FROM DAY ONE, YET ANOTHER US-ISRAELI WAR ON CHILDREN

 

As the US and Israel launched joint attacks on Iran this last day of February, children once again became the innocent victims who took the brunt of the mass violence. While the Trump administration celebrated the slaying of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in the joint attacks, the news was overshadowed by a direct hit on a girls elementary school in which the death toll soared to 167, most of them young girls, ages 7 to 12, as well as other innocent civilians including school staff.

Iranian parents had just dropped their children off at Saturday morning classes when the airstrikes on multiple locations throughout the country began. A school in a suburb of Teheran was hit but not destroyed. Two children died there. But the school that suffered the direct hit was the  Shajareh Tayyebeh school for girls in the southern city of Minab. According to multiple news outlets quoting Iranian sources, the school, which was apparently near an Islamic Revolutionary Guard post, was devastated. 

Factnameh, a Persian factchecking service, cross-referenced a video released of the devastation with other photographs of the school site, and concluded that the video was authentic. Reuters international news agency said it had also verified the footage as being from the school.

The US and Israel are not commenting on the tragedy. In these days of weaponry with surgical accuracy, however, it is hard to write this incident off as “collateral damage”. It is either intentional state terrorism by the US and Israel, or it is a glaring admission that those operating the weaponry are grossly untrained and inexpert in its use. Either way, the mass murder of innocent civilians—especially when it is the result of strikes on soft targets like hospitals and schools—is a clear violation of international law, and, specifically of Article 52 of the Geneva Conventions, which states:  

1. Civilian objects shall not be the object of attack or of reprisals. Civilian objects are all objects which are not military objectives as defined in paragraph 2.

2. Attacks shall be limited strictly to military objectives. In so far as objects are concerned, military objectives are limited to those objects which by their nature, location, purpose or use make an effective contribution to military action and whose total or partial destruction, capture or neutralization, in the circumstances ruling at the time, offers a definite military advantage.

3. In case of doubt whether an object which is normally dedicated to civilian purposes, such as a place of worship, a house or other dwelling or a school, is being used to make an effective contribution to military action, it shall be presumed not to be so used.

This Iranian school strike could perhaps be considered a tragic error if we had not already witnessed repeated and multiple Israeli violations of international humanitarian law in the Palestinian Gaza Strip, leading to the mass murders of 2,000 innocent children in two-and-a-half years of war there. A cruel, genocidal war in which the far-right Israeli regime of Benjamin Netanyahu has targeted schools, hospitals and private homes, as well as creating a humanitarian crisis by blocking food, water and medical supplies from reaching the civilian victims of its dirty war. All carried out with weaponry and support provided by the United States.

It is, then, hard to give the US and Israel the benefit of the doubt. I say all of this while leaving for another day the advisability, or not, of the US going to war with Iran, especially in the midst of supposed peace negotiations with that country, which now appear to have merely been a tactic to lull Iran into a false sense of confidence that the Trump regime was not yet contemplating renewed military action.

I will leave analysis of that situation for the future, because today, to my mind, priority should be given to the targeting of children in acts of war billed by Trump as “liberation of the Iranian people” from an admittedly repressive theocracy. Iranians should, perhaps, look at what happened in Venezuela if they are holding out hope that the true purpose of the Trump regime is to deliver them from evil.

NOTE 1: Casualty figures in this post were updated March 5th.
NOTE 2: March 7, 2026: In the interest of full transparency and disclosure: When I published the photo illustrating this post a week ago, I, along with editors in other media, took it as being a legitimate news photo. I have since learned that it is AI-generated. I am, however, allowing it to continue to illustrate this essay, without caption, for the same reason that it was originally posted. 
Snopes has tracked it back to a Pakistani Sihk journalist Harmeet Singh, who first posted it on X. Singh has since admitted that it was AI-generated, but added that he decided to post it to "symbolically reflect the scale of the tragedy" that it depicts--namely, the  mass murder of 167 people, mostly girls ages 7 to 12, in a double-tap rocket attack on an elementary school on the first day of Trump's cruel private war in Iran.
While I confess to having been taken in by what Facebook later flagged as "an altered" (as opposed to fake) image, I am taking this AI-enhanced picture to be "an illustration", a work of AI-generated photo-art, as if it were a painting or drawing, with a valid humanitarian message that forces even those who would rather not think about the consequences to innocent civilians of this ill-advised war of aggression to pause and reflect.
As for my referring to the girls and school staff killed in the attack as having been murdered, I will not be complicit in "sanitizing" their deaths as "collateral damage" or "a tragic mistake." If we think of the rockets used in the attack as "vehicles" any traffic court anywhere would deem this "error" to be vehicular homicide, as if some madman or drunk had driven his car into a crowd of innocent victims and succeeded in killing scores of them.