Satellite images show Iran school strike hit more targets than earlier reported

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The bombing of an Iranian elementary school that killed some 165 people, many of them schoolgirls, included more targets near the school than has been initially reported, a review of commercial satellite imagery by NPR has found.

The images suggest that the school was hit on Saturday as part of a precision airstrike on a neighboring Iranian military complex — and that it may have been struck as a result of outdated targeting information.

The new images come from the company Planet and are of the city of Minab, located in southeastern Iran. They show that a health clinic and other buildings near the school were also struck. Three independent experts confirmed NPR’s analysis of the additional strike points.

The strike points “look like pretty clean detonation centroids,” said Corey Scher, a postdoctoral researcher at the Conflict Ecology Laboratory at Oregon State University.

“These certainly appear like detonation sites,” agreed Scher’s colleague, Oregon State associate professor Jamon Van Den Hoek.

Jeffrey Lewis, a professor at Middlebury College who specializes in satellite imagery, said the imagery was consistent with a precision airstrike.

The images show “very precise targeting” Lewis told NPR. “Almost all the buildings [in the compound] are hit.”

Iranian state media said 165 people died in the bombing, which struck a girls’ school. The school was located within less than 100 yards of the perimeter of an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Naval base, according to satellite images and publicly available information. The clinic was also located within the base perimeter, although both facilities had been walled off from the base.

Israel has denied involvement. “We are not aware at the moment of any IDF operation in that area,” Israel Defense Forces spokesperson Nadav Shoshani told NPR on Monday. “I don’t know who’s responsible for the bombing.”

At a press conference Wednesday morning, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said that the U.S. was looking into what happened at the school. “”All I know, all I can say, is that we’re investigating that,” Hegseth said. “We, of course, never target civilian targets.”

Given Minab’s location in the southwestern part of the country, Lewis believes it’s more likely the U.S. would have conducted the strike than Israel. “As one gets further south and west in Iran, a strike is much more likely to be a U.S. strike than an Israeli strike because of the type of munitions and the geographic location,” he said.

Esmail Baghaei, the spokesman for Iran’s Foreign Ministry, called the strike “deliberate,” and said that the U.S. and Israel bombed the school in part to tie up Iranian forces in the region with rescue efforts. “To call the attack on the girl’s school merely a ‘war crime’ does not capture the sheer evil and depravity of such a crime,” he said.

But Lewis said it’s more likely that the strike was the result of an error. Satellite images show that the school was separated from the base by a wall between 2013 and 2016. The clinic was walled off between 2022 and 2023.

Lewis believes it’s possible American military planners had not updated their target sets.

“There are thousands of targets across Iran, and so there will be teams in the United States and Israel that are responsible for tracking those targets and updating them,” he said. “It’s possible that the target didn’t get updated.”

The Pentagon did not immediately respond to NPR’s request for additional information about the strike.

NPR’s Arezou Rezvani and RAD team contributed to this report.