“BARBARISM is not potent enough to describe this depravity,” said Jason Hickel, an economic anthropologist and eco-socialist, commenting on Israel.

Hickel, best known for his advocacy for degrowth, was referring to the brutal murder by Israeli soldiers of a 14-year-old Palestinian boy in a refugee camp in the occupied West Bank. The incident happened last November but was just reported on by the BBC on Thursday.

The boy was shot multiple times, then prevented from receiving medical help. “They didn’t just stand around and watch him bleed to death,” Hickel wrote. “They actively prevented two ambulances from reaching him.”

Now it is the turn of the children of Iran. After Israel and the US launched a brutal, illegal and entirely unnecessary attack on Iran on Saturday, hundreds quickly gathered in Parliament Square for an emergency protest, even before the horrific news began to filter in about the Israeli targeted bombing of a girls’ school in southern Iran.

By the time dusk began to fall as a pale moon rose beside Big Ben and protesters started to drift homeward, the death toll at the school had reached 85 young girls — a toll that mounted to 148 yesterday.

Israel has officially killed at least 50,000 Palestinian children in the Gaza Strip since it embarked on its genocide there beginning on October 8 2023, along with continued killings in the occupied West Bank. However, that number is likely far higher given the challenges of finding and counting bodies, many of whom are still buried under rubble or were incinerated beyond identification.

After the attacks on Iran, a friend wrote, “I can’t believe they bombed a school.” But the action wasn’t unbelievable in the least. Both Israel and the US have demonstrably shed any shred of humanity and killing children has become routine.

In Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US President Donald Trump, despotic madness has been unleashed with apparent impunity. No-one is immune from their unhinged and unfettered warmongering. It was fitting, therefore, that the Saturday rally attracted a broad cross section of causes.

Among those opposing the attack on Iran, led by Stop the War Coalition and CND, there were Palestinian and Lebanese flags, representatives from Your Party, assorted far left factions, the Jewish bloc, a banner from Women of Colour in the Global Women’s Strike, and two people holding a sign calling for “justice for Eritreans in Egypt.”

The rally itself was called on a moment’s notice. There was no stage and no official speakers’ line-up so media interviews were conducted on the fly. Your Party MP for Islington North Jeremy Corbyn was there, fresh off a commanding win during the recent Your Party central executive committee elections and who is set to become the party’s parliamentary leader.

“Twenty four hours ago the United States was in negotiations with the Iranian government to repeat essentially the Obama nuclear deal that were apparently going quite well,” Corbyn said. “Somewhere overnight, President Trump decided he would do something different and send the bombers in to bomb civilian as well as military targets in Iran, including a school.”

Corbyn warned the attacks could turn into “a major conflagration” and decried Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s justification for the launching of British aircraft “to defend interests and assets in the region. I wish to God we could have a British government that said our interests are to try to bring about peace in the region. Because we had that possibility and now we are in a very dangerous situation,” Corbyn said.

Chris Nineham, a founder of Stop the War Coalition, warned that “these are terrifying and catastrophic events. There is a real sense of deja vu. It reminds me of Iraq, it reminds me of Libya, it reminds me of Afghanistan.”

“There’s no good outcome here,” Nineham added. “We’ve got to do everything we can to bring this to an end. We’ve got to put maximum pressure on our government to condemn this. Trump is taking the world to the brink of absolute disaster.”

The US and Israel have used the excuse that Iran could be developing nuclear weapons to justify the current bombardment as well as the strikes last June that endeavoured to destroy Iran’s nuclear installations.

“This is another echo from the Iraq period when we were told the invasion was to stop Iraq getting nuclear weapons, to stop a possible attack on the West,” Nineham said, recalling the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, a war that dragged on for more than eight years and in which Britain was also militarily engaged on a false premise.

“They’re saying exactly the same thing,” Nineham said. “But Iran has said it doesn’t want to have nuclear weapons capability.” Both US intelligence and the UN’s own nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, have said there is no evidence Iran is developing the atomic bomb.

“The only country in the region that does have nuclear weapons, the West’s ally, the hyper-aggressor, is Israel,” Nineham added. Israel occupies a unique and disingenuous position inside the UN of “nuclear ambiguity,” where it is obliged to neither confirm nor deny whether it possesses nuclear weapons. This is despite the fact that the UN general assembly passes a resolution every year calling on Israel to disarm. The country is known to have at least 80 nuclear warheads and possibly as many as 200.

In 2010, under the Obama administration, Iran signed onto an agreement called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, known as the Iran nuclear deal, that held the country to rigorous inspections and verification of its uranium enrichment activities to ensure these were for civil nuclear purposes only.

However, during his first administration in 2018, Trump recklessly tore up the deal. The recent negotiations were designed to restore it, an effort Trump has derailed once again with his preposterous but menacingly named “Operation Epic Fury” attack on Iran.

That “fury” could now rebound on the US and Israel, particularly as reports began to filter in late on Saturday evening that the bombing raids had killed 86-year-old Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the country’s supreme leader and highest authority.

Linda Pentz Gunter is a writer based in Takoma Park, Maryland. Her book, No to Nuclear: How Nuclear Power Destroys Lives, Derails Climate Progress And Provokes War, will be published by Pluto Press in March.