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.”

Imagine the moral decay required to propose the kidnapping of children as a legitimate military tactic. This is not a fringe figure speaking from the margins—this is a senior minister in the Israeli government.

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.

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Lebanon: A generation under fire

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.

These are not accidents. These are not “collateral damage.” These are the predictable, systematic results of a military campaign that treats civilian infrastructure as legitimate targets and children as acceptable losses.

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

If Lebanon is horrific, Gaza is apocalyptic. Since October 2023, over 20,000 children have been killed in Gaza—a staggering number that defies comprehension. Even after a ceasefire was declared, more than 200 children have been killed since October 2025.

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

On February 28, 2026, a strike hit the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in Minab, in southern Iran, while classes were in session. The result: 168 girls killed. The victims were schoolchildren aged between 7 and 12. One hundred and sixty-eight girls, in a single attack, at their school.

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.

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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.

The United Nations expressed alarm at the deadly attack. But alarm is not action. Condemnation is not accountability, and the perpetrators, regardless of which side they fight for, remain free to strike again.

Impunity: No fear of consequence

What connects Ben-Gvir’s call for child abduction, the recent 247 dead children in Lebanon, the 20,000 dead children in Gaza, the 168 dead schoolgirls in Minab, and the 18 dead students in Starobilsk? The answer is simple: impunity.

The perpetrators know they will not face consequences. Israel has never been held accountable for Gaza, for Lebanon. Ukraine will not be held accountable for its attack in Starobilsk. And countless other stark examples of incidents where children were the primary target and casualty. The international legal system, designed precisely to prevent such atrocities, has proven itself utterly incapable of stopping them.

As UN experts have noted, the failure to ensure accountability “perpetuates a culture of impunity that disproportionately harms women and girls.” The same applies to children. When there are no consequences, there is no deterrence, and when there is no deterrence, the killing continues.

All the conventions, all the treaties, all the international laws drafted to protect children in armed conflict are not worth the paper they are written on. The Geneva Conventions, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court—all of them have failed to stop the deliberate targeting of children. Because laws without enforcement are merely suggestions, and what is worse, accountability is applied based on justice but on political calculations and the biased selectivity of Western countries.

As long as perpetrators enjoy impunity, children will continue to pay the heaviest price of wars they never chose. As long as figures like Ben-Gvir remain unquestioned, as long as nations that target children face no sanctions, as long as the international community remains silent, the killing will continue. And each dead child will be not a tragedy but a testament to the world’s collective moral failure.

Finally, Ben-Gvir called for the abduction of children. No one stopped him, no one held him accountable. And tomorrow, somewhere in Lebanon, Gaza, Iran, or any other corner of the world, another child will die—because the world has chosen to remain indifferent, if not complicit. This silence is definitely what emboldens others to shred every law and convention ever designed to protect the most vulnerable among us, including our children.

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The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.