We continue to watch and listen as the “innocence” of  children is used to justify violence, bloodlust and revenge; even while they are simultaneously centered in calls for peace.  This paradox illustrates that childhood and youth are always political and politicized; and convenient tools to justify mass violence, deadly neutrality and anti-democratic exceptionalism.  Today is no different – in Gaza and elsewhere.

Children living under political and structural violence must be politicized– whether in Palestine, New York City, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Puerto Rico, Haiti, South Sudan, Syria or Yemen or anywhere else.  

Their awareness and understanding of their vulnerability and its relationship to broader systems of power opens up new possibilities.  Very often their resistance to state power is  the only protection they truly have.  We stand in sustained solidarity with child and youth organizers, their families, their people and their comrades in resistance to colonial power everywhere.

Specifically, we condemn the murder and oppression of children– those deemed innocent or not.  We condemn the violence of the Israeli siege of Gaza and the violence of October 7.  As a children’s rights fund, we will not engage in apolitical false equivalence in the name of “innocence”. 

Even as we call for safe, unimpeded passage of humanitarian aid, we know it is not enough to provide care to children in these acute times of visible and dehumanizing conflict while ignoring 75 years of day-to-day dehumanizing Israeli occupation. 

We call for an immediate #ceasefire.