More than 200 children have been killed in Lebanon since Israel launched a military campaign focused on its northern neighbour two months ago, the United Nations agency for children (UNICEF) has said.
An average of three children have been killed every day in Lebanon, UNICEF told reporters on Tuesday, as Israel has intensified its bombing campaign across the country. It warned that as in Gaza, despite the horrific toll on Lebanon’s children “those with influence” were failing to mount a meaningful response.
“Despite more than 200 children killed in Lebanon in less than two months, a disconcerting pattern has emerged: their deaths are met with inertia from those able to stop this violence,” UNICEF’s spokesperson James Elder told reporters.
“For the children of Lebanon, it has become a silent normalisation of horror,” he added.Elder listed at least six attacks across Lebanon where children were killed, most of the time along with their families, over just the past 10 days.
The UN official noted “chilling similarities” between what is happening to children in Lebanon with those in Gaza, which has been pounded by Israeli air raids for more than a year.
At least 17,400 children have been killed in Gaza, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health.“In Lebanon, much the same as has become the case in Gaza, the intolerable is quietly transforming into the acceptable. And the appalling is slipping into the realm of the expected,” the UNICEF official said.
As in the besieged Strip, hundreds of thousands of children in Lebanon are now homeless; schools remain closed due to widespread attacks; signs of emotional turmoil are evident and no meaningful response has been put in place, Elder said.According to the Lebanese Ministry of Public Health, 231 children are among 3,452 people killed since the start of the war. Of the 14,664 people wounded, 1,330 of them are children.
Israel had been swapping low-level strikes across its northern border with the armed group Hezbollah, which began firing rockets into Israel in October last year as a show of support for fellow Iran-linked group Hamas.
Hamas’s attack on Israel, which killed about 1,139 people and saw about 250 captives seized, was followed by Israel’s onslaught on Gaza, which has now killed nearly 44,000 Gazan Palestinians.
However, Israel renewed the intensity of its offensive in Lebanon in late September, after widening its war goals to include the destruction of Hezbollah infrastructure and the return of 60,000 Israelis to their homes in the north.
Israeli authorities say its aim is to dismantle Hezbollah, yet the army’s shelling has killed thousands of civilians and at least 200 healthcare workers. Hezbollah has also continued to fire rockets striking deeper into Israeli territory, including Tel Aviv.