Protesters Spotlight Children Killed in Iran School Bombing

Dozens of children’s backpacks and pairs of shoes lined the Capitol lawn Wednesday as congressional Democrats called the U.S. war with Iran illegal and demanded accountability for a February strike that killed more than 100 elementary school students.

The March 18 installation, organized by peace advocacy group Win Without War, drew lawmakers who denounced the strike on a girls elementary school in Minab, a city in Iran’s southern Hormozgan province, on Feb. 28, the opening day of the U.S.-Israeli military campaign. News reports citing Iranian authorities and Amnesty International put the death toll at 168 children at the Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School.

“One of the very first strikes of this illegal war hit a girls elementary school in Iran, killing at least 175 people, most of them children,” said Rep. Yassamin Ansari, D-Ariz., who identified herself as the only Iranian-American member of Congress. Ansari said Trump launched the conflict “without a clear case made to the American people and without any strategy or plan.”

The broader war has now claimed the lives of 13 U.S. service members, nearly 2,000 civilians and military personnel in Iran, just under 1,000 civilians in Lebanon, and dozens of civilians across Persian Gulf nations and Israel, according to state officials and human rights organizations. President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have both vowed to press on.

The school strike sits at the center of a weeks-long standoff between Congress and the Pentagon.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth told reporters on March 4 that the Pentagon was investigating the strike. He said the U.S. does not target civilians. A March 11 New York Times report then revealed that an ongoing military investigation had already determined a U.S. Tomahawk missile hit the school.

Pressed on that finding at a March 13 briefing, Hegseth pushed back. “We’re not going to let reporting lead us or force our hand into indicating what happened in a particular situation, because the truth matters,” he said. “So I can report that (U.S. Central Command) has designated an investigating officer to complete a command investigation.”

Nearly every Senate Democrat signed a letter on March 11 demanding the Pentagon release the investigation’s findings quickly, according to New Hampshire Bulletin coverage of the Capitol protest.

Congressional Democrats are also pushing Republican colleagues to schedule open hearings where administration officials would face questions under oath. So far, Republican leadership hasn’t agreed.

The Capitol demonstration landed 20 days into a conflict that Democrats have called a “war of choice.” Ansari’s framing connects the school strike directly to what she described as the administration’s failure to plan. That lack of planning, she said, produced casualties that were foreseeable.

For families in the Upper Valley who’ve watched the war unfold on their phones and kitchen televisions, the images from Minab carry a particular weight. Lebanon, N.H., and Hartford, Vt., both send soldiers through the National Guard, and both communities lost people in the early weeks of the conflict. The politics playing out on the Capitol lawn, in other words, aren’t abstract here.

Ansari and other Democrats on the lawn acknowledged they don’t yet have the votes to stop the war. Republicans control both chambers. What they do have is the ability to force transparency through public hearings, and several members said that’s the immediate goal.

Win Without War, which organized the shoe-and-backpack display, has used similar visual installations at other war protests over the past decade. The group didn’t respond to a request for comment by publication time.

The U.S. Central Command investigation into the Shajareh Tayyebeh strike has no announced completion date. Hegseth has not said when or whether the findings will be made public, leaving Senate Democrats’ March 11 letter unanswered as of the protest date.