CHEBAA, Lebanon: With ceasefire talks faltering in Gaza and no clear offramp for the conflict on the Lebanon-Israel border, the daily exchanges of strikes between Hezbollah and Israeli forces have sparked fires that are tearing through forests and farmland on both sides of the frontline.
The blazes — exacerbated by supply shortages and security concerns — have consumed thousands of hectares of land in southern Lebanon and northern Israel, becoming one of the most visible signs of the escalating conflict.
There is an increasingly real possibility of a full-scale war — one that would have catastrophic consequences for people on both sides of the border. Some fear the fires sparked by a larger conflict would also cause irreversible damage to the land.
Charred remains in Lebanon
In Israel, images of fires sparked by Hezbollah’s rockets have driven public outrage and spurred Israel’s far-right national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, to declare last month that it is “time for all of Lebanon to burn.”
Much of it was already burning.
Fires in Lebanon began in late April — earlier than the usual fire season — and have torn through the largely rural areas along the border.
The Sunni town of Chebaa, tucked in the mountains on Lebanon’s southeastern edge, has little Hezbollah presence, and the town hasn’t been targeted as frequently as other border villages. But the sounds of shelling still boom regularly, and in the mountains above it, formerly oak-lined ridges are charred and bare.
In a cherry orchard on the outskirts of town, clumps of fruit hang among browned leaves after a fire sparked by an Israeli strike tore through. Firefighters and local men — some using their shirts to beat out flames — stopped the blaze from reaching houses and UN peacekeepercenter nearby.
“Grass will come back next year, but the trees are gone,” said Moussa Saab, whose family owns the orchard. “We’ll have to get saplings and plant them, and you need five or seven years before you can start harvesting.”
Saab refuses to leave with his wife and 8-year-old daughter. They can’t afford to live elsewhere, and they fear not being able to return, as happened to his parents when they left the disputed Chebaa Farms area — captured from Syria by Israel in 1967 and claimed by Lebanon.
Burn scars in Israel
The slopes of Mount Meron, Israel’s second-highest mountain and home to an air base, were long covered in native oak trees, a dense grove providing shelter to wild pigs, gazelles, and rare species of flowers and fauna.
Now the green slopes are interrupted by three new burn scars — the largest a few hundred square meters — remnants of a Hezbollah explosive drone shot down a few weeks ago. Park rangers worry that devastation has just begun.
“The damage this year is worse a dozen times over this year,” said Shai Koren, of the northern district for Israel’s Nature and Parks Authority.
Looking over the slopes of Meron, Koren said he doesn’t expect this forest to survive the summer: “You can take a before and after picture.”
Numbers and weapons
Since the war began, the Israeli military has tracked 5,450 launches toward northern Israel. According to Israeli think tank the Alma Research and Education Center, most early launches were short-range anti-tank missiles, but Hezbollah’s drone usage has increased.
In Lebanon, officials and human rights groups accuse Israel of firing white phosphorus incendiary shells at residential areas, in addition to regular artillery shelling and airstrikes.
The Israeli military says it uses white phosphorus only as a smokescreen, not to target populated areas. But even in open areas, the shells can spark fast-spreading fires.
The border clashes began Oct. 8, a day after the Hamas-led incursion into southern Israel that killed around 1,200 people and sparked the war in Gaza. There, more than 37,000 have been killed, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.
Hezbollah began launching rockets into northern Israel to open what it calls a “support front” for Hamas, to pull Israeli forces away from Gaza.
Israel responded, and attacks spread across the border region. In northern Israel, 16 soldiers and 11 civilians have been killed. In Lebanon, more than 450 people — mostly fighters, but also 80-plus civilians and noncombatants — have been killed.
Exchanges have intensified since early May, when Israel launched its incursion into the southern Gaza city of Rafah. That coincided with the beginning of the hot, dry wildfire season.
Since May, Hezbollah strikes have resulted in 8,700 hectares (about 21,500 acres) burned in northern Israel, according to Israel’s Nature and Parks Authority.
Eli Mor, of Israel’s Fire and Rescue, said drones, which are much more accurate than rockets, often “come one after another, the first one with a camera and the second one will shoot.”
“Every launch is a real threat,” Mor added.
In southern Lebanon, about 4,000 hectares have burned due to Israeli strikes, said George Mitri, of the Land and Natural Resources program at the University of Balamand. In the two years before, he said, Lebanon’s total area burned annually was 500 to 600 hectares (1,200 to 1,500 acres).
Fire response
Security concerns hamper the response to a fire’s first crucial hours. Firefighting planes are largely grounded over fears they’ll be shot down. On the ground, firefighters often can’t move without army escorts.
“If we lose half an hour or an hour, it might take us an extra day or two days to get the fire under control,” said Mohammad Saadeh, head of the Chebaa civil defense station. The station responded to 27 fires in three weeks last month — nearly as many as a normal year.
On the border’s other side, Moran Arinovsky used to be a chef and is now deputy commander of the emergency squad at Kibbutz Manara. With about 10 others, he’s fought more than 20 fires in the past two months.
Mor, of Israel’s Fire and Rescue, said firefighters often must triage.
“Sometimes we have to give up on open areas that are not endangering people or towns,” Mor said.
The border areas are largely depopulated. Israel’s government evacuated a 4-kilometer strip early in the war, leaving only soldiers and emergency personnel. In Lebanon, there’s no formal evacuation order, but large swathes have become virtually uninhabitable.
Some 95,000 people in Lebanon and 60,000 people in Israel have been displaced for nine months.
Kibbutz Sde Nehemia didn’t evacuate, and Efrat Eldan Schechter said some days she watches helplessly as plumes of smoke grow closer to home.
“There’s a psychological impact, the knowledge and feeling that we’re alone,” she said, because firefighters can’t access certain areas.
Israel’s cowboys, who graze beef cattle in the Golan Heights, often band together to fight blazes when firefighters cannot arrive quickly.
Schechter noted that news footage of flames tearing across hillsides has focused more attention on the conflict in her backyard, instead of solely on the Gaza war. “Only when the fires started, only then we are in the headlines in Israel,” she said.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said that as fighting in Gaza winds down, Israel will send more troops to its northern border. That could open a new front and raise the risk of more destructive fires.
Koren says natural wildfires are a normal part of the forest’s lifecycle and can promote ecodiversity, but not the fires from the conflict. “The moment the fires happen over and over, that’s what creates the damage,” he said.
Fires have become the most visible sign of the conflict heating up on the Lebanon-Israel border
https://arab.news/v7375
Fires have become the most visible sign of the conflict heating up on the Lebanon-Israel border
- Fire have consumed thousands of hectares of land in southern Lebanon and northern Israel, becoming one of the most visible signs of the escalating conflict
Magnitude 6.1 earthquake hits Turkiye’s Balikesir province, killing 1 and collapsing buildings
- Elderly woman pulled out alive from the debris of a collapsed building in Sindirgi but she died shortly
- 16 buildings and two mosque minarets collapsed, Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya announced
ISTANBUL: A magnitude 6.1 earthquake struck Turkiye’s northwestern province of Balikesir on Sunday, killing at least one person and causing more than a dozen buildings to collapse, officials said. At least 29 people were injured.
The earthquake, with an epicenter in the town of Sindirgi, sent shocks that were felt some 200 kilometers (125 miles) to the north in Istanbul — a city of more than 16 million people.
An elderly woman died shortly after being pulled out alive from the debris of a collapsed building in Sindirgi, Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya told reporters. Four other people were rescued from the building.
Yerlikaya said a total of 16 buildings collapsed in the region — most of them derelict and unused. Two mosque minarets also tumbled down, he said.
None of the injured were in serious condition, the minister said.
Television footage showed rescue teams asking for silence so they can listen for signs of life beneath the rubble.
Turkiye’s Disaster and Emergency Management Agency said the earthquake was followed by several aftershocks, including one measuring 4.6, and urged citizens not to enter damaged buildings.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan issued a statement wishing all affected citizens a speedy recovery.
“May God protect our country from any kind of disaster,” he wrote on X.
Turkiye sits on top of major fault lines and earthquakes are frequent.
In 2023, a magnitude 7.8 earthquake killed more than 53,000 people in Turkiye and destroyed or damaged hundreds of thousands of buildings in 11 southern and southeastern provinces. Another 6,000 people were killed in the northern parts of neighboring Syria.
Al Jazeera says 5 journalists killed in Israeli strike in Gaza
- “Al-Sharif, 28, was killed on Sunday after a tent for journalists outside the main gate of the hospital was hit
GAZA CITY, Palestinian Territories: Al Jazeera said two of its correspondents, including a prominent reporter, and three cameramen were killed in an Israeli strike on their tent in Gaza City on Sunday.
The Israeli military admitted in a statement to targeting Anas Al-Sharif, the reporter it labelled as a “terrorist” affiliated with Hamas.
The attack was the latest to see journalists targeted in the 22-month war in Gaza, with around 200 media workers killed over the course of the conflict, according to media watchdogs.
“Al Jazeera journalist Anas Al-Sharif has been killed alongside four colleagues in a targeted Israeli attack on a tent housing journalists in Gaza City,” the Qatar-based broadcaster said.
“Al-Sharif, 28, was killed on Sunday after a tent for journalists outside the main gate of the hospital was hit. The well-known Al Jazeera Arabic correspondent reportedly extensively from northern Gaza.”
The channel said that five of its staff members were killed during the strike on a tent in Gaza City, listing the others as Mohammed Qreiqeh along with camera operators Ibrahim Zaher, Mohammed Noufal and Moamen Aliwa.
The Israeli military confirmed that it had carried out the attack, saying it had struck Al Jazeera’s Al-Sharif and calling him a “terrorist” who “posed as a journalist.”
“A short while ago, in Gaza City, the IDF struck the terrorist Anas Al-Sharif, who posed as a journalist for the Al Jazeera network,” it said on Telegram, using an acronym for the military.
“Anas Al-Sharif served as the head of a terrorist cell in the Hamas terrorist organization and was responsible for advancing rocket attacks against Israeli civilians and IDF troops,” it added.
Al-Sharif was one of the channel’s most recognizable faces working on the ground in Gaza, providing daily reports in regular coverage.
Following a press conference by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday, where the premier defended approving a new offensive in Gaza, Al-Sharif posted messages on X describing “intense, concentrated Israeli bombardment” on Gaza City.
One of his final messages included a short video showing nearby Israeli strikes hitting Gaza City.
In July, the Committee to Protect Journalists issued a statement calling for his protection as it accused the Israeli military’s Arabic-language spokesperson Avichay Adraee of stepping up online attacks on the reporter by alleging that he was a Hamas terrorist.
Following the attack, the CPJ said it was “appalled” to learn of the journalists’ deaths.
“Israel’s pattern of labelling journalists as militants without providing credible evidence raises serious questions about its intent and respect for press freedom,” said CPJ Regional Director Sara Qudah.
“Journalists are civilians and must never be targeted. Those responsible for these killings must be held accountable.”
The Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate condemned what it described as a “bloody crime” of assassination.
Israel and Al Jazeera have had a contentious relationship for years, with Israeli authorities banning the channel in the country and raiding its offices following the latest war in Gaza.
Qatar, which partly funds Al Jazeera, has hosted an office for the Hamas political leadership for years and been a frequent venue for indirect talks between Israel and the militant group.
With Gaza sealed off, many media groups around the world, including AFP, depend on photo, video and text coverage of the conflict provided by Palestinian reporters.
Media watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said in early July that more than 200 journalists had been killed in Gaza since the war began, including several Al Jazeera journalists.
International criticism is growing over the plight of the more than two million Palestinian civilians in Gaza, with UN agencies and rights groups warning that a famine is unfolding in the territory.
The targeted strike comes as Israel announced plans to expand its military operations on the ground in Gaza, with Netanyahu saying on Sunday that the new offensive was set to target the remaining Hamas strongholds there.
He also announced a plan to allow more foreign journalists to report inside Gaza with the military, as he laid out his vision for victory in the territory.
A UN official warned the Security Council that Israel’s plans to control Gaza City risked “another calamity” with far-reaching consequences.
“If these plans are implemented, they will likely trigger another calamity in Gaza, reverberating across the region and causing further forced displacement, killings, and destruction,” UN Assistant Secretary General Miroslav Jenca told the Security Council.
Security footage from Syria hospital shows men in military garb killing medical worker
- A Syrian government official said they could not immediately identify the attackers in the video, and are investigating the incident to try to figure out if they are government-affiliated personnel or gunmen from tribal groups
DAMASCUS, Syria: Footage from security cameras at a hospital in the city of Sweida in southern Syria published Sunday showed what appears to be the killing of a medical worker by men in military garb.
The video published by activist media collective Suwayda 24 was dated July 16, during intense clashes between militias of the Druze minority community and armed tribal groups and government forces.
In the video, which was also widely shared on social media, a large group of people in scrubs can be seen kneeling on the floor in front of a group of armed men. The armed men grab a man and hit him on the head as if they are going to apprehend him. The man tries to resist by wrestling with one of the gunmen, before he is shot once with an assault rifle and then a second time by another person with a pistol.
A man in a dark jumpsuit with “Internal Security Forces” written on it appears to be guiding the men in camouflage into the hospital.
Another security camera shows a tank stationed outside the facility.
Activist media groups say the gunmen were from the Syrian military and security forces.
A Syrian government official said they could not immediately identify the attackers in the video, and are investigating the incident to try to figure out if they are government-affiliated personnel or gunmen from tribal groups.
He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not immediately cleared to speak to the media on the matter.
The government has set up a committee tasked with investigating attacks on civilians during the sectarian violence in the country’s south, which is supposed to issue a report within three months.
The incident at the Sweida National Hospital further exacerbates tensions between the Druze minority community and the Syrian government, after clashes in July between Druze and armed Bedouin groups sparked targeted sectarian attacks against them.
The violence has worsened ties between them and Syria’s Islamist-led interim government under President Ahmad Al-Sharaa, who hopes to assert full government control and disarm Druze factions.
Though the fighting has largely calmed down, government forces have surrounded the southern city and the Druze have said that little aid is going into the battered city, calling it a siege.
The Syrian Arab Red Crescent, which has organized aid convoys into Sweida, said in a statement on Saturday that one of those convoys that was carrying aid in the day before “came under direct fire,” and some of its vehicles were damaged. It did not specify which group attacked the convoy.
On Sunday, the UN Security Council adopted a statement expressing “deep concern” at the violence in southern Syria and condemning violence against civilians in Sweida. It called for the government to “ensure credible, swift, transparent, impartial, and comprehensive investigations.”
The statement also reiterated “obligations under international humanitarian law to respect and protect all medical personnel and humanitarian personnel exclusively engaged in medical duties, their means of transportation and equipment, as well as hospitals and medical facilities.”
It expressed concern about “foreign terrorist fighters” in Syria, while calling on “all states to refrain from any action or interference that may further destabilize the country,” an apparent message to Israel, which intervened in last month’s conflict on the side of the Druze, launching airstrikes on Syrian government forces.
Malnutrition in El-Fasher kills 63 in a week
- Since May last year, El-Fasher has been under siege by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, which have been at war with Sudan’s regular army since April 2023
PORT SUDAN: Malnutrition has claimed the lives of at least 63 people, mostly women and children, in just one week in Sudan’s besieged city of El-Fasher, a health official said on Sunday.
The official said the figure only included those who managed to reach hospitals, adding that many families buried their dead without seeking medical help due to poor security conditions and a lack of transportation.
Since May last year, El-Fasher has been under siege by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, which have been at war with Sudan’s regular army since April 2023.
The city remains the last major Darfur urban center in army control and has recently come under renewed attack by the RSF after the group withdrew from Sudan’s capital, Khartoum, earlier this year.
BACKGROUND
The city remains the last major Darfur urban center in army control and has recently come under renewed attack by the Rapid Support Forces.
A major RSF offensive on the nearby Zamzam displacement camp in April forced tens of thousands of people to flee again — many of them now sheltering inside El-Fasher.
Community kitchens — once a lifeline — have largely shut down due to a lack of supplies.
Some families are reportedly surviving on animal fodder or food waste.
Nearly 40 percent of children under five in El-Fasher are now acutely malnourished, with 11 percent suffering from severe acute malnutrition, according to UN figures.
The rainy season, which peaks in August, is further complicating efforts to reach the city.
Roads are rapidly deteriorating, making aid deliveries difficult if not impossible.
The war, now in its third year, has killed tens of thousands, displaced millions, and created what the United Nations describes as the world’s largest displacement and hunger crises.
Rapid Support Forces killed 18 civilians in an attack on two villages west of Khartoum earlier this week, a monitoring group said on Saturday.
The attack occurred on Thursday in North Kordofan state, which is key to the RSF’s fuel smuggling route from Libya.
The area has been a major battleground between the army and the paramilitaries for months, and communications lines with the rest of the world have been mostly cut off.
According to the Emergency Lawyers human rights group, which has documented abuses since the start of the war two years ago, the attack on the two villages in North Kordofan “killed 18 civilians and wounded dozens.”
The wounded were transferred to the state capital of El-Obeid for treatment.
Tolls are nearly impossible to independently verify in Sudan, as many medical facilities have been forced out of service and there is limited media access.
How conflicts across the Middle East and North Africa are brutalizing a generation
- More than 12 million children in the MENA region have been killed, injured, or displaced by conflict in just two years
- UNICEF warns that children are suffering unprecedented harm due to prolonged wars and political instability
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 NUMBERS
• 12 million Children maimed, killed, or displaced by MENA conflicts in the past two years.
• 1/2 Proportion of the region’s 220m children who live in conflict-affected countries.
• 45 million Children across the region who will require humanitarian assistance this year.
(Source: UNICEF)
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.
Palestinian school children queue up at a temporary educational centre under the supervision and funding of UNICEF in Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip, on September 19, 2024, amid the ongoing war between Israel and the Palestinian Hamas movement.
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.”
