An Iranian official said on Monday that nearly half of the Iranians killed by the US-Israeli bombing campaign that began on February 28 and has been paused since April 8 were civilians, as strikes pounded civilian targets throughout the war.
According to Tehran Times, Jamshid Nazmi, an advisor at Iran’s Foundation of Martyrs and Veterans Affairs, at least 3,468 were killed by the US-Israeli strikes. He said that 1,460 of the victims were identified as civilians.
The Human Rights Activist News Agency (HRANA), a US-based and US-funded NGO that’s very critical of the Iranian government, has put out similar numbers, though it has reported a higher number of civilians killed. The group said in its last update on the death toll on April 7 that it recorded the killing of 1,701 civilians, 1,221 military personnel, and 714 people yet to be identified, a total of 3,636 deaths.
The US-Israeli war against Iran opened with a US Tomahawk missile strike on an elementary school in Iran, which killed 156 people, including 120 boys and girls, 26 teachers, who were all women, seven parents, a bus driver, and a technician who worked at a nearby clinic.
Iranian officials have previously said that more than 200 children were killed in the bombing campaign. Other strikes against children include the US bombing of a sports hall, which killed girls as they were practicing volleyball and a boy as he played soccer, an attack reportedly carried out using a short-range ballistic missile called the Precision Strike Missile, or PrSM, which had never been tested in combat.
Iranian media also reported that in mid-March, a US-Israeli strike on a home in the central city of Arak killed a three-day-old baby boy and his two-year-old sister.
