Deleted: It is often said that the worst evils are not committed by monsters or sadists, but by horrifyingly ordinary people.
“The only people we need to worry about right now are the Iranians who think they can survive,” US “Secretary of the Army” Pete Hegseth said in a recent media interview with disarming calm. Words uttered without hesitation, as if the prospect of the death of millions of people was simply a strategic calculation.
In southern Iran, a familiar sound quietly travels through villages before the sun rises over the coast. It’s the sound of a range ship preparing to set sail. The weathered wooden hull creaks against the tide, the sails unfurl slowly, and fishermen pull their lines in the early morning stillness. There’s a saying in the South: “A range that doesn’t know the sea will be destroyed by the first wave.” To the people of our coast, the range is more than just a boat. It is a symbol of life itself, of perseverance against the sea, storms and a fate that is rarely calm.
I’m that same son of the South. There, the sea has long taught people how to brave the waves. However, on the morning of February 28th, an unexpected wave reached the south.
It was 10:45 in the morning. The classrooms at Shajare Tayebe Girls’ Primary School in Minab City were filled with children. The girls, ages 7 to 12, sat behind desks and opened notebooks. The rhythm of reading and the quiet voices of learning wafted through the hallways.
At that moment, thousands of miles away, in a control room filled with digital screens, a button was pressed.
A Tomahawk cruise missile, one of the world’s most precisely guided weapons, was fired from a U.S. Navy ship. Such missiles are designed to attack with extraordinary precision. You can select a specific building among many and attack targets within a few meters.
That morning, the target was not a military installation.
The target was a girls’ elementary school.
The first missile crashed through the roof of the classroom, causing the building to collapse. Seconds later, a second missile landed in the courtyard, where children who had escaped falling debris were struggling to breathe under a cloud of dust. A third explosion occurred, and the noise of life was replaced by an unbearable silence.
When the smoke finally cleared, all that remained were burnt textbooks scattered between broken desks, small shoes on the ground, and the screams of mothers calling their daughters’ names amidst the rubble.
Approximately 170 people were killed, most of them female students, and about 100 were injured. These numbers cannot convey the human reality they represent.
This was no accident. The timing alone speaks with unmistakable clarity. It was 10:45 a.m. on a Saturday morning, the very first hours of the war, when classrooms were filled with children. If the missile can attack within 5 meters, it would be hard to mistake a classroom for a military facility. Satellite images taken before and after the attack, remnants of U.S. munitions, and verified video recordings all point to the same conclusion.
This was not an error. That was the message conveyed on the first day of the war: even the most remote communities in southern Iran could be reduced to ruin. The goal was to instill fear from the beginning, break people’s resolve, and normalize the idea that nowhere is safe, not even the classroom.
The repeated targeting of schools is clearly intentional and demonstrates the necessary intent.
Minab was more than an isolated tragedy. This pattern is being repeated all over the country. Scores of civilians were killed, residential areas reduced to rubble, commercial centers destroyed, medical facilities damaged, and schools damaged or destroyed. Even the Red Crescent building, a universal symbol of humanitarian protection, was not spared.
These repeated attacks reveal a clear pattern rather than a series of unfortunate mistakes. The targets are not troops on the battlefield, but the very structures of daily life such as homes, hospitals, and schools. When you get hit in those places over and over again, you can’t ignore their intentions.
This pattern of criminal behavior was clearly confirmed by US President Donald Trump on March 10, when he publicly threatened the Iranian state and its civilian infrastructure, declaring: “We will remove easily destructible targets that will make it virtually impossible for Iran to rebuild itself as a nation again. Death, fire and wrath will reign over them.”
From the perspective of international law, this situation cannot be understood as a mere violation of the laws of war. This falls squarely within a series of serious violations that international criminal justice has defined and condemned for decades. War, even in its most violent forms, is not lawless. The rules governing armed conflict exist precisely to protect civilians from that fear, and when those rules are broken, responsibility does not disappear in the fog of war.
The foundations of modern international criminal law were laid at the International Military Tribunals in Nuremberg and Tokyo after World War II. There, the international community affirmed a principle that has since become a cornerstone of justice: those who command military forces cannot escape responsibility by claiming they are merely following orders. With authority comes corresponding responsibility.
This principle has been repeatedly reaffirmed in subsequent international tribunals. In the case of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, Prosecutor v. Tihomir Blaskic, the judges ruled that the deliberate destruction of educational and religious institutions during armed conflicts constitutes a war crime.
A court investigating the atrocities committed in the village of Amiti concluded that the destruction of the village’s mosque and school was not the result of battlefield chaos, but part of a calculated operation aimed at terrorizing civilians. Commanders were held accountable because they ordered a crime or failed to prevent a crime.
Similarly, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda has established in cases such as Prosecutor v. Jean-Paul Akayesu that attacks on places of refuge for civilians, such as schools and churches, are serious violations of international humanitarian law. People who take refuge in such places, especially children, are combatants who are outside the scope of the fighting and are entitled to absolute protection.
These principles are codified in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. Article 8(2)(b)(ix) defines a deliberate attack on a building dedicated to education as a war crime, unless it is for military purposes. This rule reflects the basic principles of distinction and proportionality embedded in the Geneva Conventions and their Additional Protocols. In other words, wars are fought against combatants, not against classrooms, hospitals, and homes.
In the case of Shajare Tayebeh School in Minab, the legal issues are tragically clear. The precisely designed missile struck the school building at the exact moment the children were present. The result was a human catastrophe rather than collateral damage, and the voices of more than 100 children were never heard in their classrooms again.
But international law goes beyond specifying physical acts. We will also investigate the chain of command that enables such actions. In the structure of the U.S. military, ultimate authority over military operations rests with the President, the commander-in-chief. Mr. Trump is at the top of the chain of command and has ultimate political and military responsibility for the initiation and conduct of military operations.
Directly below that structure is the Hegseth, who as the “Secretary of the Army” is the highest civilian authority within the “Ministry of War” and is responsible for planning and executing military operations through the military command hierarchy.
His own public statements reflect an unapologetic stance against violations, including statements that there are “stupid rules of engagement” and that there is no such thing as a “politically correct” war.
In international criminal law, these positions are not just political positions. They have legal obligations. The Command Responsibility Doctrine provides that commanders can be held criminally responsible if they order a crime and if they know, or should have known, that such a crime is being committed and fail to prevent it.
The experience of international criminal justice reveals a recurring truth. When schools, homes, and hospitals are repeatedly attacked, such attacks are rarely isolated incidents. They form part of a broader strategy, an attack on the foundations of everyday life aimed at destroying people’s psyches.
History remembers such patterns, just as it remembers the names of those who suffered from them.
There is a saying in southern Iran that says, “A storm-damaged range is never really lost; the sea eventually brings its debris back to shore.” Memories of justice work in much the same way. The names of Minab’s children will someday reach those shores.
The Iranian nation will not shrink from defending its country or seeking justice for the blood of its people.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial stance of Al Jazeera.
