AOAV’s spreadsheet on the explosive violence harm seen in the ongoing US-led war against Iran is neat in its precision and terrible in its meaning. We have columns for events, casualty totals, injuries, deaths. One column, however, stands out like a line of barbarism: “Reported as children.”
Since February 28th 2026, when American and Israeli forces launched Operation Epic Fury against Iran, at least 212 children have been reported in reputable English language sources killed in explosive-weapons attacks across the region.
The true figure is almost certainly higher.
The data, drawn from English media incident tracking across nine countries, reveals a conflict exacting a brutal toll on the young. Iran accounts for the overwhelming majority: 176 children dead among 595 civilian fatalities. Lebanon follows with 24, Israel with ten. Even Iraq, notionally at peace with America, has recorded one child death. In total, 1,092 civilians have been killed and another 1,860 injured across 298 recorded events.
This is nearly 3,000 total casualties in just weeks of fighting.
The single deadliest incident explains much of Iran’s horrifying lead. At approximately 8:30am local time on the war’s first morning, American Tomahawk cruise missiles struck the Shajarah Tayyebeh girls’ primary school in Minab, a coastal town in southern Iran. Between 165 and 180 people died, most of them girls aged seven to twelve. Some reports put the named number of children killed at 52, though it is not clear if this covers all the killed children, or just those named.
We list the known children’s names below.
The Pentagon has acknowledged that American forces were “likely responsible.” A preliminary inquiry found the strike resulted from what officials have termed a “targeting error rooted in stale intelligence data.”
The school building had been classified as a military facility in a Defense Intelligence Agency database; it was a designation dating from when it was part of an adjacent Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps naval compound. Satellite imagery shows the building was separated from that base, fenced off, repainted in bright colours and converted to a school between 2013 and 2016. The database was never updated.
The Minab strike alone accounts for roughly 83% of all children killed in Iran since the war began, and more than three-quarters of all child deaths across the entire conflict.
One missile salvo, one outdated database entry, one morning assembly… and suddenly the war had killed more children than many conflicts do in years.
Gaza, of course, has shown us what war can do to children, but this may have been the largest mass death of children in a single, discrete event since the atomic bombing of Nagasaki on the 9th August 1945, when tens of thousands of children were vaporised in another US bombing.
Initial media coverage fixated on Claude, an artificial-intelligence chatbot made by Anthropic, and whether it had somehow selected the school as a target. The New Yorker asked whether the AI might resort to “blackmail—and even homicide—as an act of self-preservation”? Important questions, but in the case of the school almost none of this was relevant. Yes, the targeting infrastructure that processed the strike runs on Maven, a system built by Palantir Technologies after Google abandoned the contract in 2018 amid employee protests. But AI did not kill those children.
In this case humans failed to update a database, and other humans built systems fast enough to make that failure lethal.
UNICEF has called the situation “catastrophic.” By mid-March, the agency reported that more than 1,100 children had been killed or wounded across the region since the war began. Some 3.2 million Iranians have already been displaced.
The laws of armed conflict require combatants to distinguish between military objectives and civilian objects, and to take “constant care” to spare civilians.
When intelligence is wrong, those obligations do not disappear, they become harder to meet. Legal scholars examining the Minab strike have noted that the school’s civilian character was readily ascertainable: it had bright-painted walls, playgrounds, public entrances and a “years-long online presence.”
So the failure was not technological. It was human. And the devastation was not conceptual, it too was human.
Beyond Minab, the casualty distribution tells its own story. Lebanon’s 130 recorded events have killed 425 civilians and injured 708 more, the highest injury count in the data (testimony to reporting and not to harm – Iran clearly has lots of people injured whose harm is not reported) suggesting a pattern of strikes with wide blast radii in populated areas.
Israel’s 43 events have produced 599 total casualties but only 19 deaths, indicating effective civil-defence systems, different weapon types and more granular reporting of all injuries there.
The Gulf states have seen fewer events but notable casualties nonetheless: the UAE recorded 34 total casualties across ten incidents, Iraq 62 across 38.
Wars have always killed children. What distinguishes this one is the speed at which targeting decisions flow from database to missile, and the apparent brittleness of the human checks meant to catch errors.
In Minab, that speed met a decade-old data entry, and 165 families are now in black mourning.
Across the region, 212 children are now dead. Overall, it is almost one child for every recorded injurious strike.
The spreadsheet grows bigger by the day, filled in with some of the smallest casualties.
This is a list of the reportedly known names of the dead children killed in the MInab bombing:
- Hana Dehqani, eight years old
- Reza Habashian, seven years old
- Arya Bahadori, nine years old
- Ali Asghar Zaeri, eight years old
- Zahra Bahrami, seven years old
- Ahmad Soltani, eight years old
- Hamed Par-ashegh-nezhad, seven years old
- Fatemeh Yazdan-panah, young girl, age unknown
- Mahdis Nazari, seven years old
- Athena Chamani-nezhad, six years old
- Amirghasem Zaeri, seven years old
- Fatemeh Dorazehi, 10 years old
- Arad Ahmadizadeh, eight years old
- Saman Karimzadeh, seven years old
- Fatemeh Shahdadi, age unknown
- Nadia Shahmiri, nine years old
- Parham Ranjbari, nine years old
- Fatemeh Rahdar, 10 years old
- Amir-Hassan Rasouli, eight years old
- Zahra Behrouzi, eight years old
- Mohammadhatam Raisi, 10 years old
- Asna Raisi, 12 years old
- Benyamin Jangjou, eight years old
- Mohammad-Sadra Zarei, eight years old
- Maryam Pazark, 10 years old
- Liana Mohammadi, seven years old
- Sara Shayesteh, five years old
- Zoha Pasand, eight years old
- Esra Zakeri, nine years old
- Salma Zakeri, six years old
- Zahra Ansari, seven years old
- Fatemeh Fadavi, 10 years old
- Mahna Zarei, two months old
- Athareh Zarei, 10 years old
- Alireza Zarei, nine years old
- Mohammadreza Shahsavari, eight years old
- Ehsan Saleminia, six years old
- Fatemeh Zahra Karimi, seven years old
- Zeynab Bahrami, 10 years old
- Mohammad Shah-dousti, eight years old
- Reza Barani, seven years old
- Athena Ahmadzadeh, 10 years old
- Khadijeh Darvishi, nine years old
- Reza Ranjbar, six years old
- Mohammad-Mehdi Chegini, 10 years old
- Ali-Akbar Karyani Pak, eight years old
- Hananeh Mehdikhah, seven years old
- Mohammad-Ali Karyani Pak, seven years old
- Parsa Mokhtari-nasab, 12 years old
- Arina Arab-Kish, eight years old
- Makan Nasiri, 12 years old
- Esra Farahi-Zadeh, young girl, age unknown
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