One hundred and sixty-eight children were killed when a US weapon struck the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls' school in Minab on the war's opening day. Independent satellite imagery analysis by The Washington Post, CNN, and CBC has now concluded the strike was "targeted and deliberate, possibly based on faulty IRGC intelligence" — a weapon aimed at a misidentified target, not collateral damage from a nearby military hit.
The three investigations used crater geometry, fragment analysis, and geolocated debris fields. Their findings converge with earlier reporting by CNN, The New York Times, and NBC News, which identified Tomahawk cruise missile debris at the site. NPR's satellite analysis found the blast radius extended into adjacent residential blocks beyond the school grounds. UNICEF's count of children killed across Iran since 28 February stands at 181; 168 of them died here.
The Pentagon has neither confirmed nor denied. Under International humanitarian law, the distinction matters: collateral damage assessments rest on proportionality; a deliberate strike on a misidentified target raises questions about what verification procedures were applied before launch. The investigators' reference to "faulty IRGC intelligence" suggests the school may have appeared in IRGC-linked databases as a military facility — and that the US drew targeting coordinates from those databases without independent ground-truth confirmation.
Both chambers of Congress have voted against constraining the president's war authority — the Senate 47-53, the House after a procedural manoeuvre split the bipartisan coalition. The Minab findings present a documented case — a named school, identified munition debris, three independent forensic analyses — to a political branch that has already declined to exercise oversight. Thousands gathered for the mass funeral in Minab's central square.
