London: The year 2024 created a pitiful record for being the year to kill the largest number of children due to explosive weapons in conflicts across the world, the charity Save the Children said. The figure is out of statistics that began in 2006, Al Jazeera reported.
According to the report, around 12,000 children were killed or injured in conflicts worldwide during the year, and 70 per cent of them were victims of explosions. Most of them belong to Gaza, who were targeted by Israel.
The stats for the year are 42 per cent more than those of 2020, according to the charity’s report, titled Children and Blast Injuries, published on Thursday.
Narmina Strishenets, senior conflict and humanitarian advocacy adviser at Save the Children UK, said that the world is witnessing the deliberate destruction of childhood, and the evidence to this is undeniable. She added that children are paying the top price in today’s wars since missiles are falling where children sleep, play and learn.
Save the Children says that in the past, children in war zones mostly died of malnutrition, disease or a failing health system; now they are direct targets due to explosive attacks on hospitals, schools and residential areas.
It also said that the actions once condemned by the international community and met with global outrage are now brushed aside as the ‘cost of war’, which is a moral surrender and is among the most dangerous shifts of “our time”.
Further, the charity’s findings suggest that most of the casualties among children in 2024 were in the Palestinian lands of Gaza and the occupied West Bank, Sudan, Myanmar, Ukraine and Syria.