On 28 February, the first day of the 2026 US-Israeli aerial war against Iran, missiles landed on Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school in the Iranian city of Minab, by the Strait of Hormuz.

More than 121 schoolchildren, aged 6 to 13, were killed along with 26 teachers.

Working with Sky News, we reconstructed the school site to analyse the attack and its aftermath.

The 3D Model

We reconstructed the school building and its surroundings as a digital 3D environment using photographs and videos accessible on the Shajareh Tayyebeh school’s website. Several of those images were captured in the months prior to the attack, including January 2026, providing a near-contemporaneous record of the school and the activities which took place there.

3D reconstruction of the Shajareh Tayyebeh school building shows the interior layout of the classrooms. (Forensic Architecture, 2026)

At the time of the strikes, a boys’ school and a pre-school occupied the ground floor of the building, while a girls’ school was located on the first floor. Each school had its own separate entrance, and their assembly halls were connected by a staircase, which was painted in bright colours. The assembly halls were the central room on each floor and hosted a range of activities, from mothers’ day celebrations to book fairs and award ceremonies. The classroom walls were painted blue and pink, and decorated with paper art.

Satellite imagery stretching back a decade reveal the development of the Shajareh Tayyebeh school building. (Forensic Architecture, 2026)

We verified that at the time of the attack, the building was a school and had been so for many years.

Analysis of satellite imagery shows that the site had been converted into a school by October 2015, when new entrances and perimeter walls were constructed. By 2017, football pitches and assembly areas were visible in the playgrounds, and by 2018, walls around the school compound were painted blue and pink, distinguishing the girls’ and boys’ yards.

Open-source research indicates that many of the buildings in the immediate surroundings of the school were visibly civilian in character, including a clinic, cultural centre, café, supermarket, and car wash. Many of these facilities maintained active social media accounts that further documented their locations and functions. While this area had served as a base for elements of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) throughout the Iran-Iraq war, evidence shows that it’s use had changed to public services for about a decade and IRGC’s role was likely administrative in nature.

3D reconstruction of the neighborhood where Shajareh Tayyebeh school was located shows the largely civilian nature of the site. (Forensic Architecture, 2026)

28 February 2026

According to testimonies collected and verified by Sky News, the strikes began around 11:22am.

Spatial analysis of videos capturing the strikes and their aftermath reveals the sequence of events.(Forensic Architecture, 2026)

The first nine strikes occurred across one-and-a-half minutes. The first strike landed only 130m away from the school. The second, which landed almost at the same time, hit the nearby cultural centre. The third and fourth strikes landed nearly simultaneously 10 seconds later; the latter of these hit the school.

Witness testimonies collected by Sky News provide an understanding of the sequence of events in the school during the attack. Parastesh Zaeri, 11, survived the attack, and later said:

‘When the first strike hit and made that terrifying sound, I remember Ms Sangarzadeh, the principal of our school fell downstairs. Then I stretched out my hand to pull my books toward myself. But then the second strike hit and I was thrown… I do not remember the smell, but when the second strike hit I was thrown and went under the rubble.’

The attack took the life of Parastesh’s brother Ali Asghar Zaeri, 8.

Wajiheh Zakari, a teacher at the school, said:

‘At the moment of the first strike she [fellow teacher Ms Shahriari] had been in the yard. When the first missile hit the school, [Ms Shahriari] ran toward a classroom to bring her students out, and then the second missile hit and unfortunately she was killed.’

Videos of the aftermath of these strikes show civilians and aid workers attempting to rescue children from under the rubble. Analysis of shadows in these videos confirm that they were recorded between 12:30 and 1:15pm. A number of children and teachers were rescued at this time.

From as early as 1:47pm onwards, multiple Iranian news channels reported the attack. Those first reports described the building as a girls’ school, and announced an initial death toll of five, with an expectation that it would rise.

As families and rescuers remained on the scene, a second wave of strikes hit the neighborhood. By synchronizing videos and using shadow analysis, we established that the three strikes captured landed on and near the clinic, at around 2:30pm.

Following the initial media reporting, US forces would have had an opportunity to reassess their initial misidentification, before conducting subsequent strikes.

Shadow analysis confirms that the second wave of strikes occurred at 2:30pm.(Forensic Architecture, 2026)

Witness testimonies collected by Sky News provide an understanding of the course of events between the two waves of strikes. Khadija Ahmedizadeh, bereaved mother of schoolboy Mohammad Taha Jafari, 9, said:

“All the mothers and families were still there, and the schoolyard was extremely crowded. Suddenly there was smoke and dust everywhere. I could hardly understand what was happening around me. I only remember that members of the Red Crescent grabbed my hand while everyone was running. They pulled me away and cleared the crowd, saying that we had to move to the back of the school because the area might be targeted again.”

Mohammad Yazdanpanah, a driver with the local fire department, said:

‘About half an hour, maybe forty minutes after we had arrived at the scene, there were two additional explosions, one after another. At that time there were perhaps one thousand to fifteen hundred people gathered in the compound and around the area. When the first explosion happened, we immediately threw ourselves to the ground to seek shelter. Just a few seconds later—perhaps three or four seconds afterward—a second explosion followed.’

A missile visible in the videos from the second round of strikes has been identified by Bellingcat as an RGM/UGM-109 Tomahawk Land Attack Missile (TLAM). According to Bellingcat: ‘the US is the only participant in the war that is known to have Tomahawk missiles.’ Munition experts at the Open Source Munitions Portal (OSMP), a joint project between Airwars and Armament Research Services, confirmed this identification based on munition fragments found at the scene.

Before and After

A before-and-after comparison of satellite imagery reveals the extents of destruction brought by the strikes to several buildings in the neighborhood including the school, the clinic and the cultural center.

Before-and-after comparison of satellite imagery reveals the extents of destruction.(Forensic Architecture, 2026)

Comparing this analysis against the bomb clouds captured in videos from 28 February, we could establish that at least one further strike, on a building just 70m away from the school, was not captured in those videos.

Comparison of the building’s pre-strike condition with post-strike imagery indicates that the impact crater falls within the assembly hall.(Forensic Architecture, 2026)

Shajareh Tayyebeh School sustained extensive damage in the attacks. To assess the extent and nature of the destruction, we analysed drone footage posted to social media on 4 March, four days after the strike, and used it to create a photogrammetric 3D model of the damaged structure. The reconstruction was compared against the school’s pre-strike condition to identify changes to the building and locate areas of impact. The analysis indicates that an impact crater measuring approximately 5m in diameter was located within the centre of the school’s assembly hall.

Updates

Update — 16 July 2026

The initial phase of this work contributed to Iran School Bombing: The Search for Truth, a Sky Group documentary by Full Story Films.