Some websites and social media accounts linked to Israel claimed the site was “part of an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps base”.
However, an analysis by Al Jazeera’s digital investigations unit of satellite imagery compiled over more than a decade, as well as recent video clips, published news reports and statements from official Iranian sources, tells a very different story.
The findings reveal that the school had been clearly separate from an adjacent military site for at least 10 years.
These schools are classified as nonprofit institutions and are primarily intended to provide educational services to the sons and daughters of members of the IRGC Navy.
In more than one announcement, the children of IRGC Navy members are explicitly invited to attend on specific days to complete first-grade enrolment, with another notice stating that registration for children of non-members opens on different days.
However, this administrative link (to the IRGC) or the identity of the parents does not change the schools’ legal status as civilian facilities under international humanitarian law, unless they were being used in military operations.
And the children who attend them – whether they are the children of military personnel or civilians – remain protected people with special protection in armed conflicts, including the prohibition on intentionally targeting them or carrying out attacks that could harm them.
IOF go one day without murdering children challenge: IMPOSSIBLE 
My country 'tis of thee, sweet land of atrocity.
Just a clarification to start with. The deaths weren’t all school girls, though they were the majority. Similar aged school boys also seem to be involved, along with all the teachers and some parents.
Now about the attack. It reeked of deliberate cruelty even without the Al Jazeera report (I’m not a fan of theirs, for their biases). The attacking forces had intelligence accurate enough to determine that Ayatollah Khomeini was in a meeting with the regime’s senior leadership at his residence at a specific time. They also have munitions that can target and hit a specific room in a specific building from hundreds or even thousands of miles away. They still got it wrong and hit a primary school? Seems nearly impossible. Now even if their intelligence suggested that military operatives were in the building, there’s no way they would have missed the fact that there were also hundreds of kids, teachers and parents there.
All these points to a very disturbing possibility - deliberate targeting of children as part of an emotional warfare to destroy the morale of the locals. More appropriately called terrorism. We have seen similar patterns in Gaza where we know that kids were deliberately targeted. Children’s hospitals were attacked based on the excuse that Hamas was holed up in there. In either case, the presence of the children should have taken a higher priority over the presence of enemy combatants in the decision to attack. Or in other words, killing of children can’t be excused, irrespective of the presence of enemy combatants.
It didn’t make a lot of sense until Al Jazeera added a detail here - many kids were the children of defense personnel. Now it makes perfect sense about whose morale they were targeting. This is a serious threat to the world. The world’s most powerful armed alliance running around violating human rights and killing children with impunity, all at the whims of a racist, xenophobic, volatile and demented leadership is never going to be good news for the world.
Tell that to Israel who showed this wouldn’t diminish their global support!
