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children s rights
Devastating Report Details Israel's War on Gaza Children With Disabilities
"Israeli authorities need to take immediate action to end the wrongful deaths, injuries, and suffering of children, particularly those with disabilities," one advocate said.
Sep 30, 2024
Israel's bombardment and blockade of Gaza have caused "profound trauma and suffering" to the children there, particularly to those with disabilities, Human Rights Watch said.
In a report released Monday, the watchdog group wrote that thousands of children had become disabled due to injuries sustained because of Israel's use of explosive weapons after October 7. Their numbers are added to the 98,000 children living in Gaza with disabilities before the war began, who now face "enormous difficulties to survive."
"The Israeli military's unlawful attacks and denial of aid are harming and traumatizing Palestinians throughout Gaza, but children with disabilities are facing increased threats to their lives and safety," Emina Ćerimović, HRW's associate disability rights director, said in a statement. "Countries providing military support to Israel should suspend arms transfers so long as its forces commit serious laws-of-war violations with impunity, including unlawful restrictions on aid and attacks on hospitals."
"They took everything that helped me live, like my devices, my boot, and my wheelchair. How can I go back to how I was without all this?"
For the report, titled "They Destroyed What Was Inside Us": Children with Disabilities Amid Israel's Attacks on Gaza, HRW interviewed one child with a disability, 20 family members of children with disabilities, and 13 healthcare and humanitarian workers. They also reviewed children's medical records and watched more than 50 videos and photographs showing the aftermath of bombardments.
The child they interviewed was a 14-year-old girl named Ghazal who has cerebral palsy. A bombardment of her home in Gaza City destroyed her orthotic shoe, wheelchair, and a third nighttime device, as well as most of the family's belongings.
"From the day the war broke out, they destroyed what was inside us," Ghazal told HRW. "They demolished my house and my room, which held all my memories. They took everything that helped me live, like my devices, my boot, and my wheelchair. How can I go back to how I was without all this?"
Without her mobility aides, Ghazal had to rely on her parents to carry her when the family fled south, leading to psychological distress for everyone.
"Most of the time, Ghazal would tell me, 'Mama, it's over, leave me alone and run away. You should leave me in the street,'" her mother, Hala Al-Ghoula, told HRW. "It was one of the worst days of my life, with a very difficult feeling that can never be described. I was confused: whether to stop while we were under bombardment or to walk and leave Ghazal."
Israel's assault on Gaza carries "particular risks" for children with disabilities like Ghazal because their age and conditions make them more vulnerable.
"They face additional challenges in accessing essential food, water, sanitation, medical treatment, medicines, assistive devices, and services, all of which are extremely hard, if not impossible, to obtain due to frequent Israeli strikes and major ground operations and restrictions on the entry of humanitarian aid," HRW said.
Several elements of Israel's assault on Gaza following Hamas' October 7 attack on Southern Israel are particularly difficult for both the newly and previously disabled. It is extremely challenging for people with disabilities like Ghazal to respond to short-notice evacuation orders. The use of starvation as a weapon of war is even more dangerous for children who require a special diet to maintain their health, and limited access to water and sanitation puts additional strain on those with special health needs.
Israel's method of warfare—the bombardment of densely populated urban areas—is extremely disabling. A December report from Humanity & Inclusion found that the leading type of injury from these explosions was "traumatic amputations." Meanwhile, three doctors told HRW that the most frequent kind of injury they saw when treating children following bombardments was burns, but the second most common was amputations.
"We are talking about a huge number of traumatic amputations, especially in children, leaving children with permanent disabilities. Also, many children who were wounded by shrapnel all over their faces and bodies, and I have seen children lose their eyesight due to injuries," Dr. A.G., who worked at Gaza City's al-Shifa hospital, told HRW.
Whether a child was injured in the war or had a preexisting health need, Israel's frequent assaults on hospitals further impedes them from getting the care they need. Between October 7 and August 20, Israel conducted 505 separate attacks on healthcare facilities that left 752 dead, 982 injured, and the enclave with only 17 hospitals that partially function.
"I saw a semi-functional hospital become unable to function because of the mass casualties, lack of supplies, inability of staff to reach the hospital, and security constraints," Dr. Seema Jilani, who worked for two weeks at Al-Aqsa Hospital, told HRW. "One day while I was there, a bullet went in through the ICU. And in the following few days, Israel dropped leaflets in the surrounding area, the red zone, asking people to evacuate. We were not able to return after that."
Israel's actions come despite the fact that international humanitarian and human rights law affords special protections to people with disabilities in wartime, HRW noted. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which Israel ratified in 2012, mandates that signatories take "all necessary measures" to safeguard people with disabilities during armed conflict. In Israel's case, that would mean providing more effective evacuation measures and lifting the blockade to make sure that those with disabilities have what they need to survive, such as food, water, healthcare, medication, and mobility aides.
HRW also said that countries such as the U.S., U.K., Canada, and Germany should pressure Israel to protect children with disabilities by condemning violations, applying sanctions when appropriate, and not sending weapons to Israel while it commits war crimes.
"Israeli authorities need to take immediate action to end the wrongful deaths, injuries, and suffering of children, particularly those with disabilities," Ćerimović concluded. "Governments should urgently adopt measures to press the Israeli government to comply with its legal obligations to prevent further atrocities and to ensure the rights of children with disabilities, and everyone else, are respected."
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Water, War, and Women in Gaza
Israel’s omnicide in Gaza has destroyed much of its already-stressed water infrastructure, and women and children suffer for it.
Sep 18, 2024
In late 2020, a report titled
Saving Gaza Begins With Its Waterstated:
The water crisis in Gaza is a problem of daunting proportions, with grave implications for the more than 2 million inhabitants of the Palestinian enclave... The Coastal Aquifer from which Gaza pumps water is diminishing; but more dangerously, it is experiencing significant deterioration from seawater and highly saline groundwater intrusion, as well as sewage pollution.
Fast forward to 2024: Gaza’s water scarcity pollution is severely worsened by its forced closure of water and wastewater treatment plants due to Israel’s blockade of fuel to Gaza to run the plants in its 2023-2024 war.
The authors of Saving Gaza Begins With Its Water end on a cautiously positive note. “The crisis of water in Gaza also holds promise,” they wrote, ...“because Gaza’s water problem will require cooperation between antagonists, to their mutual benefit. There is no solution that can be achieved by Gaza or Israel in isolation” because one of Israel’s water sources is the same Coastal Aquifer.
But this affirmative conclusion presumes that the people of Gaza have not been annihilated by Israeli bombing, inflicting a daily death rate greater than any major war of the 21st century, combined with the induced famine across all of Gaza by Israel’s blockades of food aid, and rampant disease including the recent polio virus. At the current rate of killing and death, 15-20% of Gaza’s people could be dead by the end of the year, a United Nations expert stated and almost entirely exterminated within a few years.
What can be done? Nothing without Israel and the United States agreeing to end their totalistic war.
Prior to the current war, Gaza had more than 150 small-scale desalination plants to produce potable water. By mid-October 2023, Israeli missile attacks destroyed the drinking water desalination plants; and its almost total blockade cut off fuel to run the other water treatment plants, as well as metal parts to repair them. Gaza’s drinking water production capacity dropped to just 5% of typical levels.
With no power to run Gaza’s five wastewater treatment plants, sewage has flowed freely through the streets, causing a record increase in cases of diarrheal illnesses. By December 2023, cases of diarrhea among children under five in Gaza jumped 2,000%, because of which children under five are over 20 times more likely to die from the illness than from Israeli military violence.
More than three-quarters of Gaza’s 2.2 million people are internally displaced to southern Gaza and, even there, continually forced to re-locate because of Israeli bombing. In some of the most overcrowded shelters in southern Gaza, there is one toilet per 600 internally displaced persons and little to no running water.
Every human being in Gaza suffers soul-shattering existence from this war variably described as genocide, ecocide, domicide (destruction of homes), and scholasticide (destruction of schools and universities). Indeed, two American trauma surgeons, who have volunteered for surgical missions in crisis situations all over the world, stated that they have never seen cruelty like Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Women and their children are its gravest victims. Daily in Gaza children are having one of both legs amputated without anesthesia. More than 25,000 children have lost one or both parents.
Recently members of the Uncommitted National Movement spoke at a press conference during the Democratic National Convention and accused the Biden administration of “hypocritical action” in saying they are working on cease-fire while providing the weapons massacring Palestinians in Gazan. At the same conference, American doctors who had volunteered in Gaza pleaded with Kamala Harris to “embrace an arms embargo on Israel and an immediate cease-fire.” The doctors attested that the killing and suffering is on “an entirely unprecedented scale.” None has seen anything “so horrific, so egregious, so inhumane.”
Impacts of War on Women
As of early 2024, The U.N. estimated that some 700,000 women and girls in Gaza experience menstrual cycles but lack adequate access to basic hygiene products like pads, toilet paper, soap, running water, and toilets because of the war nor privacy to manage menstrual hygiene. These conditions put women and girls in Gaza at grave risk of reproductive and urinary tract infections. The challenge of trying to find an available bathroom is especially difficult for pregnant women who have pressure on their bladder, and women who have just given birth and are going through weeks of postpartum bleeding.
By early March 2024 Relief/Web reported: There has been a steep rise in malnutrition among the more than 155,000 pregnant and breastfeeding women. Every day about 180 women give birth in unimaginable conditions, no longer having health-care facilities to deliver their babies. Many mothers who have given birth since the beginning of Israel’s war are too malnourished to produce milk for their newborns.
Although mothers and adult women are tasked with sourcing food, they are the ones who eat last, less, and least.
What can be done? Nothing without Israel and the United States agreeing to end their totalistic war. Dima Nazzal, a systems engineer at the Georgia Institute of Technology, believes that while rebuilding Gaza is “a daunting prospect,” with “cooperation, coordination, and courage, it is not unachievable.” But first the war must be ended.
Israel has sought security through militaristic means since its founding: expelling 750,000 Palestinians in 1948 (the Nakba—“catastrophe” in Arabic), claiming Palestinian land by force, enforcing apartheid conditions for Palestinians in Israel, establishing colonizing settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and now omnicide in Gaza. The only way for Israel to live in security is through a political compromise, in the spirit of Isaiah 59:8, that guarantees the human and political rights of the Palestinians who have lived on the land of Palestine for thousands of years. Without justice—the U.S. ending its criminal trafficking of weapons to Israel, a permanent cease-fire, the U.N. recognizing Palestine as a state and then organizing the rebuilding of Gaza with supportive countries—there can be no peace.
Pat Hynes gave a talk on the plight of women in water-starved Gaza during a conference on Memorial Day weekend sponsored by the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom entitled Water on the Frontlines for Peace. This piece is a much abbreviated and updated version.
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Those Who Violate the Rights of Children in War Must Be Held Accountable
When this does not happen, it signals that no one is safe, that the agreements we’ve made in global fora like the U.N. will not protect anyone, especially not the most vulnerable.
Jun 25, 2024
This week, the United Nations will hold an open debate on violations of children in wartime, and while this topic would seem morally clear, the debate is sure to be contentious. Earlier this month, with the
U.N. Secretary-General Annual Report on Children and Armed Conflict, the armed forces of Israel, as well as Hamas and Palestine Islamic Jihad, join the armed forces of and armed groups in Russia, Congo, Myanmar, Somalia, Nigeria, and Sudan as documented perpetrators of grave violations of the rights of children. In nearly 33,000 documented incidents, children were killed, starved, maimed, kidnapped, and recruited as soldiers in more than two dozen war zones.
The secretary-general’s annual report and its annexed list of perpetrators, the so-called “ list of shame,” have served as a unique and largely effective tool for identifying perpetrators and pressuring them to end violations and protect children in times of war. The report’s impact and credibility rely on applying the same standards to all parties across all armed conflicts. Protecting children from war should not be subject to political considerations. And yet, in this week’s debate perpetrators and their allies will surely disagree about the inclusion of parties that have harmed or killed children in war.
As a full-time advocate working for accountability for violations against the rights of children, I can say the global situation for children in conflict has never looked more dire. The U.N. secretary-general has recently reported that the proportion of children killed in 2023 tripled as compared with 2022, with 40% of global killings of children happening in Gaza. Leading child protection organizations have documented that 468 million children (or more than 1 in 6 children globally) live in areas affected by armed conflict. There has also never been the same level of witness to violations committed against the rights of children. Intense, bold campaigns in the news and on social media have captured the engagement and compassion of millions of people outside of war zones, resulting in calls for increased aid, intervention, and cease-fire.
The suffering and death of children in war—from the kidnapping of nine-month-old Kfir Bibas by Hamas, to the 46 Ukrainian children placed for adoption in Russia, to the Palestinian children with their names written in ink on their bodies so they can be identified when they die—have been incredibly brutal.
Parties involved in armed conflict must respect and ensure respect for international law, particularly international humanitarian law and international human rights law. This means not recruiting children, not subjecting them to sexual violence, not torturing them, not bombing hospitals or schools, and not creating famine. These frameworks do not consist of mere guidelines but binding commitments signed by states designed to protect individuals affected by armed conflict, including children. Violations of international law should not be tolerated—not by other states, not by the U.N. Security Council, and not by the citizens living in countries that are party to these laws.
Accountability efforts must be strengthened. This includes both political and financial efforts at domestic and international levels. Cases of universal jurisdiction have been undertaken for war crimes in third countries, but this has had a limited impact on crimes committed against children. States can do more, bringing those responsible before justice. When states and armed groups are not held accountable, it signals that no one is safe, that the agreements we’ve made in global fora like the U.N. will not protect anyone, especially not the most vulnerable. This inevitably impacts global cooperation. Diplomats are recalled, trade agreements become tenuous, travel between nations is discouraged or prohibited.
As the director of a network of organizations working to protect children from the effects of war, I must note that the work to protect children is cross-cutting. Addressing the problems faced by children in war requires a holistic approach that integrates child protection into all humanitarian and development efforts. The international aid community should consider the impact of its work on children first and collaborate across disciplines to adopt strategies that address the needs of children. By viewing child protection through this integrative lens, these organizations can create more effective and sustainable solutions, enabling more children to survive war.
The suffering and death of children in war—from the kidnapping of nine-month-old Kfir Bibas by Hamas, to the 46 Ukrainian children placed for adoption in Russia, to the Palestinian children with their names written in ink on their bodies so they can be identified when they die—have been incredibly brutal. But until we begin to meaningfully hold accountable those who commit these grave violations, naming and shaming and engaging with parties to armed conflict will remain among the best tools we have for perpetrators to change their behaviors.
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