When we speak about children and their rights, we quickly realize that countless international conventions and laws have been created to protect them in every aspect of life. Yet a pressing question remains: Why do these rules seem to vanish precisely when children’s lives are most at risk?
Consider, for example, the children of the Gaza Strip—children who are subjected to every form of injustice at the hands of the terrorist entity in the region, while no authority holds it accountable.
What about the tens of thousands of children who disappear every year, as though the earth has swallowed them? How do trauma, scenes of horror, and attacks on dignity shape their development and future? I will focus on these points in this article.
I will set aside the legal dimension—its practical absence renders it almost useless and instead turn to the psychosocial perspective. Children everywhere experience small, low-level traumas during upbringing, often resulting from unintentional mistakes by parents, educators, or peers, which may settle in their subconscious as harm.
Families go through periods of tension and anxiety that affect children, especially those who are too young to understand or naturally sensitive. This is especially true when families respond reactively to events, prolonging the trauma instead of processing it and shielding children from its effects.
The family is a protective vessel; when its shell cracks under pressure or trauma, everything inside becomes exposed. Parents may lose part of their role in providing safety and symbolic strength as the foundation of future generations. While many children outgrow these early wounds, others reach adulthood still behaving as though the injured child within them is crying out—subconsciously pulled back to the original trauma whenever something triggers it.
Behavioral patterns passed across generations through upbringing form part of a family’s or community’s culture. Few people make the effort to understand or break these patterns to prevent them from shaping the next generation. Yet suffering can be eased and repetition prevented through psychological support and behavioral therapy. The purpose is not to dwell on the origin of the wound, but to move beyond it, accept it as part of the past, and achieve forgiveness and inner peace—protecting future generations. It is now established that severe traumas can imprint themselves genetically and be transmitted from one generation to the next.
In Gaza, the aggression and terrorism practiced by the usurping entity, especially over the past two years, has turned the area into a mass grave. The scale of destruction and catastrophe, the grief of losing family members, the countless victims, displacement, and deprivation of basic needs is overwhelming. Children are both the primary target and the fuel of this machine.
The traumas Gaza’s children endure cannot be categorized as minor or simple. They are undeniably complex and compounded. The physical, emotional, and psychological violence inflicted upon them has been repeated in numerous forms and with staggering brutality. They have been deprived of the essentials of life: access to food, water, and hospitals. They have lost safe shelter and peaceful sleep, forced to constantly relocate under bombardment—often with advanced or internationally banned weapons that maim, disable, or dismember them.
If places and objects carry symbolic and emotional meaning, what security can a child feel when everything is repeatedly destroyed and they are forcibly displaced?
Even with pauses in the major offensive, the siege continues; massacres and grave violations persist. Children remain in a constant state of alert—never able to rest—living under continuous threat, intimidation, and fear for their own lives and the lives of their loved ones. This robs them of the basic security required for healthy development, worsened by the absence of stable structures or rules. We must not forget the minors who have been arrested, imprisoned, starved, or subjected to psychological and physical torture.
Children in Gaza have been forced to grow up prematurely. Some have effectively become parents to their surviving family members. Others have been thrust into responsibility for younger siblings after the martyrdom of one or both parents. One can only imagine the bitterness of such loss, compounded by the difficulty of managing their circumstances amid the near-total collapse of care institutions and the scattering of remaining family members.
The effects of these traumas may not appear immediately—whether due to lack of awareness or deliberate concealment to protect the family—but they inevitably emerge. They show up as tension and anxiety, manifested through crying, bed-wetting, fear of sleep, and aggressive verbal or physical outbursts. Other symptoms include difficulty concentrating, depression, social withdrawal, or, alternatively, violent and defiant behavior.
To maintain some form of protection and continuity, the nervous system may activate responses such as withdrawal, shutdown, disconnection, or aggression. These traumas lead to immediate or delayed psychological disorders and behavioral deviations, along with relational and emotional difficulties rooted in low self-confidence, low self-esteem, or the inability to cope with stress. The results may fall under categories such as phobias, personality disorders, psychosis, and other clinical classifications depending on the intensity and repetition of trauma.
We must also highlight how the enemy exploits the absence of protective structures and care institutions. At times, it relies on groups within foreign associations or NGOs to smuggle children across borders—children whose fate remains unknown. It is likely they are being used to fuel the organ trade (the occupying entity reportedly possesses the world’s largest human-skin bank), or for slavery and sexual exploitation. There are also allegations of their use in medical experiments.
This type of trafficking carried out by networks linked to the Zionist entity and others is an open secret. They have exploited the chaos in Arab countries and elsewhere to expand such trade and increase profits. The use of children for blackmailing world leaders through sexual exploitation is also well known. The recent Epstein files repeatedly mention many high-profile individuals. For example, U.S. court documents related to a Democratic Party case reference a specific individual more than 1,500 times across 23,000 pages from 2017 to 2019.
Epstein himself allegedly served as an agent for Israeli intelligence, building a blackmail network using underage victims to trap world leaders with incriminating photos and videos, thereby binding them to Israeli interests. Those seeking deep influence over global affairs appear to require this type of individual to preserve their power. This mafia recycles compromised, morally bankrupt figures into positions of global influence—perhaps precisely because their vulnerabilities make them easy to control.
Statistics on missing children across several countries show staggering annual figures:
• United States: 460,000
• United Kingdom: 112,835
• Germany: 100,000
• India: 96,000
• Canada: 45,288
• Russia: 45,000
• South Korea: 25,692
• Italy: 21,951
Numbers in war-torn or unstable countries are likely even higher.
In conclusion, what is being planned by the cabals that rule the world from the shadows is vast and horrifying. Those who attempt to understand, analyze, and raise human awareness are pursued because they pose a threat to those conspiring against humanity.
But silence offers no protection, and cowardice provides no safety. When lethal commands amplified by social pressure and widespread fear turn people into panicked sheep ready to accept any imposed order, the only remaining option is resistance by every possible means. Whoever does not act, resist, and spread awareness becomes, knowingly or unknowingly, an accomplice in the crime of killing people.
Children, the future of humanity, are the primary targets in a conspiracy aimed at reducing the world’s population.
By Dr. Violette Daguerre (French Psychologist, Author, and International Human Rights Activist)
This article was presented at the conference on “Children; Victims of Violence in Wars and Terrorist Incidents” held on the occasion of the World Children’s Day, organized by Habilian Association (Iranian Families of Terrorism Victims).