Evidence mounts U.S. behind deadly Iranian girls’ school strike.
175 children. A missile. A school. No words.
The smoke cleared. 175 lay silent. Little girls, books still open, would never learn again.
The Girls of Minab: A Strike, A Denial, and 175 Empty Desks
In the coastal town of Minab, in the shadow of the strategic Strait of Hormuz, there was a school. It was called Shajarah Tayyebeh, a girls’ elementary school. On the morning of February 28, the first day of the war, the classrooms were full of children learning their lessons, their voices rising in recitation, their pencils scratching across notebooks.
Then the sky fell.
Video footage, now verified by Bellingcat and The New York Times, tells the rest of the story with horrifying clarity. A Tomahawk cruise missile—a weapon known to be in the American arsenal—streaks toward the school. Smoke is already rising from the building when the missile strikes. The school, it turns out, was once part of a nearby Revolutionary Guard Corps compound, but satellite photos confirm it had been separated from the military site since at least 2016. It was, unequivocally, a place for children.
The blast killed an estimated 175 people. Most of them were little girls.
In the days since, the world has learned more about what happened in Minab. Satellite images from Planet Labs show precision strikes on multiple buildings in the area. U.S. military investigators, speaking anonymously to Reuters, the Associated Press, and the Wall Street Journal, have acknowledged that the U.S. was likely responsible. Their investigation has not reached a final conclusion, they say, but the evidence points in one direction.
And yet, in Washington, the denials are absolute.
President Donald Trump, asked by reporters on Saturday, did not hesitate. “In my opinion, based on what I’ve seen, that was done by Iran.” Moments later, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth stood before the press and offered a different tone—the U.S. was still “investigating”—before adding, “the only side that targets civilians is Iran.” Then Trump spoke again, speculating further: “We think it’s done by Iran because they’re very inaccurate, you know, with their munitions. They have no accuracy whatsoever. It was done by Iran.”
The logic is circular. Iran is accused of striking a school with an American missile, a weapon type they do not possess, because they are “inaccurate.” The families of Minab are left to wonder: If a missile has your daughter’s name on it, does the origin matter?
Online, a different narrative took hold. An image of a missile veering off course began circulating, the suggestion being that an errant Iranian rocket had fallen on the school. But visual investigators quickly dismantled the claim. One expert traced the missile in the photo to a launch site northwest of Zanjan—more than 800 miles from Minab. The missile in the image was not the one that hit the school. The lie was exposed, but by then, it had already done its work: casting doubt, muddying the waters, giving deniability to the undeniable.
But doubt does not bring back the dead. Deniability does not fill the 175 empty desks in Minab.
In the town, there is only silence now where there used to be laughter. The school building is rubble. The families who sent their daughters off with packed lunches and kisses on the forehead are left with nothing but questions and the unbearable weight of mornings that will never come again.
The war continues. The leaders talk. The missiles keep falling. But in Minab, time stopped on February 28. And for 175 little girls who will never grow up, the truth of who fired the missile is less important than the simple, brutal fact that they are gone.
Their names will be forgotten by the world. But in the hearts of their mothers, each one is a wound that will never heal.