Pakistanis know what it means to bury children after an attack on a school. From the APS massacre in Peshawar to countless bombings across the region, Pakistan has lived through the horror of classrooms turned into graveyards. When children are killed in schools, the world is supposed to stop. But increasingly, outrage seems to depend on where those children live and who is doing the bombing.

Earlier this year, missiles struck a girls' elementary school in the southern Iranian city of Minab during the opening phase of US-Israeli strikes on Iran. According to reports cited by UN experts, about 180 children and five staff members were killed. Within days, at least three additional schools were reportedly struck, and Unicef later reported that among the more than 1,300 people killed in the attacks across Iran, at least 181 were children.

The scale of the tragedy should have shocked the world. Instead, across much of the Western media landscape, the deaths of these Iranian schoolchildren passed with remarkably little sustained attention. For readers in Pakistan, the contrast is impossible to miss. Pakistanis know what it means to lose children to indiscriminate violence. The APS massacre was carried out by militants universally condemned as terrorists. No one described the slaughter of schoolchildren as a regrettable but necessary cost of security.

Yet in Gaza and now Iran, devastating attacks on civilians have been carried out or supported by states that present themselves as defenders of democracy, human rights and the international legal order. Israel is routinely described by Western leaders as "the only democracy........

© The Express Tribune