Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School – Iran

London protest march to US embassy – Saturday 7th March 2026
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Minab is not a city that appears on the maps that matter to generals. It sits in Hormozgan province in the deep south of Iran, roughly 25 kilometres inland from the Sea of Oman, a place of date palms and mango groves and the long silver thread of the Minab River cutting down through limestone highlands before spreading into the coastal plain. The city – population around 73,000 – has been here in one form or another since antiquity, its origins woven into local legend. Two sisters, Bibi Mino and Bibi Naznin, are said to have founded it, and you can still see the ruined bulk of the Hazareh Castle on the edge of town, a remnant of a civilisation the Mongols tried to erase in the thirteenth century and couldn’t quite finish.

The people of Minab are a braided population – Arab, Persian, Baloch, descendants of African traders who sailed the ancient Indian Ocean routes — and they speak a dialect, Bandari, that carries the warm, humid breath of the Gulf coast in every syllable. In summer the temperature climbs to 48 degrees Celsius. Families sleep on rooftops. Children grow up knowing the smell of salt wind and ripening limes. The region is Iran’s largest producer of dates, and in the Thursday Market, which has run for centuries, woven palm baskets and golden embroidery pass between hands in the particular unhurried way of a place that trusts time to continue.

165 Vanished

On the morning of Saturday 28 February 2026, at the start of the Iranian school week, 170 students and teachers of Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School entered their classrooms. Within 30 mintues, one-hundred-and-sixty- five would be killed.

It was the first morning of an unprovoked and brutal US-Israeli bombing campaign against Iran. In the predawn hours, warplanes and missiles had begun striking across the country – Tehran, Isfahan, Qom, Karaj, in a campaign that American and Israeli officials had been planning for months. In Minab’s Hormozgan province, the strikes were oriented around the Strait of Hormuz, one of the world’s most consequential shipping chokepoints. From a military planner’s perspective, these attacks had a bizarre and violent logic.

But what the logic did not account for was Mohanna Zari.

She was in first grade. She had a maths book. She had a folder of schoolwork, and a colour pencil box still in her bag – because it was morning, and the day had barely begun, because no one had told Mohanna her world was about to end.

They Came to Kill the Children

The school’s name becomes unbearable in retrospect. The Blessed Tree. Iranian schools are frequently given names of this kind – botanical, aspirational, suggestive of things that grow and endure. Shajareh Tayyebeh gathered its girls every Saturday morning, daughters of farmers and teachers and mechanics, ages seven to twelve, the whole wild span of early childhood from milk teeth to the first stirrings of adolescence. They came in their uniforms, backpacks on their shoulders. They brought their homework. Mohanna Zari brought her colour pencils.

The school had a sports field and other recreational areas that had been added over time, the unremarkable infrastructure of a place where children are supposed to become themselves — the painted hopscotch grid, the corner of the courtyard where the older girls stood chattering, and the open spaces where the younger ones ran without reason or destination – they ran just for the pure fun of it.

Then, screaming US-built, US-delivered missiles arrived. Three of them, minutes apart.

A staff member at the school recalled how she had watched the young girls playing at school every day. After the strike, she saw their bodies lying on classroom benches and in different corners of the school.

The children were killed in a “triple tap” strike, with the second and third missiles fired killing sheltering survivors.

A “triple tap” strike is the deliberate practice of launching additional munitions on the same location minutes after the first, timed precisely to kill survivors seeking shelter as well as emergency responders – paramedics, firefighters, neighbours – who rush to help the wounded. The tactic is not incidental to the bombing, it is the bombing’s most calculated layer. There is no ambiguity about the intent – the point is to maximise the death toll by weaponising human compassion, turning the instinct to help the injured into a means of killing more people. The US has employed triple tap drone strikes extensively. Israel has used the tactic repeatedly in Ghazzah.

Iranian authorities put the final death toll at 165 people, most of them girls aged between seven and twelve.

Let that sink in.

An Attack That was Deliberate and Precise

The school building was near facilities belonging to Iran’s security services – this is documented and acknowledged. But satellite imagery reviewed by multiple independent analysts, including Al Jazeera’s digital investigations unit and the New York Times, established clearly that a decade before, at least, perhaps even earlier, the school had been physically walled off from other buildings. Unambiguously, it stood alone.

Wes J. Bryant, a national security analyst and former senior US Air Force adviser on civilian harm at the Pentagon, reviewed satellite imagery from Planet Labs and rendered a verdict that should have been unnecessary to obtain – all of the buildings struck, including the school, showed what he described as “picture perfect” precision. The strike pattern was not a stray round, not collateral damage in the traditional fog-of-war sense. The attack was deliberate, and precise. 

Beth Van Schaack, a former State Department official and Stanford professor of human rights and international justice, put it plainly – American intelligence capabilities should have ensured the military knew a school was in the vicinity. The New York Times assembled a mounting body of evidence, including newly released satellite imagery and verified videos, indicating the school building was severely damaged by a precision strike, and that official statements about US forces targeting naval targets near the Strait of Hormuz suggest American warplanes were most likely to have carried out the strike.

By 6 March 2026, Reuters was citing American officials confirming that US now believes its forces were “likely” responsible for the attack on Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School. The investigation continues. The children do not.

Civilian Sites Chosen Intentionally

On Tuesday 3 March, thousands of people filled the streets of Minab for the mass funeral. Mourners wept over bodies wrapped in white shrouds. Some coffins bore photographs of children. An aerial image showed the freshly turned earth of the graves stretching out in rows – small graves, precisely because the bodies they held were small, because the girls of the first grade are small, because Mohanna Zari was small.

The attack on Shajareh Tayyebeh was not an isolated incident. It was the opening horror of a campaign that has continued, day-by-day, to work its way through the civilian infrastructure of a country of 90 million people. Days after Minab, missiles fired by the US and Israel struck two schools in Parand, a town southwest of Tehran.

On 6 March, Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei shared footage of Shahid Hamedani Elementary School in Tehran’s Niloufar Square – a building that should be full of children, reduced to rubble. Iran’s Ministry of Education confirmed that multiple schools across Tehran had sustained damage of varying severity – Allameh Helli School, Shahid Hemdani Elementary School, and  multiple schools in Districts 7 and 12 have all been hit.

The Ministry reported student deaths across the country. If Shajareh Tayyebeh was the first blow, it was not a singular one. Schools are not incidental to what the US and Israel are doing in Iran. They are the point.

The head of the Iranian Red Crescent reported that a staggering 3,643 civilian locations had been targeted so far.

The International Crisis Group told Al Jazeera that what is happening in Iran represents a continuation and extension of what Israel is attempting in Ghazzah – the deliberate targeting of the systems – schools, hospitals, infrastructure, state institutions – that allow a society to function and reproduce itself. The logic of this kind of warfare is not, ultimately, military. It is civilisational. It is the logic of breaking a people by destroying the places where they raise their children.

The precision of these attacks is real – 3,600 civilian sites were deliberately chosen; the attack on Shajareh Tayyebeh was calculated. Mohanna Zari’s murder was intentional. We’ve seen this playout before …. Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Occupied Palestine, Sudan, Yemen. This is what empire building looks like.  

To Break a People, Destroy Their Future

The girls of Shajareh Tayyebeh – seven years old, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve. They came from a region where the summer heat is fierce and the smell of the sea hangs in the air. They were learning to read. They were learning to count. Some of them were learning to write their names for the first time in the looping, beautiful script of Persian, the language of Hafez and Rumi and a literary civilisation three thousand years deep. They were, in the language of childhood everywhere, fighting over pencil cases and whispering to their best friends and dreading the lesson they hadn’t revised for and daydreaming about lunch.

On the morning of 28 February 2026 they were all there, then the missiles arrived, and they were gone. The children of Shajareh Tayyebeh now in a hundred small graves. There was no apology from Washington or Tel Aviv to the father kneeling in rubble, holding a maths book, asking what wrong his daughter had done – no apology, just more threats. This is what empire sounds like. 

Their names are a record of what empire destroys. Hana Dehqani, eight years old. Liana Mohammadi, seven years old. Salma Zakeri, six years old, who died alongside her sister Esra, nine, in the same room – two children from one family, one strike, one room. Sara Shayesteh, five years old. Mahna Zarei, two months old. One-hundred and sixty-five lives stolen.

They are not abstractions. They are children whose names their mothers had chosen, whose heights were being marked on doorframes, whose futures were being imagined. White-bodied empire has always required the erasure of other people’s children – in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Palestine, in Yemen, in Sudan, in Libya – the bombed school, the missile through the classroom ceiling, the “precision strike” on a building full of girls learning to write their names. To break a people, you destroy their future. You destroy it at its most tender and its most defenceless. You destroy it at eight years old, at six, at five, at two months.

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of White-Bodied Empire

None of this violence arrives from nowhere. The US was built upon two foundational crimes from which it has never fully reckoned with, let alone atoned for – the genocide of the Indigenous peoples who had inhabited the continent for millennia, and the enslavement of millions of Africans whose forced labour built the wealth on which the nation’s prosperity was raised. A country that cannot honestly name what it has done at home cannot be trusted to name what it is doing abroad.

The reach of that psychotic violence now extends across the entire planet. No country in history has established a military presence as vast as the US currently maintains. The US Department of Defence manages or uses at least 128 overseas military bases in more than 51 countries – and this figure reflects only what is officially acknowledged and unclassified. Credible independent sources estimate the true number to be closer to 750 sites, spread across 80 countries. No other nation comes close. The US military global footprint is not a deterrent posture. It is an empire’s infrastructure.

That infrastructure is backed by the largest military budget in human history. In 2024, the US spent $997 billion on defence – nearly one trillion dollars in a single year. This figure represents close to 40 percent of all military spending on earth. To put it in context, the US spent more than China, Russia, India, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, South Korea, Japan, and Ukraine combined.

In September 2025, President Donald Trump restored “Department of War” as an official secondary title for the Department of Defence – the move emphasised perpetual combat over deterrence. It is a more truthful acknowledgement of what the institution has always been – the US has been involved in some form of armed conflict in approximately 229 of its 249 years of existence, or roughly 93 percent of its entire history. There has been no decade without war. There has been no president who governed in peacetime.

This is the country that bombed the children of Minab. A nation founded on genocide and slavery, which has never properly apologised for either. A nation that maintains nearly a thousand military installations across the globe, spends close to a trillion dollars a year on its war machine, and has been in near continuous conflict. The violence visited upon Shajareh Tayyebeh school – the triple-tapping of a building full of children, the precision destruction of the places where the next generation learns to read – is not an anomaly in American foreign policy. It is its most honest expression. The record is not ambiguous. It is written in Minab’s small graves, and in the 249 years before them.

—  © 2026 Sul Nowroz  –  Real Media staff writer  –  Insta: @TheAfghanWriter