A teachers' conference held at Liberty Hall in Dublin has heard that children in Gaza have been traumatised by the onslaught of war for the last 15 months and have had their childhoods taken away.
Four hundred delegates from the Irish National Teachers’ Organisation were told that while a ceasefire is an important first step to ending the conflict, children’s lives could only start to rebuild with the help of education.
Francesca Albenese, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, who addressed the conference live online said: "I would have never imagined to have to go through this degeneration, this depravity that has dominated the past 15 months, where international law is among the victims.
"Thousands and thousands of innocents have been either killed, injured or traumatised."
She said that as a state party to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which Israel ratified in 1991, it is obliged to guard and promote the best interests of every child in its jurisdiction, no matter their nationality.
Ms Albenese said many Israeli children had also suffered as a result of the ongoing conflict, including young children who were amongst those taken hostage on 7 October 2023.
She said: "We need to remember that Palestinian children constitute half of the population under Israeli occupation, an occupation that International Court of Justice last year, in July 2024 has declared unlawful."
President of the INTO Carmel Browne, who chaired the conference, said there was an urgent need for collective action to safeguard the rights of children in Gaza.
"We welcome the adoption of the ceasefire as a first step towards ending this horrific conflict," she said.
"A lasting peace is the only way this conflict will ever truly be resolved," she added.
Ms Brown said: "Schools, which should be sanctuaries of safety and learning, have instead been sites of destruction and despair in Gaza.
"This is not only a humanitarian tragedy but also a direct assault on the future of Palestine."
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Ms Albenese ended her address by saying that she was shocked to read that the Government has endorsed a non-legally binding working definition of anti-Semitism, which is closely associated with the definition set out by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA).
She said this definition had been used to conflate criticism of the state of Israel with antisemitism and as such had been "used as a tool to silence debate and to stifle discussions like this one".
She called on those in the education system in Ireland to fully inform themselves about this change and to bring the issue up with politicians.
Ms Browne afterwards agreed that there needed to be more debate and discussion on this issue.
The Palestinian Ambassador to Ireland, who also attended the conference, said now that a ceasefire had been agreed, the children of Gaza needed support "mentally, physically, psychologically, just to lift them away from this bombardment".
Jilan Wahba Abdalmajid said over the past 467 days initiatives had continued to try to help children with their education even though the schools in Gaza had now been closed and destroyed.
She said education had always been a part of Palestinian life and it was not too early to start talking about this.
It was the main concern of many parents after getting food and water for their children, she added.
Mary Lawlor, UN Special Rapporteur for Human Rights Defenders, told the conference whilst the latest ceasefire deal was welcome, "it is too little, it's too late and its very much too late for all of the people being killed and injured and maimed and buried under the rubble".
She said the health and education systems in Gaza had been completely destroyed but it remained important to have hope.
She said there was a long history of ceasefires failing in Gaza and the lives of children in Gaza had been turned upside down.
"Not only have they not been able to go to school, they've seen their families, their mothers, fathers, brothers, siblings, friends killed," she said.
Ms Lawlor said everyone working in the enclave had now become familiar with the acronym WCNSF: 'wounded child, no surviving family’.
The quicker, she said, the infrastructure of schools could be repaired, the better.
However, the conference heard that everything happening in Gaza now was in tented structures and that any recovery if the ceasefire holds, will take generations.
