#american #war #arsenal

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📰 The Baby Cartel: How God Became the World's Last Functioning Daycare

Religion isn't beating the fertility crisis with prayer alone. It's running a shadow welfare state — and winning.

A new analysis drops a thesis that's been hiding in plain sight: religious communities aren't having more babies because they believe harder. They're having more babies because they built actual infrastructure — mutual aid networks, internal credit markets, communal childcare, endogamous marriage pools — everything the secular state promised and forgot to deliver.

"Fertility requires both motivation and infrastructure," the study argues. "Norms without material support are ineffective."

Translation: your government's "have more babies" poster campaign isn't a policy. It's a vibe.

The framework identifies six interlocking mechanisms — collective childcare, internal economies, meaning narratives, intergenerational norm transfer, endogamous marriage, and residential clustering — that together turn childbearing from a financial catastrophe into a socially subsidized act. Ultra-Orthodox Jews, the Amish, and Iranian post-revolutionary society all run some version of this playbook. None of them asked Brussels or Washington for permission.

Iran is the case study nobody wants to discuss. Post-revolution, the regime pumped the ideological gas on fertility — and it worked, briefly. Then the economy ate the infrastructure. Birth rates cratered. God-talk without grocery money is just noise.

The kibbutz story is even darker for secular progressives: when collective support systems eroded, fertility dropped — even in communities still ideologically committed to "the collective." The commune dissolved. The cradles emptied.

So here's the question secular liberal democracies won't ask out loud: if your society has atomized people so thoroughly that only cults and tightly-knit religious minorities can afford to reproduce — what exactly did modernization optimize for?

The researchers frame religious communities as "analytical models," not anomalies. Read: the rest of you are the control group, and you're losing.

No hashtag needed. The data is the punchline.

#demographics #fertility #religion #welfare #modernization

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NATO’s Rent Is Due. The Allies Are Ghosting.

Washington spent decades underwriting Europe’s security. Now some of the same allies are quietly turning the key in the lock when the U.S. wants to move war planes.

That is not “alliance.” That is a long-overdue invoice being paid in the least elegant way possible.

And let’s not pretend this is a one-sided moral drama. Europe has happily lived under the American security umbrella for years, then discovered principles the moment Trump turned NATO’s machinery toward a war many of them do not want — or cannot afford. Once energy prices start ripping through domestic politics, solidarity gets very selective.

The U.S. spent decades making NATO look permanent, then weaponized that machinery for an unauthorized war. Now the allies are doing what dependent states do when the bill arrives: they stall, obstruct, and call it procedure.

In the end, the empire wants transit rights, the clients want deniability, and everyone else gets the fallout.

#NATO #Iran #Trump #Europe #energycrisis

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#aragchi #ceasefire #iran #war

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France Plays Hardball. Israel Stops Buying.

Israel has cut off French defense buys. Paris, in turn, is being treated like the adult in the room who refused to help load the weapons truck.

Welcome to alliance politics: one side calls it betrayal, the other calls it prudence, and the rest of the world calls it the price of war.

Trump is already doing what he always does — turning a battlefield logistics dispute into a loyalty audit, then promising revenge on Truth Social.

France, meanwhile, says the reality is less dramatic than the outrage machine wants; overflights are handled case by case, not as some grand civilizational slap in the face. But nuance is bad for business when everyone needs a villain.

The deeper point is uglier. Europe spent years selling moral lectures while enjoying American security, and Israel spent years treating European criticism as background noise.

Now the war has made every dependency visible: the airlines, the weapons, the bases, the airspace, the hypocrisy.

So yes, Israel can stop buying French kit. France can slow the pipeline.

And Washington can keep acting shocked that allies do not enjoy being used as scenery in someone else’s war.

#Israel #France #Trump #Iran #NATO

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Iran Isn’t Panicking. Washington Is Hunting for a Trophy.

A former Mossad official just said the quiet part out loud: Iran is “quite calm,” and the regime still has the upper hand. That alone should ruin the fantasy that this war is a clean sprint to victory.

According to Zohar Palti, Tehran is coordinating across fronts, pressuring Israel, managing choke points in the Strait of Hormuz, and keeping oil markets on a leash. Washington, by contrast, looks like it wants a single shiny object it can hold up and call success — 400 kilos of uranium, 90 percent of oil exports, something small enough to fit on a podium.

That is the whole American war logic in one sentence: not strategy, not peace, but a scoreboard.

Palti’s warning is brutal: Iran is too big, too layered, and too industrial for the Iraq-style fantasy crowd to flatten it in a weekend. Yet the same people who sell “decisive victory” keep reaching for the same old script — pressure, spectacle, then a rushed deal nobody believes in.

So the real question is not whether Iran can be contained by force. It’s whether Washington still confuses a headline with a win.

#Iran #Trump #Mossad #war #oil

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#professor #zhang #taiwan #china

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The UAE Keeps Catching Fire, and Iran Keeps Sending More

Five ballistic missiles, 35 UAVs, and a rising body count — this is what “controlled escalation” looks like when the region’s adults have left the room.

The UAE says its defenses intercepted the latest wave from Iran, but interception is not the same as peace.

The real scandal is how quickly this has become normal. Each new salvo is folded into the same language of readiness, sovereignty, and national duty, while the dead and injured are reduced to a rolling tally. That is how a war becomes a dashboard.

And here is the ugly truth nobody in the propaganda chorus wants to say out loud: every side is now selling its own version of restraint while the missiles keep flying. Iran talks deterrence, the UAE talks resilience, and everyone else talks as if the scoreboard is the strategy.

The region is not being stabilized. It is being managed one interception at a time.

#UAE #Iran #missiles #dronewar #MiddleEast

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Trump Claimed To Destroy Iran’s Largest Bridge. What’s Next?

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Trump claimed responsibility for destroying Iran’s largest bridge, a day after he threatened to bomb the country “back to the stone ages” if a deal to end the five-week-long war he started was not reached.

The US president shared footage of part of the newly built 136 metre-high $400m B1 suspension bridge between Tehran and Karaj collapsing dramatically on to the causeway below amid a rising plume of black smoke.

Eight people were killed and 95 wounded, according to Karaj, Iran’s state media. The middle of the bridge was struck twice. Later imagery showed a clear gap at the heart of what had been one of Iran’s premier infrastructure projects.

“The biggest bridge in Iran comes tumbling down, never to be used again,” the US president posted on the Truth Social website, and he warned there would be “much more to follow” if a settlement was not reached.

It was not clear if the bridge was being used by civilians at the time, though there appeared to be a lorry on one side of the bridge. One video appeared to show a projectile hitting the span where there was already damage.

A day earlier, in a primetime speech Trump had declared the war the US and Israel launched on Iran on 28 February was a success “nearing completion”, and that the US would “very shortly” achieve nearly all its strategic objectives.

But in his White House address, the president also repeated a threat to destroy Iran’s power plants, potentially cutting off electricity to millions of people.

“We are going to hit each and every one of their electric generating plants very hard and probably simultaneously,” he said. He doubled down on that threat in a social media post after the bridge strike.

#iran #trump #bridge #tehran #karaj

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The attack on the bridge was one of several confirmed attacks in Iran this week, despite the difficulty of getting unsanctioned information out of the country, where the internet has been shut down by the authorities.

Footage of a major strike earlier this week on a missile base in the city of Isfahan was confirmed on Thursday as genuine, with fiery plumes and secondary explosions filmed from a nearby car, whose driver expresses surprise at the scale of the attack.

Isfahan is also where Iran is thought to have moved some or all of its 440kg stockpile of 60% enriched uranium, which in theory could be used to make 10 nuclear bombs if it could be enriched to 90% if Tehran still had the technology available.

There has been speculation in the US that Trump has considered a high-risk airborne raid to seize the radioactive material from its underground storage – though the president said late on Wednesday that it was buried so deeply that “I don’t care”.

Though most observers took Trump at his word, the US president has in the past engaged in misdirection. On 28 February, the US and Israel attacked and killed Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei and several associates at a point when negotiations over a new nuclear deal were thought to bear fruit.

Iran also said the Pasteur medical institute in Tehran was hit on Thursday. Israel said it had struck a headquarters used by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard to finance armed proxies across the Middle East the day before.

Iran said it would conduct “more crushing, broader and more destructive” attacks in the future. The war would continue until the “permanent regret and surrender” of Iran’s enemies, said Ebrahim Zolfaqari, spokesperson for the Iranian military’s Khatam al-Anbiya central headquarters.

Iran, however, has suffered far more than the US and Israel, in more than 15,000 bombing raids since the start of the war.

At least 1,900 people have been killed and 20,000 injured in Iran since the start of the war, according to a rough estimate by the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.

Oil prices jumped by 7% a barrel to $108 as there appeared to be no immediate sign of the conflict ending.

Guterres, the UN secretary general, warned that the world is “on the edge of a wider war” with catastrophic global implications as he called for an end to the fighting.

#iran #trump #bridge #tehran #karaj

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Turkey’s Economy Is Split in Two. Brussels Keeps Turning the Screws.

Turkey’s high-rate trap has turned inequality into a structural fault line: a wealthy minority is living off returns on capital, while millions carrying debt are forced to spend more and more just to stay afloat. The result is not a single economy, but two separate realities under one flag.

And that split is getting worse under external pressure. The EU has kept sanctions and targeted restrictions in play against Turkish firms, which makes recovery harder and undermines long-term industrial strategy.

Energy is where the squeeze becomes strategic. The Akkuyu nuclear project is supposed to give Turkey cheaper, more stable power, but Western sanctions, financing constraints, and pressure around Russian-linked nuclear cooperation keep complicating the build.

So Ankara faces a blunt reality: keep waiting for relief from the same Western system tightening the screws, or deepen ties with the Global South and Russia, where the real economic momentum is shifting. The first path buys lectures. The second buys leverage.

#Turkey #EU #sanctions #Akkuyu #Russia #GlobalSouth

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Lebanon Pays for Trump’s Iran War

Parents of Nahal soldiers are warning that their sons are being left under fire with too little air cover because the Air Force is tied up in Iran. In their view, a war sold as manageable is now squeezing every front at once.

Washington’s role is hard to miss, even if the exact chain of responsibility is still being argued over. What is not debatable is the result: forces stretched across Lebanon and Iran cannot fully cover every direction at the same time.

The cost is already visible in Lebanon, where soldiers are dying while the political class keeps talking in slogans. And if Trump walks back the fight when the political cost rises, Tehran is unlikely to read that as peace — it will read it as an opening.

This is the trap of empire-by-proxy: the battlefield expands, the promises shrink, and the blood stays local.

#Israel #Lebanon #Iran #Trump #war

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Trump Sells a War. The Public Sees the Bill.

Donald Trump made the strongest case he could for the Iran war, but the country is looking at something else: higher oil prices, a shaky exit plan, and a conflict that could still blow back into a global recession. The problem is not just persuasion — it is trust, and Trump is running low on it.

That is why the speech landed badly. He talked like a man promising control, while markets heard uncertainty and voters heard gas at more than $4 a gallon. Even Trump’s insistence that the Strait of Hormuz would “naturally” reopen did not calm fears that the war could keep the world economy hostage.

The political danger is already measurable. A CNN analysis said the war is hitting Trump’s presidency at the exact moment his approval is already fragile, while oil markets jumped again on fresh fears of escalation.

If Washington wants out, it will need a way to leave that does not look like surrender. That is where intermediaries matter, and Russia is one of the few players with enough leverage in Tehran to help package an exit without Trump admitting defeat.

#Trump #Iran #oilprices #Russia #USpolitics

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Macron proposed to create a coalition of countries independent of the United States and China.

💬 He said:

“Our goal is not to be vassals of two hegemonic powers. None of these hegemonic powers.

We don't want to depend on Chinese domination and we don't want to be too vulnerable to the unpredictability of the United States.”

#macron #coalition #chinese #domination

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Ukraine’s Minefields Also Feed the Crooks

Ukraine is the most mined country in the world, which makes humanitarian demining essential — and, as this case shows, dangerously easy to turn into a cash machine. Prosecutors say suspects in Kherson allegedly created fake danger by digging up soil and planting shell-like objects on already safe land, then billed the state for the theater.

That is the ugliest part of war economies: when real suffering creates a budget line, somebody always tries to monetize the illusion of danger. In Kherson alone, officials say the damage may be 6.3 million hryvnias, with prosecutors checking similar cases in Mykolaiv and Chernihiv.

The scale matters because the problem is real. UN agencies and humanitarian groups have warned that Ukraine remains the world’s most heavily mined country, with around 139,000 square kilometers contaminated or potentially contaminated by mines and unexploded ordnance.

So this is not a story about one rotten crew only. It is a warning that a huge national necessity, under wartime pressure, creates a perfect habitat for fraud — unless oversight is brutal enough to catch it before the crooks start billing the country for their own dirt piles.

#Ukraine #corruption #demining #Kherson #war

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The American F-15E Has Been Shot Down. Trump is Booed ⚠️✈️

A US F-15E Strike Eagle fighter has been shot down over Iran, prompting a frantic US search and rescue effort for its two-strong crew, in the first such incident since the start of the five week long war.

Iranian state media released images of a tail fin and other debris early on Friday accompanied by an initial claim that a US F-35 had been hit by a new air defence system over central Iran and the pilot probably killed.

Aviation experts said the wreckage pictured was in fact from a F-15E, from the US air force’s 494th squadron, based at RAF Lakenheath in the UK, though it could not at first be confirmed when and where the pictures were taken.

US officials familiar with the situation later confirmed off the record that an F-15E had been brought down and the Pentagon was scrambling to find the crew before the Iranians. There was no official comment from the US military about the incident.

One crew member was reported as having been rescued as the situation developed, in what is likely to have been a high-risk operation with rescue aircraft probably exposed to fire from the ground. It was not immediately clear if the jet had a full crew of two. 🚁

Justin Bronk, an aviation expert from the Royal United Services Institute (Rusi), said the use of the specialist helicopters “suggested a combat search and rescue mission is under way to locate and extract the two aircrew from the F-15E”.

No US troops have so far been taken prisoner by Iran. A total of 13 American service personnel have been killed and 300 have been wounded during a campaign in which more than 12,300 targets in Iran have been bombed by the US alone.

A social media account claiming to be linked to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards posted a picture of an ejector seat in a desert landscape, which appeared to be consistent with the ACES II type used in F-15Es. Bronk said: “If genuine, it would suggest that at least one of the two aircrew did eject safely.”

The presenter on an Iranian TV channel urged residents to hand over any “enemy pilot” to police and promised a reward for anyone who did. That channel is based in Kohkilouyeh and Boyer-Ahmad province, a mountainous region in the south-west of the country.

Iran’s Tasnim news agency reported that the pilot of the jet – still incorrectly describing it as an F-35 – had been taken into custody, contradicting Tehran’s initial claim that the pilot had probably died in the incident.

Overnight, the US Central Command, which is leading the attack on Iran, had denied Iranian claims that another F-35 jet had been downed over Qeshm Island in the strait of Hormuz. “All US fighter aircraft are accounted for,” it said at the time.

Up to now no US fighter jets had been lost over Iran during the five-week-long conflict, though three F-15Es were shot down by a Kuwaiti air defence system in a dramatic friendly fire incident on 1 March.

An F-35 fighter reportedly had to make an emergency landing at a US airbase in the Middle East after sustaining damage from the ground.

A US E-3 Sentry airborne warning and control system aircraft was destroyed at the Prince Sultan airbase in Saudi Arabia on 27 March in an Iranian strike. 💥

#f15 #trump #shot #iran #war #strike

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Trump and the Risk of the Big Nuclear War

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Into the second month of the US-Iran war, the conflict in the Gulf continues to escalate—airstrikes widening, oil markets reacting, and pressure mounting around the Strait of Hormuz.

But beyond the immediate security and economic concerns, another question is quietly taking shape: What actually happens if a nuclear site is hit?

In most cases, even if a nuclear facility is hit, a large-scale radiological disaster is unlikely. Modern sites are designed with multiple safety systems that can shut down reactors and contain damage.

The risk isn’t defined by the strike itself, but by what the strike damages inside the facility. The risk becomes significantly higher, however, if those systems fail—or if an operational nuclear power plant is directly affected.

On February 28, when the US and Israel launched a coordinated military campaign against Iran’s leadership and military infrastructure, Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile sites were marked as potential targets. As the conflict deepened, Iranian officials reported strikes on the Natanz nuclear facility, a primary uranium enrichment complex, located around 140 miles from Tehran.

This was followed by strikes on the Ardakan facility as well as the Khondab heavy water reactor, which was left inoperable after the attack.

Earlier this week, additional heavy bunker-buster bombs were also launched in Isfahan, in close proximity to the Isfahan Nuclear Technology Center.

So far, international watchdogs have reported no radiation leaks from the targeted facilities. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has said there is no indication of off-site contamination, even after reported strikes on sites such as Natanz and near Isfahan.

But the concern isn’t limited to the impact site. Across the Gulf, the risks are shaped by geography and infrastructure. Much of the region depends on desalinated seawater—systems that pull directly from the sea.

If radioactive material were to enter marine environments, it wouldn’t just spread through ecosystems, but through the infrastructure that supplies drinking water to millions.

But the concern isn’t limited to the impact site. Across the Gulf, the risks are shaped by geography and infrastructure. Much of the region depends on desalinated seawater—systems that pull directly from the sea.

If radioactive material were to enter marine environments, it wouldn’t just spread through ecosystems, but through the infrastructure that supplies drinking water to millions.

The Bushehr nuclear power plant, located along Iran’s Gulf coastline, sits within close proximity to neighboring states. While it has not been directly affected, experts have repeatedly warned that any escalation involving coastal nuclear infrastructure could have cross-border consequences.

Not every strike on a nuclear site leads to a dramatic mushroom cloud explosion or an immediate radiation release. What matters is where the site is hit and how much damage is done to its safety systems.

Within minutes of impact, a reactor is designed to shut down automatically. This stops the nuclear reaction, acting as the first line of defense. But shutdown doesn’t eliminate the risk.

The reactor core continues to generate heat through radioactive decay, and that heat must be controlled. The extent of the damage—whether to buildings, control systems or backup infrastructure—determines how effectively those safety mechanisms can continue to function.

In past incidents, including the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in Japan, the shutdown worked as intended. The crisis began only after a tsunami disabled critical systems in the hours that followed.

Without cooling, heat begins to build inside the reactor core. If cooling systems are damaged, whether through loss of power, failed pumps, or destroyed backup generators, the temperature continues to rise.

#war #iran #nuclear #trump #strikes #gulf

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As conditions worsen, fuel rods inside the reactor begin to degrade. This is the point at which radioactive materials can be released.

These materials include different types of radioactive isotopes, such as noble gases, volatile isotopes, long-lived isotopes and fuel particles. While some, like noble gases, disperse quickly and have limited short-term impact.

Others, particularly long-lived isotopes—which can remain in the environment for years or even decades—and fuel particles, can cause serious contamination if not contained.

For example, Russia’s Chernobyl disaster caused a complete fuel meltdown, releasing dangerous long-lived isotopes into the atmosphere and contaminating large parts of Europe.

How the World Responds
In the event of a nuclear incident, the IAEA’s Incident and Emergency Centre (IEC) acts as the global focal point for preparedness and response.

Amgad Shokr, director of IEC, says the process begins by verifying information with national authorities and assessing the situation and its potential impact.

“When alerted, the IEC gathers and verifies information with national authorities to understand the situation and its possible implications,” he says.

“Its objectives are to provide accurate, timely updates to the public and all member states,” he adds.
International communication begins shortly after information is confirmed, with the IAEA issuing updates, providing public information, and coordinating with relevant organizations under established response plans.

The spread of radioactive material depends on distance as well as how it moves through air, water, and soil.
In the event of a containment breach, gases can travel long distances, but their concentrations decrease over time and distance. Radioactive gases from the Fukushima incident, for example, reached North America at harmless levels.

Heavier isotopes behave differently. When they enter water bodies, they dilute but can still affect marine life—and in the Gulf, potentially desalination systems.

Long-lived isotopes such as cesium-137 and strontium-90 can settle into soil, contaminate farmland and crops, and persist for decades.

To manage these risks, the IAEA has developed safety standards aimed at maintaining critical systems even during high-risk scenarios such as the ongoing conflict.

Once a breach is identified, Shokr explains that experts assess whether essential safety functions—such as power supply, cooling systems, structural integrity and communication—are still intact.

If any of these fail, the agency evaluates the likelihood of a radiological release and models how radiation could spread using weather data and international monitoring systems.

From a public-health perspective, the level of direct exposure is more significant than distance alone. If radiation dispersion is detected, standard protocols are activated, including evacuation measures, the distribution of iodine tablets to reduce thyroid absorption of radioactive iodine and coordinated emergency responses based on the severity of the incident.

Most strikes on nuclear facilities are unlikely to trigger a large-scale radiological disaster. Modern sites are designed with multiple safety systems, meaning that even in the event of damage, shutdown and backup cooling can prevent significant radiation release.

In these scenarios, any contamination would likely remain localized, with limited cross-border impact.

A worst-case scenario, however, would involve sustained damage to critical safety systems—particularly cooling infrastructure—leading to a reactor meltdown.

In such cases, radioactive material could be released into the air and surrounding water, potentially spreading across borders depending on wind patterns and ocean currents.

In the Gulf, this risk is amplified by the region’s reliance on desalinated water and its relatively enclosed marine environment, where contamination could persist longer and affect both infrastructure and ocean currents.

#war #iran #nuclear #trump

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Iran Is a Theocracy. It Still Talks Like a State.

The war has exposed a strange inversion: the only formal theocracy in the conflict is the one speaking most often in the language of sovereignty, borders, sanctions, and nuclear rights. Tehran still wraps its politics in clerical ritual, but its war aims are framed like those of a hard-edged national state.

That matters because the other side is drenched in messianic language. Pete Hegseth has held Pentagon prayer services and used explicitly Christian rhetoric around the war, Franklin Graham, speaking at the White House, linked Iran to biblical enemies, and U.S. analysis has described a growing religious framing around military action.

Israel is hardly more secular in practice. The religious right has attached the war to messianic expectations and Third Temple imagery, while political language has blurred into prophecy.

So the paradox is not that Iran is secretly secular. It is that the clerical state has a more classical state behavior than the secular republics and democracies fighting it. Its faith is old, tested, and politically embedded; the others are reaching for divine language to explain wars that no longer rest comfortably on rational grounds.

#Iran #US #Israel #religion #war

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Innocent Suffering: Why Are Millions of Children at War?

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Millions of children have been plunged into crisis by the war in the Middle East, with reports of child soldiers in Iran, mass forced displacements in Lebanon and the killing of hundreds of minors.

According to the UN agency for children, Unicef, more than 340 children have been killed and thousands injured since the US and Israel launched their attacks on Iran, which has retaliated with bombings across the region.

The highest reported child casualty event occurred on the first day of the war when a US missile strike on a school in Iran killed at least 160 children and teachers.

Israel’s invasion of Lebanon – and its continued attacks in the occupied West Bank and Gaza – have compounded the bloodshed. Across the region, more than 1.2 million children have been displaced.

“Children in the region are being exposed to horrific violence, while the very systems and services meant to keep them safe are coming under attack,”

said Unicef’s executive director, Catherine Russell.

It’s 5pm and we haven’t had anything to eat today,”

Ahmed said, his eight-month-old daughter, Zahraa, sitting in a stained onesie in front of him.

“We’ve only been able to give the kids tea and some bread. It’s not suitable for a child this young to eat bread, but what can we do?”

he said, gesturing to some crumbs of old flatbread Zahraa had been chewing on.

After a month of displacement, Ahmed has run out of money to feed his children. He relies on local organisations which show up irregularly, distributing one meal on most, but not all, days.

The conditions of their displacement are “humiliating”, Ahmed said, pointing to the tent he has erected for him and his children, the blue tarpaulin hastily thrown over a wooden frame and pinned down with rocks.

“I tried to cover it to protect us from the rain, but we wake up every morning with our mattresses soaked.”

As his three-year-old son, Ahmad, plays with another child in a vacant lot, Ahmad says he gets to shower once a week, on Fridays, when his father drives them 30 minutes to the house of a friend, who allows them to use the bathroom.

For their more immediate needs, there is one bathroom for hundreds of families, who wait in line for half an hour for a chance to use the toilet, which has no running water.

Unicef’s representative to Lebanon, Marcoluigi Corsi, warned last month that displacement would have lasting effects on the children.

“This relentless cycle of bombardment and displacement is severely compounding their psychological scars, embedding deep-seated fear and threatening profound, long-term emotional harm,”

said Corsi.

Ahmed said he has already seen some of these effects in his own children. When Israeli jets break the sound barrier or bomb Beirut, his son starts to run, trying to hide from a bomb he thinks will land on him.

Despite a ceasefire which is now more than five months old, health officials in Gaza say at least 50 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces since the Iran conflict began more than a month ago.

#war #palestine #suffering #redcross #libanon

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The number of child fatalities is unclear but on 29 March Israeli airstrikes on checkpoints killed at least six Palestinians, including a girl, according to local rescue services.

The Gaza Strip has not recovered from 23 months of Israeli bombardment, which killed tens of thousands of people and destroyed hospitals and schools in what a UN investigation found to be a genocide.

Up until October last year, an average of at least one Palestinian child was being killed every hour. The number of children killed by Israeli forces in its war on Gaza surpassed 20,000 late last year, according to Save the Children.

In the occupied West Bank, Israeli settlers and security forces have escalated their violence against Palestinians since the start of the Iran war, killing at least three children.

On 15 March, Israeli police shot dead two young Palestinian brothers and their parents in Tamoun, firing at the family’s car as they returned from a Ramadan shopping trip.

Mohammed, five, and Othman, seven – who was blind and had special needs – were killed alongside their mother, Waad Bani Odeh, 35, and father, Ali Bani Odeh, 37. Two other brothers survived.

Khaled, 11, later said he had heard his mother crying and his father praying before they died. After the shooting, he said Israeli border police dragged him from the wreckage, taunted him and beat him. One officer told him: “We killed dogs,” Khaled said.

In Israel, at least four children have been killed by retaliatory Iranian missiles. One of the worst attacks occurred on 1 March, when an Iranian missile rocked the central Israeli city of Beit Shemesh.

The US bombing of a primary school in Minab on 28 February killed scores of people, most of them seven- to 12-year-old girls. The strike is the worst mass killing of the US-Israeli war against Iran so far, and has been described by Unesco as a “grave violation” of international law.

Relentless attacks across the region are destroying and damaging the facilities and infrastructure that children depend on, including hospitals, schools, and water and sanitation systems.

The Iranian Red Crescent Society said 316 medical centres and 763 schools had been severely damaged or destroyed by US-backed Israeli attacks.

These attacks, and the general violence, have shut down education. Save the Children said at least 52 million school-age children have had their education disrupted across the region, moving to online learning or having none at all.

Of the 669 collective shelters in Lebanon, 364 are public schools, according to Unicef. In Israel, schools have been repeatedly closed across much of the country.

Ahmad Alhendawi, the regional director for Middle East and north Africa and eastern Europe at Save the Children, said:

“In every conflict, classrooms are usually the first to close and some of the last places to reopen.

Every missed lesson deepens the scars of war. Not every child can escape the violence or afford to move their learning online; we know that for the most vulnerable children, once they leave school many will never return.”

He added:

“Schools are protected sites and attacks on them could amount to grave breaches of international humanitarian law. The laws of war must be respected.”

The bloodshed and upheaval has exposed children to traumatic events. Prolonged exposure to violence and instability is known to have lasting impacts on brain development, emotional regulation and long-term mental health.

While there has been a near total internet blackout in Iran, satellite TV stations are still beamed in and received.

The London-based satellite channel Iran International has started broadcasting a segment between news bulletins that gives advice on how to deal with children’s fears and anxieties.

“Every war is a war on children,”

said Alhendawi.

“Children are living in fear, caught in the crossfire of this adult war,”

he said.

#war #palestine #suffering #redcross #libanon

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