Name: Was the strike on a primary school in Iran a war crime? | The Global Story
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Was the deadly strike on a girls school in southern Iran a war crime?

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That's one of the questions now facing the US military.

On Saturday, February 28, in the opening hours of the U.

S. Israel war in Iran, a missile slammed into a school.

Iranian officials say that up to 168 people were killed, most of them children between the ages of 7 and 12.

While President Trump initially said he thought Iran did it, last week there were reports that US Military investigators believe American forces were likely responsible, though they haven't reached a final conclusion yet.

From the BBC, I'm Tristan Redmond in Paris.

And I'm Asma Khalid in Washington, D.C. and welcome to the Global Story on YouTube.

Coming up, we'll be speaking to an international law expert who's advised the U.S. government.

And a warning before we begin today's show.

This episode contains some graphic descriptions of violence.

First, though, we want to understand how this all happened.

And in order to get a better handle on everything we know so far, we reached out to Merlin Thomas, one of our colleagues at BBC Verify.

That's this special unit within the BBC that uses open source intelligence and satellite imagery to verify videos and fact check information.

We asked Merlin to wind back the clock to February 28th.

We which was the first day of the conflict.

It was the day that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed, and

it was also the day that that school in southern Iran was struck.

The Iranian authorities said that the first kind of strikes had been reported at about 10:45am so that's around an hour after US Israel began attacking Iran.

And initially reports had come out that there had been strikes on this school and that there had been damage on the school building.

The first kind of videos we were seeing were aftermath footage.

So you're seeing people rushing into the courtyard of the school.

You can see dark smoke plumes pouring out of the school building.

There are scenes of panic as families are kind of trying to figure out what's going on.

All of this is kind of footage circulating online and that's where we're getting it from.

We're able to kind of verify it using location identifiers, walls, the colored patterns on the side of the school building, all those kinds of particular details.

That's how geolocated, exactly where that is.

And that's basically just a fancy term for saying this is where something is.

You know, this is how we know where it is and this is how we know it's new.

We knew it was authentic initially in the Reports we could see people kind of going through rubble.

And later, you know, more footage emerge published by state media.

And this is when the footage gets more graphic and we're looking at bodies of what appear to be children underneath kind of rubble.

And you can see kind of we've seen severed arms.

And I'm sorry for kind of going into the detail, but

it is, it's important, I think, to say, you know, we, we at BBC Verify are having to go through the footage of those dead bodies and things like that because we see that it is so crucial to verify that who has been killed by these strikes.

And so we knew there was a school building, this military base was right next to the school building.

But this is all part of the jigsaw puzzle of pieces that we were putting together as footage was emerging in those early moments.

What was the claim and counterclaim about what had actually happened?

Iran said that this was a strike by US and Israel.

And at the time the US and Israel kind of had no kind of comment on it initially and quickly after that, there was no real denial or acceptance of responsibility from either side.

Israel had said that they were not aware of any operations in the area, but

Iran had maintained that this was a US Israeli strike.

Okay, so on day four of the conflict, so that's Tuesday the 3rd of March, there are pictures of a mass funeral that's held in Minab.

Iranian officials have said that there were up to 168people killed.

But how do you actually go about confirming those figures?

And that is just kind of the long and short of it.

I mean, Iranian Authorities say that 168 people were killed.

Now it's really hard to verify those numbers.

There was a handwritten list published by Iranian media.

Now, 48 of those names were aged between 6 and 11.

Now in terms of those names, there's not that much more we were able to do in terms of verification.

But what also emerged when you talk about the kind of broadcast footage of the funeral, there were images of small coffins, adult sized coffins, and

these coffins had people's faces on, children's faces on, children's names on sometimes.

And we were able to match up three names from the list to three names that were on the outside of these coffins.

So it's that kind of granular level of detail that we can go through.

But it's still Far away from the number of 168 people killed and 110 children.

But it's worth saying that the Education Ministry says that the school itself had 264 pupils.

Well, there's that image, Merlin, of the of holes in the ground taken from above that many people will have seen.

Were you able to verify that image and where did it come from?

Well, this image was the real game changer for us when we were doing our investigation.

You can see scorch marks, you can see the type of impact point they are.

You can see whether a crater is particularly dipped down and how that feeds into whether or not what kind of missile may have been used or what kind of weapon may have caused that.

And so when we showed that to experts, several experts said that this showed that there were signs of multiple strikes, that this area had been hit more than once.

And the proximity of those targets showed that there was an intentionality to the targeting as well, that this had been likely done on purpose.

So when you're looking at the satellite imagery, what does it tell you about the actual area in this town that was attacked?

So the school building kind of area itself is in the top right hand corner and then the military base is just to the kind of south west of it.

The rest of the compound is, is the military base.

Now, there's been intense speculation about whether or not the school building was part of it on Google satellite imagery.

You can kind of look at old publicly available images of this area.

In 2013, it appears that it was part of the same compound.

The school and the military base were together as one?

In 2013 and then in 2016, we see that there is a clear wall separating the two.

Even in historical imagery that there was a wall of separation between the school and the military base.

On Wednesday, March 4, our colleague Tom Bateman here in Washington D.C.

he asked the Defense Secretary of the United States, Pete Hegseth, about the school.

Can you give us an update on what the administration knows, what you know now about the reported strike on a girls southern Iran on Saturday?

All I know, all I can say is that we're investigating that.

We of course, never target civilian targets, but

we're taking a look at investigating that red tie in front just on the basis that with the information you would have your reconnaissance abilities, ability to gather information.

I mean, it's several days on now, so is there any clarity on whose munition this was?

And then a couple of days later, the President of the United States is on Air Force One and he suggests that this all could have been carried out by Iran.

We think it was done by Iran because they're very inaccurate, as you know, with their munitions.

And so at this point the United States is not accepting any responsibility.

We heard the Pentagon say that they're gonna conduct an investigation.

And Merlin, I know you and your team at VERIFY are also investigating the story.

So as it's all unfolding, what are you seeing and do you begin to see any indications of who is responsible for these strikes?

Well, a couple of days after the kind of game changing satellite image that we were able to analyze, one really key piece of footage came out.

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Was the strike on a primary school in Iran a war crime? | The Global Story

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