The school was called Shajareh Tayyebeh. In Farsi, it means “The Good Tree.”
It opened in 2015 on a quiet street in Minab, a port city in southern Iran near the mouth of the Strait of Hormuz. The former military compound it was built on had been closed for more than a decade. What remained was a school, a clinic, a supermarket, a cultural hall, and a car wash. Girls between the ages of 7 and 12 went there to learn.
On the morning of February 28, 2026 — the first day of Operation Epic Fury — they were in class when the missiles came.
What Happened
At 10:23 a.m. local time, satellite imagery shows the Shajareh Tayyebeh school still standing. Classes were in session. Parents later told NBC News that life in Minab that morning was “near-normal.” Traffic moved on the streets surrounding the school.
By 10:45 a.m., the building was gone.
According to three witnesses interviewed by NBC News — the school’s former principal, a first responder, and the mother of a seven-year-old who was killed — the school was struck not once but three times. The first missile hit the main building. The principal moved surviving students into a prayer room and called parents, telling them to come pick up their children. Before most of them could arrive, the prayer room was struck by a second missile. A father told NBC News he received the call, got in his car, and drove as fast as he could. His daughter was dead when he arrived.
A third strike followed.
Iranian state media reported a final death toll of between 165 and 180 people — the majority of them girls between the ages of 7 and 12, along with their teachers and the school’s headteacher. At least 95 others were wounded. Rows of small coffins, draped in Iranian flags and bearing photographs of children, were carried through the streets of Minab at a mass funeral on March 3. Excavators dug more than 100 graves at a mass burial site outside the city.
It is the deadliest single strike of Operation Epic Fury. It may be the deadliest known strike on a school by the U.S. military in decades.
What the Investigation Found
Seven days after the strike, U.S. investigators have preliminarily concluded that it is likely an American munition was responsible.
Two U.S. officials told Reuters on March 5 that military investigators believe American forces carried out the strike, though they cautioned that a final conclusion has not been reached and that new evidence could still emerge. NBC News independently confirmed the same preliminary findings from a separate source familiar with the investigation. CNN, the New York Times, and CBC each published their own analyses reaching the same conclusion through independent means: satellite imagery, geolocated video, geographic strike patterns, and statements from U.S. officials.
The evidence, taken together, is substantial.
Geography: The United States and Israel divided Iran geographically at the outset of Operation Epic Fury. Israel operated primarily in northern Iran. The U.S. took the south — including Hormozgan province, where Minab is located, roughly 80 kilometers east of the Bandar Abbas Naval Base that U.S. forces also struck that day. At a Pentagon briefing on March 4, Gen. Dan Caine, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, presented a map showing U.S. strike operations in southern Iran — with the area around Minab within the American zone. He separately confirmed that Israeli forces had “mainly been operating further north.”
Satellite analysis: Independent analysis of Planet Labs satellite imagery published by CBS News and the New York Times shows at least seven buildings in the Sayyid al-Shuhada military complex adjacent to the school were struck on February 28. The strikes showed a signature consistent with air-delivered precision-guided munitions, not missile defense systems or drone fragmentation. N.R. Jenzen-Jones, director of Armament Research Services — a munitions research consultancy — reviewed the imagery for Reuters and concluded the strikes were “most likely air-delivered types.”
The clinic that wasn’t hit: Al Jazeera’s Digital Investigations Unit identified what may be the most troubling detail of all. In the attack on the Minab complex, missiles struck the military base and the school — but did not strike the specialized IRGC Navy medical clinic located between the two. The clinic was spared. Al Jazeera concluded this “cannot be explained as a coincidence,” and that it “strongly indicates that the executing party was operating with coordinates and maps that distinguished between the complex’s different facilities.” In other words: whoever struck the school had specific targeting coordinates. The clinic was on a different set.
Targeting expert assessment: Wes J. Bryant, a former U.S. Air Force targeting expert, reviewed the satellite imagery for the New York Times and called the strikes “picture-perfect” precision munitions — meaning the weapons hit exactly where they were aimed. His conclusion: the most likely explanation is “target misidentification” — that U.S. forces struck the school without knowing it was occupied by children, because their intelligence showed it as part of an IRGC base.
The problem with that explanation is that the school had been there since 2015. In satellite imagery from September 2016, the building is visibly separated from the military compound. It had been a functioning elementary school for more than ten years before the first missile hit it.