Dropping Bombs on Children Is Not Normal. Stop Pretending It Is.

Manal was a teenager when the sky fell on her home in Homs.

She doesn’t remember the moment of impact. “I didn’t feel anything until I woke up,” she says, her voice measured and distant. “And then everyone told me I was burned.”

Her mother, Nisreen, was next door visiting a wounded nephew when the bomb hit. She ran back into smoke and flame, grabbed her children, and fled into the street. For eight days they ran. “I went crazy,” Nisreen whispers, tears sliding free beneath a lavender hijab. “The planes were still shooting above us. There was only basic first aid. No antibiotics. No proper care.”

Now Manal is in a Los Angeles hospital, recovering from extensive burn surgery, sketching fine, delicate lines with the stumps where her fingers once were. She wants to be a doctor. She wants to be a voice for others.

When the conversation turns to Syria, her composure fractures. She reaches for tissues. The sobs come from somewhere language cannot reach.

“There are so many children like me,” she weeps. “And no one is helping them. Please help them. They deserve a better life.”

She is right. And our collective silence is its own kind of answer.

We Have Been Trained to Look Away

Bombs falling on cities have become background noise. A notification. A scroll-past. The footage of rubble and the weeping survivors have been so relentlessly repeated that our nervous systems have learned to absorb the image without registering the meaning. This is not human nature. It is conditioning, and it should terrify us.

According to Action on Armed Violence, civilian casualties from explosive weapons rose 67 percent globally in 2024, with more than 61,000 people killed or injured. Airstrikes alone caused 63 percent of those casualties, more than doubling in lethality from the year before. Over the past decade, civilian casualties from airstrikes have increased by more than 1,100 percent.

Read that number again.

In World War One, 15 percent of casualties were civilians. In World War Two, that figure rose to 50 percent. Today, in conflicts fought in and above cities, more than 90 percent of victims of bombing in populated areas are civilians.

The math is not complicated. Bombing cities kills civilians. Overwhelmingly, it kills children. When explosive weapons are used in populated areas, 95 percent of casualties are civilians. This is not an unfortunate side effect. At this scale, it is a predictable outcome. And predictable outcomes are choices.

The Danger of Shrugging

Apathy in the face of atrocity is not neutrality, it is permission.

When governments face no meaningful public pressure, no sustained outrage, no electoral consequence for authorizing or enabling mass civilian casualties, the bombing continues. It escalates. In 2024, attacks on healthcare facilities increased by 64 percent. Attacks on schools more than doubled. Attacks on humanitarian aid workers occurred nearly five times more often than the year before

These are not accidents. These are patterns, and patterns require participation to sustain, including the passive participation of people who know and do nothing.

Manal said something remarkable amid her tears: she would not undo the airstrike that took her fingers, scarred her body, and stole her childhood. It made her braver, she said. It taught her to feel other people’s pain. That is not a lesson a child should have to earn. That is a thing we should be ashamed required teaching.

Photo by Rene Bernal on Unsplash

What Can Actually Be Done

The problem is not that solutions are impossible. It is that the political will to demand them is thin.

Pressure works. The Political Declaration on Explosive Weapons in Populated Areas, endorsed by more than 80 countries in 2022, commits signatories to collecting data on civilian harm and changing military practices accordingly. Continued pressure to enforce and expand that commitment matters. Supporting organizations that document civilian harm, such as Airwars and Action on Armed Violence, gives journalists, lawyers, and policymakers the evidence needed to hold perpetrators accountable. Holding elected representatives to account at every level, at town halls, through constituent calls, through the ballot, for their votes on arms sales and military aid, is not idealism. It is the mechanism.

And refusing to let the images blur. Refusing to scroll past. Refusing to file Manal under “collateral damage” and move on.

She is not collateral. She is one example of what a bomb does to a life, to millions of lives. She is what we keep choosing to normalize.

We don’t have to.