We’re in 2024 after a sad and happy, good and bad, 12-month season. We look forward with more optimism that the year ahead will be better than the year that just ended!
However, even when sparklers and fireworks lit up skies across the world to welcome 2024, experiences from the past few years still haunt many of us. It reminds us that unexpected developments like the Covid-19 pandemic, Russia’s war in Ukraine, or the war in Gaza can wreck the most optimistic forecasts!
Although we could survive the threat of the coronavirus, efforts to end conflicts and wars are failing. On some battlefields, peace-making is non-existent or going nowhere!
On the contrary, more people around the world are dying in fighting, being forced from their homes, or in need of life-saving aid than in decades. Only a few places in those war-torn territories were left to mark the New Year, and there were fewer loved ones to celebrate with.
Israel has already warned its war will continue throughout 2024, as unrelenting strikes killed two dozen people in Gaza and the Palestinian group fired a rocket barrage at the stroke of midnight.
What the warring leaderships forget to acknowledge is that children living in war-affected countries live in constant fear, experiencing grave violations of their rights with serious impacts on their mental health.
Today, as we witness, the nature of conflict and its impact on children have evolved. There have been deliberate campaigns of violence against civilians, including the targeting of schools, the abduction and enslavement of girls, and deliberate starvation.
Many children living in lethal war zones are already at risk of climate change and are facing unprecedented levels of hunger as well. Heavy bombardment and destruction led to the denial of their basic rights to education.
Throughout the year, as Unicef pointed out, children around the world have faced rampant violations and denials of their rights.
“In the entirety of my more than 25-year career, it is hard to recall a year in which the situation facing children affected by conflict and disaster has been as dire as the one we are currently witnessing. The horrendous situation in Gaza, which shakes us to the core of our humanity, exemplifies this," Unicef Deputy Executive Director Ted Chaiban said at a press briefing in Geneva on December 15.
In a report, the UN body said that at least a thousand children in Gaza have had their limbs amputated without anesthesia since the war began on October 7. It added that the continued shelling of Gaza would mean green lighting and the killing of more children.
The Gaza Strip, according to a report, is gradually being erased, along with its families, its people, its children, and their smiles and laughter. This has been happening despite repeated appeals by the UN for a ceasefire, saying there are no safe areas within the strip.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in November that “Gaza is becoming a graveyard for children.” According to the UN, there was no way to get out for civilians who have been displaced multiple times since October and are running out of food, water, and medical supplies.
In a recent social media report, UNRWA , another UN agency, said that over 150,000 people, including young children, women carrying babies, people with disabilities, and the elderly, have nowhere to go.
Half of the displaced are children who are now struggling with dehydration, malnutrition, respiratory and skin diseases, and extreme cold, the statement added. Some 50,000 pregnant women, meanwhile, are suffering from thirst and malnutrition.
Yet even as wars continue, we must never accept attacks on children. We must hold warring parties to their obligation to protect children and hold those who disregard international laws and standards to account.
Otherwise, it is children, their families, and their communities who will continue to suffer the devastating consequences, for now and for years to come.
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