Erika Solomon, Malachy Browne and Haley Willis
Dozens of people, most of them likely to be children, were killed in a strike that hit a girls elementary school in southern Iran, according to Iranian health officials and state media.
It was one of two strikes that appear to have hit schools since US and Israeli warplanes launched their attack around 10am (Iran time). Saturday is the start of the workweek in the country, and many Iranians had already dropped off their children and headed into their offices as explosions began to shake the capital and many cities across Iran.
On Sunday, Iran’s state news broadcaster, IRIB, said the toll had risen to 108 dead and dozens more injured in the strike on Shajarah Tayyebeh school in the southern town of Minab, CNN reported.
Iranian ambassador to the United Nations Amir-Saeid Iravani also told an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council that “more than 100 children” had been killed at the girls’ primary school. Those figures have not been independently verified.
Hossein Kermanpour, a spokesperson for Iran’s Health Ministry, said mostly “young martyrs” were killed at the school. Minab is in Hormozgan province, which sits along the Strait of Hormuz, a strategic international shipping lane.
“God knows how many more children will be pulled out of the rubble,” he wrote in a post on social media. “May God give their families strength and patience.”
Video verified by The New York Times showed damage to a building described as an elementary school. In one video, black smoke billows up from a crumbling building whose walls are painted with pastel-coloured flowers, as onlookers scream, wail and embrace. Other videos show rescuers digging through the rubble with building cranes and shovels, and piles of bloodied, dusty backpacks.
Another video reviewed by the Times shows rescue workers in military gear retrieving the severed hand of one of the victims from the wreckage.
“Under this rubble, students are buried,” a man shouts in another video, raising his voice over the sound of rescue workers drilling behind him, and holding up fistfuls of school papers and notebooks: “The blood of our loved ones, our students, which you can see on their schoolbooks.”
The Shajareh Tayyebeh school was holding its first of multiple rotating school shifts when the strike hit, according to Hengaw, a Norway-based group that focuses on human rights violations in Iran. It said in a statement that it was investigating the killings and estimated that about 170 children were in class at the time.
Videos verified by the Times show that the school is adjacent to a naval base belonging to the country’s most powerful military force, the Revolutionary Guard. Another video verified by the Times on Saturday showed a strike hitting the same Revolutionary Guard base.
Asked to respond to reports of the strike, a Central Command spokesperson said: “We are 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 minimise the risk of unintended harm.”
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi condemned the attack, saying in comments reported by the semiofficial news agency Tasnim that the school was “bombed in broad daylight.”
“This crime will not go unanswered,” he added.
Another strike appeared to have hit the Hedayat High School in the capital, Tehran, near 72nd Square in the district of Narmak, local media and rights groups said. Two students died in that attack, according to the US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency, which focuses on Iran.
A video from Mehr news, a semiofficial news agency, shows rescue workers using fire hoses to douse a building that had collapsed into a heap of rubble.
That school may have been hit in a blast that appears to have targeted the residence of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s hard-line former president. It is unclear whether Ahmadinejad was there at the time of the strike. The local Iran Newspaper reported that he was unharmed but that three of his bodyguards were killed.
The strike on the school in Minab, with such a high toll, has already begun to reverberate in the United States. Former Republican US Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who broke with US President Donald Trump and his “Make America Great Again” movement last year, condemned the attack on social media.
“I did not campaign for this. I did not donate money for this. I did not vote for this, in elections or Congress,” she wrote. “This is heartbreaking and tragic. And how many more innocent will die? What about our own military? This is not what we thought MAGA was supposed to be.“