Massacre at Minab: The School That Became a Grave

On February 28, at the outset of a new U.S.-Iran war and during Ramadan, multiple U.S. strikes hit Shajareh Tayyebeh school in Minab, Iran, turning a preschool and adjoining primary school into a ruin. Teachers, parents, and children had gathered for morning prayers and breakfast when blasts shattered windows and collapsed classrooms. Witnesses and officials report at least nine missiles struck between 10:45 and 11:30 a.m., with four more hits in the area between 1-2 p.m., including a nearby clinic. Rescue workers pulled survivors from rubble while the building burned; Iranian authorities say 156 people were killed, including 120 children and 26 women teachers. UNESCO condemned the killings as a grave violation of protections for schools, and Iranian officials characterized the successive strikes as deliberate “triple-tap” attacks constituting a heinous war crime. A former U.S. diplomat expressed horror at how such a target could be struck given U.S. military capabilities.

Survivor testimony and local detail animate the account: preschool teacher Hossniyeh Salem describes hiding children under tables as plaster fell, father Yaghoub Yazdanpanah recounts finding his daughter Fatemeh among the dead, and a child’s drawings document the carnage. Photographs and eyewitness timelines underscore the concentrated, repeated nature of the strikes and the widespread trauma inflicted on a small coastal community. The event is framed as among the worst U.S. wartime atrocities since Vietnam, raising urgent questions about targeting, accountability under international humanitarian law, and the psychological and civic damage to Minab’s families and first responders.