Politics
Bombed Iranian girls school had vivid website and years-long online presence
LONDON: An Iranian girls school that took a direct hit on the first day of the war had a years-long online presence, including dozens of photos of the children and their activities, before it was struck along with at least six other buildings in an adjacent military compound, a Reuters investigation found.
The school’s online activity calls into question how the American military vets and reviews strike locations. Reuters first reported that investigators at the Defence Department believe US forces were likely responsible for the bombing, and new indications emerged that the US may have relied upon outdated targeting data.
Separated from the base by a wall painted with bright murals, the Shajareh Tayyebeh School was the northernmost building hit on February 28. The building was destroyed during the barrage, and 150 students were killed, according to Iran’s ambassador to the UN in Geneva, Ali Bahreini. Reuters has not independently confirmed the death toll, which the Iranian Red Crescent said reached a total of 175.
The coloured walls visible from satellite imagery as early as 2018 can be seen in a version of the school’s website archived in 2025, whose photos showed girls dressed in identical pink and white in class and at play.
The school was also tagged in a local business listing, Reuters found, and multiple satellite images from the months leading up to the strike provide other indications it was a school, including playground markings.
The cluster of buildings appeared to have been struck by a series of munitions, including at least one American Tomahawk cruise missile, according to an analysis of satellite imagery data, photos and video of the strikes and their aftermath.
Video of the moment of impact by the Tomahawk on the buildings nearby showed a plume of smoke rising in the background. Satellite images from after the attack showed signs of at least seven distinct explosions along a roughly 325-metre axis, including the destroyed school, a rooftop punctured by a gaping hole, and a flattened building.
US President Donald Trump said Monday that Iran might have Tomahawks, although he did not explain how, and no US officials have offered evidence of that claim.
The Pentagon said the strike is under investigation but declined to comment on the school’s online presence, the satellite imagery or on the decision to target the Minab compound.
Two sources, both speaking on condition of anonymity, told Reuters that outdated targeting data may have been to blame, which was first reported by the New York Times.
Mark Cancian, a retired US Marine officer and defence expert with the Centre for Strategic and International Studies think tank, said the US Central Command would have had a longstanding list of potential targets in case of conflict with Iran. “The lesson learned here would be to review the target lists periodically and more closely,” he said.
The school and at least six buildings in the adjacent Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) compound were the only places struck within five kilometres between February 28 and March 2, Reuters found. This suggests they were specifically targeted, rather than struck as part of a broad bombing campaign on the southern city.
Located near the Strait of Hormuz and surrounded by farm fields, Minab is home to one of the IRGC’s largest missile bases, according to state media.
The Reuters analysis included changes detected between those dates by satellites, which, even over a large area, can measure shifts from upheavals such as destroyed buildings, fire, flooding or landslides.
Graves being prepared for the victims in Iran’s Minab on March 2, 2026. — Reuters
In the days after the strike, another place in Minab showed major disturbance in the analysis: the town cemetery. There, on March 2, the dead children were buried, creating row after row of 20 tidy rectangular holes in the earth.
The school
The Shajareh Tayyebeh School in Minab was one of 59 schools within the Persian Gulf Martyrs’ Cultural Educational Institute. The school’s website includes photos of students gathered in the yard, which matched verified videos outside the building after the strike.
Some of the schools in that network, including the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ school and its equivalent boys’ school in Minab, listed their addresses as being in or adjacent to IRGC-controlled locations, according to the archived website.
The address for the Minab girls’ school is specifically listed as “Resalat Blvd, Alley No 9, behind Asef Brigade.” The girls’ school is also included in a local business listing website that shows a photo of the alley with a sign clearly marked “Girls School”.
The boys’ school seems to share the address and be located on the side of the building that did not collapse. A comparison of post-strike images with archived photos of boys studying appears to show debris scattered on desks where students had once studied.
According to the London-based news website IranWire, the Asef Brigade is a missile unit based in Minab, under the command of the IRGC navy.
Satellite imagery from mid-2015 shows the building was walled off from the rest of the base and appears to have operated as a school since at least 2018, when the painted murals are first visible on its outer walls.
Feb 28 attack
In the early days of the war, the United States released photos and videos showcasing its use of Tomahawks in Iran, including on the war’s first day, February 28, when the school was struck.
In three photos and a video from that day that were taken by the US Navy, a Tomahawk missile launches from the deck of the USS Spruance, a guided-missile destroyer. The missiles are US-made and can be launched from surface ships or submarines.
On Sunday, the semi-official Mehr news agency published a video showing the moment one of the buildings within the IRGC compound was hit. According to local media, the attack happened around 10:45am local time.
Before impact, smoke from what appears to be a previous attack on the compound is already visible in the video. Reuters verified the visual as taken on February 28 from videos of the aftermath and satellite imagery of intact buildings taken on the morning of the strike.
Reuters shared the video of the attack with five munitions experts. Four of the experts said the missile was likely a Tomahawk; one thought it was a glide bomb.
Joost Oliemans, a Netherlands-based conflict analyst who specialises in military equipment, concluded the compound was hit by a US Tomahawk, saying that while a few countries had similar missiles, neither Israel nor Iran were among them.
Joseph Dempsey, a military analyst with London’s International Institute for Strategic Studies, also identified it as a type of Tomahawk, although he did not rule out the possibility of a previously unknown missile.
In a March 4 press conference at the Pentagon, the US military shared a map of locations it had struck in Iran. The map did not list Minab by name, but one of the strikes was marked with a red diamond where the city is located.
On Monday, the state-controlled Tehran Times newspaper published photos of what it said were the “remnants of an American missile that struck an elementary school in Minab.” At the request of Reuters, Hany Farid, a digital forensics and computer science professor for the University of California at Berkeley, analysed the images and found no evidence of manipulation or AI generation.
Two of those missile parts, laid out on a desk and photographed in front of the remains of the school, match recovered parts of other Tomahawk missiles shared by Houthis in 2025 and documented by the Open Source Munitions Portal NGO.
But at the school there was activity as recently as December 2025. Satellite imagery showed what appeared to be people gathered in the schoolyard on a cloudless day.
Some 287 candidates will be considered for the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize, the secretary of the Norwegian Nobel Committee said on Thursday, with US President Donald Trump likely to be among the nominees.
Of this year’s nominations, 208 are individuals and 79 are organisations, said Kristian Berg Harpviken, adding that there were many new nominees compared to last year.
“Since I am new in the job, one of the things that has to some extent surprised me is how much renewal there is from year to year on the list,” Harpviken said in an interview. He has held the position since January 2025.
Despite the number of conflicts rising worldwide and international cooperation under pressure, the award remains relevant, he added.
“The Peace Prize is even more important in a period like the one we’re living in,” he said. “There is as much good work, if not more, than ever.”
Trump likely nominated, but not confirmed
The leaders of Cambodia, Israel and Pakistan have said they nominated Trump for this year’s prize. Their nominations, if made, would have been done in spring and summer 2025, and they are therefore valid given the deadline was January 31.
There is no way of verifying they have done as they have said as nominations remain secret for 50 years and Harpviken declined to say on Thursday whether Trump had been nominated.
A nomination is not an endorsement by the award body.
In addition to committee members, thousands of people worldwide can propose names: members of governments and parliaments; current heads of state; university professors of history, social sciences, law and philosophy; and former Nobel Peace Prize laureates, among others.
Many names appear on betting sites giving odds on this year’s possible laureates, from Russia’s Yulia Navalnaya, the wife of the late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, to Pope Leo and Sudan’s Emergency Response Rooms, a volunteer aid group, among others.
Concern for health of jailed Iranian laureate
Harpviken said the committee was deeply concerned about the health of the 2023 Peace Prize laureate, Iranian human rights activist Narges Mohammadi, which is worsening after she suffered a heart attack in prison.
Her supporters said on Wednesday her life was in imminent danger.
“Her sister was able to visit her in prison yesterday and the reports coming out after that are actually quite alarming as to her health condition,” said Harpviken.
“We see there is a lot of international pressure now. So we hope that the Iranian authorities do pay attention to that and release her so that she can have proper medical treatment.”
Who else could be nominated?
Among possible nominees for this year’s prize are Lisa Murkowski, the US senator for Alaska, and Aaja Chemnitz, a member of the Danish parliament elected from Greenland, according to the Norwegian lawmaker who nominated them both.
“Together they have worked relentlessly to build trust and to secure a peaceful development of the Arctic region over many years,” said the lawmaker, Lars Haltbrekken.
Greenland has been in particular focus this year due to Trump’s relentless push to acquire the island from Nato ally Denmark.
This year’s Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on October 9, while the ceremony will take place on December 10.
A US federal jury convicted an Afghan man on Wednesday of providing support to the Daesh in Afghanistan but failed to agree on whether he was involved in the deadly 2021 suicide bombing at Kabul airport.
Mohammad Sharifullah, a member of the Daesh-Khorasan, was convicted in Virginia of conspiracy to provide material support to a terrorist organisation.
President Donald Trump, in an address to Congress last year, had described Sharifullah as the “top terrorist responsible” for the Kabul airport attack that killed at least 170 Afghans and 13 American troops.
The jury found Sharifullah guilty of providing support to Daesh but deadlocked after two days of deliberations on whether he played a role in the Kabul airport suicide bombing.
According to prosecutors, Sharifullah scouted out the route to the airport where the suicide bomber later detonated his device among packed crowds trying to flee days after the Taliban seized control of Kabul.
The United States withdrew its last troops from Afghanistan in August 2021, ending a chaotic evacuation of tens of thousands of Afghans who had rushed to Kabul’s airport in the hopes of boarding a flight out of the country.
Sharifullah was extradited to the United States in March 2025 and put on trial in Alexandria on the outskirts of the US capital.
He faces up to 20 years in prison.
According to the US authorities, Sharifullah was involved in a number of Daesh-Khorasan attacks between 2016 and his arrest by Pakistani authorities in 2025.
They included a June 2016 suicide bombing that targeted Nepali security guards protecting the Canadian embassy in Kabul.
Sharifullah was accused of conducting surveillance and transporting the suicide bomber to the attack site.
He was also accused of giving weapons instructions to Daesh-Khorasan gunmen who attacked the Crocus City Hall near Moscow in March 2024.
- Khamenei says US faces disgraceful defeat in its plan.
- Iran to secure Gulf, eliminate “enemy’s abuses”: supreme leader.
- Iranian rial has fallen to historic lows against dollar.
Iran’s new Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei said in a published written message on Thursday that a new chapter for the Gulf and Strait of Hormuz has been taking shape since the Iran war with the United States and Israel broke out on February 28.
Iran’s Supreme Leader said that Tehran would secure the Gulf region and eliminate what he described as “the enemy’s abuses of the waterway.”
The Supreme Leader added that new management of the Strait of Hormuz would bring calm, progress and economic benefits to all Gulf nations.
“Today, two months after the largest military deployment and aggression by the world’s bullies in the region, and the United States’ disgraceful defeat in its plans, a new chapter is unfolding for the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz,” he said, hailing Iran’s control over shipping in the strait.
Khamenei was wounded in the initial US-Israeli strikes that assassinated his father Ali Khamenei, and has not been seen in public since being named his successor as supreme leader last month.
The United States imposed a blockade on Iran’s ports two weeks ago, while the Islamic republic has maintained its stranglehold over the strategic Strait of Hormuz since the start of the Middle East war in February.
Now, a State Department official told AFP, Washington is seeking to set up an international coalition comprising allied states and shipping firms to coordinate safe passage through Hormuz — while maintaining its own blockade of ships serving Iran.
“Any attempt to impose a maritime blockade or restrictions is contrary to international law… and is doomed to fail,” Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian said, in a statement that warned the blockade that began on April 13 would be “a disruption to lasting stability in the Persian Gulf”.
And Iran’s parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, who has emerged as an influential figure, said control of Hormuz would allow Tehran to “provide itself and its neighbours with the precious blessing of a future free from American presence and interference”.
‘Choking’
Trump is expected to receive a briefing on Thursday on new plans for potential military action in Iran from Admiral Brad Cooper, the head of US Central Command, two sources with knowledge of US planning told news site Axios.
This week Trump has reportedly told oil executives and national security officials to prepare for a long US blockade designed to force Tehran to surrender its nuclear programme.
US Central Command said on Wednesday in a social media post that it had reached a “significant milestone after successfully redirecting the 42nd commercial vessel attempting to violate the blockade”.
It said there are “41 tankers with 69 million barrels of oil that the Iranian regime can’t sell”, estimating the value at more than $6 billion.
Oil prices struck a four-year high on Thursday. International benchmark Brent crude soared more than 7% to $126 a barrel, but then eased in midday trading in London.
UN chief Antonio Guterres said the closure of Hormuz was “strangling the global economy” and International Energy Agency chief Fatih Birol told a meeting at his Paris headquarters: “The world is facing the biggest energy crisis in history.”
The European Central Bank also warned that the longer the war and high energy prices continue, “the stronger is the likely impact on broader inflation and the economy.”
Trump faces domestic political pressure to end the war, which is unpopular even with much of his base, has increased costs for American consumers and has unnerved US allies.
Iran’s economy is also suffering and the rial has fallen to historic lows against the dollar.
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