The facts. No spin.

Casualty figures in war are contested by design. Parties to a conflict have an interest in the number being lower; critics have an interest in it being higher. That is why humanitarian bodies — UN OCHA, the WHO, UNICEF — publish their methodology alongside their counts, and revise them as identification catches up with the dead.

Three things are true at once: the exact figure is uncertain; the order of magnitude is not; and the uncertainty is not an argument for indifference. A margin of error around thousands of dead children is not a reason to wait for better data before caring.

Whenever you see a figure quoted — here or anywhere — ask three questions: who counted, when, and what counts as a child. If the answer is missing, the number is decoration.

• UN OCHA situation reports
• UNICEF emergencies
• WHO health emergencies

International humanitarian law does not say “try to avoid civilians if convenient.” It sets out duties that bind every party, at all times, regardless of what the other side does:

Distinction. You must at all times distinguish between combatants and civilians, and between military objectives and civilian objects. Attacks that are not directed at a specific military objective are indiscriminate, and indiscriminate attacks are prohibited.

Proportionality. An attack expected to cause civilian death or injury excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated is prohibited — even if the target itself is legitimate.

Precaution. Constant care must be taken to spare the civilian population. That includes choosing means and methods of attack to minimise civilian harm, and calling an attack off when it becomes apparent the harm would be disproportionate.

Special protection for children. The Fourth Geneva Convention and Additional Protocol I give children special respect and protection. The Convention on the Rights of the Child — ratified by almost every state on earth — obliges states to respect the rules of humanitarian law relevant to children and to protect children affected by armed conflict. The UN Security Council has named six grave violations against children in war, among them killing and maiming, attacks on schools and hospitals, and denial of humanitarian access.

None of this is exotic or new. It is the minimum that states themselves wrote down, signed, and told their own soldiers to obey.

• ICRC — treaties and commentaries
• ICRC — customary IHL database
• OHCHR — Convention on the Rights of the Child
• UN — six grave violations against children

Using civilians to shield a military objective is itself a war crime. Anyone who does it bears full responsibility for it. That is not in dispute here.

But the law is explicit about what follows. A violation by one party does not release the other party from its own obligations. The presence of civilians — voluntary or forced — does not turn a protected person into a legitimate target, and it does not switch off distinction, proportionality or precaution. The attacking party still has to weigh the expected civilian harm, and still has to refrain when that harm would be excessive.

Strip away the vocabulary and the everyday version is simple. If a man holds a child in front of him, and you fire anyway, you have made a decision about that child. Calling it his fault does not undo your decision. Both can be guilty. That is not moral relativism — it is the opposite. It is the refusal to let one crime licence another.

Notice also what the argument does to the person using it. It moves a dead child from the column marked “what we did” to the column marked “what they made us do.” It is an accounting trick performed on a corpse.

• ICRC — Rule 97, human shields
• ICRC — Rule 14, proportionality in attack

Medical and humanitarian organizations working in conflict zones publish first-hand testimony continuously — from surgeons, midwives, nurses and logisticians who are standing in it. Their statements are the least abstract evidence available anywhere.

Go to the primary sources and read them yourself:

• Médecins Sans Frontières / Doctors Without Borders
• Save the Children — news and statements
• UNRWA newsroom
• ICRC field reporting
• UNICEF press releases
• Palestine Children’s Relief Fund

The pattern repeats with almost bureaucratic reliability: warnings arrive early, the language of complexity is deployed, decisions are deferred, and the apology comes after the funerals.

Rwanda, 1994. Roughly 800,000 people were killed in about a hundred days. The UN force on the ground was reduced rather than reinforced as the killing began. Governments avoided the word “genocide” in part because using it would have obliged them to act.

Srebrenica, July 1995. More than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys were murdered in a town that had been formally declared a United Nations “safe area.” International courts later ruled it genocide.

The Holocaust. Approximately 1.5 million children were murdered. “We did not know” was the defence of a continent that had, in fact, been told.

This is not an argument that every conflict is the same. It is an argument about us — about how reliably ordinary people, in comfortable countries, wait until the history books make it safe to have an opinion. The apology always arrives. It is never useful to the children.

• UN — Rwanda genocide background
• ICTY — Srebrenica
• United States Holocaust Memorial Museum encyclopedia