Death, displacement and military duties: children plunged into crisis by Middle East war
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Millions of children have been plunged into crisis by the war in the Middle East, with reports of child soldiers in Iran, mass forced displacements in Lebanon and the killing of hundreds of minors.
According to the UN agency for children, Unicef, more than 340 children have been killed and thousands injured since the US and Israel launched their attacks on Iran, which has retaliated with bombings across the region.
The highest reported child casualty event occurred on the first day of the war when a US missile strike on a school in Iran killed at least 160 children and teachers.
Israel’s invasion of Lebanon – and its continued attacks in the occupied West Bank and Gaza – have compounded the bloodshed. Across the region, more than 1.2 million children have been displaced.
“Children in the region are being exposed to horrific violence, while the very systems and services meant to keep them safe are coming under attack,” said Unicef’s executive director, Catherine Russell.
Following are some of the ways the war has affected children.
Forced displacement in Lebanon
More than 1.1 million people, including nearly 400,000 children, have been forced to flee their homes by Israeli bombing and displacement orders in Lebanon, according to a Unicef assessment. Nearly 90% of that total are living outside shelters, with many sleeping in the street.
Nidal Ahmed, 52, and two of his children are living in a tent in an impromptu encampment with hundreds of other families in Biel, Beirut’s nightclub district. This is Ahmed’s second displacement – his home in Tyre was destroyed in an airstrike on the second day of the Israel-Hezbollah war, and his brother’s home in the southern suburbs of Beirut was ordered to be emptied by Israel days after he had fled there.
“It’s 5pm and we haven’t had anything to eat today,” Ahmed said, his eight-month-old daughter, Zahraa, sitting in a stained onesie in front of him. “We’ve only been able to give the kids tea and some bread. It’s not suitable for a child this young to eat bread, but what can we do?” he said, gesturing to some crumbs of old flatbread Zahraa had been chewing on.
After a month of displacement, Ahmed has run out of money to feed his children. He relies on local organisations which show up irregularly, distributing one meal on most, but not all, days.
The conditions of their displacement are “humiliating”, Ahmed said, pointing to the tent he has erected for him and his children, the blue tarpaulin hastily thrown over a wooden frame and pinned down with rocks. “I tried to cover it to protect us from the rain, but we wake up every morning with our mattresses soaked.”
As his three-year-old son, Ahmad, plays with another child in a vacant lot, Ahmad says he gets to shower once a week, on Fridays, when his father drives them 30 minutes to the house of a friend, who allows them to use the bathroom. For their more immediate needs, there is one bathroom for hundreds of families, who wait in line for half an hour for a chance to use the toilet, which has no running water.
Unicef’s representative to Lebanon, Marcoluigi Corsi, warned last month that displacement would have lasting effects on the children. “This relentless cycle of bombardment and displacement is severely compounding their psychological scars, embedding deep-seated fear and threatening profound, long-term emotional harm,” said Corsi.
Ahmed said he has already seen some of these effects in his own children. When Israeli jets break the sound barrier or bomb Beirut, his son starts to run, trying to hide from a bomb he thinks will land on him.
Ahmed himself is exhausted. He had to leave his wife and 17-year-old daughter in the hospital in Tyre after they were injured in the bombing of their house. He shows a picture of his comatose wife in a hospital bed, counting her ailments: Skull fractured in 33 places, internal bleeding, spinal injuries.
“They say she won’t make it,” Ahmed said, looking at his children. “The children are kept busy now, they’re playing. But when they come home and don’t find their mother there, it will be a disaster.”
Deaths, injuries and mourning in Palestine
Despite a ceasefire which is now more than five months old, health officials in Gaza say at least 50 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces since the Iran conflict began more than a month ago. The number of child fatalities is unclear but on 29 March Israeli airstrikes on checkpoints killed at least six Palestinians, including a girl, according to local rescue services.
The Gaza Strip has not recovered from 23 months of Israeli bombardment, which killed tens of thousands of people and destroyed hospitals and schools in what a UN investigation found to be a genocide. Up until October last year, an average of at least one Palestinian child was being killed every hour. The number of children killed by Israeli forces in its war on Gaza surpassed 20,000 late last year, according to Save the Children.
While the Iran war did not open a new front in Gaza, it has deepened insecurity and resulted in an intensification of ongoing Israeli military operations.
Closures and movement restrictions in Gaza triggered by the escalation have disrupted access to basic services, and forced some schools to close. Crossings into Gaza were shut for the first few days of the war, blocking humanitarian aid and commercial goods.
In the occupied West Bank, Israeli settlers and security forces have escalated their violence against Palestinians since the start of the Iran war, killing at least three children. On 15 March, Israeli police shot dead two young Palestinian brothers and their parents in Tamoun, firing at the family’s car as they returned from a Ramadan shopping trip.
Mohammed, five, and Othman, seven – who was blind and had special needs – were killed alongside their mother, Waad Bani Odeh, 35, and father, Ali Bani Odeh, 37. Two other brothers survived. Khaled, 11, later said he had heard his mother crying and his father praying before they died. After the shooting, he said Israeli border police dragged him from the wreckage, taunted him and beat him. One officer told him: “We killed dogs,” Khaled said.
In Israel, at least four children have been killed by retaliatory Iranian missiles. One of the worst attacks occurred on 1 March, when an Iranian missile rocked the central Israeli city of Beit Shemesh.
‘No excuse’: Children as young as 12 guard checkpoints in Iran
Reports of children as young as 12 being used by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) to guard security checkpoints have raised the alarm on the use of child soldiers.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) released a report at the end of March saying the IRGC was conducting a campaign to recruit children to volunteer as “homeland defending combatants”.
On 26 March, a IRGC official in Tehran said a campaign to enlist civilians, called “Homeland Defending Combatants for Iran”, had set the minimum age at 12.
The poster for the recruitment drive features a boy and a girl alongside two adults, including a man in a military uniform.
The New York-based HRW said the military recruitment and use of children was a grave violation of children’s rights and a war crime when the children were under 15.
Bill Van Esveld, the associate children’s rights director at Human Rights Watch, said: “There is no excuse for a military recruitment drive that targets children to sign up, much less 12-year-olds. What this boils down to is that Iranian authorities are apparently willing to risk children’s lives for some extra manpower.”
An 11-year-old Iranian boy had already reportedly been killed in an Israeli airstrike while at a security checkpoint. Alireza Jafari’s mother, Sadaf Monfared, told the municipality-run newspaper Hamshahri that he had been helping patrols and checkpoints run by the Basij, a volunteer militia under the command of the IRGC.
Van Esveld said: “The officials involved in this reprehensible policy are putting children at risk of serious and irreversible harm and themselves at risk of criminal liability. Senior leaders who fail to put a stop to this can make no claim to care for Iran’s children.”
Relentless attacks across the region are destroying and damaging the facilities and infrastructure that children depend on, including hospitals, schools, and water and sanitation systems.
The Iranian Red Crescent Society said 316 medical centres and 763 schools had been severely damaged or destroyed by US-backed Israeli attacks.
These attacks, and the general violence, have shut down education. Save the Children said at least 52 million school-age children have had their education disrupted across the region, moving to online learning or having none at all.
Of the 669 collective shelters in Lebanon, 364 are public schools, according to Unicef. In Israel, schools have been repeatedly closed across much of the country.
Ahmad Alhendawi, the regional director for Middle East and north Africa and eastern Europe at Save the Children, said: “In every conflict, classrooms are usually the first to close and some of the last places to reopen. Every missed lesson deepens the scars of war. Not every child can escape the violence or afford to move their learning online; we know that for the most vulnerable children, once they leave school many will never return.”
He added: “Schools are protected sites and attacks on them could amount to grave breaches of international humanitarian law. The laws of war must be respected.”
The psychological toll
The bloodshed and upheaval has exposed children to traumatic events. Prolonged exposure to violence and instability is known to have lasting impacts on brain development, emotional regulation and long-term mental health.
While there has been a near total internet blackout in Iran, satellite TV stations are still beamed in and received. The London-based satellite channel Iran International has started broadcasting a segment between news bulletins that gives advice on how to deal with children’s fears and anxieties.
“Every war is a war on children,” said Alhendawi. “Children are living in fear, caught in the crossfire of this adult war,” he said. “Wars have laws and children must be off limits in every conflict.”
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