Massacre at Minab: The School That Became a Grave

Illustration: Images drawn by Fatemeh Zahra Bahrami, a child who survived the school bombing at Minab, provided to Drop Site. In the background, the cemetery where the victims are buried.On the morning of Saturday, February 28, people across Iran began their day like any other. It was one week into the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, and people were preparing for their work and school week. Parents hustled their children out the door for school as the notorious morning traffic jams filled the streets of Tehran and other cities.In the southern Iranian city of Minab, preschool teacher Hossniyeh Salem was getting ready to leave the house. “Like any other day, I got my child ready at 7 o’clock—because my son is in fifth grade and attended the same school,” she recalled. “I got Yassin ready and headed to school. Yassin went to the boys’ school and I stayed at preschool, in my own class.”It was Salem’s seventh year as a teacher at Shajareh Tayyebeh, a well-respected, private school. “The upper floor was for girls and the downstairs was for boys. One section was for preschool. You can say there were three schools there. The preschool was in the same building,” she said. “There were students there from all walks of life—children from working class families, educators. We had all kinds of students there.”Among the students at the school was 6-year-old Fatemeh Yazdanpanah from the fishing village of Gurzang, about eight miles from Minab. The village is well known for its daily fish market—a bustling, strategic hub where fishermen trade their catches from both the Minab River and the Persian Gulf. There is a girls’ school in Gurzang, but Fatemeh’s father, Yaghoub Yazdanpanah, saw gifts for poetry in his daughter and he wanted to secure for her the best education he could find.Left: Fatemeh Yazdanpanah, a 6 year old student at the Shajareh Tayyebeh school in Minab. Right: Fatemeh with her father, Yaghoub. Photos courtesy of the Yazdanpanah family. “Fatemeh’s mother and I had noticed Fatemeh’s overflowing intelligence. I am a poet myself. When I would write poetry, edit poetry, I would repeat the poem. After hearing the poem once or twice, Fatemeh would immediately memorize it. When we would tell her a story, she would never forget the story and she would recite the story moment by moment, word for word,” recalled Yaghoub, who teaches Persian literature. “I wanted to find a school that would address Fatemeh’s needs and her active mind. I visited several schools myself. Certainly, you would do the same thing. Any parent would take their child to a good school for a brighter future,” he said. “Thank God,” he recalled thinking, “I found Shajareh Tayyebeh School.”That morning, Yaghoub kissed Fatemeh goodbye before walking to the local school in Gurzang where he taught.Iranians had gone to bed the night before with the news that negotiations between government officials and the Trump administration aimed at averting war were proceeding smoothly and a new round of technical talks would soon be held in Vienna. The foreign minister of Oman—the longtime mediator in the U.S.-Iran nuclear negotiations—was in Washington, where, after meeting with Vice President JD Vance, he announced that recent negotiations between the two sides had “yielded substantial, momentous, and unparalleled progress” that could pave the way for “an honorable agreement” to halt the U.S. drive to war.“We were very optimistic about the negotiations that were taking place,” said Pouria Askari, a prominent Iranian international law expert, who recalled being stuck in his car that morning on his commute to the university where he lectures. “We were not expecting the beginning of the war.”At Shajareh Tayyebeh in Minab, the little girls gathered that morning in the prayer hall in observance of the day when Shia Muslims across the world commemorate the passing of Umm al-Banin, the wife of Imam Ali and the mother of four martyrs who died at the battle of Karbala in the year 680.After the prayers, Salem laid out for her students a breakfast sofreh, a traditional Iranian fabric placed on the floor to serve meals. The small girls of the preschool had not yet reached the age of fasting during Ramadan. They did some lessons and then went out to the playground for recess. It was around 9:30 a.m. when Salem received word that the U.S. and Israel had begun attacking Iran.Hossniyeh Salem, right, a teacher at Minab’s Shajareh Tayyebeh Girls School, with her niece. Image courtesy of Helyeh Doutaghi / Khana House/ Still, Minab.Local authorities issued a directive instructing schools to send students home. Salem and other teachers immediately messaged parents to come and get their children. Iranians had experienced a similar situation the previous June, when the U.S. and Israel carried out what became known as the 12-Day War. Salem said there was no strong sense of panic. “They said these are war conditions and it’s better if the children go home early. We didn’t have a single thought or didn’t imagine that they might want to hit our school,” Salem said. “In complete calm and relaxation, we were calling families and telling them to come and take their children.”When Salem and other teachers stood in the school yard handing off students to their parents, a massive explosion struck not far from the school campus. “As they were coming to get the kids—a number of the children had left and some were still at the school—I first heard the sound of an explosion,” she recalled. Salem and her son Yassin raced back into the school where some of the preschool kids were still waiting for their parents to arrive. The blast had shattered the windows and shards of glass sprinkled the carpeted floor.“The children were five years old and all they did was yell, ‘Miss! Miss!’ and were crying. I ran to the children. I just said, ‘Get under the table!,’” Salem remembered. “I didn’t think they were going to strike the school. I just thought that some place had been hit. I said, ‘Don’t be afraid, sit down.’”Other teachers began grabbing students and hurrying them back toward the building and into a prayer room for cover.As Salem and her students huddled together under desks, she heard the sound of missiles hitting the building. “Two simultaneous sounds. They’re still in my ear. My son even describes them—‘Wooosh, boom! Woosh, boom!’—and then the explosion very close by,” Salem said. “Plaster was falling, the ground was shaking, and at that moment I just looked at my preschool girls and my son, and I said to myself, ‘It’s over. Now is the time when we go under the rubble, it’s going to fall now,’” she continued. “Then there were no more sounds. The class was full of smoke and dust. I told my son, ‘Yassin, run and open the door. Let’s get out!’ My preschool kids didn’t have shoes on since our classroom was carpeted. I took the children in my arms, one by one, and brought them outside.”Chaos had broken out throughout the campus. Frantic teachers and parents. Children screaming. The building was engulfed in smoke and dust, concrete was collapsing, windows were breaking. Salem couldn’t pause to take stock of any of the details. It was just apocalyptic. “We exited from the preschool yard gate until we reached the first street. I looked behind me and I saw smoke and fire coming from the school office. All I said to the preschool children was, ‘Kids, just look in front of you. Don’t look back,’” Salem said.As rescue workers began to arrive, some encountered Salem with her students outside the gates. “Run to the school—they hit the school!” she yelled. “The children are under the ruins. Go save them!”Word that the war had begun spread quickly through Iran. The residence of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei had been bombed, and military sites across the country were being struck by U.S. and Israeli missiles.In Gurzang, Yaghoub was teaching his class when a colleague told him of the developments. As he gathered his things to leave, a friend from the fish market called and told him that there were reports a school had been struck in Minab in the Mahdi neighborhood. “My heart told me the school they were talking about was Shajareh Tayyebeh. I lost it,” he said, thinking of his daughter Fatemeh. “I left my classroom, ran home, took my car, and sped to Minab. When I arrived, I said, ‘Oh no!’ The unimaginable had happened.”“There was no school left. Two-thirds of the school, maybe more, had been destroyed. Smoke was rising from all over the school. It had turned into rubble. For a moment, I thought I was asleep and having a nightmare,” Yaghoub said.The building of the destroyed Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school is pictured surrounded by rubble in Minab in Iran's Hormozgan province on August 10, 2026. Photo by Atta Kenare / AFP via Getty Images.What happened that day will go down in history as one of the single worst massacres committed by the U.S. government since the Vietnam War. Multiple direct air strikes, including with Tomahawk cruise missiles, hit a school packed with children and teachers. The attacks killed at least 156 people; 120 of the victims were children and 26 were teachers—all women, including one who was pregnant. Among the dead were also parents who had come to pick up their children. “The killing of pupils in a place dedicated to learning constitutes a grave violation of the protection afforded to schools under international humanitarian law,” the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization said in a statement a day after the bombing.“I was absolutely horrified,” recalled Hala Rharrit, a career U.S. Foreign Service officer who spent 17 years at the State Department, primarily focused on the Middle East, before she resigned in 2024. “Knowing the capabilities of our military, knowing how careful the review is for targets, I was horrified. How, how could this have happened? How could this have happened on Day One of the war?”According to the Iranian government, from 10:45 a.m. to 11:30