The elementary school sent an urgent message about her son.
“The war has begun,” he was told. Come pick him up.
The mother, who declined to be identified, said she had just dropped the boy off and couldn’t leave immediately because, as a midwife, she had patients to attend to. Then the earth shook. And she ran away.
It’s too late. Three air strikes hit the Shajareh Taybeh primary school in Minab, killing 168 people, according to the city’s mayor. Many of them were children. One of them was his son.
“By the time we arrived, the entire school had collapsed on top of the children,” the mother told NBC News. “People were pulling the arms and legs of children. People were taking out severed heads.”
Four days later, grief and anger grew over the deaths at the school, which has become a point of protest against the US and Israeli attacks. There is also anger and uncertainty over the fact that no one has accepted responsibility for the most publicised civilian casualties since the beginning of the war.
Videos and images published by state media showed large crowds gathered to bury the children on Tuesday. There is a mass burial consisting of rows and rows of what appear to be individual graves dug side by side.
The US and Israel have since hit thousands of targets inside the country, killing Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and about 800 others. , according to the Iranian Red Crescent Society.
Tehran is retaliating, attacking Israel and several other countries in the region allied with the US, including the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman and Bahrain. Those killed in the retaliatory strike included six US service members, as well as 11 people in Israel, while dozens of people have been killed in Israeli strikes against Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Asked about the deaths on Monday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters that the U.S. military “would never intentionally target a school,” adding that the Defence Department would “investigate whether this was our attack.”
Over the weekend, US Central Command, or CentCom, said it was looking into reports of civilian deaths. The Israeli military has so far declined to comment.
According to satellite footage, the school appeared to be located near an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) site, which British broadcaster BBC News reported had been targeted previously.
Both the MinB official and the mother who spoke to NBC News said the school facility was built on an IRGC base. He stated that the base shut down approximately 15 years ago, leading to the relocation of all military personnel, while the school continued to operate.
Satellite images from 2011 show the building was once part of the same complex before it was fenced.
Iran’s education ministry spokesman Ali Farhadi said on Sunday that there had been three attacks on the school, which he said had 264 students.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said on Saturday that the school was “bombed in broad daylight, when it was packed with young students.”
“These crimes against the Iranian people will not go unanswered,” he warned.
