There has to be a limit to our depravity. There must be a line that we cannot cross, lest we lost our humanity altogether. And yet increasingly we are stepping over that line.

In the first week of the ongoing war in the Middle East, 168 girls perished in Iran as a US-Israeli missile blew up their school.Even as the US has kept denying this crime, what’s obvious is that this was a private school which the children of Iran’s elite and military attended, and it was precisely targeted to teach the Iranian regime and hierarchy a painful lesson. It could not have been an accident or a mistake, for the US military apparatus, which found the secret hideout of the fallen Khamenei and his family and bombed it with accuracy, could not possibly miss its targets. The school was targeted. The bombing was intentional, deliberate, purposeful. And so, the 168 children became mere collaterals to a war they never started. The so-called leaders of this world have crossed the line. Once again, they have sacrificed the innocent ones at the altar of their modern-day Baals.

Sadly, this recent tragedy in Iran is not an isolated incident or a rarity. In Israel’s other warfront in Gaza, for instance, where 75 thousand Palestinians have already been killed, it is estimated that of this said number, 20,000 were children. Yes, 20 thousand! That means one Palestinian child killed every hour in the last two years of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. 20 thousand! That’s Araneta Coliseum filled to the rafters in an Ateneo-La Salle UAAP game. 20 thousand innocent, powerless, hapless lives gone, snuffed out all too soon.

In point of fact, according to the United Nations, one in six children or 417 million now reside forcibly in conflict areas around the world, a number that has more than doubled since the 1990s. They live in constant danger of losing life and limb, not just from crossfire or direct violence, but also from hunger and malnutrition. Even before the escalation of the Israel-Palestine conflict, the UN had reported that in 2024, 4,676 children were killed globally, a number that already reflected an increasingtrend then. Now that the entire Middle East region is explodinginto a total conflagration, the number of children casualties is expected to rise. Aware of this woeful trend, in last week’s meeting at the UN Human Rights Council, Dr. Cordula Droege, Chief Legal Officer of the International Committee of the Red Cross, issued a stern warning: “…Let me ask you to think of the children that you are lucky enough to have filled your lives. They are living in a time when the world is not just at war – it is preparing for more war. Global military spending is at record highs. Across regions, states are investing in weaponry, modernizing forces, and rearming with a sense of urgency. We would be gravely mistaken to think that any child is safe. Our generation is planting the seeds of system failure in international law, but it is our children who will have to harvest this violent future…Fewer and fewer children are spared.”

Closer to home, we may not be involved in any armed conflicts at the moment, but in recent times, a “war” was waged in our territory that deeply affected our children and youth. In Duterte’s deadly “war on drugs,” innocent children were murdered. We famously remember Kian de los Santos, the 17-year old who begged his assailants to stop because he had an exam the following day. But he was not the only young casualty of Duterte’s senseless war. According to the Human Rights Watch, from 2016 to 2018 alone, more than a hundred children were gunned down. If the total estimate of these extra-judicial killings (EJK) is placed at 30 thousand, we can only guess how many of these were children or minors! But apart from the fallen victims, the surviving children from EJK families have now become a problematic generation. Certainly, many of them, because of the loss of the family bread winner, were forced further into poverty and so, into eking out a living in any desperate ways. More importantly though, these children were deeply traumatized by their tragic experiences and so now suffer various psycho-social issues. A photo-journalist once shared that in his interactions with the surviving children, he counted more than a thousand of them filled with anger and desiring vengeance. The irony, he said, was that some of them when asked before what they ambitioned to become when they grew up, used to say, to become a police man or a military soldier. Now, they are just seething with bloodlust for those who killed their father or brother. So you now have a generation, said the journalist, with a distorted and dark view of the future. Substantially, this is the deeper and far-reaching social cost of Duterte’s drug war.

It is said that a country is judged by how it treats the powerless and not the powerful. This is why the rights and welfare of children have long been protected by international laws. Unequivocally, the killings of children in wars and conflicts across the globe are war crimes. To the Christians among us, Christ’s teachings are explicit as well. Like the Old Testament prophets, he took the side of the anawim or the powerless, once berating his apostles for preventing children to come to him.  He also warned his usual enemies, if you harm any of these little ones, it would be better for you to hang a mill around your neck and throw yourself into the sea! Clearly then, our mandate is to protect and safeguard our children. We must therefore draw the line and raise our voices. To remain silent or indifferent to the plight of our children now is to be complicit to their murder and to condemn ourselves to a future-less world.