Israeli-born legal scholar Dr Noam Peleg gave this years Yoliswa Dwane Lecture on 6 May. The annual lecture is hosted by Equal Education and UCTs Centre for Law and Society, in memory of activist and Equal Education co-founder Yoliswa Dwane, who died of cancer in 2022. This is a lightly edited and slightly shortened transcript of the lecture.
Today, I would like to talk about children, Gaza and international human rights law, and to contextualise this genocide within the ongoing war against Palestinian children that has spanned over decades.
Of the 2.3 million people who lived in Gaza 19 months ago, half were children under the age of 18.
The size of Gaza is 365km 2 . That is almost seven times smaller than Cape Town, which covers 2 446km 2 .