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unicef
UNICEF Urges End to 'War on Children' as 2 Years of Gaza Genocide Kills and Maims 64,000+ Kids
Russell's remarks came days after UNICEF spokesperson James Elder also urged an end to what he called a "war on children."
The charity Save the Children and others say at least 20,000 children are among the more than 67,000 Palestinians killed by Israeli forces in Gaza over the past two years. That's one child every hour in what the UN agency for Palestinian refugees last year reported was a higher child death toll than in the previous four years of all the world's armed conflicts combined.
Using Gaza Health Ministry data—which have been deemed generally accurate by experts including Israeli intelligence officials—Western media outlets including The Washington Post and The Guardian have published lists of more than 18,000 Palestinian children killed in Gaza since October 2023.
Experts, including the authors of multiple peer-reviewed studies in the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet, say the actual death toll is much higher, and will likely not be known for some time, as thousands of missing people are presumed dead and buried beneath the rubble of bombed buildings in a territory in which 90% of all homes have been destroyed.
According to the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, nearly 7 in 10 Palestinians killed in Gaza between November 2023 and April 2024 were women and children. As Israeli officials continued to push specious claims of a historically low civilian-to-combatant kill ratio in Gaza, leaked classified Israel Defense Forces intelligence files revealed that 5 in 6 Palestinians—83%—killed by the IDF through the first 19 months of the war were, in fact, civilians.
While Israel claims it is waging its war with unparalleled effort to avoid harming civilians, facts on the ground paint a very different—and very bloody—picture. According to many Palestinian and international doctors and nurses who worked in Gaza, Israeli forces deliberately shot children with intent to kill, often aiming at their heads and chests. IDF troops have repeatedly admitted to being ordered to fire live bullets and artillery shells into crowds of starving aid-seeking civilians, including children.
Israeli troops have also admitted to being ordered to shoot to kill “anyone who enters” a so-called “kill zone” in central Gaza, including children. One IDF soldier even boasted online about how “fun” it is to kill Palestinian children, while another said in a video uploaded to social media that “we are looking for babies, but there are no babies left"—so instead he "killed a girl that was 12."
This Palestinian girl survived an Israeli bullet in the head. (Photo by Dr. Mimi Syed via de Volksrant)
Following the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, IDF commanders dramatically loosened rules of engagement, effectively allowing an unlimited number of civilians to be killed when targeting a single Hamas member, no matter how low-ranking. Combined with the use of artificial intelligence to rapidly select targets and the use of US-supplied 1,000- and 2,000-pound bombs that can level entire city blocks, wholesale massacres of dozens or more Palestinians ensued.
Last year, UN Secretary-General António Guterres for the first time added Israel to his so-called “List of Shame” of countries that kill and injure children during wars and other armed conflicts.
A handful of Gaza's child victims are known the world over, like Hind Rajab, the 5-year-old girl who was seriously wounded in January 2024 Israeli tank attack on her family's Kia hatchback but survived, surrounded by half a dozen slain relatives and under heavy fire, before being killed along with the paramedics sent to save her. Some Israelis and their US supporters denied that Hind Rajab ever existed, part of a wider pattern of denial—a recurring theme throughout history's genocides.
But largely due to the sheer scale of slaughter, most of the children killed by Israeli bombs, bullets, and blockade will remain nameless statistics to the world, despite the best efforts of Gaza officials and international activists to record and remember them. In September 2024, for example, the Gaza Health Ministry published a 649-page database of Palestinians killed by Israel. The first 14 pages of the document were filled with the names of babies. Last May, it took 24 hours for participants at a Harvard University vigil to read aloud the names of nearly 12,000 children killed in Gaza.
Some—like a 9-year-old girl who was pulled from the rubble of her family home in Khan Younis after a December 2023 Israeli airstrike that killed her father and her only brother—have even argued that people killed quickly by Israeli bombs and bullets were the "lucky" ones, as many survivors faced unspeakable physical and psychological trauma. Thousands of children have had one or more limbs amputated, often without anesthesia, due to the systematic obliteration of Gaza's healthcare infrastructure and a "complete siege" for which former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant is wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC).
Israel is using the siege as a weapon to deliberately starve Palestinians in Gaza, with children often the worst affected by a famine that's killed at least 470 people and likely many more, while starving hundreds of thousands of others. Like Gallant, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is also a fugitive from the ICC, wanted for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes including murder and forced starvation.
"Famine persists in Gaza City and is spreading to the south, where children are already living in dire conditions," UNICEF's Russell said Wednesday. "The crisis of malnutrition, especially among infants, remains shocking. Months without adequate food have caused lasting harm to children’s growth and development."
Muhammad Zakariya Ayyoub al-Matouq, a 1-year-old Palestinian boy from Gaza City, faces life-threatening malnutrition as the humanitarian situation worsens due to ongoing Israeli attacks and blockade, on July 21, 2025. (Photo by Ahmed Jihad Ibrahim Al-arini/Anadolu via Getty Images)
Thousands of Palestinian children have also lost one or both parents to Israeli attacks. Some have seen their entire families wiped out in airstrikes. A new acronym has even been coined to describe some of these orphans: WCNSF, or “wounded child, no surviving family.”
All this killing, maiming, starving, orphaning, and forced displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian minors has wrought what one mother there called the "complete psychological destruction" of Gaza's children. A December 2024 study found that nearly all children in Gaza believed their deaths were imminent—and nearly half of them wanted to die.
To end the physical and psychic suffering of Gaza's children, Russell and others are imploring Israel to end the war—a prospect that now seems closer than ever to being realized amid reportedly fruitful ceasefire talks.
“UNICEF welcomes all efforts to end the war and chart a path towards peace in Gaza and the region," Russell said. "Any plan must lead to a ceasefire, the release of hostages, and the safe, rapid, and unimpeded passage of humanitarian relief—through all available crossings and routes—at the scale desperately needed by all Gazans, especially children."
“Every child killed is an irreplaceable loss," Russell added. "For the sake of all children in Gaza, this war must end now.”
'Full of Tears,' 1,000 Palestinian Children Graduate From Gaza School for Orphans
Organizers said the event was the largest of its kind since Israel began leveling Gaza after the Hamas-led attack of October 7, 2023. Israel's assault and siege, which are the subject of an International Court of Justice genocide case, have left more than 62,000 Palestinians dead, including over 18,500 children—official death tolls that are likely to be a severe undercount.
The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics reported in April that nearly 40,000 children in Gaza have lost one or both of their parents to Israeli bombs and bullets in what the agency called the world's "largest orphan crisis" in modern history. Other independent groups say the number of orphans is even higher during a war in which medical professionals have coined a grim new acronym: WCNSF—wounded child, no surviving family.
Hundreds of thousands of other Palestinians are starving in what Amnesty International on Monday called a "deliberate campaign." Thousands of Gazan children are treated for malnutrition each month, and at least 122 have starved to death, according to local officials.
Early in the war, the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) called Gaza "the world's most dangerous place to be a child." Last year, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres for the first time added Israel to his so-called "List of Shame" of countries that kill and injure children during wars and other armed conflicts. Doctors and others including volunteers from the United States have documented many cases in which they've concluded Israeli snipers and other troops have deliberately shot children in the head and chest.
Palestinian children take part in a graduation ceremony at al-Wafa Orphan Village in Khan Younis, Gaza on August 18, 2025. (Photo: Abdallah Alattar/Anadolu via Getty Images)
There are also more child amputees in Gaza than anywhere else in the world, with UN agencies estimating earlier this year that 3,000-4,000 Palestinian children have had one or more limbs removed, sometimes without anesthesia. The administration of US President Donald Trump—which provides Israel with many of the weapons used to kill and maim Palestinian children—recently stopped issuing visas to amputees and other victims seeking medical treatment in the United States.
All of the above have wrought what one Gaza mother called the "complete psychological destruction" of children in the embattled enclave.
Indeed, a 2024 survey of more than 500 Palestinian children in Gaza revealed that 96% of them fear imminent death, 92% are not accepting of reality, 79% suffer from nightmares, 77% avoid discussing traumatic events, 73% display signs of aggression, 49% wish to die because of the war, and many more "show signs of withdrawal and severe anxiety, alongside a pervasive sense of hopelessness."
Iain Overton, executive director of the UK-based group Action on Armed Violence, said at the time of the survey's publication that "the world's failure to protect Gaza's children is a moral failing on a monumental scale."
'Crisis of Disrupted Care': Nearly 800,000 Mpox Vaccines Meant for Africa Wasted Due to Trump USAID Cuts
"For a vaccine to be shipped to a country, we need a minimum of six months before expiration to ensure that the vaccine can arrive in good condition and also allow the country to implement the vaccination," said Yap Boum, an Africa CDC deputy incident manager.
In September, the Biden administration pledged that the U.S. would provide more than 1 million doses to fight the epidemic in Africa, which has killed nearly 2,000 people, many of them children.
However, Politico reports that just 91,000 of them were delivered, and only 220,000 of them still have a long enough shelf life to be used if the Trump administration signs off on them.
The continent is already facing a dangerous shortage of mpox immunizations. As Science reported last month:
In September 2024, Africa CDC and the World Health Organization (WHO) jointly issued an mpox "continental preparedness and response plan" that called for vaccinating 10 million people in Africa within 6 months. An updated version of the plan, issued in April, narrowed who should be offered the vaccine and scaled back the target to 6.4 million people by August.
But according to a May 29 WHO situation report, only 720,000 people in seven African countries have received mpox vaccines. Doses are scarce, vaccination teams are short on health workers and transportation, and identifying who might have been exposed to the mpox virus and should get the vaccine first is a challenge.
Salim Abdool Karim, chair of the Africa CDC's emergency consultative group, called Trump's "abrupt closure of USAID support for the mpox control effort in Africa" a "major blow, especially since it played a key role in the logistics of vaccine storage and distribution."
A June report by Public Citizen put the striking shortfall of doses into even greater perspective. The group reported that Africa had nearly six times fewer doses of the vaccine than the United States had during the 2022-23 outbreak, which was markedly less severe than what Africa currently faces.
Graphic: Public Citizen www.citizen.org
They pointed to high prices charged by the vaccine's manufacturer, Bavarian Nordic. The company has sold the vaccines to UNICEF for $65 per dose, making them the second most expensive drug UNICEF pays for.
UNICEF called for Bavarian Nordic to quarter the price of the drug and increase doses available to fight the crisis, but the company did not respond to the request. As a result, UNICEF fell 350,000 doses short of the one million that it had hoped to commit.
This shortfall was made worse by the actions taken by the Trump administration. While halting USAID operations, the U.S. also ceased cooperation with the World Health Organization (WHO), which is a major player in organizing the allocation of vaccines.
The Trump administration's actions, the report said, have "prompted a concurrent crisis of disrupted care and severe funding shortfalls across a range of disease areas and health services."
Mpox vaccines are not the only form of international aid going to waste as a direct result of the Trump administration's cuts to USAID.
On Monday, Hana Kiros reported in The Atlantic that the Trump administration had given the order "to incinerate food instead of sending it to people abroad who need it":
Nearly 500 metric tons of emergency food—enough to feed about 1.5 million children for a week—are set to expire [Tuesday], according to current and former government employees with direct knowledge of the rations. Within weeks, two of those sources told me, the food, meant for children in Afghanistan and Pakistan, will be ash.
The Trump administration formally shut down USAID on July 1, after cancelling 83% of its programs at the beginning of Trump's term.
On the same day, a study was published in The Lancet, revealing that the organization's efforts over the past two decades had saved over 90 million lives, with the biggest reductions in mortality coming from its work to prevent HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other tropical diseases.
"Is [USAID] a good use of resources? We found that the average taxpayer has contributed about 18 cents per day to USAID," James Macinko, a health policy researcher at UCLA and study co-author, told NPR. "For that small amount, we've been able to translate that into saving up to 90 million deaths around the world."
According to Impact Counter, a database created by Brooke Nichols, associate professor of global health at the Boston University School of Public Health, nearly 250,000 children and 120,000 adults already had died over less than six months as a result of cuts to these programs, as of June 26.
According to the Lancet study, if those cuts extend into 2030, 14 million people who might otherwise have lived—including millions more children—might die.
"These deaths will not be the result of droughts, earthquakes, pandemics, or war," said Olivier De Schutter in a piece published Friday in Common Dreams. "They will be the direct consequence of a single, lethal decision made by one of the wealthiest men to ever walk this planet."
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