A diagnostic of how US-Israeli military strategy and racial capitalism converge to systematically target children, from the classrooms of Gaza to the schools of Iran.

The Massacre at Minab: A Diagnosis of Atrocity

On the morning of February 28, 2026, the devastating human cost of the newly launched US-Israeli military offensive against Iran was laid bare not on a battlefield, but on a classroom. As bombs rained down across the country in a campaign described by the Israeli military as “Operation Lion’s Roar,” a missile struck the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in the southern city of Minab.

The strike occurred at approximately 10:45 a.m. local time, precisely as young students were changing class periods. Because Saturday marks the beginning of the Iranian school and work week, the building was packed with an estimated 170 young girls. The resulting massacre – killing 165 people, mostly girls aged seven to twelve — stands as a harrowing testament to the “unchilding” of the Global South. This is a process where children are stripped of their legal and social protections to be repositioned as “collateral data” in the pursuit of regime change.

A Storied History of Targeted Innocence

The tragedy in Minab is not an isolated error; it is a historically situated formation. To understand Minab, one must look at the “storied history” of US and Israeli military doctrine, which has long treated the lives of children as disposable in the service of imperial expansion.

  • The US Legacy: From the “free-fire zones” of Vietnam’s My Lai – where soldiers murdered children as young as 12 — to the “War on Terror” drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen, the US has refined a lexicon of erasure. Casualties on drone screens are often dismissed as “bugsplat,” a term that sanitises the murder of children by transforming them into digital debris.
  • The Israeli Structure: In Palestine and Lebanon, the targeting of children is a structural necessity aimed at breaking “national futurity”. This spans from the 1996 and 2006 massacres in Qana to the systematic “scholasticide” witnessed in Gaza (2023–25), where over 10,000 children were killed and 90% of schools destroyed to ensure a generation is left without an epistemic home.

Mohammed Ibrahim

The atrocities committed by the United States and Israel against children are often, as they should be, characterised by human rights organisations not as “accidents” of war, but as the result of specific military doctrines that prioritise high-level strategic goals over civilian life.

Expanding on the “storied history” previously discussed, these actions can be categorised into three distinct phases: the era of Direct Massacres, the era of Remote “Sanitised” Violence, and the contemporary era of Structural Destruction (Scholasticide).

  1. The Era of Direct Massacres: My Lai and Qana

Historically, both militaries have been involved in ground and aerial operations where the “rules of engagement” were either ignored or designed in a way that guaranteed child casualties.

  • The My Lai Massacre (1968): This remains the most documented US war crime of the 20th century. US Army soldiers from Charlie Company entered the village of My Lai and murdered between 347 and 504 unarmed civilians. Eyewitness reports and military investigations confirmed that soldiers raped and mutilated children as young as 12 and executed groups of women and children in irrigation ditches. The massacre was facilitated by “free-fire zone” policies, where any person in a designated area was treated as an enemy combatant.
  • The Qana Massacres (1996 & 2006): In two separate conflicts in Lebanon, Israeli strikes on the town of Qana resulted in mass civilian deaths. In 2006, an Israeli strike on a residential building killed 28 civilians, 16 of whom were children. UNICEF noted at the time that children made up roughly 30% of all deaths in that war, highlighting a “logic of disproportionate force” that has become a hallmark of regional escalations.
  1. The Era of Remote Violence: Drone Warfare and “Bugsplat”

In the 21st century, the US transitioned to remote warfare, which human rights groups argue has created a “culture of impunity.”

  • The Drone Wars (2002–Present): In Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Yemen, US drone strikes have killed hundreds of children. Amnesty International documented cases like that of 68-year-old Mamana Bibi, killed by a Hellfire missile while picking vegetables with her grandchildren.
  • The Dehumanisation of Data: Internal US military assessments often used a methodology that classified all “military-age males” in a strike zone as combatants. This effectively erased the teenage years of boys, treating 14-to-17-year-olds as legitimate targets. The term “bugsplat” – used by drone operators to describe the visual of a body after a strike – exemplifies the dehumanisation required to sustain this campaign.
  1. Contemporary Structural Atrocities: “Unchilding” and Scholasticide

The most recent phase of these atrocities involves the deliberate destruction of the social and educational infrastructure required for a child to exist as a “child.”

  • The Concept of “Unchilding”: Scholars argue that Israel practices “unchilding,” where Palestinian children are denied the legal protections of childhood. This is evidenced by Israel being the only country in the world to systematically prosecute minors in military courts.
  • Scholasticide in Gaza (2023–2025): The UN has accused Israel of “scholasticide”— the systematic obliteration of an entire education system. By early 2025, over 90% of schools and universities in Gaza had been destroyed or damaged by airstrikes and controlled demolitions.
  • Direct Targeting of Shelters: UNRWA schools used as emergency shelters have been repeatedly struck. In 2014, Israeli fire hit seven UN schools, killing 44 people, a disproportionate number of whom were children. In May 2025, a strike on a school in Gaza City killed 18 children, with survivors describing “unimaginable horrors” of children being pulled from burning rubble.

The common thread between US and Israeli atrocities is the geopolitical shield provided by their alliance. When the US-Israeli offensive struck the Shajareh Tayyebeh school in Minab in 2026, the responses mirrored decades of previous incidents: the US military claimed to be “looking into” the harm, while the Israeli military claimed they were “not aware” of the strike. This cycle of “denial and delay” allows the military-industrial complex to continue testing weaponry on civilian “laboratories” while avoiding international accountability for the slaughter of the innocent.

Emad El Byed

The Mercenary Logic of Racial Capitalism

This violence is fuelled by a mercenary logic where war is not merely a policy; it is a market. Under racial capitalism, the Global South is treated as a “laboratory” where advanced weaponry is tested on civilian populations to be marketed as “battle-proven” to the rest of the world.

The “university-industrial-military complex” plays a central role here. Western universities often act as parastate actors, maintaining deep financial ties to defence contractors like Lockheed Martin and Elbit Systems. These corporations profit from “testing” technologies on the bodies of children, turning human atrocity into a corporate asset. In this ledger, the death of a seven-year-old girl is a tragic by-product of a system that prioritises defence stock prices and the opening of new markets over the pulse of human life.

“One Day, We Will Have All Been Against This”

The systematic “unchilding” of the Global South is not a glitch in the software of modern diplomacy; it is the core of the code. To look upon the smoking remains of the Shajareh Tayyebeh school in Minab is to witness the ultimate, predatory expression of the American and Israeli dream — a dream that has always required a high-walled perimeter of corpses to maintain its lush, suburban interior. This is the mercenary logic of a world that views a seven-year-old girl not as a vessel of infinite potential, but as a tactical variable in a spreadsheet of “regime change.” It is the reality that has ISRAELI VIOLENCE as the 4th leading cause of violent death WORLDWIDE among children under 5, 2021-2024. It is the same cold calculation that once turned the children of My Lai into “free-fire” statistics and today dismisses the shattered spines of Gaza as “bugsplat.” We are being asked to believe that the safety of the West can only be purchased with the blood of children who were simply trying to learn their alphabet.

The repugnance of this is so thick it should choke the very air in our lungs, yet we are met with the tepid, bureaucratic “concern” of men in suits who have mastered the art of looking into cameras and saying absolutely nothing while the rubble is still warm. It is profoundly, historically vile. We are living through an era where the “university-industrial-military complex” has turned our hallowed halls of learning into laundromats for blood money, where research grants are signed in the same ink as the strike orders for southern Iran. There is a specific, jagged kind of evil in a system that markets its missiles as “battle-proven” — a branding exercise that essentially translates to: “We have tested this on the most vulnerable bodies on earth, and we can confirm that it works precisely as intended.”

Fateme Alaei

How are we not screaming? Why is the collective outrage of the world not a deafening, physical force that halts every engine of capital in its tracks? We should be incandescent with fury. To remain “neutral” or “objective” in the face of the state-sponsored slaughter of schoolchildren is not a sign of academic rigour, or aloof intelligence; it is a symptom of a profound moral rot. This is a moment that demands a total rupture with the “anaesthetic” of polite debate. We should be outraged because this is an assault on the very concept of a future. Every time a classroom is turned into a tomb, the world becomes a smaller, meaner, more desolate place. If your heart does not hammer against your ribs at the thought of those girls in Minab, if you can scroll past this without feeling a nauseating, soul-deep revulsion, then the “logic of elimination” has already succeeded in hollowing you out. This is not just a tragedy; it is an abomination that cries out for an end to the world that made it possible.

Call to Action

The bombing of the Shajareh Tayyebeh school exposes the “false binary” of mainstream media; we are not choosing between theocratic oppression and imperial “liberation,” but witnessing a total refusal of the colonial constitution of the modern world. Security cannot be built on the graves of schoolchildren.

Activists Without Borders (AWB) calls for:

  • Independent Investigations: Immediate, independent, international probes into all alleged attacks on schools.
  • Arms Trade Accountability: Suspension of arms transfers where a credible risk of civilian harm exists.
  • Protection of Educational Sites: States must recommit to the Safe Schools Declaration and clarify rules of engagement regarding urban strikes.

Activists Without Borders recommends stricter regulations, protections for children, and sustainable practices. Children are not collateral damage; they are rights-bearing human beings under international law. The protection of their lives – in Iran, Gaza, and beyond – is a non-negotiable obligation.

Further Statistics & Sources of Information: 

The 2026 Minab Primary School Strike (Iran)

  • UNESCO (Press Release March 2026) officially condemning the strike as a “grave violation of humanitarian law.” Iranian State Media (IRNA) and the Hormozgan Provincial Prosecutor’s Office (Feb 2026) report 165 confirmed dead; 95–96 injured. The majority are girls aged 7–12. Satellite imagery confirms the Shajareh Tayyebeh school is 600m from a domestic IRGC facility, falling within the “lethal radius” of high-yield munitions.

Scholasticide in Gaza (2023-2025)

Historical US Casualties in the Drone Wars (2002-2020)

“Mercenary Logic” (Arms Trade)