A few days ago President Mattarella reminded us that the war above all affects the innocent. “The heartbreaking memory of children weighs, who suffer or die in different parts of the world” or “who die for hunger, even when hospitalized by denutrition in hospitals that are means to help them and often destroyed by bombing, as in the inhuman, stubborn condition of Gaza”. It seems that in the third millennium Satan continues to set up his dirty matter and Herod is gradually extending his kingdom. With the difference that the massacre of the innocent of evangelical memory, ordered by the cruel king of Judea in the village of Bethlehem to eliminate the newborn Jesus in an attempt not to lose the throne, involved at most thirty “small martyrs”.
Here we are in the presence of tens of thousands of minors killed in the gaza alone by attacks, bombings, sieges, malnutrition, destruction of schools and hospitals, as retaliation in the Armanda massacre of the 13 Israeli minors (some of whom are burned alive) made by the terrorists of Hamas on October 7, 2023 But there is not only Gaza. In the conclaimed or forgotten wars that continue to infest the earth, the victims are above all the innocent, immune from any fault or responsibility, those for whom Jesus asks to transform us to enter his kingdom. It is the entire planet to be scattered with small crosses. As Andrea Valesini reminds us in his poignant volume “The Ukrainian winter” (beyond editions) Vladimir Putin has been indicted by the International Criminal Court of Aja precisely on charges of “population’s deportation war crime”, in particular minors, by the areas occupied by Moscow’s troops since the beginning of the conflict. There are 19,546 children (from 4 months to 17 years of age) brought by force to the invading country, according to the official portal of the Ukrainian state “Children of War” which collects the complaints.
“They were taken from orphanages, schools and even from the streets,” writes Valesini. “Or separated by mom and dad in the” filtering camps “of the occupied cities, where non -Russian Ukrainians are questioned and stripped of everything”. Even stripped of children, treated as a booty of war. Wherever these small souls are the weak link of conflicts today and yesterday (do you remember Beslan?). The figures collected by the United Nations speak clearly: in only 2024 they have been verified More than 41 thousand serious violations. The most affected places draw a map of pain that crosses whole continents. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo and in Somalia They are enrolled by force by armed groups, transformed into soldiers or victims of violence or rape. The same fate is up to Nigeriawhere kidnapping and their use in internal conflicts have become daily practice. In Syriamore than ten years after the outbreak of the war, schools and hospitals continue to be military goals. In Myanmarthe children remain trapped in villages affected by explosive devices.
The list does not end here: it Yemendevastated by an endless humanitarian crisis, sees entire generations marked by malnutrition. The Sudansunk in the civil war, forces millions of children to escape, while the Burkina Faso and the Mozambique They are crossed by violence that directly affect civil communities. Even the Caribbean are not spared: ad Haiti Minors grow as street dogs under fire armed gangs. According to the data of the Peace Research Institute of Oslo, almost today A minor out of six in the world lives in war zones. An atrocious reality that reminds us that the “massacre of the innocent” does not belong only to the stories of the Gospel, but unfortunately a daily drama is. They should grow in the arms of the parents, flooded with caresses and kisses, and instead they breathe powder from rubble and smell of blood. We should feel responsible for the mere crying of only one of them and instead we remain indifferent in front of an endless massacre.
In the cover photo: the seventeen year old Saddam Abed al Nabe, 17 years old, with his nephew, at the funeral of the Qasm and Rasem brothers, 6 and 11 years old, killed in the refugee camp of Jabaluya, north of Gaza, by an Israeli missile.
