Iranian teacher recounts horror as missile reduces primary school to rubble

Amaineh Nademi picks her way cautiously through the skeletal remains of what was once her classroom, where chunks of fractured concrete dangle precariously from the damaged upper floor and the brightly coloured walls, still adorned with painted balloons and flowers, stand as a haunting reminder of the lives that were shattered here. The 33-year-old teacher, who instructed first-grade girls at Shajareh Tayyebeh Primary School in Minab, a small city in southern Iran, knows precisely what occupied every corner of the building – the girls' classrooms on the upper floor, the boys' below, the headteacher's office, the prayer room – but all that now remains of her teaching space is a heap of rubble. It was on 28 February, in the opening hours of the US-Israeli war with Iran, that a strike on the school transformed an ordinary Saturday morning into one of the conflict's defining tragedies, and its deadliest single incident for civilians; according to the Minab prosecutor's office, 156 people, including 120 children, were confirmed killed, among them a pregnant woman and her unborn child. Experts have suggested that evidence points to US forces having carried out the attack, given that the school sits adjacent to an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) compound which satellite imagery shows was struck multiple times, though Washington has not admitted responsibility and US media have reported that military investigators believe the strike was likely unintentional.

The Iranian authorities, keen for international media to witness the aftermath, have presented the devastation as evidence that a campaign publicly framed by Washington as an assault on Iran's military and security infrastructure has instead exacted a devastating toll on the civilian population. The school day had commenced as usual, Ms Nademi recalled; because it was the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, the children had gathered in the prayer hall to recite the Quran before she began teaching her pupils a new letter of the Persian alphabet. Yet as the first attacks of the war unfolded across Iran, the headteacher announced the school would be closing, and teachers began contacting parents to collect their children. Only five of Ms Nademi's 15 first-grade pupils remained in her upper-floor classroom when she heard an explosion not far from the school; she was in the corridor and rushed back for the children, but as she went to leave, a missile struck the building. "Something hit my head and my students' heads – we were all sent flying," she said, adding that thick black smoke filled the classroom so completely that she could not even see the pupils she was holding in her arms. She recounted hearing another explosion, along with the sounds of screaming and children crying, before the school itself collapsed – "destroyed all at once" – and blood poured from her and her students.

When the smoke briefly cleared, Ms Nademi said she passed the injured children down to people below and clambered past fire and rubble towards the school gate, where she encountered a crowd of parents, many of whom had rushed to the site without even putting on shoes. In her shock and confusion, she could not understand why they were running towards the school, believing that everyone else had already escaped; she did not yet know that so many remained trapped beneath the debris. She listed the names of students and colleagues killed that day: Adrina from her first-grade class, who she said was killed on the stairs with her mother, Fatemeh in second grade, and many others, including sixth-grade students she remembered teaching the alphabet to, as well as the headteacher, deputy head, PE teacher and Quran teacher. Within minutes of the strike, emergency workers began arriving; Reza Besharati, a worker with the Iranian Red Crescent Society, said he was among the first rescuers on the scene and found the roads near the school choked with traffic as desperate families rushed to search for their children. As he made his way through the crowd and into the wreckage, he recognised people he knew, including some of his own relatives, but the grim reality quickly set in: "We started to find the people, thinking maybe someone would be alive," he said. "But unfortunately, nobody was."

The dead, Mr Besharati recounted, were found grievously disfigured – "maybe just a hand, maybe just a leg… Nobody had a complete body" – and many families recognised their children by their shoes or clothing. One of his relatives, he said, was begging "just find my child, find my son", but he could not bring himself to tell her that her son was no longer alive. The sights he witnessed while searching the collapsed building have not left him; he said he could not sleep for several days and that when he closes his eyes, he remembers only what he saw there. As details of the strike emerged, President Donald Trump first blamed Iran without providing evidence, while Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth stated that the military was investigating and that US forces "never target civilian targets", later announcing a higher-level investigation led by an officer from outside US Central Command (Centcom); the Trump administration has yet to release the findings. Several US media outlets have reported, citing people familiar with the military investigation, that preliminary conclusions suggested it was likely that outdated data supplied by the US Defence Intelligence Agency led to the school being treated as part of a military site. Expert video analysis has shown that the IRGC complex next to the school was hit by a precision-guided Tomahawk missile – a type of cruise missile that neither Israel nor Iran is known to possess – and satellite imagery confirmed that the school and several buildings in the compound had been struck, while verified videos showed the area was hit by a series of attacks.

Historical satellite images indicate that the school area was previously part of the IRGC complex but has been walled off since 2016 and possesses its own entrances and yards; moreover, information identifying the site as a school was publicly available online, with archived snapshots of the websites for the girls' and boys' sections including the address of the site in the months before the attack. The head of Centcom told a congressional committee in May, without providing further detail, that the investigation was "complex" as the school was "on an active IRGC cruise missile base" – a claim that Iran's foreign ministry rejected as a "baseless fabrication". The IRGC runs some community and medical facilities in addition to its extensive military, security and economic activities, and local residents have told BBC Persian that the site had previously been a base for an IRGC naval brigade but that they believed its military use had ceased several years ago; photographs show that buildings on the compound included a clinic and a car wash. The BBC approached the Department of Defense and the US military for comment, but officials said the investigation was ongoing and there were no further updates.

A short drive from the ruined school lies the cemetery where many of the pupils and teachers are buried, and every evening families gather beside the graves, mothers wiping dust from photographs of their children and parents sitting to pray long after darkness has fallen, while brothers and sisters play between the headstones of siblings whose lives were cut short. Masoumeh Mehran Shekhabadi comes to visit her nine-year-old daughter, Setayesh, every day, often staying long into the night; she was among the parents who ran to the school after the strike and found only smoke, children's hair, and scattered body parts – "a hand on one side, a foot on the other" – with the children "torn to pieces". She kept calling out, not only to Setayesh but to all the children, asking where they were, but her family did not receive confirmation of her daughter's death until the early hours of the following morning; she was repeatedly asked what colour socks the child had been wearing, and replied that they were cream, by which Setayesh was then identified. The nine-year-old had wanted to be a teacher, her mother added, and would line up her dolls on the couch and announce that she was their teacher. As for many parents here, grief has become intertwined with anger; Ms Shekhabadi said: "May Trump be destroyed, so these children's blood is not wasted."

Iran's government has repeatedly invoked Minab in speeches, international forums and state media coverage, even naming a plane carrying negotiators "Minab-168" in reference to the death toll previously given by officials, and the attack offers the Islamic Republic a powerful counter-narrative to Washington's description of its campaign. The war has divided Iranians; some celebrated when the air strikes began, angered by the government's history of detaining dissidents and using lethal force during repeated waves of protest, hoping that military pressure from outside might weaken or even bring down the regime. Some opponents of the government have told the BBC they saw the strike at Minab as a huge blow, as it made the idea of a clean, surgical war impossible to sustain and allowed the authorities to present themselves as the defenders of the Iranian people against foreign attack. In Minab, Ms Nademi visits the cemetery, walking 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 morning and never returned. Setayesh's mother still sits beside the grave of her little girl, and asked: "What was these children's crime? Did they carry weapons? A pencil, a book, a notebook and a schoolbag. They had no weapons… They'd gone to learn." Additional reporting was contributed by Jasmin Dyer, and Nawal Al-Maghafi is reporting from Iran on condition that none of her material is used on the BBC's Persian Service, restrictions that apply to all international media organisations operating in Iran.