The confirmed dead at Shajareh Tayyebeh school in Minab, southern Iran, now number 165 — seventeen more than the 148 reported in the conflict's first hours. The victims are girls between the ages of 7 and 12. Ninety-five others were wounded in the initial count; no updated injury figure has been released. No independent investigation has been conducted. None has been permitted.
Iran's near-total internet blackout — connectivity at 1% of normal levels, the most severe in the country's history — means information from Minab passes through state channels or the fragmentary accounts of those who reach satellite connections. The conditions required for forensic investigation — crater analysis, munition fragment recovery, radar track data — are inaccessible to any independent body. The Iranian Red Crescent's national casualty figures of 201 dead and over 700 injured included Minab, but the organisation has published no weapon-origin analysis.
Responsibility remains unresolved. Iranian state media attributed the strike to the US-Israeli campaign. Washington and Tel Aviv have neither claimed nor denied it. Separate, unverified claims have circulated suggesting an errant Iranian rocket. Under international humanitarian law, schools are protected civilian objects. The obligation to investigate applies both to the attacking party and to Iran as the territorial state. Three days in, neither obligation has been met.
The seventeen additional deaths — children who likely succumbed to injuries in hospitals already overwhelmed by the broader campaign — accumulated in an information vacuum where neither side has an incentive to establish the truth and both have an incentive to control the narrative. What is known is arithmetic: 165 girls are dead. What is not known — who fired the weapon, from what platform, at what target — cannot be determined without access that no one is providing and no one is demanding with the authority to compel it.
