The elementary school called with an urgent message about her son. He was told: “The war has started. Come and get him.”
The mother, who asked not to be named, said she just dropped the boy off and did not leave immediately because she had patients to see in her work as a midwife. Then the world shook. Then he ran.
It was too late. Three airstrikes hit the Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school in Minab, killing 168 people, according to the city’s mayor. Many of them were children. One of them was his son.
“By the time we got there, the whole school had collapsed on top of the kids,” the mother told NBC News. “People were taking out children’s arms and legs, people were taking out severed heads.”
Four days later, grief and anger grew over the death of the school, which has become a rallying point for protests against US and Israeli strikes. There is also anger and uncertainty over the fact that no one has admitted responsibility for the most publicized casualties since the war began.
A large crowd gathered to bury the children on Tuesday, according to videos and photos published by the state media. There are many burials with lines and rows that look like graves dug together.
The US and Israel have hit thousands of targets inside the country, killing Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei among nearly 800 others., according to the Iranian Red Crescent Society.
Tehran is hitting back, hitting Israel and several other countries in the region allied with the US, including the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman and Bahrain. Six members of the US were among those killed in its attack, along with 11 people in Israel, and dozens were killed in Israeli strikes against Hezbollah in Lebanon.
When asked about the deaths Monday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters that the U.S. military “would not target a school on purpose,” adding that the Defense Department “would be investigating if it was our strike.”
Over the weekend, US Central Command, or CENTCOM, said it was looking into reports of casualties. The Israeli military has so far declined to comment.
The school appears to have been close to an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) base, according to a satellite image, which British broadcaster BBC News reported was targeted earlier.
Both the Minab official and the mother who spoke to NBC News said the school site was built on top of an IRGC base. The base was closed about 15 years ago and all military personnel were removed, although the school remained open, they said.
A 2011 satellite image appears to show the building as part of the same complex, before it was later fenced off.
Ali Farhadi, spokesman for the Ministry of Education in Iran, said on Sunday they attacked the school three times, which he said had 264 students.
Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said on Saturday X that the school “was bombed in broad daylight, where it was full of young children.”
“These crimes against the Iranian people will not be answered,” he warned.
