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Residents of the Iranian city of Minab gathered July 21 to bury 62 body fragments identified as belonging to 32 students, nearly five months after a U.S. strike on the Shajareh Tayyebeh School on the opening day of the American-Israeli war against Iran.
The remains, recovered during weeks of search operations at the school and surrounding areas, were carried through the streets of the southern province of Hormozgan in a funeral procession before burial at the city’s martyrs’ cemetery.
Grieving parents and other residents had gathered earlier that day at the site where the coffins were prepared, to bid farewell to what remained of their children.
Mojtaba Qahramani, head of Hormozgan’s judiciary, said no trace has been found of 7-year-old Makan Nasiri, a first-grader who remains the only identified victim whose body has not been recovered, despite multiple specialized searches.
Qahramani told the Fars news agency that the missile struck directly at the spot where Makan was reportedly standing at the moment of impact.
An empty grave has been prepared for the boy. His personal belongings — a bloodstained sweater and a single sneaker — are kept in a glass display case at a nearby mosque.
His parents have spent months searching for any sign of their son. “Where am I supposed to look for my son?” his father said in an interview earlier this year.
Among those buried July 21 were the remains of Amirali Kamali, identified after five months of DNA testing on the recovered fragments.
Iranian officials describe the February 28 strike on the elementary school as the deadliest single attack on civilians of the war. They put the death toll at 168, including 120 students and 26 teachers, with more than 110 people wounded.
Minab’s prosecutor said 73 boys and 47 girls were among the students killed, and that the dead also included seven parents who had rushed to the school to retrieve their children after hearing reports of strikes on Tehran.
According to Iranian investigators, three Tomahawk land-attack cruise missiles hit the school in three separate strikes.
Ravina Shamdasani, a spokesperson for the United Nations Human Rights Office, said “the families of the little girls who were killed are entitled to the truth of how this happened.”
Minab Governor Mohammad Radmehr said the 62 fragments buried July 21 were matched to the 32 named students through DNA analysis. Iranian authorities have said the school will be registered as a national heritage site.
Months after the strike, the Pentagon still has not completed a standard intelligence review that would establish exactly what happened, according to multiple U.S. officials and media reports.
The military finished the first two stages of its assessment within days, confirming that American forces had struck the school. However, the final review — standard procedure for incidents involving mass civilian casualties — was never ordered.
U.S. officials cited in some recent reports said senior military commanders bypassed warnings in targeting databases indicating that intelligence on Iranian targets was outdated. The decision was reportedly made for “expediency,” as commanders rushed to finalize target lists at the outset of the war.
President Donald Trump, asked in a Fox News interview about satellite imagery showing what were described as fragments of a Tomahawk missile at the site, suggested the images could be “AI generated.”
More than two dozen Democratic senators have since demanded answers from the Pentagon, writing that “there is no justification for withholding an unclassified accounting of what happened, what went wrong, and what the Department is doing to prevent recurrence.”
The school massacre was a severe test of international humanitarian law, which has so far failed to hold the U.S. accountable for one of the clearest war crimes in modern history.
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