Iranian citizens, including children, form a human chain around a power plant in Tehran on April 7, 2026, as officials urge civilians to protect key infrastructure amid rising tensions with the US and Israel. Photo: Screenshot

Iranian authorities have urged children, teenagers, and civilians to gather around power plants and other sensitive sites to serve as human shields, in an apparent effort to raise the cost of potential US and Israeli strikes on Iran’s infrastructure.

The call came as US President Donald Trump’s deadline of Tuesday night for Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and accept a ceasefire proposal rapidly approached.

Trump previously warned that if Iran refused to reopen the strait — a critical global shipping chokepoint linking the Persian Gulf to international waters, through which about one-fifth of the world’s oil flows — US strikes would destroy the country’s key infrastructure, including bridges and energy facilities including power plants.

“We have a plan according to which every bridge in Iran will be destroyed and every power plant will be bombed by midnight. It will happen within 4 hours if we want,” Trump said during a press conference on Monday.

Trump appeared to escalate his threats on Tuesday.

“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social website.

“However,” he added, “now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS? We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World.”

In response, Iranian officials issued stark warnings that, should the strikes on Iranian soil go ahead, Tehran would retaliate by targeting infrastructure and other civilian sites in Gulf states hosting US forces, risking a broader escalation across the region.

Even as negotiations remain formally underway, Iranian officials signaled little change in their stance, insisting that Washington’s demands and tone “have not changed” amid ongoing conflict.

“There are no negotiations with the US, which wants Iran to collapse under pressure. We will show flexibility after we see flexibility from the US,” an Iranian official told Reuters.

“Iran will not open [the Strait of Hormuz] in exchange for empty promises,” he continued.

With tensions now approaching a breaking point, Iranian government and military officials have publicly urged civilians to gather near key infrastructure sites to act as a deterrent against potential airstrikes.

During a televised speech on Monday, Alireza Rahimi, Iran’s deputy minister of youth affairs, urged citizens to join the “Iranian youth’s human chain for a bright tomorrow” by gathering around power plants to serve as human shields.

“I call on all youth, athletes, artists, university students, and professors to gather tomorrow, Tuesday, at 2 pm, and form a circle around our power plants, which are national assets and the nation’s capital,” Rahimi said. 

“Come regardless of political views, because these facilities belong to the Iranian youth and their future. Let the world see that targeting civilian infrastructure is a war crime,” he continued.

Old habits die hard.

In the Iran-Iraq War, this regime deployed children with plastic keys to heaven against Iraqi machine gun fire and to clear minefields. This is a regime which also deployed Iranian and Afghan children alongside the Basij to fight in the Syrian Civil War. https://t.co/vfR3iqZnG5

— Behnam Ben Taleblu بهنام بن طالب لو (@therealBehnamBT) April 7, 2026

In a separate televised message, Hossein Yekta, a commander in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), addressed parents directly and urged them to send their children to sensitive locations and checkpoints.

“Send the children to the checkpoints so they can become men,” he said.

The regime’s use of human shields appears to extend beyond minors, with reports indicating that political prisoners and dual nationals are also being positioned near sensitive sites as part of broader deterrence efforts.

Last month, the IRGC officially lowered the minimum age for war‑related roles to 12 as part of a campaign recruiting children to serve as “Homeland‑Defending Combatants for Iran,” assigning them to patrols, checkpoints, and logistics duties.

For years, Iran has drafted children under 18 into the Basij militia, with Human Rights Watch documenting boys as young as 14 years old killed in combat, revealing a brutal pattern of exploiting children on the battlefield.

The Four Questions from The Haggadah. Łódź, 1935. Source: Irvin Ungar

Before Passover, I took my son to Borough Park to buy a new Haggadah, part of a small annual ritual and one more way into an ancient story. The streets were busy, storefronts full, families preparing. Judaism there is not abstract. It is lived, visibly and confidently, woven into the rhythms of everyday life.

A few days earlier, we had been at the Jewish Museum on the Upper East Side, where he carefully decorated a matzah cover for the holiday. It was thoughtful, creative, and quiet. Another expression of Jewish life, shaped more by culture and reflection than by density and immersion.

Two experiences. Two expressions of Judaism. Both real, and both necessary.

My son is still young, but he has reached the age when everything is noticed and everything is questioned. That is part of what makes Passover so powerful. The Seder is not designed for passive listening. It is built around questions, anticipated and encouraged. The tradition does not fear inquiry; it depends on it. And it places the responsibility squarely on parents to respond.

That responsibility feels especially urgent now, because what Jewish children are not given early, they are often forced to confront later, and not always in its full or faithful form.

At a time when Jewish identity is increasingly contested in public life and often distorted in classrooms, many Jewish students arrive at college, and even in K–12 settings, without a basic understanding of their own history, traditions, or texts. They may have absorbed fragments – holidays, foods, cultural references – but lack the knowledge that allows them to situate themselves within a larger story. They know how to gesture toward identity, but not how to explain it, defend it, or live it with confidence.

I see this firsthand. In my own classes, many Jewish students are articulate and well-intentioned. They are comfortable analyzing power, language, and identity. But when asked basic questions about Jewish history, Zionism, or the origins of the modern Middle East, there is often a striking absence of knowledge. Not hostility. Not even indifference. Something more fragile: a lack of foundation.

This is not a failure of intelligence or curiosity. It is a failure of formation.

In the months since October 7, this gap has become difficult to ignore. Campuses have filled with slogans that many students can repeat but few can explain. Jewish students, in particular, are often left without the knowledge or confidence to respond.

This reflects a broader shift in education. In many cases, students are taught to critique identity before they have been given the knowledge needed to understand it. They learn to deconstruct before they learn to inherit. They are trained to interrogate narratives without first being grounded in them. The result is not critical thinking, but a kind of intellectual weightlessness, an uncertainty about what is theirs to defend, or even to value.

By the time Jewish students arrive on campus, these gaps are no longer theoretical. They shape how students understand their own identity and how they respond when it is challenged.

On many campuses, discussions of Israel and Jewish identity are flattened into slogans, repeated with confidence but stripped of historical context and moral complexity. Students encounter phrases, not arguments. Certainty, not understanding. And without a strong sense of their own inheritance, many Jewish students are left vulnerable to distortion or silence.

What is striking is not only the presence of these narratives, but the absence of a meaningful institutional response. Universities that pride themselves on rigor and inquiry often retreat into procedural neutrality or vague calls for dialogue, while leaving Jewish students without the intellectual tools to navigate what they are hearing. Leadership hesitates. Standards blur. And in that space, confusion hardens into conviction.

Which is why the work of formation cannot be outsourced.

Passover offers a model, not just as a ritual, but as a theory of education. It assumes that knowledge must be transmitted before it can be meaningfully questioned, and that identity must be formed before it can be defended.

The Haggadah does not present a single type of learner. It presents four children, each asking in a different way, each requiring a different response. The message is simple but demanding. Transmission must meet the child where they are. The burden is on the adult to ensure that the story is told, understood, and carried forward.

This is a serious vision of education. It assumes that identity is not automatic. It must be cultivated, explained, and renewed across generations.

And it assumes something else as well. Belonging precedes critique. Understanding must come before judgment.

A child who understands the story of the Exodus, who sees himself as part of it, is in a position to ask meaningful questions about it. A child who does not know the story at all is left with abstraction. The same is true more broadly. Without grounding, critique becomes unmoored from understanding.

This requires time, attention, and a willingness to take questions seriously, even when they are difficult. It requires parents to know something themselves, to explain, to contextualize, and sometimes simply to say: this is who we are, and this is why it matters.

Antisemitism today is often less explicit than ambient. It appears in slogans, selective history, distortions of Israel, and just as often in what is omitted. Jewish students encounter it not only in hostility, but in confusion, in half-truths presented without context. The danger is not only that they will hear falsehoods. It is that they will lack the grounding to recognize them and the confidence to challenge them.

That is why what happens at home matters so much.

The Seder is not just a ritual meal. It is an exercise in memory, identity, and transmission. It is where Jewish children learn not only what happened, but why it matters, and why it is theirs. It is where questions are welcomed, where stories are told, and where belonging is made real.

It is also where pride begins.

Children who understand their history, who have heard the story of their people told with clarity and care, are not easily disoriented. They are not dependent on others to explain who they are. They carry something with them, something durable, something that does not shift with the mood of the moment.

They will not be defensive. They will be grounded. And from that grounding comes a quiet but enduring pride.

If we do not teach our children who they are, others will, and not with care, clarity, or love. Passover reminds us that Jewish identity is not inherited automatically. It is transmitted: at the table, in the home, through questions, stories, rituals, and example.

In an age of confusion and institutional hesitation, that work is not optional. It is essential and sacred work, and it begins at our own tables.

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

New York — April 7, 2026 — Today, the Forward, the nation’s leading Jewish news organization, published an exclusive, in-depth interview with Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University protest leader whose arrest during last year’s campus demonstrations thrust him into the national spotlight.

In a candid and wide-ranging conversation with Arno Rosenfeld, an enterprise reporter and author of the Forward’s Antisemitism Decoded newsletter, Khalil critiqued Hamas and said it had come to power through collaboration with Israel, explained his “nuanced” view of Zionism and detailed his vision for a “free Palestine” that includes the Jewish citizens of Israel.

“I was glad to have the opportunity to drill down on specifics that have been widely speculated upon but not addressed in Khalil’s previous interviews,” said Rosenfeld. “He wanted to speak directly to a major Jewish audience.”

The interview offers rare insight into one of the most scrutinized figures to emerge from the campus protest movement, drawing on original reporting, Khalil’s past public statements, and interviews with current and former Columbia students.

Read the complete story here.

The post The Forward publishes exclusive interview with Columbia protest leader Mahmoud Khalil appeared first on The Forward.