Manu Joseph: Why the deaths of more than 100 schoolgirls should be reason enough to end the Iran war

A Tomahawk missile is more than four times the height of an Iranian child. It can carry a 400kg warhead and fly at the speed of a commercial aircraft over 2,000km. It can even fly just 30-50 metres above the ground.

It knows precisely where it is going, and its target can be changed mid-flight. On 28 February, an American Tomahawk struck Shajareh Tayyebeh, a girls’ elementary school in Minab in southern Iran. This cruise missile, which costs at least $1 million, was probably the most expensive thing ever to enter that school.

Some children survived. But then came another Tomahawk, sent precisely to kill survivors and saviours in a tactic that is nattily called ‘double-tap.’ Then, according to reports, there was a third one. According to Iran, more than 175 died, most of them school children.

In a video of the aftermath, scores of adults are seen trying to clear debris on the school’s campus, their wails and screams filling the air. At first, US President Donald Trump said that Iran may have struck its own school, but a preliminary report of the US military suggests that it struck the school by mistake. The school was very close to Iranian military structures that were being struck around the time.

It was once a military building, it claimed, and the Tomahawk had old data. Since the tragedy, the war has continued. The world is not so heartless that it does not care about what happened in the school.

In a world that has become more practical than ever, the event does not appear to be pivotal. But even in such a cold rational world, we still need one ideal. If you have mistakenly bombed a school, you cannot say ‘oops’ and move on.