Gaza's children: the world's moral failure

Gaza's children have suffered hell on earth for nearly 18 months as over 18,200 children have been massacred and tens of thousands maimed, many irreversibly incapacitated. Gaza now has the largest cohort of child amputees in modern history, per the UN. Let that sink in: the largest cohort of child amputees. Imagine a playground where every other child is missing a limb — or more.

These aren't faceless statistics. These were children who ran unshod in the streets, whispered dreams to their siblings and bubbled with laughter until their stomachs hurt. Gazan children, like any child, have an inalienable right to safety, love, dignity and the chance to grow up. But these same children either lie entombed under rubble or fight to survive with lost limbs, shattered families, lost homes and deep psychological scars.

Many have lost entire families and are left alone in a world that has forsaken and reduced them to a cold acronym: WCNSF (wounded child, no surviving family). Isn't it a clinical, bureaucratic label for something so devastatingly cruel?

Almost half of Gaza's people are children, meaning that when Israeli airstrikes rain down, it's children who suffer the heaviest toll of annihilation. Bombing homes, schools, hospitals and refugee camps isn't collateral damage; it's the deliberate erasure of an entire generation. But the atrocity doesn't stop with aerial assaults; it seeps into every crack of life in Gaza. Starvation, too, is being wielded as a weapon.

Gaza's children endure the world's highest levels of malnutrition. Their growth is stunted, their bodies frail and their immune systems too weak to fend off diseases caused by dirty water, poor sanitation and medicine shortages. This isn't war. This is pure annihilation!

Educational institutions have been wiped off the map of Gaza. Schooling for nearly 660,000 children has been wiped out since October 7, 2023. Israel has bombed almost all of Gaza's universities while 90% of schools have been devastated, as documented by the UN. The few remaining schools now serve as refuges for dispossessed families.

As there're no classrooms for students to return to and no future left to dream of, they either scrounge or toil to survive while others wander through the debris of their neighborhoods or play outside makeshift shelters, knowing an aerial onslaught could snuff them out any moment.

The unthinkable violence inflicted on Gazan children tramples over every international law on child protection, human rights and war crimes. But when it comes to Gaza, these laws aren't worth the paper they're written on.

The whole world wrings its hands over 'Israel's right to defend itself' while Israel dehumanises Gazans, unleashes hell on them and massacres their children by the thousands. What right does an occupying power have to defend itself against the people it occupies, starves and bombs? What right does Israel have to obliterate an entire generation's future and abandon them to tents and mass graves?

If the world won't stop this genocide, it can at least shield Gaza's children. But even that minimal demand is too much for global leaders who never stop lecturing about human rights and democracy while arming Israel to the teeth.

But let's be clear: the world's indifference isn't just reprehensible; it's complicity in oppression. The tacit refusal to hold Israel accountable is connivance. History will remember this moment, this silence and this complicity. But for the children of Gaza, history offers no solace. They're dying, starving and suffering - orphaned, displaced, mutilated and traumatised. They aren't seen as children! They aren't seen as human.

What exactly is this world waiting for? For the last child in Gaza to be buried? For the Strip to be wiped clean of life altogether? How much more must they endure before the world confronts the reality that Palestinian lives — Palestinian children's lives — are a moral imperative to protect?

If there's any shred of humanity left in this world, it starts with standing up for Gaza's children. Not out of political loyalty. Not out of sympathy. Not out of ideological alignment. Not out of strategic interests. But out of the basic recognition that no child — anywhere — should be subjected to such horror.