9 May 2025
Palestinians inspect the ruins of Aklouk Tower destroyed in Israeli airstrikes in Gaza City on 8 October 2023. Photo via Wikimedia: WAFA (CC BY-SA 3)
Israeli-born legal scholar Dr Noam Peleg gave this year’s Yoliswa Dwane Lecture on 6 May. The annual lecture is hosted by Equal Education and UCT’s Centre for Law and Society, in memory of activist and Equal Education co-founder Yoliswa Dwane who died of cancer in 2022. This is a lightly edited and slightly shortened transcript of the lecture.
Today, I would like to talk about children, Gaza and international human rights law, and to contextualize this genocide within the ongoing war against Palestinian children that has spanned over decades.
Of the 2.3-million people who lived in Gaza 19 months ago, half were children under the age of 18.
The size of Gaza is 365km2. That is almost seven times smaller than Cape Town, which covers 2,446km2.
During these 19 months, nearly 20,000 children have been killed by Israel with thousands more buried under rubble or gone missing.
This is an average of 30 children killed every day since 7 October, or one child every 45 minutes. At least 825 of these children didn’t celebrate their first birthday, and nearly 900 of these children were below the age of two.
The life expectancy in Gaza in 2024, according to a study published at the Lancet, is 40.6 years old, while in 2023 it was 75.5 years old. We can only imagine what the drop in life expectancy will be once the 2025 data become available.
It is estimated that over 10,000 children have lost one or more siblings. 17,000 children have lost both parents and an additional 22,000 children have lost one parent.
Tens of thousands of children have lost limbs or suffer from other physical injuries. If a child is lucky to be rushed to a hospital, they might be treated by a doctor, but this will likely be done without any pain killers, or anaesthetic, even when undergoing amputations. This is not due to medical negligence, but because a blockade means that medical supplies are running low, or gone.
Today, Gaza has the largest number of amputee children on earth because of Israel’s war of annihilation. Polio, a disease that has been eradicated from this part of the world, spreads among children in Gaza, especially among newborns.
The population in Gaza has suffered from famine for over a year now, with children dying of malnutrition or walking around with almost no muscles left in their body.
There is almost no food left in Gaza, and the warehouses of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, the World Health Organisation and World Food Kitchen are empty. This is a result of the total blockade that Israel imposed on Gaza since March 2nd, when it broke the ceasefire.
Children are waking up hungry, going to sleep hungry, develop long term health issues due to malnutrition, and eventually die of hunger.
Fifteen-year-old Fayez Abu Shra is one of those kids. He was killed by Israel on Friday last week, while attempting to secure flour for his four younger sisters.
Fayez went to the Al-Shuja’iyya neighbourhood of Gaza City to retrieve flour from their evacuated home. While there, an Israeli drone bombed the area and Fayez was killed. Those who rushed to rescue him were also targeted. Fayez was killed trying to feed his family.
Starving the population isn’t the unintended consequences of a just or legal war, but rather a result of a deliberate policy to bring about physical destruction to the population. And this is not a new policy.
A report by the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food, Professor Michale Fakhri, published last year, documents Israel’s policies to destroy the Palestinian food system that span over 70 years, dating back to the 1950s.
The report describes how Israel destroys orchards and farms, how it harasses and kills fishers and shepherds. The report further describes how these policies caused malnutrition, famine, and disease that killed more people than bombs and bullets.
The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, highlighted in its March 2025 report the sexual and gender-based dimension of the genocide, showing how women and girls are directly targeted by Israel, including by deliberate attacks on sexual and reproductive health care facilities and the rise in family violence.
The violence, destruction, starvation and dispossession that children in Gaza are currently suffering from is almost impossible to comprehend. This war, as the UN Secretary General said, is “a war against children”.
Probably all the children in Gaza, suffer from mental health trauma. This trauma will remain a part of their lives forever, impacting future generations too, and becoming an enduring part of Palestinians’ traumatic history.
We are talking about an entire generation that witnessed the destruction of their homes, streets, schools, playgrounds, mosques, and the entire social infrastructure that supports children and their rights — from bakeries and libraries to community centers — all deliberately destroyed by a war machine that was explicit about how it sees all human beings in Gaza: “animals”, said Yoav Galant, former defence minister and currently a fugitive, wanted by the International Criminal Court for committing crimes against humanity and war crimes.
Another former defence secretary, Avigdor Liberman, added ‘there are no innocent people in Gaza”.
The genocide targets the whole of Gaza, and the war against Palestinian children should be understood in the broader context of the dehumanisation of Palestinian children over decades, where they were stripped from being considered as beneficiaries of the universal category of rights, and, as Hanna Ardent said in her analysis, from the category of the human itself.
The Israeli legal system is both complicit and a key enabler of the genocide in Gaza, and for generations it was a key player in the war against Palestinian children. It legalised and legitimised the killing, and incarceration without trial, or after a trial by a military court, of tens of thousands of children.
It denied them their right to education, their right to health, their right to family life, their right to identity, their right to non discrimination, their right to self determination and their right to life.
I want to share with you the story of Rania. Rania is a pseudonym that I use to protect her privacy. Rania is a 20-month-old baby. She also has cancer and needs chemotherapy. Rania lives in Gaza, but she can’t get any chemotherapy, as the treatment is unavailable.
Chemotherapy isn’t available not because there are no oncologists or nurses in Gaza but rather because Israel has systematically and deliberately destroyed the viability of the health care system in Gaza, and, as a result, children like Rania, and adults too, are at the mercy of Israel.
A 50-minute drive from where Rania lives, there is a hospital where she can receive the life-saving treatment that she needs. The problem is that this hospital is in the city of Ashkelon, in Israeli ‘48 territory. Rania used to be treated there, but her entry permit was revoked by Israel overnight and her parents were told that this has been done due to security concerns.
Preventing Rania from getting chemotherapy means one thing and one thing only – that she will die of cancer very soon.
The advocates who tried to assist Rania were looking to find some solutions to overcome this ‘security concern’. It was suggested that Rania can go for her chemotherapy with someone who is not a family member, if Israel is concerned about her father or one of her older brothers (based on the racist logic that sees all Palestinian adolescents and men as threats). Israel, however, still argued that this will not nullify its security concerns.
In their despair, the family has suggested that Rania will be taken to the hospital by the Red Cross, without any family member accompanying her. Any parent can try to imagine what it means for a 20-month-old baby child to be sent all alone to receive chemo, surrounded by strangers, separate from her parents.
Israel has refused this solution, claiming, once again, that it will not meet its security concerns, adding that Ranya herself is the cause for their security concerns. In other words, a nuclear power considers a sick baby to be a security concern.
A petition for a judicial review that was submitted to the Supreme Court of Israel, the highest court of the land, was quickly rejected. The court held a short hearing, during which it reviewed some “secret evidence”; evidence that was presented to the court by the security services but not shared with Rania’s lawyers.
So, without following anything that remotely looks like due process, the judges said that while they feel sorry for Rania, they nonetheless see no reason to question the secret service’s determination that Rania presents a security risk to the state of Israel. Therefore, the court concluded, they will not offer Rania any remedy.
Rania’s case was heard at the Supreme Court years before Israel launched its current genocidal war against Gaza. Rania’s case was heard before 46 children were killed, and nearly 8,800 children have been injured from live ammunition during the 2018 march of return in Gaza.
Rania’s case was heard before the 2014 attack on Gaza, when 500 children were killed, before the 2012 attack and before the 2009 attack, when hundreds of more children died and thousands more were injured. Rania’s case was heard in 2007, nearly 20 years ago.
Rania’s death sentence was lawful. It was signed by a panel of respected justices, after the state’s legal advisors submitted a carefully crafted legal argument, explaining why the decision to withhold Rania’s entry permit was legal.
These lawyers studied in Israel’s top law schools, where they were taught international law and human rights law by teachers who roam the academic world, presenting themselves as critical scholars, who are fighting an uphill battle against their own government, being hailed for their courage. All while contributing to the preservation and development of the legal arm of apartheid state, and for the last 19 months, aiding and abiding the legal arm of genocide.
Rania’s case was not unique, nor an exception to the rule. I was her lawyer, and I and my colleagues have dealt with a countless number of similar cases, where arbitrary decisions concerning everyday matters, such as entry permits, were in fact death sentences for babies and children.
This banality of evil is a testament to the ways in which Palestinian children are seen and treated by the legal system in Israel.
Since the late 1990s, Palestinians were effectively denied their right to freedom of movement and can’t leave Gaza.
First, Israel limited the ability to travel between Gaza and Israel. Then it added restrictions on the ability to travel between Gaza and the West Bank, which are one territorial unit under international law.
And then, in 2005, Israel effectively closed the door and threw away the key for Gaza, blocking all land crossing and maintaining effective control over the air space and Gaza’s territorial war. This has created what later was labelled as the world’s biggest open air prison.
The war on Gaza violates basic provisions of international law that aims to protect children. Modern international children’s rights law was created in 1924, 101 years ago. Against the horrors of the first world war and the disproportionate impact that it had on children, the League of Nations adopted the Declaration of the Rights of the Child.
Eglantyne Jebb, an English teacher and founder of Save the Children, drafted this declaration and advocated the League of Nations to adopt it.
In her memoirs, Jebb writes that it was the famine that children were exposed to in Europe, the loss of fathers who either didn’t come back from the war, or came back injured physically and mentally, and the internal displacements and its effects on children were her motivations to create a universal law that will protect children at times of conflict and hostility.
The 1924 declaration, also known as the ‘Geneva Declaration’, includes 5 short provisions. Provision 2 says “The child that is hungry must be fed, the child that is sick must be nursed, the child that is backward must be helped…”. And provision 3 continues, “The child must be the first to receive relief in times of distress.”
The 4th Geneva Convention, which was adopted in 1949 after the atrocities of the second world war, and its additional protocols from 1977, provide another layer of protection for children, shielding them from being the objects of direct attacks and ensuring that they will get the relief that they need during armed conflicts.
When it comes to malnutrition and distribution of supplies, the 4th Geneva convention orders states to prioritise “persons who must be accorded privileged treatment or special protection, such as children, expectant mothers, maternity cases, and nursing mothers” (GCIV Arts. 38.5, 50; API Art. 70.1).
A related obligation is to ‘’permit the free passage of all supplies of essential foodstuffs, clothing, and tonics intended for children under fifteen and expectant and nursing mothers” (GCIV Art. 23).
Quoting Save the Children, the situation is simple: “To prevent children dying from starvation and malnutrition, you need to be able to reach them, screen them and treat them. We need access to communities. We need to be providing supplementary feeding for children and pregnant and lactating women to prevent children becoming malnourished. And families need to have their fundamental rights to clean water, sanitation and healthcare services fulfilled to prevent more children from getting even more sick.”
International law also provides a dedicated, child-specific instrument: the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.
The Convention on the Rights of the Child is the most ratified human rights treaty, with all countries of the world, except the US, having signed and ratified it. It includes a range of provisions that acknowledge the rights of children, starting with the basic right to life, and continue with the rights to survival and development, the right to an adequate standard of living, the right to the highest attainable health. It also provides for the right of children to education, and for play and leisure.
Nearly all schools in Gaza have been destroyed by Israel and since October 2023, no child can attend school on regular basis. Children have no physical education setting to go to. Children are displaced, and their teachers have been killed or displaced too.
The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, the body that monitors the implementation of the Convention, warned time and again in the last 19 months that the genocide violates Israel’s core obligations to the children in Gaza under the convention.
As early as 1 November 2023, the committee expressed its concerns that “Grave human rights violations against children … are mounting by the minute in the Gaza Strip”, adding that “there are no winners in a war where thousands of children are killed”.
In September 2024, the Committee articulated the legal obligations that Israel has towards children in Gaza, the West Bank and Occupied East Jerusalem.
Reiterating its own jurisprudence, and following the advisory opinions of the International Court of Justice about the legality of Israel’s occupation that was published in July 2024, the Committee said that the Convention on the Rights of the Child continues to apply even in times of armed conflicts and occupation, and that Israel is responsible to protect the rights of all children under its effective control.
On the ground, the situation couldn’t be more removed from this. The sad reality is that Palestinian children, as I argued earlier, have been removed from the category of children and therefore aren’t seen as entitled to protection of their human rights. International law, in that sense, is failing to deliver its core missions.
Children have been victims of genocides and other war crimes through the 20th century. History showed that children in this country, as well as in Sudan, Cambodia, the Balkans, or across Europe during the Holocaust did not enjoy any of the protections that adults promised them.
The question then is whether the war against Palestinian children in Gaza is any different? Genocide apologists claim that there are no innocent people in Gaza, not even children, and therefore killing them is legitimate and necessary in order to create a permanent state of security (paraphrasing genocide studies expert Dirk Moses).
Some Israelis go as far as claiming that it is essential to kill Palestinian children as they are the next generation of terrorists.
The genocide in Gaza is the first time that victims have livestreamed their own death and the reality of destruction. It is also the first genocide where the criminals celebrate their own war crimes on social media, from soldiers on the ground to the head of state.
It is also a genocide where key institutions of international law acted in real time, when the International Court of Justice orders a set of preliminary measures in 2024 and the International Criminal Court issued arrest orders for war crimes and crimes against humanity later in the year, and the genocide didn’t stop, but rather, as some claim, intensified.
I think that it tells us that despite the universal acceptance of children’s rights, the knowledge about what is happening on the ground and the seemingly bold and even unprecedented actions by international institutions, racism is stronger, revealing how deep anti-Palestinian racism runs.
In her book, Incarcerated Childhood and the Politics of Unchilding, the Palestinian scholar Nadera Shalhub Kevorkian shows how Israel has been targeting Palestinian children in Israel, the West Bank, Jerusalem and Gaza since 1948.
These historical and ongoing assaults are described as a process of ‘unchilding’, arguing that Palestinian children are intentionally denied the opportunity to be children and the opportunities to experience their childhood in an environment free of colonisation, occupation, domination, humiliation, and dehumanization.
But childhood is not and should not be seen as a state of passive victimhood only, even in times of apartheid and genocide. Ethnographic studies with children in Gaza and the West Bank documented and theorised children’s resistance against the war on their lives, parents, families, and community.
Like studies done with children in other conflict zones too, Nitin Sawhney, for example, in his paper Invisible Lives, Visible Determination, shows how daily activities like flying kites at the beach are not only a playful act, a distraction for the children from the sound of drones and bombs, but also an act of resistance – where children insist on practicing their childhood, when they play with each other on their own land, even while having a target on their backs for the sole reason of being Palestinian children.
Sawhney also describes how storytelling workshops are opportunities for children to experience alternative communal space instead of the schools or classrooms that were bombarded. These are new social sites where children can meet new peers, share their memories, their stories, their fears, where they can talk about family and friends who were killed by bombs, or who were displaced and haven’t been seen for weeks.
As some children told Erika Jimenez, these activities are sites for resistance, against what they see as the ongoing attempt by Israel “to delete us”.
And indeed, pictures and videos of these spaces can sometimes be seen on social media. In some pictures you will see smiling children, happy and cheerful, playing, while in other videos you will see the same children covered in debris and their own blood, lying still.
Ahed Tamimi, Jana Jihad Ayad, and Lama Yahya, write in the introduction to the book Lived Resistance Against the War on Palestinian Children that was published a few months ago, “We the children of Palestine have known for as long as we can remember that occupation is fear. We have had to conquer our fear to create a life.
“The Zionist project to colonise our land was built on a foundation of racism and religious excuses. To that project we are the ‘others’, whose lives are worth less, who can be killed, eliminated, humiliated, and denied dignity. Our land is seen as a land with no people, a land that can be stolen, used to cement the colonial project.”
The war on Palestinian children didn’t start today, nor 19 months ago. It’s been going on for generations.
The war against Palestinian children was legitimised at times when international human rights law was in its peak, both in terms of the institutional capacities and the moral convictions it advanced. And the genocide goes on when international law might be dying, or at least changing forever.
International children’s rights law was born of the idea that children should be protected during war time, while no one was imagining that they will be the direct targets of drones and snipers.
Today, international children’s rights law might be lying under the rubble in Gaza. It might die there, and its faith depends on what we do and if and how we act.
It has been 45 minutes since this event began. Statistically, it means that another child in Gaza was killed by Israel.
One important lesson that we should learn from the life and activism of Yoliswa Dwane and the work of Equal Education is that giving up in the face of injustice is not an option, nor is caving to censorship and intimidation.
It is our duty to continue and speak up for children, to continue and fight for the rights of all children, in Gaza, Cape Town and elsewhere.
It is our duty to mobilise and act until the genocide ends, and then ensure that those who are responsible for this horror will be held to account.
Dr Noam Peleg is an Associate Professor and Director – Equity, Diversity and Inclusion at the Faculty of Law and Justice at the University of New South Wales Sydney. He works in international children’s rights law, human rights law, childhood studies, and family law. Before moving to academia, Noam practiced law in several human rights organisations.