In just one week, more than 1,000 Iranians have been killed in the war between Israel–U.S. forces and Iran. Among them were 165 elementary school children. The violence has also claimed 120 Israeli lives, 70 Lebanese, six Americans, and 80 sailors who drowned at sea.
Numbers like these quickly become statistics, cold figures buried beneath the dust of destruction and devastation.
But behind every number is a human life abruptly erased. For mothers and fathers, wives and husbands, sons and daughters, brothers, sisters, friends, families and neighbours, these deaths are not statistics. They are wounds that will never heal, a lifetime of grief and emptiness left behind.
In the theatre of war, soldiers are remembered as heroes and martyrs, honoured with medals and memorials. Yet the civilians, children in classrooms, families in their homes, people simply trying to live ordinary lives, are reduced to “casualties,” anonymous entries in a grim tally.
The leaders who initiate and sustain these wars sit safely behind their political fortresses and protective “iron domes,” often far removed from the suffering their decisions unleash. To them, the deaths of innocents are frequently dismissed as collateral damage, a sterile phrase that conceals unbearable human tragedy.
Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the ruling Mullahs of Iran, you are all responsible for bringing in this catastrophe. When wars are ignited or prolonged, it is the innocent who pay the price. Civilians and little angels vanish in seconds, their lives extinguished before they have truly begun.
In the end, the question: who is winning and who is losing in this war and other deadly fights? It is inconsequential, but what is consequential is the immense loss of human lives and the slow erosion of our shared humanity.
Promod Puri.com 