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UNICEF Decries 'Intolerable' Israeli Killing of Lebanese, Palestinian Children
Despite promised ceasefires, ongoing Israeli attacks "are killing and injuring children, deepening their exposure to trauma, and leaving devastating consequences that could last a lifetime."
May 14, 2026
Officials at the United Nations Children's Fund this week condemned Israel's killing, maiming, and traumatization of children in Lebanon—where there is ostensibly a ceasefire in effect—the illegally occupied West Bank of Palestine, and Gaza.
UNICEF said Wednesday that at least 59 children in Lebanon have reportedly been killed or wounded by Israeli forces over the past week, despite a nearly monthlong truce between Israel and the militant resistance group Hezbollah.
“Children are being killed and injured when they should be returning to classrooms, playing with friends, and recovering from months of fear and upheaval,” UNICEF Regional Director for the Middle East and North Africa Edouard Beigbeder said in a statement.
“Nearly a month ago, an agreement was reached to silence the weapons and stop the violence," Beigbeder added. "Reality is proving to be very different. Continued attacks are killing and injuring children, deepening their exposure to trauma, and leaving devastating consequences that could last a lifetime.”
According to Lebanon's Ministry of Public Health, at least 23 children have been killed and 93 wounded during the ceasefire. Since March 2—when Israel renewed attacks on its northern neighbor amid the nascent US-Israeli war on Iran—at least 200 children have been killed and over 800 others injured.
The ministry said six people—including two women and a child—were killed and 12 people wounded Wednesday evening when Israel bombed the village of Arab Salim in Nabatieh district. Separately on Wednesday, Israeli strikes on the village of Harouf killed one child, while two children were among three people killed by an Israeli strike on Roumine.
Lebanese officials say at least 2,896 people have been killed and 8,824 others wounded by Israeli attacks in Lebanon since March 2.
UNICEF spokesperson James Elder said Monday in Geneva that “children are paying an intolerable price for escalating militarized operations and settler attacks across the occupied West Bank of Palestine, including East Jerusalem," as part of Israel's accelerating ethnic cleansing and colonization of the Palestinian territory.
“We're seeing attacks become increasingly coordinated,” Elder noted. "Documented incidents include children shot, stabbed, children beaten, and children pepper-sprayed.”
Elder continued:
Between January 2025 and today, at least one Palestinian child has been killed, on average, every week. That is, 70 Palestinian children killed in this timeframe. Ninety-three percent of these were killed by Israeli forces. A further 850 children were injured. Most of those children killed or wounded were by live ammunition. All this comes amid historic levels of settler attacks. [The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs] said last month that March 2026 saw the highest number of Palestinians injured by settler attacks in the past 20 years.
“These are not isolated incidents—they point to a sustained pattern of the worst kinds of violations of children’s rights, as well as attacks on children’s homes, on their schools, and on the water they rely on," Elder stressed. "What is unfolding is not only an escalation in violence against Palestinian children; it is the steady dismantling of the conditions children need to survive and grow."
On Wednesday, the Palestinian Ministry of Health said that Israeli occupation forces fatally shot 16-year-old Youssef Ali Youssef Kaabneh near Jaljulia, north of Ramallah, amid sweeping raids across the West Bank.
Elder said that in Gaza, at least 229 children have been killed and 260 others wounded by Israeli forces since the October 2025 ceasefire between Israel and Hamas—which led the October 7, 2023 attack—took effect. Since October 2023, more than 64,000 children and 250,000 Palestinians of all ages have been killed or wounded by Israel's Gaza onslaught, which a panel of UN experts last year called a genocide. UNICEF has called Gaza “the world’s most dangerous place to be a child."
Dr. Reinhilde Van de Weerdt, the UN World Health Organization representative for the occupied Palestinian territory, drew attention this week to the 10,000 Gazan children "with life-changing injuries." Treatment for these wounds is often difficult to impossible due to Israel's ongoing siege of the coastal strip.
"Every day that rehabilitation services in Gaza remain underresourced is a day that preventable disability risks becoming permanent," said Van de Weerdt. "Gaza does not need stopgap measures, it needs sustained investment in the health workforce, in equipment, and in the systems and environment that allow people to recover, rebuild, and return to life."
Thousands of Gazan children have lost at least one limb, tens of thousands have lost their parents, and hundreds of thousands have lost their homes due to mass forced displacement.
All that trauma and more is fueling a mental health crisis among children in Palestine and Lebanon.
“The impact of repeated exposure to conflict on children’s mental health can be profound and long-lasting,” said Beigbeder. “Children in Lebanon have endured waves of violence, displacement, and uncertainty, often with little or no time to recover. Without urgent support, the psychological scars of this compounded crisis may stay with them for years, affecting not only their well-being, but their future and the future of the country.”
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If Trump Doesn't Stand Up to Israel on Lebanon, Iran War Will Continue to Drag On
The government of Lebanon wants the United States to exert enough pressure on Israel to end the current Israeli offensive.
May 11, 2026
The Trump administration will host a new round of talks this week aimed at ending the latest warfare involving Israel and Lebanon.
No new developments on the Lebanese front give reason for optimism that this round will yield an agreement that two prior rounds did not. The Trump administration, however, has an incentive to push for an agreement because of President Trump’s need to extract himself and the United States from the impasse involving the Strait of Hormuz.
The last time Iran lifted its closure of the strait—a move Tehran reversed when Trump continued his own blockade—was in response to the announcement of a ceasefire in Lebanon.
Iran has insisted from the outset of the war that any ceasefire must be comprehensive, covering what Israel is doing in Lebanon as well as combat in the Persian Gulf. Israel and the United States have resisted linking these two Middle Eastern theaters. But if either side in a conflict says that two things are linked, then there is linkage, whether the other side likes it or not.
The Iranian perspective on this question reflects the fact that the military operations in Lebanon grew directly out of the war against Iran. Shortly after Israel and the United States launched that war in late February, Lebanese Hezbollah responded by firing rockets into northern Israel.
Hezbollah has always been an ally of Iran. No one, least of all the Israelis, should have been surprised by this response.
The fighting on the Lebanese front since then has been as one-sided in the resulting death and destruction as Israeli combat with Palestinians. The Israeli assault has killed 2,700 people in Lebanon, while Israeli fatalities have been 18 military personnel and two civilians. At the height of the offensive, more than a million people—about a fifth of Lebanon’s population—were displaced, and most remain so. Israeli forces have destroyed entire villages in southern Lebanon.
The ceasefire that the United States brokered in March, like most ceasefires involving Israel, has seen at most a slowing of the tempo of offensive operations rather than a cessation of them. In addition to continued lethal operations in the south of Lebanon, Israel conducted one of its bolder airstrikes in the Beirut area, which destroyed an apartment building in the city’s southern suburbs.
The talks this week in Washington will be unusual as peace negotiations go, in that they are not really between two belligerents. The weak government of Lebanon has not sought a war with Israel, and the war that is taking place is as asymmetrical in nature as the casualty figures suggest. Israel says its enemy is Hezbollah, but Hezbollah will not be in the conference room.
Israel’s central demand involving Lebanon has been that Hezbollah must be disarmed. No one is talking about disarming Israel, or even limiting its arms, even though Israel has inflicted far more of the suffering on this front than Hezbollah has. In any event, even though many figures in the Lebanese government would welcome Hezbollah’s disarmament, that is far easier said than done.
The hurdles to any disarmament of Hezbollah are partly a matter of physical capability. They also are a matter of political realities within Lebanon. Hezbollah speaks for a substantial proportion of the Lebanese population, especially the nearly one-third of Lebanese who are Shiites. It holds 13 seats in the Lebanese parliament and did well in municipal elections last year.
One indication of those realities comes from Nabih Berri, speaker of the Lebanese parliament and one of the most powerful politicians in Lebanon. Berri heads Amal, the other major Shiite party in Lebanon and an ally of Hezbollah. Berri said last week that there should be no negotiations with Israel until Israel ceases its offensive military operations in Lebanon and withdraws from the south of the country.
That similar sentiments extend beyond the Shiite portion of Lebanon’s population is reflected in the position of President Joseph Aoun, who, like all Lebanese presidents, is a Maronite Christian. Aoun has resisted US pressure for him to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, saying that any such meeting must await a cessation of Israel’s offensive operations and a withdrawal of Israel from Lebanon. Aoun’s stance is why this week’s talks are being held at the ambassadorial level.
Hezbollah is not a prime mover of mayhem that somehow arose through spontaneous generation, now was it imposed on Lebanon by Iran. Hezbollah owes its existence and rapid rise in the 1980s to previous Israeli aggression and occupation of portions of Lebanon. Hezbollah presented itself as a defender especially of Lebanese Shiites but also of all Lebanese against Israeli predation.
That history is especially relevant to what Israel is doing to Lebanon today. In addition to the lethal aerial assaults, it is occupying much of southern Lebanon, in a replay of what it did four decades ago. It has singled out Shiites with a demand—not equally directed toward other sectarian groups—to abandon their homes in that portion of Lebanon.
Such discriminatory demands will stoke additional resentment and desire for revenge within the confessional group that has always been Hezbollah’s main base of support.
The results are already being seen in the attitudes even of some Lebanese who wish Hezbollah had never fired rockets in support of its Iranian ally and who blame the group for drawing Lebanon into the US-Israel-Iran war. In the face of the suffering from the new Israeli offensive and the inability of the Lebanese government to do much about it, many of these Lebanese are again looking to Hezbollah as their main hope for defending themselves.
An implication is that even if some agreement is reached that silences the guns for now, the ingredients will remain in place for future rounds of fighting on the Israel-Lebanon front. A lasting peace would depend on a complete and permanent Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon and some assurance by the United States that it would use its influence to keep the withdrawal permanent.
Violence on the Israeli-Lebanese front is a reminder of how much instability in the Middle East stems from Israeli subjugation of the Palestinians and the violent resistance that it inevitably provokes. Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982 involved going after the exiled Palestinian Liberation Organization—an organization that would not exist if there were no perceived need to liberate Palestinians living under Israeli occupation. The last previous Israeli invasion of Lebanon in October 2024 grew out of the devastating Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip that had been ongoing for a year, in response to which Hezbollah fired rockets at Israel in support of the Palestinians in Gaza.
The government of Lebanon wants the United States to exert enough pressure on Israel to end the current Israeli offensive. Lebanon is one of multiple fronts in the Middle East in which the biggest variable in determining whether instability will lessen is whether the United States will pressure Israel. In this case, Trump’s desire to extract himself from the Iran quagmire may be sufficient to yield at least a ceasefire that holds up better than the one that currently is being repeatedly violated.
Whether even that limited form of agreement is achieved will depend mostly on the US-Israeli dimension of this week’s talks, more than the government of Lebanon’s role in the negotiations. Given the linkage with events in the Persian Gulf, it may also depend partly on any wider bargains struck in Pakistani-mediated negotiations between Iran and the United States.
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Israeli Drone Kills Man and 12-Year-Old Daughter in 'Barbaric' Double-Tap Strike
The pair were among the at least 24 people killed by Israeli strikes on Lebanon on Saturday despite a nominal ceasefire.
May 10, 2026
An Israeli drone killed a Syrian laborer and his 12-year-old daughter in a double-tap attack in southern Lebanon on Saturday, in what the Lebanon Health Ministry described as part of a continuing pattern “of grave violations of International Humanitarian Law.”
The man was riding with his daughter on a motorcycle in Nabatiyeh when the pair were targeted by three drone strikes, according to the ministry.
The Associated Press reported:
The ministry said that after the initial strike, the man and his daughter managed to move away from the site only to be attacked again by the drone instantly killing the man. The girl then moved about 100 meters (yards) away and was hit again by the drone after she had been already wounded.
The girl was taken to the hospital, but did not survive her injuries, according to Lebanon's National News Agency.
"What does terrorism mean to you? If it’s [not] double-tap killings of paramedics, journalists, and today a 12 year old girl, then what is it?"
“The Ministry of Public Health denounces this barbaric targeting and the deliberate violence against civilians and children in Lebanon,” the ministry said, as AP reported.
The father and daughter were among a total of at least 24 people in Lebanon who were killed by Israeli strikes on Saturday, according to Al Jazeera.
One strike on the town of al-Saksakieh killed seven, among them a child. The strike also wounded 15 people including three children.
The bombings continue despite a nominal ceasefire between Lebanon and Hezbollah that went into effect April 17. However, Israel has killed almost 500 people in Lebanon since April 16, raising the death toll since its March 2 invasion to over 2,750.
War correspondent Courtney Schellekens shared the story of the 12-year-old girl and her father in a video on social media on Saturday.
What does terrorism mean to you? If it’s no double-tap killings of paramedics, journalists, and today a 12 year old girl, then what is it?
Westerners, where is your humanity?
Cameraman: @aliezzedine7 pic.twitter.com/ntXIwz4s6H
— courtneybonneauimages (@cbonneauimages) May 9, 2026
"What does terrorism mean to you? If it’s [not] double-tap killings of paramedics, journalists, and today a 12 year old girl, then what is it?" she wrote above the video.
At the conclusion of the video itself, she continued the same line of questioning.
"To my Western followers, I really want you to think critically about the definition of terrorism, to whom it gets applied and who does it benefit," she said. "Because where I've been sitting for the last 18 months, this mass murder and mass, you know, look at this," she gestured to the ruble behind her, "this mass destruction, this ethnic cleansing of south Lebanon, this looks a lot like terrorism to me."
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