“The School That Became a Grave”: Jeremy Scahill on U.S Bombing of Minab, Killing 120+ Iranian Kids

October 2, 2026
Drop Site News released a major investigation this week into the U.S. bombing of the Shajareh Tayyebeh children’s school in the Iranian city of Minab on February 28, the first day of the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran. Drop Site spoke to survivors, first responders, parents and witnesses in one of the most in-depth reports on the massacre to date. The bombing killed at least 156 people — 120 of the victims were children, 26 were teachers, and the rest were parents. A United Nations fact-finding mission recently concluded that the U.S. strike was a war crime, but the Trump administration has not yet even acknowledged U.S. responsibility.

“This was not a single bombing or collateral damage,” says Drop Site News’s Jeremy Scahill, lead author of the investigation. “There were at least two direct hits on a school packed with children … and a couple of hours after those initial hits, as first responders came, as parents came, the U.S. launches more strikes.”
Scahill points out that until 2013, the area where the school is was a facility operated by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps. But in satellite photos from just weeks before the strike, “You could see the murals on the wall. You could see the soccer field. Some of the satellite photos show shadows of tiny people playing outside.”
 
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman. We’re broadcasting from Publix, the House of Journalism in Berlin, Germany.
The Pentagon is sending a third aircraft carrier to the Middle East as President Trump considers a new escalation of the U.S. war on Iran. The latest move adds 7,000 sailors, up to 3,000 Marines, to the U.S. military presence in the region.
Today, we spend the rest of the hour looking at the U.S. bombing of a children’s school in the Iranian city of Minab on the first day of the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran. The bombing killed at least 156 people, 120 of them children, 26 teachers, all women. A United Nations fact-finding mission recently concluded the U.S. strike was a war crime, but the Trump administration has not yet even acknowledged U.S. responsibility.
Drop Site News is out this week with a devastating investigation into the bombing of the school. The article and accompanying video is headlined “Massacre at Minab: The School That Became a Grave.” We’re joined right now by investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill, lead author on the report.
In a moment, Jeremy, we’ll play some of your interviews with survivors, first responders and parents. But first, Jeremy, set up what happened that day on February 28th.
 
JEREMY SCAHILL: Thanks, Amy.
You know, we need to back up a few weeks and remember that Iran and the United States were engaged in an intense round of negotiations that were being mediated by the Sultanate of Oman, which had been the main mediator for two decades between the United States and Iran on nuclear issues and had played a major role in brokering the 2015 JCPOA agreement signed under Barack Obama. And the Iranians were very skeptical about this process, because just some months before these negotiations, in June of 2025, when the Iranians were negotiating with the United States, the U.S. and Israel launched surprise bombing attacks against Iran in what became known as the 12-Day War.
But the foreign minister of Oman, on February 27th, had gone to the United States. He met with Vice President JD Vance in the White House. He came out, and he told media that he was optimistic that a deal was going to be reached and that it would be historic in nature — yes, there were details to work out; nothing was guaranteed — but that there were technical talks scheduled for the following week in Vienna, Austria.
And so, when Iranians woke up on the morning of February 28th, let’s remember this was a Saturday, but in Iran, Saturday is the beginning of the school and workweek, and so Iranians were, you know, paying attention to everything, but they went to bed understanding that this process was still going on, that war was very much a possibility, but not believing it was going to start imminently, because you had this next round of negotiations and you had the Omani foreign minister expressing optimism.
Well, then, as people are stuck in traffic jams, they’re getting their kids out the door for school, children start arriving at school, we get the initial reports that there are airstrikes that have happened in Tehran, the capital of Iran. And the first strikes that happened that day were on the residence and offices of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and so a lot of the media speculation at that point was about whether or not Iran’s supreme leader had been assassinated.
And word starts to spread very quickly across Iran and on state media that there are attacks happening throughout the country. And so, administrators and officials in provinces around Iran begin calling schools and directing principals and teachers to start having parents come to take their children home. There was going to be a shelter-in-place order. And the Iranians had been through this before.
And so, as this is happening, we then start to hear shocking reports that in the southern Iranian city of Minab, a missile has slammed into a girls’ school, and we start to see images that show children and the bodies of children. And very quickly, the media narrative sort of becomes — and this is being pushed kind of by the United States — that the school had been right next to an IRGC missile facility and that it was sort of collateral damage.
We did an investigation into this. There’s been some very good reporting on this. This is not a story that we broke. But what we did is we really went deeply into what happened in the experience of Iranians who lived it that day, and by talking to teachers who survived. You know, 26 teachers were killed in this attack — one of them was pregnant — 120 children. This was not a single bombing or collateral damage. There were at least two direct hits on a school packed with children. That was with Tomahawk cruise missiles, one of the most sophisticated weapons in the U.S. arsenal. And a couple of hours after those initial hits, as first responders came, as parents came, the U.S. launches more strikes. A total, Iran says, of 13 missiles were launched. The justice minister of Iran told me, “This isn’t a double-tap — a double-tap strike; this is a triple-tap strike.”
And, you know, one of the most horrifying details, Amy, that we uncovered is that after the first bomb had hit near the school that morning, the teachers didn’t believe that their school would be bombed, because it was a school, and they had gathered the children, many of the children, in the schoolyard because their parents had come to pick them up. And when the bombs hit not far away from the school, they said, “My god, we need to get everyone back into the school.” So they ushered the children back into the school. One of the teachers took some of the girls into a prayer hall inside of the school, and then, moments later, direct hit with a Tomahawk cruise missile on the school. So, the protected site of the school, the parents and the teachers thought that they would find shelter there, and the United States directly bombed that school while they were inside.
 
AMY GOODMAN: Jeremy, I want to go to the voices of the people themselves. This is an excerpt of your Drop Site News new investigation, “Massacre at Minab: The School That Became a Grave,” featuring interviews with Yaghoub Yazdanpanah. His daughter Fatemeh died in the strike. But first, this is preschool teacher Hossniyeh Salem. She survived the bombing.
 

HOSSNIYEH SALEM: [translated] Like any other day, I got my child ready at 7:00, because my son is in fifth grade and attended the same school. I got my child ready and headed to school. My son went to the boys’ school, and I stayed at preschool in my own class. Our school had two floors. The upper floor was for the girls, and the downstairs was for the boys. One section was for preschool. You can say there were three schools there. There were students there from all walks of life, children from working-class families, educators. We had all kinds of students there.

 

YAGHOUB YAZDANPANAH: [translated] I have to go back a little and tell you about how I chose this school. Fatemeh’s mother and I had noticed Fatemeh’s overflowing intelligence. When we would tell her a story, she would never forget the story, and she would recite the story moment by moment, word for word. I wanted to find a very good school that would address Fatemeh’s needs and her active mind. After asking a lot of questions, I found Shajareh Tayyebeh School.

 

HOSSNIYEH SALEM: [translated] After the lesson started, we handed out books, and the children did their activities. I took the children to the schoolyard, the park that was in our schoolyard, so the children could play. The time was around 9:30, I think, when I was informed by a friend that the war had started and they had hit Tehran.

 

JEREMY SCAHILL: In the first moments of the U.S. and Israeli bombing campaign, they strike the personal residence and offices of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran. And they killed, assassinated not only Khamenei, but members of his family. They start then striking other leadership targets of the IRGC, the elite military force of Iran; political offices in Iran; government ministries in Iran. And word starts to spread all across the country that this isn’t just like a one-off airstrike, that this does seem to, in fact, be a full-scale war.

 

HOSSNIYEH SALEM: [translated] Administrators said there are war conditions, and it’s better if the children go home early. We didn’t have a single thought or didn’t imagine that they may want to hit our school. In complete calm and relaxation, we were calling families and telling them to come and take their children. As they were coming to get the kids, a number of the children had left, and some were still at the school. I first heard the sound of an explosion.

 

ON-SCREEN TEXT: After a missile strike nearby, some teachers ushered children back inside the school for protection.

 

HOSSNIYEH SALEM: [translated] The preschool children were 5 years old, and all they did was yell, “Miss! Miss!” and were crying. I ran to the children. I just said, “Get under the table!” I didn’t think they were going to hit the school. I just thought that someplace had been hit. I said, “Don’t be afraid. Sit down.”

I heard this horrible sound, and it was so close, two simultaneous sounds. They’re still in my ear. My son even describes them. “Woosh, boom! Woosh, boom!” And then explosion. Plaster was falling. The ground was shaking. And at that moment, I just looked at my preschool girls and my son, and I said to myself, “It’s over. Now is the time when we go under the rubble. It’s going to fall now.”

Then there were no more sounds. The class was full of smoke and dust. I told my son, “Yassin, run and open the door. Let’s get out!” My preschool kids didn’t have shoes on since our classroom was carpeted. I took the children in my arms, one by one, and brought them outside. We exited from the preschool yard gate until we reached the first street.

I looked behind me, and I saw smoke and fire coming from the school office. All I said to the preschool children was, “Kids, just look in front of you. Don’t look back!” I told everyone to run to the school because they had hit the school. “The children are under the ruins. Go save them!”

 
AMY GOODMAN: That’s an excerpt from Drop Site News’ new investigation, “Massacre at Minab: The School That Became a Grave.” That was preschool teacher Hossniyeh Salem. She survived the bombing. In this clip, we hear more from Yaghoub Yazdanpanah, who describes how he raced to the school to look for his little daughter Fatemeh.
 

YAGHOUB YAZDANPANAH: [translated] It was like something was telling my heart that the school they were talking about was Shajareh Tayyebeh. I lost it. I left my classroom, ran home, took my car and sped to Minab.

When I arrived, I said, “Oh no!” The unimaginable had happened. As soon as I arrived there, I saw there was no school left. Two-thirds of the school, maybe more, had been destroyed. Smoke was rising from all over the school. It had turned into rubble. For a moment, I thought I was asleep and having a nightmare.

 
AMY GOODMAN: In this excerpt from Drop Site News’ new investigation, “Massacre at Minab: The School That Became a Grave,” we hear two Iranian Red Crescent Society emergency workers describing the utter devastation following the U.S. strike on the Minab school.
 

EHSAN MOHSEN: [translated] Mothers came to me and said, “My daughter is in the classroom,” “My son is in the classroom. In God’s name, please bring me my son.” We didn’t know how to answer these families. Each body part that was brought out from the building and taken to the ambulances, the families ran, looking to see who it was.

 

YAGHOUB YAZDANPANAH: [translated] People kept coming and coming to help, to remove children from under the ruins. All of us were there waiting. I, a 32-year-old father, was waiting for them to bring my daughter from under the ruins. Imagine the depth of this catastrophe and how hard it was for us.

 

MAJID DADANIA: [translated] There was a father with us who was searching for his two children until it was 4:00 or 5:00 at night, when his fingers no longer worked. His fingers were covered in blood. He had lost his fingernails. In that same condition, he fell asleep.

There was also a father — we had nothing to give him. All that remained was a school bag and shoes. Where we had collected the school bag and shoes, the father sat and was talking to the school bag and shoes. He was just talking to the school bag and shoes. Nothing from his child has been recovered.

 
AMY GOODMAN: Again, those are two Red Crescent workers, an excerpt of Drop Site News’ new investigation, “Massacre at Minab: The School That Became a Grave.”
In March, President Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth denied the U.S. was responsible for bombing the school. They spoke to reporters aboard Air Force One.
 

REPORTER: Did the United States bomb a girls’ elementary school in southern Iran on the first day of the war and kill 175 people?

 

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: No, in my opinion, based on what I’ve seen, that was done by Iran.

 

REPORTER: Is that true, Mr. Hegseth, that it was Iran who did that?

 

DEFENSE SECRETARY PETE HEGSETH: We’re certainly investigating.

 

REPORTER: Still investigating?

 

DEFENSE SECRETARY PETE HEGSETH: But the only — the only side that targets civilians is Iran.

 

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: We think it was done — we think it was done by Iran.

 

AMY GOODMAN: That was Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and President Trump. In July, President Trump told a different story, appearing on Fox News, talking about the airstrike.

 

TREY YINGST: There are images from this site that show fragments that appear to be from U.S. Tomahawk missiles. Is it possible that old intelligence or a mistake during a very active time in the war led to this event?

 

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: It is, but it’s also possible that those images that you have are AI-generated. … Now, I know we’re waiting for a conclusive report. I don’t think there can be a conclusive report.

 
AMY GOODMAN: Oh, really? So, that’s President Trump talking about the report. Jeremy Scahill, you are the co-founder of Drop Site News. This is an incredible investigation, “Massacre at Minab.” Can you respond to what Hegseth and Trump said? And talk about the state of the investigation into this deadly attack on the schools, February 28th, that killed over 150 people, as you said, 120 of them children.
 
JEREMY SCAHILL: Amy, I think there’s only two possibilities here for what actually happened that day. On the one hand, it’s possible that because Pete Hegseth came in with a tone set by Trump himself that civilian deaths don’t matter, that soldiers and military personnel should not worry about killing or injuring civilians, that they eliminated the entire department that is supposed to do civilian harm mitigation, that they used AI, including Maven systems developed by Palantir, to rush to develop as many targets as possible, that they had old satellite photos that indicated that this was a military base and not a school, and that because of that disregard for civilians and civilian life, they pushed forward and said, “We want to break records” — they’re always talking about records — “and maximize lethality.” And so, it was a process where they didn’t care, and they just started striking everything.
On the flip side of it — and, you know, a former senior State Department official told me this — knowing what she knows about the entire system and the fact that this was struck in the first hours of the first day of this war that they had been planning, that something very sinister may well be at the core of this.
And so, you know, it’s important to say, up until the year 2013, this was — this area in Minab was actually a facility that was operated by the IRGC. We obtained documents, and the satellite photos also show this clearly, showing that in 2014 the school filed for registration. The IRGC donated the land. The province redistricted the whole area, and the IRGC actually moved most of its facilities nearly two miles away. That base, which was a publicly known base, was not hit during these attacks that morning. Instead, it was an area that was a school, a car wash, a clinic — what we would call in America a strip mall — and the only remaining IRGC building in that vicinity was an administrative office of the naval forces of the IRGC, and they had totally vacated that property after the June 2025 war.
So, what happened that day was there was literally no presence of the IRGC whatsoever there. And in fact, satellite photos from just weeks — that the public can see — from just weeks before the strike, you could see the murals on the wall. You could see the soccer field. Some of the satellite photos show shadows of tiny people playing outside. I spoke to Wes Bryant, who used to be one of the people in charge of civilian harm mitigation at the Pentagon up until 2025. His division was the one that Hegseth shut down. And he said that under the rules in the doctrine, they should have checked the most readily available satellite imagery before launching any strike of that nature. The other thing is, Tomahawk cruise missiles have cameras on them. They can loiter. They can shift direction. So, there are many, many questions that need to be asked about this.
This is one of the single gravest war crimes that I’m aware of since Vietnam. It’s akin to the Amariyah shelter bombing in Baghdad, Iraq, in the 1991 Gulf War, when the U.S. dropped a bomb, a bunker buster bomb, ripped open a hole in a bunker where hundreds of civilians were, and then dropped another 2,000-pound bomb directly, incinerating more than 400 people. It rises to the level of gravity of that crime.
And it’s really just shocking that there isn’t more outcry from the American public and the U.S. Congress. This is one of the most severe war crimes. And it’s not like, you know, the tone under Obama, where he says, “Oh, oops, we tortured some folks,” or they said, you know, “We regret this.” Trump’s people are defiant about this. And the Democrats, you know, they’re not in control of the Congress right now, but this should be front and center of foreign policy questions toward Donald Trump. If the Democrats regain control of the House of Representatives, they should go after them for this. These are war crimes.
 
AMY GOODMAN: And has any — has any investigation been done by the U.S. government, made public?
 
JEREMY SCAHILL: No, the United States Central Command is supposedly doing an investigation, but Bradley Cooper, the head of CENTCOM, lied in front of Congress and said this was an active IRGC missile base. There’s no evidence to suggest that there ever were missiles launched from this site. And this was congressional testimony.
It seems like the best-case scenario is that they kind of say this was human error, artificial intelligence and outdated maps, because the threat was so serious, and we moved forward, and, oops, this was a mistake. That would be the best-case scenario. The worst-case scenario, in some ways, is that Trump’s people and the Pentagon just simply say, “Oh, no, this is Iranian propaganda. We still think that maybe the IRGC bombed it themselves.”
That’s why it’s so important to have actual investigations. The U.N. sent a commission there, and they’ve determined that it’s a war crime, just on the basis of the idea that if they used AI, if they used systems where they shut down the civilian harm mitigation and they didn’t check to see what was there before they launched the missile, that satisfies the legal barriers to indicate that a war crime, not just a crime against humanity, was committed.
 
AMY GOODMAN: Jeremy, we just have 20 seconds, but the devastating pictures of — I mean, the victims are not only those who’ve died, but the children that survived, that are saying to their parents, “I wish I had been one of the martyred to be with my friends.” These last 20 seconds, the effect today?
 
JEREMY SCAHILL: You know, one of the drawings from the psychologist, a child just drew a severed hand. And she said, you know, that the kids feel like they did something wrong, that they don’t understand why their friends died and they weren’t able to save them.
 
AMY GOODMAN: Jeremy, we have to leave it there. It is an incredibly devastating report. Jeremy is co-founder of Drop Site News. We’ll link to your new investigation and film, “Massacre at Minab: The School That Became a Grave.”