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On a Saturday morning in late February, as hundreds of missiles and guided bombs rained down across Iran, one struck a primary school in the small southern town of Minab. The children inside had been told to go home. Most hadn't made it out yet.

The Shajareh Tayyebeh Primary School, nestled within — but physically walled off from — an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps naval compound in Hormozgan province, was hit before 11 a.m. on February 28, 2026. By the time Iranian state media updated its count on March 4, 168 people had been reported killed. At least 48 of the first 57 identified victims, cross-referenced against official birth records, were children.

Neither Washington nor Tel Aviv has claimed responsibility for the strike. But the evidence points squarely at them.

"We're Investigating That"

When US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was asked directly about the school attack at a March 4 press briefing, his response was brief. "All I can say is that we're investigating that," he said. "We, of course, never target civilian targets, but we're taking a look."

Standing beside him, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Dan Caine pointed to a map and described how US forces from the USS Abraham Lincoln strike group had been applying "pressure" along the "southeastern side of the coast," targeting naval capabilities along the strait — gesturing toward an area that included Minab, where strike activity had been confirmed.

Two days earlier, at a separate briefing on March 2, Caine had described the broader campaign in terms that left little ambiguity about its scale and deliberateness. The attacks, he said, represented "the culmination of months, and in some cases, years of deliberate planning and refinement against this particular target set," spanning "precision strikes against key military infrastructure" and "persistent intelligence and targeting integration."

The Israeli military, for its part, told Human Rights Watch on March 3 that after an initial examination, it was "not aware of any strikes in the area," adding that "the incident is being examined." On February 28, as strikes were still underway, Israeli military officials had publicly stated the attacks were based on "precise intelligence."

Months of planning. Precise intelligence. A school full of children.

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The Strike Pattern Tells Its Own Story

Human Rights Watch researchers analyzed 14 verified videos and photographs taken in the immediate aftermath of the attack, alongside roughly 40 satellite images spanning 25 years of the site's history, as well as commercially obtained high-resolution imagery captured in the days after the strike.

What they found was not a stray bomb or a guidance failure. The pattern of destruction across the IRGC compound indicated a deliberate, multi-target strike using highly accurate guided munitions. At least ten structures across the compound were directly hit. Five of them, including the school and the compound's medical clinic, show damage consistent with large munitions entering through the roof and detonating inside — a signature of precision-guided penetrator weapons.

Four other buildings were destroyed outright. Two more showed fire damage at a distance from neighboring impact points, consistent with having been individually struck rather than caught in secondary blasts. In total, 14 of the compound's structures sustained damage. Nearly every building on the base was hit.

The entry points of munitions are visible on multiple structures in the satellite imagery. The strikes were not random. They were deliberate, coordinated, and accurate.

A School, Not a Barracks

The compound's military character is not in dispute. Signage at its southern entrance references a "Seyyed Al-Shohada Cultural and Educational Complex" alongside an IRGC emblem. Another entrance bears a sign for the "Shaheed Absalan Specialist Clinic, the Health Commandment of the IRGC's Naval Force," inaugurated in January 2025 by the IRGC's then-commander-in-chief, Major General Hossein Salami. The main gate carries the IRGC logo alongside the word for "barracks."

But the school is a separate matter entirely.

Satellite imagery stretching back to 2016 shows that the Shajareh Tayyebeh Primary School was physically partitioned from the rest of the compound by an interior wall built between February and September of that year. A dedicated, unguarded street entrance was constructed at the same time, allowing students and teachers to enter without passing through any military checkpoint. Two watchtowers that had previously stood less than 50 meters from the school building were removed. By August 2017, a soccer pitch had been painted in the courtyard.

The school had, in every practical and structural sense, been separated from the military installation surrounding it. Children arrived through their own entrance. They played on their own pitch. They had no need to interact with, and no access to, the military compound next door.

Human Rights Watch found no evidence the school was being used for military purposes at the time of the attack.

The Final Minutes

Iran's work and school week begins on Saturday. On February 28, the first reports of incoming strikes surfaced online before 10 a.m. The Shajareh Tayyebeh school administration contacted parents immediately and urged them to collect their children. But the window between the warning and the explosion was devastatingly short.

"The time between the announcement of the school's closure and the moment of the explosion was extremely short; many families had not yet arrived," the Coordinating Council of Iranian Teachers' Trade Associations said in a statement issued on March 1.

Satellite imagery confirms the school was intact at 10:23 a.m. The first video of the aftermath appeared on social media at 11:47 a.m. Local media, citing officials, placed the moment of impact at approximately 10:45 a.m. Somewhere in that 22-minute window, a guided munition struck a school that was still full of children waiting to be taken home.

Videos verified by Human Rights Watch researchers show black smoke pouring from the roof, part of which had collapsed. The brightly painted school walls are visible in the background. People are gathered outside, screaming. Body bags are laid on the ground. Photographs show four girls in school uniforms, their faces covered in dust, lying side by side. A separate video shows a child in a green checkered school uniform — the same uniform worn by a surviving boy captured in another clip — with a wound to the head.

By March 3, a newly dug burial plot at the Minab Hermud Cemetery, roughly 3.5 kilometers from the school, contained rows of fresh graves. Satellite imagery from March 1 shows ground preparation beginning within hours of the attack. By March 4, aerial imagery shows over 100 individual graves, 83 of them excavated using heavy machinery.

Accountability, Undermined From Within

Human Rights Watch's inquiry arrives at a moment when, the organization argues, the United States has been systematically dismantling the internal safeguards designed to prevent exactly this kind of outcome.

Under the second Trump administration, the Defense Department has terminated senior military lawyers, reportedly loosened targeting protocols, and eliminated "civilian environment teams" and "red teams" from the operational chain of command — bodies tasked with independently stress-testing strike plans for civilian harm. At a March 2 press conference, Secretary Hegseth dismissed what he called "stupid rules of engagement," suggesting they interfered with the military's ability to "fight to win."

The laws of armed conflict do not function as optional constraints. They prohibit attacks on civilian objects — schools, hospitals, homes — unless those objects are being actively used for military purposes. They require that anticipated civilian harm not be disproportionate to the expected military gain. They require that all feasible precautions be taken. They require, where circumstances allow, effective advance warning to civilian populations.

Human Rights Watch is not aware of any warning being issued before the strike on Shajareh Tayyebeh.

The organization has called for a full, independent investigation into the attack, with accountability for all those in the chain of command — military and civilian — who bear responsibility. Victims and their families, it says, should be appropriately compensated.

"Allies of the US and Israel should insist on accountability for the Shajareh Tayyebeh school attack and for an end to attacks on civilian infrastructure," said Sophia Jones, open source researcher with the Digital Investigations Lab at Human Rights Watch. "Before more civilians, including children, are unlawfully killed."

The US military has not responded to Human Rights Watch's written inquiry. Iran has not responded either. Israel says it is still examining the incident.