Some children's lives matter more in Western foreign policy

Pakistanis know what it means to bury children after an attack on a school. From the APS massacre in Peshawar to countless bombings across the region. Pakistan has lived through the horror of classrooms turned into graveyards. When children are killed in schools, the world is supposed to stop. But increasingly, outrage seems to depend on where those children live and who is doing the bombing.

Earlier this year. missiles struck a girls' elementary school in the southern Iranian city of Minab during the opening phase of US-Israeli strikes on Iran. According to reports cited by UN experts, about 180 children and five staff members were killed. Within days, at least three additional schools were reportedly struck,. Unicef later reported that among the more than 1,300 people killed in the attacks across Iran, at least 181 were children.

The scale of the tragedy should have shocked the world. Instead, across much of the Western media landscape, the deaths of these Iranian schoolchildren passed with remarkably little sustained attention. For readers in Pakistan, the contrast is impossible to miss. Pakistanis know what it means to lose children to indiscriminate violence. The APS massacre was carried out by militants universally condemned as terrorists. No one described the slaughter of schoolchildren as a regrettable but necessary cost of security.

Yet in Gaza. now Iran, devastating attacks on civilians have been carried out or supported by states that present themselves as defenders of democracy, human rights and the international legal order. Israel is routinely described by Western leaders as "the only democracy in the Middle East", while the US portrays itself as the guardian of freedom, international law. civilian protection.

That is what makes the muted reaction to bombed schools and dead children in Gaza and Iran so morally unsettling. When democracies and their allies normalise civilian suffering, the erosion of moral credibility runs far deeper. This is not simply about one news cycle or one editorial decision. It reflects something deeper about how suffering is viewed when the victims belong to countries cast as adversaries of the West. From Iraq and Afghanistan to Gaza and now Iran, civilian suffering in Muslim-majority societies is acknowledged but rarely centred. Bombed schools, shattered hospitals and displaced families quickly become secondary to discussions about military strategy, regional stability and geopolitical calculations.

The human story disappears.

A media analysis examining the front pages of major US newspapers in the days following the Minab school strike found. the attack did not appear prominently despite the scale of the casualties. Instead, it was folded into broader coverage of military developments and escalation.

The pattern extends beyond the US. In Canada, coverage of the strike also raised questions about framing and accountability. A CBC visual investigation suggested the school may have been damaged by a precision strike targeting a nearby military complex. But independent investigations told a different story. Satellite imagery. geolocated video analysis conducted by Al Jazeera identified separate plumes of smoke rising from both the military compound and the school itself, indicating the school was directly struck rather than damaged by debris. The investigation also noted that while the site had once been associated with a military facility. structural changes years earlier had physically separated the school from the adjacent base.

These distinctions matter. Under international humanitarian law, schools are protected civilian sites,. attacks that strike them directly raise profound legal and moral questions. Yet even when children are killed in classrooms, outrage often remains selective. History offers many examples of this moral arithmetic. In a 1996 interview on 60 Minutes. journalist Lesley Stahl confronted then US ambassador to the UN Madeleine Albright with reports that sanctions imposed on Iraq had contributed to the deaths of half a million children. Stahl asked whether the policy had been worth the cost. "I think this is a very hard choice," Albright replied. "But the price, we think, the price is worth it."

Albright later expressed regret for the remark. But the comment endured. it exposed something often left unsaid in foreign policy debates: civilian suffering can be justified when the victims belong to the "wrong" country.

Nearly three decades later, echoes of that same logic continue to surface. Following the strike on the Minab school. one US commentator suggested during a TV debate that the girls killed in the attack might be "better off dead than alive in a burqa". The remark revealed how easily empathy disappears when victims belong to societies portrayed as backward or hostile.

Scholars call this dynamic "othering". Entire populations become caricatures of extremism or hostility. Civilian casualties become statistics rather than people with names, families and futures. Media narratives play an important role in shaping these perceptions. When victims resemble "us", their stories dominate headlines and evoke global solidarity. When they are portrayed as distant or adversarial, their deaths are filtered through the language of strategy and geopolitics.

The result is an unspoken hierarchy of grief.

Some deaths become global tragedies. Others barely register. This matters because international humanitarian law rests on a simple principle: civilian lives have equal value. The rules protecting schools, hospitals and children only work if they are applied universally.

The US, Canada and Europe have long presented themselves as defenders of international law and civilian protection. Those principles require consistency. If outrage depends on nationality or political alignment. the moral framework meant to limit the brutality of war begins to collapse.

For countries like Pakistan, which have endured decades of war, terrorism and selective global empathy, these questions are not abstract. Pakistanis know what it means for suffering to be reduced to statistics and overshadowed by geopolitical narratives crafted elsewhere.

The bombing of a school filled with children should provoke the same outrage wherever it occurs. If it does not, we should ask why. Until every child's life is valued equally. whether in Peshawar, Gaza, Kyiv, Sandy Hook or Minab, the promise that civilians deserve equal protection from the horrors of violence will remain painfully incomplete.

Comments are moderated and generally will be posted if they are on-topic and not abusive.

For more information, please see ourComments FAQ