There is no better place to begin this article than with the words of Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s National Security Minister. During a security cabinet meeting in early June, he called for the abduction of Lebanese women and children as a means to pressure Hezbollah. “Let’s start thinking outside the box about Hezbollah,” he said, urging officials to adopt more aggressive measures, including “abducting their women and children” because, in his assessment, that is “what hurts them the most.”

Imagine the moral decay required to propose the kidnapping of children as a legitimate military tactic. This is not a fringe figure speaking from the margins—this is a senior minister in the Israeli government.

Imagine the moral decay required to propose the kidnapping of children as a legitimate military tactic. This is not a fringe figure speaking from the margins—this is a senior minister in the Israeli government.

His words were met with no meaningful international outrage, no emergency session of the UN Security Council, no sanctions, and no indictment. Thus, as the Arabic proverb holds, silence is an implicit approval of one’s actions.

Where is the international community? Where are the human rights organizations that exist precisely to condemn such hideous rhetoric? The silence is deafening. And that silence is not passive—it is active complicity in the normalization of child-targeting as an instrument of war.

READ: Palestinian infant killed, parents wounded in Israeli fire in occupied West Bank

Lebanon: A generation under fire

The numbers from Lebanon are staggering. Since March 2, 2026, Israeli attacks have killed at least 3,711 people in Lebanon, including 247 children, according to Lebanon’s Health Ministry. Since the April 17 ceasefire—a truce that has proven to be nothing more than words on paper—Israeli forces have killed on average more than one child every single day. At least 70 children have been killed since the ceasefire was declared.

These are not accidents. These are not “collateral damage.” These are the predictable, systematic results of a military campaign that treats civilian infrastructure as........

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