alt Hacker NewsThat's a non excuse.
I live near a military base, and there is a daycare, school, rec center, pub, ice rink, church, and grocery store, open to the public, and not managed by the military. All of it is on land owned by the military, but outside the wire.
The fact that these facilities exist on military land near a base (which a hostile government would surely argue IS the base) does not mean that the people in those buildings have it coming.
Technically the statutes of Rome forbid using human shields.
A nation state bombing US mainland bases sounds rather implausible, although I certainly would prefer that civilian infrastructure to have a minimum distance to military targets, even in the US, even if only to set the right example to the rest of the world.
I do believe there would be value in modernizing the statutes of Rome regarding human shields, which would force nation states to compile machine readable lists of school locations, so that non-existent reported childrens schools and secret childrens schools would be automatically screened.
Keeping the school secret, or reporting a school location too close to a military base would then activate the right of the international community to attack that nation, in order to prevent nation states from using elementary schools etc. as human shields.
IRGC wants nuclear ICBM's. Iran invests heavily in STEM education and physics. The whole population is aware of such goals, the whole population is aware of the adversarial relationship with the Western hemisphere. Imagine your child being allocated the school that was bombed in Iran, but before it was bombed: wouldn't you protest and ask for your child to be allocated to a different school? They risk being the first casualties when the inevitable escalation to war occurs. Clearly in this fun society of Iran, those parents didn't get a choice, and could only pray their kids get through elementary before such a foreign attack occurs.
IMHO, the most damning aspect is that proper, modernized international law clarifying the permitted action-reaction patterns around human shields could have prevented these deaths, by disincentivizing such nations from using kids as human shields.