ByNawal Al-Maghafi

Senior international investigations correspondentReporting fromMinab, southern Iran

This report contains distressing descriptions of the deaths of children.

Amaineh Nademi moves slowly through the ruins of her former school. Pieces of fractured concrete dangle unsteadily from the harmed upper level. Several classrooms remain intact, their vivid walls covered with drawings of balloons and blossoms.

The 33-year-old educator recalls precisely where everything stood - the girls' rooms upstairs, the boys' rooms downstairs, the principal's office, the prayer space.

Debris is all that is left of her room, where she instructed first-grade girls at Shajareh Tayyebeh Primary School in Minab, a modest city in southern Iran.

On 28 February, during the initial hours of the US-Israeli conflict with Iran, an attack on the school turned a routine Saturday into one of the war's most notable tragedies - and its deadliest event for non-combatants.

Overall, 156 individuals, among them 120 youngsters, have been verified dead, including a woman expecting a child and her fetus, per the Minab prosecutor's office.

Analysts note that proof points to US troops striking the school, located beside an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps compound that satellite views reveal was targeted multiple times.

The US has not claimed responsibility, yet US outlets have indicated that military probes suggest US forces likely performed the strike by mistake.

The anguish from the incident here lingers sharply. Educators say they offer prayers at the location daily. Rescue teams continue to seek remains of those lost.

Much of the top floor fell onto the level beneath. "You cannot term it a school," states Amaineh - merely "walls that carry the scent of death, sorrow and the blood spilled here."

Iranian officials encouraged our visit to the school - it serves as proof, they state, that an operation framed by Washington as targeting Iran's military and security structures instead caused severe harm to civilians.

'We were all sent flying'

The school day started normally, Amaineh explains.

Since it was the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, the youngsters assembled in the prayer hall to read the Quran, she remembers, before she started lessons on a fresh letter of the Persian alphabet.

Yet, as the opening strikes of the war spread across Iran, she says the principal declared the school would shut, and staff began reaching parents to urge them to fetch their children.

Only five of Amaineh's 15 first-grade pupils remained in her upstairs classroom, she notes, when she first detected a blast nearby. She says she was in the hallway and hurried back for the children.

"Right as I prepared to exit, a missile hit the school," says Amaineh. "An object struck my head and my pupils' heads - we were all thrown through the air."

Next, she says, dense black smoke filled the space: "I could not even see the children I held in my arms. We could not breathe."

She says she recalls another blast, plus cries, children weeping and then the building itself crumbling - "ruined in a single moment."

"Blood flowed from me and the pupils," she adds.

When the smoke thinned briefly, she says she lowered the hurt children to those below and made her way past flames and debris to the gate, where she saw parents gathered. Many had hurried there without shoes, she recalls.

She says she could not grasp why the parents rushed toward the school, thinking in her daze that all others had already left: "I did not realize they were all buried under the rubble."

Amaineh had taught first grade there for six years. She names students and coworkers lost that day: Adrina from her class, killed on the stairs with her mother, Fatemeh in second grade, and others including sixth-graders she once taught the alphabet, plus the principal, deputy, PE instructor and Quran teacher.

'Find my son'

Within moments, emergency crews arrived.

Reza Besharati, an Iranian Red Crescent Society worker, says he was among the first responders and found roads near the school jammed as frantic families sought their children.

Minab is a small city. As Reza moved through the group and into the wreckage, he says he recognized familiar faces, including some relatives.

"We began locating people, hoping someone might survive," he says. "But sadly, no one did."

He says the dead appeared terribly mangled: "Perhaps only a hand, perhaps only a leg... No one had an intact body." Many families identified their children by shoes or clothes, he notes.

One of Reza's relatives searched while pleading "just find my child, find my son," he says. "I could not say her son was gone. We all wept."

Reza says the scenes from the collapsed building stay with him: "I could not rest for days," he says. "When I shut my eyes... I only recall these sights from here."

Strike investigated

As facts of the strike surfaced, President Donald Trump initially accused Iran, without evidence.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth stated the military was probing the matter and that US forces "never aim at civilian sites." He later ordered a senior review, headed by an officer from outside US Central Command. The Trump administration has yet to issue the results.

Several US media have reported - citing sources close to the US military probe - that early conclusions found it probable that old data from the US Defence Intelligence Agency caused the school to be viewed as part of a military target.

Expert video review has revealed the IRGC site next to the school was struck by a precision Tomahawk missile - a cruise missile type neither Israel nor Iran is known to hold. Satellite images showed the school and several compound buildings hit, and confirmed videos showed repeated strikes on the area. US military maps also verify American actions in southern Iran - including Minab - at the time.

Past satellite images show the school zone was once part of the IRGC compound, but it has been separated since 2016 with its own entries and yards.

Further, details showing the site was a school were available online. Archived pages from the girls' and boys' school sites - captured months before the attack - list the address.

The head of Centcom told a congressional panel in May, without more detail, that the probe was "complex" since the school sat "on an active IRGC cruise missile base" - which Iran's foreign ministry dismissed as a "baseless fabrication."

The IRGC operates some community and medical sites alongside its military, security and economic roles. Local residents told BBC Persian the site once housed an IRGC naval unit, but they thought its military role had ended years ago. Photos show buildings in the compound included a clinic and a car wash.

The BBC contacted the Department of Defense and US military for comment. Officials said the probe continues with no new updates.

'Identified by her socks'

A short drive from the damaged school lies the cemetery where many pupils and teachers rest.

Each evening, families gather by the graves. Mothers clean dust from photos of their children. Parents remain and pray well after dark.

Around them, siblings play among the markers of brothers and sisters whose lives ended too soon.

Masoumeh Mehran Shekhabadi visits her nine-year-old daughter, Setayesh, daily, often staying late into the night.

She was among the parents who ran to the school after the strike. "The school was gone," she says, her voice faltering. "Only smoke, children's hair, a hand here, a foot there. They were torn apart."

Masoumeh adds: "I kept shouting, not just for Setayesh, but for all the children: 'Children, where are you?'"

Setayesh's family received word of her death only in the early hours the next day, Masoumeh says. She recalls being asked repeatedly what color socks the child wore, and answering cream. Setayesh was recognized by her socks, she says.

The nine-year-old had hoped to teach, her mother notes. "She would arrange her dolls on the sofa and say: 'I am your teacher. I am in primary school now, so I teach.'"

As with many parents here, grief mixes with rage. "May Trump be ruined, so these children's blood is not lost in vain," Masoumeh says.

'They'd gone to learn'

Iran's government has often cited Minab in addresses, global meetings and state media - even labeling a plane with negotiators "Minab-168," referencing the earlier death count from officials.

The attack gives the Islamic Republic a strong reply to Washington's account of its campaign.

The war has split Iranians. Some rejoiced when the strikes started, upset by the government's record of holding dissidents and using force during protests. They hoped outside military action might finally weaken or topple the regime.

Some government critics told the BBC they saw the Minab strike as a major setback. It showed a precise, clean war could not hold and let authorities cast themselves as protectors of Iranians from foreign assault.

In Minab, Amaineh goes to the cemetery, moving among the graves of her former pupils.

On a nearby memorial wall are the faces of the children, staff and parents who left home that Saturday and did not return.

Setayesh's mother still sits by her daughter's grave.

"What was these children's crime? Did they hold weapons? A pencil, a book, a notebook and a schoolbag. They had no weapons... They had come to study," she says.

Additional reporting by Jasmin Dyer

Nawal Al-Maghafi reports from Iran on condition that none of her material is used on the BBC's Persian Service. These limits apply to all international media in Iran.

Iran
Iran war
United States
Human rights
Middle East