Innocent civilians, including women and children, are victims of ruthless killings, maiming, torture, forced recruitment and kidnapping.

Armed conflict exposes girls, and women to gender based violence, torture, killing, maiming, abduction and other egregious crimes against humanity.

The security situation had improved, but the Forces nationales de libération (FNL) continued to do harm, operating virtually as a terror organization, maiming and robbing civilians and imposing taxes.

Norway is deeply concerned about the continuous reports of the killing and maiming of children, the recruitment and use of child soldiers, as well as rape and other forms of sexual violence against children in conflict situations.

He then addressed the issue of the rebel group known as the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), which had been responsible for acts of terrorism against the people of northern Uganda and various atrocities including abduction, maiming, sexual abuse and murder, committed in particular against women and children.

For five years, the Israeli occupation forces had been guilty of systematic war crimes and State terrorism against Arab civilians in those territories, using sophisticated weapons and fighter planes and killing some 4,000 persons, including children, women and elderly people, and maiming tens of thousands more.

But we are even more alarmed by the insidious threats posed by landmines and small arms and light weapons, which are responsible for the maiming and killing of so many innocent civilians in Africa and Asia in the many conflicts there that the international community is still not able to stop.

But there is a real danger in conflating criticism of Israeli intransigence and extremism with anti Semitism. To say that it is anti Semitic to condemn the killing and maiming of children in Gaza is to make a mockery of acts that really are anti Semitic and that deserve to be condemned by every civilized person.

Strongly condemns any recruitment and use of children in armed conflicts contrary to international law, and urges all parties to armed conflict to end such practice, and all other violations against children, including killing or maiming, rape or other sexual violence, abduction, denial of humanitarian access, attacks against schools and hospitals and the forced displacement of children and their families

The humanitarian crisis in northern Uganda is one of the world's worst, with 1.6 million people internally displaced and living, some for 10 years, in squalid, insecure camps, with acts of brutality killing and maiming committed against the local populations, and with tens of thousands of children abducted by the Lord's Resistance Army to serve as child soldiers or as sex slaves.