Amman: At least 83 children were killed in Middle East war zones in January, most of them in Syria, the UN children’s agency UNICEF said on Monday, vowing their voices “will never be silenced”.

“They were killed in ongoing conflicts, suicide attacks or frozen to death as they fled active war zones,” said UNICEF’s regional director for the Middle East and North Africa, Geert Cappelaere.

“In the month of January alone, escalating violence in Iraq, Libya, the State of Palestine, and Syria has claimed the lives of at least 83 children,” Cappelaere added in a statement.

Calling January a “dark (and) bloody month”, Cappelaere said it was “unacceptable that children continue being killed and injured every single day”.

“Children may have been silenced but their voices will continue to be heard... their voices will never be silenced,” he said.

“We collectively continue failing to stop the war on children! We have no justification. We have no reason to accept a new normal.” The highest death toll was in Syria where 59 children were killed in violence as the war there enters its eighth year, said UNICEF.

“UNICEF is receiving reports of killed and injured children on a daily basis from different countries,” it added.

In Libya’s second city Benghazi, a suicide attack killed three children while three others died while “playing near unexploded ordnance” and a fourth child was critically wounded.

A child was killed in a “booby-trapped” house in Iraq’s second city Mosul, ruled for three years by Daesh group extremists before being driven out by government forces in July after fierce battles.

And north of the city of Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, Israeli soldiers shot dead a 16-year-old Palestinian boy.

Four children were among 16 Syrian refugees who “froze to death” in a snowstorm as they were fleeing their country to neighbouring Lebanon, said UNICEF, adding that more children suffered frost bite.

A Lebanese security official put the death toll at 17.

“Not hundreds, not thousands but millions more children in the Middle East and North Africa region have their childhood stolen, maimed for life, traumatised, arrested and detained, exploited, prevented from going to school and from getting the most essential health services; denied even the basic right to play,” said Cappelaere.

In 2017, Thousands of Iraqis surged out of western Mosul during a lull in heavy fighting in districts around the densely populated Old City where Iraqi forces are facing fierce resistance from Daesh militants.

Five months into the battle to take Daesh’s last bastion in Iraq, government forces have cleared the east and half of western Mosul, and are now focused on controlling the Old City as well as the strategic al-Nuri Mosque.

Tens of thousands have flowed out of war-wracked Mosul in recent weeks, but Samir Hamid and 33 family members have decided to go against the tide to return home.

“We stayed with relatives for a week and now we’re going back home,” says the father-of-five, who has travelled with his extended family from a small town outside Mosul.

Iraqi forces have retaken several neighbourhoods in west Mosul from the Daesh group since starting an assault last month to recapture the extremists’ last major urban bastion in the country.