Children in Gaza accounted for nearly 40 percent of minors killed in conflicts globally last year, according to an upcoming United Nations report on cases it says it has verified.
The killing of more than 2,000 Palestinian children helped push violence against children to “extreme levels” in 2023, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in the report, which was reviewed by Bloomberg News and is scheduled to be released publicly later this month.
The data only includes deaths that the UN can verify, it said, adding that it’s still making determinations on thousands of additionally reported Palestinian deaths in the first three months of the war.
The death toll from Israel’s war on Gaza has galvanized global efforts to halt the fighting, which mediators including the US, Qatar, and Egypt have failed to achieve. Details of the deaths have been difficult to confirm as the fighting continues.
The war “presents an unprecedented scale and intensity of grave violations against children, with hostilities leading to an increase in grave violations of 155 percent,” Guterres wrote in the report.
The UN said both the Israeli army and Hamas’s military wing, as well as the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, are not doing enough to protect children in Gaza.
The UN notes the report “does not represent the full scale of violations against children, but provides United Nations-verified trends.” To vet reported violations, the UN relies on a monitoring and reporting mechanism that requires local monitors to independently verify claims.
The annual report by the UN looks at cases of violence against people under 18 years old in conflicts worldwide. This is the first time Israel and Hamas have been included in the so-called blacklist of actors that “commit grave violations” against children in the 20-plus years the report has been presented to the Security Council.
Israel’s ambassador to the UN, Gilad Erdan, who has been highly critical of the organization, said last week that including Israel in the report was an “immoral decision.”
Israel had expressed in the days before it was informed of the decision that it intended to cooperate with the UN on preventing violence against children, according to a senior UN official who asked not to be identified describing private discussions. Since then, it has gone silent on the matter, the person said. The Israeli mission to the UN didn’t respond to a request for comment Wednesday.
With Bloomberg.
