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.”
