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 reported 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 reported death toll soared to more than 80, most of them young girls, as well as other innocent civilians.
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. Reports point to at least 80 fatal casualties,
nearly all children, and dozens of others unaccounted for.
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 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. Iranian 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.
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