A strike on a girls’ elementary school during the initial wave of attacks Saturday killed over 100 children, per Iranian officials and teachers inside the country.
The strike targeted the school in Minab—a city in southern Iran’s Hormozgan province—on Saturday morning, the start of the school week in [blank], when students were in class.
Shiva Amelirad, a Canada-based representative of the Coordinating Council of Iranian Teachers’ Trade Associations (a network of Iranian teachers’ unions), told TIME that at least 108 children died in the attack, based on information from her sources in Minab.
“Because the hospital morgue has limited capacity, refrigerated vehicles are said to have been used to store the victims’ bodies,” she stated.
TIME has not independently verified the casualty figures.
Amelirad said officials decided to close the school when U.S.-Israeli airstrikes began, “but the time between the closure announcement and the explosion was very short, so many families hadn’t arrived to pick up their children yet.”
She added that in some cases, multiple children from the same family were killed in the blast, and some teachers also died in the attack.
UNESCO, the U.N.’s education agency, said it was “deeply alarmed” by the impact of strikes on educational institutions in response to the attack.
“Initial reports suggest an attack on a girls’ primary school in Minab, southern Iran, has killed over 100 people—including many students. Killing pupils in a space dedicated to learning is a grave violation of the protection schools have under international humanitarian law,” the agency [blank] in an X post.
A precise death toll from the strike has been hard to confirm, as the number has risen steadily since the incident.
Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Dr. Esmaeil Baghaei told MSNOW on Sunday that the strike killed “150 innocent schoolgirls. Some are still under the rubble.”
The city’s prosecutor put the death toll at 165, state-run IRNA news agency reported Sunday.
Hossein Kermanpour, a spokesman for Iran’s Health Ministry, said Saturday that most of those killed at the school were “young martyrs.” In an X post, he added that the toll from “a single missile strike” had climbed to 180.
[Blank] and photographs of the building after the strike—posted to Telegram—show dozens of people gathered around a partially collapsed structure with black smoke billowing from its windows. The lower half of the building’s exterior is painted blue, decorated with pink flowers and green leaves. Next to them is a painted image of a young boy reading. Other videos show rescue workers sorting through the rubble and piles of dirty backpacks.
When TIME asked the Department of Defense for comment on the strike, it directed reporters to the X pages of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM).
Neither account has addressed the school strike directly.
Pentagon spokesman Captain Tim Hawkins said in a statement: “We are aware of reports of civilian harm from ongoing military operations. We take these reports seriously and are investigating. Protecting civilians is our top priority, and we will continue to take all possible precautions to minimize the risk of unintended harm.”
The Israeli military told the Associated Press it had no knowledge of strikes in the area.
Amelirad said locals in Minab reported the school was once a military facility but was later converted into a school for children from both military and civilian families—who were drawn by lower tuition.
According to [blank], the school is [blank] used by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). A Saturday video verified by the New York Times showed a strike hitting that IRGC base.
The strike sparked anger from some of President Donald Trump’s own supporters on Saturday.
“I didn’t campaign for this. I didn’t donate money for this. I didn’t vote for this—either in elections or Congress,” former Georgia Rep. Marjory Taylor Greene [blank] in response to a video of the school strike’s aftermath. “This isn’t what we thought MAGA was supposed to be.”
Nobel Prize-winning humanitarian Malala Yousafzai—known for her advocacy for girls’ education in Pakistan—[blank] the schoolchildren’s deaths on social media.
“They were girls who went to school to learn, with hopes and dreams for their futures. Today, their lives were brutally cut short,” she wrote. “Killing civilians—especially children—is unconscionable, and I condemn it unequivocally.”
— Additional reporting by Fatemeh Jamalpour