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“WILL YOU BRING MY DAD AND GIVE ME MY HAND BACK?  
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Nick Turse
October 22, 2024
Tom Dispatch
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_ War Is Not Healthy for Children and Other Living Things _

At least 16,314 Palestinian children were killed in Israel’s
devastating offensive on the Gaza Strip since last Oct. 7, local
authorities said on Thursday.,

 

“War is not healthy for children and other living things,” reads a
poster titled “Primer” created by the late artist Lorraine
Schneider for an art show at New York’s Pratt Institute in 1965.
Printed in childlike lowercase letters, the words interspersed between
the leaves of a simply rendered sunflower, it was an early response to
America’s war in Vietnam. “She just wanted to make something that
nobody could argue with,” recalled
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Schneider’s youngest daughter, Elisa Kleven, in an article published
earlier this year. Six decades later, Schneider’s hypothesis has
consistently been borne out.

According to Save the Children, about 468 million children
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— about one of every six young people on this planet — live in
areas affected by armed conflict. Verified attacks on children have
tripled since 2010
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Last year, global conflicts killed three times as many children
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as in 2022. “Killings and injuries of civilians have become a daily
occurrence,” U.N. human rights chief Volker Türk commented in June
when he announced the 2023 figures
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Hospitals bombed. Heavy artillery launched on entire communities.”

It took four decades for the United Nations Security Council to catch
up to Schneider. In 2005, that global body identified — and
condemned — six grave violations
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against children in times of war: killing or maiming; recruitment into
or use by armed forces and armed groups; attacks on schools or
hospitals; rape or other grave acts of sexual violence; abduction; and
the denial of humanitarian access to them. Naming and shaming,
however, has its limits. Between 2005 and 2023, more than 347,000
grave violations against youngsters were verified across more than 30
conflict zones in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America,
according to UNICEF
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the U.N. agency for children. The actual number is undoubtedly far
higher.

From the extreme damage explosive weapons
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do to tiny bodies to the lasting effects of acute deprivation on
developing brains, children are particularly vulnerable in times of
conflict. And once subjected to war, they carry its scars, physical
and mental, for a lifetime. A recent study
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by Italian researchers emphasized what Schneider intuitively knew —
that “war inflicts severe violations on the fundamental human rights
of children.” The complex trauma of war, they found, “poses a
grave threat to the emotional and cognitive development of children,
increasing the risk of physical and mental illnesses, disabilities,
social problems, and intergenerational consequences.”

Despite such knowledge, the world continues to fail children in times
of conflict. The United States was, for instance, one of the members
of the U.N. Security Council that condemned those six grave wartime
violations against children. Yet the Biden administration has greenlit
tens of billions of dollars
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sales to Israel, while U.S. munitions have repeatedly
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been used
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in attacks
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on schools
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that have become shelters, predominantly for women and children, in
the Gaza Strip. “Make no mistake, the United States is fully, fully,
fully supportive of Israel
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said
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recently, even though his administration acknowledged the likelihood
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that Israel had used American weaponry in Gaza in violation of
international law.

And Gaza is just one conflict zone where, at this very moment,
children are suffering mightily. Let _TomDispatch_ offer you a
hellscape tour of this planet, a few stops in a world of war to
glimpse just what today’s conflicts are doing to the children
trapped by them.

GAZA

The Gaza Strip is the most dangerous place on Earth to be a child,
according to UNICEF
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Israel has killed around 17,000 children
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there since the current Gaza War began in October 2023, according to
local authorities
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And almost as horrific, about 26,000
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kids have reportedly lost one or both parents. At least 19,000 of them
are now orphans or are otherwise without a caregiver. One million
children
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in Gaza have also been displaced from their homes since October 2023.

In addition, Israel is committing “scholasticide,” the deliberate
and systematic destruction of the Palestinian education system in
Gaza, according to a recent report
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by the Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, a Palestinian advocacy group.
More than 659,000 children
[//reliefweb.int/report/occupied-palestinian-territory/unrwa-situation-report-140-situation-gaza-strip-and-west-bank-including-east-jerusalem-all-information-24-26-september-2024-valid-26-september-2024-2230-local-time]
there have been out of school since the beginning of the war. The
conflict in Gaza will set children’s education back by years and
risks creating a generation of permanently traumatized Palestinians,
according
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to a new study by the University of Cambridge, the Centre for Lebanese
Studies, and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for
Palestinian Refugees in the Near East.

Even before the current war, an estimated 800,000 children in Gaza
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— about 75% of the kids there — were in need of mental health and
psychosocial support. Now, UNICEF estimates that more than one million
of them
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— in effect, every kid in the Gaza Strip — needs such services. In
short, you can no longer be a healthy child there.

LEBANON

Over four days in late September, as Israel ramped up its war in
Lebanon, about 140,000 children in that Mediterranean nation were
displaced. Many arrived at shelters showing signs of deep distress,
according to Save the Children staff
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“Children are telling us that it feels like danger is everywhere,
and they can never be safe. Every loud sound makes them jump now,”
said Jennifer Moorehead, Save the Children’s country director in
Lebanon. “Many children’s lives, rights and futures have already
been turned upside down and now their capacity to cope with this
escalating crisis has been eroded.”

All schools in that country have been closed, adversely affecting
every one of its 1.5 million children
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More than 890 children have also been injured in Israeli strikes over
the last year, the vast majority — more than 690 — since August
20th, according
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to the Lebanese Ministry of Public Health. Given that Israel has
recently extended attacks from the south of the country to the
Lebanese capital [[link removed]],
Beirut, they will undoubtedly be joined by all too many others.

SUDAN

Children have suffered mightily since heavy fighting erupted in
Khartoum, Sudan’s capital, in April 2023 between the Sudanese Armed
Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces. More than
18,000 people have reportedly been killed and close to 10 million have
been forced to flee their homes since the civil war there began.
Almost half of the displaced Sudanese are — yes! — children, more
than 4.6 million of them, making the conflict there the largest child
displacement crisis
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in the world.

More than 16 million Sudanese children
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are also facing severe food shortages. In the small town of Tawila in
that country’s North Darfur state, at least 10 children die of
hunger every day, according to a report
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last month in the _Guardian_. The population of the town has ballooned
as tens of thousands fled El Fasher, North Darfur’s besieged
capital. “We anticipate that the exact number of children dying of
hunger is much higher,” Aisha Hussien Yagoub, the head of the health
authority for the local government in Tawila told the _Guardian_.
“Many of those displaced from El Fasher are living far from our
clinic and are unable to reach it.”

More than 10 million Sudanese children, or 50% of that country’s
kids, have been within about three miles of the frontlines of the
conflict at some point over the past year. According
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to Save the Children, this marks the highest rate of exposure in the
world. In addition, last year, there was a five-fold increase
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in grave violations of Sudanese children’s rights compared to 2022.

SYRIA

More than 30,200 children
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have been killed since the Syrian Civil War began in 2011, according
to the Syrian Network for Human Rights. Another 5,200 children were
forcibly disappeared or are under arrest.

However little noticed, Syria
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largest refugee crisis. More than 14 million Syrians have been forced
from their homes. More than 7.2 million of them
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now estimated to be internally displaced in a country where nine in 10
people exist below the poverty line. An entire generation of children
has lived under the constant threat of violence and emotional trauma
since 2011. It’s been the only life they’ve ever known.

“Services have already collapsed after 14 years of conflict,”
Rasha Muhrez, Save the Children’s Response Director in Syria, said
last month
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“The humanitarian crisis in Syria is at a record level.” More than
two-thirds of the population of Syria, including about 7.5 million
children, require humanitarian assistance. Nearly half of the 5.5
million school-aged children — 2.4 million between the ages of five
and 17 — remain out of school, according to UNICEF
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About 7,000 schools
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destroyed or damaged.

Recently, Human Rights Watch sounded the alarm
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about the recruitment of children, “apparently for eventual transfer
to armed groups,” by a youth organization affiliated with the
Kurdish-led Autonomous Administration for North and East Syria and the
U.S.-backed Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, its military wing.

UKRAINE

Child casualties in Ukraine jumped nearly 40% in the first half of
this year, bringing the total number of children killed or injured in
nearly 900 days of war there to about 2,200, according to Save the
Children
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“This year, violence has escalated with a new intensity, with
missiles, drones, and bombs causing an alarming rise in children being
injured or killed in daylight blasts,” said Stephane Moissaing,
Deputy Country Director for Save the Children in Ukraine. “The
suffering for families will not stop as long as explosive weapons are
sweeping through populated towns and villages across Ukraine.”

There are already 2.9 million Ukrainian children
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in need of assistance — and the situation is poised to grow worse in
the months ahead. Repeated Russian attacks on the country’s
infrastructure could result in power outages of up to 18 hours a day
this winter, leaving many of Ukraine’s children freezing and without
access to critical services. “The lack of power and all its knock-on
effects this winter could have a devastating impact not only on
children’s physical health but on their mental well-being and
education,” said
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Munir Mammadzade, UNICEF representative to Ukraine. “Children’s
lives are consumed by thoughts of survival, not childhood.”

Ukraine also estimates that Russian authorities have forcibly removed
almost 20,000 children
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from occupied territories there since the February 2022 invasion. A
_Financial Times_ investigation
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found that Ukrainian children who were abducted and taken to Russia
early in the war were put up for adoption on a Russian
government-linked website. One of them was shown with a false Russian
identity. Another was listed using a Russian version of their
Ukrainian name. There was no mention of the children’s Ukrainian
backgrounds.

WEST AND CENTRAL AFRICA

Conflicts
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have been raging in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) for
decades. World Vision has called the long-running violence there
“one of the worst child protection crises in the world
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A 2023 U.N. report on children and armed conflict
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documented 3,377 grave violations against children in the DRC. Of
these, 46% involved the recruitment of children — some as young as
five — by armed groups.

Violence and intercommunity tensions in the DRC have forced 1,457
schools
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to close this year alone, affecting more than 500,000 children. And
sadly, that country is no anomaly. In May, the United Nations Office
for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, or OCHA, reported
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that more than 5,700 schools in Burkina Faso had been closed due to
insecurity, depriving more than 800,000 children of their educations.
And by mid-2024, conflicts had shuttered more than 14,300 schools in
24 African countries, according to the Norwegian Refugee Council
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That marks an increase of 1,100 closures compared to 2023. The 2024
closures were clustered in West and Central Africa, mainly in Burkina
Faso, the DRC, Cameroon, Chad, Nigeria, and Niger. They have affected
an estimated 2.8 million children.

“Education is under siege in West and Central Africa. The deliberate
targeting of schools and the systemic denial of education because of
conflict is nothing short of a catastrophe. Every day that a child is
kept out of school is a day stolen from their future and from the
future of their communities,” said Hassane Hamadou
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the Norwegian Refugee Council’s Regional Director for West and
Central Africa. “We urgently call on all parties to conflict to
cease attacks on and occupation of schools and ensure that education
is protected and prioritized.”

FEET OF CLAY

It’s been six decades since Lorraine Schneider unveiled her poster
and her common-sense wisdom to the world. She’s been proven right at
every turn, in every conflict across the entire planet. Everywhere
that children (not to mention other living things) have been exposed
to war, they have suffered. Children have been killed and maimed. They
have been physically, psychologically, and educationally stunted, as
well as emotionally wounded. They have been harmed, assaulted, and
deprived. Their bodies have been torn apart. Their minds – the
literal architecture of their brains
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– have been warped by war.

In the conflict zones mentioned above and so many others — from
Myanmar to Yemen — the world is failing its children. What they have
lost can never be “found” again. Survivors can go on, but there is
no going back.

Schneider’s mother, Eva Art, was a self-taught sculptor who escaped
pogroms in Ukraine by joining relatives in the United States as a
child. She lost touch with her family during World War II, according
to her daughter Kleven
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and later discovered that her relatives had been killed, their entire
shtetl (or small Jewish town) wiped out. To cope with her grief, Art
made clay figurines of the dead of her hometown: a boy and his dog, an
elderly woman knitting, a mother cradling a baby. And today, the
better part of 100 years after the young Art was forced from her home
by violence, children continue to suffer in the very same ways — and
continue to turn to clay for solace.

Israa Al-Qahwaji, a mental health and psychosocial
support coordinator for Save the Children in Gaza, shared the story
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of a young boy who survived an airstrike that resulted in the
amputation of one of his hands, while also killing his father and
destroying his home. In shock and emotionally withdrawn, the boy was
unable to talk about the trauma. However, various therapeutic
techniques allowed him to begin to open up, according to
Al-Qahwaji. The child began to talk about games he could no longer
play and how losing his hand had changed his relationship with his
friends. In one therapy session, he was asked to mold something out
of clay to represent a wish. With his remaining hand, he carefully
shaped a house. After finishing the exercise, he turned to the
counselor with a question that left Al-Qahwaji emotionally
overwhelmed. “Now,” the boy asked, “will you bring my dad and
give me my hand back?”

Copyright 2024 Nick Turse

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Nick Turse is the managing editor of _TomDispatch
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a fellow at the Type Media Center
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most recently of _Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead: War and
Survival in South Sudan
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of the bestselling _Kill Anything That Moves
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* Children as War Victims; Gaza; Lebanon; Sudan; Syria; Ukraine;
West and Central Africa;
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