On 28th of February 2026, the first day of the latest war, US Tomahawk missiles hit a girls elementary school in southern Iran. It’s hard to discover the exact death toll, but at least 175 people were killed, and more than 100 of them children. 

It’s hard to imagine how we would react here in Bulgaria if over 100 little girls were killed in a single event. In Bulgarian the term ‘catastrophe’ is used to describe traffic accidents. Two cars hit each other and someone brakes his arm in three places. We describe it as a ‘catastrophe’. What word could we use, what words could anyone use, to describe the murder of over 100 little girls. 

In the English language the world implies some sort of massive event. Our use of the word to describe a car crash would seem strange to them. It summons up images of some massive natural disaster, an earthquake, famine or huge flood. 

But missiles hitting schools is not a ‘natural disaster. Bombs don’t just fall out of the sky ‘naturally’. Bombs hit schools because people fire bombs at schools. 

What sort of people would do that? Trump initially denied that it was an American bomb, and said that the Iranians had done it. He described them as ‘evil’. Certainly most people would describe the murder of over 100 little girls as ‘evil’. It turned out though that even the Americans accept now that it was their missiles that hit the school. UNESCO called the attack “a grave violation of international law”. We understand people who would describe it as ‘evil’. 

It’s hard to know the death tool in wars, particularly when they are ongoing. Reports at the time of writing (27th March), say that 1,500 civilians have been confirmed killed in Iran so far, 15% of them children. Meanwhile, Israel has renewed its attacks on Lebanon. In the current round of fighting over 1,000 Lebanese have been killed, and over 1,000,000 people, making up around 20% of the countries population, turned into refugees. This too is a catastrophe of human suffering. Again though, it is in no way a ‘natural disaster. 

In Arabic, and in particularly for the Palestinians,  the use of the word is different again. It’s used in Palestine as a proper noun to describe the expulsion of the Palestinian people from their lands during the formation of the State of Israel in 1948. Over a two year period up to 16,000 civilians were killed, and three quarters of a million people driven from their homes. 

Since then, we have seen catastrophe after catastrophe after catastrophe in the Middle East caused by Israel and its American allies. It’s an unending series of horrors. If we look to the countries where the victims of the current war are, we see events such as the shooting down of Iranian airlines flight 655. US missiles shot down a civilian passenger plane killing all 290 people on board. When planes crash we call it a catastrophe. When people blow planes out of the sky, it is generally called terrorism. 

When asked to apologise, George Bush, Vice President at the time, said “I will never apologize for the United States—I don’t care what the facts are … I’m not an apologize-for-America kind of guy”. Then as now, there are no apologies from Trump for murdering school girls. Rather he stated that “Like I said, some people will die”. 

And dying is what people have been doing again and again and again. If we return to Lebanon, in the 1982 war, up to 5,000 Lebanese civilians were killed during the siege of Beirut. Following the siege Israel transported Christian militia men to the refugee camps in the south of the city, they went on the rampage killing up to 3,500 mostly Palestinian civilians, virtually all women, children, and old men, as men of military age had already been expelled. Israeli troops used flares to light up the sky so they could continue the butchery at night. Later Israel itself admitted that their troops were ‘indirectly responsible’ for the massacres. 

The horrors of the past look small compared to the horrors of today.If the Palestinians describe the events of 1948 as a ‘catastrophe’, how can the events of the ongoing genocide in Gaza be described. If 17,000 dead civilians was a ‘catastrophe’, how to describe the deaths of over 70,000 civilians in the continuing terror in Gaza. There aren’t words to describe such horror. 

Nor have these horrors been restricted to the countries involved in the current wars. The number of dead Iraqis in America’s wars against Iraq are uncountable. When asked about reports that up to half a million Iraqi children had died as a result of US sanctions, US Ambassador to the UN Madeleine, Madeline Albright, stated on television that “we think the price is worth it”. 

We at Konflikt don’t think that the price is ‘worth it’. We don’t think that anything justifies the murder of half a million children. Nor do we think that anything justifies the murder of over 100 little girls. We think it’s terror, pure utterly ‘evil’ terror. 

That’s why we are asking all those who think that this terrorism is horror beyond imagination to join us on May 16th in Varna to commemorate the victims of this series of atrocity after atrocity, and protest about the ongoing slaughter being committed in the Middle East by American, Israel and their allies.