Children in Wars Outside Gaza apparently Don’t Matter

We thought it would be useful to begin this column which deals with the civilian death toll in Gaza with a statement from the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF).  To wit:

“By almost every measure, 2024 was one of the worst years on record for children living in conflict zones in UNICEF’s history. More than one in six children globally now live in areas affected by conflict, forced to face unthinkable violations.

“Children do not start wars but they pay the highest price for them. They’re more likely than adults to be killed or maimed by explosive weapons. They lose the protection and care of family members and friends. They’re abducted from their homes, recruited by armed groups and sexually violated. Their schools and hospitals are destroyed, and many are denied life-saving aid, based simply on who they are or where they live.

“From Haiti to Myanmar, to the State of Palestine, Sudan, Ukraine and beyond, we cannot allow a generation of children to become collateral damage to the world’s unchecked wars.”

In the Sudan, for instance, UNICEF reports that 30 million people are in need of aid, more than half (that’s 15 million!) of them children who face daily violence and sexual assault.

In Haiti, UNICEF says a staggering 1,000 per cent rise in sexual violence against children in Haiti has turned their bodies into battlegrounds. The 10-fold rise, recorded from 2023 to last year, comes as armed groups inflict unimaginable horrors on children.

I am going to go way out on a limb and guess you were not aware of the disastrous conditions children suffer through in many parts of the world. And there is a good — but not laudable — reason for that.

Because if you are a news junkie, as I am, and follow news in print and on TV, you are told that the only place in the world where children are suffering and dying is in Gaza.  And the only country responsible is Israel.

It is disgraceful.  It is shameful.  It is immoral and unethical.  And I am being kind. (Yes, I have written about this subject before but it deserves repeating — constant repeating.)

In more than six decades scribbling and ranting on the typewriter and then the keyboard, never have I seen such one-sided reporting.  Almost daily on TV, there are gut-wrenching videos of wounded children or dead children carried in their parents’ arms.

None of this is to suggest that these stories should not be covered nor that Israel should not be held to account when necessary and appropriate. I am addressing the one-sided slanted coverage of the Hamas-Israeli War.

I noticed the unethical (a kind adjective) media behavior almost immediately after the war started October 7, 2023.  One week into the conflict, I wrote a column that started with two words: “Hamas won.” I meant not militarily but from a PR/political perspective.

The media began their reporting — actually misreporting — right from the start and continue to this day, citing death tolls numbers that can’t be verified.  Sometimes there is no attribution; sometimes they are attributed to “health agencies,” (there are none in Gaza except the Hamas Health Ministry), sometimes to “witnesses” who are not vetted.

And the numbers on fatalities generally conclude with the following line: “…and the death toll includes mostly women and children.” What’s more, at times, Hamas is not even mentioned as a party in the war.  A typical headline: “Israel kills X in Attack on Hospital,” not “X Die in Clash Between Israel and Hamas at Hospital.”

Doing a random search for this column, I read the following opening paragraph in the first story I came across: “Palestinian health authorities say Israel’s ground and air campaign in Gaza which resumed last week has killed more than 50,000 people, with nearly a third of the dead under 18.”

Rarely, if ever, have I read or heard how many Hamas terrorists have been killed in the war.  Nor are readers/viewers informed that the numbers come from a terrorist organization, which on October 7, burned civilian Israelis alive, beheaded others, riddled babies with bullets and gang raped women.  Surely, Hamas would not lie.

Then there is the issue of context.

Sadly, in war, civilians always suffer more than combatants.  In WW II, 15 million combatants died while the number of civilians is somewhere between 30-45 million.

The Allies deliberately bombed civilians (including children), leveling Berlin, Dresden, Cologne, and in Japan, the U.S. firebombed more than 60 Japanese cities, killing some 300,000 civilians and leaving eight million homeless.  In Tokyo alone, some 100,000 civilians died in one three-hour bombing raid, a bombing considered the most destructive in air attack history.  We won’t even mention “Little Boy” and “Fat Man,” the two A-bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

And in that war, the enemy did not use civilians as shields as Hamas has done.  Hamas contributed to the civilian death toll by firing on its own people.  Hamas’s leader, Yahya Sinwar, who was killed by Israel, touted in emails published by the Wall Street Journal, that the high civilian death toll helped Hamas in garnering support around the world.

Let’s reflect on some other disasters which have escaped media attention:

Ukraine:  The civilian death toll is hardly ever mentioned, nor is the fact                            that Russia has kidnapped about 20,000 Ukrainian children.

Yemen: Human Rights Watch says 11 million children need humanitarian assistance, much of the suffering caused by a nine-year conflict.

Democratic Republic of the Congo: Save the Children, in begging the world for assistance, says that 78,000 children have been displaced and families ripped apart as fighting escalates.

Human Rights on Myanmar:  The military is responsible for widespread killings, detention, torture [of children] …with 1.4 million children displaced and millions deprived of basic rights…

Save the Children offers this summary paragraph of children suffering around the globe:

In 2022, 468 million children (please, reflect on that number) worldwide live in areas affected by armed conflict. Nearly 200 million children are living in the world’s most lethal war zones, the highest number in over a decade.

None of this has made the headlines.  No photos, videos or “exclusives” like those covering suffering children in Gaza.

Who pays the highest price for the media’s ignorance, blindness and distorted reporting?

The world’s suffering children.