.Satellite images show Iran school strike hit more buildings than earlier reported
MARCH 4, 202612:50 PM ET
HEARD ON ALL THINGS CONSIDERED
By
Geoff Brumfiel
,
Alyson Hurt
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of a precision airstrike on a neighboring Iranian military complex — and that it may have been struck as a result of outdated targeting information.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."
A satellite image of an Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corp compound taken on March 4, five days after an airstrike destroyed a school on the edge of the compound. The image reveals that half-a-dozen other buildings in addition to the school were struck.
Planet Labs PBC
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 southeastern 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 east 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
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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.’
No update from the US yet but
surely they know if they were bombing in that area .