What you are about to read is not an analysis of failure. It is an autopsy of deliberate design.

Three days before celebrating children’s rights (November 20, 2025, marked 36 years since the ratification of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child), the UN Security Council committed an act so obscene it defies comprehension. Resolution 2803 didn’t just fail to stop the slaughter of 20,000 Palestinian children; it blessed it, legitimized it, and guaranteed its continuation forever. By granting Donald Trump control over Gaza’s future through his “Board of Peace,” we witness yet again what we already knew: the destruction of Palestinian children isn’t collateral damage, isn’t fog of war, isn’t humanitarian crisis. It’s policy. It’s strategy. It’s the international system working exactly as intended.

The theoretical frameworks in this article, from Fanon’s “zone of non-being” to Mbembe’s “necropolitics,” from Maldonado-Torres’s “coloniality of being” to Weheliye’s “juridical humanity,” aren’t academic exercises. They’re diagnostic tools that reveal how the machinery works: how a three-year-old Palestinian becomes classified as a “demographic threat” while a three-year-old Ukrainian becomes an “innocent victim.” How the same international law that mobilized instantly to protect 19,000 transferred Ukrainian children remains complacent while over 20,000 Palestinian children are killed. How Arab states perform outrage while enforcing the blockade and collaborating with the perpetrators of this livestreamed genocide. How the UN Security Council transforms from guardian of international peace and security to death administrator.

These theories expose the blueprints of a system where some children are born with rights and others are born as targets. Where the Convention on the Rights of the Child operates as a sorting mechanism: protecting those deemed human while legitimizing the elimination of those expelled from humanity itself. Where international law doesn’t fail to reach Palestinian children but actively constructs their killability, making their deaths appear not just acceptable but necessary, not just legal but moral.

Resolution 2803, passed November 17, 2025, with China and Russia merely abstaining rather than vetoing, represents this system’s most honest moment: the international community formally, legally, openly choosing to make Palestinian children’s death-world permanent. Thirteen nations voted yes. None said no. This article traces how we got here: 77 years of deliberate strategy disguised as unfortunate history, three generations of calculated destruction presented as complex conflict, and now, finally, genocide receiving its official UN seal of approval.

What follows is the operating manual for manufacturing disposable children. Once you see it, you cannot unsee it.

Death-Worlds Made Real Through International Law

While the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child genuinely sought to guarantee every child’s “inherent right to life, survival and development” without discrimination, becoming the most rapidly adopted human rights treaty in history with 196 state parties (United Nations, 1989, Article 6), Resolution 2803 reveals how completely the international community abandons these principles when children have been relegated to what Achille Mbembe (2003, 2019) calls “death-worlds.”

Death-worlds are not metaphorical spaces but concrete realities where sovereign power creates “new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead” (Mbembe, 2003, p. 40). Resolution 2803 doesn’t merely tolerate these conditions; it institutionalizes them. The resolution grants the Zionist entity eternal control through what it calls a “security perimeter presence” that will remain “until Gaza is properly secure from any resurgent terror threat,” with the Zionist entity alone determining when that condition is met (UN Security Council, 2025). This transforms temporary occupation into permanent sovereignty, emergency into eternity.

In these zones, the normal rules of human existence are suspended through law itself. When the resolution authorizes the International Stabilization Force to “use all necessary measures” while granting participants immunity from local jurisdiction, it legally sanctifies what was already happening: hospitals becoming legitimate targets, schools becoming burial grounds, refugee camps that are meant to be safe areas burned down with their inhabitants. Death-worlds are spaces where five-year-olds learn to distinguish the sounds of different weapons, where mothers choose which child to feed with the last food, where doctors amputate children’s limbs without anesthesia while they scream.

Resolution 2803 makes this ecology of death official UN policy. By establishing what UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese calls “a security-first, capital-driven model of foreign control,” (Albanese, 2025) the resolution ensures death saturates every aspect of existence: the water (97% undrinkable), the air (toxic from white phosphorus), the soil (contaminated by destroyed sewage systems). The Board of Peace doesn’t bring peace but administers death, coordinating which Palestinians receive food, which areas get rebuilt, which children might access medical care, all while maintaining the conditions that create the need for such coordination in the first place.

Three Generations in the Zone of Non-Being

The systematic violation of Palestinian children’s rights began with the 1948 Nakba, when 750,000 Palestinians were expelled (Pappé, 2006), creating what is now 5.6 million refugees across three generations (UNRWA, 2024). This isn’t merely displacement; it’s what Nelson Maldonado-Torres (2007)  identified as the naturalization of war: “[it is] transformed—through the idea of race—and becomes naturalized” (p. 248). What should be exceptional (violence, displacement, rightlessness) becomes the permanent condition for colonized populations.

To understand how Resolution 2803 crystallizes this naturalization, we must grasp Maldonado-Torres’s fundamental insight about how colonial systems transform temporary war conditions into permanent racial realities. During war, normal ethical relations are suspended. Killing becomes permissible, rape becomes a weapon, property can be seized, and entire populations can be displaced. These suspensions of ethics are supposedly temporary, limited to active combat between combatants. Once war ends, normal ethical relations should resume: murder becomes illegal again, civilians regain protections, refugees return home.

Resolution 2803 exemplifies this naturalization perfectly. The resolution conditions Zionist entity withdrawal on “standards, milestones, and timeframes linked to demilitarization that will be agreed between the IOF, ISF, the guarantors, and the United States.” Palestinians themselves have no say in when their occupation ends. Their children will grow up under the same “emergency” conditions their grandparents faced in 1948, now formalized through international law rather than military decree.

Consider how this naturalization operates through what scholar Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian (2019) calls “unchilding,” the systematic stripping away of childhood itself. Palestinian children can be detained without trial, tried in military courts while Jewish children in the same territory face civilian courts, shot for throwing stones under military orders that don’t apply to settlers, and denied freedom of movement, all justified not by active warfare but by their racialized identity as perpetual “security threats.”

This “unchilding” means Palestinian children cease to be children in any meaningful legal or ethical sense. The three-year-old at the checkpoint isn’t processed as a child but as a potential combatant. The twelve-year-old in military court isn’t granted the protections due to minors but treated as an adult enemy. The infant requiring medical care isn’t a baby deserving urgent treatment but what Zionist entity officials openly call a “demographic threat.”

Resolution 2803 codifies this unchilding into international law. By establishing a Palestinian committee that must be “technocratic” and “apolitical,” composed only of “competent Palestinians from the Strip,” the resolution denies Palestinians political agency while treating their children as administrative problems to be managed rather than human beings to be protected. The Board of Peace, chaired by the very president who provided $17.9 billion in weapons used to kill these children, will determine their fate without their participation.

The Current Escalation: Necropower Legitimized by Law

The genocide escalating since October 2023 represents what Mbembe calls necropower in its purest form: “the subjugation of life to the power of death” (Pele, 2020, para 4). Over 20,000 Palestinian children have been killed, one every hour for 23 months (Save the Children, 2025). But necropolitics isn’t merely about killing; it’s about creating conditions where the distinction between life and death becomes irrelevant, and Resolution 2803 makes these conditions permanent.

The resolution exemplifies Mbembe’s concept of how sovereignty operates through the “capacity to define who matters and who does not, who is disposable and who is not” (2003, p. 27). When Donald Trump, who called Palestinians “terrorists” and gave Netanyahu Jerusalem, chairs the Board of Peace alongside Tony Blair, who destroyed Iraq, we see necropolitical sovereignty in action. Those who orchestrated death in Baghdad now oversee life in Gaza. Those who armed the killers now manage the survivors.

Resolution 2803’s provisions for reconstruction expose necropolitics’ most obscene dimension: the transformation of Palestinian children’s suffering into corporate profit. The Board of Peace—chaired by Donald Trump, who provided the bombs that killed 20,000 children—will “coordinate funding for the redevelopment of Gaza” and “establish operational entities” with “transactional authorities” (United Nations, 2025). This isn’t reconstruction; it’s the industrialization of death into capital. Private military contractors like UG Solutions, who deployed 96 former US special forces operatives to Gaza’s checkpoints (Haaretz, 2025) turned aid distribution into killing fields. During their operations from May to October 2025, these contractors killed more than 2,600 Palestinians and wounded over 19,000 who came seeking food (Drop Site News, 2025; Greatreporter, 2025). Contractors later testified they fired live ammunition, stun grenades, and pepper spray “at nearly every distribution site, even without security threats,” with personnel recruited from the Infidels Motorcycle Club whose charter calls for Muslim extermination (Euronews, 2025; New Arab, 2025). These same killers now expand their operations, with UG Solutions recruiting for “12 to 15 new aid distribution sites”—more death traps disguised as humanitarian zones (Drop Site News, 2025; The Intercept, 2025). The obscenity reaches its apex in the estimated $70 billion reconstruction bonanza. Turkish firms like Limak, Tekfen, and Enka; Egyptian military-controlled companies, including Arab Contractors and Orascom; American technology corporations—all circle like vultures over children’s graves (Eurasia Review, 2025; Palestinian Information Center, 2025). Erdogan and Sisi, who enforced the blockade while children starved, now position their construction sectors to profit from rebuilding what they helped destroy (The Globe and Mail, 2025; Carnegie Endowment, 2025). The Board of Peace ensures “multinational corporations rebuild what their governments’ weapons destroyed” (The Arab Weekly, 2025), each bombed school a future contract, each dead child a business opportunity. Critics correctly identify Resolution 2803 as “repackaged colonial control” that rewards genocide’s co-perpetrators with reconstruction profits while absolving the Zionist entity of its crimes (Al-Shabaka, 2025). This is Mbembe’s necropower perfected: not merely the right to kill but the machinery that transforms Palestinian children’s blood into quarterly earnings, their amputated limbs into market opportunities, their mass graves into construction sites. Death doesn’t just generate profit—it becomes profit’s raw material, with Palestinian children processed through the machinery of destruction into the commodity of reconstruction.

Juridical Humanity in Action: The Ukraine Comparison

The differential treatment of Ukrainian versus Palestinian children following legally equivalent ICC arrest warrants illuminates how international criminal law operates through what Alexander Weheliye (2014) calls “racializing assemblages,” law “the law pugnaciously adjudicates who is deserving of personhood and who is not” (p. 77).

Both conflicts generated ICC arrest warrants: Putin and Lvova-Belova in March 2023 for transferring Ukrainian children (13 months after invasion), and Netanyahu and Gallant in November 2024 for war crimes including starvation as a method of warfare (14 months after October 2023). The warrants are legally identical, issued by the same court under the same Rome Statute. Yet the international response reveals how law alone doesn’t determine who receives protection.

For Ukrainian children, the ICC warrants catalyzed unprecedented global mobilization. Thirty-nine states formally referred the situation to the ICC, the largest state referral in Court history. The UN General Assembly passed multiple resolutions demanding children’s return. The EU allocated €2 billion for Ukrainian child refugees, UNICEF launched its largest European response since WWII with $1.4 billion, and 23 countries coordinated through Eurojust to secure the return of 388 children by January 2025.

ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan declared: “We cannot allow children to be treated as spoils of war.” The vocabulary was protective: Ukrainian children were “innocent victims,” “traumatized children needing immediate protection.”

For Palestinian children, the same legal finding generated the opposite response. The United States immediately condemned the warrants as “outrageous,” with President Biden declaring “there is no equivalence between the Zionist entity and Hamas.” Congress threatened sanctions against the ICC itself. Germany announced it would not execute the arrests. France questioned Netanyahu’s immunity. The US approved $8 billion in additional weapons sales to the Zionist entity the same month the ICC declared the starvation of Palestinian children a war crime.

Most tellingly, the killing accelerated after the warrants. While Ukrainian children received immediate evacuation and protection, Palestinian children continued to be killed at the rate of one per hour. Resolution 2803, passed just days after these warrants, doesn’t even mention them, doesn’t reference war crimes, doesn’t acknowledge genocide. Instead, it rewards those named as war criminals with permanent control over their victims.

This reveals how international criminal law operates through what Sylvia Wynter (2003) calls the “master code” of race, distinguishing “the good/life/fully-human from the bad/death/not-quite-human” (p. 318). The ICC warrants paradoxically prove the point: even when the highest international court recognizes Palestinian children as victims of war crimes, the international order continues treating them as legitimate targets..

Arab States: The Colonial Intermediaries

Where are the Arab states as Palestinian children scream under rubble? Counting money. (Arab Center, 2022, 2024) Egypt’s military regime, which receives $1.3 billion annually from Washington, enforces Gaza’s southern border with more dedication than the Zionist entity enforces the north.(Voice of America, 2024)  Egypt’s military regime, which receives $1.3 billion annually from Washington, enforces Gaza’s southern border – a policy that prioritizes strategic alliances over Palestinian lives.

The joint statement of November 14, 2025, where the United States secured support from Qatar, Egypt, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Pakistan, Jordan, and Turkey for Resolution 2803, reveals how completely Arab regimes (Chatham House, 2025) have internalized their role in maintaining the structures that ensure Palestinian subjugation. They receive limited sovereignty and security guarantees in exchange for managing their populations’ rage about Palestine while preserving the systems that guarantee Palestinian death.

Saudi Arabia builds NEOM, its $500 billion vanity city, while Palestinian mothers feed their children grass and animal feed 1,000 kilometers away. The UAE hosts luxury conferences about “tolerance” while maintaining security coordination with forces bombing Gaza’s children. Morocco’s king received Netanyahu with honor, shaking the hand that signs bombing orders, trading Palestinian lives for American recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara.

Russia and China’s abstention rather than veto reveals how even supposed alternatives to Western hegemony participate in Palestinian erasure. Russian Ambassador Nebenzia described Resolution 2803 as “reminiscent of colonial practices and the British mandate for Palestine,” yet abstained because “the Palestinian Authority and several Arab-Muslim countries had expressed support.” China’s Ambassador Fu Cong noted “Palestine is barely visible in the draft” also abstained, prioritizing regional relationships over Palestinian lives.

They Knew Everything

When historians write about this period, they won’t struggle to understand. The evidence is overwhelming, the intent explicit, the results livestreamed. Zionist entity officials invoked biblical commands to destroy Amalek: “kill both man and woman, infant and nursing child.” Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich called for “no half measures” against Gaza’s population. The starvation policy was calculated in calories per person. The killing of children was celebrated on social media by soldiers posting trophy videos.

They all knew. Biden knew when he sent 14,000 2,000-pound bombs while children were already being pulled from rubble. The EU knew when they continued trade agreements worth €30 billion annually while Gaza’s hospitals were systematically destroyed. The UN Security Council knew when they voted for Resolution 2803 while 67 children had been killed just during the ceasefire period.

They knew about the amputations without anesthesia, the C-sections without medication, the children dying of treatable infections because antibiotics were blocked as “dual-use items.” They knew about the 10,000 children with amputated limbs, the 625,000 children out of school for two years. They knew because UN agencies documented it, humanitarian organizations reported it, Palestinian families livestreamed it as they are being murdered.

And they didn’t just allow it; they structured it, funded it, legitimized it. This is the ultimate obscenity: not just the power to kill but the power to make killing rational, legal, even virtuous. Not just creating conditions of death but getting the UN to officially approve them. Not just destroying Palestinian children but having the world agree they brought destruction on themselves.

Breaking the Machinery

Resolution 2803 is the international order removing its mask, revealing what Mbembe calls “those contemporary forms of subjugation of life to the power of death” (2003, p. 39). The transformation of child murder from crime to policy, from atrocity to administration, from genocide to governance. The Convention promised every child the right to life. For Palestinian children, it delivered the right to be killed legally, systematically, eternally, with UN approval.

History will record that when Palestinian children needed protection, the international order revealed its true function: a necropolitical system where “the generalized instrumentalization of human existence and the material destruction of human bodies” operates through law itself (Mbembe, 2003, p. 14). The Convention promised every child the right to life. For Palestinian children, it has delivered only membership in what Fanon (1961) called “the wretched of the earth,” those whom necropower has marked for social and biological death.

The question isn’t why the Convention failed. The question is why we expected documents written by empires to protect those whom empires need dead. Why we thought laws created by the powerful would shield the powerless. Why we believed systems built on racial hierarchy would suddenly recognize Palestinian children as human.

Three generations have now learned that international law exists not to protect them but to legitimize their destruction. Resolution 2803 ensures countless more will learn this truth. Unless we stop appealing to systems designed to kill them and start dismantling the machinery itself: not just the occupation but the entire global order that makes Palestinian children’s death appear rational, profitable, necessary.

The theoretical frameworks of Fanon, Mbembe, Maldonado-Torres, and Weheliye don’t just describe this machinery; they reveal its vulnerable points. If Palestinian children are killed because they’ve been expelled from humanity through racialization, then asserting their humanity becomes resistance. If their deaths are profitable, then making them costly becomes strategy. If their suffering is made invisible through slow violence, then making it spectacular becomes necessity.

Resolution 2803 makes clear that international law will not save Palestinian children. The UN will not save them. Arab states will not save them. Only the complete dismantling of the colonial machinery that produces their death can save them. This means not reforming but abolishing the systems that sort children into those who deserve protection and those marked for elimination. Not appealing to international law but exposing how it operates as an instrument of their destruction. Not requesting recognition from powers that profit from their death but building new forms of solidarity that bypass imperial structures entirely.

They exist where, as Mbembe (2019) writes, “death and freedom are irrevocably interwoven,” where the only escape from the death-world is death itself (p. 38). This is the truth the UN Security Council enshrined three days before Children’s Rights Day: some children are born to be protected, others are born to be eliminated. The Convention sorts them accordingly.

But Palestinian children continue to exist, to resist, to survive despite everything designed to destroy them. In their survival lies the seed of the system’s undoing. Every child who lives despite the machinery of death, who learns despite destroyed schools, who plays despite bombardment, who dreams despite trauma, proves that necropower, while devastating, is not total. In their stubborn insistence on living, on being children despite systematic unchilding, lies both the greatest accusation against the international order and the foundation for its eventual destruction.

Resolution 2803 is not the end but the beginning of the end: the moment the system revealed itself so completely that its legitimacy crumbles. When the UN votes to make child killing permanent, it signs not just Palestinian children’s death warrant but its own moral death certificate. What remains is not reform but revolution, not appeal but abolition, not recognition but resistance until the machinery that produces dead Palestinian children is itself destroyed.

Acknowledgment: The author thanks Ousmane Al-Desiri, an activist and junior researcher committed to environmental justice and to defending the rights of Indigenous peoples and LGBTQ+ communities in North Africa, for his invaluable support and ongoing commitment to Palestinian liberation

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