Sharon Zhang
Truthout / November 8, 2024
Children account for the single largest group of people killed by Israel.
The Israeli military is killing over five dozen children every day in Gaza, a UN official has reported, as Israel is worsening already unimaginable conditions in Gaza each day with no end in sight.
Israel is killing at least 67 Palestinian children on average each day amid its genocide, UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) officer Louise Wateridge told Al-Jazeera on Friday.
This is a show of the outsized toll of Israel’s violence against children, who account for the single largest group of those killed by Israel, according to a UN report published Friday. According to the report, the age group most affected by Israel’s slaughter is those aged between 0 and 14 years old.
In June, Israel was officially added to a UN list of global violators of children’s rights, after the UN noted that last year saw the highest-ever level of recorded violations against children, due in large part to Israel’s assault on Palestine.
In all, according to the official death count by Palestinian officials, Israel has killed at least 16,765 children in 13 months of genocide. The true death toll is likely far higher, and it is possible that tens of thousands more children are dead, with children accounting for roughly 40 percent of deaths in Gaza.
Babies and toddlers aged 0 to 4 are among the most-represented age groups of those killed by Israel.
On top of these horrific killings, Israeli forces have detained and tortured hundreds, if not thousands, of children from Gaza and the occupied West Bank amid the genocide. These children are among the over 20,000 children in Gaza who are missing, according to an estimate from Save the Children earlier this year, either separated from their families, abducted by Israeli forces, trapped under rubble, buried in mass graves, or otherwise.
Wateridge, reporting from north Gaza, also noted that conditions in Gaza are horrific. Roughly 500,000 Palestinians in Gaza are sheltering in areas with high risks of flooding, as mass flooding events in other parts of the world like Valencia, Spain, have had disastrous consequences. Meanwhile, there are over 42 million tons of rubble in Gaza littered with dangerous unexploded bombs left by Israel’s destruction of the region.
North Gaza, where Israel has embarked on a campaign of ethnic cleansing and total destruction, is effectively unlivable, Wateridge said. Israel has blocked all attempts by humanitarian groups to deliver food in the region for over a month now amid its escalated assault on northern Gaza. Israel is even blocking Palestinians from reaching basic needs like water, Wateridge noted to Al-Jazeera.
Health care, meanwhile, is next to non-existent as Israel has violently forced shutdowns of all but one hospital in the region — a hospital that the military has also repeatedly raided and bombed. There are dozens of trucks filled with medical and hygiene supplies waiting outside of Gaza’s border entries, according to the UNRWA official, but Israeli forces are blocking entry of nearly all aid.
Meanwhile, former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant reportedly told families of hostages this week that Israeli officials could end the assault whenever they wanted, and are only prolonging it out of a desire to remain in Gaza. Gallant — who Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu fired this week and who has directed military operations throughout the genocide until this point — said that the prime minister is prolonging the assault despite military officials saying that there is no strategic reason to remain in Gaza, according to Israeli media.
According to the reports of Gallant’s comments, who international prosecutors have named along with Netanyahu in arrest warrant requests for the assault, the former official said that there are no “security considerations” for leaving troops in Gaza. By contrast, in July — after Israel had already massacred, at a minimum, 38,000 Palestinians — “conditions were ripe” for a ceasefire and hostage deal, Gallant said, but Netanyahu instead purposely sabotaged the negotiations.
Sharon Zhang is a news writer at Truthout covering politics, climate and labour
