How We Analyzed the Strike on the Iranian School | Visual Investigations

This is the result of the single deadliest known attack in this war so far. This aerial image shows around 100 graves being dug after an elementary school was hit in a town called Minab in southern Iran. You can see excavators there, workmen digging, graves that are marked out to be dug. These were mostly children. On Saturday morning when the US and Israel started its attacks on Iran, our colleagues got in touch with us and said there were reports of a school being hit. After the attack, this information started to swirl. There were denials online that the US or Israel was responsible. The question was, could we verify what happened? The first videos that emerged after the strike show these massive plumes of smoke over Manab, what was being described as the school building that had been destroyed and uh children under the rubble. The challenge there is to verify that this building is in fact a school. There were reports that it was near a military base of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. So we started looking for military bases in that area. Found one that had been bombed and adjacent to that military base was the school. We were able to match the architectural features of the school, the contours of the building, the size of it with satellite imagery. Going back over historic satellite imagery, we could see that the building that the school is in was part of the IRGC compound in 2013. But by September 2016, it had been cordoned off into its own compound. There was a play area. You could see the bright pastel colors of the school walls and it very clearly became a school and wasn't part of the IRGC base. What we can see in the satellite imagery and the images from the ground is that more than half the building is gone. a very powerful explosion. A precision strike is required to do that. It's not secondary damage from a strike nearby. A precision strike is where an army will take the coordinates of a target, input that into their targeting system, or visually identify a target and lock onto it. We can see in the satellite imagery precision strikes that destroyed buildings or punched holes in the roofs of those buildings very precisely. Our reporting has shown this is characteristic of Israeli and US strikes. So far, the US hasn't confirmed or denied responsibility for the strike on the school. Defense Secretary Pete Hgset said, >> "We of course never target uh civilian targets, but we're we're taking a look at investigating that." At the same briefing, Dan Kaine, who's the US military joint chief's chairman, said that during the first 100 hours of operations over Iran, Israel was bombing in the north and the US was bombing in the south, which is where the school in Manab is located. So given that the US was operating in that area at the time, the evidence seems to be pointing at US responsibility.

Neither the U.S. nor Israel has yet taken responsibility for an airstrike that hit an elementary school in southern Iran on Feb. 28 at the same time as an attack on an adjacent Iranian military base. Malachy Browne of our Visual Investigations team explains what satellite imagery and other evidence tell us about who might be responsible for the deadliest known episode of civilian casualties since the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran. Video by Malachy Browne, Aaron Boxerman, Coleman Lowndes, Estelle Caswell and Mona Lalwani/The New York Times #iran #US #israel #war Read the story here: https://nyti.ms/4rXt0cB Subscribe: http://bit.ly/U8Ys7n More from The New York Times Video: http://nytimes.com/video ---------- Whether it's reporting on conflicts abroad and political divisions at home, or covering the latest style trends and scientific developments, New York Times video journalists provide a revealing and unforgettable view of the world. It's all the news that's fit to watch.