On the morning of February 28, 2026, the Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab, Iran was struck by a missile while packed with students. At least 165 were killed, mostly children.
Within days, a disinformation campaign was underway claiming that Iran’s own Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had accidentally bombed the school. The claims spread fast, garnering millions of views. But they did not survive scrutiny. Investigations by The New York Times, Al Jazeera, New Lines Magazine, PolitiFact and independent researchers have all debunked the claims. And on March 6, Reuters reported that two U.S. officials confirmed military investigators believe it is “likely” that American forces were responsible for the strike.
The Damage Pattern Rules Out a Failed Missile
The most straightforward evidence is the damage itself. As The New York Times reported, the paper and other analysts debunked the failed-missile claim by determining that a single errant rocket would not have caused such precise and targeted damage to several buildings across the naval base. NPR’s review of Planet Labs satellite imagery showed half a dozen buildings struck across the compound. Three independent experts — including researchers at Oregon State University’s Conflict Ecology Laboratory and Jeffrey Lewis of Middlebury College — described the impact patterns as “pretty clean” and the imagery as consistent with a precision airstrike. Munitions expert N.R. Jenzen-Jones of Armament Research Services, consulting for Reuters, concluded the school and compound were hit by “multiple simultaneous or near-simultaneous strikes with explosive munitions.” Lewis noted that given Minab’s location in southern Iran, the strike was more likely carried out by the U.S. than Israel — consistent with the division of operations in which Israel struck targets in western Iran while the U.S. handled naval and military targets in the south.
A failed rocket does not produce this kind of damage. Former U.S. Air Force targeting expert Wes J. Bryant reviewed the imagery and was unequivocal. Speaking to CBC News, he concluded:
“This absolutely was deliberately targeted. It is improbable that the strikes on the school and medical facility were merely misses. All targets hit at centre point or near centre point of the structures. With a miss of a GPS munition, we’d expect it would hit the dirt in the immediate vicinity closer to the IRGC building, not 100 metres or so away almost perfectly on the school. Same with the medical facility — that’s pretty much dead centre.”
The Disinformation Was Fabricated
The specific claims used to blame Iran were not just wrong — they were manufactured. Pro-Pahlavi monarchist accounts circulated an image they claimed showed the failed IRGC missile launch. It was quickly debunked — the image was from the town of Zanjan, roughly 800 miles away, and showed snowcapped mountains that do not exist in southern Iran. The following day, accounts claimed the IRGC had confessed to the strike, circulating a screenshot from what they said was an official state channel. This too was debunked — the supposed confession came from a monarchist Telegram channel, not an Iranian government source. PolitiFact rated the claims false.
A Familiar Pattern
This is not the first time disinformation has followed a strike on civilian infrastructure. When Israel struck the al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza in October 2023, the same playbook unfolded. A Netanyahu aide posted on X that the Israeli Air Force had hit a Hamas base inside a hospital, then deleted the post. Israel blamed a misfired Palestinian rocket. Fake accounts impersonating journalists emerged to push the narrative. Subsequent investigations remain disputed, with investigations reaching contradictory conclusions.
But the debate over al-Ahli was soon forgotten, because Israel went on to strike hospital after hospital, school after school, until the pattern was undeniable. Over 80 percent of Gaza’s schools destroyed. Ninety-four percent of health facilities damaged or destroyed. Over 73,000 Palestinians killed as of February 2026 — a figure even Israel’s own military has accepted — with over 20,000 of the dead children.
When the evidence became too overwhelming to deny, the excuses shifted — from “it wasn’t us” to “Hamas was hiding there.” Each served the same function: create just enough doubt to let the genocide continue.
What Is Happening Right Now
The U.S. and Israel have been bombing Iran for seven days. The death toll has surpassed 1,230. More than 6,000 wounded. At least 300 children hospitalized. The U.S. has struck nearly 2,000 targets across the country.
And just as in Gaza, it is not only schools. The WHO has verified 13 attacks on healthcare facilities in Iran, including direct strikes on Khatam al-Anbia Hospital and Gandhi Hospital in Tehran. Motahari Hospital, a burn victims facility, was damaged. Valiasr Hospital was rendered inoperable. Nine Red Crescent centres have been hit. UNICEF reports that 12 additional children were killed at schools across five other locations, with at least 20 schools and 10 hospitals damaged overall. A sports hall in Lamerd was bombed during a girls’ practice, killing 18. Two more schools in Parand, southwest of Tehran, were reportedly struck on Thursday.
UN human rights experts have specifically condemned the targeting of hospitals, schools, and Red Crescent facilities, calling it “a grave violation of international humanitarian law.”
When evidence like this starts to pile up, as it did in Gaza, honest observers cannot call all these strikes a “mistake.” They are the policy.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth hinted as much, telling reporters: “We are punching them while they are down, which is exactly how it should be.”
"Death and destruction from the sky, all day long” he added.
Not wanting to be outdone, the White House X account has posted a series of propaganda videos showing targets being blown up, with one headlined, “No pause. No hesitation.”
This is not the language of a government concerned about civilian casualties.
Why the Lie Persists
People keep repeating the claim that Iran bombed its own school because it shields them from confronting the possibility that their own government is engaged in actions they would call terrorism if any other country did the same. That the point of these strikes is to engineer societal collapse.
The historical record is not ambiguous. The U.S. invasion of Iraq killed hundreds of thousands, with a Lancet estimate reaching 600,000. Israel has bombed schools and hospitals for over two years in Gaza, in what the International Court of Justice has determined presents a plausible case of genocide. Yet people still search for ways to explain it away, because accepting that one’s own government commits atrocities is psychologically difficult. So the mind invents justifications and alternative stories that allow the bloodshed to continue.
The arguments — “Iran bombed its own school,” “it was a failed rocket,” “the IRGC confessed” — function as distractions. They are not offered in pursuit of truth. They are offered in pursuit of comfort. And that comfort comes at the cost of 165 dead schoolchildren in Minab, a thousand dead across Iran, seventy thousand dead in Gaza, and the uncounted dead across decades of American military operations.
The United States has been killing civilians with a litany of Orwellian excuses for decades — in Vietnam, in Iraq, in Libya, in Gaza, and now in Iran. It is the most thoroughly documented pattern in modern geopolitics, and it is the one Americans are least willing to name.
We have a word for it when other governments do it. Terrorism. And that is the truth.
But when our government does it, first we say “officials are looking into it” and “investigations are still pending.” When the evidence becomes undeniable, we shift to justification: they must have been hiding weapons, there was a base nearby, it was an “intelligence failure.” When justification fails, we fall back on intentions: we’re spreading freedom, we’re protecting the world. When intentions ring hollow — when it becomes obvious this is yet another war for oil and imperial dominance — we pivot to comparison: Iran is worse, they massacre their own people, as if “they do it too” has ever been a defense for killing children. And when even that wears thin — when the “liberated” country is left in ruins, when the installed government turns out to be just as brutal as the last one — we simply stop talking about it and move on to the next war.
This is the pattern. The U.S. overthrew Iran’s democratic government in 1953 and installed a dictator whose secret police tortured dissidents for 26 years. It destroyed Iraq on the basis of lies and left behind a shattered state, sectarian war, and the rise of ISIS. It bombed Libya into a failed state that still has open-air slave markets a decade later. Vietnam, Afghanistan — the list goes on. Not one of these interventions delivered the freedom that was promised. Not one. And yet each time, Americans believe it will be different, because the alternative is confronting what their government actually is.
If the U.S. succeeds in toppling Iran’s government, history tells us exactly what comes next: not democracy, but chaos, or a new theocratic regime loyal to Washington, or both. The people of Iran — who rose up against their own regime and were massacred for it — are not being rescued. They are being used as a justification for a war that was planned decades ago, which has already killed over a thousand people.
The excuses will keep coming. They always do. But at some point we have to ask what it means to spend decades condemning terrorism abroad while funding, arming, and carrying out terrorism ourselves — and never once applying the word to our own actions. We don’t get to call ourselves the good guys while bombing schools and hospitals. We don’t get to condemn extremism while practicing it at industrial scale. At some point, the denial itself becomes the extremism — a willful, sustained refusal to hold our own government to the standards we demand of everyone else. And in that refusal, we become the very thing we claim to oppose.
Tim Hjersted is the director and co-founder of Films For Action, a library dedicated to the people building a more free, regenerative and democratic society.
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