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8:55 pm, March 7th, 2026 - 39 comments
Categories: child abuse, families, human rights, Iran, military, Peace, schools, us politics, war -
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The US-Israeli killing of children must be stopped.
Three more schools and a major hospital have been bombed in Iran and more in Lebanon by the US-Israeli military, all within the first week of launching their latest war. This is a pattern, not ‘collateral damage’. Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations Amir-Saeid Iravani said on 7 March that the US and Israel “recognise no red line in committing their crimes” against his country. Densely populated parts of Tehran are being pounded by wave after wave of US and Israeli bombs. Shahid Hamedani School in Tehran was struck on 6 March, the day of the funerals of schoolgirls (6-12 year-olds) killed in Minab, Iran. UN officials have confirmed that the Minab attack killed 160 children and five staff.
The Palestinians, despite the genocide inflicted on them by Israel and the West, have never become used to the daily killing of children: “The smallest coffins are always the heaviest,” Palestinians say. Israel has killed many times more women, children and babies as they have Palestinian resistance fighters. There is even a name for this depravity: the Dahiya Doctrine.
International media are reporting that Dahiya, a southern suburb of Beirut, Lebanon, is suffering another brutal aerial bombardment from the Israelis. Dahiya – al-Dahiya al-Janubiya – is home to 700,000 civilians living in high-density housing. The suburb lends its name to Israel’s policy of using massive, disproportionate force against civilians and infrastructure to weaken an enemy’s resolve. It is, of course, a war crime to do so.
In the 2006 Lebanon War Israel attacked Dahiya, a popular stronghold of the Hezbollah movement. The massive bombing campaign wasn’t to achieve a military objective; the target was civilians and civilian infrastructure. Hundreds of children were amongst the dead.
According to Israel’s Institute of National Security Studies, the Lebanon War led to a formal framing for its war against civilians: The Dahiya Doctrine. In a paper titled “Disproportionate Force: Israel’s Concept of Response in Light of the Second Lebanon War” written in 2008, they wrote:
“By instilling proper expectations of the IDF response among the civilian population, Israel will be able to improve its readiness and the resilience of its citizens.”
The Dahiya Doctrine is a strategy to make civilian suffering so great – whether that be in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria or Iran – that they can bend hostile governments or groups like Hezbollah to their will. The President of Israel, Isaac Herzog, warmly welcomed by Australia last month, lives and breathes this doctrine – for him, there are no innocents in Gaza.
Let’s be honest: this is very much in the tradition of the Nazi German bombing of Guernica in Spain in 1937 in which the targets were civilians. Terror bombing it was then; terror bombing it is now.
I have a fabric reproduction of Pablo Picasso’s Guernica on my office wall. It has been coloured red, green black and white – those of the Palestinian flag – to draw the important parallel. The governments of New Zealand, Australia, the UK, Canada and all the others, with rare noble exceptions like Spain, support this depraved criminality. We share values with the Israelis and the Americans, our leaders tell us.
The Americans and Israelis have a bloodlust and openly brag about their destructive abilities. Operation Epic Fury screams to the world: “war crimes”. What should constrain US-Israeli violence is international law and the principle that there are limits to what is acceptable in “incidental” harm caused to civilians.
Proportionality is one of the foundational concepts in international law, along with other important injunctions like the prohibition of force against sovereign states. Under the Geneva Convention, before undertaking military action states are obligated to consider: Distinction (separating civilians from combatants), Proportionality, Precaution (taking care to minimise civilian harm), Military Necessity (i.e. don’t launch wars of aggression), and Humanity – prohibiting unnecessary suffering.
This is the exact opposite of the Dahiya Doctrine and the American Way of War – from Korea to Iraq by way of Vietnam. Over six million civilians were killed by the US in just those three conflicts alone.
The principle of proportionality is codified in Article 51 of the Geneva Conventions, and affirmed as binding customary international law applicable to all parties in all conflicts. This is further affirmed by International Committee of the Red Cross’s Rule 14 which states:
“Launching an attack which may be expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof, which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated, is prohibited.”
The West has torn up its copies of international law but we need to keep its spirit alive. New Zealand, Australia and most of the “civilised world” are signatories to various treaties that require them to enforce humanitarian law upon belligerents. Instead, our countries work day and night to support Israel and the US in their evil work. Evil is the appropriate word here.
I will give the last word to the Israeli commander who led the 2006 terror bombing of Dahiya. General Gadi Eisenkot, chief of Northern Command:
“What happened in the Dahiya quarter of Beirut in 2006 will happen in every village from which Israel is fired on. We will apply disproportionate force on it (villages) and cause great damage and destruction there. From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages, they are military bases. This is a plan. And it has been approved.”
Eugene Doyle
The shocking attack on The Shajereh Tayyebeh (The Good Tree) school in the city of Minab does indeed continue the depraved nature of the US/Israeli genocide of Palestinians. An Aljazeera report concludes that the tageting was almost certainly deliberate :
The deliberate targeting is confirmed by the sickening double tap nature of the strike
And yet in the face of this massacre by absolute monsters, Luxon still prevaricates. I guess part of his fundamentalist religion demands allegiance to Israel come what may but it must be emphasized that these missiles were fired by the USAF.
This is what it means when the secretary for war tells us that the US will not be constrained by red lines
"Nits make lice." – J M Chivington*.
There could well be some verses in the Old Testament expressing the same sort of attitude, but I haven't the time to research them.
* Look him up (warning: you'll need a strong stomach)
On the subject of religious quakery, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation has recieved hundreds of complaints from US service members over commanders telling them that the current war with Iran is part of biblical prophecy regarding the return of Jesus and that Trump has been anointed by Jesus as the one to bring Armageddon, the biblical precursor for Jesus' second coming.
I will check out J M Chivington but Netanyahu already uses the biblical story of the Amalek to justify the targeting of children and infants no matter how young, claiming that their are no innocents in Gaza
https://thecradle.co/articles/dozens-of-us-lawmakers-demand-probe-into-pentagon-officials-saying-iran-war-gods-divine-plan
Thanks, Sub. That reference to the Amalek sounds like the sort of thing I was thinking of. I was sure there had to be something like it in the OT, which can usually be relied on for some good ol' thud and blunder. A bit shocking though to see the NT being cited as well by those US military. But then I never took much stock in St John The Divine, hallucinating away in his cave on Patmos (much as a certain individual would later do in his cave on Mount Hira').
If you think the level of religious loonery within the US military is bad, you'll shit your pants when you find out about their opponents in this conflict.
I absolutely assure you that I wont
That's just projection sadly common among Islamophobes.
It’s the kind of thinking which led to the Christchurch terrorist attacks.
You are the one here conflating the Islamic Revolutionary cause of Iran with Islam.
One could argue the Iranian polity is more Mozlem than Muslim.
They wanted 45 to return as their king 47.
The media is not so bold.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/3/questions-over-minab-girls-school-strike-as-israel-us-deny-involvement
Admission of use of old site data.
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/03/11/politics/us-iran-school-strike-civilians
1000 targets in 24 hours, The Times defence expert wonders if AI was at fault.
https://www.thepost.co.nz/world-news/360965014/first-ai-war-us-and-israel-test-autonomous-tech
For the record, a Palestinian government built the largest system of shelters against bombs and missiles in history, then started a war against a country armed with a large number of bombs and missiles and refused to allow any Palestinian civilians including the children access to those shelters – or even the right to leave the area of fighting.
That's just a repeated excuse for Israels genocidal ongoing killing of civilians. Israeli planes take less than a minute warning to empty their payload over the population. Air raid sirens rely on advanced warning of which there is none provided.
The excuse rings rather hollow when active Hamas brigades are left behind Israeli lines (inside kill-zones) where they have been actually operating. Civilians are automatically targeted inside these kill zones (as a matter of IDF policy) and so they are the areas of Gaza most clearly making up the battle field. Never the less the IDF doesn't fight in these areas and when they rarely do suffer a casualty rate they find unacceptable. If the IDF was targeting Hamas and destroying Hamas defensive infrastructure this would be a different conflict with very different casualty rates. In the very rare cases where we have seen Hamas commanders fighting (and being killed by the IDF) they are clearly fighting in military areas of Gaza (and typically being killed remotely by shelling or drones).
The other thing to note is most of what we hear about the Gaza tunnel network comes from the IDF department which designed graphics of the tunnel network they imagine is there for propaganda purposes. These are based on almost zero information as they are created before the IDF has investigated on the ground (though often after the civilian infrastructure on top has been bombed). It's very unlikely that the visualizations used to try to justify bombing a hospital match what's actually there in any way. In the cases of tunnels being investigated after a bombing of civilian infrastructure (inevitably a hospital) I have yet to see it ever come close to the visualizations presented to justify the bombing.
It's very annoying when your preferred side loses, sure.
Re the tunnels: in this interview with a Hamas official, he doesn't dispute that there are 500 km of tunnels, confirms that the tunnels are there for Hamas fighters, not civilians to hide in, and says that Hamas has no obligation to protect the people of Gaza because that's the UN's job (and Israel's, he says – I kid you not).
https://www.memri.org/tv/hamas-official-mousa-abu-marzouk-tunnels-gaza-protect-fighters-%20not-civilians
In a rich irony, Israeli hostages were kept in the tunnels to shelter them from bombs and missiles, because the hostages had value to Hamas – unlike the children of Gaza, whose deaths were simply good propaganda material.
If Israel as the occupying power (and the UN by demanding the IDF apply international law to the conflict) isn't protecting civilians from harm (even considering proportionality and a valid selection of actual military targets) how on earth is Hamas military wing (which you have genocidally conflated with a Palestinian government above) expected to protect them?
And no, tunnels have never provided great protection, unless your being minded (as the hostages were) living underground is far from viable for a wider population. Plenty of hostage deaths are directly attributable to a US supplied Israeli munition regardless of the shelter from the initial explosion.
Writing the words "occupying power" doesn't make Israel an occupying power or responsible for Gaza's population. Gaza's been effectively independent for 20 years, and like it or not, Hamas was the government of Gaza for almost that whole period.
As to how Hamas could have protected them, well it could have built civilian bomb shelters as easily as it built tunnels, however the more obvious protective method would have been to stop attacking Israel. No attacks, no responses, and all that aid money could have gone on doing something useful for the place rather than destroying it. Shit governments tend to produce shit outcomes for the people they're governing and this one's no exception. I'm not sure there's ever been one that was so proud of it, though.
I am typing this slowly so you can understand it – Israel is an Occupying Power in Gaza. Full. Stop.
Typing just as slowly: the fact that you assert something to be true does not make it true. Full. Stop.
As you know (but probably refuse to acknowledge) the international court has consistently ruled that Gaza is occupied militarily, just as much as the West Bank is. That's what makes Israel the occupying power as its adjudicated by the UN. Before October 7 Israel was completing its responsibilities as an occupying power to what might be described as a bare minimum level, other than the important responsibility to end the occupation.
We both know a compliment of bomb shelters would do little to help the situation, especially given the warning times possible. Plenty of Israeli civilians dying as a result of Iranian missiles landing in Israel being evidence of that (with much better advanced warning happening there).
In your last point you appear to be arguing that Palestinians in Gaza take on collective responsibility for Hamas attacks. That would be a statement consistent with things the Israeli president has infamously said. It has also been suggested that those statements by him were Genocidal as they imply civilian deaths at the hands of the IDF can be justified by this supposed collective responsibility. Suffice to say Hamas has no active responsibility, what so ever, to protect Gazan civilians from the IDF attacking them. The notion is a non-sense demanding that Hamas attacks Israel again (where these attacks originate), and is completely incompatible with following international law. Its also well beyond Hamas means to prevent these attacks.
I'm aware that international bodies hostile to Israel often demonstrate that hostility, yes. What matters is whether the territory is in fact occupied by Israel in reality, which it very obviously hasn't been (for one thing, no occupying power would allow the place to be ruled by Hamas).
We don't both know that, because it's untrue. Warning times are generous when the attacker advertises its attacks well in advance, which Iran doesn't but Israel does. With advance warning, bomb shelters do a lot to help the situation. Even without them civilian casualties are reduced, which is why Israel does it.
You may be astonished to learn this, but you, I and everyone else in NZ bear responsibility for the actions of the NZ government, just as Israelis and Americans bear responsibility for the actions of their governments. There is no "But my government's a dictatorship" escape clause. The UN could of course adopt a policy that dictatorships are not legitimate representatives of their nations, but that would have a lot of trouble getting a majority given the number of UN members that are dictatorships.
Yeah, yeah, as anticipated the only reason (in your unlearn 'ed opinion) international law would possibly apply to Israel is due to international court and UN biases. I also wonder why you put such foolish arguments which have zero relevance to the subject to me in the first place. No, the international court does not find the Israeli position on Hamas means anything about the ongoing Israeli occupation. On the other hand successive Israeli governments have supported (and funded) Hamas governing Gaza and even at times acknowledged doing so, so if your argument is accepted Israel is occupying Gaza.
Iranian missile attacks obviously are and are able to be far better anticipated in Israel than Israeli bombing runs are able to be in the bordering Gaza, which have basically zero warning time.
As for individual citizens responsibility, there is responsibility for government actions to the extent they can be influenced by individual citizens and then there is incitement to genocide of a whole population. You have unfortunately veered well into the later category. Hamas governing Gaza, or attacking Israel, provides no defense to any crime prosecuted at the international criminal courts.
You're the one who appealed to "international courts" that have no jurisdiction over the thing they're pronouncing on, not me.
It's just an unfortunate fact that a government being a dictatorship doesn't mean countries attacked by that dictatorship can't go to war against it, with all the consequences of a war for the people living under the dictatorship. And it's ironic that people who support Hamas, an organisation with the publicly stated official goal of genocide of a whole population, project genocidal intent onto Israelis.
No jurisdiction, lol. You seem to be confusing this case with an already failed argument about the Genocide case. The occupation ruling applies to the UN, of which Israel is definitely a member.
Israel still has the opportunity to run your novel, "but they are a dictatorship what attacked us sir", argument in the ongoing Genocide case. I think they have better lawyers than to waste time on arguments which put up no defense whatsoever before the court. The same goes for your statements about Hamas supposed chartered genocidal intent. Israeli hasbara spreads plenty of arguments around which are so ridiculous they have no bearing on actual cases (and are in no way relied on in courts by Israel). These are just for suckers on the internet, such as yourself. Completely unserious and asking you to fool yourself about what's going on.
You're welcome to have faith in the pronouncements of the UN if you like, but others choose not to. And the Hamas charter is available on the web, it's not "Israeli hasbara."
None of this thread alters the facts of my OP. Feel free to continue without me.
You're telling me you don't actually know where your talking points originate from?
The point you missed about that is that "They were going to do a genocide if we didn't do ours first" is not a defense to the allegation, its more of a confirmation of it.
While the Israeli (and especially the American) case for war against Iran is morally and legally dubious at best, there is very little actual evidence that their conduct has been uniquely or unusually cruel, or that civilians are being deliberately targeted as a matter of policy.
In any large-scale armed conflict, civilian casualties unfortunately occur. International humanitarian law attempts to minimise this through principles such as distinction, proportionality, and precaution in attack. These rules recognise that even precision weapons can fail, intelligence can be incomplete, and combatants may place military assets within civilian areas.
That does not make civilian deaths acceptable, and any alleged violations should be investigated. But it also means that high civilian casualties alone are not proof that a campaign is deliberately targeting civilians.
I also suspect this conflict will ultimately be worse for American foreign policy aims in the Middle East than a nuclear-armed Iran would have been. But reducing complex international conflicts to a black and white narrative in which the United States and Israel are treated as uniquely cruel actors does little to clarify what is actually happening or how these conflicts unfold in the real world. It is also worth remembering that less than three months ago the Iranian government was surveilling, imprisoning, and torturing many of the same Iranians whose suffering we are now rightly concerned about.
Real-world international relations rarely conform to a simple morality play,
It's even more valuable to remember that it wouldn't have happened without sustained interference and crippling economic sanctions visited by the US and Israel over the decades. An Iran free to trade and govern without external sabotage, both within its borders and throughout the region, is more than likely a benign beast.
But we'll never know that, will we?
Benign?
Their armed proxy undermined Lebanon and fought for the tyrant Assad.
They armed Russia, after it invaded Ukraine.
Their opposition to the existence of the state of Israel undermined support there for a two state outcome and thus made the circumstance of Palestinians worse. And they knew it.
The design of their rule of Iran was based on limiting the peoples freedom – including who they could vote for to be their president.
None of that was caused by sanctions.
The regime also had the option of not being a brutal theocracy with a severe oversupply of religious police and shortage of human rights. They could have chosen to not fund actual terrorist organizations overseas to meddle in the affairs of other states. Or to not deliberately launch ballistic missiles at civilian targets.
But sure, that's all America's fault.
Also, Israel did not have the capacity to meaningfully threaten Iran in 1979 after the revolution.
But I'm sure you won't let a few inconvenient facts get in the way of your moralising.
'But reducing complex international conflicts to a black and white narrative in which the United States and Israel are treated as uniquely cruel actors does little to clarify what is actually happening or how these conflicts unfold in the real world.'
Youve done it again. Shilling for Netanyahu (chief genocider) and child rapist Trump. You really think that a genocide doe not involve "uniquely cruel actors"?? Its a US/Israeli partnership requiring both the cruelty of the Israeli state and the US state. Perhaps you could just come out and declare your Zionism. Puckish Rogue has and Psycho obviously is. But you seem a little hesitant.
What is it with you and the personal insults?
I’m not shilling for anyone. Simply making an argument that’s a little more complicated than ‘Israel bad.’
If anyone is tying themselves in knots here, it’s people on the left who simultaneously want Iran to be both a helpless victim of Western aggression and a heroic anti-imperialist power standing up to the US and Israel.
Those two claims cannot both be true at the same time.
You say you care about the Iranian people, but your argument effectively strips them, and their country, of any agency. You treat Iran not as a state with its own history, institutions, and choices, but as a passive object onto which Western power simply acts.
That is not analysis, and it certainly does not help us understand what is actually happening.
If you don't have anything actually substantive to add then maybe just let the grownups do the talking?
For Bibi, buoyed by the IDF's 'success' in the Gaza strip and Lebanon, the latest (pre-emptive) attacks on Iran are mostly about staying in power and out of jail.
For convicted felon Trump, imho, it's about greed (drill, baby, drill), vanity and mid-terms. Bored of peace, he can kiss a Nobel Prize goodbye, but no matter.
Maybe this latest war will also prove an effective means of executing the lasting regime changes many wish for. In the fog of 'war' on many fronts, might rules.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/mar/09/cuba-us-regime-change-iran-war
I think we’re talking past each other here…
I’ve already said that Israel’s stated reasons for attacking Iran are morally weak, militarily dubious, and quite possibly unlawful. The American justification is even less coherent, ranging from claims about Iran’s nuclear programme to the idea that this was somehow a pre-emptive response to retaliation for Israel’s own pre-emptive strike. Which would be a very novel interpretation of international law.
I also agree that domestic politics likely plays a significant role. Netanyahu clearly has powerful incentives to stay in power and out of jail, and Trump has every reason to want to project strength heading into the midterms and boost his popularity.
How launching into an incredibly unpopular war without even attempting to build domestic support achieves that aim is at best unclear.
But there is a critical distinction in international law between jus ad bellum (the legality of starting a war) and jus in bello (the rules governing how a war is fought).
Israel and the US look deeply suspect on the former. The available evidence so far does not show systemic or egregious violations of the latter.
Possibly. I believe the current Iranian regime is reprehensible. Still, I'd like to think it would be difficult to persuade me that assassinating their leaders, and the leaders after that, and so on, was the best/only way forward.
Israelis' case for war is pretty clear: having taken out the proxy forces that were attacking them directly, the next step is to prevent the people running the proxies from building them back up again.
The US is altogether different. The administration seems to have no idea why it started the war, what it wants from it, what it expects from its allies, or how it might end it. I guess we shouldn't be surprised about that given it's the most corrupt and incompetent American government in my lifetime at least, but somehow I'm still surprised.
Under-reported is the use of AI for target selection in these attacks. If the US & Israel is using AI like Israel has in Gaza then the AI system will adjudge targets based on a score.
In Gaza, as little as being related to a Hamas member, working for a UN agency and posting anti-Israeli comments on social media could be assessed as making you an automatically selected legitimate target for killing using weapons with huge payloads and only mediocre accuracy.
One suggestion is the AI is marking these schools and hospitals as targets because children of regime members attend the school (AI may not consider age to be relevant in assessing if they are relatives and therefore targets – it certainly doesn't in Gaza) or members of hospital staff have been making online content hostile to the USA/Israel or they simply treating injured members of the ruling elites.
The circumstances that AI has been deployed in target selection in Iran and Gaza needs urgent international scrutiny. Handing over morality to machines does not abjure anyone from the consequences of committing war crimes.
In the absence of significant evidence to the contrary, AI generated kill lists should be treated as the military rubber stamping their most provisional target lists. Lavender is fundamentally a statistical system based on examining contact networks superficially (the nature of these contacts are not investigated), so it has a significant false positive rate (as all statistical systems do). Also of concern is that the Israeli military doesn't show any signs of differentiating between the military and civil divisions within Hamas who were the operational government in Gaza. In all probability Lavender has been setup and trained to make Gazan civil service into approved targets. I've also seen zero reporting that military objectives or firing positions are shown to Lavender at all, making a defense of the systems use based on military target justification a nonsense.
I totally agree, but something that will never happen, now we no longer live in a world with international law. And morality doesn't feature without it either.