The families torn apart by the Minab school bombing

April 3, 2026·31 min·2 clips

Hussein keeps digging through the rubble until late evening because, after finding Zahra dead, he thinks of all the other girls still buried beneath the concrete.

February 27th begins with Ramadan routine. Families in a small city in the south of Iran prepare for Iftar while two households move through the familiar noise of life with small children. Zahra is eight. Her parents remember her art, her glue, her bright plans, and how she had moved from wanting to be a doctor to wanting to teach. Subhan is ten. His younger sister Hania is seven. The cold open stays with those children before it moves out to the bombing of their primary school in Iran. The tone is grave, but it does not feel inflated. Zahra's father returns to the rubble and keeps searching even after others tell him his daughter is gone. He keeps digging. That is the detail that stays under the skin, because the episode starts with a family, not with a toll. Archival audio cuts into the grief. Claims about military action and civilian targeting sit beside the reported toll from an elementary school hit by airstrikes. The host names the heartbreak plainly, then asks Tess what it felt like to read the reporting and hear the parents' voices. Tess does not dress it up. A 2,000-plus-pound bomb on a primary school full of children, mostly 7 to 12 years old, and their teachers is almost impossible to take in. The numbers are brutal: more than 160 people killed, including 130-plus girls and around 30 teachers, according to the transcript. The legal question is just as hard to avoid. Schools are protected under international humanitarian law, yet the episode says no one has taken responsibility for this strike. The investigation remains at the center. The closing credits send listeners back to Tess's reporting and the evidence uncovered through The Guardian's Rights and Freedom Project. What lingers is the smallness of the children's ordinary lives before the bombing, and the size of what one community lost.

As heard by us

A stark, carefully reported account of the Minab school bombing and the families left in its wake.

Today in Focus keeps the Minab school bombing painfully close to the families who lived it. The episode starts with ordinary Ramadan routines, children painting, playing and crowding their parents' lives, before moving to the school rubble and the parents searching for any child…

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Why you'd press play

If you want the human cost behind a bombing headline, start here.

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