IPR Policy Brief - Protecting Palestinian children from political violence

Violence has shaped the setting in which successive generations of children living in the occupied territories of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, have grown up. Although numerous UN and international non-governmental agencies have worked for many years with the aim of protecting children from this violence and realising their basic human rights, the limits of their capacity to achieve this aim have been all too apparent.Research conducted by Dr Jason Hart (University of Bath) and Claudia Lo Forte (Independent Researcher), has explored and identified the reasons for the failures of these organisations. They argue that international agencies and their donors have been constrained in their ability to properly protect Palestinian children because of serious flaws in their understanding of and willingness to address the political situation in the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt).As a result of the tendency to deal with the effects rather than the causes of the suffering of children, efforts remain technocratic and ameliorative (aimed at increasing the capacity of Palestinian families to cope better and longer with Israeli violations), rather than principled and preventative. The research recommends that international agencies and their donors engage in, and are judged against, a concerted and multi-level solution rooted in the realisation of human rights and child protection principles