The impact of Palestinian-Israeli conflict on the rights of Palestinian minors

Abstract

Millions of children are caught up in conflicts in which they are not merely bystanders, but targets. Some fall victim to a general onslaught against civilians; others die as part of a calculated genocide. Still other children suffer the effects of sexual violence or the multiple deprivations of armed conflict that expose them to hunger or disease. Just as shocking, thousands of young people are cynically exploited as combatants. All of the conflicts took place within States, between factions split along ethnic, religious or cultural lines. The conflicts destroyed crops, places of worship and schools. Nothing was spared, held sacred or protected - not children, families or communities. In the past decade, an estimated two million children have been killed in armed conflict. Three times as many have been seriously injured or permanently disabled, many of them maimed by landmines. Countless others have been forced to witness or even to take part in horrifying acts of violence. This is a space devoid of the most basic human values; a space in which children are slaughtered, raped, and maimed; a space in which children are exploited as soldiers; a space in which children are starved and exposed to extreme brutality. Even though the United Nation Convention on the Right of the child was encoded 1989, nonetheless, neither humanitarian law (including the 1949Geneva Conventions and the 1977 Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions), nor the laws on human rights have managed so far, to elevate the sufferings and halt the involvement of children in armed conflict. Humanitarian law has a limited purpose and was not intended to be an instrument for children's rights, or indeed, for human rights.