A strike on a girls’ elementary school in the opening salvo of the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran on Saturday killed more than 100 children, according to Iranian officials and teachers inside the country.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]
The strike hit the school in Minab, a city in the Hormozgan province of southern Iran, on Saturday morning, the start of the school week in Iran, when children were in class.
Shiva Amelirad, a Canada-based representative of the Coordinating Council of Iranian Teachers’ Trade Associations, a network of teachers’ unions in Iran, told TIME that at least 108 children had been killed in the attack, according to information she had received from sources in Minab.
Read More: Did Trump Have the Legal Authority to Strike Iran? An Expert Explains
“Due to the limited capacity of the hospital morgue, refrigerated vehicles have reportedly been used to store the bodies of the victims,” she said.
TIME has not been able to independently confirm the casualty figures.
Amelirad said a decision was made to close the school when U.S.-Israeli airstrikes began, “but the time between the announcement of the school’s closure and the moment of the explosion was very short, and many families had not yet arrived to pick up their children.”
She said that in some cases, multiple children from the same family were killed in the explosion, and that some teachers were killed in the attack.
The U.N. education agency, UNESCO, said in response to the attack that it was “deeply alarmed” by the impact of strikes on educational institutions.
“Initial reports indicate that an attack on a girls’ primary school in Minab, southern Iran, has resulted in the deaths of over 100 individuals, including numerous students. The killing of pupils in a place dedicated to learning constitutes a grave violation of the protection afforded to schools under international humanitarian law,” the agency said in a post on X.
A precise death toll from the strike has been difficult to ascertain, as the number has risen steadily since the incident.
Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Dr. Esmaeil Baghaei told MSNOW on Sunday that the death toll from the strike was “150 innocent school girls. Some of them are still under the rubble.”
The city’s prosecutor said the number of people killed in the strike was 165, according to the state-run IRNA news agency on Sunday.
Hossein Kermanpour, a spokesperson for Iran’s health ministry, said Saturday that mostly “young martyrs” were killed at the school. In a post on X Sunday, he said the toll from “a single missile strike” had risen to 180.
Video and photographs of the building in the aftermath of the strike, posted to Telegram, show dozens of people gathered around a partially collapsed building, with black smoke billowing from its windows. The bottom half of the building’s exterior is painted blue, with pink flowers and green leaves. Painted beside them is a young boy, reading. Other videos show rescue workers sorting through the rubble and piles of dirty backpacks.
When asked by TIME to comment on the strike, the Department of Defense pointed to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM)’s X pages.
Neither account has commented directly on the school strike.
Pentagon spokesman Captain Tim Hawkins said in a statement that the agency “was aware of reports concerning civilian harm resulting from ongoing military operations. We take these reports seriously and are looking into them. The protection of civilians is of utmost importance, and we will continue to take all precautions available to minimize the risk of unintended harm.”
The Israeli military said it was not aware of strikes in the area, according to the Associated Press.
According to Amelirad, based on reports from locals in Minab, the school had previously been used as a military facility but was later converted into a school attended by children from a mixture of military and civilian families attracted by lower tuition.
According to FactNameh, the school is on the grounds of a base that is used by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, or IRGC. A video verified by the New York Times on Saturday showed a strike hitting that IRGC base.
The strike prompted an angry reaction from some of President Donald Trump’s own supporters on Saturday.
“I did not campaign for this. I did not donate money for this. I did not vote for this, in elections or Congress,” former Rep. Marjory Taylor Greene, from Georgia, wrote on X Saturday in response to a video of the aftermath of the strike on the school. “This is not what we thought MAGA was supposed to be.”
Nobel prize winner and humanitarian Malala Yousafzai, known for her campaign for girls’ education in Pakistan, decried the strikes and the schoolchildren’s deaths on social media.
“They were girls who went to school to learn, with hopes and dreams for their future. Today, their lives were brutally cut short,” she wrote. “The killing of civilians, especially children, is unconscionable, and I condemn it unequivocally.”
— Additional reporting by Fatemeh Jamalpour
Leave a comment
