JERUSALEM (VINnews) — The political adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Ofir Falk, claimed on Thursday in a CNN interview that the strike on the girls’ school in the city of Minab, where 175 students were killed, was caused by a failed Iranian launch that struck the schoolgirls.

Reports first began last Saturday when Iran’s Health Ministry claimed that about 60 people were killed following an attack on a girls’ school in Minab in southern Iran. It was also reported that many women were trapped under the rubble, though their exact number was unknown.

Ofir Falk, Netanyahu’s political advisor on CNN:

The attack on the girls’ school in the city of Minab, where 175 students were killed, was carried out by a failed Iranian launch that was fired and hit the schoolgirls. pic.twitter.com/HSWf9qfvl0

— Eli Afriat 🇮🇱 (@EliAfriatISR) March 5, 2026

Footage that spread across social media shows terrified civilians while thick black smoke rises from one of the school buildings. In addition, large crowds can be seen standing on the rubble near efforts to rescue people trapped beneath the debris.

Falk’s claim is currently disputed by other sources. A CBC News visual investigation of new satellite imagery and social media footage suggests that the bombing of the school on Saturday was the result of a precision airstrike on a military complex immediately adjacent to the building.

The strike, which killed at least 165 people, mostly children, according to Iranian state TV, occurred on Saturday, during the first wave of U.S. and Israeli operations against Iran. Shortly after, several videos appeared showing a girls’ school in Minab largely destroyed.

While the facility was functioning as a school, CBC News has confirmed a previous New York Times report stating the building was once part of an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) base.

Jeffrey Lewis, a professor at Middlebury College who specializes in satellite imagery, said the imagery was consistent with a precision airstrike.

The images show “very precise targeting” Lewis told NPR. “Almost all the buildings [in the compound] are hit.”

Israel has denied involvement. “We are not aware at the moment of any IDF operation in that area,” Israel Defense Forces spokesperson Nadav Shoshani told NPR on Monday. “I don’t know who’s responsible for the bombing.”

At a press conference Wednesday morning, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said that the U.S. was looking into what happened at the school. “”All I know, all I can say, is that we’re investigating that,” Hegseth said. “We, of course, never target civilian targets.”

Given Minab’s location in the southwestern part of the country, Lewis believes it’s more likely the U.S. would have conducted the strike than Israel. “As one gets further south and west in Iran, a strike is much more likely to be a U.S. strike than an Israeli strike because of the type of munitions and the geographic location,” he said.

Esmail Baghaei, the spokesman for Iran’s Foreign Ministry, called the strike “deliberate,” and said that the U.S. and Israel bombed the school in part to tie up Iranian forces in the region with rescue efforts. “To call the attack on the girl’s school merely a ‘war crime’ does not capture the sheer evil and depravity of such a crime,” he said.

But Lewis said it’s more likely that the strike was the result of an error. Satellite images show that the school was separated from the base by a wall between 2013 and 2016. The clinic was walled off between 2022 and 2023.

Lewis believes it’s possible American military planners had not updated their target sets.

“There are thousands of targets across Iran, and so there will be teams in the United States and Israel that are responsible for tracking those targets and updating them,” he said. “It’s possible that the target didn’t get updated.”