A little more than four weeks after Israel began a devastating bombing campaign on the Gaza Strip following the October 7 Hamas attack on southern Israel, the besieged coastal enclave has become a mass grave for children. Over 4,000 Palestinian children have been killed in the bombing — now accompanied by an Israeli ground assault — out of a total death toll of nearly 9,800 people in Gaza. That is half the number of children killed or maimed in the Iraq war between 2008 and 2023. A week ago, the global non-government organisation, Save the Children, reported that more children had died in this densely-populated Palestinian territory in three weeks of Israeli bombardment than in all conflicts combined in any year since 2019. That children would bear the brunt of missiles raining down from the skies was known: half of Gaza’s 2.3 million people are children, none of whom voted for Hamas when it came to power in the region in 2006. Gaza’s rows of small bodies, wrapped and bound in white shrouds, call out Israel’s bluff that its military campaign is focused on Hamas. Yet, the tragedy of the ongoing war is not limited to those who are no more. The images of children who have survived — grievously injured, traumatised, in grief — point to the collective failure and the complicity of the global community. Research shows that children exposed to war suffer some of the worst effects of post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, dissociative disorders and behavioural disorders in the long run. The ongoing war in Gaza has created a generation of children with a lost future. It must be pointed out that the children of Gaza in fact, symbolise, the arcs of a broader moral deficit. A Unicef report suggests that on an average, 20 children lose their lives or are maimed per day in conflicts the world over in the 21st century.

The Geneva Conventions are clear: children in war must have access to hospitals, food, clothing, medicines and safe evacuation. None of these is available in Gaza: Israel has bombed schools, ambulances, churches and convoys of fleeing people in apparent disregard for international law. Such violations are not uncommon in the other theatres of conflict. The plight of children in Gaza exposes the double-facedness of Western governments: they rightly condemned Russia’s deportation of Ukrainian children in 2022 but are backing a conflict that is, in many ways, now a war against Palestinian children.