State media says Israeli attack on girls’ school in the city of Minab in the south of the country kills dozens.
An Israeli strike has hit an elementary girls’ school in Minab, a city in the Hormozgan province of southern Iran, killing at least 53 people, according to state media, as the immediate civilian cost from Israel and the United States’s huge bombardment of Iran comes into sharper focus.
Workers are continuing to clear wreckage from the site, where 63 others were injured on Saturday, said Iran’s state-run IRNA news agency. The strike is part of a wave of joint US-Israeli military attacks across Iran that has triggered an outbreak of regional violence.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi shared a photo of the attack, which he said destroyed the girls’ school and killed “innocent children”.
“These crimes against the Iranian People will not go unanswered,” Araghchi wrote in a post on X.
Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baghaei also slammed the “blatant crime” and urged action from the United Nations Security Council.
Separately, Iran’s Mehr news agency reported that at least two students were killed by another Israeli attack that hit a school east of the capital, Tehran.
Reporting from Tehran, Al Jazeera’s Mohammed Vall said the attacks call into question US and Israeli claims that “they are targeting only military targets and they are trying to punish the regime, not the people of Iran.”
“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,” said Vall.
There was no immediate reaction from the US or Israel on Iran’s claims about the school strikes.
The last time the US and Iran waged attacks on Iran in June 2025, sparking the 12-day war, the civilian toll in Iran was also heavy.
According to Iran’s Ministry of Health and Medical Education, thousands of civilians were killed or injured, and public infrastructure was damaged, during that conflict.
