At Least 100 Iranian Schoolkids Killed in U.S.-Israel Strikes as Trump Parties at Mar-a-Lago

UPDATE: 9:42 p.m.: The Iranian government confirmed the attack on Iran has killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the country’s authoritarian supreme leader for 37 years.

---

Iranian state media said that at least 100 elementary school children were killed Saturday morning, with dozens still missing, as the U.S. and Israel launched an attack on Iran that President Trump definitely did not get Congressional authorization for. 

The Tayyebeh girls’ school in Minab, southern Iran, is located near one of the naval bases for the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps—the country’s most powerful military force. The base was also struck, according to a video verified by the New York Times. At least one other school appeared to have been hit, according to various videos shared on social media. Saturday is the start of the work week in Iran, and parents had just dropped off their kids at school before the strikes began. 

“God knows how many more children’s bodies they will pull from under the rubble,” Hossein Kermanpour, the spokesperson for Iran’s health ministry, posted on Twitter. 

Neither Israel nor the U.S acknowledged the civilian casualties. But in an eight-minute video posted to Truth Social on Saturday, Trump said he expected U.S. casualties because that’s the price of war (which, again, he initiated without Congressional authorization): “The lives of courageous American heroes may be lost, and we may have casualties. That often happens in war, but we’re doing this not for now. We’re doing this for the future, and it is a noble mission.” Iran has since attacked multiple U.S. military bases in the region. 

In a separate Truth Social post on Saturday afternoon, Trump announced that Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was killed in the attack, echoing reports from Israel—though the Iranian government has yet to confirm this. In the same announcement, Trump wrote that “the heavy and pinpoint bombing, however, will continue, uninterrupted throughout the week or, as long as necessary to achieve our objective of PEACE THROUGHOUT THE MIDDLE EAST AND, INDEED, THE WORLD!” 

As he recklessly risked igniting World War III, Trump is hosting a $1,000,000-per-plate fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago this weekend. On Friday night, Mar-a-Lago was host to the 2026 Lexus Hope Bash, with one video from the event showing Trump wearing a USA hat, dancing inside the Mar-a-Lago ballroom as guests, decked in black tie attire, singing, “God Bless the USA.”

The bombing has reportedly been planned for months, making it the second time in eight months that the U.S. and Israel have attacked Iran amid ongoing nuclear talks. In June, Trump declared that the U.S. had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program. Yet, on February 21, Trump’s “special envoy” to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, said Iran was “a week away” from having the stuff they needed to make a nuclear bomb. During his State of the Union address on Tuesday, Trump declared Iran had “sinister nuclear ambitions,” which, yeah, we’ve been hearing that for decades. 

If taken at face value, Trump’s own timeline suggests a remarkable turnaround—for a country to go from having its nuclear program “obliterated” to “being one week away” from having a nuclear bomb in just eight months. Though reports pretty quickly confirmed that nothing was even close to obliterated in June’s attack. 

Trump has also seemingly taken advantage of the country’s civil unrest as further justification for starting another war in the Middle East, urging Iranians on Saturday to “seize control of your destiny” and that “when we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”

Beginning in late December, Iranians began protesting their government for basically allowing their economy to go to absolute shit. The regime quickly cracked down on demonstrations, killing thousands of protesters and throwing the country into an internet blackout. At the height of the protests, in mid-January, Trump promised the people of Iran that help was on the way, while Khamenei blamed the U.S. and Israel for stoking the unrest, and Iran’s foreign minister justified the killing of protesters by pointing to ICE. 

“President Trump has promised the Iranian people that aid or help is coming their way, but now we are seeing civilian casualties; that’s something that the Iranian government will stress as a case of violation of international law and an aggression against the Iranian people,” Al Jazeera’s Mohammed Vall said on Saturday, reporting from Tehran. 

The international response to Saturday’s bombing has been varied, though mostly aligned with who’s allied with whom—China, Saudi Arabia, and Russia all condemned the attacks; Canada’s Prime Minister said the country stands with the U.S., as did Australia’s Prime Minister; France’s President tweeted that the escalation “is dangerous for all”; Spain’s Prime Minister similarly tweeted that there must be “immediate de-escalation and full respect for international law”; the European Union also asked that everyone “respect international law”; Hungary’s Prime Minister is worried about oil prices.

Early Saturday morning, Oman’s Foreign Minister Badr Al Busaidi, who’s been a key mediator in the U.S.-Iran nuclear talks, wrote on Twitter: “Active and serious negotiations have yet again been undermined. Neither the interests of the United States nor the cause of global peace are well served by this. And I pray for the innocents who will suffer. I urge the United States not to get sucked in further. This is not your war.” U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres also condemned the strikes: “Military action carries the risk of igniting a chain of events that no one can control in the most volatile region of the world.”

In the U.S., Democrats were, of course, furious, but many MAGA hardliners were also (surprisingly) disturbed. Tucker Carlson said the attack was “absolutely disgusting and evil,” Alex Jones said, “Trump‘s HUGE gamble accelerates the world‘s trajectory towards a nuclear world war,” even Andrew Tate, the misogynist, accused human traffkicker, and infamous manosphere influencer, held a livestream to say, “Why would going into a war with Iran benefit anybody in American at all?”

Marjorie Taylor Greene also seems ready to start a revolution to overthrow the government. (These really are the worst and strangest times.) “I did not campaign for this. I did not donate money for this. I did not vote for this, in elections or Congress. This is heartbreaking and tragic,” she wrote on Twitter. “And how many more innocent will die? What about our own military? This is not what we thought MAGA was supposed to be. Shame!” 

Hilariously, Vice President JD Vance told the Washington Post on Friday that he had no idea what Trump was going to do but that there’s  “no chance” the U.S. is going to get involved in another years-long war in the Middle East.

So much for that. 

Like what you just read? You’ve got great taste. Subscribe to Jezebel, and for $5 a month or $50 a year, you’ll get access to a bunch of subscriber benefits, including getting to read the next article (and all the ones after that) ad-free. Plus, you’ll be supporting independent journalism—which, can you even imagine not supporting independent journalism in times like these? Yikes.