Even the smallest candle defies the darkest night. — Anonymous Imagine the horror of more than 160 innocent schoolgirls in Tehran obliterated in broad daylight. Their laughter silenced, their futures erased by the cold precision of modern weaponry. The same targeting device that could locate Iran’s Supreme Leader and his family failed to distinguish between military installations and schools, hospitals, and playgrounds. Was this failure of technology—or was it deliberate? Was it collateral damage, or calculated cruelty? When children die, the world should weep. Yet in this gruesome tragedy, the silence is deafening. No candlelight vigils, no global outpouring of grief, no songs of remembrance. Were these children of a lesser God? We in Pakistan know the agony of such loss. On December 16, 2014, terrorists stormed the Army Public School in Peshawar, massacring 142 innocent children. The nation was plunged into mourning. Emotional songs were composed, memorials erected, and the world stood with Pakistan, condemning the barbarity. Tears flowed across continents, and humanity seemed united in grief. That tragedy became a scar etched into our collective memory. Also read: Ayatollah Khamenei assassinated in US-Israeli airstrikes: state media But juxtapose that with the brutal annihilation of schoolgirls in Tehran. The toll—over 160 lives, each a universe of hopes and dreams—snuffed out without mercy. And yet, the international media barely whispers. Pakistani outlets, too, remain muted. No elegies, no dirges, no collective outrage. The contrast is chilling. Why does one tragedy evoke oceans of sympathy, while another is met with indifference? Why do some children command the world’s tears, while others are abandoned to silence? The death of one child is a tragedy; the death of many becomes a statistic. This selective empathy indicts our age. The media, entrusted with amplifying human suffering, often chooses which tragedies deserve headlines and which can be buried in footnotes. When the massacre of children is ignored, humanity itself is diminished. Weapons today boast of “surgical precision”. They claim to strike with mathematical accuracy, guided by satellites and algorithms. Yet when schools and hospitals are reduced to rubble, when classrooms become graves, one must ask: Is this precision, or perfidy? Innocence becomes expendable, and accountability evaporates in the fog of war. The silence of the media compounds the crime. In Gaza, the silence is not hypothetical but real. Thousands of children have perished under bombardment, their homes turned to dust, their schools flattened, their playgrounds drenched in blood. Their plight is documented, yet too often dismissed as collateral damage. Their faces rarely grace the front pages of global newspapers. Their cries echo unheard. A picture of a baby monkey clutching a stuffed toy once went viral, while an image of a child crying in rubble, holding its doll, was ignored. Such contrasts reveal the callousness of selective compassion. Do not ask for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. — John Donne Every child lost to violence diminishes us all. Their laughter, their innocence, their unfulfilled potential—these are treasures stolen from humanity. To ignore their deaths is to betray our shared humanity. To remain silent is to become complicit. Pakistan experienced the unity of a nation in grief, but it also taught us that remembrance must be universal. If we mourn only our own, we fail the test of humanity. If we ignore the suffering of others, we betray the very essence of compassion. The tragedy of Tehran’s schoolgirls and the massacre of Gaza’s children are mirrors held up to the world. They reflect our selective outrage, our moral blind spots, our failure to uphold the sanctity of all human life. They challenge us to ask: why do we allow the media to dictate whose deaths matter? Why do we accept silence when the victims are distant, foreign, or politically inconvenient? Also read: Trump’s Iran strikes mark his biggest foreign policy gamble The answer lies in reclaiming our humanity. We must demand that every child’s life be valued equally, that every massacre be condemned unequivocally, that every tear be acknowledged. We must hold the media accountable for its silences, its biases, its complicity in erasing suffering. And we must remind ourselves that compassion is not a commodity to be rationed—it is the essence of being human. The child is the father of the man. — Wordsworth In every child lies the seed of tomorrow. To kill them is to kill the future. The tragedy of Tehran’s schoolgirls is not about numbers—it is about faces, names, dreams. It is about humanity’s failure to weep when it should. It is about the silence that screams louder than any bomb. And it is about the urgent need to reclaim our moral compass. And how many ears must one man have, before he can hear people cry? — Bob Dylan The cries of Tehran’s schoolgirls—painfully real in their symbolism—and the cries of Gaza’s children, tragically real, echo across the conscience of the world. Will we hear them? Or will we consign them to silence, as if they were children of a lesser God?