Photo: The Canadian Press

After seven years of war in Syria, the United Nations has one thing to say: Stop the war on children.

The numbers speak for themselves.

Of Syria's estimated 10 million children, 8.6 million are now in dire need of assistance, up from about half a million after the first year of war. Nearly 6 million children are displaced or living as refugees, and about 2.5 million are out of school. Over 3 million children are exposed to the hazards of unexploded ordinance and land mines, even in areas where the conflict has died down. Some 40 per cent of those killed by land mines are children.

While the U.N. has verified about 2,500 children killed between 2014 and 2017, it says the actual numbers are far higher.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which has tracked the war since it began, has documented as many as 19,800 children killed since the conflict began in March 2011. A study published in the Lancet in January shows that children are increasingly bearing the brunt of the fighting, making up 23 per cent of the civilian casualties in 2016, compared to 8.9 per cent in 2011. The Lancet study reported at least 13,800 children have been killed from 2011 through 2016.

And in the first two months of 2018, more than 1,000 children have been killed or injured, according to the U.N.

"The war is going on unabated with an incredible, unacceptably brutal impact upon children," Geert Cappelaere, UNICEF's regional director for the Middle East and North Africa told The Associated Press. "This is a war on children. ...Thousands of children have been killed, continue to be killed. Tens of thousands of children have been seriously injured. Many of them are going to carry scars for life. Thousands of children have been disabled by war."

And despite moves to establish "de-escalation" zones by the parties to the conflict, the violence has only worsened. Nearly 400,000 of civilians are trapped in the rebel-held Damascus suburbs of eastern Ghouta as the government and allied forces wage a relentless bombing and shelling campaign to retake the area.

Save the Children, in a report issued on Monday, said that its partners on the ground have described an "apocalyptic" bombing campaign that has targeted homes, more than 60 schools, 24 hospitals and other medical facilities and forced thousands to live in underground shelters.

Further north, hundreds of thousands in the Kurdish district of Afrin are also squeezed amid a Turkish offensive to expel a U.S.-backed local Kurdish militia.

"For hundreds of thousands of children in Syria, this is the worst point of the conflict so far," Save the Children said in its report.