Nearly one in five of the world’s children live in areas affected by conflicts, with more than 473 million children suffering from the worst levels of violence since the second world war, according to figures published by the UN.
The UN humanitarian aid organisation for children, Unicef, said on Saturday that the percentage of children living in conflict zones around the world has doubled from about 10% in the 1990s to almost 19%, and warned that this dramatic increase in harm to children should not become the “new normal”.
With more conflicts being waged around the world than at any time since 1945, Unicef said that children were increasingly falling victim. Citing its latest available data, from 2023, the UN verified a record 32,990 grave violations against 22,557 children, the highest figures since the security council mandated monitoring of the impact of war on the world’s children nearly 20 years ago.
The death toll after nearly 15 months of Israel’s war in Gaza is estimated at more than 45,000 and out of the cases it has verified, the UN said 44% were children.
In Ukraine, the UN said it had verified more child casualties during the first nine months of 2024 than during all of 2023, and predicted there would be a further increase in 2025.
“By almost every measure, 2024 has been one of the worst years on record for children in conflict in Unicef’s history – both in terms of the number of children affected and the level of impact on their lives,” Unicef’s executive director, Catherine Russell, said.
“A child growing up in a conflict zone is far more likely to be out of school, malnourished, or forced from their home – too often repeatedly – compared with a child living in places of peace,” Russell added. “This must not be the new normal. We cannot allow a generation of children to become collateral damage to the world’s unchecked wars.”
Unicef drew attention in particular to the plight of women and girls, amid widespread reports of rape and sexual violence in conflicts. It said that in Haiti there had been a 1,000% increase in the number of reported incidents of sexual violence against children over the course of 2024 alone.
Unicef also pointed out that children were especially affected by malnutrition in times of war, a particularly lethal threat in Sudan and Gaza. More than half a million people in five conflict-affected countries are in famine.
Conflict also seriously affects children’s access to healthcare and education. Forty per cent of unvaccinated or undervaccinated children live in countries wholly or partly affected by conflict, making them far more vulnerable to outbreaks of diseases such as measles and polio. Polio was detected in Gaza in July, the first time the virus had appeared there for a quarter of a century. A UN-led vaccination campaign, enabled by a series of temporary and partial ceasefires, managed to reach more than 90% of the child population.
Unicef reported that more than 52 million children in conflict-affected countries were deprived of education, saying most children across the Gaza Strip, and a significant proportion of children in Sudan, had missed out on more than a year of school. In other countries in conflict, including Ukraine, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Syria, schools had been damaged, destroyed or repurposed, leaving millions of children without access to learning.
“The impact on children’s mental health is also huge,” Unicef said. A study backed by the charity War Child earlier this month reported that 96% of children in Gaza felt that their death was imminent and almost half wanted to die as a result of the trauma they had been through.
“Children in war zones face a daily struggle for survival that deprives them of a childhood,” Russell said. “Their schools are bombed, homes destroyed, and families torn apart. They lose not only their safety and access to basic life-sustaining necessities, but also their chance to play, to learn, and to simply be children. The world is failing these children. As we look towards 2025, we must do more to turn the tide and save and improve the lives of children.”
