Report: Over Past Decade, 170,000 Children Had Rights 'gravely violated'

“The hostilities damaged or caused the closure of critical basic services including schools, and health and water facilities,” said UNICEF. “Many of those displaced, especially children, are also in desperate need of psychological support after witnessing shelling, fighting and explosions in their home communities.”

The first nine months last year were particularly devastating for Afghani children, said UNICEF. Approximately nine children were “killed or maimed” each day.

“Even by Afghanistan’s grim standards, 2019 has been particularly deadly for children,” said Fore.

In February 2019, there were attacks on Ebola treatment centers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in the midst of one of the largest-ever outbreaks of the disease. Ebola, which kills about two out of every three people infected, particularly impacts children as they are at risk of losing their parents or being forced to spend time in isolation due to fear of the virus spreading.

Schools were frequent targets of violence in 2019, said the report. In April, 14 children were killed in a bombing attack in Sana’a, Yemen, while class was in session. About 2 million of Yemen’s children are not even enrolled in a school due to poverty, violence, or other reasons. A quarter of these children left school since the country’s civil war began in 2015. In Cameroon, violence has led to over 800,000 school-aged children being kept out of school. Cameroon’s civil unrest expanded to eight regions of the country last year.

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Over in eastern Ukraine, which is in a sustained conflict with Russia, there were 36 attacks on schools in 2019.

UNICEF also continued to decry the use of children as soldiers. In June, three children were used as “human bombs” in northeast Nigeria in an attack that killed 30 people, the organization noted.