School Strike in Southern Iran Raises Calls for a War Crimes Inquiry

Last updated: 22 September 2026

The aftermath of the attack on a school in Minab, southern Iran, on February 28, 2026. © 2026 Abbas Zakeri/Mehr News/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via Reuters

On March 7, 2026, Human Rights Watch published a report on the February 28 attack on Shajareh Tayyebeh Primary School in Minab, in Iran’s southern Hormozgan province, arguing that the strike should be investigated as a possible war crime. The article says the school was hit during a broader wave of Israeli and US strikes across Iran that morning and that the attack reportedly killed scores of civilians, including many children. It presents the incident as one of the most serious recent cases raising questions about the protection of civilians and the application of the laws of war in the expanding regional conflict.

The report centers on a key legal claim: even in the middle of a military operation involving legitimate targets, an attack can still be unlawful if the expected civilian harm is excessive in relation to the anticipated military advantage. The article says schools are civilian objects and remain protected unless they are being used for military purposes. In this case, the report states that researchers found no evidence that the school itself was being used for military activity. That distinction is central to the article’s argument, because it means the presence of military facilities nearby would not automatically make the school a lawful target.

A major part of the report concerns the school’s location. The building stood on the interior border of an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Naval Forces compound, but the article says it was walled off from the rest of the compound and had its own separate entrance to the street. Researchers also found that structural changes made years earlier had further separated the school from the surrounding military site, including the removal of nearby watchtowers and the creation of an accessible school courtyard with sports markings. The article uses these details to argue that the school functioned as a distinct civilian space, even though it was close to military installations.

The physical evidence described in the report forms another core part of the case. Researchers analyzed 14 videos and photographs recorded immediately after the strike or during rescue operations, plus 4 more from funerals, and reviewed around 40 publicly available satellite images as well as commercial satellite imagery captured after the attack. According to the article, the pattern of damage indicates that the site was struck with highly accurate guided munitions, not by a single errant weapon that had lost guidance or been deflected. The report says at least eight structures on the compound were directly hit, including the school, and that the likely total number of directly attacked buildings may have been ten.

The article places special emphasis on the strike pattern because it bears directly on responsibility and intent. The researchers say that small circular entry holes visible on several buildings, along with the distribution of impacts across separate structures, strongly suggest a multi-target operation using accurate munitions. The implication is that the school was not damaged merely by a nearby blast or random malfunction, but was likely among the structures directly struck. This is one of the most consequential points in the report, because it strengthens the call for a formal investigation into whether the attackers knew or should have known that the building was a functioning primary school full of children and teachers late in the morning.

The report also reconstructs the timing of the attack. It says the school week in Iran begins on Saturday morning, and the first online reports of US and Israeli attacks appeared before 10 a.m. on February 28. According to a statement cited from the Coordinating Council of Iranian Teachers’ Trade Associations, the school administration called parents to collect their children, but the time between the closure announcement and the explosion was extremely short. Satellite imagery showed the school still intact at 10:23 a.m., while the first social media video of the strike surfaced by 11:47 a.m. Local media, citing Iranian officials, said the attack occurred at around 10:45 a.m. Together, these details suggest the strike happened during school hours, when children were still present on the premises.

The casualty figures in the article remain partly uncertain, but the reported toll is severe. As of March 4, Iranian state media said the death toll had risen to 168, though the report says that figure could not be independently verified. Researchers reviewed a list of 57 names published by local authorities and circulated by Iranian news outlets; of those, at least 48 appeared to be children based on listed birth dates. They then identified an additional 25 names through other public sources, including funerary materials and lists published by the Iranian Gymnastics Federation, and said at least 15 of those also appeared to be children. The article notes that the list also included the apparent school principal and several teachers.

Visual evidence described in the report adds to the scale of the tragedy. Videos analyzed by researchers showed an ambulance arriving at a nearby hospital, body bags laid out on the ground, and children in school uniforms among the dead. Photographs from the scene reportedly showed rescuers digging through school rubble, and aerial images from Minab Hermud cemetery showed preparations for large numbers of burials beginning within a day of the strike. By March 4, rows of freshly dug graves were visible in satellite imagery. The report says it could not confirm whether all the graves were used for victims from the school strike alone, but it presents the burial preparations as further evidence of a very high number of deaths.

Another important part of the article concerns attribution. Neither the United States nor Israel has formally accepted responsibility for the school strike. The report says Israeli and US forces were carrying out hundreds of strikes across Iran that morning, but that Israel told researchers it was “not aware of any [Israeli military] strikes in the area” and that the incident was being examined. The Iranian government, by contrast, blamed the US-Israeli coalition. The report also notes that the US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said on March 4 that the United States was investigating the incident and that the US military does not target civilian sites, while the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Dan Caine, indicated that US forces from the USS Abraham Lincoln strike group had been applying pressure along the southeastern coast in an area that included Minab on a map shown during the briefing.

The article also raises a second legal issue involving Iran itself. If military facilities inside the compound were in use for military purposes at the time, the report says Iranian authorities may also have been violating the laws of war by placing civilians at unnecessary risk. This does not reduce the obligations of the attacking party, but it broadens the legal discussion beyond a single question of who launched the strike. In the report’s framing, both the conduct of the attackers and the placement of civilian infrastructure near military facilities must be examined.

Overall, the article presents the Minab school strike as a case that could become a major test of accountability in the current regional war. It argues that a functioning school full of children appears to have been hit during a precision strike on a larger military compound, and that the available evidence is strong enough to require a prompt, thorough, and independent investigation. The report says that if the strike was carried out by US or Israeli forces, those responsible should publicly assess their role, fully account for civilian harm, compensate victims and families, and prosecute anyone responsible for war crimes. It also argues that allies of both countries should press for accountability and for an end to attacks on civilian infrastructure before more civilians, including children, are unlawfully killed.

Conclusion

The report presents the Minab strike as more than a tragic battlefield accident. It argues that the available visual, satellite, and contextual evidence points to a direct attack on a school that was not shown to be serving a military function, making the case a serious test of whether the laws of war will be enforced in the current conflict.

More broadly, the incident is drawing attention because it brings together several of the war’s most urgent questions at once: civilian protection, proportionality, the use of precision weapons, and public accountability by states conducting cross-border operations. In that context, the call for an investigation is not only about establishing what happened in Minab, but also about whether those responsible for attacks on civilians will face meaningful scrutiny.