Israel and the United States launched a joint attack on Iran Saturday morning, bombing several cities in the country. As a result, Iran Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed, his death confirmed by state media Sunday. Also included in the casualties were reportedly dozens of children at a girls' school.
Amir-Saeid Iravani, Iran's ambassador to the United Nations, said that more than 100 children were killed at the bombing of the Shajarah Tayyiba school in the city of Minab. The school was located near an Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps naval base. Via the Washington Post, photos and videos showed rescue workers digging through the rubble and backpacks covered in dust and blood. One video showed a man holding up a severed arm. A spokesperson for United States Central Command said it was looking into the reports.
In an article published Saturday, Drop Site spoke to some of the parents of the victims:
Fatima al-Zahra Mohammad Ali, a nine-year-old student, was among those killed. "When we arrived at the school, the place was in chaos," her mother, Amina Ansari, told Drop Site. The girl’s father, Mohammad Ali, who lost his right leg during the Iran-Iraq war, did not want to speak.
"The school itself didn’t know how to handle the situation," Ansari said. "There was no accurate information about what was happening. Every time we asked someone they said, ‘Be patient until we get the girls out from under the rubble.'" The family did not learn that Fatima had been killed until around 4 p.m., when her body was discovered.
This past June, Israel attacked Iran, killing hundreds of civilians; the U.S. provided support by bombing sites of nuclear facilities. The purported reason for this bloodshed is regime change, more accurately motivated by the manufactured specter of another country having nuclear weapons, but Donald Trump has never bothered to put much effort in his messaging when it comes to international affairs. As usual, he didn't even go through the process of attaining congressional authorization; members of Congress are already trying to force a vote for Monday.
If you listen to the aggressors tell it, it's actually preemptive to fire missiles at a country. The beats of the story are exceedingly familiar: Israel felt threatened, and its "right to defend itself" extends to killing children. The focus will stay on Khamenei's death rather than the heavy collateral damage, like in 2024, when Israel rigged and detonated pagers all across Lebanon to attack Hezbollah, and killed a couple of kids in the process.
Even though polling shows that most Americans don't want to bomb Iran or start all-out war there, the Trump administration is committed to pointless violence around the globe. Senator Lindsey Graham gets positively tumescent for destruction in Iran. These ghouls were so excited about the prospect that some of them reportedly boasted about it in the open at a restaurant near the White House, hours before the bombing began. They can't be trusted not to injure and kill their own citizens, and they're stupid and arrogant enough to believe that they'll be the first to create a power vacuum that doesn't lead to worse outcomes.
It's all so needless and grotesque: the Mar-a-Lago Situation Room, the title "Operation Epic Fury," the ability to bet on the bloodlust through Polymarket and profit off dead bodies in a more direct manner than Lockheed Martin stock. You wouldn't trust anyone in the Trump administration to water your garden properly, and yet they get to decide who and what gets blown up. Everyone else has to suffer the consequences, this time none more greatly than those girls and their families. The regime in Iran will change as a result of these attacks, but it won't be in the way that Israel and the U.S. intended.
