Sky News spent four months pulling apart the bombing of the Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school in Minab — the strike that instantly became the most notorious moment of the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran. It happened on day one. The school was hit again and again, and 168 children were killed, along with teachers and staff whose identities were traced through painstaking open‑source work. Most of the dead were girls between seven and twelve. Their families have waited four months for the U.S. investigation that was promised, and nothing has been released.
With Iran’s internet shut down and travel into the country nearly impossible, Sky News’ Data and Forensics team turned to whatever evidence could be gathered remotely: satellite archives, CCTV, witness videos, old maps, school records, anything that could be verified. They worked with Forensic Architecture to rebuild the school in 3D and reconstruct the attack second by second.
What they found wasn’t a mystery. It was a failure that had been built into the system long before the missiles were launched.
The Pentagon had satellite imagery of the site going back to 1987. They had decades of overhead surveillance showing exactly what the compound was. They had images from December 2025 where you can literally see children’s shadows in the playground. The school had been walled off from the adjacent IRGC naval base since at least 2015, with its own perimeter, its own website, its own public footprint. Any analyst with basic tools could have confirmed it was a civilian school in minutes.
But on February 28, three Tomahawk missiles were fired from the USS Spruance, roughly 716 kilometers away in the Arabian Sea. CCTV shows the compound being hit nine times at 11:22 a.m. The school itself was struck about ten seconds after the first impact. Witnesses say the second missile landed exactly where a teacher had moved surviving students for shelter, killing nearly everyone who had taken cover there. A third strike followed on the same spot. The crater matches a Tomahawk. The pattern of impacts matches a Tomahawk. The launch platform matches a Tomahawk. There is no serious doubt left about what was used or who fired it.
The question isn’t whether the U.S. did it. The question is how it was allowed to happen when every safeguard on paper existed to stop exactly this.
Months before the war, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gutted the offices meant to prevent civilian deaths. The Civilian Protection Center of Excellence had its workforce cut by around ninety percent. CENTCOM’s civilian casualty assessment team was slashed from ten people to one. A Pentagon Inspector General report in May described the civilian protection structure as a shell — no budget, no mandate, no real mission. A functioning warning system was defunded on purpose, then later blamed for not warning anyone.
Four months on, CENTCOM’s commander has told reporters the investigation into the Minab strike is nearly complete, yet nothing has been released. No findings, no accountability, no names of those who signed off on the target. Asked in June whether anyone would face consequences, Trump called it a strange question and said war is nasty and mistakes are made. But the “mistake” started when they chose not to fund the office that exists to catch mistakes like this one.
A military that surveilled a schoolyard for forty years didn’t suddenly fail to see the children. It decided in advance that seeing them wouldn’t change the targeting. Nobody in this chain lacked information. They had the satellite history, the courtyard shadows, the separation wall, the school’s online presence, the open‑source proof that this was a girls’ primary school. They had all of it.
And they fired anyway.
