Responsibility, not charity

Blog by Sabine Saliba, Eurochild Secretary General, about the urgency of action for Gaza drawing on her own childhood experiences of war to highlight the deep injustice faced by Palestinian children, whose suffering is too often ignored, dehumanised, and dismissed by the world.

When I’m asked to speak about the impact of the genocide in Gaza, I come forward as a human rights and child rights activist, as an Arab woman, and as someone who grew up in war-torn Beirut and has witnessed conflict throughout my life.

While nothing I’ve ever experienced compares to the horrors that children in Gaza are facing today, I do know, if only in a small way, what it means to fall asleep to the sound of gunfire or explosions, what it means to live in constant fear, what it means to grow up too fast.

As a child, I remember watching how children in the West lived. Through the eyes of a child growing up in war and recurring instability, their lives seemed easy, joyful, safe. I wondered what it felt like to be so free, free to play, to dream, to plan for a future. That contrast felt like another form of violence, a reminder of how deeply unjust the world can be.

And now, for Palestinian children, that injustice is compounded by the way their suffering is ignored, or worse, justified. The dehumanisation of Palestinian children, and of the Palestinian and Arab population more broadly, is one of the most chilling aspects of this crisis. Their deaths are not met with the same outrage. Their pain is not given the same space. Their lives are not valued equally.

As children, we look to the world for fairness. We notice how some lives are mourned, while others are dismissed. We learn too early that where you are born can determine whether your life is protected or expendable. This is a lesson no child should ever have to learn.

And today, Gaza’s children are being denied even the most basic right: the right to live.

Since the start of the genocide, Israel has killed over 54,000 Palestinians. According to UNICEF, 50,000 children have been killed or injured. These numbers are staggering, yet we have become too accustomed to them. The scale of loss risks becoming just another headline, just another statistic. But behind every number is a child, a family, a future erased. We must not allow this normalisation of mass death to dull our outrage or weaken our resolve.

Israel’s ongoing attacks and its blockade of Gaza have devastated access to food, water, and medicine. This is not just a humanitarian crisis; this is a war on children, one the international community is witnessing in real time. The International Criminal Court taken steps, including issuing arrest warrants, for Netanyahu among others. And yet, the bombs continue to fall. The aid remains blocked. The children continue to die.

The European Union cannot look away. It cannot continue to speak the language of human rights while standing silent in the face of atrocities. As a key ally of Israel, with deep diplomatic, economic, and political ties, the EU has both a unique responsibility and the power to act. The cost of inaction is unbearable. The moral price is too high.

As someone who still carries the echoes of war in her bones, I ask you: how many more children must die before we say, enough?

We urge you to act, not out of charity, but out of responsibility, and out of humanity. The response must not come in half-measures, but with courage and a full commitment to international law.