MALAIKA MAHLATSI | Children always casualties of Israeli, US wars – and it’s intentional

Last Saturday, Israel and the US launched joint criminal military aggression against the sovereign nation of the Islamic Republic of Iran. One of the first targets hit was the Shajareh Tayyebeh Girls’ Primary School in the city of Minab. The school building, which collapsed partially, was scorched by three reported missile strikes.

Footage aired by various news outlets shows rescuers digging through rubble for surviving victims and recovering schoolbags and textbooks. Iranian authorities have stated that at least 165 people were killed, including pupils, parents, and school staff. There are two important things to note about the strikes on the girls’ school.

The first is that Minab, located in southern Hormozgan province, is more than 1,300km from Tehran, the capital city of Iran and the seat of the government. The governments of the US and Israel have boasted many times about their military capabilities, emphasising that their missiles are technologically advanced and can strike their targets with accuracy. They brag about how this accuracy is the reason they were able to assassinate the supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Hosseini Khamenei, who died in an airstrike while working in his office in Tehran on the same day that the girls’ school was bombed.

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The implication is that the missile strike on the girls’ school was deliberate. If the missiles are technologically advanced and can strike their targets with accuracy, then it is clear that the girls were an intended target. Israel and the US had every intention of murdering little girls in a school hundreds of kilometres from the capital city.

The second thing to note is that this was not an aberration. The intentional murder of children has always been a constitutive element of Israeli and US military aggression. The images that came out of Minab are reminiscent of scenes from the genocide in Gaza, where Israel has killed more than 75,000 people since October 2023, many of them children.

Israeli military operations in Gaza have frequently targeted school buildings, the vast majority of which have been repurposed as shelters for displaced civilians. As of early 2026, international monitoring groups and UN agencies report that nearly 95% of Gaza’s school buildings have been damaged or destroyed. Some of the deadliest single strikes in Gaza have happened in schools.

These include the strike on Al-Tabieen School in August 2024, which targeted a prayer hall inside a school complex during dawn prayers. Nearly 100 people were killed, most of them school children. A month earlier, an airstrike at Khadija Girls’ School in Deir al-Balah killed at least 30 people.

A few months ago, an Israeli airstrike at Fahmi Al-Jarjawi School killed at least 36, including 18 children and six women. This too was a school-turned-shelter in Gaza City. In Palestine, the Israeli Defence Force maintains that it targets schools because they are used by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad as command-and-control centres, weapons depots, or bases for planning attacks.

There’s no doubt that a similar argument will be made about the missile strikes that are now happening in Iran, many of them targeting schools, hospitals and clinics. T This egregious lie that has often been repeated by Israeli and American leaders should not be accepted. We can all see the truth for ourselves.

The truth is that Israel and the US are aggressors in Iran, just as they are and have always been in Palestine. The truth is that children are targeted in these wars because the ultimate objective of the Zionist regime is to ethnically cleanse the Middle East of Arabs and other indigenous peoples.

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