Children in the West Bank pay a “heavy price for violence” and amputees in Gaza are deprived of artificial limbs

UNICEF spokesman James Elder said that children in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, are “paying an unbearable price” from the ongoing violence. Some 70 children have been killed since January 2025 – at least one child per week on average – and another 850 children have been injured, most by live ammunition.

Elder told reporters in Geneva: “All of this comes amid historic levels of settler attacks,” Noting that the month of March 2026 witnessed the highest number of Palestinians injured as a result of settler attacks during the past twenty years.

Citing data from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), Mr. Elder added: “We note that attacks are becoming increasingly more coordinated. Documented incidents include cases in which children were shot, stabbed, beaten, or sprayed with pepper gas.”

The UNICEF spokesman recalled his recent visit to the West Bank, describing his encounter with a child who was beaten with a piece of wood during an attack by settlers, which required his transfer to the hospital to receive treatment for head injuries.

He explained, “The child’s mother’s arms were broken when she extended her hands to protect her child, thereby placing her arms as a barrier between her child and the attacker’s club.”

Education-related attacks

Mr. Elder also highlighted the rise in education-related attacks, which include killing, injuring and detaining students, as well as the demolition of schools. He warned that “Schools – which should be places of safety and stability – are increasingly becoming places of terror.”

A UNICEF spokesman said: “I walked with schoolchildren around the West Bank trying to help them avoid any attacks. It is interesting to watch the way they walk… they do not walk in a straight line, because they are constantly looking behind their backs.”

He said, “The trip to school turned into a journey shrouded in fear.” He reported a “sharp increase” in the arrests and detention of Palestinian children, noting that 347 of them are currently being held in Israeli military detention centers “against accusations of alleged security violations.” This is the highest number recorded in eight years.

And he said: “Worryingly, more than half of these children – 180 children – are detained under the administrative detention system and without the necessary procedural guarantees, including denial of regular access to a lawyer, and denial of the right to appeal the detention decision.”

In Gaza, Mr. Elder said that the United Nations has documented the killing of at least 229 children and the injury of 260 others since the ceasefire in October 2025.

Life-changing injuries

For her part, Dr. Reinhild van de Weerdt, representative of the World Health Organization in the occupied Palestinian territory, said that 10,000 children in Gaza are living with injuries that will permanently change the course of their lives.

Overall, it is estimated that about 43,000 people – out of 172,000 people injured in Gaza since October 2023 – have suffered severe injuries of this type, affecting their limbs, spinal cord or brain. Nearly 2,500 people have been injured since the ceasefire in October 2025.

Dr. van de Weerdt said: “Of the 2,277 people who underwent amputation, less than 25 percent were fitted with permanent prostheses.” She attributed this to the severe shortage of prosthetic limbs within the Gaza Strip.

Speaking from Jerusalem to reporters in Geneva, the WHO representative explained that at least 18 shipments of rehabilitation-related supplies – such as wheelchairs or prosthetic limbs – are still awaiting entry permits into Gaza, with waiting periods for obtaining these permits ranging from 130 days to more than a year.

In total, more than 50,000 people with conflict-related injuries require long-term rehabilitation programmes; While there are currently no rehabilitation facilities operating within the sector. Dr. van de Weerdt said: “Every day that passes as rehabilitation services in Gaza lack resources is a day in which avoidable disabilities turn into permanent disabilities.”