The children were seven to twelve years old. They were at school on a Saturday morning. Then the missiles came.
The name of the school was Shajareh Tayyebeh. It sits in Minab, a city in Hormozgan province - southern Iran, near the Strait of Hormuz. On the morning of February 28, 2026, it was full of girls aged seven to twelve attending their Saturday classes.
By the time the dust settled, 85 of them were dead. Another 63 were wounded. Some were still trapped under rubble for hours. Rescue workers dug through broken concrete with their hands. Parents arrived and were met with a scene that defied language.
A staff member who witnessed the aftermath told Middle East Eye: "I felt like I had gone mute. I couldn't speak. You could hear the sound of children crying and screaming."
This is what Operation Epic Fury - the joint US-Israeli strike campaign that killed Supreme Leader Khamenei and decapitated Iran's military command - also produced on its first day. A primary school. 85 dead children. Images broadcast across the world.
The military objectives of the operation may have been achieved. But Minab is doing something different. It is rewriting the global narrative about who the victims of this conflict actually are.
Minab is not a strategic military target. It is a mid-sized city of roughly 90,000 people, known for its colorful bazaar and for the women who wear traditional needle-embroidered masks. It sits on the Hormozgan coastline, adjacent to the Strait of Hormuz - the chokepoint that carries 20% of global oil shipments. That proximity to strategic geography may have drawn targeting attention to the region. The school was not a weapons depot.
The strike hit while school was in full session. There were 170 female students present. Iran's semiofficial Tasnim News Agency cited the Judiciary of Minab confirming the toll at 85 dead. Iran's state-run IRNA reported 63 injured.
Footage circulated by pro-IRGC Telegram accounts - not exactly known for broadcasting unfavorable content - showed people digging through rubble, smoke rising from surrounding structures, and a wrecked car in the street. The images were visceral enough that even sources aligned with the Iranian government shared them as evidence of the attack's scale.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi posted a photo of the destroyed school on X. He wrote: "The destroyed building is a primary school for girls in the south of Iran. It was bombed in broad daylight, when packed with young pupils. Dozens of innocent children have been murdered at this site alone. These crimes against the Iranian People will not go unanswered."
Iran's Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei called it a "blatant crime" and urged the United Nations Security Council to act. That call will go nowhere - the US holds veto power. But it landed exactly as intended: a propaganda lever the images fully support.
Before Minab, the global conversation about Operation Epic Fury centered on legitimacy - whether decapitating Iran's nuclear program and killing Khamenei constituted justified force against a state sponsor of terror. That argument has a coherent case. Iran funds Hezbollah. Iran arms the Houthis. Iran has proxies in seven countries. Iran was months from a nuclear weapon by multiple intelligence estimates.
Minab does not erase those facts. But it complicates them considerably.
Within hours of the images spreading, the global response fractured along lines that were already visible - but became sharper after photographs of a destroyed primary school reached every newsroom on earth.
Newsweek noted there was "little in the barrage of foreign ministry statements to give much comfort to Iran." Even European powers who refused to endorse the strikes spent their statements condemning Iranian behavior rather than US-Israeli military action.
But that calculus was produced before Minab images went global. The school strike is now doing what decades of Iranian state propaganda alone could never achieve - generating genuine emotional solidarity with Iranian civilians from populations that have spent years viewing Iran as a threat.
Iranian state media has spent decades manufacturing victimhood. The regime understands image warfare. But Minab is different from fabricated propaganda for one central reason: it is real, independently documented, and it involves children between seven and twelve years old.
The images from Shajareh Tayyebeh school are not staged. The testimony of the staff member who could not speak, who ran back to find children's bodies on classroom benches and in corridor corners, is not a state script. Al Jazeera's correspondent in Tehran noted directly on air that the attacks "call into question US and Israeli claims that they are targeting only military targets."
That is the central challenge now facing Washington and Tel Aviv. They eliminated Khamenei. They may have set back Iran's nuclear program by years. But 85 dead schoolgirls in Minab hand the Iranian government exactly the kind of moral leverage they have never legitimately held - because their own regime has killed thousands of Iranian civilians over decades of misrule. The IRGC circulating school rubble footage is the same organization that shot protesters dead in the streets in 2019, killing an estimated 1,500 people in two weeks. The regime that is weeping for these children on state television is the regime that spent 36 years killing Iranian adults who asked for freedom.
The regime didn't earn this sympathy. The strike gave it to them.
The global audience watching this conflict is now holding two simultaneous truths - both factually accurate, both politically inconvenient.
Truth One: The Iranian regime funded proxy wars that killed hundreds of thousands, crushed domestic protesters who wanted freedom, diverted oil wealth into weapons programs while its people lived under 43% inflation, and was months from building a nuclear weapon. The regime was a genuine threat to regional stability and to its own population. Iranians themselves danced in the streets of Tehran when Khamenei died.
Truth Two: Eighty-five girls aged seven to twelve were sitting in their school in Minab when missiles hit the building. They had nothing to do with Khamenei's nuclear program. They had nothing to do with Hezbollah funding or Houthi drone strikes on Red Sea shipping. They were at school on a Saturday morning.
Neither truth cancels the other. But images from Minab are far more emotionally accessible than arguments about uranium enrichment percentages. That is simply the nature of visual communication in wartime. Numbers like "60% enrichment" require explanation. A destroyed school requires none.
Khamenei is dead. The command structure that controlled Iran for 36 years has been decapitated in a single day. Iran's retaliatory strikes hit US military bases in Qatar, Kuwait, the UAE, and Bahrain. One of those strikes, in Minab, hit a school. Iran's Foreign Minister called these children "martyrs." The IRGC framed their deaths as proof of Western brutality.
This is now Iran's primary diplomatic asset in the aftermath of Operation Epic Fury: not its remaining missiles, not its proxy networks, but 85 dead schoolgirls and the footage to prove it.
For whoever emerges from the vacuum of post-Khamenei Iran, Minab represents an unexpected reset. A state that was globally isolated over its nuclear program, proxy funding, and repression of women - the "Woman, Life, Freedom" uprising of 2022 that killed 500+ protesters including dozens of children - now holds a legitimate civilian grievance. Not manufactured. Real, with names and ages attached.
How Iran's next leadership deploys that grievance will define the country's diplomatic trajectory. If a reformist faction uses it to push for ceasefire and negotiated settlement, Minab could paradoxically become the moment that begins Iran's reintegration into the international community. If the IRGC hardliners use it to justify further escalation, the dead children become fuel for wider war.
There is a question that Western governments and media are carefully sidestepping: how was a girls' primary school hit in a strike operation that both the US and Israel described as targeting Iran's military and nuclear infrastructure?
Reuters noted it "could not independently confirm" the reports from Minab - standard war-zone caveat when access is impossible. But the images, IRGC footage, witness testimony, and Iranian judiciary statement converge on a consistent account. A school was hit. Children died. The only disputed element is which specific platform fired the missile.
Israel has not commented on Minab specifically. The US has not issued a statement explaining how a primary school appeared in the target set, or whether it was collateral damage from a nearby military objective, or an intelligence failure, or something else entirely. That silence is itself a communication - and the global audience is reading it.
Al Jazeera's correspondent put the question on air: if this operation is about punishing the regime rather than the people, what explains Minab?
There is no clean answer. In wars fought from the air against embedded adversaries, targeting algorithms, intelligence failures, and collateral damage calculations are real. They are also, in the court of global opinion, largely irrelevant. The result is the same whether the school was deliberately targeted or struck in error. Eighty-five dead girls.
Operation Epic Fury may succeed on its stated military objectives. Khamenei is dead. Iran's nuclear facilities have been struck. The regime's command structure is shattered. Whether Iran becomes a more stable, less threatening country as a result depends entirely on what fills the power vacuum - and the world has limited history of air campaigns producing functional democracies.
What is already clear is that Minab has done lasting damage to the moral clarity that the US and Israel claimed entering this conflict. The narrative of liberating the Iranian people from a tyrannical regime - a narrative that had real substance, given that Iranians themselves celebrated in the streets of Tehran when Khamenei died - is now running in direct competition with footage of rescue workers pulling children from rubble.
Forty years from now, Minab will be the date that children in the Middle East learn about this war. Not Operation Epic Fury. Not the death of Khamenei. Minab.
The Iranian regime spent 36 years killing its own people and calling them martyrs. Now there are 85 actual martyrs in a destroyed school in Hormozgan province, and the regime didn't have to manufacture a single frame of it.
That is the thing about wars. The side that gets to define the dead usually wins the long argument - even when they lose the immediate battle.
Iran lost its Supreme Leader today. It may have gained something more durable: a generation's worth of global sympathy, paid for with the blood of its youngest citizens.
And the irony - brutal and complete - is that the regime which ran that nuclear program, which armed the Houthis, which sent those girls to school in a warzone it helped create, is the same regime now weeping for them on state television.
Toll figures as reported by Iran's Tasnim News Agency citing the Judiciary of Minab, Reuters, Al Jazeera, and Middle East Eye, February 28, 2026. Article updated as the situation develops.