Countless pieces of evidence from the current conflict show Iranian ballistic missiles being launched from within or immediately adjacent to schools and hospitals. Satellite imagery, open-source intelligence (OSINT) and consistent local reports confirm that this is not accidental. It is a deliberate, state-level doctrine designed to embed military power within the heart of civilian life.
As the war between the United States, Israel and Iran unfolds, the world has been saturated with images of civilian tragedy emerging from inside Iran. That includes the devastating strike near the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ school in the southern Iranian city of Minab on Feb. 28, day one of U.S. “Operation Epic Freedom” and Israeli “Operation Roaring Lion.” While the loss of more than 150 students sparked immediate global outrage, a critical, strategic question has been ignored: Why was a primary school located directly beside a high-value compound belonging to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps?
For those of us who have spent two decades documenting the civilian battlefield along the border with the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, this pattern is painfully familiar. It is the signature of a specific, radical ideology. At its core, this war is not merely about ballistic trajectories or nuclear ambitions; it is a confrontation with a radical ideology that calculates military success through the weaponization of civilian suffering. In international law, the tactic of “human shielding” is a war crime. But what we are witnessing is a double war crime: a regime that fires sophisticated missiles at Israeli civilians while simultaneously using its own children as a physical buffer for its launchpads.
Furthermore, a profound legal asymmetry defines this conflict—one that receives inaccurate attention or, worse, no mention at all. While Israeli and U.S. air forces utilize precision intelligence to target Iranian military infrastructure and IRGC command centers, resulting in casualties that are overwhelmingly combatant-based, Tehran has unleashed a different class of terror. Reports indicate that up to 50% of the ballistic missiles it has fired utilize cluster submunitions—weapons designed specifically to spread destruction across a wide radius to maximize civilian injuries and deaths. The use of these indiscriminate weapons in civilian areas is a direct violation of the Geneva Convention and international law, yet the global outcry remains focused solely on the defensive response.
The tactic is devastatingly effective. When military infrastructure is embedded in schools or hospitals, any defensive strike by Israel or America creates instant imagery of destruction. This imagery travels across the world in seconds via social media, fueled by propaganda driven by artificial intelligence, long before the military context is ever understood.
Twenty years ago, when I arrived as a student in Sderot, the town was already under a constant rain of rocket fire from Gaza. My work documenting those attacks led me to establish the Sderot Media Center, where I dedicated the following decade to showing the world the reality of living one mile from the world’s most dense human-shield environment. From Israeli disengagement in the summer of 2005 until the horrors of Oct. 7, 2023, roughly 30,000 rockets have been launched from Gaza toward Israeli homes. According to assessments by the Israel Air Forces, some 97% of those rockets were fired from within civilian environments: behind apartment buildings, inside hospitals, mosques or atop schools.
Today, Tehran has adopted this proxy tactic as national policy. Satellite imagery from Planet Labs and analysis by Bellingcat confirm that the Minab school stood within 100 yards of an IRGC Naval Forces military installation. The tragedy did not happen at a school; it happened at a military base that used a school as its front door.
The IRGC’s calculation in this “battlefield of images” is cold and surgical. By embedding high-value targets within civilian no-strike zones, the regime attempts to force its opponents into tactical paralysis. If the military site is not targeted, the weapons remain active and lethal. If the site is targeted, the resulting civilian casualties become the immediate global headline. The IRGC understands that in the 24-hour news cycle, the image of a ruined school and dead students carries more weight than the evidence of the missile launcher hidden inside it.
In 2026, this strategy is amplified by multimillion-dollar social-media campaigns and AI-generated content. Images of destruction reach global audiences within minutes, while the complex military questions, such as why students were placed next to a strategic installation or why teachers warned of military equipment in classrooms, emerge far later, if at all. By the time the OSINT community verifies the proximity of the IRGC compound to the Minab school, the narrative of “unprovoked aggression” has already been cemented, fueling orchestrated demonstrations across the West.
There is a profound moral hypocrisy at play. Many voices that mobilized to condemn wartime strikes during Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza remain silent about the Iranian regime’s domestic brutality. According to reports from Amnesty International and leaked data cited by Time magazine, Iranian security forces have killed upwards of 30,000 to 50,000 of their own citizens during recent waves of anti-government protests. These were civilians demanding freedom, murdered in cold blood by their own government. Yet their deaths rarely spark the global demonstrations seen after a kinetic strike on a military target.
From the hills overlooking Gaza to the current front lines against Tehran, the lesson is clear: Middle Eastern conflicts are fought on two fronts—the battlefield of weapons and the battlefield of images. The more this truth is exposed—the deliberate use of civilians as shields, the calculated weaponization of tragedy and the media manipulation that follows—the more the regime in Tehran is exposed for what it is.
Those who sympathize with this cause are not merely reacting to war; they are amplifying the very strategy of evil that fuels it.
