Tag: Child Rights

Why mass kidnappings still plague Nigeria a decade after Chibok abductions | Armed Groups News

Lagos, Nigeria – In the decade since the armed group Boko Haram kidnapped nearly 300 students at an all-girls school in the town of Chibok, abductions have become a recurrent fixture in Nigeria, especially in the restive northern regions.

Just last month, on March 7, a criminal gang kidnapped 287 pupils at the government secondary school in Kuriga, a town in Kaduna state. Two days later, another armed group broke into the dorm of a boarding school in Gidan Bakuso, Sokoto state, kidnapping 17 students.

The Sokoto victims and more than 130 of the victims from Kaduna have since been released, but there is no word yet about the remaining abductees.

Meanwhile, out of the hundreds taken in Chibok in April 2014, more than 90 are still missing, according to the United Nations children’s agency, UNICEF.

“I cannot believe that it is 10 years and we have not really done anything about [stopping] it,” said Aisha Yesufu, the co-convener of the #BringBackOurGirls movement pressing for the release of the kidnapped Chibok students.

Nigeria is plagued by insecurity. In the northeast, Boko Haram has waged a violent insurgency since 2009; in the north-central region clashes between farmers and herders have escalated in recent years; and acts of banditry by gunmen in the northwest are terrorising citizens.

Across the country, the targeting of vulnerable populations has been widespread, including kidnappings for ransom or to pressure the government to meet the aggressors’ demands. Experts also say that worsening economic conditions have led to an increase in abductions for ransom over the last four years.

But as Africa’s largest economy and a country with one of the strongest military forces on the continent, many have questioned why Nigeria has been unable to nip the spiralling insecurity crisis in the bud.

“At the end of the day, it comes down to the fact that there is no political will,” Yesufu said.

Bring back our girls campaigners chant slogans during a protest calling on the government to rescue the remaining kidnapped Chibok girls who were abducted in 2014 [File: Sunday Alamba/AP]

A booming industry

Last year, charity Save The Children reported that more than 1,680 students have been abducted in Nigeria since 2014. This has significantly contributed to deteriorating absentee statistics, with one in three Nigerian children not in school according to UNICEF.

But students are not the only ones bearing the burden of the crisis as travellers, businesspeople, priests, and those perceived as being well-off are also often targets. Kidnappings have become a sub-economy of sorts, as abductors rake in millions of naira in ransom payments. Social media is also littered with public requests from people soliciting funds to buy the freedom of their abducted relatives and friends.

Since 2019, there have been 735 mass abductions in Nigeria, according to socio-political risk consultancy firm, SBM Intelligence. It said between July 2022 and June 2023, 3,620 people were abducted in 582 kidnapping cases with about 5 billion naira ($3,878,390) paid in ransoms.

This year alone SBM Intelligence said there have already been 68 mass abductions.

The abductions are not confined to the north, where banditry and armed religious groups are prevalent, but have also been seen in the south and the southeast. Even Abuja, Nigeria’s capital territory, has not been spared, and in Emure Ekiti in the relatively peaceful southwest region, five students, three teachers and a driver were kidnapped on January 29.

The roots of hostage-taking in Nigeria can be traced back to the 1990s in the Niger Delta, where the country gets most of its oil; at the time, armed groups started abducting foreign oil executives as a way to pressure the government to address their concerns about oil pollution in their communities.

But in recent times, hostage-taking has become a booming industry, said Olajumoke (Jumo) Ayandele, Nigeria’s senior adviser at the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED). Perpetrators now mostly target socially classified vulnerable groups such as children and women, she said, to elicit public anger and press their demands for ransom payments or the release of their arrested gang members.

When a ransom is demanded, the payment is expected to be made by the victims’ relatives, or in some cases the government – and delays or non-payment can sometimes be deadly. One of five sisters kidnapped in Abuja in January was brutally killed after a ransom deadline passed, sparking a national outcry.

“The groups that have used this strategy are able to gain local and international attention to really show their strength and amplify what they want to state authorities,” Ayandele told Al Jazeera.

Although the Nigerian government has said it does not negotiate with terrorists in dealing with the spiralling security crisis, experts say this may not be true.

“We have heard and we have seen some state governments negotiating with some of these groups and some of these bandits,” said Ayandele. In many cases, this has only emboldened the criminals.

A security official walks near families of a kidnapped children in Nigeria
A member of the security forces holds a weapon as people wait for the arrival of rescued schoolgirls who were kidnapped in Jangebe, Zamfara [File: Afolabi Sotunde/Reuters]

Why can’t Nigeria stop the abduction of pupils?

Experts say that complex, multilayered issues are at the heart of the worsening insecurity crisis. These include socioeconomic factors, corruption and a lack of cohesiveness in the security structure – where there is no rapid response to attacks and ineffective collaboration between the police and the military.

Over the last decade, Nigeria’s economic situation has all but nosedived as the country grapples with high inflation, rising youth unemployment, and the loss of currency valuation. The fortunes of citizens have hardly improved, and 63 percent of people are in multidimensional poverty. Experts say this has pushed many into criminality.

“The economic hardship during this period has only increased and different policies drive different dimensions. As a result, this has led to kidnapping being seen as a viable and profitable endeavour,” said Afolabi Adekaiyaoja, a research analyst at the Abuja-based Centre for Democracy and Development.

The security architecture in Nigeria is also centralised, with authority concentrated in the hands of the federal government and no real state or regional policing independent of that. Experts say this has hindered the ease with which security agents can operate. It has also led to calls for state policing, especially amid criticisms that security agencies do not collaborate effectively.

At an army level, soldiers have complained about low remuneration and substandard weapons. The Nigerian military has been dogged with accusations of corruption, sabotage, connivance and brutality in the past, and this has fractured relationships with communities and potential sources of intelligence.

“This inability is not down to the military alone – there is a cross-government failing in security response,” Adekaiyaoja told Al Jazeera.

“There needs to be a stronger synergy in communal buy-in in securing facilities and also escalating necessary intelligence … There should be a renewed focus on necessary and frankly overdue police reform and a stronger synergy between intelligence and security agencies.”

Nigeria’s insecurity plagues all six of the country’s geopolitical zones, with each facing one or more of the following: armed fighters, farmer-herder clashes, bandits or unknown gunmen, Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) separatists, oil bunkering and piracy. This has kept the armed forces busy.

“Our security forces are spread thin. We have six geopolitical zones in Nigeria and there is something that is always happening,” said ACLED’s Ayandele.

Nigerian students and staff who were kidnapped in March arrive in Kaduna after they were freed [File: Abdullahi Alhassan/Reuters]

What is the toll of the crisis?

Abduction victims who have been released have reported harrowing conditions while in captivity. They are often threatened with death and barely fed as they endure unhygienic, unsavoury living conditions, including sleeping out in the open and trekking long distances into forests where they are kept.

The girls especially are vulnerable to rape and even forced marriages. Adults’ testimonies claim they are routinely beaten and tortured until the captors’ demands have been met.

Experts say the experiences leave victims with serious psychological wounds and trauma.

The fear of their children being abducted has led many parents in hot zones in the northeast and northwest to pull their children out of school entirely to avoid the risk. This is despite the government’s introduction of free and compulsory basic education in schools.

According to UNICEF, 66 percent of all out-of-school children in Nigeria are from the northeast and northwest, which also represent the poorest regions in the country.

“No parent should be put in a situation where they have to make a choice between the lives of their children and getting their children educated,” said #BringBackOurGirls movement’s Yesufu, adding that education is under attack in Nigeria.

As a result, she said illiteracy is then weaponised by the political class, who use people’s lack of information and knowledge to manipulate voters during elections.

But for some girls, the consequences may be even more dire than just losing an education, Yesufu said, as some parents decide to marry their daughters off early to avoid them getting kidnapped or worse. More than half of the girls in Nigeria are currently not attending school at a basic level, and 48 percent of that figure are from the northeast and northwest.

Education is crucial to national growth and development. But Nigeria’s continuing abduction crisis is posing serious challenges to schooling in the worst-affected regions of the northeast and northwest – and experts worry it may have broader implications for the country in the near future.

“This is just a ticking time bomb because when you don’t have a populace that is educated, they can be easily radicalised or recruited into these non-state armed groups,” Ayandele said.

“We don’t know what can happen in the next 20 years if we don’t address this education problem as soon as possible.”

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Nigerian army rescues 17 students abducted from Sokoto state | Government

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Children who were kidnapped in two separate abductions in northern Nigeria have been freed. On Friday the army rescued one group taken from Sokoto, while more than 130 students from Kaduna were released early on Sunday.

Published On 24 Mar 2024

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How Yazan starved to death amid Israel’s war on Gaza | Israel War on Gaza

Rafah, Gaza – The loss of nine-year-old Yazan, or Yazouna as his mother called him, hangs like a dark cloud over the el-Kafarna family’s tiny living space.

They huddle together in a shelter that Sharif el-Kafarna rigged up out of bits of wood, cardboard and sheeting in front of the third-floor door to the elevator in an UNRWA school in Rafah.

It is tidy inside and a string of Ramadan bunting hangs on one wall, but nothing can hide the fact that the family of five sleeps, prays, eats and spends all day in a space about eight metres square (80 feet square).

Breaking down, his mother wept: “This is our first Ramadan without Yazan, God has ordained this for us and we cannot complain, we can only praise him and have faith.”

Yazan died on March 4 at the Abu Youssef al-Najjar Hospital in Rafah, hooked up to breathing machines and IV drips, his body having wasted away to nothing during five months of relentless war during which his family ran from one supposed “safe place” to another, terrified, destitute and hungry.

He would have turned 10 on June 4.

Yazan’s family spend all their time in the cramped shelter his father was able to build in front of an elevator door on a school landing [Screengrab/Sanad/Al Jazeera]

A protected childhood

Yazan was diagnosed with cerebral palsy as a month-old infant, amid an earlier Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip in 2014.

His parents took great pains to structure his life in Beit Hanoon where they lived before the war so he had the food, supplements and healthcare he needed.

“Yazan needed special vitamin mixes for his mental acuity and these injections to keep his body strong, as well as physiotherapy which he needed regularly.”

“He needed healthy food as well, eggs, vegetables, fruits, dairy. He would also eat baby cereal and we would puree foods for him so he could eat,” his father, Sharif said.

He also received physiotherapy at home by therapists from various associations who would visit the family home regularly. There were also therapists who worked with him to provide psychological support and some basic learning.

“He enjoyed his sessions, you could see it in his eyes. He would smile, sometimes he’d clap, too, and his eyes would follow what was happening, like the trainers talking to him or shows on a screen that we’d show him,” his father said.

The little boy was thriving, and his parents celebrated him as much as they protected him.

Yazan’s mother broke down as she spoke to Al Jazeera about the loss of Yazan [Screengrab/Sanad/Al Jazeera]

“We’d have birthday parties for Yazan. He would smile, he would clap when he heard music, he was moving well, thank God.

“We’d do the whole thing, with a birthday cake and party food, just like we did for the other kids,” his mother said.

Understanding and love

The couple has three surviving children, eight-year-old Mouin, four-year-old Wael and four-month-old Mohamed, who was born weeks after Israel began its assault on Gaza on October 7.

Mouin was the closest of the brothers to Yazan, his mother told Al Jazeera.

“He would sit with him and watch him for me when I had to be in another room. He didn’t change his diapers or anything like that, but he would spend hours with him just watching something or chattering,” she said.

Because Yazan could not speak, he made different sounds depending on what he needed, his father said.

“I couldn’t understand what he wanted to, well, his mum was the one who knew what he wanted based on the sound he was making,” he said.

Yazan’s mother smiled fondly at the memory of her relationship with her eldest.

“He was closer to me … such a good kid, our relationship was great and I always understood him. He’d make a particular noise when he was hungry, another one if he was startled.

Yazan’s father, Sharif, is still devastated at what happened to Yazan [Screengrab/Sanad/Al Jazeera]

“I took him with me everywhere, to market, to my family’s places, he just came along. We went to the beach, too, but I didn’t put him in the sea because I always worried he’d get too cold, I’d just bathe him in the tub.”

Memories of that past life bring fleeting smiles to her face as she describes their two-bedroom home with its big living room and kitchen where the children had space to play – now they huddle with their parents in a tiny space all day.

“Fridays we’d have a big family meal, then take our afternoon siestas and go out to visit our families, either we’d go to my family or to my in-laws’,” she said.

Sharif used to work as a driver, earning enough money to provide everything the family needed, especially Yazan.

“I tried to do the same here,” he said. “We’re from Beit Hanoon, we were displaced to Jabalia, then Nuseirat, then Deir el-Balah, and when we got here, I made sure we had our own space, so Yazan would be as comfortable as I could manage for my son,” Sharif continued.

War brings the beginning of the end

“I was so happy when I was watching my son growing day by day when he had the food and medicines he needed. But then when the war started, he couldn’t get the treatment or the right food any more,” Sharif said.

Yazan was alert and thriving before the war, thanks to his family’s efforts to take care of him [Courtesy of the el-Kafarna family]

They tried, he continued, as hard they could to secure what Yazan needed to survive – soft, nutritious food that could be eaten by the little boy – but first, the supplies dwindled, then the black market prices rose alarmingly, then finally, there was no more of the food to be found.

Yazan’s health began to deteriorate in front of his parents’ horrified eyes as they carried him in their arms from one supposed “safe” place of displacement to another.

No amount of softened bread scraps they gathered for him could help keep him alert and strong, and his already thin frame began to waste away.

“He started to deteriorate day after day. We didn’t have enough medicine so I’d try to skip days to make what we had stretch further,” his father said sadly.

“We took him to the hospital and he lived his last days on life support at Abu Youssef al-Najjar Hospital. By then he was no longer able to respond to anything, not even his mother.”

Yazan spent 11 days in the hospital before he died on March 4.

“I can never forget Yazan,” his mother said, in tears.

“He’s in my heart and mind every minute of every day. Look at what’s happening to our children!”

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UN says acute malnutrition spreading fast among children in Gaza | Israel War on Gaza News

Israel says it will send a delegation to Qatar for more talks with mediators after Hamas presented a new truce proposal.

The main United Nations aid agency operating in Gaza has said that acute malnutrition was accelerating in the north of the Palestinian enclave as Israel prepared to send a delegation to Qatar for new truce talks on a hostage deal with Hamas.

On Saturday, the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) said one in three children under the age of two in northern Gaza are now acutely malnourished, putting more pressure on Israel over the looming famine.

“Children’s malnutrition is spreading fast and reaching unprecedented levels in Gaza,” UNRWA said in a social media post.

On Friday, Israel said it would send a delegation to Qatar for more talks with mediators after Hamas presented a new proposal for a ceasefire with an exchange of hostages and prisoners.

A source familiar with the talks told the Reuters news agency that the delegation will be led by the head of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency, David Barnea. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is seeking to convene the security cabinet to discuss the proposal before the talks start.

Netanyahu’s office has said the Hamas offer was still based on “unrealistic demands”.

Repeated efforts failed to secure a ceasefire before the holy month of Ramadan, which started a week ago, with Israel saying it plans to launch a new offensive in Rafah in southern Gaza.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, starting a two-day visit to the region, voiced concerns about an assault on Rafah, where more than half of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents are sheltering, saying there was a danger it would result “in many terrible civilian casualties”.

On Friday, Netanyahu’s office said he had approved an attack plan on Rafah and that the civilian population would be evacuated.

It gave no timeframe, and there was no immediate evidence of extra preparations on the ground.

Humanitarian crisis

Israeli attacks on Gaza have killed at least 31,553 Palestinians, mostly women and children, according to the Hamas-run health ministry in the strip.

The assault has also devastated the enclave, forcing nearly all the inhabitants from their homes, leaving much of the territory in rubble and triggering a massive hunger crisis.

“Children’s malnutrition is spreading fast and reaching unprecedented levels in Gaza,” UNRWA said in a social media post. Hospitals in Gaza have reported some children dying of malnutrition and dehydration.

Western countries have called on Israel to do more to allow in aid, with the UN saying it faced “overwhelming obstacles” including crossing closures, onerous vetting, restrictions on movement and unrest inside Gaza.

A first delivery into Gaza by the World Central Kitchen, pioneering a new sea route via Cyprus, arrived on Friday and was off-loaded, the charity said.

Cypriot President Nikos Christodoulides said a second cargo of food aid was ready to depart by sea from Cyprus on Saturday, while the United States and Jordan said they carried out an airdrop of humanitarian aid.

In a CNN interview, Queen Rania of Jordan called the airdrops “literally just drops in the ocean of unmet needs” and accused Israel of “cutting off everything that is required to sustain a human life: food, fuel, medicine, water”.

Humanitarian aid for Gaza is loaded on a cargo ship in the port of Larnaca, Cyprus [Yiannis Kourtoglou/Reuters]

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South Korea to China: Why is East Asia producing so few babies? | Demographics News

South Korea’s low birthrate has been declared a national emergency despite its government’s efforts to incentivise people into parenthood by paying 2 million won ($1,510) on the birth of each child as well as providing a host of other benefits to parents.

The country is one of several in East and Southeast Asia where birthrates have declined rapidly in recent years. Indeed, all five of the countries with the world’s lowest birthrates (stripping out Ukraine, which is undergoing a war) are in East Asia, according to a 2023 CIA report.

What is causing this, and why does it matter so much?

Which countries have the lowest birthrates?

South Korea, which already had one of the lowest fertility rates in the world, has experienced yet another drop in its birthrate.

Last month, Statistics Korea published data showing that the country’s birthrate has dropped by 8 percent in 2023 to 0.72 compared with 2022 when it was 0.78. The birthrate refers to the number of children the average woman will have during her lifetime.

Experts are warning that South Korea’s population of 51 million people may halve by 2100 if this rate of decline continues.

According to the 2023 CIA publication comparing fertility rates around the world, the birthrate decline is much sharper in East Asia than any other region.

The CIA’s report puts South Korea’s birthrate a little higher than the country’s own estimate – at 1.11. However, this is still the second-lowest in the world.

According to the CIA report, the birthrate in self-governed Taiwan is the lowest in the world at just 1.09 while in Singapore and Hong Kong, the birthrates are 1.17 and 1.23, respectively.

China, where a strict one-child policy was in place from 1980 to 2015, has a birthrate of 1.45. Japan, which has been facing the issue of an ageing population for some time, has a birthrate of 1.39.

These figures are in stark contrast to other parts of the world. The 10 countries with the highest birthrates are all in Africa. Niger is the highest at 6.73, followed by Angola at 5.76.

In the West, birthrates are much lower than this but still higher than East Asia. In the United States, it is 1.84 while it is 1.58 in Germany.

Why are birthrates in East Asia dropping?

While demographers refer to the birthrate as the fertility rate, this term encompasses those who choose not to have children as well as those who are unable to have children.

There are several reasons for the decline in Asia.

Economic growth and improving living conditions have reduced child mortality rates, and since more children are expected to live into adulthood, this has led to couples having fewer children, said analysts at the East-West Center, an international research organisation.

The analysts explained in an article in Time magazine that economic growth and educational opportunities for women have also led them to resist traditional roles, such as housewife and mother. As a result, they may “choose to avoid marriage and childbearing altogether”.

However, Ayo Wahlberg, a professor in the anthropology department at the University of Copenhagen, told Al Jazeera that this explanation is an “incomplete description of what’s going on”. While there may be a correlation between more women being employed and lower birthrates, Wahlberg said both men and women are working longer hours than they did in the past, giving them less time and energy to dedicate to childcare.

He cited the example of China’s “996 working hour system”, under which some companies expect people to work from 9am to 9pm, six days a week. Wahlberg added that in South Korea, the working conditions are similarly stringent. “When are you going to have the time to look after a child in such cases?” he asked.

He also pointed out that in many countries, the burden of housework and childcare falls more heavily on women than men. Additionally, women experience pregnancy-based discrimination in the workplace if companies decide to avoid hiring an employee who will need to take maternity leave.

Women in East Asia face some of the worst gender pay gaps among members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Additionally, they are aware that taking maternity leave could harm their chances of promotion and progression in their careers. Therefore, they decide not have children despite family or societal pressures to do so, he said.

“Is that selfish? I think it’s more being very rational about a very unacceptable situation,” Wahlberg said.

Both women and men are also deciding not to have children as part of an emerging movement that has deep concerns about climate change.

Why is a declining birthrate a problem?

Low birthrates will ultimately lead to population declines. Wahlberg said, to replace and maintain current populations, a birthrate of 2.1 is required.

A declining birthrate could have disastrous economic consequences.

Many countries are facing labour shortages and are struggling under the demands of an ageing population. With improvements and developments in health and science in recent decades, life expectancy has risen sharply, which raises concerns about people growing into old age in a society that does not have enough young people to take care of them.

The burden on younger people to support a much larger, aged population who are no longer working could also become intolerable, according to a 2023 report by the Pew Research Center in the United States, which concluded that income and sales taxes could have to rise steeply in the future to compensate.

An abandoned school swimming pool at Shijimi Junior High School in Miki, Japan, which closed three years ago due to a lack of demand. Japan’s birthrate is falling faster than expected, and school closings have accelerated, especially in rural areas [Buddhika Weerasinghe/Getty Images]

What is the solution in East Asia?

East Asian countries are trying to increase fertility rates by incentivising women to have more children.

In Japan, where schools have been closing at a rate of more than 475 per year since 2002 due to a lack of students, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has made the sliding birthrate a priority. “The youth population will start decreasing drastically in the 2030s. The period of time until then is our last chance to reverse the trend of dwindling births,” he said while visiting a daycare facility in June.

Despite high levels of debt, his government has announced plans to spend 3.5 trillion yen ($25bn) a year on childcare and other measures to support parents and encourage people towards parenthood.

In South Korea, more than 360 trillion won ($270bn) has been spent in areas such as childcare subsidies since 2006.

China has done away with its one-child policy. From 2016 to 2021, the country moved to a two-child policy. Now, a three-child policy is in place.

Reversing the one-child rule has so far been unsuccessful in China, where the birthrate continues to fall.

Due to the unequal burden of childcare placed on women, most women in China do not want a third child, according to research by the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership. Furthermore, in a survey conducted by the job search website Zhilian Zhaopin in 2022, only 0.8 percent of respondents said they wanted to have three children.

A potential solution other than increasing the birthrate is for Asian countries to open up to more immigration to end or reduce labour shortages. Japan, the only major developed nation that has historically kept its doors closed to immigrants, did this in 2018 when its parliament approved a new law under which up to 300,000 foreigners could be granted one of two new visas depending on their labour skills and proficiency in Japanese.

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South African mother charged with trafficking her missing 6-year-old | Human Trafficking

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There were angry scenes outside a court in South Africa where a mother was charged with kidnapping and trafficking her own 6-year-old daughter, whose disappearance has made headlines across the country.

Published On 14 Mar 2024

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UNRWA photographer recounts Israeli killing of his daughter | Gaza

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‘I relive it every single day.’ A Palestinian father and UNRWA photographer returns to the place where Israeli forces killed his four-year-old daughter while following evacuation orders to flee to south Gaza.

Published On 5 Mar 2024

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Six children die of malnutrition in Gaza hospitals: Health Ministry | Israel War on Gaza News

Six children have died from dehydration and malnutrition at hospitals in northern Gaza, the Health Ministry in the besieged Palestinian territory has said, as the catastrophic humanitarian situation in the besieged enclave worsens.

Two children died at al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, the ministry said on Wednesday. Earlier it reported that four children died at the Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza, while seven others remained in critical condition.

“We ask international agencies to intervene immediately to avert a humanitarian catastrophe in northern Gaza,” Health Ministry spokesperson Ashraf al-Qudra said in a statement, as Israel’s attacks on Gaza continue.

“The international community is facing a moral and humanitarian test to stop the genocide in Gaza.”

Kamal Adwan Hospital’s Director Ahmed al-Kahlout said that the hospital had gone out of service due to a lack of fuel to run its generators. On Tuesday, Al-Awda Hospital in Jabalia also went out of service for the same reason.

In a video posted on Instagram and verified by Al Jazeera’s Sanad verification unit, journalist Ebrahem Musalam shows an infant on a bed inside the pediatric department at Kamal Adwan Hospital, as power comes in and out.

Musalam said the children in the department are suffering from malnutrition and a lack of infant formula, and that necessary devices have stopped working due to the constant power outages as a result of fuel shortages.

Palestinian group Hamas on Wednesday said that the closure of Kamal Adwan Hospital would exacerbate the health and humanitarian crisis in Northern Gaza, which is already teetering on the brink of famine as Israel continues to block or disrupt aid missions there.

‘Killing and starvation’

On Wednesday, Israel said a convoy of 31 trucks carrying food had entered northern Gaza. The Israeli military office that oversees Palestinian civilian affairs, the Coordination of Government Activity in the Territories (COGAT), also said nearly 20 other trucks entered the north on Monday and Tuesday.

These were the first major aid deliveries in a month to the devastated, isolated area, where the United Nations has warned of worsening starvation.

Israel has held up the entry of aid into Gaza for weeks, with Israeli protesters taking part in demonstrations calling for no aid to be allowed into the territory, even as hunger and disease spread.

UN officials say Israel’s months-long war, which has killed nearly 30,000 people in Gaza, has also pushed a quarter of the population of 2.3 million to the brink of famine.

Project Hope, a humanitarian group operating a clinic in Deir el-Balah in central Gaza, has said that 21 percent of the pregnant women and 11 percent of the children under the age of five it has treated in the last three weeks are suffering from malnutrition.

“People have reported eating nothing but white bread as fruit, vegetables, and other nutrient-dense foods are nearly impossible to find or too expensive,” Project Hope said.

In a joint communique on Wednesday, Qatar and France stressed their opposition to an Israeli military offensive on Rafah in southern Gaza and underlined their “rejection of the killing and starvation suffered by the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip”.

They called for the opening of all crossings into Gaza, including in the north, “to allow for humanitarian actors to resume their activities and notably the delivery of food supply and pledged jointly $200m effort in support of the Palestinian population”.

Jan Egeland, secretary-general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, also said Israel must allow aid trucks into Gaza in order to address the dire humanitarian crisis.

“Hundreds of aid trucks wait in line to cross into Gaza at the Rafah and Kerem Shalom [Karem Abu Salem] crossings to a starving civilian population,” Egeland said in a social media post, with a video showing scores of aid trucks lined up.

“There has not been a single day we have gotten the needed 500 trucks across. The system is broken and Israel could fix it for the sake of the innocent.”

Medical aid group Doctors Without Borders, also known as Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), has meanwhile said that medical workers are struggling to serve hundreds of thousands of displaced people in Gaza who are living in dire conditions with nowhere to go.

“Healthcare has been attacked, it’s collapsing. The whole system is collapsing. We are working from tents trying to do what we can. We treat the wounded. With the displacements, people’s wounds have been infected. And I’m not even talking about the mental wounds. People are desperate. They don’t know anymore what to do,” MSF’s Meinie Nicolai said.



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Two-month old Palestinian boy dies of hunger amid Israel’s war on Gaza | Israel War on Gaza News

A two-month-old Palestinian boy has died from starvation in northern Gaza, according to media reports, days after the United Nations warned of an “explosion” in child deaths due to Israel’s war on the besieged enclave.

The Shehab news agency said Mahmoud Fattouh died at al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City on Friday.

Footage, verified by Al Jazeera, shows the emaciated infant gasping for breath in a hospital bed.

One of the paramedics who rushed the boy to the hospital says Mahmoud died from acute malnutrition.

“We saw a woman carrying her baby, screaming for help. Her pale baby seemed to be taking his last breath,” the paramedic says in the video.

“We rushed him to hospital and he was found to be suffering acute malnutrition. Medical staff rushed him into the ICU. The baby has not been fed any milk for days, as baby milk is totally absent in Gaza.”

Mahmoud’s death came as the Israeli government – which launched its assault on Gaza following attacks by Hamas fighters in October – continues to ignore global appeals to allow more aid into the Palestinian enclave.

At least 29,606 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s war on Gaza, while 69,737 have been wounded since October 7. The revised death toll in Israel from the October 7 attacks stands at 1,139.

The UN says some 2.3 million people in Gaza are now on the brink of famine.

Israel, which cut off all supplies of food, water and fuel into Gaza at the start of the war, opened one entry point for humanitarian aid in December. But aid agencies say stringent checks by Israeli forces and protests by far-right demonstrators at the Karem Abu Salem crossing, known by Israelis as Kerem Shalom, have hampered the entry of food trucks.

When the supplies do get through to Gaza, aid workers say they are not able to pick up the goods or distribute them because of a lack of security, caused in part due to Israel’s targeted killings of policemen guarding the truck envoys.

The situation is particularly desperate in northern Gaza, which has been almost completely cut off from aid since late October.

Doctors there have described the situation as “beyond catastrophic”.

Dr Hussam Abu Safiya, the head of Kamal Adwan Hospital in north Gaza, said he was seeing “many” deaths among children, especially newborns.

“Signs of weakness and paleness are apparent on newborns because the mother is malnourished,” Abu Safiya told Al Jazeera. “Unfortunately many kids have died in the past weeks … if we don’t get the proper aid urgently, we will be losing more and more to malnutrition.”

Despite the dire situation, UN agencies have not been able to provide help.

The World Food Programme tried to resume deliveries to northern Gaza last Sunday but announced a suspension two days later, citing Israeli gunfire and a “collapse of civil order”. It said its teams witnessed “unprecedented levels of desperation” in the north, with hungry Palestinians mobbing trucks to get food.

The agency said it was working to resume deliveries as soon as possible and called for better security for its staff as well as “significantly higher volumes of food” and the opening of crossing points for aid directly into northern Gaza from Israel.

The UN has meanwhile said its assessments indicate that 15 percent, or one in six, children below two years of age in northern Gaza were acutely malnourished.

“The Gaza Strip is poised to witness an explosion in preventable child deaths, which would compound the already unbearable level of child deaths in Gaza,” said Ted Chaiban, UNICEF’s deputy executive director for humanitarian action, in a statement last week.

“We’ve been warning for weeks that the Gaza Strip is on the brink of a nutrition crisis. If the conflict doesn’t end now, children’s nutrition will continue to plummet, leading to preventable deaths or health issues which will affect the children of Gaza for the rest of their lives and have potential intergenerational consequences,” he said.

Before the war, only 0.8 percent of children below five in Gaza were considered acutely malnourished, the UN said.

“Such a decline in a population’s nutritional status in three months is unprecedented globally.”



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When words fail, we must turn to the law | Israel War on Gaza

A crisis. A horror. A tragedy. All words we’ve heard many times over to describe the situation in Gaza. All woefully insufficient.

As a Palestinian, I can assure you if there’s one thing Palestinians aren’t short of, it’s words. You may even recall that in the first weeks of this war, children in Gaza held their own press conference imploring the world “to protect them” so they could “live as other children live”.

But the scale of the violence in Gaza since the attacks on Israel on October 7, which killed about 1,139 people, is unlike anything we’ve experienced before.  Israeli forces have killed an average of 250 Palestinians a day, exceeding the daily death toll of all other conflicts in recent decades.

Over one million people have been displaced to Rafah, the only remaining place in Gaza where there is any semblance of a meaningful humanitarian response, waiting for the next military operation that could lead to a bloodbath.

And so, words have begun to fail us. Many now say there simply are no words that justly capture the torment we’re facing. I disagree.

There are still some words we can and must fall back on, words that anchor us to our collective humanity. The language of human rights, international law and accountability. Words like obligations, violations, atrocity crimes. The laws of occupation. And the laws of war.

I emphasise these words because they are the right words to use, but also because they counter other words that have come to the fore, such as the language of dehumanisation, which paves the way for atrocity crimes to be committed.

Back in June 2023, I attended my brother’s wedding in the occupied West Bank village where we grew up. If only for a brief moment, we were able to forget about the occupation we live under and the daily abuse that brings.

That moment of joy was swiftly crushed when a few days later hundreds of armed settlers marched into our village, firebombing homes and cars and attacking my family, friends and neighbours, in the 10th attack on the village in just six months.

A 27-year-old father of two young children was murdered. Many others were shot and injured. As far as we’re aware, not a single settler has been held to account.

The attacks on my village fitted a trend of increasing insecurity for Palestinians with more frequent and more violent attacks by settlers and Israeli forces occurring across the occupied West Bank. In September, a Save the Children report found that 2023 had become the deadliest year for Palestinian children in the occupied West Bank on record. The number of children killed in the first nine months of the year was triple the number killed in 2022- itself previously the deadliest year on record since 2005. And then came October 7, leading to unprecedented levels of dehumanisation and violence.

Horrifyingly, at least four of the six grave violations against children have been perpetrated since the war began, including children killed in Gaza and Israel, the abduction of children from Israel to Gaza, attacks on hospitals and schools across Gaza, and the denial of humanitarian access for children in Gaza.

At least 29,000 people have been reported killed and 69,000 wounded in Gaza while an estimated 8,000 people are missing, presumed buried under the rubble of bombed-out buildings, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health.

Some of the most inhumane actions carried out by Israeli forces include directing Palestinian civilians to so-called “safe zones” and then bombing these areas, and preventing food, water and medicine from reaching civilians, even as aid agencies warn that nearly every single child in Gaza is at imminent risk of famine.

These extreme levels of violence are no doubt in part a consequence of the increasing dehumanisation of Palestinians. Senior Israeli government officials have labelled Palestinians “human animals”, there have been calls by some journalists for Gaza to be turned “into a slaughterhouse”, and some Israeli soldiers were shown wearing T-shirts depicting pregnant Palestinian women and babies as military targets.

Indiscriminate attacks on civilians, forced displacement, the use of collective punishment and starvation as a weapon of war are all violations of international humanitarian law and may constitute war crimes.

Videos have been broadcast to the world showing Israeli bulldozers digging up Palestinian cemeteries, the lifeless bodies of Palestinians run over by military vehicles, and young Palestinian boys blindfolded and stripped naked in the street.

It terrifies me that many world leaders who claim to be champions of human rights and the rules-based order would have seen these same videos and failed to condemn them. In contrast, there was global condemnation when videos surfaced of some of the over 130 hostages still held captive in Gaza after being seized in Israel on October 7.

Just as in so many other places before our failure to prevent the atrocities in Gaza is making a mockery of “never again”.

With everything that we now know, I wonder whether world leaders will finally use their positions of power and influence to bring this bloodshed to an end or whether they will simply continue issuing “statements of concern” and turning a blind eye.

This war should never have begun but it has certainly gone on for far too long. Every day it continues, more and more children will be killed, maimed, orphaned, and left deeply traumatised.

But even if politics continues to undermine humanity, the rule of law can still be upheld. In the weeks, months and years ahead, judgements handed down have the potential to redefine society’s course, leading to a fairer and safer world.

We owe it to all children, including those across the occupied Palestinian territory in Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and across Israel, to demand an end to the violence, adherence to international law and to hold to account those who violate it.

They have a right to no less.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

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