US Tomahawk killed 120 Iranian schoolchildren

The dead of Minab

Before midday on 28 February, a missile hit the Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab, a town in Iran’s Hormozgan province. It killed 120 schoolchildren, 73 boys and 47 girls, most of them aged seven to twelve. It killed 26 of their teachers, all women. It killed seven parents who had come to collect their children, a bus driver and a pharmacy technician. A six-month-old fetus died with its mother. Ninety-five children were injured. Among the dead was a boy named Makan Nasiri, whose remains have never been recovered. A schoolgirl named only as Zahra, daughter of Hossein, was described by a survivor giving evidence of what she saw that morning.

Munitions investigators at Bellingcat and BBC Verify identified the weapon from video footage as a US Tomahawk. Eight independent munitions experts agreed. A satellite data-link antenna recovered from the wreckage carried Ball Aerospace markings; debris was traced to a 2014 Raytheon contract for 231 Block IV Tomahawk missiles. The United States was the only combatant in the war using Tomahawks. A Pentagon internal investigation concluded the United States was responsible. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have called for a war-crimes investigation. UN human rights experts have demanded an independent inquiry.

That is the opening act of the war Washington and Israel launched to kill Ali Khamenei.

A funeral Washington did not plan for

Iran began burying its supreme leader on 3 July, four months after the strike that killed him, in a state funeral running across Tehran, Qom, Najaf, Karbala and Mashhad until 9 July. Officials expect 15 to 20 million mourners, which would make it the largest state funeral in Iranian history. Khamenei’s body lay in state at Tehran’s Grand Mosalla complex on 4 July. Crowds carried red flags, the Shia symbol of a blood debt still owed, and chanted for revenge.

Turnout at a state funeral is not a referendum, and grief, nationalism and organised mobilisation are not the same thing. But an operation built on the premise that removing Khamenei would crack the Iranian state open has instead produced one of the largest mass gatherings the country has ever seen, held together rather than fractured by his death.

The regime-change bet that did not pay off

On 28 February, US and Israeli aircraft, more than 50 of them carrying over 100 munitions, struck a bunker in Tehran on CIA targeting intelligence and killed Khamenei, 86. Opening-day strikes hit 24 provinces and killed at least 201 people, according to Iran’s Red Crescent. US and Israeli officials called it a decisive blow, and the stated purpose, on the public record, was to destabilise Iran’s political order.

It did not. A provisional Leadership Council, made up of President Masoud Pezeshkian, the head of the judiciary and a Guardian Council jurist, kept the state running within hours. The Assembly of Experts held its own election between 3 and 8 March and named Khamenei’s son, Mojtaba, 56, as the new supreme leader on 9 March. Analysts had set military defections as a precondition for real regime collapse; there is little evidence any occurred.

Even Donald Trump has conceded the operation missed its own target. He acknowledged that the strike “was so successful it knocked out most of the candidates” Washington had hoped might succeed Khamenei on its own terms, wrecking the transition scenario the operation was meant to produce. Yossi Mekelberg of Chatham House put it more plainly: the assumption of a quick collapse and an end to Iran’s nuclear and missile programmes “was a complete failure.”

Iran International and IranWire have reported that Mojtaba has not appeared in public since the strikes, and that the Revolutionary Guard applied what they describe as psychological and political pressure on Assembly members during the succession vote. Those outlets have a long-standing editorial interest in a regime-change narrative, and their claims should be read with that in mind rather than treated as settled fact. Set against a functioning Leadership Council, a completed election and a funeral drawing millions, the weight of the evidence points to continuity, not coercion dressed up as order.

The diplomacy the strike killed

Before the assassination, Omani mediators say a deal was within reach, including Iranian concessions on uranium stockpiles. Ali Vaez of the International Crisis Group has said the strike removed “the most pragmatic decision-maker in the system,” closing a door on nuclear diplomacy that had been open and strengthening hardliners with far less interest in a deal.

The aftermath bears that out. Within weeks, Iran’s Tasnim news agency was calling for leaving the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty “as soon as possible,” and Iranian MPs were floating both NPT withdrawal and the idea of acquiring warheads from abroad. Oman’s foreign minister, Badr Albusaidi, said Washington had “lost control of its own foreign policy” and that Israel had pushed it into what he called a grave miscalculation and a catastrophe.

The war that followed cost more than lives. On 21 June the US bombed Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan. Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz produced what the International Energy Agency called the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has said American sanctions policy was “a direct factor” in Iran’s currency instability and domestic unrest, the very unrest the strike was supposed to exploit.

What Washington has to show for it

A 60-day framework signed remotely on 17 June by Trump and Pezeshkian, with Trump putting his name to it from Versailles during a G7 stop, now sits behind a fragile ceasefire, sanctions relief talks and a resumed nuclear negotiation. If that framework produces a deal, the White House will claim the pressure worked. It has not produced one yet, and the record so far does not support the claim: the diplomacy on the table now is diplomacy that existed before the strike, on terms Tehran was already offering through Oman, minus the pragmatists the strike killed.

An intelligence picture drawn up in Tel Aviv told Washington that Khamenei was isolated and that removing him would break the Iranian state. It was wrong. The bill for that misjudgement was paid by 120 children in a schoolroom in Minab.