‘This is a war on children,’ UNICEF warns after Israel resumes bombing Gaza

UNICEF has sounded a strong warning about the toll being exacted on children in the Gaza Strip, which has come under a renewed and genocidal Israeli war.

“We cannot see more children with the wounds of war, with the burns, with the shrapnel littering their bodies, with the broken bones,” James Elder, spokesman for the United Nations children’s agency, said on Friday.

“Inaction by those with influence is allowing the killing of children. This is a war on children,” he added.

The regime launched the war against Gaza on October 7 following an operation staged by the territory’s resistance movements.

The war killed more than 15,500 people, most of them women and children, across the coastal sliver until last week when an Egyptian- and Qatari-mediated truce took effect. Israel restarted the military campaign earlier on Friday, following the truce, killing nearly 200 more people.

Thousands more are missing and feared buried under rubble.

Speaking earlier this month, the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said the besieged Palestinian territory was turning into “a graveyard for children.”

“The health system here is overwhelmed,” Elder said.

“I cannot overstate how the capacity has been reduced of hospitals in the last seven weeks,” he added.

“Clearly words, clearly pleas from the world do not make a difference on those who have the power to stop the killing, the maiming of children.”

The remarks came amid untrammeled military and political support for the war on the part of the United States, Israel’s biggest and oldest ally.

The US has provided the regime with thousands of arms consignments since the initiation of the war.

Washington, which has backed Tel Aviv’s ferocious attacks on Gaza as a means of “self-defense,” has also been casting its veto against the UN Security Council resolutions that would call on the occupying regime to cease its aggression.