When children become the primary casualties of wars and conflicts

There is no better place to begin this article than with the words of Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s National Security Minister. During a security cabinet meeting in early June, he called for the abduction of Lebanese women and children as a means to pressure Hezbollah. “Let’s start thinking outside the box about Hezbollah,” he said, urging officials to adopt more aggressive measures, including “abducting their women and children” because, in his assessment, that is “what hurts them the most.”

His words were met with no meaningful international outrage, no emergency session of the UN Security Council, no sanctions, and no indictment. Thus, as the Arabic proverb holds, silence is an implicit approval of one’s actions.

Where is the international community? Where are the human rights organizations that exist precisely to condemn such hideous rhetoric? The silence is deafening. And that silence is not passive—it is active complicity in the normalization of child-targeting as an instrument of war.

READ: Palestinian infant killed, parents wounded in Israeli fire in occupied West Bank

The numbers from Lebanon are staggering. Since March 2, 2026, Israeli attacks have killed at least 3,711 people in Lebanon, including 247 children, according to Lebanon’s Health Ministry. Since the April 17 ceasefire—a truce that has proven to be nothing more than words on paper—Israeli forces have killed on average more than one child every single day. At least 70 children have been killed since the ceasefire was declared.

When you bomb residential neighborhoods, when you order entire cities to evacuate, when you wage war with no meaningful distinction between combatants and civilians, children will die. And they do—every day.

Palestine: Gaza children slaughtered in front of the world

On the first weekend of June 2026 alone, eight children were killed and 18 injured in five different locations across Gaza, according the local authorities in Gaza. In the West Bank the situation is not far from that of Gaza, on June 5, a 7-month-old baby was shot by Israeli soldiers’ fire while sitting on his mother’s lap in the backseat of a car near Hebron city, and the perpetrator was not held accountable, not even questioned.

The world saw children in Gaza literally being burned alive. The world saw their bodies torn apart. The world saw hospitals overflowing with child casualties. And the world did nothing.

Iran: The Minab massacre

UNICEF confirmed that approximately 180 children have reportedly been killed in Iran, with 12 additional children killed in other schools across five different locations. Schools are protected under International Humanitarian Law. They must be places of safety. Instead, they have become killing fields in the course of the US-Israeli aggression on Iran.

READ: US likely used AI in airstrike that killed 160 schoolgirls: Report

Russia-Ukraine conflict: Children under deliberate attack

While Israel stands as the most egregious abuser when it comes to targeting children, other conflicts around the world have also shown chilling incidents. In the Russian-Ukrainian war, children have also been deliberately placed in the crosshairs. On May 22, 2026, Ukrainian forces used heavy armed drones to carry out a targeted strike on a dormitory of a vocational school in the town of Starobilsk in the Luhansk region. At the time of the attack, 86 students – aged between 14 and 18 – were in the dormitory. The five-story building collapsed down and at least 18 children were confirmed killed along with dozens of injured.