On the morning of 28 February, a girls' primary school in the port city of Minab, in Iran’s Hormozgan province, was reduced to rubble after what Iranian officials say were multiple airstrikes. Parents who had escorted children into the school that day found charred walls, scattered backpacks and the bodies of pupils; Iranian state media and local prosecutors report 165 dead and 96 wounded, most of them schoolchildren.
Video circulating on social media and images released by Iranian agencies show hallways and classrooms gutted by blast damage and thick plumes of smoke rising over the rubble. Rescue workers and relatives clawed through debris seeking survivors. Local hospitals, overwhelmed by the scale of the casualties, resorted to refrigerated trucks to store corpses, underscoring the immediate humanitarian toll.
Iranian authorities blamed the strikes on joint American and Israeli military action, saying the school sits adjacent to an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) naval base and was struck by three missiles. International monitors and rights groups have pointed out that the school was located roughly 61 metres from a documented military site, a proximity that raises difficult questions about target selection, munitions effects and compliance with international humanitarian law.
Tehran has responded with sustained outrage. Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi described the killings as the murder of Iran’s innocent children and warned that such crimes ‘‘will not go unanswered’’. President Pezeshkian condemned the strikes as barbaric and urged the United Nations Security Council to act; UNESCO issued a rare, scathing denunciation, calling the attack a serious violation of the laws of war.
The United States and Israel have not publicly accepted responsibility for this particular strike. The White House, while framing wider operations in the region as focused on military and command targets, said it was evaluating reports of civilian harm; U.S. Central Command announced it was investigating alleged civilian casualties. Those responses are likely to offer little immediate comfort to grieving families, and they leave a contest of narratives in which forensic investigation and independent verification will be decisive.
Humanitarian organisations report the violence is not confined to Hormozgan. The Iranian Red Crescent said more than 20 of Iran’s 31 provinces have been affected by recent air operations, with at least 201 dead and 747 wounded nationwide. The International Committee of the Red Cross and the Red Crescent movement said emergency teams were being mobilised to the affected school and surrounding areas to assist with recovery and body-handling operations.
The strike has sharpened questions at the heart of contemporary warfare: how to reconcile proximity between military assets and civilian infrastructure, the adequacy of safeguards to protect non-combatants, and the reputational and strategic costs of civilian slaughter. The Minab school attack will be used by Tehran to justify a harder line at home and more aggressive rhetoric abroad, increasing the risk that tit-for-tat strikes escalate into a broader regional conflagration that could imperil shipping through the nearby Strait of Hormuz and roil global energy markets.