Iran school hit from nearby US base: Envoy defends strikes in Gulf at Conclave
India Today
Iran's Ambassador to India defended Tehran's attacks on neighbouring countries, saying the missile strike on a school that killed around 170 students was launched from a US base in one of the neighbouring nations.
A Tomahawk missile that struck a girls’ school in Iran, killing around 170 students, was launched from a US military base in a West Asian country and not from an aircraft carrier at sea, Iran’s Ambassador to India Mohammad Fathali said at the India Today Conclave on Saturday.
Defending Tehran’s decision to target US bases in Gulf nations, the envoy said Iran respects its neighbours but was forced to respond as attacks were being carried out from American bases stationed in those countries.
“And we have announced that you will not actually be touched -- your assets, whatever you have inside your country. But we asked them what we should do when one of my schools, including the children, was hit by American Tomahawk missiles,” he said at the Conclave.
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“We respect them (the Gulf countries) completely. But we will definitely target the American bases... It is very bad that we witnessed these schools being hit by missiles launched from a base in one of the neighbouring countries,” the envoy added.
On February 28, in the early hours of the US-Israel Operation Fury against Iran, a missile strike hit the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ primary school in Minab in southern Iran, killing around 170 people, most of them schoolgirls aged between 7 and 12. Preliminary investigations by the US military and independent organisations suggested the strike was carried out by US forces, allegedly due to outdated intelligence that mistakenly identified the school as part of an adjacent military complex.
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