The death toll at Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in Minab has risen to 85. We need to say that again, slowly, because the number keeps climbing and the world keeps moving and we refuse to let that happen without stopping and making you feel the weight of it. Eighty-five people. Almost all of them young girls, between the ages of seven and twelve, according to Iranian state media, sitting in their classrooms on a Saturday morning — Saturday is the first day of the school week in Iran — when the bombs fell. Sixty-three more were injured. Workers are still clearing the rubble. The school had a name. Shajareh Tayyebeh. The girls had names. We don’t have all of them yet. We will not stop asking.
Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said it on X with a photo of the destroyed building: “The destroyed building is a primary school for girls in the south of Iran. It was bombed in broad daylight, when packed with young pupils. Dozens of innocent children have been murdered at this site alone.” A staff member at the school, who asked not to be named, told Middle East Eye she used to watch the young girls playing there every day. After Saturday’s strikes, she saw their bodies lying on classroom benches and in different corners of the school.
Israel has not denied the strike. The IDF’s situation room said it was “looking into reports of fatalities.” When asked for an update hours later, it said it had none to provide. The White House did not respond to requests for comment. Commander Bone Spurs was monitoring the situation from Mar-a-Lardo.
The overall toll across Iran is now catastrophic. The Iranian Red Crescent says at least 201 people have been killed across 24 provinces and roughly 700 others wounded. Iran has retaliated with what every major news outlet is describing as an unprecedented wave of strikes across the region — targeting U.S. military bases in Qatar, the UAE, Kuwait, and Bahrain, as well as Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq. The U.S. Embassy in Bahrain has been closed. The Fifth Fleet headquarters was hit. Iran has declared all U.S. and Israeli interests in the region legitimate targets. A drone hit Kuwait International Airport. A missile damaged a runway hosting Italian forces. Blasts were heard from the beaches of Dubai to the streets of Doha. One person was killed in Abu Dhabi by debris from an intercepted Iranian missile — a civilian, in a country that paid a billion dollars to join the Board of Peace.
Airspace across the Middle East has been shut down. Flights are canceled. The Strait of Hormuz — through which 20 percent of the world’s oil passes every day — is now a live combat zone.
And now, let’s talk about what the man who started all of this had to say about it.
Trump posted an eight-minute video to Truth Social at 2:30 in the morning, standing at a lectern in front of an American flag in what was presumably Mar-a-Lago, wearing a white USA baseball cap. This is how he announces wars. In baseball caps. On his own social media platform. While monitoring things.
The video was, by any measurable standard, an extraordinary document. He told the Iranian people: “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.” He told the IRGC to lay down their weapons and receive “complete immunity,” or face “certain death” — a demand made somewhat confusing by the fact that the U.S. operation is entirely airborne, so it remains genuinely unclear to whom exactly the IRGC would be surrendering, or to where. He said the U.S. would “annihilate” Iran’s navy and “raze their missile industry to the ground.” He said the operation was “massive and ongoing.” He called it “a noble mission.”
He also said this: “The lives of courageous American heroes may be lost and we may have casualties. That often happens in war.” In the same breath he called it a noble mission. He told families their children might not come home, in a video he posted on Truth Social at 2:30 in the morning, wearing a baseball cap.
The day before, speaking to reporters outside the White House before boarding Marine One, he’d been asked about the risks of getting drawn into a prolonged conflict. “I guess you could say there’s always a risk,” he said. “You know, when there’s war, there’s a risk of anything, both good and bad.” Both good and bad. The man entrusted with the nuclear codes offered, as his strategic risk assessment of a military strike on a country of 90 million people, the observation that wars contain both good and bad risks. He was asked how close he was to making a decision. “I’d rather not tell you,” he said. He’d decided the night before. The bombs were already loaded when he said it.
He also — and we cannot stress enough how much this happened — called it “a very simple message” while simultaneously laying out at least six different justifications for the war in the same eight-minute video, including: imminent nuclear threat, decades of terrorism, regional proxy aggression, missile development, American security interests, and freedom for the Iranian people. Bloomberg’s analysis noted that Trump never explained to Congress or anyone else what his goals or legal justification were before beginning the operation, and that his stated objectives now amount to “everything.” No congressional authorization. No War Powers notification before the strikes. Just an eight-minute Truth Social video in a baseball cap at 2:30 in the morning.
Meanwhile the operation he’s running has a commander. Pete Hegseth — Kegsbreath, our most magnificently underqualified Secretary of Defense, the man who shot down a weather balloon like it owed him money, blew up Houthi boats as a warmup act, and destroyed a $30 million American drone apparently by accident — is now in charge of an actual, declared, multi-day military campaign against the third-largest country in the Middle East. The IDF has confirmed the operation is planned to last approximately one week. Cabinet ministers in Israel were told that the duration could shorten if Khamenei is confirmed killed — Israel reportedly dropped 30 bombs on his compound. Iran’s foreign minister says the Supreme Leader is alive “as far as he knows.” That caveat is doing a lot of work.
The operation began, per CENTCOM, at 1:15 a.m. Eastern Time Saturday. The Oman foreign minister — who had been mediating the U.S.-Iran talks — flew to Washington on Friday to brief Vice President Vance, saying he believed the negotiations had made significant progress. He flew home to a war. “Active and serious negotiations,” he said in a statement, “have yet again been undermined.” That mediator landed in Washington on Friday. Trump told reporters he’d made “no final decision.” The bombs fell at 1:15 a.m. Saturday.
The Trumpstein files are not going anywhere. The fire sales of national assets, the gutting of federal agencies, the legal exposure metastasizing through half a dozen courtrooms, the oligarchs dividing the country between themselves like a dessert cart — none of that stopped when the bombs started falling. That is precisely the point. Chaos is the cover. War is the page-turner. And the people running this operation are counting on you to be so overwhelmed, so exhausted, so hollowed out by the sheer velocity of catastrophe, that you close the tab.
Don’t close the tab.
We can watch the bombs fall and follow the money simultaneously. We have done harder things. The girls of Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School went to school on a Saturday morning. They were between seven and twelve years old. Eighty-five of them are gone.
We are not moving on.
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