Neither the U.S. Nor Israel Seem Concerned About Who Killed Over 100 Iranian Schoolkids

“Children, little girls, at the beginning of the school day being killed in this manner, backpacks with bloodstains on them—this is absolutely horrific,” UN Human Rights Office Spokesperson Ravina Shamdasani said in a statement on Tuesday. (Iran’s workweek starts on Saturday.) “The onus is on the forces that carried out the attack to investigate it. We call on them to make public the findings and to ensure accountability and redress for the victims.” 

Speaking to Time and the Associated Press, various spokespeople for the U.S. Department of War and the Israeli Army claimed they weren’t aware that Shajareh Tayyebeh, or the “Good Tree” school, was hit. UNESCO classifies attacks on schools as a “grave violation of humanitarian law”—though one shouldn’t need an international agency to tell them that.

David Scheffer, a Clinton-era diplomat specializing in war crimes, told USA Today that “it would be difficult to establish a lawful basis for the strike on the school building at a time when it is full of children.”

Hours after the attack, multiple rumors circulated about why the school was struck. One theory suggested that because Shajareh Tayyebeh is near the Navy barracks for Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, or the IGRC, it was an accident, or might have been hit by a rogue IGRC rocket. However, New Lines’ journalist Nilo Tabrizy noted that the rogue rocket rumor was pushed by Iranian pro-royal burner accounts using misleading social media images, which were quickly debunked. Tabrizy also wrote that the school’s “brightly colored walls” make it visually distinct from the barracks, meaning a mistake by the U.S. or Israel would be highly unlikely. Other theories, explaining that the barracks were only walled off after 2016, claim the Pentagon is using outdated maps. 

According to an Al Jazeera investigation, while missiles hit both the military and the school, they avoided hitting a clinic complexbetween the two—suggesting the attack used precise coordinates. The outlet asks: “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?”

Israel denied involvement on Monday, with officials telling NPR, “We are not aware at the moment of any IDF operation in that area. I don’t know who’s responsible for the bombing.” On Wednesday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said, “All I know, all I can say, is that we’re investigating that. We, of course, never target civilian targets.”

The same day, the Senate failed to rein in Trump’s military powers and end the war on Iran, and then the House did the same on Thursday—even though pretty much no one from either side of the aisle wants this war. 

Human Rights Activists News Agency estimates nearly 1,000 people have died in Iran, 181 of whom are children under the age of 10. 

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