Over 200 children killed in Lebanon in past two months, UNICEF says

PHOTO CAPTION: A displaced child reacts to a camera outside his makeshift shelter at a roadside, amid the ongoing hostilities between Hezbollah and Israeli forces, in Beirut, Lebanon November 8, 2024. REUTERS/Adnan Abidi

GENEVA (Reuters) -More than 200 children have been killed and 1,100 injured in Lebanon in the past two months, the U.N. children's agency (UNICEF) said on Tuesday.

The more than year-old conflict in Lebanon spiralled into all-out war in late September when Israel launched a major offensive against Iran-backed Hezbollah.

"Despite more than 200 children killed in Lebanon in less than two months, a disconcerting pattern has emerged: their deaths are met with inertia from those able to stop this violence," UNICEF spokesperson James Elder told a Geneva press briefing. "For the children of Lebanon, it has become a silent normalisation of horror."

He declined to comment on who was responsible for the killings, saying that it was clear to anyone who follows the media.

Elder said there were "chilling similarities" between the conflicts in Lebanon and in Gaza, where a significant portion of the more than 43,000 people killed in the 13-month-old war between Israel and Hamas are reported to be children.

UNICEF is providing psychosocial support to children and providing medical supplies, meals and sleeping kits to the hundreds of thousands of children who have fled the fighting.

"In Lebanon, much the same as has become the case in Gaza, the intolerable is quietly transforming into the acceptable," he added.

(Reporting by Emma Farge; editing by Matthias Williams, William Maclean)