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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.