War Destroys the Children's Lives!

    Written By John Perez A Sophomore in Frank McCourt Highschool

   
       When a child is born into a war , he has no choice but to accept what he was given. “Children accept the conditions they are born into, and, to a degree, I was getting used to the bombings, fires, and death around me. I remember that I thought those things were normal. It is grown-ups who worry about things, and this ... this was total panic! I could taste the fear, and I could see that my mother was frightened, which I had never seen before, and this made me even more frightened.”(Alfred Nestor, Uncle Hitler:A Child’s Traumatic Journey Through Nazi Hell to the safety of Britain). This is significant because it show how War can affect a child. The quote explains that a child born into war , will learn to accept it as if it is the normal way of life . The child will grow up with the mentality that it’s okay,and will panic when they see their loved ones fear the outcomes of war.

Ever since the beginning of time , warfare has many effects on adults as well as children. Today , children lose lives as they struggle to survive during the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict which started in the 1940s.

Since the 1940s the Israeli-Palestinian conflict only continues to spread and grow more violent as time passes. The main issue occurring is the fight for the Holy Land of Jerusalem. Israel has a very oppressive military and they continued to take away privately owned land in the West Bank and continued to maintain control over Gaza. Palestinians have a very limited control of their own lives. As many as 10,000 Palestinian men,women and children are kept in Israeli prisons. Very few of these people have a legitimate reason to be there.Abuse and physical torture occur very frequently in these prisons.  Palestinian borders aren’t controlled by Palestinians , but by different Israeli forces. From time to time men, women, and children are forced to be strip searched.Women in labor are prevented from reaching hospitals , which can lead to a baby being delivered in a wrong way causing disorders.Food and medicine are blocked from entering Gaza, that creates a huge problem for food supply and leads to a huge hunger problem and possibly a  “humanitarian crisis”. “Israeli forces invade almost daily, injuring, kidnapping, and sometimes killing  inhabitants.”(Joanna Santa Barbara) The conflict doesn’t seem to have any knowledge of a solution as people continue to lose their lives daily.

(Source: Unicef Canada)

A 12-year-old girl and a boy peer through openings in their damaged home in the Al Bureij refugee camp, central Gaza.

Children are affected in every way that adults are. Children don’t have the chance to grow up , because they were born into a place of warfare. Children need certain things to grow and develop such as empathy and need to be loved and feel loved. The children often suffer from loss of parents and family during war and have no choice but to get everything by themselves. Or there parents are occupied on finding resources to keep the family sustained and can’t be with the child the time that they need.

“Older men declare the war. But it is the youth that must fight and die. And it is the youth who must inherit the tribulation,the sorrow and triumphs that are the aftermath of war.”In times like today , it is the adults , the elders who declare war with one another yet it is the youth that suffer the aftermath. The innocent children often experience major injuries and lost lives during war without reason .  

Also,  children continue to get lifetime injuries during war and are even killed as a result.

Injuries such as the loss of vision , the loss of hearing or even the loss of a body part , which can limit their opportunities in the future. Many kids today lose their life as a result of war also. In today’s Israeli Palestinian Conflict , statistics show that a total of 1,619 kids have lost there life to this conflict in warfare. 129 Israeli children and 1,519 Palestinian children have been victims to this conflict and more and more continue to lose their lives today. “The majority of these Palestinian children were killed and injured while going about normal daily activities, such as going to school, playing, shopping, or simply being in their homes. Sixty-four percent of children killed during the first six months of 2003 died as a result of Israeli air and ground attacks, or from indiscriminate fire from Israeli soldiers.”(Catherine Cook) Children , growing up in poverty isn’t easy and it makes life even harder for them when they walk to school with fear of death because of the warzone there in. With fear of death kids struggle to maintain their ambition and lose determination and can even refuse to live life to it’s fullest anymore.A child has so much to live for , and so much to experience. In the book An Hour of Sunlight: One Palestinians Journey from Prisoner to Peacemaker , Sami Al Jundi is a child witnessing the Israeli Palestinian Conflict and it certainly has a huge affect on his life.

Sami is a child experiencing this “war” and he is certainly dragged into the conflict when problems start to emerge such as discrimination and he signs up for the war.Sami gets beaten up for being an Arab and then the back and forth violence through revenge breaks out and things start to get out of hand.  People start dying and readers start to see and live through the war with the character. The conflict between the Jews and Arabs is only getting worse and something has to be done. There are some possible solutions that can be applied to help stop this problem once and for all.

    As students there are many things that we can do to try and prevent this problem from going on and essentially limit the injuries and deaths of these children at war. One way that students can help is first by spreading awareness. Let our community know that this problem is occurring right now and something has to be done to stop it. Children , innocent kids are dying during war and also as a result of the AfterMath of these wars. Speak up , create flyers that explain why this is a huge problem. The Facebook website that you engage on everyday ,you can post statuses about how we can help and show your friends and associates the effects of this problem and how others are suffering.