US Tomahawk hit naval base beside Iranian school, video shows
Malachy Browne and John Ismay
New York/Washington: A newly released video adds to the evidence that a US missile probably hit an Iranian elementary school where 175 people, many of them children, were reported killed.
The video, uploaded on Sunday by Iran’s semiofficial Mehr News Agency and verified by The New York Times, shows a Tomahawk cruise missile striking a naval base beside the school in the town of Minab on February 28. The US military is the only force involved in the conflict that uses Tomahawk missiles.
A body of evidence assembled by the Times – including satellite imagery, social media posts and other verified videos – indicates that the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school building was severely damaged by a precision strike that occurred at the same time as attacks on the naval base. The base is operated by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard.
Asked by a reporter from the Times on Saturday if the United States had bombed the school, US President Donald Trump said: “No. In my opinion and based on what I’ve seen, that was done by Iran. They’re very inaccurate, as you know, with their munitions.”
Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, who was standing beside Trump, said the Pentagon was investigating, “but the only side that targets civilians is Iran”.
The video of the strike, which was first reported by the research collective Bellingcat, was independently verified by the Times, which compared features visible in the footage to new satellite imagery captured days after the strikes in Minab.
The video was filmed from a construction site opposite the base and shows a worn, dirt path across a grassy area and piles of debris also evident in recent satellite imagery, bolstering its credibility. The video also comports with other verified videos taken in the immediate aftermath of the strikes.
A Times analysis of the video shows the missile striking a building described as a medical clinic in the Revolutionary Guard base. Plumes of smoke and debris shoot out of the building after it is hit, as the distant screams of onlookers are heard.
As the camera pans to the right, large plumes of dust and smoke are already billowing from the area around the school, suggesting that it had been struck shortly before the strike on the naval base. This is supported by a timeline of the strikes assembled by the Times that shows the school was hit about the same time as the base.
Several other buildings inside the naval base were also hit by precision strikes in the attack, an analysis of satellite imagery shows. Determining precisely what happened has been impeded by the lack of visible weapons fragments and the inability of outside reporters to reach the scene.
The Times has identified the weapon seen in the new video as a Tomahawk cruise missile, a weapon that neither the Israeli military nor the Iranian military has. Dozens of Tomahawks have been launched by US Navy warships into Iran since February 28, when the US-Israeli attack on Iran began. US Central Command said a video it released of several Tomahawks being launched from ships was filmed on February 28, the day the Iranian base and school were hit.
The US Defence Department describes Tomahawks as “long-range, highly accurate” guided missiles that can fly about 1600 kilometres. They are programmed with a specific flight plan before launch, and the missiles steer themselves to their targets. Each Tomahawk is about six metres long and has a wingspan of 2.6 metres, according to the navy. The most commonly used Tomahawks have warheads that contain the explosive power of about 136 kilograms of TNT.
Trevor Ball, a former US Army explosive ordnance disposal technician, also identified the missile in the video as a Tomahawk, as did another weapons expert, Chris Cobb-Smith, director of Chiron Resources, a security and logistics agency.
Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine said at a news conference on Wednesday that US forces were carrying out strikes in southern Iran at the time the naval base and school were hit. A map he presented showed that an area including Minab, which is near the Strait of Hormuz, had been targeted by strikes in the first 100 hours of the operation, although it did not explicitly identify the town.
“Along the southern axis, the USS Abraham Lincoln strike group has continued to provide pressure from the sea along the south-eastern side of the coast and has been attriting naval capability all along the strait,” the general said.
It is not the only time that Caine has acknowledged the role Tomahawk missiles played in the early hours of the war.
“The first shooters at sea were Tomahawks unleashed by the United States Navy,” he said in a briefing to reporters at the Pentagon on March 2, as the navy “began to conduct strikes across the southern flank in Iran”.
In June, a navy submarine launched more than two dozen Tomahawks at a nuclear facility in Isfahan, Iran, as part of the 12-day war.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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