LONDON: For the past two years, humanitarian aid groups and UN aid agencies have warned repeatedly about the increasingly terrible price being paid by children in the conflicts across the Middle East and North Africa.
It is a refrain which, against the backdrop of the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, has all but faded into the general cacophony of horror that in 2025 has become the soundtrack to life for so many in the region.
So when Edouard Beigbeder, MENA region director at UNICEF, the UN children’s fund, announced that more than 12 million children had been maimed, killed, or displaced by conflict in the region over the past two years, this gargantuan figure caused barely a ripple.
“A child’s life is being turned upside down the equivalent of every five seconds due to the conflicts in the region,” Beigbeder said.
“Half of the region’s 220 million children live in conflict-affected countries. We cannot allow this number to rise. Ending hostilities — for the sake of children — is not optional; it is an urgent necessity, a moral obligation, and it is the only path to a better future.”
