‘My heart burns with pain’: Iranian mother tells UN of Minab school attack

Grieving mother Mohaddeseh Fallahat, whose two children were killed, and Iran’s foreign minister address Human Rights Council.Mohaddeseh Fallahat remembers combing her children’s hair on the morning of February 28, then tying their shoes and lifting their backpacks onto their shoulders before kissing them goodbye.“That morning was like any other,” Fallahat told a session of the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva via videolink on Friday. “There was no sign that this would be the last time.Recommended Stories list of 3 itemslist 1 of 3Minab: When the world’s most precise missile chose a classroomlist 2 of 3Map shows how 22 days of attacks have evolved in US-Israel war on Iranlist 3 of 3US responsible for deadly attack on Iranian school: Amnesty Internationalend of list“As they walked out the door, they simply said, ‘Mum, come pick us up after school.’ That simple sentence now repeats in my mind 1,000 times, and each time my heart burns with pain,” she said.Her two children were among more than 170 people killed by United States Tomahawk missiles that hit the Shajareh Tayyebeh Girls’ School in Minab, southern Iran, during the opening hours of the US-Israeli assault. Most of the victims were schoolgirls.Speaking to the UN’s top rights forum as it held an urgent debate on the crisis in the Middle East, Fallahat said: “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.’”Attack was ‘deliberate and intentional’: Iranian FMIran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi told the council via videolink that the attack was no “miscalculation”.“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.