” until lawyers obtained a court order for a family visit the next afternoon. Police had shackled Wadea to the hospital bed, hand and foot, though his father and lawyer said he was unconscious and connected to multiple medical devices.

On January 27, other relatives were waiting to visit him in the hospital parking lot when police said they had to leave, forced one man to the ground and beat him and pushed the group out of the lot, family members said.

At around 9:30 p.m., Palestinian journalists called Wadea’s lawyer to ask about rumors of his death. A security official at the hospital told him to wait outside and returned at 12:10 a.m. with Wadea’s death certificate, the lawyer said.

At 8:00 a.m. the next day, Border Police raided the family’s yard, broke down the condolence tent, confiscated Palestinian flags and posters of Wadea, and broke plastic chairs, a relative said. Border Police returned several times in the following days and forcibly dispersed neighborhood residents who “kept coming to our home, spontaneously … waiting and expecting the body to be released. There were confrontations and they fired tear gas.”

Israeli authorities took Wadea’s body for autopsy. The Israel Security Agency (known as the Shabak, or Shin Bet), which Israeli law grants authority over the return of bodies of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces in what they consider security incidents, then refused to return the boy’s body to his family. Israeli authorities currently hold in morgues the bodies of at least 115 Palestinians, including 15 children, killed in what the authorities consider security operations. The family’s lawyers appealed to the Supreme Court, which upheld their demand on May 4, but without specifying a date.

The family received the body from Israeli police at 10 p.m. on May 30 near the entrance to a cemetery, after paying a 10,000 NIS (about $2,725) guarantee that would be forfeited unless they conducted the burial immediately, admitted at most 25 mourners, and did not take photographs, chant, or raise Palestinian flags, said the lawyer, who was present. Police checked the mourners’ identification documents and kept them, and the mourners’ mobile phones, during the burial.

The lawyers also appealed to the Department of Internal Police Investigations within the Office of Israel’s State Attorney (“Machash”), to investigate Wadea’s shooting, but had not received updates regarding their complaint by mid-August.

Wadea’s father was fired from his job at an Orthodox Jewish institution in Jerusalem when the management learned his son had been shot, he said. Border Police also took the principal of Wadea’s school, Shatha Mahmoud, from her school for questioning about a Facebook post in which she criticized his killing, said residents and the Wadi Hilweh Information Center, a local organization that documents rights abuses.

Mohammed al-Sleem, Azzun

On the evening of March 2, Mohammed al-Sleem, 17, and a group of five friends he had grown up with were walking from the town of Azzun to the nearby village of Izbat al-Tabib, where a relative had a home at which the group regularly “hung out,” one boy said. Azzun is close to Road 55, which connects the large Israeli settlements of Alfei Menashe and Karnei Shomron.

Human Rights Watch spoke to two of Mohammed’s friends, ages 16 and 17, who were with him at the time, and three of his relatives. At around 7:40 p.m., the boys saw a dark blue Israeli truck with military license plates on the road that runs through the village, they said. According to reports by local media, based on residents’ accounts, the youths threw rocks or Molotov cocktails at the vehicle, which was roughly 30 meters away. The boys said the military vehicle had protective metal mesh over the windows, which could significantly reduce the risk of serious injury or death. A second military vehicle arrived next to the first, and the boys ran in different directions as four soldiers got out of the vehicle and fired assault rifles at them. The two witnesses said they heard between two to five individual gunshots followed by automatic gunfire.

Mohammed ran down a side street past an elementary school about 80 meters from the village road, and through plots of land with olive trees, his friends said. His friend, age 16, recalled, “We started running, and Mohamed told me, ‘I’m hit’, and I said, ‘Run! Run!’ and I was shot too. I ran about 100 meters, then I couldn’t go on.” A bullet pierced the back of the left shoulder of Mohammed’s friend and exited his chest. He collapsed but was able to call for help from relatives in the area, he said. He said that he cannot lift his left arm, or take deep breaths because of his injuries.

Mohammed was shot in the back by a bullet that lodged in his right lung. He ran approximately 200 meters, then collapsed in a field. Residents reached him 30 minutes later, found him unconscious, and took him to a hospital in Azzun in a private vehicle. He was transferred by ambulance to a hospital in the Palestinian city of Qalqilya and pronounced dead on arrival.

A third boy, 17, was shot through the bicep, he said, and a fourth, 16, had a superficial wound from a bullet that grazed his lower back. Researchers counted 10 apparent bullet impacts on the wall of the schoolyard, and others in olive trees, consistent with witness descriptions, indicating that Israeli soldiers fired a significant number of high-velocity assault-rifle rounds at fleeing children at a time when they posed no threat to life or of causing injury.

The military reported on the incident and said “hits [of Palestinian suspects] were identified” but did not report any injuries to soldiers.

Israeli forces regularly raid Azzun, residents said. They perceived the raids as a disproportionate, a collective deterrent against throwing rocks at Israeli vehicles driving to and from the settlements on Road 55, recalling repeated warnings by Israeli officers in the area against throwing stones at the road. On April 8, a soldier in a military vehicle fatally shot Ayed Sleem, 20, in the chest, although he was not armed or throwing projectiles at the time, an Israeli news report said.

Adam Ayyad, Deheisheh refugee camp

A large Israeli force was withdrawing after a raid on Deheisheh refugee camp near Bethlehem at around 5:00 or 5:30 a.m. on January 3, when Adam Ayyad, 15, joined a group of youths who threw stones at Israeli forces on a street below them, three boys who were there at the time said. After another boy threw a Molotov cocktail, an Israeli soldier in a building overlooking the street where the boys were, fired repeatedly at the group, two of the boys said.

The Israeli military told news media in general terms that Border Police officers had shot suspects during the large-scale raid on the camp, in response to Molotov cocktails, explosive devices, and stones thrown at them, but did not address Adam’s killing specifically.

The witnesses said that one bullet went through the window of a parked car and then wounded a 13-year-old. The soldier fired again repeatedly and hit Adam. A Palestinian Medical Relief Society medic who lives in the area said that repeated gunfire from Israeli forces delayed him as he tried to reach the wounded boys to stop their bleeding.

Human Rights Watch could not determine whether Adam was holding a projectile at the time. However, the three boys said that the members of the group began running away as soon as they heard the first shot. Several news reports cited an initial statement from the Palestinian Health Ministry that Adam was shot in the chest, but doctors at the hospital where Adam was taken and pronounced dead told Human Rights Watch that his wounds indicated the bullet hit him in the right side of his upper back and caused a large wound in the front of his chest, indicating that he had turned away from the direction of the Israeli soldiers and the shooter. Defense for Children International – Palestine also reported that Adam was shot in the back.

Based on witness statements, the Israeli forces were withdrawing roughly 45 meters away on the street below, and could have been hit by projectiles thrown from the youths’ more elevated position. The shooter was apparently in a room on the unfinished top floor of a multi-story building 73 meters away, where the boys later found spent bullet casings. That is consistent with Human Rights Watch researchers’ observations of bullet impacts at the site.

The shooter was apparently in position before the boys began throwing projectiles, but Israeli forces did not issue a warning, use less-lethal weapons, or shoot at the boys’ extremities before the shooter repeatedly fired with live ammunition at the group, with the bullets striking at chest-level, the witnesses said.

The incident raises questions about whether the shooter had targeted members of the group who posed an imminent threat to life or of serious injury, and if so, whether the shooting continued beyond the point where it could be deemed necessary. The military did not report any injuries to their forces during the raid.

Adam, an only child, had stopped attending school and found work in a bakery from 9 a.m. to 11 p.m. each day, a coworker said, to help support his mother, who is divorced and was raising him alone. Israeli forces had killed a friend who worked at another bakery nearby, Omar Manah, 23, during a raid on December 5, a relative said, and Adam was carrying a handwritten statement meant to be read if he was killed, which read, in part, “I had a lot of dreams I wished would come true but we are living in a reality that makes your dreams impossible.” His mother sometimes still prepares meals for both of them, especially his favorite dishes, she said.

International Law on Use of Force and Israeli Investigative Practices

International human rights standards prohibit law enforcement officials from “the intentional lethal use of firearms” except when “strictly unavoidable to protect life.” Throwing rocks, Molotov cocktails, and explosive fireworks could pose a risk to life, depending on the circumstances. However, nonviolent means and warnings must be used first whenever feasible, and force may be used “only if other measures to address a genuine threat have proved ineffective or have no likelihood of achieving the intended result.” The UN Code of Conduct for Law Enforcement Officials provides that, “Every effort should be made to exclude the use of firearms, especially against children.”

Palestinians in the West Bank are protected under the Geneva Conventions. Willful killings of protected persons by the occupying power outside what is permissible under human rights standards would constitute a grave breach of the laws of occupation.

Under international human rights law, governments “must ensure that individuals also have accessible and effective remedies to vindicate” their rights, including the right to life.

The Israeli military does not automatically open criminal investigations into cases in which soldiers use lethal force against Palestinians in the West Bank, including if a complaint is filed. Human Rights Watch has found that investigations are more likely to be opened in cases in which international news media report extensively on the killing. The armed forces military police carry out investigations and, regardless of whether an investigation is opened, impunity remains the norm.

Recommendations

• The Israeli military and Border Police should end the unlawful use of lethal force against Palestinians, including children. The Israeli government should issue clear directives publicly and privately to all security forces, that prohibit the intentional use of lethal force except in situations where it is necessary to prevent an imminent threat to life.
• The United Nations Secretary-General should list Israel’s armed forces in his annual report on grave violations against children in armed conflict for 2023 as responsible for the violation of killing and maiming Palestinian children.
• The prosecutor of the International Criminal Court should expedite his office’s Palestine investigation, including for grave violations committed against children.
• Foreign governments, such as the US which pledged $3.8 billion in military aid to Israel in 2023, should condition assistance on Israel taking concrete and verifiable steps toward ending their serious abuses, including the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution and the regular use of lethal force against Palestinians, including children, that violate international standards, and to investigate past abuses. It should suspend assistance so long as these grave abuses persist.
• Members of the US House of Representatives should support the Defending the Human Rights of Palestinian Children and Families Living Under Israeli Occupation Act (H.R. 2590), which would prohibit US funding to Israel from being unlawfully used for the military detention and abuse of Palestinian children, destruction of Palestinian property, and expropriation of land for settlements.

Featured Photo: Left to Right, Adam Ayyad, Wadea Abu Ramuz, Mahmoud al-Sadi, and Mohammed al-Sleem. © Private

Via ( Human Rights Watch

(The Conversation) – Climate change is not just an environmental crisis, it’s a human rights crisis. And the humans to be most affected by climate catastrophe are the youngest ones: children.

We have seen children directly impacted in the Northern Hemisphere’s unprecedented heatwaves this year. In Greece, 1,200 children were evacuated when a wildfire threatened their holiday camps.

In the United States, children were swept away by floodwaters in Kentucky after torrential rain, while an extreme heatwave swamped the West Coast. In Australia, this summer is expected to be hot, dry and dangerous but that’s nothing compared to what is to come.

So what are the responsibilities of governments to reduce the harm climate change will wreak on the lives of children?

A statement from the United Nations (UN) released today seeks to clarify this. It clearly stipulates why and how the rights of children are compromised by climate change – including the very basic right to life. It also details the steps necessary to mitigate this catastrophe.

A practical guide to help children

The statement comes from a UN body of 18 experts that monitors how national governments are implementing the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. This is an international agreement on a broad range of human rights as they relate to children, including their health, education, development, best interests and living standards.

From time to time, UN human rights committees publish a new interpretation of the treaty they oversee. These are known as “general comments”.

General comments are significant because they provide authoritative guidance to the governments of the 196 countries that have ratified the convention, with Australia being one of them. They also provide a globally agreed standard against which governments and businesses can be assessed.

This new comment follows nearly two years of consultation with more than 7,000 children from 103 countries, as well as governments and relevant experts.

It’s not merely an aspirational statement. Rather, it’s a practical “how-to” guide to action. This document will help children, young people and their advocates hold governments and others accountable for their decisions.

So what does the document say?

The general comment says governments have obligations to respect, protect and fulfil children’s rights. It states the “adverse effects of climate change” on the enjoyment of children’s rights “give rise to obligations of states to take actions to protect against those effects”. It adds the committee overseeing the convention aims to:

i) Emphasise the urgent need to address the adverse effects of environmental harm and climate change on children;

ii) Promote a holistic understanding of children’s rights as they apply to environmental protection;

iii) Clarify the obligations of States parties to the Convention and provide authoritative guidance on legislative, administrative and other appropriate measures to be undertaken with respect to environmental issues, with a special focus on climate change.

The general comment also identifies children as agents in their own lives. By extension, this means children have a right to participate in the drafting of environmental policies or laws that will affect them.

Here are the committee’s points that are most relevant to Australia.

1. Best interests of the child

A key principle of the treaty is the best interests of the child should be a primary consideration when making decisions on their behalf. These decisions include laws, regulations, budgets and international agreements. The general comment expands on this, saying:

the best interests of the child shall be a primary consideration in the adoption and implementation of environmental decisions affecting children.

It says this process should take into account “the specific circumstances that make children uniquely vulnerable in the environmental context”.

This “best interests” approach stands in stark contrast to that taken by the full bench of the Federal Court in Australia. In 2022, the court accepted the federal government’s argument that it has no duty of care for children, and that the best interests principle is not something it ought to consider when making decisions about the environment.

2. Protecting Indigenous children

Indigenous children and their communities are particularly vulnerable to climate change.

For example, a recent study found Indigenous communities in New South Wales were disproportionately exposed to a range of climate extremes such as heat, drought and flooding. They also experienced higher rates of climate-sensitive health conditions and socioeconomic disadvantages.

The comment says states are obliged to ensure the right to life, survival and development of Indigenous children. They are also expected to “engage with Indigenous children and their families in responding to climate change by integrating, as appropriate, Indigenous cultures and knowledge in mitigation and adaptation measures”.

In Australia, it means the state, territory and federal governments have the duty to listen to Indigenous communities – especially to their younger members – and to take their perspective into account when crafting any policy or law that might have an impact on their livelihood and culture.

3. Actions of the business sector

The general comment says governments should require businesses to conduct “due diligence” to assess how their current and future actions might affect the climate and the rights of children.

Where the impacts of a business cross national boundaries, governments are expected to ensure businesses operate at “environmental standards aimed at protecting children’s rights from climate-related harm”.

The comment also expects governments to encourage investment in and use of zero-carbon technologies, particularly when the assets are publicly owned or funded. Governments should also protect the rights of children when implementing tax regimes and procuring goods and services from the private sector.

Facing up to the challenge

The general comment makes it clear states should no longer ignore the impacts of the climate crisis on children and future generations because they have legal duties to rectify it.

The UN committee articulates the responsibilities of states and details how children’s rights should be protected by all levels of government. Despite the fact the Convention on the Rights of the Child was adopted decades before environmental rights became a topic of discussion, the new general comment is a good reference for everyone from on-the-ground, grassroots local advocacy groups to international non-government organisations and UN organisations like UNICEF.

In this bold new statement, the committee has pushed the interpretation of the convention almost to the maximum, and like other international treaties, the real test will be in its implementation.

Noam Peleg, Senior Lecturer, Faculty of Law and Justice; Associate, the Australian Human Rights Institute, UNSW Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.