Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu acted illegally in launching a lethal and devastating attack on Iran on the morning of February 28, 2026. We were not under an eminent attack, there was no discussion with Congress or the United Nations to seek support for a war. They acted alone. More than 60% of Americans disapprove of the war.
How does the bombing of a girl’s primary school showcase the violations of international humanitarian law, central to how this conflict is being waged?
Map of Southern Iran Locating Minab
and the Elementary School that was bombed on February 28
I wrote a post a few days ago about the Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school that was bombed by two or three American Tomahawk missiles. Young girls, ages 5-11 who lived in the neighborhood in Minab, Iran, had just arrived for a half day of classes. The map shows the location of Minab.
According the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, and customary international humanitarian law, the following acts are prohibited:
- Intentionally attacking civilians, including students and teachers.
- Targeting civilian objects, such as schools not used for military purposes.
- Failing to take feasible precautions to protect civilians, including by locating military operations near functioning schools.
Trump claimed today that he wants the war to end and does not want to kill Iranians. He already has killed civilians, and has destroyed a great deal of the infrastructure in the country.
Three Documents
In this post, I continue exploring the killing of more than 150 young children and adult teacher in a Minab elementary school. You will find three documents here. The first is a “letter fragment” from Skyler Fusaro, a fictional correspondent who lives in the later part of the 21st century in Atlanta. I have published many of her letters and documents here. The second document is a recovered interview with the father of the two school children that were killed in the attack. And the third document is another letter from Skyler.
Document 1. Letter Fragment: Skyler Fusaro (Atlanta Archive, 2063)
From the Blue Cities File / Section IV: Constrictive Martyrdom
Jack—
There are documents that resist interpretation.
You can place them in a sequence, you can surround them with context, you can build the scaffolding of cause and effect—but some records remain intact in a way that defeats argument. They do not expand into meaning. They hold.
I am sending one of those.
It was circulated in translation, though the original is said to have been written by hand, in uneven lines, as if the act of writing itself required force. It appears in multiple archives, sometimes shortened, sometimes annotated, sometimes stripped of names.
I am including the most complete version I can verify.
- Do not summarize it.
- Do not correct it.
- Do not improve it.
Place it where it interrupts.
—Skyer
Document 2. Recovered Document 17: Testimony (Minab)Filed without date. Circulated in translation.
I am writing this because I was told to write what I remember, and because I am afraid that if I do not, the morning will be taken from me and replaced by other people’s words.
There were two girls.
They were my daughters.
Laleh was eleven. She had begun to correct me when I spoke, not out of disrespect but because she believed the world could be made more precise if we tried hard enough. She folded her clothes carefully. Laleh stood a little straighter each day.
Niloofar was nine. She laughed before finishing her thoughts. She misplaced things and then found them in places she insisted she had already checked. Niloofar followed her sister everywhere, though she would say she did not.
On the morning of March 28, I walked them to school.
There is nothing unusual in this sentence, but I am told it is important to say it plainly.
We drank tea. They argued about a pencil. I told them not to run. They told me they were not running.
At the gate, I adjusted their scarves. Bending down I kissed their foreheads. I told them that after school we would go to the river.
I did not choose these words carefully. And I chose them the way a man chooses any words that belong to the future.
They went inside together.
I watched them until I could not distinguish them from the others.
This is the last moment I saw them alive.
At approximately 10:20 in the morning, there was an explosion at the school.
I did not see it. I heard it.
I am told it was a missile. I am told it came from far away. I am told many things that explain how such a thing can happen.
None of these explanations contain my daughters.
When I reached the school, there were no classrooms, only openings where classrooms had been.
People were calling names.
I called theirs.
This is not a detail that requires elaboration.
I have been asked to provide identifying features.
Laleh: serious expression, dark eyes, a way of holding her books close to her chest.
Niloofar: quick smile, restless hands, a habit of leaning into her sister when she stood still.
These descriptions are insufficient. I include them because I was told to.
What I want to record instead is this:
That in the morning, before anything happened, they walked side by side.
That when they spoke, they spoke over each other.
That when one forgot something, the other remembered.
And when they entered the school, they did not look afraid.
I have also been asked if I have anything further to add.
I do not know how to answer this question in the way it is intended.
So I will answer it this way:
If there is a record, let it show that they were together.
If there is a record, let it show that they were loved.
If there is a record, let it show that the last thing I gave them was a promise about the river, which I did not keep.
End of statement.
Document 3. Skyler Fusaro (annotation, appended)
Jack—
You have written elsewhere about the difference between expansive and constrictive martyrdom.
This is neither, at least not in the way the categories are usually deployed.
No one here chose.
No one here intended to stand for anything.
There is no speech, no march, no last act that can be framed as a widening of the circle. In
And yet—
There is a pressure, in documents like this, to make them serve.
To convert the dead into argument.
To extract from them a lesson that can be circulated, defended, opposed.
That pressure is the beginning of distortion.
Constrictive martyrdom does not only narrow who belongs.
It narrows what the dead are allowed to be.
It assigns them a function.
It reduces them to evidence.
The refusal, then, may be the only honest response:
to let the record remain smaller than history wants it to be.
Two sisters.
A morning.
A promise about a river.
If there is an expansion here, it is not rhetorical.
It is the simple, unbearable fact that these lives exceed every explanation offered for their loss.
—Skyler
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