At Least 121 Children Died at Shajareh Tayyebeh School. The Evidence Now Points to a U.S. Tomahawk.

On the opening morning of the U.S.–Israeli air campaign against Iran, a missile sheared through a girls' primary school in the port city of Minab and killed at least 121 children along with 26 of their teachers. Four months on, a stack of independent investigations — from BBC Verify, CNN, The Associated Press, NBC News, The Guardian and, most recently, Forensic Architecture working with Sky News — has converged on the same conclusion: the weapon that hit the school compound was almost certainly a U.S. Tomahawk cruise missile, fired at a military target next door.

The strike landed on February 28, 2026, the first day of what the Pentagon has named Operation Epic Fury, in a working-class neighbourhood of Minab on Iran's southern coast, close to the Strait of Hormuz ⁶¹⁰. The death toll itself has moved with the reporting. Iranian authorities initially said 168 people died, including roughly 110 children ²; a BBC visit to the site put the figure at 120 children killed ⁸; Democracy Now! and Truthout, citing the Forensic Architecture study, reported at least 121 schoolchildren and 26 teachers, with an overall count above 140 ⁶¹⁰. The school was Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school.

The earliest independent corroboration came from video, not from any government. BBC Verify authenticated footage published by Iran's Mehr news agency and concluded that a U.S. Tomahawk had struck the military base adjacent to the school ². CNN's analysis of new footage, published on March 9, "appears to confirm" the same thing — an American cruise missile hitting the Iranian base next door ⁵.

The trail then widened. The Associated Press, citing satellite imagery, expert analysis and a U.S. official, reported the blast was "likely a US airstrike" ³. NBC News, sourcing U.S. officials, said the U.S. military had been "targeting an area near" the school at the time of the strike ⁹. The Guardian published its own evidence review on March 10 and reached the same direction of travel ⁷.

Then came the map. On March 4, 2026, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Gen. Dan Caine held a Pentagon news conference at which they displayed a chart titled "Operation EPIC FURY Timeline – First 100 Hours." The chart places Minab inside the U.S. target box for the opening hours of the war ³. It is the U.S. military's own operational diagram of where it was striking, drawn by the people doing the striking.

The Forensic Architecture and Sky News study, released in late July, added a second and uglier finding: the neighbourhood was hit again while families and rescue workers were still on the ground ⁶¹⁰. A double-tap on a school site is the kind of pattern that, in other wars, has drawn international legal scrutiny. None of the sources provided to HeyDay confirm a separate Human Rights Watch legal analysis — that claim, repeated in the broadcast caption, does not appear in the underlying reporting.

Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have said the Pentagon is investigating. Israel's military, by several accounts, was not operating in the area at the time ¹¹. President Donald Trump has publicly suggested that images of the bombed school could be "AI" ⁶, and has continued to deny U.S. responsibility. The administration has been publicly silent for more than 100 days; the AP reported on July 1 that there has been no final accounting ⁴.

The broadcast's narration also carried two attributed lines — that Trump's denials are "actively undermining the official investigation," and that the Pentagon probe is "stalled at CENTCOM for political reasons." Neither phrasing appears verbatim in any of the sources HeyDay reviewed. They are not asserted here as facts.

What can be said with the available evidence is narrower than the caption's strongest claims, and the gaps matter. The sources confirm the Tomahawk attribution and the Pentagon's own map. They do not confirm the specific component markings — the "Globe Motors" or "Ball Aerospace" labels, the "made in USA" stamps — that the broadcast cited, nor the claim of a separating wall since 2016. A reader who never presses play should know what rests on what.

When the BBC reached the site in late July, a survivor asked the question that now hangs over the official silence: "What was their crime?" ⁸. Four months after a Tomahawk — by every available line of evidence — destroyed a primary school in the first hours of a war the Pentagon itself has named, no U.S. official has answered her.