The Trump administration’s decision to halt all visitor visas for Palestinians from Gaza, which came after pressure from right-wing activists, will be a death sentence for children who require life-saving medical treatment.
The Palestine-Global Mental Health Network calls on global leaders to protect Palestinian children by cutting off the military, political, financial, and diplomatic support that sustains Israel’s systematic human rights abuses.
The Palestine-Global Mental Health Network is now launching an international campaign to demand world governments hold Israel accountable for its war crimes against Palestinian and Lebanese children.
At least 210 Palestinians were killed and 400 others were injured in the central Gaza Strip on Sunday after Israeli forces carried out a “rescue operation” to retrieve four captives. Reports of U.S. involvement in the operation have sparked backlash.
Israel has a long history of taking Palestinian children captive, abusing and scarring them in the process. This mass incarceration of children living under occupation boils down to one thing: control and the deprivation of liberty.
As leaders discuss extending the temporary truce, Israeli forces kill two children, including an 8-year-old boy, in the occupied West Bank. Meanwhile, Gaza is still facing a grave humanitarian crisis, with children on the front line.
There is no moral justification whatsoever for continuing this brutality which will result in the debilitation, wounding and death of thousands more children.
The scenes today in Gaza feel familiar. And yet, at the same time, what we are witnessing today is worse than anything we have seen before in Gaza.
Israel’s war on education is part of Israel’s war on Palestinian childhood. The only way to fight it is through a Palestinian pedagogy of liberation and international solidarity through BDS.
Israeli settler colonialism and apartheid is based on the extermination of the indigenous population and the elimination of their hope of living freely. Palestinian children represent that hope.