The families torn apart by the Minab school bombing

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:09Today, what really happened in the bombing of a primary school in Iran?

0:20A warning before we start, this episode does have discussion on losing children killed in war. It's February 27th, a Friday afternoon in Ramadan Families are getting ready for iftar, like they do all month, to break the fast together Fridays are extra special In the small city of Manab in the south of Iran, more than a thousand miles away from the capital Two households settle into the rhythm and chaos of life with small children Zahra's eight years old

0:55Tess McClure:She loves art. She loves to paint. She loves cutting and pasting. And her parents say that when they can smell glue in the house, that's when they know that Zara's been up to something. Zara's mum and dad, Hussain and Marze, they dote on their little girl. She's got a toothy grin, pinch me cheeks and big dreams. She did want to be a doctor when she was little, when she was a preschooler. And now since she's settled in at primary school, she loves her teacher. She's decided she wants to be a teacher. Over in the other household, Zara's schoolmates are keeping their parents busy. Subban is 10 years old and Hania is 7, his little sister.

1:47Tess McClure:They both love to play. They love ball games, soccer, rough and tumble, jumping on their dad's shoulders. These two are really cute. Soban has huge eyes and Honia has a hint of mischief in hers. Soban was their first son. And when he was born, they were told by doctors that he'd had delays in his growth and would likely have learning disabilities. so Matsia, his mother and father, just poured energy into helping him to thrive. She used to take him every day to go to speech therapy so he ultimately learned to speak when he was almost five and to have him at primary school with his wee sister and doing well was a huge achievement for their family.

2:46In the morning, Zahra, Soban and Hanyer will wake up and get ready for school like they do every Saturday. Their parents will juggle the usual chores, breakfast, school run, work. It's a morning like hundreds of others. It's the last one they'll share. From The Guardian, I'm Noshin Iqbal. Today in Focus, the Minab school strike and the lives of Iranian families blown apart by the war.

3:17Tess McClure:So we were able to conduct these interviews through an intermediary in Farsi where each of the families told us in a lot of detail what happened to them. Tess McClure is the Guardian's Rights and Freedom Editor, and she's gotten interviews with several families in Manab, including Zahra, Sobhan and Hania's. Using those interviews, we were able to reconstruct how the day unfolded.

3:52Tess McClure:So the night before, Zara's parents went to visit their in-laws, and Zara stayed home with her older brother babysitting her. They prepared their own iftar together to break the fast and sent their parents a photo of the food that they'd made. Zahra and her brother Ali had become really close over this Ramadan in particular and liked to bunk down together in the same bed. So when the parents get home at 11pm, classically they're still up and chatting and they sent them to bed late at that point.

4:31Tess McClure:So the next morning Zahra wakes up and she's looking around for her textbooks. She's got a science project that day that she needs a torch and a string of lights for, which are closely guarded by her older brother Ali. He's reluctant to let his little sister take them into school. So she promises him that she won't break them, and they finally head off to school with her armed with her things. The school week starts on Saturday in Iran, and Hanyay and her big brother Soban, who go to the same school as Zahra, are up early too.

5:10Tess McClure:Soban and Hania's mother, Matsya Ashani, also wakes up early. She gets her kids ready for school. Hania that morning, surprisingly for her, she sometimes oversleeps, but that morning she's awake, she's ready to go, she's dressed, she's even cleaned her backpack the night before to get to school on time. So Matsya gets the kids ready and sends them off with their dad to do the school run. She hasn't been sleeping well, so she stays home and has a nap.

5:49Tess McClure:Muhammad Ritza, their dad, drops them at the school gate. He sees Soban, tumbles out of the car and grabs his sister Hania in a giant bear hug. and he thinks, you know, I'm really grateful that I have a son that loves his wee sister in this way. And then he waits at the curb there and watches them go inside.

6:21Tess McClure:Then a couple of hours after they've been dropped off, Zara's mother gets a call from her teacher at about quarter past 11 saying that the kids need to be picked up. She doesn't say why. She's in a rush. She's got a lot of parents to call, it turns out that morning. She just hangs up and moves on. Zara's mother calls her husband. They discuss the logistics. Zara's uncle is asked to head to the school. They hang up the call. Moments later, she hears a bang.

7:01Tess McClure:Her first thought is that it's her preschooler son, Mohammed, has got out onto the balcony and learned to slam it shut as part of a new game. She calls out to him, tells him to stop it, but he says it's not him. And then she hears the next bang, which is a huge explosion. It makes the whole house rattle. rattle. Subhan and Hania's parents have got the same hurried phone call. Mohamed Ratzai is already on the way to pick them up when he hears the same gun.

7:38Tess McClure:He doesn't know what it is, but he hits traffic as he gets closer to the school. It's almost gridlocked, none of the cars are moving, there's loads of parents trying to get there. So he parks up and he starts making his way to the school on foot.

7:59At home, Zahra's mother is beginning to panic.

8:06Tess McClure:She calls back her teacher that called, but she's not picking up the phone. And she starts calling everyone she can think of at the school, the Quran teacher, the head principal, she even calls the janitor. No one's picking up the phone. While Marzia's on the phone, frantically trying to get through to anyone, her husband Hussein arrives at the school to the most devastating scene.

8:37The school has been bombed. The building is in ruins. School bags and desks, toys and books are scattered among the debris.

8:50Tess McClure:He walks in and just sees this huge pile of rubble and he immediately goes to start digging through looking for his daughter. He goes to the place where the staircase would have been because he has this idea in his head that maybe she would have tried to get out down the stairs and he'll find her there and he's just digging with his hands pulling at the rubble trying to find a person underneath.

9:30In shock Hussein calls his wife

9:35Tess McClure:he doesn't want her to lose hope he tells her to pray and she also gets a ride with relatives to the school.

9:47Tess McClure:While she's there, she's watching as occasionally a child will be dug out of the rubble and very occasionally one of the children will be brought out alive. So she stands there and she prays that Zara will be found. Still on foot, having made his way through the traffic, Mohamed Retsa, Subhan and Hanya's father, finally arrives at the site.

10:19Tess McClure:He arrives at the school gate and kind of can't believe what he's seeing in front of him. He's bewildered by the site initially. The buildings that he's expecting to see there are just gone. He keeps looking around for the classrooms and they're flattened. He calls his wife. She's woken by a call from her husband. He's crying. He's saying something about the school being hit. But the phone line isn't working properly at that point and she can't get a full explanation. She steps out onto the street outside and sees her brother passing on a motorbike. he's able to pick her up and he takes her to the school.

11:19Tess McClure:While he's at the school, Mohamed Retzer hears from one of the other mothers there that Soban actually had survived the initial blast when the girls' side of the school was hit. he and some of the other boys had run out into the playground, and some of those boys had survived the explosion. But Sobhan, knowing that his little sister was in that destroyed building, went back in to find her and was killed by shrapnel in a subsequent blast.

12:02Tess McClure:After Hussein has been digging for a while some of the other parents in the crowd around him he hears from them that Zara was actually one of the first kids to be found she's already been found and she's already died so he goes to the morgue to find her and he finds Zahra there and is able to identify her.

12:30Tess McClure:Mohamed Ritsa, after searching for his children at the site and sending out relatives to try and find them, also goes to the morgue to look for them and he finds Hania and Soban there. Go on. He knows Soban immediately, even though he's been very severely injured. His legs are broken, half of his face is gone, he's missing an eye, but it's still him. It's still Soban. And he finds Haniyeh there as well. Her head has been fractured, but she's still mostly intact. Haniyeh.

13:23Hussein, Zara's father, heads back to the scene.

13:29Tess McClure:He doesn't go back home. He makes his way back to the school and back to the pile of rubble that he had been digging at, trying to pull these lumps of concrete and debris off and look for the children underneath. He says that at that point he had this thought of all the other girls, that it wasn't just his daughter, that if he could find any child under the debris, and occasionally one of the other parents or the people at the scene will recognise him and they know that Zara is dead. They tell him to go home, but he keeps digging until late in that evening as the light fades.

14:23A short time ago, the United States military began major combat operations in Iran. Our objective is to defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime. Airstrikes hit an elementary school Saturday, killing more than 160 people, mostly children. It is a war. That's all. Schools are protected spaces under international humanitarian law. And at this stage, no one has taken responsibility for this strike. There's only one entity in this conflict between us and Iran that never targets civilians. Literally never targets civilians.

15:08Tess, reading your reporting, interviewing those parents about their horrific loss and what happened that day in Minar, it really just made me cry. And now hearing their voices is so heartbreaking. You've been investigating the story from the beginning. Can you tell me about the impact of the bombing on that school?

15:28Tess McClure:I mean the impact of dropping a 2 ,000 plus pound bomb on a primary school full of children, mostly 7 to 12 years old and their teachers, is just kind of unimaginable. Manab is not a huge city for that community the loss of 130 plus girls and around 30 teachers is just an incredible loss for those families and I think what comes through as well when you listen to their voices listen to them describing their children is just this incredible ordinariness of family life up until that moment that just has transformed all of their lives forever. How did you go about verifying photographs and video from their site and what did you see and learn?

16:26Tess McClure:So in the hours after the bombing when the news first started to emerge there were a few videos that started to come out on Iranian social media. And those were initially verified by looking at the videos and comparing them to satellite imagery of the site. And you can see certain markers in the videos like walls, trees, telephone towers that allow you to know that those were shot at that site. And in the case of Manab, quite quickly, a large number of videos were clearly coming from this place that you could see in satellite imagery was the school. And obviously, a lot of the content wasn't published on the Guardian site, presumably because it was so graphic and sensitive, but sifting through that material, what kind of damage could you see had been done?

17:23Tess McClure:There are a lot of photographs and videos from the site that we don't publish because they're too graphic. But you can see that the building itself has mostly been completely levelled. It's really reduced to dust and rubble. It's like a two-storey school. Yeah, a multi-storey school that's split into two halves. One half where the girls were taught and the other half the boys. The girls' side was completely destroyed and the boys' side is very severely damaged as well. But there are the horrendous damage, not just to the building, obviously, but to the children inside of it. There are photographs and videos of very small children's limbs being dug out of the rubble of their bodies, covered in dust, being carried out, those kinds of things.

18:17Tess, almost immediately after the strike, there were these claims made by the Israelis that the school was part of a military facility and therefore somehow a legitimate target. How did that idea take hold?

18:29Tess McClure:So the school over a decade ago was part of a wider complex of buildings that were associated with Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps, which is a kind of domestic military, and with the naval barracks. So there's a wider complex of buildings that includes some multi-use buildings. There's a cultural center, a medical clinic, and some barracks buildings as well. And around nine years ago, we can tell from satellite imagery, maybe even longer, the school was walled off from the rest of that wider complex. Right. So it's separated completely. It has a separate entrance. It's no longer part of that complex of buildings.

19:16Tess McClure:and at that point the school also developed some visual indicators where you can see that that has been transitioned into an educational facility. So things like? You can see the murals on the walls, these kind of colourful educational murals. You can see evidence of a playground. You can see a football field painted on the grounds. and you can also online, there was a functioning website for the school, it had an internet presence, so it had very much been operating as a school, as an educational facility, separate from the IRGC buildings for a long time. Tess, there's also been this battle playing out online over what information is true, what is real and what isn't.

20:07I think one of the striking things I remember is this argument over this really devastating image of the graves of these children lined up and this aerial photo of it being shared on social media and then immediately people claiming that it was AI, it was from somewhere else, it wasn't real. I mean, how have you processed things like that and how you've gone about your reporting?

20:32Tess McClure:So in the case of that photograph, it shows the graveyard at Manab as they prepare to bury those children. There's a huge amount of evidence that that photograph is real. It also doesn't show any evidence of tampering or AI. So in that case, we have a very confronting piece of evidence of this war crime that people are being told or are choosing to believe is fake. This is definitely a growing issue, this kind of twofold thing happening, which is firstly that there's a huge number of AI photographs and videos circulating, which have to be closely inspected to see if they are AI, which often requires looking at them frame by frame.

21:19Tess McClure:And then there's also this flip side to that, which is we're seeing real photographs and real evidence dismissed as AI by people who are increasingly used to seeing images that can be faked or are being outright told that those images are faked. So the misinformation that's spreading is only growing, and I think it's becoming extremely difficult for people to know how to discern.

21:52Coming up, piecing together the evidence that the United States bombed the school in Manab.

22:11How did investigators come to work out who was most likely behind the attack?