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![Mourners hold a portrait of a students during a funeral ceremony for children, who lost their lives after a primary school in Iran’s Hormozgan province was targeted in US and Israeli attacks, on March 03, 2026 in Minab, Iran [Anadolu Agency/AlJazeera]](https://the-secularist.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/WhatsApp-Image-2026-03-09-at-1.37.13-PM.jpeg)
A missile strike, an attack that opened the United States–Israel military campaign against Iran on 28 February 2026, destroyed the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in Minab, in southern Hormozgan province of Iran.
The assault occurred during the school day. Classrooms were full. More than 165 young children were killed, the majority of them girls between the ages of seven and twelve.
They were not soldiers.
They were not militants.
They were children.
At the time of this writing, no formal apology has been issued by the Trump administration for the deaths of the children.
Instead, the tragedy has been mostly presented as an unfortunate but unavoidable consequence of war. U.S. President Donald Trump even conceded casualties were to follow, saying at the time of the strikes:
“They may lose the lives of all valiant American heroes, they may have casualties. That often happens in war.”
He added bluntly:
“Sadly more will probably happen before it ends.”
The point of this language is clearly to make people ready for the eventual results of military escalation.
But when it involves students sitting in school in a class as victims, the words land differently. We should not be casual about war. War is not a video game, nor is it a cinematic fantasy of heroes defeated by villains.
But the language and the visuals that echo this war increasingly looks just like that.
Accounts associated with the administration and the administration’s media outlets have circulated video-game style war memes, making references to games like Grand Theft Auto and Call of Duty presenting airstrikes and military escalation in a tone that might as well be considered entertaining.
Within such a political culture, war verges on spectacle. Leaders start to enact strength as if they’re the hero of their own action movie, pursuing villains and projecting power for domestic audiences. But war is not a movie. And children are not pawns.
Kids killed at school cannot simply disappear into the backdrop of geopolitics. They are not stats in a strategy meeting. They are lives snuffed out, before they had the opportunity to begin, their futures wiped away in an instant.
The Military Target Argument
Some defenders of the strike say that the school was situated near a military centre tied to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). The school turned out to be close to an IRGC compound, at least one that the strike was targeting.
Yet proximity is no excuse to undermine civilian protection under international humanitarian law. Civilian infrastructure, including schools, remains protected even near military establishments.
In a variety of places around the globe, families of military personnel and civilian populations tend to live close to bases or security posts. Kids commonly go to schools where their parents live and work, including near military bases.
The presence of a military site nearby cannot justify the destruction of a school full of children. Where Is the Outrage? Just as troubling is the lack of protracted global outrage.
But if more than 165 schoolgirls were killed in almost any other way, especially in the West, the story would be in the international news grid. Governments would condemn it. Editorial boards would call for accountability.
Instead, the deaths have barely appeared in the global news cycle. It poses an uncomfortable question:
Whose children matter?
War as Entertainment
What makes this moment so surreal, though, is the tone emanating from Washington. Instead of the sombre language once associated with wartime leadership, the messaging on the conflict often seemed shockingly juvenile. Recent reporting in the media outlet Zeteo described the chilling feel of the administration’s online messaging:
“What the Trump-Vance administration is doing around the world doesn’t resemble a functioning government in a healthy democracy but rather addled suburban teens playing Grand Theft Auto, laughing hysterically as they run down stretches of civilians in a crazy drive-by fray.”
Official accounts tied to the White House circulated war memes inspired by video games, including references to Grand Theft Auto and Call of Duty, while airstrikes remained across Iran, the report said.
When war starts to feel like entertainment, something fundamentally dangerous is happening in political culture. Human lives devolve into background scenery in a performance designed to convey strength.
Yet behind every missile strike is real families, real classrooms, and real children whose lives are ripped short.
War can be an easy idea to talk about in the abstract – the language of strategy, geopolitics and national security.
This becomes more difficult when you imagine reality itself.
A child wakes up in the morning. Gets ready for school. Packs their bag. Sits with friends in a classroom talks, laughs, learns. And suddenly all hell breaks loose.
For a moment, imagine that the child sitting in that classroom was you.
Your son.
Your daughter.
That is what children do, go to school and the sky falls suddenly.
It’s so much harder to defend war when you no longer see statistics, but you see children instead.
Because, under the headlines, under the politics and under the spectacle,165 schoolgirls never came home.
