Prepared by: The Media and Communication Department at the Arab Network of Early Childhood Network

(Monday 15, July,2024)

The world is witnessing the largest conflicts since World War II. The Arab region is a prolific epicentre of these crises, conflicts, and wars, the most recent being the ongoing Israeli genocide in the Gaza Strip and the war in Sudan for more than a year, not to mention the conflict in Somalia and the extreme climatic disasters the country has witnessed. The Convention on the Rights of the Child, signed in 1989, continues to be violated in all its provisions. Killing, maiming, sexual exploitation, sexual abuse, displacement, recruitment, attacks on schools and hospitals, and severe food poverty affecting 1 in 4 children in the world, many of them in Yemen and Somalia. What was once the most ratified convention in the history of human rights conventions has become a theatre of blatant abuse. 

Those who follow UN reports related to children in armed conflict, most notably the annual reports issued by the UN Secretariat, note the increasing number of children exposed to violations related to these conflicts year after year. These violations include killing and maiming, recruitment, use, abduction, rape and other forms of sexual violence against children, and attacks on schools, hospitals and protected individuals associated with schools and/or hospitals. 

Last year, the United Nations documented 315,000 grave violations against children during conflicts around the world over 17 years between 2005 and 2022. Compared to 2021, “the number of children verified to have suffered grave violations due to armed conflict increased in 2022, and children continued to be disproportionately affected by armed conflict,” according to the UN. Last year, conflict-related violence reached record levels, with a 21% increase in grave violations. Killing and maiming rose by a “staggering” 35%, according to the UN. While the UN had verified 27,180 grave violations in 2022, the number of grave violations that occurred in 2023 or were committed earlier and verified last year rose to 33,000. This is according to the latest report on the situation of children in armed conflict, which covered the period from January to December 2023 and was released in June 2024. This indicates an upward trend in the violations that children are subjected to in this context. 

While the UN documents grave violations against children in several Arab countries, including Iraq (where the new report confirms that there are no confirmed cases of recruitment, use, and denial of humanitarian access), Libya, Lebanon, and South Sudan, occupied Palestine, specifically the Gaza Strip, Sudan, and Somalia receive special attention due to the wars and increasingly tragic conditions in these countries.

However, the information does not capture all the violations committed against children; it only reflects what the UN has verified. The documentation comes at a time when the monitors have been working for years under difficult conditions. These conditions range from difficult access to affected areas and restrictions to prevent such access to assaults or threats of assault, which puts a strain on their monitoring capabilities. 

The Gaza Strip is a stark example of the difficulty of verifying such violations for a number of reasons: 

• Israel’s ongoing genocide and the logistical impossibility of monitoring and documentation. 
• The Israeli army targeting UN centres, international organisations, their staff, and humanitarian actors and preventing them from documenting any kind of violations.   
• Israel’s decades-long policy of blockading the Gaza Strip and restricting the movement of human rights defenders which affects the documentation of violations. 

Israel blacklisted, and its violations nearly impossible to document 

In the context of Israel’s inclusion by the United Nations in the “blacklist” of countries and organisations that harm children, the UN Secretary-General placed the Israeli military and security forces on the list attached to the report for killing and maiming children and attacking schools and hospitals. The significance of this is that for the first time since the annual reports were issued – after years of abstention – it coincides with an international judicial trend to hold Israel accountable for its crimes through the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court (ICC).  

According to the UN, “the (current) conflict is unprecedented in terms of the scale and severity of grave violations against children, with hostilities increasing violations by 155%.” The UN estimates that more than 2,200 Palestinian children have been martyred and nearly 1,900 maimed (until the end of 2023). As of early July of this year, the number of martyrs exceeded 38,000, about 16,000 of them children, and 92,000 wounded, according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, while the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor raises the number of victims to more than 45,000. The Palestinian NGO’s Network Rehabilitation Sector indicates that there were 10,000 cases of disability in the Gaza Strip, half of them children, due to the aggression, as of the end of June.

The targeting of schools, hospitals, infrastructure, water and sanitation facilities, mills, bakeries, UN facilities, and the blocking of humanitarian aid in Gaza is of particular concern to the UN. Most importantly, the threat of famine and acute malnutrition has caused the death of 37 Palestinians, most of them children, as of early June. Not to mention that about half a million Palestinians, including children, are at risk of starvation, according to figures released by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) on June 25, 2024. In short, 9 out of 10 children in the Gaza Strip suffer from severe food poverty and survive on food from two or fewer food groups per day, according to UNICEF data published on June 6, 2024.

Despite the starkness of the data, the number of violations against Palestinian children in the Gaza Strip and West Bank documented by the United Nations does not reflect the reality of the situation. The reason is “severe access challenges, especially in the Gaza Strip,” as the UN itself puts it.  

According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS), 2023 recorded the highest number of martyrs among Palestinians since the 1948 Nakba, exceeding 22,000, most of whom were women and children. This was, of course, accompanied by various grave violations against children. Last year, the United Nations documented violations against only about 4,000 Palestinians, to the best of its ability, while noting notices concerning more than 19,000 Palestinian children that have yet to be verified.

Many reasons complicate or prevent the documentation of violations. The most immediate and obvious reason for this is the first-ever Israeli targeting of international humanitarian centres, their staff, and humanitarian actors. However, restricting the movement of human rights defenders in a way that affects the documentation of Israeli violations in the current war is part of a decades-long Israeli policy. This policy has long been criticised and attacked by local and international human rights and humanitarian organisations.

In 2017, Human Rights Watch (HRW) addressed Israel’s 25 years of increasing restrictions on the movement of human rights organisation staff to and from Gaza. “Although Israel makes some exceptions to the travel ban – what it calls humanitarian reasons – the general rule remains that it does not allow Palestinians, Israelis, and foreign staff of international human rights organisations to enter and leave Gaza,” the HRW explained. The organisation criticised the Israeli government’s justifications for these restrictions related to “threats to Israel’s security” and limited Israel’s obligations towards Gaza to “transit in exceptional humanitarian circumstances, and the travel of human rights staff is not considered an exceptional circumstance.” “Human rights staff from foreign and Israeli organisations are routinely prevented from entering Gaza, limiting their ability to identify violations of human rights and international humanitarian law. Experts are prevented from applying their specialised knowledge in researching and documenting violations of international humanitarian law, including possible war crimes.”

Within the legal framework, Human Rights Watch explained that these restrictions “go far beyond what is permitted under international humanitarian and human rights law.” “While Israel continues to control many aspects of life in Gaza, it continues to have obligations under the law of occupation in areas under its control, particularly to facilitate the movement of people and goods,” and that “Israel is obligated under the law of occupation, as required by Article 43 of the Hague Regulations, to allow the work of civil society, including human rights activities and organisations.”

Children of Sudan: Unprecedented killing and maiming 

In Sudan, which has been embroiled in fighting since April 15, 2023, grave violations against its children have increased by 480% over the past year. In his report, the Secretary-General states that children in Sudan have been killed and maimed at levels unprecedented in the devastating crisis, including through the use of explosive weapons with wide spatial effects. Some of the child victims are as young as one year old. Save the Children notes that the number of children killed, injured or facing grave violations in Sudan rose sixfold to a record high last year.  

Recently released figures indicate that the UN has verified 1,721 grave violations against 1,526 children, a significant increase from the 306 violations reported in 2022, more than fivefold. In addition to killing and maiming, the UN documents cases of child recruitment and use, sexual violence, abductions, attacks on schools and hospitals, and deteriorating humanitarian access. The figures are the highest in the country since 2006 when the UN began systematically collecting information on the six grave violations against children in conflict. 

The escalation of tribal violence in Sudan is also of concern to organisations working on children’s issues. The UN Secretary-General has expressed grave concerns, including ethnically motivated attacks and mass displacement of children. Sudan has the largest child displacement crisis in the world. The country’s internally displaced people reached more than 10 million, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM) in June 2024. 

Somalia’s children in the crosshairs of conflict and natural disasters   

In addition to the bloody armed conflict, between 2020 and 2023, Somalia faced the longest drought in its recent history, posing an imminent risk of famine, followed by the worst floods in decades at the end of 2023. These tragic circumstances have taken their toll on the situation of children in Somalia, which was among the countries with the highest number of grave conflict-related violations against children last year. 

In total, the United Nations verified 2,283 grave violations against 1,802 children. The violations included killing and maiming (629 children), recruitment and use (658 children), detention (278 children), abduction (719 children), attacks on schools and hospitals, and denial of access to aid. The UN was able to verify that 197 girls were subjected to rape and other forms of sexual violence by various actors.

At a nutritional level that is highly correlated with conflict, natural disasters, and inequality, 63% of Somalia’s children live in extreme food poverty and highly vulnerable communities. More than 80% of caregivers report that their children cannot eat for an entire day. This is according to a report by UNICEF in June 2024, titled “Child Food Poverty: Nutritional Deprivation in Early Childhood“. The report analyses, for the first time, the impacts and causes of food deprivation among the world’s youngest people in nearly 100 countries and across different income groups. It reveals an alarming figure of 181 million of the world’s children under the age of five suffering from severe food poverty, which increases their risk of wasting by 50%. In Somalia alone, 1.7 million children under the age of five are acutely malnourished, including 430,000 with severe acute malnutrition, according to a report by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) on Humanitarian Needs and Response Plan for Somalia 2024. 

“The ‘weapon of sexual violence’ against children   

Sexual violence against children is one of the most prominent forms used in wars and conflicts. Due to the social stigma associated with this type of abuse, fear of retaliation, and harmful social norms, it is severely underreported. 

With this background, which makes it difficult to determine the actual number of sexually abused children, international and humanitarian organisations begin to document these violations. These violations include rape, sexual slavery, sex trafficking, forced prostitution, forced marriage and pregnancy, forced sterilisation, sexual exploitation, and child abuse. In some cases, sexual violence is used to humiliate the population deliberately or to force people to leave their homes. 

Although the number of children at risk of conflict-related sexual violence has fluctuated over the years, the upward trend is evident. The number of children at risk in 2021 was ten times higher than in 1990, according to Save the Children in a study published in 2021. “In recent years, a greater proportion of armed actors committing acts of sexual violence are also committing them against children,” the organisation noted. 

While the UN had previously reported a 12% decrease in cases of such violence against children in 2022, in 2023, the proportion of confirmed cases rose to 50% overall and 25% against children, according to UN statistics. This rise is closely linked to “the outbreak and escalation of conflict against civilians fueled by the proliferation of weapons and increased militarisation,” according to the UN Secretary-General’s latest report on sexual violence in conflict, which he has been submitting since 2009. 

Women and girls are disproportionately exposed to conflict-related sexual violence, especially displaced, refugee and migrant women and girls in South Sudan, Somalia, Libya and Yemen, according to the United Nations. According to UNICEF figures, girls were victimised in 97% of cases between 2016 and 2020. While “boys were more frequently recruited, used, killed and maimed in 2023, there were significantly more acts of conflict-related sexual violence against girls,” according to the UN report. However, this does not diminish the severity of sexual violence against boys. While “90% of sexual violence was committed against girls (in 2023), the number of victims of rape and other forms of sexual violence among boys increased by 25%,” according to UN Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict Pramila Patten. 

In addition, “the proliferation of weapons has contributed to an environment conducive to perpetrating sexual violence with impunity.” According to UN research, for which data is available, some 70 to 90% of incidents of conflict-related sexual violence involve small arms and light weapons.” The UN also emphasises that the denial of humanitarian access coincides with an increase in grave violations, including sexual violence. Incidents of denial of access in 2023, verified by the UN, increased by more than 32%. 

The above is just a snapshot of what children in Arab countries suffer as a result of wars and armed conflicts. In a world where militarisation and armed conflicts are on the rise, violations of the rights of young children, especially in Arab countries, are also on the rise. Without serious and concerted action.