This article was originally published in Common Dreams under Creative Commons 3.0 license. Read the original article. Contact: editor@commondreams.org
By Stephen Prager
US and Israeli missiles have hit a school in Iran for the fourth time in six days, according to videos shared on social media by a spokesperson for the Iranian Foreign Ministry on Friday.
Spokesperson Esmaeil Baqaei said that the Shahid Hamedani School, an elementary school in Niloufar Square, Tehran, had been “targeted by the American/Israeli aggressors.”
He posted a video showing the school filled with dozens of young students prior to the attack, followed by scenes of the school in ruins, with several empty classrooms filled with rubble.
Baquaei said it showed “how the United States administration is helping the people of Iran.” He did not include any information about the number of casualties or the circumstances of the attack.
According to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), at least 192 children have been killed across the Middle East since the US and Israel launched a regime change war this past Saturday.
Most of them were girls ages 7-12 who were killed on Saturday during an attack at a girls’ school in the southern Iranian town of Minab.
At least 175 people were reported to have been killed in the attack, which unnamed officials have said was “likely” carried out by the United States, according to Reuters. HuffPost reported that Pentagon officials have briefed Congress that the US “was most likely responsible.”
Eyewitnesses and relatives of the victims have told Middle East Eye that the attack was a “double-tap” strike in which survivors and first responders were targeted following the initial bombing. An Al Jazeera investigation has concluded that the attack was likely “deliberate.”
Iranian media have also published CCTV video of a separate strike on the same day, in which a missile landed next to a boys’ school in Qazvin, resulting in scenes of terrified students and teachers running for their lives.
On Thursday, two other schools in the town of Parand, southwest of Tehran, were hit by missiles fired by the US and Israel, according to Iranian state media. The Fars News Agency shared photos of a classroom filled with debris. So far, no casualties from the attack have been reported.
US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has said that as it wages its war in Iran, the US is not abiding by “stupid rules of engagement,” and has boasted of raining down “death and destruction from the sky all day long.”
According to data analyzed by the Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA), part of a US-based human rights monitor for Iran, at least 1,168 civilians have been killed by US-Israeli attacks since Saturday. The Iranian government on Friday put the death toll at 1,332 people.
More than 3,643 civilian sites have been damaged in attacks attributed to the US and Israel, according to figures released by the Iranian Red Crescent Society—among them have been 3,090 homes, 528 commercial centres, 13 medical facilities and nine Red Crescent centres.
Amjad Iraqi, a senior analyst at the International Crisis Group, told Al Jazeera that these routine attacks on civilian infrastructure increasingly resemble those carried out by Israel during its more than two-years of genocide in Gaza.
“There are straight lines between what Israel has attempted to do… in Gaza, to completely decimate and collapse the systems that existed there,” Iraqi said, “to what we are seeing in Iran, on a much more massive and dangerous scale, to bring down the Islamic Republic and to cause as much devastation as possible.”
[DS]
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