Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Esmaeil Baghaei stated that an elementary school in Tehran's Niloufar Square has been struck in attacks allegedly carried out by the United States and Israel. Baghaei on Friday shared a video on X, purportedly showing Shahid Hamedani School with students before and after the attack, without elaborating on the circumstances or the number of casualties.
If confirmed, this would mark the fourth school hit in Iran since the conflict erupted. The first school, Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ school in the southern city of Minab, was struck on Saturday, the initial day of US and Israeli attacks against the country, killing 160 children and five staff according to UN experts. Some websites and social media accounts linked to Israel claimed the site was “part of an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps base”.
An analysis by Al Jazeera’s digital investigations unit, based on satellite imagery compiled over more than a decade, recent video clips, published news reports, and statements from official Iranian sources, revealed that the school had been clearly separate from an adjacent military site for at least 10 years. The investigation also indicated that the strike pattern raises fundamental questions about the accuracy of intelligence information on which the bombing was supposedly based, potentially even questioning whether the strike was a deliberate targeting of the school.
Amid scrutiny over the incident, the US regime acknowledged its military was investigating it. Reuters reported, quoting two US officials, that US military investigators believed it was likely that US forces were responsible for the apparent strike, but had not yet reached a final conclusion. UN rights chief Volker Turk on Friday urged Washington to move “very quickly” with its probe, saying his body had asked the US for “prompt, transparent and impartial investigations”.
On Thursday, missiles fired by the US and Israel reportedly hit two other schools in the town of Parand, southwest of Tehran, according to state media. The Fars news agency shared photos of damage and debris in what appeared to be a classroom and said several nearby residential units also sustained damage in the attack on Thursday. On Friday, UNICEF stated that of the more than 1,300 people killed in the strikes on Iran so far, at least 181 were children.
Deliberately attacking a school would constitute a war crime, and if a US role were to be confirmed, the strike would rank among the worst cases of civilian casualties in decades of US wars in the Middle East, highlighting the severe humanitarian costs of the ongoing conflict.
Source: www.aljazeera.com