Six Months After Minab School Strike, Families Mourn Children as Pentagon Findings Remain Unreleased
By Sadaf Sundas Riaz — SCN NEWS
MINAB, Iran — Six months after a U.S. strike devastated the Shajareh Tayyebeh school in southern Iran, its shattered classrooms are becoming a memorial to the children and teachers killed there while fundamental questions about how an American weapon struck the school remain publicly unanswered. A banner surrounding the ruins now carries the faces of 120 students — 47 girls and 73 boys — and 26 teachers and staff members, while three other children are presumed dead but remain missing. Iranian state media have put the overall death toll at 168, although a definitive independently verified casualty accounting has not been established.
The school was hit on February 28, the opening day of the war, as U.S. and Israeli forces carried out strikes across Iran. Independent evidence gathered in the months since has increasingly focused attention on American responsibility. Amnesty International's Evidence Lab examined more than 30 satellite images, 28 videos and 30 photographs and concluded that the school was directly struck during an attack that also hit structures in an adjacent Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps compound. Its analysis found evidence consistent with a top-down air strike and said a U.S.-manufactured Tomahawk missile was likely used.
The location of the school has become central to understanding how the disaster may have occurred. Historical satellite imagery examined by Amnesty showed that the building had once been inside the perimeter of the neighboring IRGC compound, but was later separated by a wall and given its own public entrances. The school stood about 74 metres from the nearest structure targeted inside the military compound. That history has raised the possibility that targeting information failed to reflect the site's transformation into a functioning school, although the Pentagon has not publicly issued its final explanation.
The consequences of whatever happened inside that targeting process remain visible in Minab. Heydar Sadeghi now spends many evenings beside the destroyed school where his 11-year-old grandson Hami and daughter-in-law Neda Salehizadeh, a teacher, were killed. His nine-year-old granddaughter Nila survived after being pulled from the rubble, but her grandfather says unexpected noises still frighten her and she struggles to sleep. Sadeghi described trying to conceal his own grief from the surviving child, mourning instead at the school before returning home to comfort her.
Another family's account illustrates how narrow the difference between survival and death became that morning. Fatemeh Barani said her daughter, second-grade teacher Nasim Neyestani, became alarmed as news of strikes elsewhere in Iran emerged and began contacting parents of her 22 pupils. Fourteen children were collected before the attack, according to Barani; Neyestani remained with eight pupils who had not been picked up and all nine were killed when the school's prayer room was struck. Those specific details could not all be independently verified, but the account is consistent with other evidence that teachers were contacting families before Iranian authorities ordered schools nationwide to close.
The timing makes the episode particularly difficult. Amnesty's reconstruction placed the start of U.S. and Israeli strikes across Iran at around 9:45 a.m. local time and said Iranian authorities announced a nationwide school closure at approximately 10:15 a.m. Hormozgan's governor said the Minab school was struck at about 10:45 a.m. Satellite imagery taken at 10:23 a.m. showed the school and adjacent military compound still standing without visible damage, supporting a later strike time. Families therefore appear to have been racing toward the school to collect children as military operations were already underway.
What remains unresolved is not simply which military possessed the weapon. Reuters reported in March that an initial internal U.S. military investigation found American forces were likely responsible, while subsequent reporting indicated investigators were examining whether outdated targeting information contributed to the strike. More than two dozen Democratic senators, including Senate Armed Services Committee ranking Democrat Jack Reed, demanded in July that the administration disclose the investigation, brief Congress and explain what measures would prevent another such incident. The Pentagon's findings have still not been publicly released.
International humanitarian law requires parties to distinguish military objectives from civilians and civilian objects and to take feasible precautions to minimize civilian harm. Amnesty concluded that the Minab attack failed that standard and called for those responsible to be held accountable, while also saying Iranian authorities have obligations to separate civilians from military objectives where feasible. Those are Amnesty's legal findings rather than a judgment by an international court, but its evidence analysis intensifies the importance of the Pentagon explaining what information American planners possessed before the strike.
Six months later, Minab is increasingly preserving its own record. Hormozgan authorities plan to retain the damaged school as a memorial and war museum rather than erase the ruins, while a separate section of the local cemetery has been dedicated to those killed. Families continue visiting both places, leaving flowers and sitting beside photographs of children and teachers whose school day ended before many parents could reach them.
The contrast is now the central fact of the Minab story. The physical evidence is being preserved, the victims are being individually remembered and families are still living with the consequences, yet the American investigation that could explain how the school came to be struck remains outside public view. Until that accounting is released, Minab will remain not only one of the war's most devastating civilian tragedies but an unresolved test of military transparency and accountability.