By OUR CORRESPONDENT
BERLIN — 100 days after a devastating missile strike decimated an elementary school in southern Iran, Tehran’s diplomatic corps has launched a sharp rhetorical offensive, accusing Western governments and human rights organizations of becoming “complicit” in war crimes through their continued silence.
The condemnation, delivered on Tuesday by Majid Nili Ahmadabadi, Iran’s ambassador to Germany, centers on the February 28 bombing of the Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in the coastal city of Minab.
The strike, which occurred during the opening hours of a massive joint U.S.-Israeli air campaign against Iran, resulted in the deaths of 156 civilians—including 120 children—making it the single bloodiest mass-casualty event of the brief but devastating conflict.
”The silence, justification, and delay of human rights advocates in condemning the massacre of elementary school students make them complicit with the perpetrators of this war crime,” Mr. Ahmadabadi said in a statement broadcast by the state-run Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA).
The ambassador noted that more than three months have passed since what he characterized as “the bloodiest missile attack on a school in modern times,” describing the victims as children “whose crime was nothing more than carrying books, pencils, and thoughts.”
He added that history would not forget Western officials who “cowardly took refuge in silence instead of standing by the victims.”
The strike on the Shajareh Tayyebeh school has remained a deeply sensitive geopolitical flashpoint, even as a fragile, Pakistan-mediated cease-fire has largely held since early April.
The school, located in Minab’s Shahrak-e Al-Mahdi neighborhood, sat adjacent to a heavily fortified naval base belonging to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Asif Missile Brigade. On the morning of February 28, the United States launched Operation Epic Fury, a torrent of nearly 900 strikes in 12 hours aimed at neutralizing Iran’s ballistic missile infrastructure and senior leadership following months of escalating regional tensions.
While President Donald J. Trump initially claimed, without presenting evidence, that the tragedy was caused by an “inaccurate” misfired Iranian munition, international investigators and independent journalists quickly debunked that narrative.
Munitions experts identified debris recovered from the flattened two-story concrete building as fragments of an American-made Tomahawk land-attack missile.
Human rights groups, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, have called for a formal war crimes investigation. A preliminary Pentagon assessment leaked to The New York Times in March suggested that the school was “triple-tapped” by guided munitions due to the U.S. military’s reliance on outdated intelligence.
The data used to program the strikes reportedly failed to recognize that the school building, though historically connected to the IRGC complex, had been completely walled off and operating purely as a civilian educational institution for at least nine years.
The Rhetorical Battle Over Human Rights
Western governments have largely avoided issuing explicit statements of condemnation regarding the Minab strike, a hesitation that Tehran has aggressively seized upon to portray Western humanitarian values as hypocritical.
In his address from Berlin, Mr. Ahmadabadi targeted what he described as the selective empathy of European and American leaders. By remaining silent, he argued, Western institutions have effectively provided political cover for a catastrophic failure of the military principle of precaution.
Independent monitoring groups notes that the humanitarian toll of the conflict has been severe. According to data compiled by regional rights organizations, U.S. and Israeli air strikes through the spring destroyed dozens of schools and healthcare facilities across Iran, causing thousands of civilian casualties.
Yet, for Tehran, the ruins of the Minab school have become a potent symbol. According to local accounts of the attack, school administrators had begun frantically calling parents to retrieve their children shortly after the wider air raids began at 10:00 a.m.
A first missile struck the adjacent IRGC compound, prompting teachers to huddle dozens of students into a central prayer room for safety. Moments later, subsequent strikes hit the school building directly, causing the roof to collapse and trapping hundreds under concrete debris.
As diplomatic talks slowly progress to resolve the ongoing maritime blockade in the Strait of Hormuz, the political fallout from Minab underscores a harsh reality: while the physical combat may have paused under the April cease-fire, the bitter narrative warfare between Tehran and the West shows no signs of cooling down.
The conflict broke out on February 28, 2026, following a massive wave of civil unrest inside Iran earlier that winter. Citing a severe domestic crackdown by Iranian security forces and stalled nuclear negotiations, the Trump administration enacted a major military buildup in the Persian Gulf.
The opening salvos of Operation Epic Fury successfully assassinated Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, but plunged the entire region into a chaotic multi-front war involving missile exchanges across Saudi Arabia, the U.A.E., and Israel.
The “Targeting Error” Contradiction: The core of the diplomatic dispute hinges on intent versus negligence. The U.S. position has quietly shifted from outright denial to an implied intelligence failure, framing the school as collateral damage from an attack directed at the neighboring IRGC coastal defense naval base.
Conversely, human rights organizations emphasize that under international humanitarian law, failing to verify that a target is a civilian object before ordering an attack constitutes a failure of due diligence and a potential war crime.
Tehran’s Strategy of Western Discredit: Ever since the April 8 cease-fire took effect, Iran’s foreign ministry has systematically used international forums and European diplomatic outposts to highlight civilian casualties.
By keeping the Minab school bombing in the public eye, Iran aims to weaken the moral authority of Western human rights critiques regarding its own domestic governance, while applying pressure on European nations to distance themselves from Washington’s hardline stance.