By: Zahra Zarbakht Ali
September 9, marks the International Day to Protect Education from Attack , a UN observance established in 2020 to confront a crisis that too often goes unspoken: the deliberate, systematic destruction of children’s Right to Learn.
The numbers should stop us cold. Between 2022 and 2023, the Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack documented roughly 6,000 attacks on students, teachers, schools, and universities. Over the two years that followed, that figure nearly rose to 8,566 reported attacks. More than 10,000 students, teachers, and academics have been killed, abducted, arrested, or otherwise harmed- turning the safest place in a child’s day into a legitimate target under the grim logic of war.
Attacks on education are, with disturbing frequency, a strategy, a way to break a community’s future by breaking its present. When a school is destroyed, so is the promise it represented: that a child born into hardship might still learn her way out of it. Pakistan knows this cost with unbearable precision. On December 16, 2014, Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan gunmen stormed the Army Public School in Peshawar and killed more than 140 people, most of them schoolchildren, in one of the deadliest attacks on education anywhere in the world. Every December 16, the country observes that loss, the empty desks, the uniforms never worn again, as a permanent reminder of what is at stake when classrooms become battlegrounds. It is a memory our Country carries into this day more than most nations, and a reason its voice on protecting education should carry weight.
More recently, The February 28, 2026 strike on the Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in Minab, Iran, is one of the deadliest known attacks on education in recent memory. On the first day of US-Israeli military operations against Iran, a missile strike hit the school, killing between roughly 150 and 175 people, most of them children, according to varying reports from Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and news outlets. Evidence including an AP investigation and video analysis points to a US Tomahawk missile as the likely weapon.
Why schools become targets?Education threatens those who profit from ignorance and fear. Regimes that rule through division cannot tolerate curricula that teach critical thought. Occupying forces that hope to erase a people’s identity know that language, history, and culture are transmitted, generation to generation, in a classroom. So schools burn. Teachers are threatened into silence or killed for defying it.
The toll is not only physical. A child who studies under the threat of attack learns fear alongside arithmetic. A teacher who buries colleagues cannot easily inspire the next lesson. And a generation that loses years of schooling to conflict pays for it for decades afterward, in lost wages, lost stability, and lost peace because a country’s ability to rebuild after war depends enormously on whether it kept teaching its children how to read while the war was happening.
The world has not been silent on this. The Safe Schools Declaration, now backed by more than 100 states, commits governments to keep schools and universities out of the fight a straightforward, achievable pledge that fewer than half the world’s countries have yet signed. UNESCO’s Preventative Plan of Action, approved last year, gives the international community concrete tools for prevention, not just condemnation after the fact.
That means funding humanitarian education programs with the same urgency as emergency food or shelter because a lost school year is also an emergency. It means holding parties to conflict accountable, through documentation, sanctions, and international courts, when they use schools as barracks or bomb them as targets. It means protecting teachers, who are too often assassinated, threatened, or forced into exile simply for showing up to work. And it means listening to displaced and refugee students themselves, who consistently say that the fastest path back to normalcy is a classroom, a teacher, and a curriculum, not just a tent and a ration card.
Protecting education from attack is not utopian. It is a specific, achievable demand: stop bombing schools, stop occupying them, stop recruiting from them, stop killing the people who teach in them. Every government that has not yet endorsed the Safe Schools Declaration should be asked, publicly, why not. Every donor nation should be asked why education receives a fraction of the humanitarian funding that food and health do, despite its outsized role in a society’s long-term recovery.
This International Day’s observance will produce statements, panels, and no doubt more sobering statistics. That’s necessary, but not sufficient. The real measure of this day is whether, a year from now, the number of attacks has gone down instead of up, whether fewer children spend their mornings wondering if their school will still be standing when they arrive. A classroom should never be a target. Making sure of will!
