🚨 UPDATED: March 9, 2026 | TegReportHQ Breaking Intelligence
On the morning of February 28, 2026, dozens of girls arrived at the Shajareh Tayyebeh — “The Good Tree” — elementary school in Minab, a city in southern Iran’s Hormozgan province. Classes had just begun when the first missile hit.
By the time it was over, up to 180 people were dead. Most of them were girls between the ages of 7 and 12.
Now, new video footage — geolocated, verified, and analyzed by independent weapons experts — is directly contradicting President Trump’s public statement that Iran accidentally struck its own school.
Here’s everything TegReportHQ has confirmed.
What the Video Shows
New footage released by Mehr News Agency on March 8 — and independently geolocated by Bellingcat using satellite imagery matching — shows a missile striking an IRGC facility in Minab at coordinates placing it meters from the Shajareh Tayyebeh school. Smoke can already be seen rising from the school’s vicinity in the same footage.
Eight independent munitions experts — cited in a Washington Post investigation — examined the video and assessed the weapon as a U.S. Tomahawk cruise missile. This is not a contested point among weapons analysts.
The reason it matters: the United States is the only party in this war known to possess and deploy Tomahawk missiles. Israel does not have them.
U.S. Central Command has confirmed it used Tomahawk missiles throughout the Iran campaign and even released a photograph of the USS Spruance — part of the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier group positioned within range of Minab — firing a Tomahawk on February 28, the same day as the school strike.
The Timeline: Precision Strikes, Then Children Die
Satellite imagery from Planet Labs has reconstructed what happened minute by minute.
At 10:23 a.m. local time, documented satellite images show the Shajareh Tayyebeh school still standing — completely intact. By 10:45 a.m., a guided missile had hit it directly. The school was struck not once, but three times according to Minab’s mayor and the Iranian Ministry of Education.
According to survivor accounts documented by Drop Site News and Al Jazeera: after the first strike, the school’s principal moved surviving students into a prayer room and called parents. Before parents could arrive, the building was hit again. A parent confirmed he received a call from the school saying his daughter survived the first strike — and was killed in the second before he reached her.
The school was triple-tapped.
The Geography: Why Minab Was Always a Target
Minab is not a random city. It sits in Hormozgan province, directly overlooking the Strait of Hormuz — one of the most strategically critical chokepoints on earth, responsible for roughly 20% of global oil flow.
The Sayyid al-Shuhada military complex in Minab serves as a key hub for IRGC Navy operations, including headquarters of the Asif Brigade — an IRGC unit specializing in asymmetric naval warfare using fast boats, coastal missile platforms, and drones capable of disrupting shipping in the Strait. Neutralizing that capability was clearly on the U.S. military’s opening-day target list.
What investigators found strange — and what Al Jazeera’s Digital Investigations Unit flagged — is that missiles hit the military base and the school, but deliberately bypassed a medical clinic complex located directly between the two. That level of selectivity strongly indicates the striking party was operating with detailed, facility-specific targeting coordinates — meaning the school’s location relative to the IRGC base was known before the strike.
What the School Actually Was
This is where the story gets complicated — and why the full picture matters.
According to Minab’s mayor and NBC News reporting: the school was built on the grounds of a former IRGC base that had been fully decommissioned approximately 15 years ago. All military personnel were relocated at that time. Satellite imagery confirms that by September 2016, the school had been physically walled off from the military complex — becoming, as Al Jazeera described it, “a clearly defined civilian institution for more than 10 years.”
CBC News, which conducted an independent investigation, described the school as being struck as part of “a precision airstrike on a military complex immediately adjacent to the building” — noting the school building was formerly part of the base but had long since been converted to civilian use.
The Guardian found no indication the school served any current military purpose. The adjacent buildings were a medical clinic and a pharmacy.
Trump’s Response vs. The Evidence
When asked directly whether the U.S. was responsible for killing children in Minab, President Trump responded without providing evidence: the strike was done by Iran, and Iran is “very inaccurate” with its missiles.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth quickly backed that claim.
But neither the U.S. military’s Central Command nor the Israeli military have responded to direct requests for comment on the new video evidence. The White House has not ruled out U.S. military responsibility for the strike.
Bellingcat stated directly that the footage “appears to contradict” Trump’s claim. The Washington Post, CNN, CBC, NPR, and The New York Times have all published separate investigations reaching the same conclusion: the United States was likely responsible for the Minab school strike.
PolitiFact confirmed: Iran’s government never claimed responsibility. Iran’s government has consistently blamed the U.S. and Israel.
International Response
The United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights issued a formal statement expressing “profound shock and grief,” calling the strike “a grave assault on children, on education, and on the future of an entire community.” UN experts called for an independent investigation and stated plainly: “There is no excuse for killing girls in a classroom.”
UNESCO described the bombing as “a grave violation of humanitarian law.”
Iran held mass funerals for at least 165 victims. State television broadcast images of excavators digging more than 100 graves. Coffins draped in Iranian flags, some bearing photographs of children, were lined up across Minab.
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said: “Attacks on schools target a nation’s future. The world must condemn it.”
TEG’s Take: What This Actually Means
Here’s the bottom line — stripped of spin from every direction.
The U.S. military launched strikes on a strategic IRGC naval complex in Minab on February 28. That complex was next to a girls’ school that had been a civilian institution for over a decade. The weapon that hit the area — confirmed by video, geolocation, satellite imagery, and eight weapons experts — was a Tomahawk. Only the U.S. has Tomahawks in this war.
Whether the school was struck by accident as collateral damage from the IRGC base strike, or was mistakenly included in targeting coordinates, is still being investigated. But the evidence that a U.S. missile caused the deaths of up to 180 people — most of them children — is now overwhelming.
The White House’s counter-narrative that Iran shot its own school is not supported by any verified evidence. It is contradicted by video, satellite data, and expert weapons analysis from multiple independent organizations.
At TegReportHQ, we don’t tell you what to think. We give you the full intelligence picture and let you decide. The evidence in this case is speaking loudly.
Sources: Bellingcat (March 8, 2026), Washington Post, CNN, CBC, Al Jazeera Digital Investigations Unit, Wikipedia/2026 Minab school airstrike, AP, PolitiFact, UN OHCHR, CBS News, Planet Labs satellite imagery
— TEG | TegReportHQ.com