During hours of tense testimony before Congress on Wednesday, US War Secretary Pete Hegseth described the deadly strike on Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in Iran’s southern city of Minab as an “unfortunate incident,” which according to him remains under investigation.
On the first day of the US-Israeli aggression against Iran on February 28, US Tomahawk missiles struck the school, killing 168 people, most of them children.
In a post on X on Friday, Baqaei said that the attack “was not an ‘unfortunate situation.’ It was a premeditated, heinous war crime.”
Baqaei shared a video of Representative Ro Khanna questioning Hegseth about the cost to American taxpayers “in terms of the strike on the Iranian school where kids were killed, in terms of the missiles we used.”
“To put it plainly,” Baqaei said, “how much did it cost American taxpayers for their secretary of defense to direct the deliberate killing of innocent schoolchildren and their teachers?”
The spokesman added that those responsible for the crime “must be held fully accountable and brought to justice.”
In an address to the UN Human Rights Council in late March, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi described the incident as “the tip of the iceberg” of systematic violations committed with impunity by the United States and Israel, Press TV reported.
The two enemies launched a large-scale, unprovoked war against Iran, assassinating then Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei, and a host of senior commanders while indirect negotiations were underway between Tehran and Washington regarding Iran’s peaceful nuclear program.
Subsequent terrorist strikes on civilian targets have so far killed more than 3,300 people, including children.