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In just two days, U.S. and Israeli attacks have killed over 500 people across Iran, with American and Israeli forces bombing numerous civilian sites, including medical centers and hospitals, human rights advocates have warned.
The Iranian Red Crescent Society said on Monday that it has counted at least 555 deaths since the U.S. and Israel launched unprovoked strikes on Saturday. Strikes have targeted at least 131 cities across Iran thus far.
Videos of strikes show massive blasts destroying entire blocks and laying waste to buildings. Analysts expect the toll to rise quickly with the U.S. and Israel’s bombardments continuing across Iran on Monday, with some analysts likening the strikes to a carpet bombing campaign.
The pace of killing and devastation has already far surpassed that of last year’s war. Over just the course of two days, the death toll has reached roughly half of the Iranian death toll from the 12-day war with Israel and the U.S. last June, when bombardments killed 1,190 people, including both military figures and civilians.
Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was among those killed in strikes on Saturday, with U.S. and Israeli leaders first announcing his death, and Iranian state media confirming it. Several of the country’s other top military figures were also killed in the U.S.-Israel attacks.
The first reports of casualties from the U.S.-Israeli bombardment on Saturday were from the bombing of a girls’ elementary school in Minab, in southern Iran.
The toll from that strike rose to at least 175 on Sunday, Iranian health officials said, most of them children. The search for survivors under the rubble has ended, officials said, as Red Crescent rescuers searched through blood-soaked desks, school books, and back packs to find survivors or remains.
Families stood by the school in silence and fear on Saturday, waiting to hear the fate of their children, Drop Site reported — with each name read aloud by officials “chang[ing] the fate of an entire family.”
Municipal worker Seyyed Ibrahim Mirkhayali and his family were told near sunset that his daughter, 9-year-old Zeinab, had been killed.
“How long are we going to live like this? Why can’t the United States and Israel reach an agreement with Iran and end this war? What happened is a crime,” Mirkhayali told Drop Site. “Since the last war we have not lived a stable life in our country because of the United States and Israel.”
“We stayed until her body was brought out from under the rubble,” he said. Though her body stayed largely intact, “her head was crushed by falling stones from the building. That is what killed her.”
This was one of many instances of attacks on civilian sites thus far. According to Iranian human rights agency HRANA, at least seven civilian buildings were targeted on Sunday alone. This includes five hospitals or emergency facilities, despite such sites receiving special protection under international humanitarian law.
“The simultaneous registration of multiple medical and emergency facilities in a single day constitutes an important humanitarian indicator in assessing the consequences of the attacks,” HRANA said. The group said that it is still assessing dozens of other attacks and the scope of the damage, including death tolls.
There were also reports of a strike on a sports hall in Lemard, in southern Iran, that killed 18 civilians as teenage girls were doing their regular training sessions there.
“I noticed a strange gathering of people at the corner of the street leading to the sports hall,” 50-year-old school teacher Hossein Gholami told Drop Site. Gholami’s 16-year-old daughter, Zahra, was training in the hall at the time. “The screaming was rising from a distance. A colleague ran toward me, waving his arm, and said in a shaken voice: ‘Zahra, the hall, there has been an explosion.’ I felt as though the ground had split beneath my feet.”
Zahra was killed in the blast. “Every time I close my eyes I see her face, her smile, and I hear the sound of the explosion,” Gholami said.
The objectives of the war are unclear. Immediately following the commencement of strikes on Saturday, President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called for Iranians to take over their government and overthrow the current leadership. However, reports say that the U.S. is internally skeptical that they can achieve regime change, and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said on Monday that the goal is not regime change at all. Trump has, however, declared that the U.S. will destroy Iran’s military and nuclear enrichment program.
The planned length of the war is also unclear, with Trump claiming that it will last four to five weeks, but Hegseth saying it could be longer or shorter than that. Hegseth also refused to rule out the possibility of American boots on the ground in the war.
Trump also warned that the U.S. and Israel are slated to intensify their bombardment, despite the unclear goals of the war and Iran’s leader having been killed already.
“We haven’t even started hitting them hard,” Trump told CNN on Monday. “The big wave hasn’t even happened. The big one is coming soon.”
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