“Attacks against children in Gaza cannot be normalized,” says James Elder, global spokesperson for the United Nations children’s agency, UNICEF.
Elder has just visited Gaza on his fourth mission to the territory in the last twelve months.
The spokesperson has two decades of experience in conflicts, but in the case of Gaza he faces something that has never happened to him: having to remind the world “that Palestinian children are children.”
This October 7 marks one year since the escalation of violence in Gaza following the Hamas attack in Israel in which nearly 1,200 people died and more than 200 were taken hostage, according to Israeli authorities.
Israel’s subsequent offensive in Gaza left more than 41,000 dead, including more than 16,000 children, and nearly 100,000 injured, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health. More than 10,000 people remain missing, presumably under rubble, according to Palestinian sources.
Below is a summary of James Elder’s conversation with BBC Mundo.
In a video he published on Twitter on this last visit to Gaza he said that it was “like the first day.” Where did you go on this occasion and what did you see?
I was in Deir el Bala, in the central area of Gaza. He said it was like the first day because of the appearance of the hospitals.
In the early days of the conflict, hospitals were war zones and that has not changed. The hallways are full of civilians, mothers, children, all with brutal war wounds.
Bomb explosions cause three effects on a child’s body. Shrapnel fragments can pass through concrete, making them devastating to a child’s body. Then there are heavy things falling on a child or children being thrown from buildings in explosions. And then there are the horrendous burns.
When the hospital is flooded with people due to the scale of the bombings, there are children on the floors. Every time I return to Gaza the hospitals are still with blood on the floor, parents crying, children injured. That’s why I felt like it could have been the first day.
But of course, it’s not like the first day. It’s much worse. It is cumulative. The suffering in Gaza is pushing the limit of what we thought was possible.
You have said that the scars on children are much deeper than physical wounds. Can you explain the levels of psychological trauma you have seen?
85% of the Gaza Strip is under some type of evacuation order. So people are crowded into small areas, they have moved three, four, five, eight times.
I spoke to a child psychologist who told me that we are in uncharted territory when it comes to the psychological state of children.
I think it is fair to say that all children in Gaza will need some form of mental health support.
Right now, of course, most of that support comes from their parents, but the parents are suffering like their children, so they are not in a position to give them the kind of psychological care they need.
I can’t describe the level of trauma because I don’t think trained specialists can describe it.
And we may not understand how bad it is until the bombing stops and people start to return home and realize how many of their friends or family have been killed.
To help us understand the trauma of continued displacement, can you tell us about a child you have known?
I can tell you about a girl called Qama, who is 8 years old. After being injured in a bombing, she ended up in a hospital in the north that is a maternity hospital.
I went to this hospital in November and literally saw people bleeding in the hallways. It is not a trauma hospital, it did not have the equipment or doctors to care for the large number of victims it was receiving.
So when Qama arrived, in any other situation they could have saved his leg. But the doctors made the quick decision to amputate because they were very afraid of infection, since many of these hospitals do not have basic antibiotics.
This little girl’s life changed irrevocably. Even more so when the two places that made prosthetics in Gaza are not operating at the moment and the vast majority of children like her are not receiving approval from Israel for a medical evacuation.
What happened after the girl had surgery?
His mother found a wheelchair. Suddenly they had to leave the hospital and push a wheelchair with a girl with a recently amputated leg through a mile or two of dust and sand heading south.
They sought any shelter they could find and went to Khan Yunis, but there was another attack there and they had to move again.
We must remember that when a child experiences a bombing it is something terrible. The girl felt that reality through the shrapnel fragments and the immense, unimaginable pain in her leg and then suffered an amputation.
Any future bombing will simply increase the trauma. I can’t imagine how her mother would try to appease her at night during those bombings.
When there was an attack on Khan Yunis they moved again in the middle of the night, under air attack, with tanks on the ground, with all the screams of terror from other people, and they headed to Rafah.
Then Rafah was invaded and they had to move again and that whole scenario repeated itself.
Certainly my words do not do justice to what the mother and her three children were enduring, and what the grandparents are enduring. They had already destroyed their family home, everything they had worked for was destroyed in an instant. And now they move for the third time with this girl with a recently amputated leg.
When I met them they were in Deir el Balah, where, by the way, this week there was an attack in which 51 people were reported killed.
They have learned absolutely what we have been trying to say for many, many months: that nowhere is safe in Gaza.
You mentioned this week that restrictions on supplies entering Gaza have not been eased. Why is the aid still not arriving in sufficient form?
There are several reasons. Often a convoy is given approval and then, for reasons never explained, made to wait at a checkpoint.
The Israeli checkpoint is inside Gaza. The convoy is forced to wait there for five, six, seven, eight hours. And once that happens it is impossible to deliver aid.
It is known that we cannot deliver aid in the middle of the night. So those delays are enough to spell the end of a convoy.
I have had colleagues tracking down families to take children from the north to the south to reunite with their relatives, and those colleagues had to sit at checkpoints until one or two in the morning.
Furthermore, when help comes in, there is only one path we can use to deliver it. This is not enough and also represents a serious problem in terms of security.
Therefore it is about having efficient internal checkpoints, but also about having additional entry points. That depends on Israel. The Rafah crossing was the lifeline for Gaza and has been closed since May.
When all those things are disabling together, it is a case of death by a thousand cuts.
August was the month in which the smallest amount of humanitarian aid came in of any full month in all this time.
Can you tell me about the polio situation? I know that UNICEF carried out a mass vaccination campaign.
Two doses must be administered and the first part of the campaign reached more than half a million children. He showed what can be done with small humanitarian breaks like five or six hours a day.
But there is something quite bitter about this, because those same families who received the polio vaccine at eleven in the morning may well face bombings at eleven at night. Now we need the same thing to happen in the second vaccination in a couple of weeks.
The anti-polio campaign was a success, but the need for a polio campaign is a sign of failure. Polio had not been in Gaza for a quarter of a century and that was due to the great importance that Palestinians attach to vaccination.
Polio arrived in Gaza due to the devastation of the primary health care system.
Is UNICEF calling for a ceasefire?
Yes, absolutely, that hasn’t changed. UNICEF and the United Nations must have called for a ceasefire a hundred times.
Given the crushed hopes and broken promises, it may seem futile to continue calling for a ceasefire, to continue calling for peace. But the cost of remaining silent remains greater.
Every day we continue waiting, more children die. That is why we cannot afford to stop asking for what we know is the only human solution.
I also want to talk about the hostages and unimaginable torment they are still going through somewhere in Gaza, and the pain and torment their families are going through in Israel.
The vast, vast majority of the hostages were released during the sustained humanitarian pause or ceasefire or whatever it was officially called, which took place in late November, December. A tiny number have since been released.
So if you want to prevent the deaths of children, distribute humanitarian aid, stop the outbreak of disease and return hostages to their homes, there has always been only one answer: a ceasefire.
Already in December of last year UNICEF referred to the situation in Gaza as a war against children. Is this how you would describe what is happening in Gaza today?
For a year, an average of 40 girls and boys were reported killed every day. That’s why we talk about a war against children.
In terms of where this is going, I think the right thing to do is to convey what the many Gazans I talk to are saying, and I think there are two groups of people.
There is one who literally keeps holding on to hope. But there are definitely young people who have told me that they hope the next bomb hits their tent. They are so traumatized and depressed that they see no way out and with bombings night after night they hope that this will literally end for them.
I think this all has to do with leadership. We know this can be solved, as the executive director of UNICEF said a long, long time ago. Peace in the Middle East will not be achieved by the relentless bombing of Gaza and the killing of so many children.
But unfortunately it doesn’t seem like that’s the thought process of those in power right now.
You have worked for UNICEF for twenty years and you have said that there is something you have never faced before: having to claim that Palestinian children ARE children. Could you explain this?
I find it very difficult to understand how some people have a hard time finding moral equivalence in the lives of children. that a ni ño is a child is something that is at the heart of everything I have done for Unicef and Unicef’s mandate.
When months ago there were reports that five thousand children had been killed, there were those who denied or tried to justify this. I’m really having a hard time understanding that.
Now, when according to the Ministry of Health in Gaza more than fifteen thousand children have been killed, we hear the same arguments.
That to me is an inability to see moral equivalence. And that is what led me to say that for most of my career we have advocated for the protection, health, and education of children and that was enough.
But in the case of Gaza it seems that some people feel comfortable denying or justifying this unprecedented number of dead and injured children, so we have had to take a step back and first try to claim that they are real children.
With the violence in Lebanon, coverage of Gaza has decreased. In a tweet you sent a few days ago you say: “Attacks against boys and girls cannot be normalized.” Could you expand on this?
It has already been a year and there may be fatigue, but that, of course, is a paradox, given that the situation in Gaza is worsening and people should be more concerned about the situation of the children.
On this latest mission to Gaza I knew it would be difficult for me to continue conveying the horrors that are occurring. I saw children with fourth degree burns, which I didn’t know existed. I saw a girl whose face was literally almost blown off by a bomb explosion. I’ve never seen anything like it. But the girl still can’t get the medical evacuation permit she needs.
As I seek to convey those stories I know that they are not resonating, that this seems to have become normalized. I don’t hold the people responsible for that, but rather the leadership at the highest levels.
The Secretary General of the United Nations made it very clear what world leaders must do here, but I understand why average people close their eyes to avoid seeing something that is horrendous.
I often worry about the generation of young people around the world who are raising their voices and making it very clear that there must be a ceasefire.
They see the horrors that happen to children on social media and see a total lack of accountability. That is a stain on humanity.
I am concerned about a very young generation from Europe to South Africa and from Australia to Canada and Latin America who are seeing immense levels of hypocrisy.
I am concerned about people in their twenties for whose indignation there is unfortunately impunity.
