World’s first war on children: Watch first-person account from Gaza

It is a war on children. Never have so many children been killed and maimed in so short a time. He cannot remember another war zone quite as horrific as Gaza. As videos flood social media of Israeli airstrikes, bombs and drones deliberately picking out Palestinians and children, in an online conversation with UNICEF’s UK ambassador Jemima Goldsmith Khan, UNICEF spokesperson James Elder provides a first-person account of the horrors around him.

Thousands of children are lying on the floor in makeshift hospitals waiting for painkillers and antibiotics. Elder has lost count of children whose limbs have been amputated without anaesthesia. They are running short of food, water, medicines and even oxygen. There are few functioning ICUs left and though doctors are on 24-hour shifts, they are finding it difficult to cope.

Fuel is in short supply and there has been no electricity since 7 October 2023, when Israel cut off the supply. Stores are running empty and in any case, whatever is available is prohibitively expensive and there is a shortage of cash.

There have been dozens of ‘mass casualty events’, says Elder, when Palestinians and children gathered for humanitarian aid have been mowed down by unprovoked airstrikes, drones and bombs.

He speaks of six-year-old Ahmed-Al-Abed, who was sent out to buy bread. The boy went out and saw a crowd rushing to a point where food was apparently being distributed. The boy joined the crowd, thinking he would return with more food, surprise the family and become a hero. But the crowd was bombed and the boy with shrapnel wounds in his head is now in an ICU, possibly never to recover.

The conversation between Elder and Jemima Khan is essentially an appeal for more humanitarian aid and funds of course, but listening to the conversation in India makes one wonder what UNICEF India is doing. If the agency is organising a drive to raise funds for Palestinians and more specifically, for the children in Gaza, it is not quite apparent. If UNICEF’s India ambassador Kareena Kapoor Khan has issued any appeal for help for Gazans, it is not visible.

UNICEF India may well say they do not get quite enough to take care of the children in India. But in the face of the unprecedented humanitarian crisis in Gaza, the agency might have surely thought of appealing to well-heeled Indians to show some empathy?

Elder says he has never before encountered so many children with mental health issues in need of counselling. Aid, he adds, now means water, vaccines, food, medicine, cash, counsellors and volunteers as the trapped millions are denied permission to leave the combat zone, with their homes and lives destroyed.

An Al Jazeera report in late June from Ground Zero quoted a Palestinian mother bitterly saying, “World leaders that can end wars decisively cannot deliver medicine to Gaza, cannot bring in food aid without daily bloodshed… even as Iran’s missiles rained down on Tel Aviv, Israel never stopped bombing us. Its tanks rolled on, its evacuation orders never ceased. And the daily charade of 'humanitarian aid' has continued to kill starving Palestinians as they wait in line at distribution sites.”

It was a tight slap on presidents and prime ministers attending summits, negotiating the ‘Gaza peace plan’ and announcing sanctions on Iran.