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Deep-Dive Investigation Examines Minab School Bombing: ‘One of the Worst US War Crimes Since Vietnam’
“The children were five years old and all they did was yell, ‘Miss! Miss!’ and were crying. I ran to the children. I just said, ‘Get under the table!” recalled preschool teacher Hossniyeh Salem. “I didn’t think they were going to strike the school. I just thought that some place had been hit. I said, ‘Don’t be afraid, sit down.’”
“Two simultaneous sounds. They’re still in my ear. My son even describes them—‘Wooosh, boom! Woosh, boom!’—and then the explosion very close by,” Salem said. “Plaster was falling, the ground was shaking, and at that moment I just looked at my preschool girls and my son, and I said to myself, ‘It’s over. Now is the time when we go under the rubble, it’s going to fall now,’” she continued. “Then there were no more sounds. The class was full of smoke and dust."
Yaghoub Yazdanpanah, a literature teacher at another school about eight miles from Minab, described the moment he learned that the school his 6-year-old daughter, Fatemeh, attended had been bombed.
“I left my classroom, ran home, took my car, and sped to Minab. When I arrived, I said, ‘Oh no!’ The unimaginable had happened," he said. “There was no school left. Two-thirds of the school, maybe more, had been destroyed. Smoke was rising from all over the school. It had turned into rubble. For a moment, I thought I was asleep and having a nightmare."
Yazdanpanah said he already knew the worst had happened well before he received his daughter’s body at an overwhelmed hospital that night.
“We knew our children had been martyred; we knew our children were no longer with us," he said. “When they brought Fatemeh, she was in one piece because she had been in her teacher’s arms [when she died].”
“There was no school left."
The US has still not accepted responsibility for the Minab attack, even though an internal Pentagon investigation has concluded that US forces struck the school using two Tomahawk missiles. In the initial days after the attack, President Donald Trump claimed that Iran had been responsible before backing off the claim, stating, “I just don’t know enough about it.”
Drop Site obtained images of the missile fragments from the site, which an independent weapons inspector said “all appear to be remnants of Tomahawk missiles." Iran is not known to possess Tomahawks. A UN fact-finding mission report released earlier this month determined that the school had been “the intended point of impact" rather than collateral damage.
People are seen scouring the wreckage at the site of the February 28, 2026 bombing of the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in Minab, Iran. (Photo by Mehr News Agency/Wikimedia Commons)
Adm. Brad Cooper, the commander of US Central Command (CENTCOM) told Congress in May that the school was "located on an active [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] cruise missile base."
Wes Bryant, a former senior targeting adviser at the Pentagon, told Drop Site he'd never seen any indication that the school was on an active missile site and explained that even if it was, "it doesn’t matter."
“Those children, all those civilians, are still non-combatants and protected, so it’s really disgusting to hear that," he said. "This wasn’t even fragmentation that hit a school next to another target. This was deliberately targeted very, very clearly and obviously. So at the very least, [it was a] complete mischaracterization of the target.”
There was abundant evidence of the school's civilian use that would have been available to those who conducted the strike. The school was part of a compound that included barracks for the elite IRGC but was redeveloped for civilian use beginning in 2014. It had publicly and officially operated as a school since 2015.
The school had a very active online presence with a website that prominently displayed classroom activities and school events. Meanwhile, satellite imagery captured just two months before the attack showed children standing in the schoolyard outside the building.
An investigation from Bloomberg found that the school had been placed on a list of targets for the war's opening salvo that was assembled in part using the Maven artificial intelligence system developed by Palantir, which reportedly did not classify it as a school.
The UN report emphasized that even if the attack can be boiled down to an intelligence failure, it still likely amounted to a war crime because the US attacked despite readily available evidence that the building was a school, a failure investigators said went “beyond mere negligence” and amounted to recklessness toward the risk of striking civilians.
US President Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth attend a dignified transfer event for US service members killed during operations in the Middle East, at Dover Air Force Base in Dover, Delaware, on July 22, 2026. (Photo by Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images)
Hala Rharrit, a career former US Foreign Service officer who spent 17 years at the State Department before resigning in 2024, remains unsatisfied by the government's efforts to downplay the attack as a "mistake."
“There’s no way to say that this was some type of error,” Rharrit told Drop Site. “You’re either saying that our US Military is completely incompetent, that despite the multiple layers of review, everybody messed up—or there was something very, very sinister about this strike.”
According to data from the Human Rights Activists News Agency, the vast majority of US-Israeli strikes during the first 40 days of the war did harm to civilians or civilian infrastructure, contradicting repeated claims that the US “never targets civilians.” At minimum, the data shows at least 1,701 civilians have been killed, but HRANA has stressed that the true death toll is likely substantially higher.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has spent his tenure dissolving guardrails meant to prevent civilian casualties, denouncing "stupid rules of engagement," and saying the military should pursue “lethality” over “legality.” Trump, meanwhile, has repeatedly threatened mass destruction upon Iran, including that the "entire civilization" would "die."
“The administration and Hegseth have made it quite clear that they don’t really care about civilian casualties. That may also have been true of previous bombing campaigns that predate the Trump administration, but it is even more the case than in the past, and they have made it clear that troops do not need to be concerned about consequences,” said Harrison Mann, a former US Army major and intelligence analyst for the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).
“There is no mystery about what coordinates those missiles hit, and that question would have been answerable on the day of the strikes," he told Drop Site. "The only way that CENTCOM would not know is that they are choosing to be willfully ignorant.”
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