Israel-US deliberately targeted Iranian girls’ school, killing 165 children, investigation reveals
Israeli-Americans are replicating their Gaza tactics in Iran
The Israeli-American strike on a school that killed at least 165 children, most of them girls aged between 7 and 12, on the first day of the illegal war on Iran was deliberate, an investigation by Al Jazeera has revealed.
The Shajereh Tayyebeh (The Good Tree) school in the city of Minab, in Hormozgan province of Iran, near the Strait of Hormuz, started as an institution primarily to serve the children of Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Navy personnel. It initially formed part of a larger military complex.
The Al Jazeera report highlights that “this administrative link (to the IRGC) or the identity of the parents does not change the schools’ legal status as civilian facilities under international humanitarian law, unless they were being used in military operations.” Furthermore, “the children who attend them – whether they are the children of military personnel or civilians – remain protected people with special protection in armed conflicts, including the prohibition on intentionally targeting them or carrying out attacks that could harm them.”
Notably, over a decade ago, Iranian authorities started the process of separating the school entirely from the military complex. The school got its own entry and exit gates and thick walls separated it from the military components of the larger complex, making it an independent civilian facility.
Satellite images dated September 6, 2016 capture the main turning point, when new internal walls were created and built, fully and tightly separating the school building area from the rest of the military block.
Similarly, a hospital that served civilians was completely separated from the military component. The Martyr Absalan Specialised Clinic was inaugurated in January 2025 to serve residents of eastern Hormozgan province.
“As with the school years earlier, building the clinic required spatial separation from the military base,” the Al Jazeera investigation reported.
“After the Martyr Absalan clinic opened in January 2025, a separate gate was opened to connect it directly to the external street to receive civilian patients, and a dedicated car park was established – measures mirroring what the school underwent when it was separated from the complex and given three independent gates.
“Thus, what had been a single unified military complex became three independent sectors, clearly distinguishable in satellite imagery: The Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ school, separated since 2016 with its own walls and gates; the Martyr Absalan Specialised Clinic, separated since early 2025 with an independent civilian entrance; and the Sayyid al-Shuhada military complex, which remained a closed and active site.”
However, on the day of the criminal strike, the Israeli-American genocidaires left the medical facility untouched but specifically targeted the military base and the elementary school full of children on the first day of the school week, which starts on Saturday in Iran.
The investigation surmises that this selective targeting cannot be a coincidence:
When the US-Israeli attack began on the morning of February 28, 2026, analysis of the strike locations revealed an odd pattern: Missiles hit the military base and the school, but bypassed the specialised clinic complex located between the two without touching it.
This exclusion cannot be explained as a coincidence; it strongly indicates that the executing party was operating with coordinates and maps that distinguished between the complex’s different facilities.
Here lies the fundamental contradiction exposed by this investigation: If the intelligence was up to date enough to spare a clinic that had been open for only one year, how did it fail to identify an elementary school that had been separated from the military complex and had become a clearly defined civilian institution for more than 10 years?
The report concludes that this is either a case of intelligence failure — which is implausible considering the precise targeted strikes the Israeli-Americans have regularly carried out against Iranian officials, who operate with sophisticated intelligence protection to evade enemy targeting, in comparison to a wide-open civilian school — or it is a “deliberate strike based on a linkage that treats the school as part of the military system.”
The attack’s deliberate intent to maximise destruction, targeting survivors and rescuers, is reinforced by the fact it was a “double-tap” strike.
“When the first bomb hit the school, one of the teachers and the principal moved a group of students to the prayer hall to protect them,” a Red Crescent medic told Middle East Eye. “The principal called the parents and told them to come and pick up their children. But the second bomb hit that area as well. Only a small number of those who had taken shelter survived.”
“I felt like I had gone mute. I couldn’t speak,” one staff member told MEE. “You could hear the sound of children crying and screaming.”
Going by the pattern of Israeli-American behaviour during their criminal wars throughout history, but especially over the past two and a half years in the Gaza Strip, it is apparent that the wanton slaughter of children at the Minab school was deliberate.
“The Minab school incident is not an exception in the record of civilian facilities being targeted by the US and Israeli militaries; rather, it falls within a documented pattern stretching across decades of military operations and attacks, in which the same scene recurs: Strikes hit schools, hospitals, and civilian shelters, followed by immediate denial or shifting of blame to the other side, before independent investigations later reveal the falsity of official claims,” the report added, citing incidents of Israeli-American attacks on children and schools from Egypt to Afghanistan.
In April 1970, Israeli Phantom fighter jets bombed the Bahr al-Baqar elementary school in Egypt’s Sharqia governorate, killing 46 children out of 130 who were in their classrooms that morning.
Israel claimed the school was an Egyptian military facility, and Defense Minister Moshe Dayan said at the time that “the Egyptians may have put elementary school pupils in a military base.”
However, a captured Israeli pilot revealed the truth:
But an Israeli pilot who took part in the raid and was captured during the October 1973 war later revealed it had been a deliberate attack and that they knew it was merely a school.
The Gaza Strip has been the most glaring example of the specific targeting of children and schools. What is more, the Israelis have continued to target schools long after they stopped functioning as educational institutions and became the last shelters for displaced Palestinians.
Beyond mass killings, it appears to be a deliberate tactic to destroy all means of education for the Palestinians long after the direct assault on their enclave ends.
“In the Gaza Strip, attacks on educational facilities have reached an unprecedented level since October 2023,” the report added, highlighting the Israeli-American predilection for the ritual slaughter of children.
By the early months of 2025, 778 of the enclave’s 815 schools had been partially or completely destroyed – about 95.5% of all schools. UNRWA reported that about one million displaced people sought refuge in its schools, which had been turned into shelters; nevertheless, at least 1,000 people were killed and 2,527 wounded inside these schools through July 2025.
Moreover, the report added that the targeting of schools in Gaza has been a systematic process, with special teams set up to oversee such ghastly operations: “Journalistic sources also documented that the Israeli army set up a ‘special strikes cell’ to target schools systematically, classifying them as ‘centres of gravity.’”
In this context, the concept of a “centre of gravity” comes from military theorist Carl von Clausewitz, who defined it as the key source of an enemy’s strength that, if neutralised, will weaken them decisively.
To classify schoolchildren as “centres of gravity” to be ritually slaughtered in order to weaken the enemy is another level of perversion to which the Israeli-American campaign of global savagery is making the world grow accustomed.
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If this pre-meditated attack wasn't the definition of evil, then I don't know what is.
Of course it was deliberate.
What does Iran or anyone else propose to do about it?