More than 62 body fragments belonging to 32 students martyred in a US airstrike on an Iranian elementary school have been identified through DNA testing and buried, nearly five months after the attack that killed 168 people, most of them children.
The remains, recovered during weeks of search operations at the Shajareh Tayyebeh School in Minab and surrounding areas, were carried through the streets of Hormozgan province in a funeral procession Wednesday before burial at the city’s martyrs’ cemetery.
Grieving parents gathered earlier at the site where coffins were prepared to bid a final farewell to what remained of their children.
Mojtaba Qahramani, head of Hormozgan’s judiciary, said that despite multiple specialized search operations at the school and its environs, no trace has been found of 7-year-old Makan Nasiri, a first-grader who remains the only victim whose body has never been recovered.
Qahramani told the Fars news agency that the US missile struck directly at the location where Makan was standing at the moment of impact.
An empty grave has been prepared for Makan, while his personal belongings including a bloodstained sweater and a single sneaker are preserved 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 asked in an interview earlier this year, his eyes filled with tears.
The Feb. 28 strike on the Shajareh Tayyebeh School occurred on the first day of the US-Israeli terrorist military campaign against Iran and is considered the war’s deadliest attack on civilians.
Iranian officials put the death toll at 168, including 120 students and 26 teachers. More than 110 people were wounded.
Investigations indicate three precision-strike Tomahawk missiles hit the school. The school was struck three separate times.
The attack has drawn condemnation from the United Nations and human rights groups. “The families of the little girls who were killed are entitled to the truth of how this happened,” Ravina Shamdasani, a UN Human Rights Office spokesperson, said.
The 62 fragments buried Wednesday were identified as belonging to 32 students, according to Minab Governor Mohammad Rademehr.
Among them were remains of Amirali Kamali, identified after five months of searching. The recovered fragments had been awaiting DNA identification for weeks before the funeral ceremony.
Minab’s prosecutor said 73 boys and 47 girls were among the students killed. The dead also included seven parents who had rushed to the school to retrieve their children after hearing reports of airstrikes on Tehran.
The school is set to be registered as a national site in Iran, recognizing its significance as a symbol of sacrifice and resilience.
Months after the strike, the Pentagon has refused to complete a standard intelligence review that would establish exactly what happened, according to multiple US officials and media reports.
The military completed the first two stages of its assessment within days of the strike, confirming US forces hit the school. But the final intelligence review — standard procedure for incidents involving mass civilian casualties — was never ordered.
Senior US military commanders bypassed warnings in critical targeting databases that intelligence on Iranian targets was severely outdated, according to three sources familiar with the decision-making process. The decision to ignore the warnings was made for “expediency,” as commanders rushed to finalize target lists at the outset of the war, the sources said.
President Donald Trump, in a Fox News interview, said the findings may never be made public.
“I don’t think anybody is ever going to be able to say what happened there,” he said. When pressed on satellite imagery showing fragments of a US Tomahawk missile at the site, Trump suggested the images could be “AI generated.”
More than two dozen Democratic senators demanded answers, 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”.
