UEFA’s Banner: "Stop Killing Children" — but which ones?

UEFA rolled out a giant banner before the Super Cup match between Tottenham Hotspur and Paris Saint-Germain in Italy this week with the words “Stop Killing Children. Stop Killing Civilians”.

Apparently, this was not political.

Well, who could disagree? Stop killing children indeed. (While we’re at it, there are towns in England that could do with a giant banner demanding “Stop Raping Children”.)

But UEFA did not name a war, a country, or a perpetrator. So, which children did they mean?

Perhaps the Nigerian Christian children slaughtered over and over again by Boko Haram and other militants. Over 52,000 Christians have been killed between 2009 and 2025, many of them children. In Nigerian states under Sharia law, families targeted for their Christian faith get little protection. These killings rarely make the front pages, so if UEFA meant the under-reported, slaughtered children of Nigeria, good on them.

Or maybe they meant the Yazidi children murdered, abducted, sold as slaves, raped, and forced into marriage by ISIS. Thousands executed. Thousands starved or died of injuries. Even now, 1,300 abducted Yazidi children are still missing.

On the football theme, perhaps UEFA wanted to draw attention to the 12 Druze children killed by a (probably Hezbollah) rocket in Majdal Shams in 2024, while they were playing football.

Perhaps, just perhaps, this was a belated reference to the horrors of October 7, 2023, when terrorists murdered 36 children in Israel, injured many more, and took others hostage.

Or maybe it was about the children of Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo or Somalia. Perhaps Afghanistan, Yemen or Syria. The Western media pays very little attention to the dead children of African and Middle Eastern war zones — unless the war is in Gaza.

This is not whataboutery. I am a mother. My heart bleeds for every child caught in the crossfire of adult hatred and war. Every young life lost — whether in Israel, Gaza, Nigeria, Syria, or Sudan — is a tragedy beyond words. Children should be safe in classrooms, on football pitches, in their beds. It is precisely because the loss of children is so grievous, so morally unambiguous, that UEFA’s claim this banner was ‘not political’ is so insulting. It is also a lie to pretend it was not rooted in Israelophobia — or to call it by its real name, antisemitism.

Because although UEFA hasn’t named the war zone or the perpetrator, we all know who they mean.