May 12, 2026 – Eleven-month-old Misk Al-Adini lies on a bed at Al-Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis. His condition worsens considerably following brain damage which prevents him from moving his neck or limbs. The little girl suffers from acute malnutrition, chronic diarrhea, incessant vomiting and a high fever, in addition to serious breathing difficulties and an inability to suckle or eat. The plight of sick children in the Gaza Strip is worsening due to the total collapse of the health system caused by the genocide perpetrated by Israel at Al-Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis. Medical resources are lacking as Israel continues to restrict the flow of supplies to Gaza – Photo: Doaa Albaz / Activestills
Par Ahmed Asmar
There is no better starting point for this article than the words of Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israeli Minister of National Security. At a security cabinet meeting in early June, he called for the kidnapping of Lebanese women and children to put pressure on Hezbollah.
“Let’s start thinking outside the box when it comes to Hezbollah,” he said, urging officials to adopt more forceful measures, including “kidnapping their wives and children,” because, he said, that is “what hurts them the most.”
Imagine the moral decadence it takes to propose child abduction as a legitimate military tactic. This is not a marginal figure speaking on the sidelines, but a senior minister in the Israeli government.
His remarks did not arouse any significant international reaction of indignation, did not give rise to any emergency session of the UN Security Council, did not result in any sanctions and did not result in any indictments. Thus, as the Arab proverb says, “silence is equivalent to implicit approval of the acts committed”.
Child killers!
Where is the so-called international community? Where are the human rights organizations that exist precisely to condemn such abhorrent rhetoric? The silence is deafening. And this silence is not passive: it is active complicity in the normalization of the targeting of children as an instrument of war.
Lebanon: a generation under the bombs
The figures from Lebanon are frightening. Since March 2, 2026, Israeli attacks have killed at least 3,711 people in Lebanon, including 247 children, according to the Lebanese Ministry of Health.
Since the April 17 ceasefire – a truce that turned out to be nothing more than ink on paper – Israeli forces have killed an average of more than one child per day. At least 70 children have been killed since the last declaration of a so-called ceasefire.
These are not accidents. This is not “collateral damage”. These are the predictable and systematic consequences of a military campaign that considers civilian infrastructure as legitimate targets and children as acceptable casualties.
When we bomb residential neighborhoods, when we order the evacuation of entire cities, when we wage a war without any real distinction between combatants and civilians, children die. And that’s what happens – every day.
Palestine: children of Gaza massacred before the eyes of the world
If the situation in Lebanon is appalling, that in Gaza is apocalyptic.
Since October 2023, more than 20,000 children have been killed in Gaza – a staggering figure that boggles the mind. Even after a so-called ceasefire was declared, more than 200 children have been killed since October 2025.
During the first weekend of June 2026 alone, eight children were killed and 18 others injured in five different locations in the Gaza Strip, according to local Gaza authorities.
In the West Bank, the situation is not very different from that in Gaza: on June 5, a 7-month-old baby was killed by Israeli soldiers’ fire while he was sitting on his mother’s lap in the back of a car near the city of Hebron, and the perpetrator was not held responsible, nor even questioned.
The world saw children in Gaza literally burned alive. The world saw their torn bodies. The world saw hospitals overflowing with injured children. And the world did nothing.
Iran: the Minab massacre
On February 28, 2026, a strike hit Shajareh Tayyebeh Girls’ Primary School in Minab, southern Iran, while classes were taking place. Results: 168 girls killed.
The victims were schoolgirls aged between 7 and 12. One hundred and sixty-eight girls, in a single attack… In their school…
Iran: mourning the dead children
UNICEF has confirmed that around 180 children are believed to have been killed in Iran, with a further 12 children killed in other schools across five different sites.
Schools are protected by international humanitarian law. They must be safe places. Instead, they became battlefields during US-Israeli aggression against Iran.
Russian-Ukrainian conflict: children deliberately targeted
While Israel is the country that commits the most egregious violations in terms of targeting children, other conflicts around the world have also given rise to frightening incidents.
In the Russo-Ukrainian war, children were also deliberately targeted. On May 22, 2026, Ukrainian forces used heavily armed drones to carry out a targeted strike against a vocational school dormitory in the town of Starobilsk, Luhansk region. At the time of the attack, 86 students – aged 14 to 18 – were in the dormitory. The five-story building collapsed and at least 18 children were confirmed dead, while dozens more were injured.
The United Nations has expressed its concern about this deadly attack. But worry is not synonymous with action. Conviction does not equal accountability, and perpetrators, regardless of which side they fight for, remain free to strike again.
Total impunity
What connects Ben-Gvir’s call to child kidnapping, the 247 children recently killed in Lebanon, the 20,000 children killed in Gaza, the 168 schoolgirls killed in Minab and the 18 students killed In Starobilsk? The answer is simple: impunity.
The authors know that they will not have to answer for it. Israel has never been held responsible for what happened in Gaza or Lebanon. Ukraine will not be held responsible for its attack in Starobilsk. And there are countless other striking examples of incidents where children were the main targets and victims.
The international legal system, designed precisely to prevent such atrocities, has proven completely incapable of stopping them.
As UN experts have pointed out, the failure to ensure accountability “perpetuates a culture of impunity that disproportionately affects women and girls.” And the same goes for all children.
In the absence of consequences, there is no deterrent, and without a deterrent, the killings continue.
Gaza: famine kills children first
All the conventions, all the treaties, all the international laws drawn up to protect children in armed conflict are not worth the paper they are written on.
The Geneva Conventions, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court: all have failed to end the deliberate targeting of children. Because the laws that are not applied are mere suggestions, and worse, responsibility is not established according to justice, but on the basis of political calculations and the biased selectivity of Western countries.
As long as the perpetrators of these crimes enjoy impunity, children will continue to pay the heaviest price in wars that should spare them.
As long as figures like Ben-Gvir remain unpunished, as long as nations that target children are not subject to any sanctions, as long as the so-called international community remains silent, the killings will continue. And each dead child will not be a tragedy, but a testimony to the collective moral failure of the world.
Finally, Ben-Gvir called for the kidnapping of children. No one stopped him, no one called him to account. And tomorrow, somewhere in Lebanon, Gaza, Iran or any other corner of the world, another child will die – because the world has chosen to remain indifferent, even complicit.
This silence is undoubtedly what encourages others to flout every law and convention ever designed to protect the most vulnerable among us, including our children.
June 12, 2026 – Middle East Monitor – Translation: Chronicle of Palestine
