The Minab School Case: How a School in the Midst of War Became a Battleground Over Truth
Minab is not only about who fired the missile, but about how war corrodes language and turns dead children into objects of political bargaining.
On the morning of 9 Esfand 1404 (February 28, 2026), in the very hours when the first wave of U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran was still unfolding, a building collapsed in Minab that was never supposed to stand at the center of military debate: Shajareh Tayyebeh Primary School. In the first hours, what emerged from the site looked more like chaos than news. Images of rubble, schoolbags, small shoes, collapsed walls, and contradictory figures about the number of those killed circulated before it was even clear what had happened. A few days later, as videos, satellite images, munition remnants, and the preliminary findings of the U.S. internal investigation were placed side by side, a clearer picture emerged: the most likely scenario was that a U.S. cruise missile had struck the school grounds and adjacent buildings, and that outdated targeting data was one of the main lines of inquiry. A few days later still, the Pentagon raised the level of the investigation and handed the case to a senior officer outside the regional operational command, a step usually taken when the incident is no longer treated as a marginal error.
From that point on, the Minab case was no longer only a military matter. It acquired three layers. The first was technical and legal: had a school been mistakenly placed inside a military target package? The second was political: who, in the first days, denied responsibility or tried to shift it elsewhere? And the third, perhaps more important than either of the first two, was ethical: how did the deaths of children, instead of becoming a red line, turn into a matter of narrative bargaining? This report begins with that first layer, but it does not stop there. Because the Minab school tells the story of the moment when war contaminates language as well.
A School Beside the Wall
As for the site itself, a few facts are now more or less established. Shajareh Tayyebeh School was part of an educational network affiliated with the IRGC, and in archived versions of that network’s website its address was listed next to, or within the perimeter of, locations under IRGC control. But this reality was accompanied by another fact that later became decisive: for years, the school building had been separated from the neighboring compound by a wall; from at least 1398 (March 21, 2019–March 19, 2020), murals and clear signs of an educational environment could be seen on its outer walls; it was listed in public local directories as a girls’ school; and signs of educational activity were still visible there as late as Esfand 1404 (February 20–March 20, 2026). Later examinations also showed that within a radius of several kilometers, only the school itself and a few buildings in the adjacent compound had been hit. This matters because it moves the case away from the hypothesis of indiscriminate bombing and toward deliberate targeting.
In videos captured at the moment of the attack and in the seconds that followed, and later matched with satellite imagery, a guided munition can be seen that several independent experts identified as most likely a Tomahawk. Examination of remnants found at the site was also consistent with that hypothesis. At the same time, documents and statements by officials familiar with the U.S. internal investigation pointed to a specific possibility: those who prepared the targeting package had not used updated data and had apparently failed to distinguish sufficiently between the school and the neighboring base. It is still unclear why and how those data remained on the target list, or whether other factors, such as timing, operational pressure, or failures in final review, also played a role. But all these reports share one point in common: for years, the school bore public and visible signs of being a civilian space.
There is still no shortage of uncertainty in the details. Different accounts place the death toll somewhere between around 150 and 175. Some reports speak of 168 children killed. It is not yet clear what final figure will appear in the official report, or whether it will clearly distinguish among students, teachers, staff, and others who were on the grounds. But for understanding the central issue, these numerical discrepancies are not decisive. Even the lowest estimates point to one of the deadliest attacks on a school in recent years. The real question is how a building that looked like a school from the outside, on maps, and in satellite images entered the chain of decision-making as an attackable target.
Day One, Before the Truth Arrived
In the first hours and days, narratives were shaped not by established facts but by the political needs of the parties involved. The U.S. president initially said, without evidence, that Iran itself might have been responsible for the attack, and even floated the strange possibility that Iran might possess Tomahawks. A few days later, as evidence mounted, the official position shifted toward waiting for the results of the investigation. On the other side, images of funeral processions with small flag-draped coffins entered the circuit of official propaganda, and the catastrophe, instead of remaining simply a matter of asking who was responsible, was quickly absorbed into the state’s machinery of meaning-making. This is nothing new in wartime. Before truth is established, each side tries to fill its place with a narrative that serves its needs. Minab was no exception.
But what distinguishes the Minab case from an ordinary struggle over the news is the speed and direction of these narrative shifts. At first, the scenario that “the regime did it itself” or “their own missile hit by mistake” spread quickly through part of the Persian-language online sphere. When technical evidence, munition remnants, and the preliminary findings of the U.S. internal investigation weakened that line, the focus shifted from “who fired” to “what exactly was that building?” Then, when it became clear that the school had for years borne unmistakable signs of being an educational center, a third stage began: reducing the human weight of the catastrophe by tying the children to a military institution, to their families, or to the environment around them. The pattern was clear. When denial no longer worked, it gave way to ambiguity. And when ambiguity was not enough, it turned into the withdrawal of sympathy.
In observable examples of Persian-language online reactions in the days after the attack, these three lines recurred clearly: the initial attribution of the attack to the government itself; the subsequent emphasis on the school’s wall-to-wall proximity to the base or on its being “an IRGC school”; and, in some cases, the downgrading of the victims’ human worth by pointing out that the students or their families were tied to the IRGC. These examples are not a census of the entire online sphere, and they cannot produce comprehensive statistics. But they are enough to show the mechanism of narrative construction. The issue was not only lying. The issue was that if the first line collapsed, the second was ready, and if the second was not enough, the third — stripping the victim of innocence — entered the field.
Where Interventionist Politics Enters
At this point, the issue is no longer simply a matter of a few anonymous accounts or a handful of chaotic reactions. To understand why such patterns were able to grow at all, one has to look at the political context before the attack. In the weeks before the war, Reza Pahlavi had publicly defended intensified external pressure. In Dey 1404 (December 22, 2025–January 20, 2026), he called on the international community to join the protesters “fully,” target the IRGC’s command-and-control structure, freeze the assets of government leaders, and expel Iranian diplomats. Less than a month later, on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference, he went a step further and said that U.S. military intervention could save lives, that an attack could weaken the government or accelerate its collapse, and expressed hope that such an attack would speed the return of people to the streets. These were not vague remarks or second-hand quotations. They were direct and public positions.
The importance of these positions lies not only in themselves, but in the political framework they create. When a political project sees foreign attack not merely as a horrifying possibility but as a potential tool for accelerating “transition,” it runs into a difficult problem: if that same foreign attack results in the killing of children, what then? At that point, there are two paths. Either the very premise of bombing as a shortcut to change has to be reconsidered, or the catastrophe has to be managed narratively so that one can still say the cost was heavy, but the project’s underlying political necessity remains unchanged. A significant part of the online behavior aligned with this camp, at least in the Minab case, resembled the second path much more than the first. The focus shifted from responsibility for the attack to the nature of the victims, as if what mattered more than who fired was whether those killed were “neutral” enough to deserve mourning.
This is precisely the point at which part of monarchist discourse intersects with the general language of wartime propaganda. War propaganda needs one simple thing in order to survive: the blurring of the boundary between civilian and military. If it cannot erase that boundary, it must muddy it. If a building is plainly a school, it says it was next to a base. If the victim is a child, it says they belonged to the other side’s family. If public sympathy rises, it says the real issue is something else. This language does not necessarily come out of a single operations room, but in practice it performs the same work for war: it lightens the moral burden of killing. In the Minab case, part of the reactions aligned with the idea of intervention operated, not necessarily in coordination, but according to exactly this logic.
A School, Even Next to a Base, Is Still a School
This is exactly where a clear distinction must be drawn between two arguments that have been stitched together, deliberately or not. The first question is what relation the school had to the neighboring compound. On that point, the available documents are clear: the school belonged to a network affiliated with the IRGC and stood next to a military complex. The second question is whether that institutional or physical proximity made the school a lawful target. From the standpoint of international humanitarian law, and even from the standpoint of the simplest logic of distinction, the answer to that second question is no. The customary rules of the laws of war say that civilian objects are protected from attack unless, and only for such time as, they become military objectives. And in cases of doubt concerning an object ordinarily used for civilian purposes — including a school — it must be presumed civilian. The same rules also stress the duty to verify and to take all feasible precautions before an attack.
This point has also been repeated explicitly in legal and expert examinations of the Minab case. Independent legal assessments published after the attack emphasized that the school was a civilian object and that the students and teachers were civilians; the school’s proximity to IRGC facilities, and even the possible presence of children of IRGC members there, does not change that conclusion. Put plainly, being the child of an IRGC member, or studying at a school run within a network affiliated with the IRGC, does not create combatant status. If that principle is abandoned, then not only Minab, but any school in a garrison town or near a military center, potentially becomes a target that can be justified. This is exactly the slope down which the language of war wants to push society.
That is the framework in which phrases such as “it was an IRGC school” or “these were IRGC children” must be understood. On the surface, such expressions may look like mere political positions, but in practice they perform a very precise operation: they revoke the victim’s innocence. They make mourning conditional. They say that before we can sympathize, we must first inspect the dead child’s political lineage. Morally and legally, this logic is more dangerous than it appears when treated as a passing insult. Because it enters the scene at the very moment when society must insist on the boundary between child and enemy. If that boundary collapses, then after the school, the hospital and the home will be next.
The State, War, and the Commodification of Death
The Minab case, of course, is not only about monarchist discourse or American discourse. The Islamic Republic too, as in so many other crises, was at once the victim of an external attack and the producer of its own preferred political meaning. The small coffins, the funeral images, the official language of “martyrs,” and the incorporation of the catastrophe into the state’s grand narrative all showed that the government, too, was not going to leave the deaths of children as simply a matter of truth-finding. In that sense, Minab was a scene in which three simultaneous meaning-producing machines were at work: the war machine, which had to manage error or responsibility; the state machine, which had to absorb the catastrophe into its own narrative; and the oppositional machine, for which war could be a political opportunity and whose human costs therefore had to be explained away somehow. Caught in the middle were the children themselves — not as symbols, not as political capital, but as human beings killed at school on an ordinary morning.
That is why Minab cannot simply be called a deadly mistake and the file closed. If one day the final report says that outdated data, an incomplete review, or a defective decision-making chain led to this strike, then only the first layer will have been explained. The second layer, discussed far less often, is what happened to the truth after the impact. Who tried from the very beginning to deny the catastrophe? Who, once denial no longer worked, turned to making the identity of the school and the students ambiguous? And who treated the deaths of children not as a moment to rethink the politics of war, but as a problem of public-opinion management? In this sense, the Minab case is not only about a targeting error. It is also about the moral quality of the forces that want to build a political future out of war.
What Minab Revealed
Minab contains a clear warning. That warning is directed not only at armies and command structures, but also at politicians who see war as an instrument of change. Any project that, in order to save itself, finds itself forced to explain over the bodies of children that “the context also matters,” or “they were connected to that institution,” or “we should not forget the school’s proximity to the base,” has in fact lost something fundamental: the ability to recognize the most elementary boundary between a military target and civilian life. This boundary is not some luxury of moralists. It is the minimum necessary for any society to remain within the realm of humanity.
In the end, Minab raises not only the question of who fired. It also raises the question of who, after the strike, tried to neutralize the public shock. Who reduced the deaths of children to a matter of political bargaining. And who looked at a school and, instead of seeing a school, turned it into an exception. Any serious response to the Minab case must hold both layers together: a possible mistake or unlawful attack on the ground, and the erosion of human standards in language. Wars often endure through the latter. Once a society accepts that some children are less children than others, missiles have a much easier job.
The Minab School Case: How a School in the Midst of War Became a Battleground Over Truth #MinabSchool #WarAndTruth
