"Will You Bring My Dad and Give Me My Hand Back?" - TomDispatch.com

"Will You Bring My Dad and Give Me My Hand Back?" - TomDispatch.com Nick Turse, The Global War on Children October 22, 2024 It hardly matters what day you check out which news report when it comes to Gaza or now Lebanon. Amid the accounts of chaos and further destruction, there are always the children, even if often hidden away in the odd paragraph somewhere in the piece. Take a typical New York Times report on October 11th about how the Israelis were extending their devastating bombing campaign in Lebanon to the very heart of that country's capital, Beirut. Deep in that piece was this paragraph: "In Beirut, residents were still absorbing the shock and horror of Thursday’s airstrikes, with many fearing the death toll could rise. Samira Ali Sbheiteh, 71, said the attack hit an apartment building where her cousin Fatima, her cousin’s husband, Abbas Khalsa, and their two young children had been living. 'We still have no news about them,' she said." And yes, like so many other children in Lebanon, and especially in Gaza in the last year, they could be dead. Here, the day after that Times report, was an all too typical paragraph from the British Guardian on the latest grim developments in Gaza: "Airstrikes overnight on Friday on Jabalia destroyed an entire building and severely damaged several more, according to medics and first responders, who are still recovering missing people from under the rubble and ruins created by a 20-metre deep impact crater. At least six women and seven children were among the dead, and a strike in another part of Jabalia in the early hours of Saturday killed two parents and injured their baby, the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory said." And sadly, that's simply been the norm. In fact, the group Save the Children claims that there is no more deadly place to be a child on Earth today than Gaza where at least 11,300 kids have been identified as being killed (30% younger than five and 710 of them less than a year old) in the last year. And sadly, that's guaranteed to be, at best, a partial count. Worse yet, Gaza and Lebanon are anything but alone. As TomDispatch regular Nick Turse explains all too vividly today, this world is anything but safe for children to grow up in. In fact, it may be growing more unsafe by the month and, the remarkable Turse aside, it's strange how few people even notice what an increasingly dangerous place this planet is for our children. Tom