Iran Today

The Price of Looking Away

by Iran Prism 13 min read

The Dam

In 2018, Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar said something that rarely appears alongside the images of dead children shared on social media: “We decided to turn that which is most dear to us — the bodies of our women and children — into a dam blocking the collapse in Arab reality.”1

He was not speaking metaphorically. He was describing a strategy — one that has been employed by every authoritarian and militant organization that faces a militarily superior opponent bound by laws the opponent follows and the shielder does not. The strategy has a name in game theory. It has a legal framework in international humanitarian law. It has a documented track record across decades and continents. And it works — but only if you let it.

The Three Players

The human shield scenario is a three-player sequential game. Understanding the players — and especially understanding which one holds the decisive power — is the key to understanding why children keep dying near military bases.2

Player 1: The Shielder. The party that embeds military assets among civilians. This player moves first — Thomas Schelling called it “burning bridges,” an irreversible commitment that forces the other players to react to conditions already set. The IRGC builds a missile base. Then a school appears 200 feet away, operated by the IRGC Navy as part of a 32-school recruitment network.3

Player 2: The Striker. The party that must decide whether to hit the military target at the cost of civilian casualties, or refrain and leave the threat intact. This player faces a lose-lose choice that was engineered by Player 1.

Player 3: You. The international community — the public, the media, the institutions that respond to civilian casualties. Your response determines the payoff for both other players. This is the critical variable.

If you blame the striker, the shielder wins. The military target survives, or the dead children generate condemnation that constrains the striker’s future operations. Either way, the shielder faces no cost for placing children in harm’s way — and gains significant benefit.

If you blame the shielder, the strategy fails. The propaganda dividend disappears. The cost of embedding military assets among civilians increases. Over time, fewer children are placed at risk.4

Scholars Rubinstein and Roznai identified the core asymmetry: “This omission by the international community countenances and motivates the intentional placement of civilians at risk.” The international community’s failure to hold shielders accountable does not merely allow the strategy to continue. It actively incentivizes expansion.5

The Moral Hazard

The mechanism is precise. In economics, moral hazard occurs when an actor insulated from the consequences of risky behavior takes more risk because someone else bears the cost. Overly generous fire insurance incentivizes arson.6

The international community’s asymmetric response functions as insurance for the shielding actor. The premium — condemnation of civilian casualties — is paid by the striker. The payout — diplomatic pressure, ceasefire demands, sanctions, investigations — flows to the benefit of the shielder by constraining its adversary.

The shielder is insulated from the costs of its own violation of international humanitarian law. It takes ever-greater risks with civilian lives because it does not bear the consequences — and may benefit from them.

The documented record confirms the incentive structure.

After the 2006 Lebanon war, Hezbollah expanded from roughly 15,000 rockets to an estimated 150,000 over eighteen years. Hamas’s tunnel network grew from roughly twenty tunnels in 2006 to an estimated 350–450 miles with 5,700 shafts by October 2023. Civilian casualties escalated at every step — from 1,400 dead in 2008–09 to over 72,000 in 2023–25. Each cycle of restraint produced conditions for worse outcomes in the next cycle.7

The chain-store paradox — identified by game theorist Reinhard Selten — explains why: if the striking actor consistently yields when shields are present, it builds a reputation that makes shielding ever more attractive. The equilibrium is self-reinforcing. Once established, it requires increasingly dramatic action to break.8

The Children the Regime Killed

The regime that accuses others of killing children at Minab has itself killed more Iranian children than any foreign power. This is not a rhetorical pivot. It is the evidence of what “looking away” — allowing the regime to survive — costs in children’s lives.

Kian Pirfalak, nine years old, shot through the lung while riding in his family’s car. Nika Shakarami, sixteen, beaten to death in a van by three IRGC agents. A two-year-old named Mirshekar, shot dead in Zahedan. At least 236 minors among the 7,007 confirmed dead in the 2026 crackdown. Sixty-eight children among the 551 killed in the 2022 Woman Life Freedom protests. Twenty-three children among the approximately 1,500 killed in 2019.9

Iran has executed 93 of 138 juvenile offenders worldwide since 1990 — more than twice every other country combined. Ali Najafi was taken to the gallows nine times before his execution. Hamidreza Azari was executed at seventeen; state media falsified his age to claim he was eighteen. During the Iran-Iraq war, 550,000 students were sent to the frontlines and 36,000 were killed. Children as young as nine were used as mine-clearers in human wave attacks.10

This is the regime that the human shield strategy protects. If the strategy works — if international pressure stops strikes against the IRGC’s military infrastructure and the regime survives — these killings continue. The juvenile executions continue. The body ransoming continues. The nine-year-olds shot in family cars continue.

The calculus is not between dead children at Minab and no dead children. It is between children killed near military bases the regime built next to schools, and children killed by the regime itself — in protests, in prisons, in detention centers, on gallows — for decades to come.11

The Emotional Weapon

The philosopher Saba Bazargan-Forward described how the trap works: the shielding actor “intentionally denies you the option of preventing both of two distinct harms” specifically “in order to provide you with a moral reason to commit or allow the lesser of the two harms.”12

The image of a dead child triggers a deontological moral response — this specific child died because of this specific strike, and therefore the strike was wrong. This response is human. It is correct in its compassion. And it is precisely the response the shielding actor engineered.

The consequentialist analysis — that yielding to the shield strategy produces more dead children over time, not fewer — requires abstract reasoning that the image actively undermines. The regime manufactured the conditions that kill the child and simultaneously manufactured the emotional response that prevents strategic thinking about how to stop the killing.

Michael Walzer warned about the danger of looking “too much like the terrorists.” But the inverse is equally dangerous: when the shield tactic renders military targets immune, international humanitarian law compliance becomes a strategic liability — and the actor that exploits it is rewarded with survival.13

Michael Newton described human shields as a “force multiplier” — one that transforms the opponent’s moral constraints into military advantage. Michael Skerker defined it as “the attempt by a conventionally weaker force to shape the conditions of combat so that the stronger force cannot advance without violating the rules of war.” The captured Hamas military manual was more direct: fighters should “use populated civilian areas so that it increases the hatred of the citizens towards the attackers.”14

What the Law Actually Says

International humanitarian law addresses human shields with unusual clarity — and the enforcement gap is where the strategy thrives.15

Article 51(7) of Additional Protocol I: parties shall not direct civilian movement to shield military objectives. Article 58: parties must avoid locating military objectives near densely populated areas. The Rome Statute, Article 8(2)(b)(xxiii): shielding is a war crime in international armed conflicts. ICRC Customary Rule 97: the prohibition binds in all conflicts, international and non-international.

The law is clear. Placing a military base next to a school violates international humanitarian law.

Article 51(8) adds the critical qualifier: the shielding party’s violation “shall not release the Parties to the conflict from their legal obligations” toward civilians. Both sides retain obligations. The striker must still apply proportionality and precaution. The shielder must still not shield.

But the enforcement is radically asymmetric. Commissions of inquiry focus on the striking party. Media coverage frames casualties as the striker’s responsibility. UN Human Rights Council sessions pressure the striker. Ceasefire demands are addressed to the striker. The shielder’s violation — the act that created the risk — is investigated afterward, if at all.16

The Goldstone Report on Gaza exemplifies the pattern: despite numerous reports of Hamas operating from civilian buildings, the Report found it “did not encounter any evidence to substantiate” allegations of human shielding because it “could not find the required criminal intent.” Critics noted the Report refused to infer Hamas’s intent from outcomes while frequently inferring Israeli intent from outcomes.17

Criminal prosecution of human shield use is, in the words of one legal analysis, “vanishingly rare.” Shielding is not listed as a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions, meaning no mandatory universal jurisdiction. The ICC has shown a pattern — documented in the Leiden Journal of International Law — of invoking “human shielding” to absolve the attacker without subsequently investigating or prosecuting the shielding offense itself.18

The legal architecture assigns primary responsibility to the shielder. The enforcement architecture holds only the striker accountable. The gap between law and enforcement is where the strategy lives.

The Honest Reckoning

There is no clean answer. Honest people disagree — not because some are moral and others are not, but because the competing moral claims are genuinely agonizing.19

The deontological case for restraint is powerful: civilians are ends in themselves, never merely means. To strike through shields is to use those civilians as instruments. The causal claim that striking through shields deters future shield use remains unproven by rigorous empirical analysis. The combatant-noncombatant distinction may be the single most important achievement of the laws of war, and weakening it risks catastrophe.

The consequentialist case is equally powerful: the empirical record shows that every period of restraint was followed by expanded shield infrastructure and escalating civilian death. Gaza’s casualty trajectory — from 1,400 to 72,000 across four cycles — is not an anomaly but a trend line. The regime that shields would, if it survives, continue killing children at a pace that dwarfs any single military strike. Michael Huemer argues that “discounting shields to some degree is not callousness toward civilian life but a strategy for protecting more of it over time.”20

What honest people cannot do is pretend the problem does not exist. Refusing to engage with the calculus is itself a choice — and it is the choice the shielding actor is counting on. The regime has calculated that your empathy for dead children will protect it from accountability. It has calculated that you will direct your outrage at the visible harm and ignore the structural cause. It has calculated that you will share the image without asking who placed the children next to the target.

The strategy was designed so that anyone who shared the image — out of genuine compassion — would unknowingly amplify it. If you have ever shared an image of a destroyed school without knowing why the school was built next to a military base, or who operates it as part of a military recruitment network, that is the strategy working as intended. The invisibility is the design.21

The Bet

Every authoritarian regime on earth is watching to see whether the human shield strategy works against Iran.22

The IRGC trained Hezbollah in the Bekaa Valley. IRGC General Hossein Hamdani organized the embedding of fighters in Syrian civilian areas — sleeping in homes, converting mosques into command posts. The Quds Force created 82 fighting units in Syria, approximately 70,000 armed men deliberately intermingled with civilians. The doctrine cascaded outward: from the IRGC to Hezbollah to Hamas to the Houthis to Iraqi militias. Now it has come home — deployed against Iran’s own citizens, with a school network operated by the IRGC Navy itself.23

If the strategy works here — if the Minab claim stops military operations against the IRGC and the regime survives — the lesson propagates globally. Russia will embed deeper in Ukrainian cities. Myanmar’s Tatmadaw will expand its use of civilian infrastructure. Every militant organization with access to a school and a camera will learn that the fastest route to a ceasefire is a dead child on the evening news.

If the strategy fails here — if the world identifies the shielder as primarily responsible, if military operations continue against legitimate targets with appropriate precautions, if the regime that placed a missile base next to a school bears the diplomatic cost — then the calculus shifts. Fewer bases will be built next to schools. Fewer children will be placed in the line of fire. Not because authoritarians develop conscience, but because the strategy stops working.

The dead children calculus is not an equation that produces a clean answer. It is a question that demands you sit with the discomfort — and recognize that the discomfort itself is the weapon the regime manufactured.

What you do with it is yours to decide. But understand what you are deciding. The regime is betting that you will look at the dead children and blame the bomb. It is betting that you will not ask who built the school next to the base, who operates the school as a military recruitment network, and who imposed the internet blackout that prevents anyone from independently verifying what happened.

If the regime is right about you, more schools will be built next to more bases. That is the price of looking away.24

This article is part of The Dead Children Calculus. For how the US targeting system works, see How Targeting Actually Works. For the regime’s record of deception, see The Credibility Ledger.

Footnotes

  1. Yahya Sinwar (2018): “We decided to turn that which is most dear to us — the bodies of our women and children — into a dam blocking the collapse in Arab reality.” ↩

  2. Three-player sequential game framework. Thomas Schelling, Arms and Influence (1966): military strategy as coercion. Stackelberg leader-follower game: shielder holds first-mover advantage. ↩

  3. “Burning bridges” as commitment device (Schelling). IRGC Asef Missile Brigade base adjacent to Shajareh Tayyebeh school. IranWire: 32-school IRGC Navy recruitment network. ↩

  4. Robert Powell’s commitment problem framework: no side can credibly commit to an agreement making everyone better off. International community cannot credibly commit to holding shielder accountable. ↩

  5. Rubinstein and Roznai (2011, Stanford Law and Policy Review): “This omission by the international community countenances and motivates the intentional placement of civilians at risk.” ↩

  6. Moral hazard: economic definition — actor insulated from consequences of risky behavior takes more risk. Kelly Greenhill (Weapons of Mass Migration): weak actors exploit target’s moral commitments. ↩

  7. Hezbollah rearmament: roughly 15,000 to an estimated 150,000 (18 years). Hamas tunnels: ~20 to 350-450 miles (17 years). Gaza casualties: 1,400 (2008-09) to 72,000+ (2023-25). Sources: multiple intelligence assessments, Alma Research Center. ↩

  8. Reinhard Selten’s chain-store paradox: consistent yielding builds reputation making shielding ever more attractive. Self-reinforcing perverse equilibrium. ↩

  9. Kian Pirfalak (9), Nika Shakarami (16), Mirshekar (2). 236+ minors in 2026 (HRANA). 68 children in 2022 (IHR). 23 children in 2019 (Amnesty). Sources: BBC, CNN, Amnesty International, Iran Human Rights. ↩

  10. 93 of 138 juvenile executions worldwide since 1990. Ali Najafi: gallows 9 times. Hamidreza Azari: age falsified. 550,000 students to frontlines, 36,000 killed. Sources: Amnesty International, IHR, Iran’s own state media. ↩

  11. The calculus: regime survival = continued juvenile executions, protest killings, body ransoming. Scale documented by Amnesty, HRW, HRANA, UN FFM. ↩

  12. Saba Bazargan-Forward, “moral coercion” framework (Philosophers’ Imprint): shielding actor intentionally creates lose-lose choice for observer. ↩

  13. Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars. Deontological vs consequentialist tension in human shield response. ↩

  14. Michael Newton: “force multiplier” (Cambridge, International Review of the Red Cross). Michael Skerker: weaker force shaping combat conditions. Hamas military manual: “use populated civilian areas.” ↩

  15. API Article 51(7): prohibition on shielding. Article 58: avoid locating military objectives near populated areas. Rome Statute 8(2)(b)(xxiii): shielding as war crime. ICRC Customary Rule 97. ↩

  16. Article 51(8): shielding violation does not release attacking party from obligations. Enforcement asymmetry: commissions, media, UNHRC sessions all focused on striking party. ↩

  17. Goldstone Report: “did not encounter evidence to substantiate” shielding allegations. Asymmetric inference of intent documented by critics. ↩

  18. Criminal prosecution of shielding “vanishingly rare.” Not a grave breach — no mandatory universal jurisdiction. Leiden Journal: ICC pattern of invoking shielding to absolve attacker without prosecuting shielder. ↩

  19. Deontological case: Kantian categorical imperative, epistemic humility, combatant/noncombatant distinction. Consequentialist case: empirical escalation pattern, regime’s own child victims, Huemer’s rule-utilitarian insight. William Shaw (Utilitarianism and the Ethics of War): civilian protection should be “nearly absolute.” ↩

  20. Michael Huemer (2025, Journal of Applied Philosophy): “discounting shields to some degree is not callousness toward civilian life but a strategy for protecting more of it over time.” Gaza casualty escalation as trend line. ↩

  21. Perspective-taking: sharing images without asking who placed children next to targets. Strategy designed to be invisible. ↩

  22. Authoritarian learning curve documented across Hezbollah, Hamas, ISIS, IRGC proxies. Every major shielding actor maintained or increased shield use after favorable international responses. ↩

  23. IRGC trained Hezbollah (Bekaa Valley). General Hossein Hamdani organized Syrian civilian embedding. Quds Force: 82 fighting units (~70,000 men) intermingled with civilians (West Point CTC). Doctrinal cascade: IRGC → Hezbollah → Hamas → Houthis → Iraqi militias. ↩

  24. NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence: “there is every reason to believe [shielding actors] will continue resorting to the use of civilians as human shields.” The price of looking away: strategy expands wherever it succeeds. ↩