The war on Iran has reopened urgent questions about Empire, sovereignty and the limits of international law. The bombing of Shajareh Tayyebeh Girls School in Minab exposes the human cost behind competing claims of lawful force.
By Gillian Schutte
The United States and Israel opened their 2026 campaign against Iran with coordinated strikes that killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and senior military commanders. The decapitation of a sovereign state’s leadership was framed in Western capitals as pre-emptive self-defence. Within days, Iranian sources and humanitarian bodies were reporting hundreds of deaths across the country, including more than 160 killed when a missile struck the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in Minab during school hours. Images of schoolbags buried beneath concrete and dust travelled across the region. The children did not figure prominently in Western legal discourse. The vocabulary shifted instead to escalation management.
When Iran responded with missile and drone strikes against Israeli and allied military infrastructure across the region, Western leaders moved swiftly to condemn the retaliation as disproportionate and destabilising. Civilian casualties in Israel and in neighbouring states hosting Western bases were cited as evidence of recklessness. The initiating violence was stabilised as necessity. The response was pathologised.
The asymmetry is not accidental. It reflects a hierarchy embedded in the so-called rules-based order.
The United Nations Charter recognises the right of self-defence when a state is subjected to armed attack. That principle has been stretched by the United States to justify invasion in Iraq and expanded drone campaigns across multiple sovereign territories. NATO’s intervention in Libya was authorised under the banner of civilian protection and ended in regime collapse and prolonged instability. Israel has conducted sustained operations in Gaza, Lebanon and Syria under an expansive doctrine of anticipatory defence. These precedents are narrated in Western discourse as regrettable but lawful expressions of security.
Iran is denied comparable interpretive latitude.
The destruction of a girls’ school in Minab, with more than a hundred children killed in a single strike, should have triggered serious international legal scrutiny. Instead, the discussion shifted toward the risks posed by Iranian counter-strikes. The moral centre moved away from the dead schoolgirls and toward Atlantic anxieties about regional balance.
This selective framing corrodes the credibility of international law. Law becomes pliable when applied to Western and Western-aligned actors and rigid when invoked against their adversaries. It is within this context that Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly criticised what he calls the replacement of international law with a “rules-based order” whose rules are drafted by a narrow bloc of states and enforced according to political convenience. His observation speaks directly to the structural imbalance now visible in the Security Council and beyond.
China’s President Xi Jinping has similarly urged restraint and respect for sovereignty in statements surrounding the escalation, calling for adherence to the principles of the United Nations Charter and de-escalation through diplomacy. Beijing’s emphasis on non-interference and territorial integrity reflects a multipolar insistence that no single bloc should monopolise the interpretation of global norms. The divergence between Atlantic condemnation of Iranian retaliation and calls for restraint from Moscow and Beijing exposes a fracture within the Security Council itself.
The Security Council was established to prevent unilateral war-making and to embed collective oversight within the international system. Yet when permanent members engage directly or through proxies in targeted killings and regime-level strikes, the Council becomes paralysed. Veto power shields initiators from censure while condemnation flows rapidly toward those who answer force with force. The institutional architecture reveals its bias under pressure.
The schoolgirls of Minab stand as indictment. Their deaths were folded into diplomatic language and forensic qualifiers. Western officials spoke of investigations and unintended consequences. When Iranian missiles struck military installations and infrastructure tied to the initiating assault, Western leaders spoke of violations and escalation. The grammar of outrage followed alliance lines.
Frantz Fanon wrote in The Wretched of the Earth that colonial violence produces counter-violence, and that the colonised are condemned for mirroring the brutality first imposed upon them. The coloniser’s force is described as order. The colonised response is described as savagery. In this moment, Iran occupies the position of the state whose retaliation is framed as illegitimate, even as its leadership was targeted and its civilians were killed.
Gaza remains the most harrowing backdrop. More than seventy thousand Palestinians have been killed since late 2023 according to humanitarian reporting carried across major outlets. Entire districts have been erased. Schools and hospitals have been struck repeatedly. Western capitals sustained military and diplomatic backing for Israel throughout that devastation. The language of proportionality thinned as the death toll rose.
Now the same capitals invoke proportionality against Iran.
This is monstrous exceptionalism. It grants one bloc interpretive supremacy over law and denies parity to those it confronts. It sanctifies pre-emption when exercised by empire and criminalises defence when exercised by its targets. It invokes civilian protection selectively, mourning some children loudly while muting others beneath rubble.
International law cannot survive as a rhetorical instrument wielded asymmetrically. Either it constrains all use of force or it becomes a vocabulary of hierarchy. The Security Council’s paralysis, the Atlantic bloc’s moral selectivity and the rapid criminalisation of Iranian retaliation reveal a system strained by its own double standards.
The question confronting the global South is whether it will continue to internalise Atlantic definitions of legality or insist on a genuinely universal application of principle. The schoolgirls of Minab and the children of Gaza testify to the cost of selective law. Sovereignty measured against the comfort of empire is not sovereignty at all. It is conditional existence within a hierarchy that calls itself order.