Minab: When the world’s most precise missile chose a classroom

Targeting a school and the mass killing of children are war crimes, and those responsible need to be held to account.

Deleted: It is often said that the worst evils are committed not by monsters or sadists, but by people who are terrifyingly ordinary.

United States “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth recently remarked with disarming composure in a media interview: “The only ones that need to be worried right now are Iranians who think they’re going to live.” Words spoken without hesitation, as if the prospect of death for millions were merely a strategic calculation.

In southern Iran, before the sun rises over the coast, a familiar sound travels quietly through the villages: the sound of lenj boats preparing for the sea. Their weathered wooden hulls creak against the tide, sails unfold slowly, and fishermen pull their ropes in the stillness of the early morning. In the south, there is a saying: “A lenj that does not know the sea, will be broken by the first wave.” For the people of our coast, the lenj is more than a vessel. It is a symbol of life itself — of perseverance against the sea, against the storm, against a fate that has rarely been gentle.

I am a son of that same south, where the sea has long taught its people how to stand against the waves. Yet on the morning of February 28, an unexpected wave reached the south.

It was 10:45 in the morning. The classrooms of Shajareh-Tayyebeh Girls’ Primary School in the city of Minab were filled with children. Girls between the ages of seven and 12 sat behind their desks with notebooks open before them. The rhythm of recitation and the quiet voices of learning drifted through the corridors.

At that very moment, thousands of kilometres away, inside a control room filled with digital screens, a button was pressed.

A Tomahawk cruise missile — one of the most precise guided weapons in the world — rose from a US naval vessel. Such a missile is designed to strike with extraordinary accuracy. It can select a specific structure among many buildings and hit its target within a few metres.

On that morning, its target was not a military installation.

Its target was a girls’ elementary school.

The first missile tore through the roof of the classrooms, and the structure collapsed upon itself. Seconds later, a second missile struck the courtyard, where children who had escaped the falling debris were struggling to breathe beneath clouds of dust. A third explosion followed, and the noise of life gave way to an unbearable silence.

When the smoke finally lifted, what remained were burned textbooks scattered among broken desks, small shoes lying across the ground, and the cries of mothers calling the names of their daughters amid the rubble.

About 170 people were killed, most of them schoolgirls, and some 100 were wounded. These numbers cannot convey the human reality they represent.

This was not an accident. The timing alone speaks with unmistakable clarity: 10:45 on a Saturday morning, precisely when the classrooms were full of children, in the very first hours of war. A missile capable of striking within five metres does not mistake a classroom for a military facility. Satellite imagery taken before and after the strike, remnants of US munitions, and verified video recordings all point to the same conclusion.

This was not an error. It was a message delivered on the first day of war that even the most remote communities of southern Iran could be turned into sites of devastation. Its purpose was to instil terror at the outset, to break the resolve of a people, and to normalise the idea that nowhere — not even a classroom — is safe.

The repeated targeting of the school clearly demonstrates deliberateness and evidences the requisite intent.

Minab did not remain an isolated tragedy. Across the country, the pattern has repeated itself. Civilians have been killed in large numbers, residential neighbourhoods reduced to rubble, commercial centres destroyed, medical facilities struck, and schools damaged or obliterated. Even buildings of the Red Crescent, an institution that stands as a universal symbol of humanitarian protection, have not been spared.