As the world prepares to usher in a new year, hundreds of millions of children are battling for survival amidst a series of wars that are only expanding as the sun sets on 2024. In fact, according to UNICEF, 2024 has been one of the worst years for children in the UN agency’s history. More than 473 million children — or one in every six — now live in regions that are ravaged by conflict. The figure is up from one in every 10 children in the 1990s. This is because the world is torn by more conflicts today than at any point since the end of the Second World War. The fires that continue to burn in Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, Sudan, Chad, Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of Congo and from Ukraine to Haiti are adversely affecting children. Other relevant data make for sombre reading as well. For instance, while children form 30% of the global population, they represent 40% of the world’s refugee population. In the first nine months of 2024, the UN tracked more children killed in war — with Israel’s devastating assault on Gaza driving the numbers — than in all of 2023.

Death or injury, as the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, in particular, illustrate, are not the only challenges though. For instance, Israel’s deliberate — announced — campaign for months to limit the entry of food, medicine and other essential supplies to the Palestinian enclave has led to famine-like conditions; the acute malnutrition will certainly impact an entire generation of children. All of Gaza’s universities and many of its schools — even those run by the UN — have been bombed, denying children and young adults an opportunity to pursue a future through education. Babies have died in incubators because Israel would not allow power even to hospitals. Medical facilities are routinely bombed and patients and doctors forced to leave. Earlier this year, polio resurfaced in Gaza, with the enclave’s sanitation facilities devastated. Elsewhere, in a separate act of transgression, Russia has forcibly transferred thousands of Ukrainian children away from their families: in July, it bombed Ukraine’s largest paediatric clinic. This war on children, in Gaza, Ukraine and beyond, poses a threat to the very future of affected communities. Even when ceasefires are eventually announced, these wars will live on in the hearts and minds of a generation of young survivors — on their maimed bodies, in their anger and trauma. The world has let them down. It will have to deal with the consequences.