What seems to have really happened at the girl's school in MInab ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Thursday, March 05, 2026

What seems to have really happened at the girl's school in MInab

Top Trump administration officials said on Wednesday that they were still investigating whether it was a U.S. airstrike that hit a girls elementary school in Iran on the opening day of the war.

The strike was one of the deadliest attacks of the American-Israeli campaign against Iran so far, killing at least 175 people, most of whom were likely children, according to state media and health officials.

It is not clear why the school was hit, or which country’s forces fired at it.

This is an astounding story because it doesn't mention the proximity of the school to a major IRGC naval compound, which was also hit, multiple times, in the same raid.

The girls' school was originally within the IRGC compound; it was separated around 2016. Even today you can see the wall around the entire complex. The school is in the upper left of this image (my Google Earth screenshot.).

NPR and Planet Labs catalogued all the airstrikes - seven, by their count - based on satellite image analysis:

Seven identified strikes. One hit the school.

From everything we can tell, this was a mistake based on outdated intelligence thinking the school building was still part of the complex. In fact, the school was primarily built to provide education to children of IRGC members who work in the complex, according to Al Jazeera.

But Al Jazeera is not willing to give the Americans a pass. They say:

What had been a single unified military complex became three independent sectors, clearly distinguishable in satellite imagery: The Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ school, separated since 2016 with its own walls and gates; the Martyr Absalan Specialised Clinic, separated since early 2025 with an independent civilian entrance; and the Sayyid al-Shuhada military complex, which remained a closed and active site.

When the US-Israeli attack began on the morning of February 28, 2026, analysis of the strike locations revealed an odd pattern: Missiles hit the military base and the school, but bypassed the specialised clinic complex located between the two without touching it.

This exclusion cannot be explained as a coincidence; it strongly indicates that the executing party was operating with coordinates and maps that distinguished between the complex’s different facilities.

Here lies the fundamental contradiction exposed by this investigation: If the intelligence was up to date enough to spare a clinic that had been open for only one year, how did it fail to identify an elementary school that had been separated from the military complex and had become a clearly defined civilian institution for more than 10 years?

There is only one problem with this analysis: the Planet Labs image clearly shows that the clinic suffered a direct hit as well (the lower yellow L-shaped polygon.) You can see the black hole in the Planet Labs image that was clearly not there in the Google Earth image above it.

And this Planet Labs high resolution image makes it even clearer that the clinic suffered a direct hit.

If both the clinic and the school were hit, then that indicates that the attackers were tragically working with outdated intelligence. (My guess is that this was the US, since Israel's main focus on the first day was Iranian leaders, anti-aircraft defenses and ballistic missile launchers.)

But publicizing the clinic would be problematic for Iran; photos would have almost certainly shown the damage to the other IRGC buildings surrounding it which would weaken the claim of an intentional attack on schoolchildren.

This could be why Iran didn't trumpet a US hit on a medical clinic. In this case, it would hurt the propaganda effort, not help it.

This could also account for the high death toll that Iran attributes to the airstrike at the school. Chances seem high to me that Iran counted all the casualties - from the clinic, school and the military complex - and said they were all at the school. This way the hospitals and morgues really were filled up, but not with students, but with a mix of victims of seven airstrikes. A death toll of 175 people from a single airstrike is plausible but would be quite high (although satellite images show that more than half the school is rubble.)

Iran was careful to show photos of the school and pretend that this was the only target, and the media filled in the rest with the presumption that all the deaths Iran blamed on the school strike really were from there.

From all evidence, this was not a false flag Iranian operation. It was not a misfired Iranian rocket, as some claimed. And neither the school nor the clinic were hit by collateral damage from the IRGC building strikes.

The entire compound remains primarily IRGC. The school and clinic, even though later separated, were built for IRGC personnel and their families. This does not make them legitimate targets, but when you look at the entire picture, it seems clear that this was an intelligence failure based on outdated information.

Because 100% of the buildings hit were IRGC buildings in the not-too-distant past.