The Palestinian Center for the Missing and Enforced Disappeared executed a large-scale correspondence campaign targeting Members of the European Parliament and international human rights organizations on the occasion of International Missing Children’s Day, which falls on the twenty-fifth of May each year, to brief them on the issue of missing children in the Gaza Strip and to attach detailed documents explaining their numbers and the circumstances in which they disappeared.
The Center explained in its statement today that this campaign aims to raise awareness of this issue, which is clearly present on the ground yet absent from international platforms, and to demand that international parties and parliamentarians raise the file in European Parliament sessions and pressure the Israeli authorities to reveal the fate of the hidden children in their prisons and detention centers.
The Center pointed to the ongoing tragedy of about 2,900 children in the Gaza Strip who are now missing or forcibly disappeared. It warned that estimates indicate that there are about 2,700 children under the rubble of destroyed buildings after it became impossible to retrieve them due to the acute shortage of equipment, the prevention of fuel entry, the targeting of rescue teams, and their presence in places where Israeli forces are stationed, out of about eight thousand completely missing persons in the Strip, at a time when statistics recorded the killing of 21,510 children during the months of the ongoing aggression.
The human rights Center indicated that out of the general total, contact was lost with about 200 children in separate areas of the Strip, amid fears and indicators of their exposure to enforced disappearance by the Israeli army or direct targeting that led to the loss of their bodies on the roads.
The Center’s researchers explained that the documentation of cases showed children being taken by Israeli army forces, followed by enforced disappearance operations without disclosing their fate or places of detention, especially in the vicinity of aid distribution centers and areas under Israeli military control. According to the statement, the documentation indicates that a large percentage of the missing children had headed to humanitarian aid distribution points or attempted to obtain flour from areas classified as high risk during the intensification of hunger levels, while others were lost while collecting firewood or during their return to their destroyed homes to inspect them and extract belongings from them, which reflects the scale of daily risks they face in an environment lacking the minimum components of safety.
The Center stressed that the remaining of the bodies of thousands of children under the ruins constitutes a compound violation of human dignity and doubles the psychological suffering of their families who live in a continuous state of anxiety and uncertainty between despair and hope. It emphasized that the failure to take serious international measures to retrieve the bodies and determine the fate of the missing perpetuates the policy of impunity and deepens the humanitarian wound.
The Palestinian Center for the Missing and Enforced Disappeared demanded in its correspondence campaign urgent and effective international actions to stop this tragedy, including that European Parliament members activate their tools and raise the issue of missing and disappeared children in Gaza within the plenary sessions, as well as addressing written and oral parliamentary questions to the European Commission to ensure that the Union moves as a pressuring and accountability force.
The Center also demanded pressure through binding legal mechanisms to force the Israeli authorities to immediately disclose the names and fate of the children detained by them, the health conditions they are going through, and to allow the International Committee of the Red Cross to visit them immediately, in parallel with immediate international intervention to ensure the entry of heavy equipment and fuel necessary to enable civil defense crews to retrieve children trapped under the rubble as an inherent human right that guarantees the dignity of the victims and the right of their families to know their fate.
The Center concluded its statement by emphasizing that the protection of children in times of armed conflict is a legal and moral obligation imposed by the rules of international humanitarian law and the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and that their continuous targeting or exposing them to the risk of death, loss, and enforced disappearance represents a crime that does not lapse by prescription.
