'What was their crime?': BBC visits Iran school where strike killed 120 children

By Nawal Al-Maghafi Senior international investigations correspondent , Reporting from Minab, southern Iran This report contains distressing descriptions of the deaths of children. Amaineh Nademi walks carefully through what is left of her old school. Chunks of broken concrete hang precariously from the damaged upper floor. A few classrooms are still standing, their brightly coloured walls decorated with painted balloons and flowers. The 33-year-old teacher knows exactly what was where - the girls' classrooms on the upper floor, the boys' classrooms below, the headteacher's office, the prayer room. Rubble is all that remains of her classroom, where she taught first-grade girls at Shajareh Tayyebeh Primary School in Minab, a small city in southern Iran. To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. This video can not be played Figure caption, Children's chairs and decorated walls can still be seen in the damaged classrooms On 28 February, in the opening hours of the US-Israeli war with Iran, a strike on the school transformed an ordinary Saturday morning into one of the conflict's defining tragedies - and its deadliest single incident for civilians. In total, 156 people, including 120 children, have been confirmed killed, including a pregnant woman and her unborn child, according to the Minab prosecutor's office. Experts say evidence indicates that US forces hit the school, which is next to an IRGC compound that satellite images show was struck several times. The US has not admitted responsibility, though US media have reported that military investigators believe it is likely that US forces carried out the strike unintentionally. Image caption, Girls were taught on the upper floor of the primary school while the boys' classrooms were below The pain of what happened here is still raw. Teachers tell us they pray at the site every day. Rescue workers are still searching for remains of those killed here. Much of the upper floor collapsed into the one below. "You can't call it a school," says Amaineh – just "walls that smell of death, grief and the blood that was shed here". The Iranian authorities were keen for us to visit the school – it is evidence, they say, that a campaign presented by Washington as an attack on Iran's military and security apparatus has instead inflicted a devastating cost on civilians. 'We were all sent flying' The school day had begun as usual, Amaineh says. Because it was the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, the children gathered inside the prayer hall to recite the Quran, she recalls, before she began teaching her pupils a new letter of the Persian alphabet. But, as the first attacks of the war unfolded across Iran, she says the headteacher announced the school would be closing, and teachers began contacting parents, urging them to collect their children. Only five of Amaineh's 15 first-grade pupils were left in her classroom on the upper floor, she says, when she first heard an explosion not far from t