Dozens of people, probably most of them 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 U.S. and Israeli warplanes launched their attack on Iran around 10 a.m. local 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.
Iran’s Red Crescent and several state news outlets said more than 60 people were killed in the strike on Shajarah Tayyebeh school in the southern town of Minab. By Saturday evening, Iran’s state news broadcaster, IRIB, raised the toll to 85 dead and 93 injured.
Hossein Kermanpour, a spokesman 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-colored 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 Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, or IRGC. Another video verified by The Times on Saturday showed a strike hitting the same IRGC base.
Asked to respond to reports of the strike, a CENTCOM 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 minimize the risk of unintended harm.”
Iran’s 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 U.S.-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 Mr. 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 Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who broke with President 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.”
Sanjana Varghese and Aaron Boxerman contributed reporting.
Malachy Browne is enterprise director of the Visual Investigations team at The Times. He was a member of teams awarded the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting in 2020 and 2023.
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