JERUSALEM (AP) — It was described as the deadliest strike of the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran, and most of those who died were children. Yet more than 120 days later, the full truth of what happened remains buried under a cloud of incomplete information and political maneuvering.
Since at least one American missile struck an Iranian primary school on February 28, the Trump administration has neither formally accepted responsibility nor publicly released the results of a Pentagon inquiry into the bombing. A U.S. official familiar with the matter, speaking anonymously because the investigation is ongoing, told the Associated Press that the military had evidence almost immediately that the school had been hit.
The AP pieced together an account of the attack using open-source data, video footage, human rights documentation, and interviews with researchers and civilians both inside and outside Iran. The reconstruction revealed previously unknown details about the bombing in Minab — including the range of backgrounds of the children who were killed.
A lack of information from the Pentagon, combined with Iran’s government using the tragedy for its own political messaging, has made independent reporting extremely difficult. Families of the victims have been left without answers. Key questions — such as exactly how many munitions struck the school and a complete list of those who died — remain unresolved.
When asked about the incident last week, President Donald Trump said he had not read the Pentagon’s report and had seen nothing convincing him that the U.S. was responsible.
“I don’t know that they’re ever going to solve that problem in terms of whose fault was it, because there were missiles flying all over the place,” he said. “I don’t think it was us.”
Iran’s mission to the United Nations did not respond to the AP’s request for comment.
The AP’s reporting drew on conversations with U.S. officials, Iranian human rights workers, a Minab resident, an international representative of the Coordinating Council of Iranian Teachers’ Trade Union, and researchers from major international rights organizations. Many of those interviewed requested anonymity out of concern for their safety and the safety of those they spoke with.
The morning of Saturday, February 28 was clear and bright over Minab, a city in southeastern Iran located roughly 16 miles from the Strait of Hormuz. It was Ramadan and a regular school day in Iran.
Students filed into the Shajareh Tayyebeh school — a name that translates from Farsi as “Good Tree” — passing colorful murals in the schoolyard before settling into classrooms with brightly painted desks, boys and girls in separate areas.
The school was one of more than 30 bearing the same name, established to serve children from families connected to Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard or other state institutions, according to Shiva Amelirad, the international union representative who taught in Iran for 18 years and has maintained contact with people in Minab.
While most Iranian schools operate under the Islamic Republic’s general guidelines, the Shajareh Tayyebeh schools were more deliberately designed to instill and reinforce the Guard’s ideology, Amelirad said. She was quick to add, however, that children are civilians no matter their family backgrounds, and that “any attack targeting a school is unequivocally condemnable.”
Satellite imagery and open-source mapping reviewed by the AP showed the school sat within the same walled compound as a Guard base. It had once been part of that base before being separated and converted into a school more than a decade ago.
While some students were children of Guard officers stationed at the nearby base, others were local children from Minab — a city with a predominantly Sunni Baluch population, an ethnic minority that frequently faces repression from the Iranian government, according to the Balochistan Human Rights Group.
Hundreds of students were believed to be inside the building when teachers and administrators learned that bombs had begun falling on Tehran at around 9:40 a.m. School officials decided to send the children home early and began calling parents on landlines to come pick up their kids, according to two people who spoke with the AP. An independent conflict-tracking organization called Airwars, based in London, also documented that parents were summoned to retrieve their children.
At 10:15 a.m., Iran’s state media issued an advisory closing schools across the country.
One father who lived nearby immediately went to collect his 10-year-old son, according to a Minab resident who shared the stories of several families with the AP — details the AP cross-referenced against available lists of the dead and timelines compiled by rights groups. At the school, the father spotted two younger relatives, ages 6 and 7, waiting outside. He offered them a ride home, but they declined, saying their own father was already on his way.
He left with his son and stopped at a supermarket. Ten minutes later, he heard explosions.
Multiple munitions hit the compound, striking at least five buildings, according to the AP’s satellite imagery analysis. The school was leveled under hundreds of pounds of explosives.
The father rushed back to find a scene of devastation. Video circulated by Iranian state media showed onlookers screaming as men dug through smoldering debris pulling out bodies. The father eventually spotted two burned figures he believed were his young relatives — though he couldn’t be certain.
More people arrived. A man from a nearby Sunni village came searching for his nephew after receiving a frantic call from the boy’s mother. He found the child dead in the rubble.
Rescuers uncovered small backpacks, children’s drawings, colored pencils, and worksheets. A tiny arm was found suspended in the wreckage.
Men carried mangled limbs and torsos to the local hospital, according to the Balochistan Human Rights Group, whose staff spoke with two victim families. The AP was unable to independently confirm the exact number of munitions that hit the school, but the blast had left remains so badly damaged that many body parts were unrecognizable.
By the end of that day, hospital doctors estimated they had received at least 108 bodies, though they cautioned the number was likely an undercount, the Minab resident said. By the following day, state media was reporting roughly 150 dead. The figure soon climbed to 168.
Three days after the bombing, thousands of Iranians gathered at a roundabout in Minab for a mass funeral, standing before a podium and a large portrait of the late founder of the Islamic Republic. All parents of victims — regardless of ethnicity or religion — were required to attend, according to the Minab resident. Most women in the crowd wore the black chador, a garment standard in the Islamic Republic but not typically worn by Baluch people at funerals.
Parents were initially told they could take their children’s bodies home for private burials, the resident said. In the end, many chose to bury their children together. Drone footage circulated by state media showed workers digging a grid of small, identical, unmarked graves in an open lot.
“The state media advocated a narrative based on IRGC interest,” said Amelirad. “You can tell because they called the kids martyrs.”
As strikes continued across Iran, journalists and human rights researchers scrambled to document what was happening — but verifying details from Minab proved nearly impossible. No one had access to the site. Iranian government restrictions blocked most foreign journalists from entering the country. On the first day of the war, Iran shut down internet access, cutting off ordinary civilians from the outside world.
As fighting intensified around the Strait of Hormuz, the atmosphere in the province grew increasingly tense. All military branches were heavily deployed in the region. Families of victims feared speaking out. Reports emerged of people being detained for attempting to contact foreign media.
That left Iran’s government in control of the story.
Iran’s soccer team wore golden “#168” pins on their jackets when they arrived at the FIFA World Cup. The Iranian negotiating team pursuing a pause in the war with the U.S. called itself “Minab 168.” Pro-Iran groups produced viral videos depicting the children as animated Lego figures, mocking the United States.
“In the aftermath of the attack, Iranian authorities … exploited the suffering of victims’ families and surviving children for propaganda purposes,” Amnesty International wrote in a March report on the deaths.
Throughout all of this, no public list of the victims’ names was ever released.
With access to Iran blocked, researchers turned their focus to the question of who was responsible. Iran blamed the U.S. Trump cast doubt on American involvement and pointed the finger back at Iran. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said only that the Pentagon was looking into it.
Internally, the U.S. military knew more than it publicly acknowledged. When reports of the school strike first emerged, the military was aware it had conducted strikes in that general area — though it took time to verify Iranian claims that a school had been hit and to formally open an investigation, said the U.S. official speaking anonymously.
It appears that while one analyst had identified the building as a school as far back as seven years ago, that finding was never adequately shared across the various intelligence and military agencies involved. As a result, the building was not recognized as a school by those selecting targets — pointing to potential systemic failures in the target review process, the official said.
A former Pentagon official, also speaking anonymously, said the bombing was a foreseeable consequence of changes made by the Trump administration — specifically, reductions in staff dedicated to minimizing civilian casualties and Defense Secretary Hegseth’s focus on military lethality.
When Hegseth took over, he significantly reduced the size of an office known as the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, which had been established by Congress in late 2022. That move halted the office’s work on maintaining “no-strike lists” — catalogues of protected locations such as hospitals, schools, churches, and mosques — said Wes Bryant, who joined the office in 2024 as Branch Chief of Civil Harm Assessments. Bryant noted that when he was at the Pentagon, it was widely understood that the list was already out of date.
In recent weeks, some progress has been made in identifying the victims. Airwars spent months reviewing open-source information and was able to confirm the names and identities of 157 people killed, including 123 children aged 13 and under, and 34 adults. Among the adults were 26 school staff members — one of whom was pregnant — and five parents, each of whom lost at least one child. Airwars estimates the death toll falls between 157 and 168, with between 95 and 111 people injured.
Whether the Pentagon’s formal findings will ever be made public remains unclear. Much of the investigative work has reportedly been completed, but the military’s Central Command, which commissioned the probe, is still reviewing the results.
Past investigations have moved faster. When a Hellfire missile killed 10 civilians in Kabul, Afghanistan, on August 29, 2021, the Defense Department acknowledged responsibility and provided operational details within a month.
When asked about the Minab investigation last week, Trump said, “I don’t know that they’re ever going to solve that problem.” Hegseth said the findings would be released “when the appropriate time is right.”
Some members of Congress are still demanding answers. Sen. Mike Rounds, a Republican from South Dakota who sits on both the Armed Services and Intelligence committees, said in a recent interview that Congress has not received adequate information about the bombing and expects a full report.
The issue, he said, “has not gone away.”
