On the 5th Anniversary of the blockade, MAP launched an in-depth report in partnership with Save the Children on the impact of the on-going blockade on the lives and health of Gaza's children. 

There is prolonged poverty and food insecurity in a community torn by political disputes and with health services struggling to recover from conflict. The environment is heavily polluted and people are being squeezed into an ever-shrinking and increasingly unhealthy space with no clean water. 

The impact on children is alarming: 

Stunting, or long-term exposure to chronic malnutrition, remains high, found among 10% of children under five.Anaemia, usually caused by dietary iron deficiency, affects most children in Gaza.Sanitation-related diseases with serious implications for child mortality, such as typhoid fever and water diarrhoea, in children under three years have increased at clinics serving refugees in the Gaza Strip. 

The report calls on Israel to lift the blockade as a matter of urgency. 

This brief account is taken from MAP's Witness of Autumn 2012. 

MAP – Medical Aid for Palestinians: E-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.  

This article was first published in the 'Campaigns' section of TAC Interconnections News Service in 2012.

Visit: http://www.map-uk.org/

'It manifests itself as abscesses, in massive tumours, in gangrene, internal bleeding and child mastectomies and shrunken heads and deformities and thousands of tiny graves.' * (p 895)

Comment by Peter Limbrick: I make no apology for harking back to the Gulf War of 1991 and our (USA and UK) invasion of Iraq in 2003 or for quoting again from Robert Fisk's exemplary chronicles of them. Fisk has long first-hand experience of the Middle East and an unwavering commitment to reporting what governments get up to in my name and yours. It is essential to learn how past conflicts have treated children because the next one is always just around the corner and perhaps some work could be done to protect children from war's ravages and obscenities.

This piece is about depleted uranium (DU) munitions and their devastating impact on that generation of children and on generations to come. DU shells, delivered by aircraft or tanks, are made from nuclear industry waste products, are tougher than tungsten and ignite into an aerosol uranium spray after piercing a tank or personnel carrier's armour. I can easily imagine some arms industry inventor feeling proud of such a clever weapon – and one that turns waste to good use as well!

Fisk develops the argument that DU weaponry has brought in its wake a cancer epidemic in Iraq:

'... increasingly, we found that those most at risk came from areas where allied aircraft – and in the far south, tanks – had used large quantities of DU munitions.' (p 896)

'Dr Ismael blamed...the 1991 war for turning his paediatric ward into way-station for dying children, for the infants who – given their first medicines – bleed to death in front of the doctors. "In three years, I have seen hundreds of children with leukaemia and last year there was a dramatic increase" Dr Ismael said. "This month we diagnosed twenty new cases, mostly from the south – from Basra, Nasiriyah, Kerbala and Najaf. It's mainly caused by radiation.' (pp 897-898)

'There was a military base near our home in Baghdad," she (Hassiba) says. "It was bombed heavily by the Americans....We felt ill with the choking smoke at the time. I already had a healthy child, born before the war. But when I became pregnant after the war, I had a miscarriage. Then I had Youssef, who has leukaemia, then another miscarriage.' (p 899)

The following extract comes from a letter from a US lieutenant colonel at the Los Alamos National Laboratory dated 21/3/91 to a Major Larson at the organisation's 'Studies and Analysis Branch':

'There has been and continues to be a concern regarding the impact of DU on the environment. Therefore, if no one makes a case for the effectiveness of DU on the battlefield, DU rounds may become politically unacceptable and thus be deleted from the arsenal. If DU penetrators proved their worth during our recent combat activities, then we should assure their future existence (until something better is developed) through Service/DOD (Department of Defence) proponency. If proponency is not garnered, it is possible that we stand to lose a valuable combat capability.' (p 906)

Fisk bites:

'So there it is...the message is simple: the health risks of DU ammunition are acceptable until we – the West – invent something even more lethal to take its place.' (p 906)

That 'something even more lethal' is already on the shelf waiting to be used. Believe me. The arms industry and the politicians that promote it and directly or indirectly profit from it are waiting for the next conflict so they can try it out. I subscribe to the argument that the citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed, fried, burned and evaporated in just such a 'product test'. It worked – both by validating the new technology and scaring the Russians.

I do not have a crystal ball to predict the next 'theatre' (Pakistan, Iran and Sub-Saharan Africa come to mind) but I do know that one of the group of 'actors' will be eager arms dealers anxious to show their wares. The number of people their new 'smart' weaponry can kill will be a factor in the sales pitch. 'Collateral damage' (i.e. the murder of innocent men, women and children) will not be considered and environmental damage will be thought too insignificant to be mentioned.

Wars mean money and the dead or damaged bodies of children mean nothing.

________________________________________

All quotes in this Comment are from Robert Fisk's The Great war for civilisation: the conquest of the Middle East, published by Harper Perennial in 2006. I recommend this book to readers so they will get a fuller account than I have been able to give here.

Some relevant websites:

http://www.warchild.org.uk  

http://childrensrightsportal.org/children-in-war/?gclid=CKrmu-Wp9LECFQ0htAodj3IAJQ

http://www.unicef.org/sowc96/1cinwar.htm

http://www.civicworldwide.org/

This article was first published in the 'Comments' section of TAC Interconnections News Service in August 2012.

This is about the incongruities and hypocrisies of the UK government's attitude to the killing, disabling and orphaning of children.

Half a million dead children – a price worth paying:

Since May 27th this year we have repeated reports of 'massacres of the innocents' referring to the brutal murder of children in Syria (as in the Independent Newspaper of that date). These alarming and believable accounts are bolstered by indignant protestations from UK and US politicians in whose mouths butter would not melt.

I am surely going to add my (small) voice to any campaign to end the killing, wounding and maiming of babies, children and teenagers in 'just' or 'unjust' struggles and disputes between adults (usually men), but there is a vicious hypocrisy here. This stance of wanting to defend and protect innocent children (and which ones are guilty?) is just a cynical political ploy used to massage the public towards current foreign policy – to generate popular condemnation of whoever is the anti-West 'baddy' of the moment.

When there are reports that government forces in Syria have killed and maimed children (and their families) our politicians cry 'foul' and strut about in an important outrage as though their hands were not equally bloodied. When it is us in the West killing and disabling children and creating orphans in other countries, we disguise it as 'collateral damage' or 'a price worth paying' and we do not even bother ourselves with counting the bodies or listing how many thousands of children we have disabled.

Yes, we do have the blood of children on our hands. We also massacre multitudes of innocents when it suits us and will surely do so again. When UN sanctions against Iraq were in place from the 1990s, after we had crippled their power stations and bombed water and sewage facilities, while we were cruelly keeping hospitals deprived of equipment and medicines, hundreds of thousands of children died – the world's children – just like yours and mine. The three following quotes are from Robert Fisk*:

1. A Harvard team of lawyers and public health specialists, after visiting forty-six Iraqi hospitals and twenty-eight water and sewage facilities, stated in 1991 that deaths among children under five in Iraq had nearly quintupled, that almost a million were undernourished, and 100,000 were starving to death. Their research found that 46,700 children under five had died from the combined effects or war and trade sanctions in the first seven months of 1991. (p. 864-865)
2. By 1996, half a million Iraqi children were estimated to have died as a result of sanctions. (p. 865)
3. In May 1996...Madeleine Albright (then US Ambassador to the UN) had told us that sanctions worked and prevented Saddam from rebuilding weapons of mass destruction. Our then Tory government agreed, and Tony Blair toed the line. But when asked by an interviewer if the 'price' – the death of half a million children – was worth it, she had replied to the world's astonishment: 'I think this is a very hard choice, but the price, we think the price is worth it.' (p. 1113).

It is profoundly sad that the lives and wellbeing of children count for nothing when politicians (mostly parents themselves) embark on aggressive foreign policy – in the case of Iraq to topple the regime and secure oil. Our politicians, who would surely like to convince us they care about 'our' disabled children, are happy to turn a blind eye to what they are doing to children 'over there' – who, presumably they consider to be less important than our own, and entirely expendable in a 'good' cause.

*The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East by Robert Fisk. Published by Harper Perennial as a revised edition in 2006.

Your comments are welcome.

This article was first published in the Comments section of TAC Interconnections News Service in June 2012.