An Iranian mother shared the last moments she had with her young children before them left for school never to return.
She was addressing a UN Human Rights Council hearing into the deadly strike on February 28 in which the US and Israel forces forces bombed a primary school in Iran killing 170 people, mostly children.
The emergency debate at the Geneva council was called by Iran to discuss the attack on the Shajareh Tayyebeh Girls’ School in Minab, a tragedy that took place on the first day of the nearly month-long war launched by the US and Israel.
Mohaddeseh Fallahat said that morning was like any other.
“There was no sign that this would be the last time I would see my children alive.
Fallahat remembers combing her two children’s hair, then tying their shoes and lifting their backpacks onto their shoulders before kissing them goodbye.
“As they walked out the door, they simply reminded me to pick them up after school. That simple sentence now repeats in my mind, and each time my heart burns with pain,” she said.
“I am a mother, a mother who even now when passing by my children’s room feels the urge to open the door and see them sleeping in their beds as always, or sitting there drawing. But the room is silent. Much more silent than any home should ever be.
“No mother ever thinks she will send her child off to school with a smile, only to be met with silence. No mother is prepared to hear the words: ‘Your child is not coming back.’”
Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi told the council via videolink that the attack was no “miscalculation”, adding the victims were “slaughtered in cold blood”.
“At a time when the American and Israeli aggressors, in their own assertion, possess the most advanced technologies and the highest precision military and data systems, no one can believe that the attack on the school was anything other than deliberate and intentional,” he said.