There is something irreversibly broken about a world where a child sleeps to the lullaby of sirens, wakes to the sound of explosions, and learns to spell “war” before they spell “peace.” Every time a missile tears through a school, a hospital, a playground, or a home — it does more than end lives. It seeds hatred. It creates enemies. And worse, it ensures that the cycle of violence will never end.
Wars are not won anymore; they are merely passed on — from one generation to the next, like trauma, like inheritance. When a child loses a parent to a drone strike, when a boy finds his sister buried under rubble, when a girl watches her father shot at a checkpoint — we aren’t erasing threats; we are manufacturing them. Not in the form of armed combatants today, but in the form of radicalised, broken, and revengeful souls tomorrow.
History has shown us this repeatedly. From Palestine to Afghanistan, from Vietnam to Iraq — every time militaries claimed to bring order through destruction, they unknowingly planted resentment deeper than any ideology could. That resentment grows up. It puts on a schoolbag, then one day replaces it with a rifle. And when it pulls the trigger, we call it “terrorism” — forgetting that terror once came from the sky wearing the flag of a nation.
It is easy to speak of “collateral damage” when sitting in air-conditioned war rooms or studios. It is harder to see the face of a five-year-old holding her dead mother’s hand as anything but criminal consequence. Empires, democracies, and dictatorships alike must realise: violence breeds enemies far faster than it eliminates them.
Security doesn’t come from missiles. It comes from justice. From dignity. From opportunity. A child with access to food, safety, education, and love rarely grows up hating the world. A child raised under fire, in contrast, has every reason to.
So the next time a world leader, a general, or even a media house justifies a strike by saying “we’re targeting the enemy,” remind them:
Every time you send a missile towards a child, you are creating an enemy for the future.