This article draws on on-the-ground reporting by Wyatt Reed for The Grayzone, whose video dispatch from the wreckage of the Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School can be watched here. Full credit for the field reporting belongs to Reed and the Grayzone team. Watch their work, support it: thegrayzone.com.
There is a particular kind of silence that hangs over a place where a building used to be. In the southern Iranian city of Minab, in Hormozgan province, that silence now belongs to the Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School — or rather, to the patch of ground where the school used to stand before a US Tomahawk missile cut it in half on the morning of 28 February 2026, and a second one returned to finish what the first had started.
By the time the dust settled, 155 people were dead. 120 of them were children.
The Trump administration has yet to acknowledge that it was American hands on the trigger. The Grayzone’s Wyatt Reed travelled to Minab anyway, walked the rubble, spoke to survivors, and filed the dispatch this article is built on. His video stands as one of the few pieces of Western journalism to actually go and look.
What happened that morning
The school sat in the Shahrak-e Al-Mahdi neighbourhood, on the edge of what had once been a base used by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy. The key word is had been. According to satellite imagery reviewed by Human Rights Watch, the building housing the school had been walled off from the rest of the compound by 2016 at the latest. It had its own street entrances. It had no military checkpoint. The base’s military security posts had been dismantled. By the mayor’s account, the compound had been shut for roughly fifteen years and the school was the only thing still operating on the site. It had a website. It had a children’s playground. It had children in it.
Saturday is a working day in Iran, and 28 February was a school day. At around 9.45am local time, the joint US–Israeli assault on Iran began. At roughly 10.45am — peak classroom hours — a missile struck the two-storey school building. The roof pancaked downward onto the children below, a destruction pattern that Amnesty International later identified as the unmistakable signature of a top-down precision strike rather than a stray weapon.
The school principal, according to testimony given to Middle East Eye by Red Crescent medics and a victim’s father, gathered the survivors of the first blast into a prayer room and began phoning parents to come and collect their children. Before most of the parents could arrive, a second missile arrived first. It hit the prayer room. According to Minab’s mayor and the Iranian Ministry of Education, the school was actually struck a third time. BBC Verify’s satellite analysis found multiple impacts on the site.
The military term for this is a “double tap.” The first strike kills the primary target. The second kills the rescuers, the medics, the parents — anyone who runs toward the screaming. It is one of the oldest signatures of deliberate cruelty in modern aerial warfare.
“We never target civilians”
The Pentagon’s response has followed the script that Western militaries have been reading from for the better part of a century. On 4 March, US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told reporters the Department of Defense was “investigating,” while insisting that American forces never target civilians. Donald Trump, asked about mounting visual evidence that a US Tomahawk had struck the school, suggested that another country might have fired the missile and at one point publicly accused Iran itself of bombing the school.
The evidence does not cooperate with this story.
Tomahawk missiles are used exclusively by US forces in the current conflict. Photographs of weapon fragments recovered from the rubble were analysed by the New York Times and CNN and judged consistent with Tomahawk components. The Pentagon itself published video of US warships firing Tomahawks at Iran on the same day. By 11 March, the New York Times was reporting that an internal US military investigation had preliminarily determined that the United States was responsible — and that the strike had been carried out using outdated targeting data which still listed the long-civilianised school as part of an active military base.
Amnesty International was unequivocal: the strike was unlawful, those responsible must be held accountable, and the reliance on out-of-date intelligence to obliterate a building any open-source researcher could have identified as a school in five minutes constitutes a serious breach of the principle of precaution under international humanitarian law.
Human Rights Watch has called for the attack to be investigated as a potential war crime.
The My Lai comparison
The framing of the Grayzone video — that this is the worst US military massacre of civilians since My Lai — is not rhetorical excess. It is a measured comparison.
In March 1968, US soldiers murdered between 347 and 504 unarmed Vietnamese villagers in the hamlet of My Lai. The Army covered it up. Only the dogged work of Ronald Ridenhour and Seymour Hersh forced it into public view. Twenty-six soldiers were charged. Exactly one was convicted. Lieutenant William Calley Jr was given a life sentence which was almost immediately commuted; he served three and a half years of house arrest and died a free man.
Minab is the largest single mass killing of civilians by US forces in the decades since. And so far, the institutional response — denial, deflection, blaming the victim — is following the same arc.
What Minab has that My Lai did not is satellite imagery, missile fragments analysed by major newspapers, satellite-tracked impact patterns from BBC Verify, and an entire chorus of international human rights organisations naming the perpetrator within weeks rather than years. Six senior Democratic senators — Schatz, Shaheen, Reed, Warren and others — wrote to Hegseth demanding answers. 120 House Democrats followed. The Iranian foreign ministry called it a blatant war crime. UNESCO condemned it.
And yet the White House continues, as of this writing, to insist either that it didn’t happen or that someone else did it.
What Wyatt Reed found
What Reed’s reporting from Minab brings is the texture that satellite imagery cannot. The neighbourhood. The shape of the destruction at street level. The accounts of people who ran toward the school after the first explosion and were still running when the second missile arrived. The small painted flowers on the fragments of wall still standing — the school had been decorated, on the outside, with pink flowers and green leaves.
The Grayzone has done what most legacy outlets have not: gone to the place, walked it, and pressed record. In an information environment where the Pentagon’s denial is treated by much of the Western press as one valid “side” of a debate, that act of basic journalism — go and look — has become rare enough to be radical.
The accountability that probably won’t come
The honest assessment from analysts quoted across the coverage is bleak. Even if the Pentagon’s internal investigation eventually concludes what every external investigation has already concluded — that this was a US strike on a civilian school — the most likely outcome is administrative. Perhaps a single officer disciplined. Perhaps a quietly revised targeting protocol. No prosecutions. No reparations. No reckoning.
That is the pattern. My Lai produced one Calley. The drone wars produced almost no one. The pattern continues because it is allowed to continue.
What can be done — what the families of 120 dead children in Minab are owed at the absolute minimum — is that their names are not allowed to disappear. That the school is not allowed to be erased a second time, this time from memory. That when the official record is written, it includes the words the United States did this, and not the laundered passive voice of “a tragic incident occurred.”
The Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School existed. It was a school. The Pentagon hit it twice. 120 children are dead. Say it plainly, and keep saying it.
