FACT:
In the last ten years alone, two million children have been killed in wars around the world.

UNITED NATIONS

FACT:
At the beginning of the century, 10% of civilians were casualties of war. In today’s wars, 90% of the casualties are civilians.

UNITED NATIONS

FACT:
At the end of the 20th century, the deliberate targeting and killing of children has become a crime against humanity.

UNITED NATIONS

ISRAEL AND PALESTINE
Since the signing of the Oslo Peace Accord in 1993, the terrorist group Hamas has made suicide bomb attacks on Israeli civilians often targeting buses and busy shopping districts.

In 1994 Israeli settler Baruch Goldstein killed 29 Muslims while at prayer in the Abraham Mosque. One hundred children were present during the massacre and seven children were killed. The settlers erected a memorial shrine to Goldstein which was destroyed in 1999 by the Israeli government that bans monuments to perpetrators of terrorism.

On March 29th, 2002, during the second Intifada (uprising), a sixteen year old female Palestinian suicide bomber killed herself and two others at a crowded Israeli street corner, including a 17 year old Israeli girl. Both girls were high school seniors.

Israeli Government Council for Communication

RWANDA
The war in Rwanda is the first genocide officially recognized by the United Nations since the end of World War II. In just three months, 800,000 Tutsi men, women and children were killed. Of the dead, 300,000 were children.

UNICEF

For the first time in modern history, children as young as eight years old have been accused of participating in the genocide. As many as 350 boys accused of genocide have been placed in a juvenile facility and will remain there indefinitely.

Rwandan Government

After the Tutsi led RPF declared victory, more than 1 million Hutus fled the country. Approximately 114,000 children were lost or separated from their families in this panicked migration. In one of the largest tracing efforts in modern history, humanitarian groups joined together to reunite approximately 33,000 lost children of Rwanda.

UNICEF

BOSNIA
An estimated 15,000 children died in this three-year-long civil war.

UNICEF

An estimated 200,000 people were killed during the war which also produced 3 million refugees who were forcibly expelled from their homes by Serbian and Croatian ethnic cleansing.

UNHCR

After the Dayton Peace Accord, fewer than 10 percent of refugees were able to return home. The majority of refugees were displaced throughout the former Yugoslavia and the world.

UNHCR

NORTHERN IRELAND
On April 10, 1998, 70 percent of the people of Northern Ireland voted for the landmark Good Friday Peace accord.

British Government

Three months after the Peace Accord was signed, in July 1998, the British government again banned the Protestant Drumcree Parade because of its routing through Catholic neighborhoods. In response, Protestant paramilitaries fire bombed 10 Catholic churches and the home of a religiously mixed family, killing three young boys, aged eight, nine and eleven, as they slept in their beds.

Royal Ulster Constabulary

After 19 months of agonizing struggle, in December 1999 Protestant and Catholic politicians finally agreed to a power-sharing government. The implementation of the Peace Accord once again holds the promise of an end to violence in Northern Ireland.