An elementary school in the Iranian capital Tehran’s Niloufar Square has been struck in US-Israeli attacks, according to Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Esmaeil Baghaei.
Baghaei on Friday shared a video on X, purportedly showing Shahid Hamedani School with students before and after the attack, without elaborating on the circumstances or the number of casualties.
If confirmed, this would be the fourth school hit in Iran since the war erupted.
The Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ school in southern city of Minab, was the first to be hit on Saturday, the first day of US and Israeli attacks against the country. The attack killed 160 children and five staff, according to UN experts.
Some websites and social media accounts linked to Israel claimed the site was “part of an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps base”.
An analysis by Al Jazeera’s digital investigations unit of satellite imagery compiled over more than a decade, as well as recent video clips, published news reports and statements from official Iranian sources, has revealed that the school had been clearly separate from an adjacent military site for at least 10 years.
The investigation also showed that the strike pattern raises fundamental questions about the accuracy of intelligence information on which the bombing was based. The findings may even raise questions about whether the strike was a deliberate targeting of the school.
Amid scrutiny over the incident, the US acknowledged its military was investigating it. The Reuters news agency reported, quoting two US officials, that US military investigators believed it was likely that US forces were responsible for the apparent strike, but had not yet reached a final conclusion.
UN rights chief Volker Turk on Friday urged Washington to move “very quickly” with its probe, saying his body had asked the US for “prompt, transparent and impartial investigations”.
“We need this to happen very quickly and we need to also make sure that there is accountability as well as redress for the victims,” he told reporters in Geneva.
Other attacks on schools
On Thursday, missiles fired by the US and Israel hit two other schools in the town of Parand, southwest of Tehran, according to state media.
The Fars news agency shared photos of damage and debris in what appeared to be a classroom and said several nearby residential units also sustained damage in the attack on Thursday.
On Friday, UNICEF said that of the more than 1,300 people killed in the strikes on Iran so far, at least 181 were children.
Deliberately attacking a school would be a war crime, and if a US role were to be confirmed, the strike would rank among the worst cases of civilian casualties in decades of US wars in the Middle East.—Al Jazeera
