2026 Minab school attack

Minab girls' elementary school

According to locals, the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls' elementary school in southern Minab was previously a military facility.^[6] Its location was near^[b] the Sayyid al-Shuhada military complex which included the headquarters of the Asif Brigade of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy (IRGCN).^[9] As of early 2026, it had been more than 10 years that the school had existed as a civilian institution, separate from the IRGCN compound.^[9] According to satellite imagery, the building housing the school was walled within the IRGCN compound in 2013 and walled off by September 2016 at the latest.^[8][10] Its new wall had three entrances separate from the rest of the compound and all were without a military security checkpoint, allowing entry without having to pass through the compound.^[10][11] Imagery of an outdoor play area was visible as late as August 2017.^[10][12] The Guardian determined there was no indication that the building served a military purpose and found that the adjacent compound buildings were a medical clinic and a pharmacy,^[13] the former of which was walled off from the compound between 2022 and 2023.^[3] Furthermore, the compound's four military security posts had been removed by 2016.^[11] According to Minab's mayor, the compound had been closed for about 15 years and all military personnel had moved out; the school was the only operational facility at the former base.^[14]

Start of the 2026 Iran war

On 28 February 2026, the US and Israel launched attacks against Iran.^[15] The airstrikes, which began at around 10:00 a.m. IST, coincided with the time at which Iranians usually send their children to school, as Saturday is a working day in Iran.^[16][13]

Emergency and volunteer response

As reports emerged that the school had been hit, many panicked locals, including family members of victims, rushed to the scene while security forces attempted to push families back, fearing the area would be targeted again, and sealed off the building.^[30] Soon after, recovery efforts began—some informal—as civilians, Iranian Red Crescent Society emergency workers, and individuals donning uniforms resembling the Basij searched through the debris.^[8][11] Although initially using just their hands,^[30] rescue services used construction cranes and shovels to save people trapped by rubble,^[10][16] while black smoke scorching the remaining walls continued to pour from the building's windows.^[6][33] Footage reveals items including severed arms,^[8] bodies, and school bags being recovered.^[33][34] Other imagery confirmed that areas struck within the school were used for schooling.^[11] One video shows a man, previously digging through the rubble, waving dust-covered textbooks and worksheets; in a quote translated by The Guardian, he yelled:^[13]

"These are the schoolbooks of the children who are under these ruins, under this rubble here," he shouts. "You can see the blood of these children on these books. These are civilians, who are not in the military. This was a school and they came to study."^[13]

During recovery efforts, an opening was created between the IRGC and school's compounds, allowing recovery teams to move rubble out of the way.^[11] Corpses were collected in body bags and injured victims taken away in ambulances,^[8] with most initially being sent to the Hazrat Abolfazl located 2 km away from the school.^[10] Later in the day of the airstrike, bodies of the victims were transferred to their relatives gathering at a nearby designated collection area.^[30] The attack flooded Minab's morgues, however, forcing some of the bodies of victims to be held in refrigerated trucks.^[6] The search for victims ended on 1 March.^[8]

Authorities announced the end of search operations for survivors on 1 March.^[35] The same day, Shiva Amelirad, representing the Coordinating Council of Iranian Teachers’ Trade Associations, told TIME magazine that 108 or more children had been killed in the attack, according to sources within Minab she was in contact with.^[6] Minab's public prosecutor office reported later that day, through the state-run Islamic Republic News Agency, that 150 "innocent school girls" were killed, with some still trapped under the rubble.^[6] The judicial head of Hormozgan stated that 140 of the deceased had been identified up to that point, while efforts continued to identify another 25 people, and that the remains of the bombs used in the attack had been located, seized, and transferred for analysis in preparation for an investigation.^[36]

Mass funeral

The funeral and mass burial of victims of the attack, both attended by thousands of mourners

On 3 March, Iran held a mass funeral for the children killed in the airstrike in a public square in Minab, attended by thousands of mourners. Those in attendance held imagery of the attack and phrases condemning what one victim's mother called "a document of American crimes".^[37][38] Images show excavators preparing a hundred or more graves at a mass burial site at Minab Hermud cemetery, whose grounds were subsequently filled with the mourners which held a procession bringing the caskets of victims to the site.^[14][20] Some victims were buried at other sites outside Minab.^[10]

United States military investigation

On 5 March, Reuters reported that two American military personnel involved in an internal investigation believed the attack was likely perpetrated by the US, although a final conclusion had not yet been reached. The US and Israel had divided their strikes geographically, with the US responsible for striking targets in southern Iran where the school was located. Independent analysis of satellite imagery suggested that the school and the Sayyid al-Shuhada military complex had been struck near-simultaneously by air-delivered munitions.^[39]

On 11 March, the New York Times reported that the preliminary findings of the investigation determined that the US was responsible for the strike. The inquiry suggested that the school was likely targeted due to outdated coordinates provided by the Defense Intelligence Agency.^[40][41]

On 13 March, US secretary of defense Pete Hegseth promised a thorough probe into the strike, in what the Washington Post described as a tacit acknowledgement of US responsibility for the attack.^[42]

Domestic

President Masoud Pezeshkian said that "the American and Zionist aggression against Minab Elementary School will never be erased from the historical memory of our nation."^[44] The foreign ministry spokesperson Esmail Baghaei called the airstrike a "blatant [war] crime," adding that "the world must stand up to this great injustice", including "the UN Security Council [which] must act now in line with its primary responsibility under the Charter."^[24][45] Foreign minister Abbas Araghchi said the "crimes against the Iranian people will not go unanswered."^[30] The spokesperson for the Health Ministry, Hossein Kermanpour, called the report of the attack "the most bitter news" so far, adding that there may be even more bodies under the rubble.^[18] Iran's ambassador to the United Nations, Ali Bahreini, followed up on calls from Iranian officials on 1 March, raising the "unjustifiable" and "criminal" issue with UN human rights chief, Volker Türk,^[38][46] which Türk heeded.^[20] In an opinion piece for Al Jazeera, Bahreini placed blame on Trump as the commander-in-chief of the American armed force for the attack, arguing that "the legal question is tragically clear" before writing that "a missile engineered for precision struck a school building at the precise moment when children were present," the result of which "was not collateral damage but a human catastrophe."^[47]

The head of Iran's Red Crescent, Pirhossein Kolivand, said the "unique and bitter incident" had "no comparison with any other incident" even outside of Iran, as he said no singular attack killed so many students simultaneously, "even in Gaza".^[8]

International

Human rights activists and organizations

The Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor described the attack as a "horrific crime and a consolidation of the collapse of civilian protection", and said that any attack on "protected persons" such as children and teaching staff constitutes a serious violation of international humanitarian law.^[9] The Norway-based human rights group, Hengaw, said it was seeking the names of victims of the attack, adding that "the establishment and expansion of military facilities in close proximity to schools and public spaces place civilians at heightened risk."^[20]

Moments before and after a Tomahawk missile strikes one of the buildings within the IRGC compound, located adjacent to the school

Open-source researcher for the HRW Digital Investigation Lab, Sophia Jones, said "a prompt and thorough investigation is needed into this attack, including if those responsible should have known that a school was there and that it would be full of children and their teachers before midday." Jones added that "those responsible for an unlawful attack should be held to account, including prosecutions of anyone responsible for war crimes."^[10] Its Washington director, Sarah Yager, said that "even if those responsible for the strike did not deliberately target a school full of children, the US military has an obligation to take all feasible precautions to avoid civilian harm, which it clearly did not do in this case." Yager argued that the US reckoning with its accountability for the attack was also important for ensuring that "this never happens again."^[58] HRW said, however, that if any buildings within the adjacent base were used for military purposes, the school would have been placed "at unnecessary risk" by Iranian authorities, in violation of the laws of war.^[10]

Amnesty International’s Senior Director of Research, Advocacy, Policy and Campaigns, Erika Guevara-Rosas, said that "this harrowing attack on a school, with classrooms full of children, is a sickening illustration of the catastrophic and entirely predictable price civilians are paying during this armed conflict." Arguing that the US "could and should" have known of the building being a school, Guevara-Rosas believed the strke was "strictly prohibited under international humanitarian law."^[11] Like HRW, Amnesty called for impartial, transparent investigation from the US, but instead argued that whether the building was struck with people inside, without people inside, or strikes fell in the adjacent IRGC compound, civilians could, would, and did fall at risk, thus constituting some illegal international action.^[11]

Pakistani female and human rights activist Malala Yousafzai, who is a United Nations Messenger of Peace and Nobel Peace laureate, said news of the airstrike left her "heartbroken and appalled". Yousafzai condemned the killings of civilians, particularly those of children.^[8][56]

The National Human Rights Commission of Thailand condemned the attack on the Minab school.^[59]

Targeting process and precision

An initial Al Jazeera English investigation into the airstrike concluded that the attack was either based on "outdated intelligence" from before 2013, and would thus "constitute grave negligence", or that the attack was intentional and done "to inflict maximum societal shock and undermine popular support for Iran’s military establishment".^[9] The Al Jazeera investigation also linked the attack and subsequent misinformation to similar attacks targeting civilian facilities by the US and Israel, such as the Bahr El-Baqar primary school bombing (1970), Amiriyah shelter bombing (1991), Qana massacre (1996) and Kunduz hospital airstrike (2015) and Israeli attacks on schools during the Gaza war (since 2023).^[9] Experts speaking to NPR corroborated the airstrike's precision. Researchers at Oregon State University's Conflict Ecology Laboratory, Corey Scher and Jamon Van Den Hoek, noted that the detonation centroids were "pretty clean". Satellite imagery specialist Jeffrey Lewis agreed that the airstrikes were precision airstrikes but added that the strike being an error was more likely.^[3]

Two people familiar with the logistics of the strike told The Washington Post that intelligence had tagged the building as either a factory or arms depot before approving it as an airstrike target.^[12]

Responsibility and intentionality

Shortly after the strike, Jeffrey Lewis said the US was more likely than Israel to be responsible for the strike based on Minab's location as related to where the US had been striking.^[3] Investigations by the CBC and NPR corroborated Lewis' analysis, finding that the area where the school is located was the target of more than one precision strike, with imagery showing multiple craters and plumes of smoke present. Both investigations suggested that the strike was likely the result of a failure in intelligence gathering.^[3][2] An investigation by The New York Times also concluded that the school was likely hit by a US precision strike.^[1] A later HRW report published satellite imagery showing damaged to roofs of buildings within the compound, where "relatively small circular" entry points through the roofs demonstrated the munitions' precise nature.^[10]

The CBC and NPR investigation also found that the school and surrounding complex fell under the area of operations of the US military, with verified US airstrikes having taken place nearby.^[3][2] Later investigations by Bellingcat and BBC Verify geolocated footage released by Mehr News, showing a subsonic cruise missile identified by both as an American UGM-109 Tomahawk land attack missile striking the area near the school shortly after it hit.^[66][67] The missile being a Tomahawk was confirmed by eight other munition experts, Sam Lair of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, U.S. Air Force Special Operations targeting expert Wes Bryant, among others.^{[66][67][68][69]} Furthermore, the US was the only participant in the conflict to use the Tomahawk missile, with Lewis saying the missile in the footage did not match any known weapons possessed by Iran.^[66][70][71] Bellingcat, among other sources, added that the footage having confirmed the US' striking of areas within the vicinity of the school contradicted Trump's claim that an Iranian missile hit the school.^[69][66]

A CBC investigation concluded that the school was bombed as part of a precision airstrike against the military complex adjacent to the targeted building and that it was not a mistake. It said the impact on the school demonstrated that it was either a weapons system failure or a serious CENTCOM intelligence gathering error, adding that the US primarily targeted military bases and missile launchers in southern and central Iran. Israel, on the other hand, was focusing its operations in the north saying that "Minab's location in the south, near the Strait of Hormuz, places it within the US military's primary area of operations and lines up with other US strikes on the Bandar Abbas Naval Base, about 80 kilometres west of Minab, and facilities in Konarak, which is 400 kilometres to the southeast."^[2]

Legality

Shannon Bosch, an associate professor of law at Edith Cowan University, analyzed the strike from the perspective of international humanitarian law (IHL). Without drawing firm conclusions, Bosch noted that schools and children under 18 are especially protected under IHL, concluding that "the legality of that strike turns on whether the expected harm to children and the school was excessive compared to the military advantage gained by striking the target."^[33] UN human rights experts characterized the strike as a potential war crime under the Rome Statute.^[72] Regarding the attack, international humanitarian law expert Janina Dill said that attackers are required to "verify the status" of targets to avoid harming civilians. Beth Van Schaack said the US "should have known that a school was in the vicinity".^[1] HRW said the same, adding that beyond the laws of war requiring precise intelligence, the strike's proximity to civilian infrastructure required advanced notice.^[10]

On the other hand, legal scholar at Yale University and then president-elect of the American Society of International Law, Oona Hathaway, said that it would not necessarily amount to a war crime should the attack be an honest mistake and not "a reckless lack of care."^[73]

Media coverage

Polish journalist Mariusz Zawadzki [pl], writing for Gazeta Wyborcza, stated that in the week after the attack, the event was being mostly ignored by Western media.^[74]