Gaza’s children: Lessons for the world
Malaysians and others can learn from conflicts that affect 2 of every 3 children in the world, and how children exposed to conflicts grow up more aggressive.
As I watched my neighbourhood children play football on the field in the housing estate, a moment of envy flitted by. And their enthusiasm, energy and innocuous laughter momentarily transported me to my childhood.
Most of them were teenagers, with a sprinkling of younger boys, and they were playing with abandon, as boys are wont to do.
To the left, several young children were chortling or grimacing as they defied gravity on swings, with an adult either pushing the swing or watching alertly.
How lucky these children are, I thought.
Yes, Malaysian and Singaporean children are fortunate to be able to enjoy these pleasures of childhood and to grow up without a care in the world, getting to eat good food, sleeping in relative comfort, and going regularly to school to get an education.
Malaysian and Singaporean children make up one of every three children in the world who get the opportunity to enjoy such a peaceful life.
2 of every 3 children live in conflict-affected countries
The other two out of three live with, or under the threat of, hunger, malnutrition, displacement and the fear of injury and death. For they live in conflict-affected countries or territories such as Ukraine, Sudan, Yemen, Ethiopia, Syria, Myanmar, El Salvador and Palestine.
On 30 October, a UN official said almost 70 per cent of those reported killed in the fight between Israel and Hamas were children and women.
Sima Bahous, the executive director of UN Women, the United Nations agency promoting gender equality, said on 19 January that some 1 million women and girls had been displaced in Gaza, and that around 10,000 children had lost their fathers.
On 11 January, aid charity NGO Save the Children said it had been informed by the Palestinian health ministry in Gaza that more than 10,000 children had been killed by Israeli airstrikes and ground operations since 7 October last year, and that thousands more were missing.
The Palestinians also claimed the death toll had reached 25,000 on 21 January.
Children among hostages
On 24 January, Save the Children and 15 organisations, noted that children were among the hostages abducted by Gaza fighters when they stormed southern Israel on 7 October, sparking the latest conflict.
They added, “Armed groups in Gaza have continued to indiscriminately fire rockets towards population centres in Israel, disrupting school for children, displacing and threatening the lives and well-being of civilians.”
In calling for a ceasefire and an immediate halt to the transfer of weapons, parts, and ammunition to Israel and Palestinian armed groups, they said more than 1,000 Palestinian children had lost one or more of their upper or lower limbs.
They added, “Gaza today is the most dangerous place to be a child, a journalist, and an aid worker.”
In 1994, Save the Children said wars had killed 1.5 million children from Laos to Somalia over the past decade and injured another four million.
It had added, "More than four million children have been disabled, maimed, blinded and brain-damaged. More than 12 million children have lost their homes."
Africa has highest number of children living in conflict zones
According to a report released last year by the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), about 1.7 billion children under the age of 18 (68 per cent, or more than two out of three children) were living in a conflict-affected country in 2022.
These are among the findings mentioned in the report:
In 2022, about 468 million children (18.8 per cent, or more than one in six) were living in a conflict zone.
Around 96 million children were living in high-intensity conflict areas (with 100 or more killed within 50km of the fighting).
Close to 41 per cent of all children exposed to conflict lived in an area that experienced more than 25 battle-related deaths within a 50km radius.
In 2022, as in 2021, Africa was the region with the highest number of children living in conflict zones (183 million children). The total number in Asia was 145 million.
The Middle East continued to have the highest share of children living in conflict zones relative to the total child population (with as many as 39 per cent, or more than one third of all children in the region).
In the Palestinian Territories, the report said, practically all children lived within 50km of one or more violent events in 2022.
This is terribly, terribly disturbing.
Children exposed to violence become more aggressive
Can we in Malaysia and Singapore, living in peace, even imagine the trauma faced by these children? Can we visualise their lives growing up under such horribly uncertain, even dangerous, circumstances?
How many of these children, exposed to armed violence or abuse or slavery, will grow into adulthood scarred by their experience? How many of them are likely to take up arms in adulthood or even earlier, thus perpetuating the cycle of violence?
According to a study published in the journal Child Development in 2012, children exposed to ethnic and political violence in the Middle East were more aggressive than other children.
Participants of the study included 600 Palestinian-Arab families, 451 Israeli Jewish families, and 450 Israeli Arab families. It included children aged 8 to 14 years old.
Psychologist Paul Boxer, lead author of the study, had then said: “We found that over time, exposure to all kinds of violence was linked to increased aggressive behaviour among the children.
“We also found that these effects were strongest among the youngest age group, and that they appear to result from a chain of influence in which ethnic-political violence increases violence in families, schools, and neighbourhoods, which in turn increases aggressive behaviour among children.”
The paper’s co-author, University of Michigan psychologist L. Rowell Huesmann, added: “Importantly, we found that late childhood was a critical period. The children who were 8-years-old at the start of our study were more susceptible than older children to the effects of witnessing violence.”
They found that Palestinian children were the most exposed to violence although Israeli Jews experienced more security checks and threats, and that Palestinian children, especially males, showed the highest levels of aggressive behaviour.
Say 'no' to war
There it is! Clear evidence of the harm war and armed conflict of any kind have on young minds.
No wonder the violence in places such as Palestine, Afghanistan, Sudan, Myanmar and Nigeria never seem to end, or erupt after short periods of peace.
It’s time to end all wars, all armed violence to protect our future generations.
Do the adults who commit their communities or countries to war ever consider what it will do to their children? Or the long-term consequences of their agitated reactions?
It’s a lesson for our leaders to always be conscious of their words and actions, and it’s a lesson for us too. The best option is always to meet at the discussion table, not on the streets and certainly not on the battlefield.
We need to do all we can to cherish the peace that we enjoy, and to build bridges with our neighbours - whether individuals or nations.
A.Kathirasen is a veteran Malaysian journalist/editor who has been writing columns, with breaks, in newspapers and online since 1981. All views expressed are the writer's own.
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