The Arithmetic of Outrage
The school was called Shajareh Tayyebeh (The Good Tree). On the morning of February 28, 2026, a missile brought its roof down on one hundred and sixty-five girls (most of them between the ages of seven and twelve), according to Iranian authorities and confirmed by multiple international news organizations. Ninety-six more were wounded.
When children are killed by adversaries of the United States, their deaths are named, mourned, memorialized. When children are killed by American weapons, they become variables in a targeting equation. The asymmetry is not incidental to American war-making: it is policy. It is the targeting calculus that assigns some children as acceptable loss before the first missile is fired. It is how we have decided, in advance, that some children’s lives are worth less than others.
The Pentagon called the Minab deaths “collateral damage.” That phrase is permission before the strike. When reporters pressed for more, the Department of Defense said it was “looking into it.” Those words do not mourn. They absolve.
Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense who oversaw these strikes, has spoken at length about protecting Western civilization and the innocence of children. The Trump administration wrapped its Iran policy in the language of liberation: freeing the Iranian people from a theocratic regime. But one hundred sixty-five Iranian girls were in school that morning. They were the future that the administration claimed to be fighting for. Their names will never be read into the Congressional record, no moment of silence called, no flags flown at half-staff.
The word “collateral” is designed to erase the killing of children from the accounting. It is an engineering term applied to human beings—it has no category for a school, for walls, for teachers who knew their students by name, by struggle, by promise. On that Saturday morning, the school had children who had been sent there by parents who believed it was safe.
The measure of a country’s conscience is not what we say about the children we grieve. It is what we say, and what we refuse to say, about the children we kill. By that measure, we have not yet found the words for what we owe.
One hundred and sixty-five girls went to school on that Saturday morning. They did not come home.