Saturday, April 04, 2026
Death, displacement and military duties: children plunged into crisis by Middle East war
Death, displacement and military duties: children plunged into crisis by Middle East war
“The Middle East war has severely impacted children, with over 340 killed and thousands injured. Displacement has affected over 1.2 million children, with many living in dire conditions and facing psychological trauma. Reports of child soldiers in Iran and attacks on schools and healthcare facilities further exacerbate the crisis, disrupting education and endangering lives.
Millions of children have been plunged into crisis by the war in the Middle East, with reports of child soldiers in Iran, mass forced displacements in Lebanon and the killing of hundreds of minors.
According to the UN agency for children, Unicef, more than 340 children have been killed and thousands injured since the US and Israel launched their attacks on Iran, which has retaliated with bombings across the region.
The highest reported child casualty event occurred on the first day of the war when a US missile strike on a school in Iran killed at least 160 children and teachers.
Israel’s invasion of Lebanon – and its continued attacks in the occupied West Bank and Gaza – have compounded the bloodshed. Across the region, more than 1.2 million children have been displaced.
“Children in the region are being exposed to horrific violence, while the very systems and services meant to keep them safe are coming under attack,” said Unicef’s executive director, Catherine Russell.
Following are some of the ways the war has affected children.
Forced displacement in Lebanon
More than 1.1 million people, including nearly 400,000 children, have been forced to flee their homes by Israeli bombing and displacement orders in Lebanon, according to a Unicef assessment. Nearly 90% of that total are living outside shelters, with many sleeping in the street.
Nidal Ahmed, 52, and two of his children are living in a tent in an impromptu encampment with hundreds of other families in Biel, Beirut’s nightclub district. This is Ahmed’s second displacement – his home in Tyre was destroyed in an airstrike on the second day of the Israel-Hezbollah war, and his brother’s home in the southern suburbs of Beirut was ordered to be emptied by Israel days after he had fled there.
“It’s 5pm and we haven’t had anything to eat today,” Ahmed said, his eight-month-old daughter, Zahraa, sitting in a stained onesie in front of him. “We’ve only been able to give the kids tea and some bread. It’s not suitable for a child this young to eat bread, but what can we do?” he said, gesturing to some crumbs of old flatbread Zahraa had been chewing on.
After a month of displacement, Ahmed has run out of money to feed his children. He relies on local organisations which show up irregularly, distributing one meal on most, but not all, days.
The conditions of their displacement are “humiliating”, Ahmed said, pointing to the tent he has erected for him and his children, the blue tarpaulin hastily thrown over a wooden frame and pinned down with rocks. “I tried to cover it to protect us from the rain, but we wake up every morning with our mattresses soaked.”
As his three-year-old son, Ahmad, plays with another child in a vacant lot, Ahmad says he gets to shower once a week, on Fridays, when his father drives them 30 minutes to the house of a friend, who allows them to use the bathroom. For their more immediate needs, there is one bathroom for hundreds of families, who wait in line for half an hour for a chance to use the toilet, which has no running water.
Unicef’s representative to Lebanon, Marcoluigi Corsi, warned last month that displacement would have lasting effects on the children. “This relentless cycle of bombardment and displacement is severely compounding their psychological scars, embedding deep-seated fear and threatening profound, long-term emotional harm,” said Corsi.
Ahmed said he has already seen some of these effects in his own children. When Israeli jets break the sound barrier or bomb Beirut, his son starts to run, trying to hide from a bomb he thinks will land on him.
Ahmed himself is exhausted. He had to leave his wife and 17-year-old daughter in the hospital in Tyre after they were injured in the bombing of their house. He shows a picture of his comatose wife in a hospital bed, counting her ailments: Skull fractured in 33 places, internal bleeding, spinal injuries.
“They say she won’t make it,” Ahmed said, looking at his children. “The children are kept busy now, they’re playing. But when they come home and don’t find their mother there, it will be a disaster.”
Deaths, injuries and mourning in Palestine
Despite a ceasefire which is now more than five months old, health officials in Gaza say at least 50 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces since the Iranconflict began more than a month ago. The number of child fatalities is unclear but on 29 March Israeli airstrikes on checkpoints killed at least six Palestinians, including a girl, according to local rescue services.
The Gaza Strip has not recovered from 23 months of Israeli bombardment, which killed tens of thousands of people and destroyed hospitals and schools in what a UN investigation found to be a genocide. Up until October last year, an average of at least one Palestinian child was being killed every hour. The number of children killed by Israeli forces in its war on Gaza surpassed 20,000 late last year, according to Save the Children.
While the Iran war did not open a new front in Gaza, it has deepened insecurity and resulted in an intensification of ongoing Israeli military operations.
Closures and movement restrictions in Gaza triggered by the escalation have disrupted access to basic services, and forced some schools to close. Crossings into Gaza were shut for the first few days of the war, blocking humanitarian aid and commercial goods.
In the occupied West Bank, Israeli settlers and security forces have escalated their violence against Palestinians since the start of the Iran war, killing at least three children. On 15 March, Israeli police shot dead two young Palestinian brothers and their parents in Tamoun, firing at the family’s car as they returned from a Ramadan shopping trip.
Mohammed, five, and Othman, seven – who was blind and had special needs – were killed alongside their mother, Waad Bani Odeh, 35, and father, Ali Bani Odeh, 37. Two other brothers survived. Khaled, 11, later said he had heard his mother crying and his father praying before they died. After the shooting, he said Israeli border police dragged him from the wreckage, taunted him and beat him. One officer told him: “We killed dogs,” Khaled said.
In Israel, at least four children have been killed by retaliatory Iranian missiles. One of the worst attacks occurred on 1 March, when an Iranian missile rocked the central Israeli city of Beit Shemesh.
‘No excuse’: Children as young as 12 guard checkpoints in Iran
Reports of children as young as 12 being used by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) to guard security checkpoints have raised the alarm on the use of child soldiers.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) released a report at the end of March saying the IRGC was conducting a campaign to recruit children to volunteer as “homeland defending combatants”.
On 26 March, a IRGC official in Tehran said a campaign to enlist civilians, called “Homeland Defending Combatants for Iran”, had set the minimum age at 12.
The poster for the recruitment drive features a boy and a girl alongside two adults, including a man in a military uniform.
The New York-based HRW said the military recruitment and use of children was a grave violation of children’s rights and a war crime when the children were under 15.
Bill Van Esveld, the associate children’s rights director at Human Rights Watch, said: “There is no excuse for a military recruitment drive that targets children to sign up, much less 12-year-olds. What this boils down to is that Iranian authorities are apparently willing to risk children’s lives for some extra manpower.”
An 11-year-old Iranian boy had already reportedly been killed in an Israeli airstrike while at a security checkpoint. Alireza Jafari’s mother, Sadaf Monfared, told the municipality-run newspaper Hamshahri that he had been helping patrols and checkpoints run by the Basij, a volunteer militia under the command of the IRGC.
Van Esveld said: “The officials involved in this reprehensible policy are putting children at risk of serious and irreversible harm and themselves at risk of criminal liability. Senior leaders who fail to put a stop to this can make no claim to care for Iran’s children.”
Attacks on schools and a loss of education
The US bombing of a primary school in Minab on 28 February killed scores of people, most of them seven- to 12-year-old girls. The strike is the worst mass killing of the US-Israeli war against Iran so far, and has been described by Unesco as a “grave violation” of international law.
Relentless attacks across the region are destroying and damaging the facilities and infrastructure that children depend on, including hospitals, schools, and water and sanitation systems.
The Iranian Red Crescent Society said 316 medical centres and 763 schools had been severely damaged or destroyed by US-backed Israeli attacks.
These attacks, and the general violence, have shut down education. Save the Children said at least 52 million school-age children have had their education disrupted across the region, moving to online learning or having none at all.
Of the 669 collective shelters in Lebanon, 364 are public schools, according to Unicef. In Israel, schools have been repeatedly closed across much of the country.
Ahmad Alhendawi, the regional director for Middle East and north Africa and eastern Europe at Save the Children, said: “In every conflict, classrooms are usually the first to close and some of the last places to reopen. Every missed lesson deepens the scars of war. Not every child can escape the violence or afford to move their learning online; we know that for the most vulnerable children, once they leave school many will never return.”
He added: “Schools are protected sites and attacks on them could amount to grave breaches of international humanitarian law. The laws of war must be respected.”
The psychological toll
The bloodshed and upheaval has exposed children to traumatic events. Prolonged exposure to violence and instability is known to have lasting impacts on brain development, emotional regulation and long-term mental health.
While there has been a near total internet blackout in Iran, satellite TV stations are still beamed in and received. The London-based satellite channel Iran International has started broadcasting a segment between news bulletins that gives advice on how to deal with children’s fears and anxieties.
“Every war is a war on children,” said Alhendawi. “Children are living in fear, caught in the crossfire of this adult war,” he said. “Wars have laws and children must be off limits in every conflict.”
Friday, April 03, 2026
Israel passes death penalty law for Palestinians convicted of lethal attacks | Reuters (Isreal's Racist European Colonialism Continues)
Israel passes death penalty law for Palestinians convicted of lethal attacks
JERUSALEM, March 30 (Reuters) - Israel's parliament passed a law on Monday making death by hanging a default sentence for Palestinians convicted in military courts of deadly attacks, fulfilling a pledge by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right allies.
The law would only apply to Israelis convicted of murder whose attacks aimed at "ending Israel's existence", meaning it would mete out the death penalty for Palestinians but not for Jewish Israelis who committed similar crimes, critics say.
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The legislation has drawn international criticism of Israel, which is already under scrutiny for increasing violence by Jewish settlers against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and its war in Gaza.
NO RIGHT TO CLEMENCY
The measure includes provisions requiring an execution by hanging within 90 days of sentencing, with some allowance for a delay but no right to clemency. It provides the option of imposing a life imprisonment sentence instead of capital punishment, but only in unspecified "special circumstances".
Israel abolished the death penalty for murder in 1954. The only person executed in Israel after a civilian trial was Adolf Eichmann, an architect of the Nazi Holocaust, in 1962.
Military courts in the West Bank can already sentence Palestinian convicts to death but have not done so.
The measure was promoted by Itamar Ben-Gvir, the far-right national security minister who wore noose-shaped lapel pins in the run-up to the vote.
"This is a day of justice for the murdered, a day of deterrence for enemies," Ben-Gvir said in parliament. "Whoever chooses terror chooses death."
PALESTINIANS REJECT LAW, SOME CALL FOR ATTACKS
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas condemned the legislation as a breach of international law and a doomed bid meant to intimidate Palestinians.
"Such laws and measures will not break the will of the Palestinian people or undermine their steadfastness," Abbas' office said in a statement.
"Nor will they deter them from continuing their legitimate struggle for freedom, independence, and the establishment of an independent Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital."
Palestinian militant groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad called on Palestinians to launch attacks in revenge for the law.
CRITICS SAY BILL IS DISCRIMINATORY
Israel's leading rights groups decried the law as "an act of institutionalized discrimination and racist violence against Palestinians." The Association for Civil Rights in Israel said it filed an appeal against the law with Israel's Supreme Court.
[1/3]Israel Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Itamar Ben Gvir shake hands as the Israeli government approve Netanyahu's proposal to reappoint Itamar Ben-Gvir as minister of National Security, in the Knesset, Israeli parliament in Jerusaelm, March 19, 2025 REUTERS/Oren Ben Hakoon Purchase Licensing Rights
The law is the latest action by Netanyahu's nationalist-religious coalition to raise concern among Israel's Western allies, who have also been critical of settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank.
In an effort to head off international backlash, Netanyahu asked for some elements of the legislation to be softened, Israeli media reported. He voted in favour of the bill, which won the backing of 62 of the Knesset's 120 members.
The original bill had mandated the death sentence for non-Israeli citizens convicted in West Bank military courts of deadly terrorist acts. The revised legislation includes the option of life imprisonment.
In Israel's civilian courts, the new legislation mandates either life imprisonment or the death penalty for anyone convicted of "deliberately causing the death of a person with the intent of ending Israel's existence."
Critics of the bill say that language effectively confines those Israelis who can be sentenced to death to members of the country's 20% Arab minority, many of whom identify as Palestinian, and not to Jewish citizens.
Even before the vote, the bill drew criticism from the foreign ministers of Germany, France, Italy and Britain, who said it had a "de facto discriminatory" character toward Palestinians and undermines Israel's democratic principles.
A group of U.N. experts said the bill includes vague definitions of "terrorist", meaning the death penalty could be meted out over "conduct that is not genuinely terrorist".
Ben-Gvir's Jewish Power party argues that the death penalty will deter Palestinians from carrying out deadly attacks against Israelis or attempting kidnappings with the aim of affecting swap deals for Palestinians jailed in Israeli prisons.
Amnesty International, which tracks countries imposing death penalty laws, says there "is no evidence that the death penalty is any more effective in reducing crime than life imprisonment".
Professionals in Israel's legal establishment argued the bill was unconstitutional, increasing the likelihood of the Supreme Court striking down the law.
GLOBAL TREND ON DEATH PENALTY IS TOWARD ABOLITION
Some 54 countries around the world permit the death penalty, including a handful of democracies such as the United States and Japan, according to Amnesty International. The group says the global trend is toward abolition, with 113 countries having outlawed it.
Israeli rights group B'Tselem says military courts in the West Bank, where Palestinians are tried for alleged crimes, have a 96% conviction rate and a history of extracting confessions through torture.
Ben-Gvir, who was convicted in 2007 of racist incitement against Arabs and support for the Kach group on the Israeli and U.S. terrorism blacklists, has overseen an overhaul of prisons that has led to allegations of abuse of Palestinian prisoners.
He made capital punishment for Palestinian militants a main pledge in his 2022 election campaign and since taking office has publicly backed some Israeli soldiers being probed for suspected excessive force against Palestinians.
The next national election is due in October 2026.
Reporting by Pesha Magid and Maayan Lubell in Jerusalem, Ali Sawafta in Ramallah and Nidal al-Mughrabi in Cairo; editing by Rami Ayyub, William Maclean and Stephen Coates"
Is the US committing war crimes by targeting Iran’s civilian infrastructure? | International law | The Guardian
Is the US committing war crimes by targeting Iran’s civilian infrastructure?
"Donald Trump, other senior US officials and their cheerleaders appear to be embracing attacks – and threats of attacks – on Iranian civilian infrastructure, which legal experts say appears to constitute serious war crimes under international law.
In his rambling national address on Wednesday, the US president warned that if Iran did not reach an unspecified deal with him, US forces would “hit each and every one of their electric-generating plants” and “bring [Iran] back to the stone ages – where they belong”.
Following through on that threat a day later, Trump posted images of a strike on an the unfinished B1 bridge near Tehran, warning: “Much more to follow!”
Erika Guevara Rosas, Amnesty International’s senior director of research, advocacy, policy and campaigns said: “Intentionally attacking civilian infrastructure such as power plants is generally prohibited. .
“Even in the limited cases that they qualify as military targets, a party still cannot attack power plants if this may cause disproportionate harm to civilians.
“Given that such power plants are essential for meeting the basic needs and livelihoods of tens of millions of civilians, attacking them would be disproportionate and thus unlawful under international humanitarian law, and could amount to a war crime.”
That principle was underlined in 2024 when the international criminal court issued arrest warrants for the Russian politician and a former defence minister, Sergei Shoigu and the Russian general Valery Gerasimov, who were accused of directing widespread attacks on Ukraine’s power infrastructure and of causing excessive harm to civilians.
On Thursday, more than 100 US experts in international law from universities including Harvard, Yale, Stanford and the University of California, said the conduct of US forces and statements by senior US officials “raise serious concerns about violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law, including potential war crimes”.
The letter, published on the website of the Just Security policy journal, highlighted Trump’s comment last month that the US may conduct strikes on Iran “just for fun”. It also cited comments by the defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, who told reporters the US did not fight with “stupid rules of engagement”.
The experts said they were “seriously concerned about strikes that have hit schools, health facilities, and homes”, noting an attack on a school in Tehran on the first day of the war that killed more than 160 children and teachers.
The two issues of what constitutes a civilian object and the consideration of proportionality in striking civilian objects that a belligerent has identified as having a military function are among the knottier questions in international humanitarian law.
Under article 52 of the first additional protocol to the Geneva conventions of 1977, “civilian objects”, such as infrastructure, are defined not in themselves but by what they are not: military objectives whose destruction offers no definite military advantage.
At the heart of the question of what may –or may not – be attacked is the overarching principle of distinction between civilians and combatants. Rule 10 of the customary rules international humanitarian law – relating to both international and internal armed conflicts – explicitly states: “Civilian objects are protected against attack, unless and for such time as they are military objectives.”
That places a requirement on all parties: attackers must avoid targeting civilian objects and the party under attack must avoid “mingling” the military and civilians.
Codified in international law, the statute of the international criminal court also makes it explicit that it is a war crime intentionally to direct attacks against civilian objects if they “are not military objectives”.
Even when a civilian object is deemed to have become a military object, international law requires an attacking party to balance the harm to the civilian population.
International law has become more explicit and precise over the issue of the protection of civilian objects since the second world war, but the US and western allies have launched questionable attacks on civilian infrastructure before, including against Iraq in the 1991 Gulf war and on Serbian power plants.
The crippling of Iran’s power plants would be “devastating to the Iranian people”, cutting off electricity to hospitals, water supplies and other vital civilian needs, said Sarah Yager, the Washington director of Human Rights Watch.
“The US military has protocols designed to constrain that kind of harm to the civilian population, but when the president speaks this way, it risks signalling that those constraints are optional, and that is what makes this moment so dangerous,” she said.
International law permits attacks on energy plants and other ostensibly civilian targets only if determined that they primarily support military activity. But Trump’s statements indicate otherwise, said Tom Dannenbaum, a professor at Stanford Law School.
“The reference to the stone age indicates that objects would be targeted seemingly because they contribute to the viability of a modern society in Iran, which is completely unrelated to the question of contribution to military action –the necessary condition for targeting in war,” he said.
Attacks on civilian objects by both Iran, the US and Israel have prompted a pointed response from the president of the international committee, Mirjana Spoljaric, who said war crimes may be being committed.
“War on essential infrastructure is war on civilians … Deliberate attacks on essential services and civilian infrastructure can amount to war crimes. We are seeing energy, fuel, water and healthcare infrastructure damaged and destroyed.
“This disturbing trend is not limited to the Middle East or the last three weeks; it has been pervasive in conflicts across regions.”
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