MINAB, Iran — A missile strike that devastated Shajareh Tayyebeh School in Minab turned a school building into one of the war’s most scrutinized civilian tragedies, with rights groups and U.N. officials reporting that more than 100 children and school staff were killed, Feb. 28, 2026. The attack has intensified calls for accountability because investigators are examining whether U.S. forces struck a site that open-source records, satellite images and local accounts had long identified as a functioning school.
Reuters reported that the school had a yearslong online presence, including photos of pupils and classroom activities, and that the building was separated from an adjacent military compound by a wall. The finding cuts through a common defense of the “fog of war”: even in a complex strike environment, the civilian character of the site appears to have been knowable before the missiles landed.
Amnesty International said its evidence review found the strike killed and injured children, parents and teachers, and raised serious concerns that the school may have been hit because of outdated intelligence. Amnesty also said Iranian authorities must remove civilians from the vicinity of military objectives where feasible, allow independent monitors into the country and restore internet access so families can reach loved ones and lifesaving information.
Iranian women carry the war’s double burden
The toll in Minab cannot be understood only as a targeting failure. It sits at the intersection of foreign military power, Iran’s own security state and the long campaign to control women’s bodies, movement and education. The children killed at school were not symbols. The teachers who stayed to move students out were workers, caregivers and public servants in a society that has repeatedly asked women to absorb political violence quietly.
That is why the demand for a feminist reckoning must be broader than a call for one investigation. It must ask why girls’ schools keep becoming sites of fear, why mothers are forced to identify children in morgues while states argue over responsibility, and why women’s grief is so often converted into propaganda by governments that deny women equal freedom in life.
Reuters reported that a U.N. fact-finding inquiry had begun investigating the strike, with a mission member saying an independent outcome was necessary given the lives lost. Human Rights Watch later argued in a legal analysis of whether the Minab attack may amount to a war crime that the key questions include what attackers knew or should have known, whether the school was a civilian object and whether expected civilian harm was excessive in relation to any military advantage.
UNICEF said the escalation had already killed approximately 180 children across Iran and damaged schools and hospitals, warning that children and schools are protected by international humanitarian law. The agency’s warning makes Minab part of a wider civilian emergency, not an isolated footnote.
A pattern before the bombs
The Minab strike lands on older wounds. In 2024, the U.N. Fact-Finding Mission on Iran said institutional discrimination against women and girls had enabled serious rights violations, many amounting to crimes against humanity. The mission said the Woman, Life, Freedom protests began after the death of Jina Mahsa Amini in morality police custody in September 2022 and documented killings, arbitrary detention, torture, rape, enforced disappearance and gender persecution.
The classroom had already become a site of fear. In 2023, U.N. experts condemned the deliberate poisoning of more than 1,200 schoolgirls in Iran and criticized the state’s failure to protect students or investigate swiftly. That older crisis matters now because it shows that girls’ education had been politically vulnerable long before foreign missiles hit Minab.
The same continuity appears in daily life. Amnesty International documented how authorities were doubling down on punishments against women and girls who defied compulsory veiling laws after the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising, restricting mobility, work and public participation. War did not create that gendered control; it intensified the conditions under which it becomes deadlier.
Accountability cannot stop at blame
The first duty is truth: casualty lists, a transparent timeline, munition analysis, targeting records and access for independent investigators. Families need more than dueling statements from governments. They need names, evidence, reparations and guarantees that schools will not be treated as acceptable collateral damage.
The second duty is political. The United States and Israel must account for civilian harm where their operations are implicated. Iran must account for any military use or dangerous placement of facilities near civilian spaces, end information restrictions that block families and monitors, and stop using women’s suffering as a shield against scrutiny of its own repression.
For Iranian women, Minab is a warning against two forms of erasure: the erasure caused by bombs and the erasure caused when states speak over the dead. A feminist response must refuse both. It must center the children who should have gone home from school, the teachers who stayed with them and the families demanding a future in which neither war nor repression decides whose daughters are safe.
