Iran’s top human rights official has used the occasion of the World Children’s Day to slam international organizations and governments for their failure to protect children in Gaza where the Israeli regime has killed thousands of children over the past 45 days as part of a relentless military campaign against the territory.
“If they consider the children in Gaza to be part of the world’s children, it would be good for them to respect the right of these oppressed children to have a [normal] childhood, to continue to live and to grow,” said Kazem Gharibabadi in a post in Farsi on the X, formerly known as Twitter, on Monday.
Gharibabadi serves as the secretary general of Iran’s High Council for Human Rights, a subsidiary of the Iranian judiciary. The body has been involved in a campaign of documenting human rights violations and crimes against humanity committed by the Israeli regime during the war in Gaza.
His comments came as the number of children killed since the start of the Israeli aggression on Gaza on October 7 exceeded 5,500 on Monday, according to official figures. That means that one out of every 200 children in Gaza has been killed in Israeli attacks over the past six weeks.
Estimates suggest that nearly half of Gaza’s population of more than 2.3 million people are under 18 years of age.
The plight of children in Gaza has drawn the attention of rights activists and anti-war groups around the world as protests are being held almost on a daily basis in cities in Western countries to press the Israeli regime to stop its massacre of women and children in the blockaded territory.
