Number of people murdered in US-Israel school strike rises to 180

An overhead shot shows the graves being dug for the victims of the U.S.-Israeli strike on an Iranian school | image source: Seyed Abbas Araghchi

The death toll at the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in Minab has now been confirmed to be 180, most of whom were girls aged 7-12 years of age. With search and rescue operations formally declared over, the focus will now shift to the recovery of any more remains of victims. Ninety-six more children and staff were injured. There has been no follow-up statement from the United States military and no acknowledgment from Israel. While the U.S. military claims it has launched an investigation into the strike, multiple U.S. officials have denied that the strike was caused by their attacks.

What we know is that the school has been destroyed in the first wave of attacks by the USA and Israel, and the attack came before any Iranian response, ruling out the chance of a failing Iranian missile causing the disaster. Footage of the school in the aftermath of the attack have been verified by the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Iranian fact-checking organisation Factnameh, who verified footage taken at the scene against existing satellite imagery of the building.

A school official told Time magazine that a decision had been made to close the school when the strikes began, but that the gap between the announcement and the moment of impact was so short that many parents had not yet arrived to collect their children.

Israel and the United States will likely point to the fact that the school sits in close proximity to an IRGC base, the argument being that the base was the intended target. Under international humanitarian law, the obligation to protect civilian life does not evaporate because a military asset is nearby. UNESCO made this explicit, stating that the killing of pupils in a place of learning constitutes a grave violation of the protections schools are afforded under that law, protections that the USA and Israel have already ignored in their genocide in Gaza.

The children inside were not combatants, they were between seven and twelve years old. They were at school on a Saturday morning because Saturday is a working day in Iran. A school official who survived described walking back towards the building after hearing the blast and finding girls’ bodies in the classrooms and in the corridors, a video that has gone viral showed a man holding the severed arm of one of the young victims, showing the true destruction caused by the unlawful attack.