International law ‘laid to rest’
Daniel Levy, president of the US/Middle East Project, says Israel’s war on Gaza and Lebanon will have an “impact for generations”.
“The level of destruction, suffering, even polio vaccination campaigns that cannot be continued but it is also about how international law is being laid to rest (in) an even more definitive way,” Levy told Al Jazeera from London.
“What Israel has done is maintained an occupation, an apartheid regime which has been largely paid for across decades by international funding,” he added.
Levy explained it is only possible for Israeli ministers to call for settlements in Gaza because Israel’s “trade ties” internationally “continue to be normal” despite the level of destruction.
“Even when its (Israel’s UN) ambassador says the UN building should be destroyed and shreds the UN charter on the podium at the General Assembly…where are those arrest warrants, where are the sanctions, where is that questioning of whether Israel can be a member in good standing?” he asked.
Children in Gaza ‘have seen things that no child should ever see’: NGO official
Rachael Cummings, a health specialist with Save the Children, says the fact that 50 children have been killed in Gaza over the past 48 hours shows the “intensity of this conflict and this war on children”.
The Israeli attack on a polio vaccine centre yesterday, additionally, will have a “knock-on effect” on mothers who have little trust in ensuring their children are safe when being vaccinated, Cummings told Al Jazeera from Gaza’s Deir el-Balah.
“They’d have to weigh up that with the risk of another hospital, another healthcare facility being attacked,” she said, adding that 20,000 children are missing or have become unaccompanied in this conflict in the last year while another 14,000 children have been killed.
With no formal education, being constantly displaced and living under the threat of bombs, children’s “sense of normality, their sense of stability has been ripped away from them”, Cummings said.
“[Children are] having to take on roles within family settings that are not for children. They take on caregiver roles. They have to take on fetching water, trying to find food,” she added.
“They have seen things that no child should ever see.”
In Palestine, ‘children, in particular, are targeted’
United Nations Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese has said that Palestinian children are, “in particular, targeted in so many depraved ways – through killing, maiming, starving, torture, terror, depriving them of schools, dreams, future, hope”.
In a post on X, she said: “Look at the totality of Israel’s conduct, in the totality of the land it unlawfully occupies, against the totality of the Palestinian people living there. And when you see how children, in particular, are targeted … you see the destructive mind and intent at work, in the realisation of a plan that comes from afar.”
Albanese was referring to an incident in which Israel’s military blocked children from reaching the Haj Ziad Jaber School in the Jaber neighbourhood of Hebron, south of the occupied West Bank, by closing the road with barbed wire.
