Pakistan is a country where 40 per cent of the population is under 15, where 93 million children are of school age, where the state has for years spent less than one per cent of GDP on health and less than 2pc on education despite disasters. When the water recedes, the roads get rebuilt. The child who missed seven weeks of school, who was screened for severe acute malnutrition at a flood clinic, who caught malaria from a collapsed WASH system, does not get rebuilt on the same timeline. Evidence from the 2005 earthquake shows four weeks of closure can cost a child one and a half years of learning four years later. Pakistan has just handed its children five years of near continuous disruption: Covid, the 2022 floods, the 2024 heatwaves, the 2025 floods. Each calamity more severe than the last.

Before the 2022 floods, 26.2m children were already out of school, the second highest figure in the world. The floods destroyed or damaged 27,000 schools, converted 5,000 more into relief camps, and locked 3.5m children out of learning in a single season. By January 2023, only 200,000 had received any education intervention. The provincial numbers show that the out-of-school share jumped from 32 to 80pc in Khairpur Mirs and from 46 to 86pc in Jacobabad. Entire districts where enrolment simply stopped. The pattern held: 1,300 more schools damaged in 2024, 230,000 children in Sindh losing access, nearly 30,000 schools damaged in Punjab in 2025, affecting 700,000 more. Each cycle adds to the base rather than starting from zero. Displaced teachers, especially women, do not return to classrooms that no longer exist. The system absorbs the loss quietly, without a ledger.

Girls absorb this collapse first and hardest. Even before 2022, the out-of-school rate for girls aged five to 16 stood at 59pc in Balochistan and 51pc in Sindh. When a flood or a drought strips a household of income, a daughter’s schooling is usually the first expense cut, and marriage becomes a coping strategy. The 2022 floods alone are linked to an 18pc rise in child marriage prevalence — five years of progress erased in a single monsoon. The term now in the literature is ‘monsoon brides’. Researchers have traced the chain across South Asia: economic shock triggers withdrawal from school, withdrawal triggers marriage, and marriage closes the door on everything meant to follow. This is a girl absent from every flood damage assessment. The floodwaters recede but they leave monsoon brides behind.

Pakistan has handed its children five years of near continuous disruption.

The harm does not stop at school gates or wedding registers. After the 2022 floods, half of the 3.4m children needing assistance showed signs of psychological distress, and seven in 10 Sindh parents reported depressive symptoms in their children. Pakistan has no framework to recognise this as loss, no methodology to measure it, no mechanism to compensate for it.

The same demographic pressure that turns a flood into a generational event turns a heatwave into one too. Global tracking shows infants and children under five now experience more heatwave days per year than any other age group, a fourfold increase over two decades, and Pakistan’s heatwaves already exceed 50 degrees Celsius. In 2024, that exposure alone shuttered classrooms for roughly half of all school-age children. Unicef’s 2026 Children’s Climate Risk Report has found that 1.1 billion of the world’s children are now exposed to three or more climate hazards simultaneously, and named Pakistan among the countries most severely affected. We can layer this onto a country ranked 109th of 127 nations on the Global Hunger Index, where up to 40pc of children under five are stunted and a third of mothers are malnourished. A child entering a heatwave, drought or a flood in Pakistan is not entering it from a healthy baseline. He is already behind, and the event does not reset him to zero, it pushes him further back.

Pakistan cannot see the scale of what it is losing, because it is not counting it. None of the official estimates, including the 2022 Post-Disaster Needs Assessment or the 2026 lessons-learned reviews, has counted it. Child deaths from malaria, cholera and respiratory illness after floods are rarely registered and are thus invisible to policymakers. Regional modelling projects that sustained climate-related learning disruption could generate up to $380bn in lost future earnings by 2050, a figure absent from our projections. This is what the country loses when it fails to protect the children who are supposed to grow into its workforce, tax base and its institutions.

The way forward has to run in the same sequence as the damage, not around it. First, disaster relief funds need a mandatory child impact reporting requirement, tracking school closures, malnutrition screening, child marriage referrals and mortality alongside infrastructure damage, published on the same timeline as the damage assessment. Second, education recovery financing needs to be pre-positioned rather than requested after each disaster, a drawdown facility that can disburse within weeks and carries a funded protocol for keeping girls enrolled once household income collapses. Third, Pakistan needs to bring its own child climate risk data into climate finance negotiations, rather than relying on an external index to describe a crisis the state has not measured for itself.

Pakistan does not lack evidence of what is happening to its children. It lacks a mechanism, in its own data systems and in the loss and damage registry, to make that harm count.

This article draws on a talk by the writer last month at the University College London-Unicef Roundtable, London Climate Action Week.

Published in Dawn, July 30th, 2026

GAZA CITY: The Israeli military on Wednesday admitted to bombing a mosque in the Gaza Strip, which it alleged was being used as a weapons storage facility by Hamas.

Photos showed fire and a huge plume of smoke rising above tents housing displaced Palestinians after a strike on the Al-Muttaqin Mosque, near the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) building.

People could be seen combing through vast piles of rubble and debris in the aftermath of the attack.

Amir Abu Al-Amrain, the director general of the ministry of awqaf and religious affairs in the Gaza Strip, said Israeli forces had “completely destroyed” the mosque in the air strike.

“The occupation cites false pretexts — such as the alleged presence of military sites — to justify these crimes,” he said, calling for urgent intervention to protect mosques and places of worship.

As of March 24, 2026, the UN’s cultural agency Unesco had verified damage to 164 sites since the start of Israel’s war on Gaza. Fourteen of those are religious sites.

“Israeli warplanes carried out a series of air strikes focusing on central and northern Gaza”, said Al Jazeera’s Tareq Abu Azzoum, reporting from Deir el-Balah.

“Yes, the whole area was warned, but a very narrow window of time was given for people to take precautionary measures,” he said.

“Is this a ceasefire? Every day there are attacks, every hour, every breath. There are attacks everywhere. They threaten and strike, whether it’s civilian vehicles or anything else they bomb,” Shehadeh Badawi, an eyewitness, told AFP in the aftermath.

Israel killed one person in a separate strike on the Nuseirat refugee camp. The strike targeted a group of Palestinians in a busy market, killing one Palestinian and wounding at least 20 others.

Meanwhile, eight Palestinians fled their home in Abu Najim, near Bethlehem, after Israeli settlers set fire to the building, according to the Palestinian Red Crescent.

Settlers also torched a car and sprayed graffiti on the walls of the building before setting it ablaze, according to locals.

There has been a rise in settler violence targeting Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, as lynch mobs attack people in their own homes or in public spaces.

Published in Dawn, July 30th, 2026

Additional District and Sessions Judge Zulfiqar Ahmed Naeem heard the bail petitions filed by Ijaz Haider and other police personnel.

The judge allowed their bail till Aug 12 and restrained the police from arresting them.

He directed each petitioner to furnish surety bonds of Rs50,000 and also ordered them to join the investigation.

The police officials had approached the court apprehending their arrest in the case registered by the Sarwar Road police.

According to the FIR, a police party led by Sarwar Road SHO entered the attorney general’s residence at around 6pm on July 27 after scaling the main gate. The cops allegedly harassed employees present in the house and damaged flower pots placed outside the residence during the operation.

A total of 11 policemen were booked in the FIR.

At the time of the police raid, the attorney general was not in the city.

The police claim the raid was conducted on a tip-off about the presence of some suspects in a neighbouring house, but the raiding team mistakenly entered the residence of the country’s principal law officer.

Published in Dawn, July 30th, 2026

A statement issued by KP Inspector General (IG) Zulfiqar Hameed said that the checkpost was attacked by Fitna al Khawarij, a term the state uses for terrorists belonging to the banned Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), while police personnel were present.

He said that the police personnel responded bravely, while additional personnel were also dispatched. However, the terrorists ambushed the contingent, due to which an armoured personnel carrier was damaged.

The IG said that despite these challenges, the personnel fought with bravery and professionalism.

“Fifteen kharji were killed while multiple others were injured due to the police’s response,” he said. The IG added that during the intense and long exchange of fire, nine cops, including DSP Diyar Khan, were martyred while 28 others were injured.

The IG asserted that KP police’s morale and resolve were strong, adding that the battle to wipe out terrorists from every corner of the province would continue.

Speaking to Dawn, a senior police official also confirmed the number of casualties. He said that an exchange of fire broke out after the terrorists attacked the checkpost.

Separately, a police checkpost in Adezai area, within the jurisdiction of the Mattani police station in Peshawar was also attacked by terrorists late on Wednesday night.

“Terrorists fired at the post but cops responded, prompting the former to escape,” a senior police official said, adding that all the cops remained unhurt.

Meanwhile, Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi strongly condemned the attack on the checkpost in Hangu. He offered his condolences to the families of the martyred officials and prayed for the recovery of the injured.

A monthly security assessment released in early June by the Pakistan Institute for Conflict and Security Studies (PICSS) said that after two consecutive months of improvement, Pakistan’s security situation deteriorated sharply in May, driven primarily by escalating terrorist violence in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan.

Earlier on Wednesday, a policeman and four members of a village defence committee were martyred, while six terrorists belonging to TTP were killed during a joint security operation in the mountainous areas of Kabal and Matta tehsils.

On July 6, 27 policemen were martyred in a terrorist attack on a police post in Balochistan’s Ziarat district; nine police personnel were killed on the spot, while 18 others were killed by the terrorists after being kidnapped.