Jeremy Scahill, the international investigative reporter for Drop Site News, has published an article revisiting the US bombing of a school in Iran on the first day of the war of aggression by Israel and the United States, beginning on 28 February 2026.
Date: 28 February 2026.
It was a shocking massacre. The school building had, more than ten years previously, been part of an Iranian military base. In the intervening decade, however, there had been multiple photographs and articles documenting the building’s use as a school.
Jeremy Scahill gives a very moving account of his interviews with the schoolteachers, firefighters, relatives of those killed and members of the local community about what happened.
What emerges from Scahill’s investigation is a particularly disturbing sequence of strikes. First, a US Tomahawk made by Raytheon missile struck the school. A second Tomahawk then struck the school building. Later, there was a further US attack on buildings elsewhere in Minab.
So when I refer to a three-strike sequence, I do not mean that three missiles struck the school itself. The school was struck twice. The third part of the sequence was a subsequent attack on other buildings in the town. It is slightly that the warship that launched the Tomahawk missiles was operating near the Straits of Hormuz. The Iranian military has managed to push warships (like USS Frank E. Petersen Jr. , USS Spruance, USS Michael Murphy further away to defend its people from similar war crimes.
This sequence of attacks is important because it raises questions about what information the US military was acting upon and why these civilian locations were being targeted. Scahill asks the question: how could the attack on the school simply have been a mistake? Was it a planned attack intended to kill as many civilians as possible, or was it a catastrophic targeting error?
What followed was the familiar process of denial and obfuscation. Trump claimed that the Iranians had cruise missiles and suggested that an Iranian missile could have been responsible. Then came the usual conflicting explanations and attempts by the US and Israeli administrations to avoid responsibility for what had happened.
Scahill describes the Minab school massacre as the worst incident of a US war crime that he knows of since the American war in Vietnam. He could think of only one comparable incident: during the 1991 Iraq War under President George H. W. Bush.
In that case, the US military bombed the Amiriyah shelter in Baghdad. The first bomb penetrated the reinforced shelter and another followed, killing more than 400 Iraqi civilians.
But I cannot help thinking that the greatest war crime involving the United States in our time is the genocide in Gaza.
The United States has supplied the overwhelming proportion of the weapons and military support used by Israel. It has also established a so-called Board of Peace whose task is supposedly the reconstruction of Gaza, but which, in practice, does nothing to prevent the continuing destruction and displacement of the Palestinian population.
Consider Gaza’s schools
Some 97 or 98 per cent of Gaza’s schools have been destroyed or damaged by bombing. As far as I can determine, the Holy Family School, the Catholic school in Gaza, is now the only functioning school remaining with a roof. The Pope has appealed to Netanyahu not to bomb it again.
For the other children of Gaza, what education remains is taking place largely in tents and temporary learning spaces.
That image says much about what has happened to Gaza: an entire generation of children attempting to continue their education under canvas because their schools have been destroyed or rendered unusable.
In bombing Gaza’s schools, thousands upon thousands of Palestinian children have been killed. This has taken place with the active military and political support of successive United States administrations. Both the Biden and Trump administrations have been deeply involved in supporting Israel throughout the destruction and ethnic cleansing of Gaza.
As Norman Finkelstein has argued, this should not be understood simply as a war. It is a genocide which continuestothisday..
In a war, the primary military objective is supposedly to defeat the opposing armed forces. Finkelstein argues, on the basis of the evidence from Gaza, that Israel’s campaign cannot adequately be explained as an attempt simply to destroy the Palestinian armed resistance. The overwhelming destruction of civilian life, homes, hospitals, schools and the basic infrastructure necessary for human survival points to something much broader: the destruction and removal of the Palestinian population of Gaza.
That is why the Minab school massacre should not be considered in isolation.
It raises the same fundamental question that must be asked about Gaza: when civilian places are repeatedly bombed, when children are killed in enormous numbers, and when the destruction continues despite overwhelming evidence of its consequences, at what point does the explanation of “mistake” cease to be credible?
Ian Curr, 3 October 2026