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LONDON: For the past two years, humanitarian aid groups and UN aid agencies have warned repeatedly about the increasingly terrible price being paid by children in the conflicts across the Middle East and North Africa.

It is a refrain which, against the backdrop of the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, has all but faded into the general cacophony of horror that in 2025 has become the soundtrack to life for so many in the region.

So when Edouard Beigbeder, MENA region director at UNICEF, the UN children’s fund, announced that more than 12 million children had been maimed, killed, or displaced by conflict in the region over the past two years, this gargantuan figure caused barely a ripple.

“A child’s life is being turned upside down the equivalent of every five seconds due to the conflicts in the region,” Beigbeder said.

“Half of the region’s 220 million children live in conflict-affected countries. We cannot allow this number to rise. Ending hostilities — for the sake of children — is not optional; it is an urgent necessity, a moral obligation, and it is the only path to a better future.”

UNICEF estimates that 45 million children across the region will require humanitarian assistance this year “due to continued life-threatening risks and vulnerabilities” — up from 32 million in 2020, a 41 percent increase in just five years.

The analysis is based on reported figures for children killed, injured, or displaced in Iran, Israel, Lebanon, Palestine, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen since September 2023, combined with demographic data from the UN Population Division.

But only those who have seen firsthand the suffering of children can fully understand the true meaning of such statistics. UNICEF staff on the ground in Gaza and elsewhere in the region are among those who have witnessed the true meaning of children’s suffering up close.

One of them is Salim Oweis, a communications specialist with UNICEF’s MENA office. Based in Jordan, his job is to go where, thanks to Israeli restrictions, international journalists cannot go, to tell stories from the scene.

It is a job which, he freely admits, gives him nightmares.

Oweis was in Gaza in August last year during one of the peaks in violence, when UNICEF was trying to reunite children separated from their families. And during the temporary ceasefire in February this year, when UNICEF worked with the World Health Organization to administer polio vaccines to hundreds of thousands of children.

When he first joined UNICEF, nine years ago, it was at the height of the civil war in Syria. “I wasn’t in the field yet, but I was receiving all these disturbing stories and images,” said Oweis. “I used to have nightly nightmares about me running away with my nephews, who were babies at the time.”

His job is harrowing, he says, but “how could I be sleeping safely at home, knowing this is happening, without doing anything?”

Oweis even describes as “selfish” the “reward” he gets from telling stories that might otherwise remain untold. “I’ve been there, I’ve spoken to people, I’ve been able to hug a child, or smile with a child, or listen to a mother,” he said.

“Maybe I can’t directly help her in the moment, but our job is to deliver the story, especially in places like Gaza, where no international media is allowed, and I think that is crucially important, in terms of letting people know what’s happening with children, and for their voices not to go unheard.

“Yes, I have my daily reminders of being exposed to that. But I think the cause is bigger than me, I believe in it — and I want to be on the right side of history.”

The message Oweis wants the world to hear, loud and clear, is that, whether in Gaza or Sudan, children are facing “a total disruption of whatever you think normal daily life for a child should be.

“Everything is disrupted. There is no sense of safety, no sense, even, of belonging, no sense of connection with others, no sense of community, because they are being constantly ripped away from places and communities to which they belong are under constant threat of death or displacement.”

Oweis says when he was in Gaza, “I didn’t meet any child, or adult, for that matter, who hadn’t lost someone, and mostly it’s either a father, a mother, a sister or a brother.”

For Oweis, meeting children in Gaza who had lost a father was hard, but looking into the eyes of children who had lost siblings was equally distressing.

“For a child to lose a brother or a sister, who they play marbles with, climb with, even fight with. When all that suddenly goes.

“We like to say that children have a high tolerance, but I think that is a dangerous word to use, because we say it and then we expect them to be resilient, but not every child is equally resilient.”

In Gaza, UNICEF has been doing its best to offer as much psycho-social support as possible to a generation of children in danger of being brutalized by war.

“The UN has been very clear that there are no such thing as ‘safe zones’ in Gaza,” said Oweis. “But we create child-friendly spaces where children can go for a couple of hours a day.”

Part of the objective is to maintain a basic level of education in four main subjects — maths, science, English and Arabic — “but school is not only for learning,” added Oweis. “It’s also for bonding, for community, for emotional and social connection.”

Through games, singing, and other activities, children are encouraged to be children, if only for a couple of hours a day, and to express themselves.

Oweis visited one camp for displaced people in Gaza where UNICEF had partners delivering activities, one of which was a session in creative writing.

Asked to write about their least favorite color, many of the children, who had seen more bloodshed than any child should ever see, unhesitatingly nominated red, followed by grey, the color of the rubble of devastated buildings.

Each child, Oweis found, is affected differently by the trauma they have experienced. “Some of them are very withdrawn. They don’t speak to you, they don’t respond to you. They don’t even look you in the eye. They seem broken by what they’ve been through.

“Others are more active and engaging. There is no one mold that fits all, but you know that every one of them is affected in some way.”

Affected, and affecting. Oweis will never forget one young boy he met, who had lost a leg. “He was in a wheelchair, and he was the sweetest person, very smiley. We asked him what he wanted for the future, and he said, ‘I want to go back and play football.’

“Me and my colleague and the boy’s father were there and all of us were taken aback, because we knew he was never going to do that in the way he thinks he will.”

Oweis fears that the conflicts in Gaza and elsewhere are breeding a generation of lost souls. “I truly hope not,” he said.

“Before all this we had an initiative with a lot of global partners in Syria called No Lost Generation. But unfortunately, each day that war continues, and hostilities impact children — not only in Gaza, but also in Sudan, in Syria, and now in Yemen, which is unfortunately almost forgotten — the risk of losing that generation, those childhoods, grows.

“I don’t want to believe that, because I really believe that we can still do something. But unfortunately, we know that many of the children that we will be able to provide with psychological support will not benefit from it. For them it will be too late, because the trauma is not a one-off, but is a daily thing for months on end.

“So yes, each day we are risking many more children being lost, and we’re talking about not only the impact on their lives, but also on the community, because they’re not going to be productive, they’re going to be needing a lot of support, medical, social and psychological, and that will have impact on the very core of these communities.”

There is also the fear that the brutality unleashed in Gaza will simply perpetuate the seemingly never-ending violence by breeding a new generation of terrorists.

“The best way for a government to fight terrorist movements is to avoid killing civilians, otherwise the cycle of victimization just breeds more terrorists,” said Jessica Stern, a research professor at Boston University’s Pardee School of Global Studies, whose work focuses on connections between trauma and terror.

In a co-authored article published in Foreign Affairs magazine two months after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack on southern Israel that triggered the war on Gaza, Stern wrote: “Those who study trauma know that ‘hurt people hurt people,’ and the adage holds true for terrorists.”

People who live in a state of existential anxiety, she argued, “are prone to dehumanizing others.”

“Hamas, for instance, calls Israelis ‘infidels,’ while the Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant has referred to members of Hamas as ‘human animals,’ and both sides have called the other ‘Nazis.’

“Such dehumanizing language makes it easier to overcome inhibitions against committing atrocities.”

UNICEF’s wake-up call about the suffering of children across the MENA region comes as the agency is experiencing major funding shortfalls.

As of May, its programs in Syria were facing a 78 percent funding gap, while its 2025 appeal on behalf of the people of Palestine fared little better, with a 68 percent shortfall.

Looking ahead, says UNICEF, “the outlook remains bleak.”

As things stand, the agency expects its funding in MENA to decline by up to a quarter by 2026 — a loss of up to $370 million — “jeopardizing life-saving programs across the region, including treatment for severe malnutrition, safe water production in conflict zones, and vaccinations against deadly diseases.”

As the plight of children in the region worsens, said UNICEF’s regional director Beigbeder, “the resources to respond are becoming sparser.

“Conflicts must stop. International advocacy to resolve these crises must intensify. And support for vulnerable children must increase, not decline.”
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