By José Luis Méndez Méndez on October 12, 2024
Members of the al-Zanati, family killed following an Israeli strike, being taken to burial.Photo: Mahmud Hams/AFP
The first year of an unending genocide has passed, the pretext began on October 7, 2023, when the Palestinian resistance decided to respond to Israel’s perpetual aggression against its citizens, the invasion of their territory by usurping settlers, tired of suffering the demolition of their homes, the preferred method of the Zionists, fed up with the permanent humiliation of their citizens by the occupying troops and determined to show the right to defend themselves, resist and win.
The Palestinian attack was carefully prepared, it was known, according to all evidence and analysis, by the specialized Israeli services in advance, they used it as a pretext to continue the sweep in the Gaza Strip of the Palestinian presence, to exterminate a nation and a culture.
With the pretext of revenge, already more than satiated, with the claimed right to exist and defend themselves, with total brutality the aggression grew without limits or distinction. The children of today will be the men and women of tomorrow, they became, therefore, the priority of infanticide, convinced by the Zionists that the blood of today and the hatred of the aggressor will last for generations.
I wrote then about the horrors of the first days, weeks and months, the murders became daily, without measure, each news of a crime surpassed the previous one, but was less than the next. Twelve months later nothing has changed, the genocide has expanded to Yemen, Syria and Lebanon It suggests that the aggressors who preside over the criminal coalition along with the United States, Britain and other NATO countries, who participate in the securing, with full impunity and international laziness will continue the unlimited extermination and the complicity by omission of some countries that have unscrupulously declared themselves “neutral” before the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict”, mendacious by conviction and practice. They do not recognize the asymmetry and difference between the powerful bully and the non-existent capacity of the Palestinians to defend themselves, there is no conflict nor difference, it is an insistent aggression.
After twelve months of crimes, the news that embraces the world is horrifying: “After 12 months of military offensive in the Gaza Strip, the war leaves more than 10,000 amputees”. The revelation is false, there has been no war, which requires warring parties, when in reality there are hundreds of thousands of people, trying to escape the bombs, lying under the rubble, the data of victims, deaths and missing are dubious and inaccurate. The occupied areas of the West Bank have also recorded an alarming increase in the number of victims, with almost a hundred Palestinians killed, 28 of them children.
UNICEF, a UN organization specializing in the care of children and adolescents, designed to mitigate the absences of the most disadvantaged and protect the rights of children, has collapsed and has exceeded its wartime assistance possibilities.
Thousands of children wander through refugee camps without relatives, with traumas and after-effects of what they have lived through, some hundreds of them have ended up in the international child black market, for organ trafficking, and the European, Arab and African mafias fight for control of the immense supply that does not diminish.
The mutilated, the disabled, the sick and the irreversibly disabled, lacking primary health care, the permanent questions are depressing, some millions in the world prefer not to know the details of what is happening, they avoid the news of the areas of death and destruction.
End of Form
A boy carries his belongings out of a bombed building in Gaza. © UNRWA
What has happened to the children of Gaza? How many children have been killed in Gaza since October 7? How many Palestinian children have been maimed by the barbarism? How many children have been left orphaned, without filial support? Save the Children, a non-governmental organization, estimates that 21,000 children are missing in the Gaza Strip, many of them trapped under rubble, dead or in unidentified mass graves. There is no safe place for the children there, the occupying soldiers hunt them in the demolished houses, it is a priority not to let them go free.
Other figures are staggering, in addition to the missing, an estimated 14,000 have been killed in Israeli attacks, and 17,000 unaccompanied children have also been registered.
Other organizations are making arrangements for the care of the mutilated in countries willing to receive them, Colombia has responded and seeks to care for between 35 and 50 children with various amputations. Up to January 2024 alone, a thousand children had suffered the amputation of one or more limbs, according to UNICEF, which has come up with a horrifying statistic: More children have died in Gaza in five months than in the last four years in all wars. At least 12,300 youngsters have died amid a humanitarian catastrophe in the redoubt, which has left in more than half a million minutes of shelling in the enclave, compared with 12,193 worldwide between 2019 and 2022. The figure is more shocking in light of the latest report from the health agency which notes that infant mortality is at an all-time low. Orphaned children have been born victims of the genocidal alliance’s state terrorism.
Amid reports of new Israeli airstrikes in Gaza overnight Tuesday, October 7, 2024, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) confirmed that more children have been killed there in recent months than in four years of conflict worldwide: “This war is a war against children. It is a war against their childhood and their future,” said the UNRWA commissioner general.
The UNRWA official reiterated repeated international calls for an immediate ceasefire in the Gaza Strip, where heavy Israeli bombardment has leveled entire areas of the Strip. To date, more than 42,000 Palestinians have been killed and 72,889 injured, according to local health authorities.
Children have been the most vulnerable, the news came as UN humanitarian workers repeated their dire warnings about the catastrophic situation in Gaza, a territory of 360 square kilometers, where one in four people are on the brink of starvation, at least 576,000 people. Numerous children have died from severe acute malnutrition and dehydration in northern Gaza. It is estimated that about 1.8 million people resided there before the Zionist attacks.
No international entity is respected by the aggressors, shocking was the case of a new attack on a UN shelter school causing dozens of deaths, including many children.
The youngest are the least able to cope with hunger and disease, with one million children having already left their homes because of Israeli aggression and the aforementioned 17,000 unaccompanied or separated children, 1% of the 1.7 million displaced Gazans.
A year after the Palestinian holocaust, the aggression has become wider, more destructive, deeper and now involves several countries targeted by the Zionists, in that environment children are prioritized spoils.
Source: Cuba en Resumen