UNICEF said on Tuesday that more than three children on average have been killed in Lebanon every day for the last two months, lamenting that “the intolerable is quietly transforming into the acceptable.”
“Despite more than 200 children killed in Lebanon in less than two months, a disconcerting pattern has emerged: their deaths are met with inertia from those able to stop this violence,” UNICEF spokesperson James Elder said in a press briefing in Geneva.
“For the children of Lebanon, it has become a silent normalization of horror,” Elder lamented, adding that at the same period, “many, many more” have been injured and traumatized daily.
He said, “We must hope humanity never again witnesses the ongoing level of carnage of children in Gaza, though there are chilling similarities for children in Lebanon.”
Listing the “chilling” similarities between Gaza and Lebanon, he said hundreds of children have been made homeless in the country, medical facilities are under attack, all schools are closed, “alarming signs” of emotional turmoil are becoming evident in children, and lastly, “the escalation of children killed is eliciting no meaningful response from those with influence.”
As the attacks intensify, the level of need also intensifies, the spokesperson said, noting that UNICEF’s latest appeal has less than 20% funding.
“In Lebanon, much the same as has become the case in Gaza, the intolerable is quietly transforming into the acceptable. And the appalling is slipping into the realm of the expected,” Elder said.
“And once more, the cries of children go unheard, the world’s silence grows deafening, and again we allow the unimaginable to become the landscape of childhood,” he added, calling it “a horrific and unacceptable new normal.”
Israel has been engaged in cross-border warfare with Lebanon, launching an air campaign against what it claims are targets of the Hezbollah group in late September.
More than 3,500 people have been killed by Israeli attacks in Lebanon, with nearly 15,000 injured and more than a million displaced since last October, according to Lebanese health authorities.
Tel Aviv expanded the conflict by launching a ground assault into southern Lebanon on Oct. 1 this year.