A girls’ elementary school named Shajareh Tayyebeh in the southern Iranian city of Minab was struck during school hours on Saturday as part of the joint US-Israeli military assault on Iran, killing dozens of students and wounding scores more in an attack that Iran’s government described as a deliberate war crime, and that neither Washington nor Tel Aviv had commented on as of the time of publication.
Casualty figures reported by Iranian state and semi-official media diverged significantly in the hours following the strike, reflecting both the chaos of ongoing rescue operations and the difficulty of independent verification in an active conflict zone. Iran’s state-run Islamic Republic News Agency put the death toll at 53, with 63 others injured, citing continuing clearance of wreckage at the site. Mehr News Agency and Minab Governor Mohammad Radmehr gave a figure of 40 killed and 60 injured, while Fars News Agency reported 70 fatalities and 90 injuries across Minab and the nearby coastal city of Jask combined. A separate statement from the Minab Governor said 51 students had been killed and another 60 wounded, with local authorities emphasising that rescue operations remained ongoing and that the toll was likely to rise. Reuters could not independently verify any of the figures. The deputy governor of Hormozgan Province confirmed that the school was “a direct target of this attack” and that debris removal operations were continuing into the evening.
The Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps maintains a military base in Minab city, a fact that may bear on the targeting rationale Israeli and US officials have yet to explain publicly. The presence of a military installation in close proximity to a civilian school does not under international humanitarian law diminish the obligation to avoid disproportionate civilian harm, a principle that Iran’s Foreign Ministry invoked immediately in demanding an emergency response from the United Nations Security Council.
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Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi shared photographs of the destruction on his official social media account, writing that the strike had destroyed the school and killed “innocent children.” “These crimes against the Iranian people will not go unanswered,” he said. Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baghaei described the attack as a “blatant crime” and called on the UN Security Council to act in accordance with its responsibilities under the UN Charter. Iran’s Supreme National Security Council issued a formal statement characterising the broader operation as a “brutal air operation” and pointedly noting that it had taken place while nuclear negotiations between Tehran and Washington were still under way. “The enemy imagines that the resilient Iranian nation will surrender to their petty demands through these cowardly actions,” the council said.
A second school strike was reported separately. Iran’s Mehr News Agency said at least two students were killed when Israeli ordnance hit a school in an unspecified location east of Tehran. That incident also drew no response from the US or Israeli governments. Al Jazeera correspondent Mohammed Vall, reporting from Tehran, said the school strikes directly undermined US and Israeli claims to be targeting only military infrastructure.
“President Trump has promised the Iranian people that aid or help is coming their way, but now we are seeing civilian casualties, that’s something that the Iranian government will stress as a case of violation of international law and an aggression against the Iranian people,” Vall said.
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The civilian dimension of Saturday’s strikes was already drawing international attention before the full scale of the Minab casualties emerged. In Iraq, two members of the Popular Mobilization Forces were killed and three wounded in an Israeli strike. In Syria, four civilians were killed by an Iranian retaliatory missile. In the United Arab Emirates, one man died in what UAE officials described as an Iranian retaliatory attack. In Israel itself, one man was wounded by debris from incoming Iranian fire. The accumulating cross-border casualties indicated that the conflict, while centred on Iran, was already generating a wider humanitarian toll across the region.
The June 2025 conflict between the US, Israel, and Iran, a 12-day exchange that preceded the current assault, resulted in thousands of civilian casualties in Iran, according to figures from Iran’s Ministry of Health and Medical Education, and killed more than 30 people in Israel. That earlier campaign’s civilian toll drew significant international criticism but did not produce a binding UN Security Council resolution, with the United States vetoing draft resolutions condemning the strikes.
No response to the school strike had been issued by the United States Central Command, the Pentagon, the White House, or the Israeli Defence Forces as of the time this report was filed. The Iranian government said search and rescue operations at the Minab school remained active into Saturday evening.