The Pentagon's silence on the February 28 strike on the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls' elementary school in Minab reached its sixth full day Monday with no incident report, no named officer, and no published targeting record. [1] Iranian authorities place the death toll at 168, including approximately 110 children; Middle East Eye's "double-tap" investigation found the second explosion hit survivors who had taken shelter in the school's prayer hall after the first strike, with parents arriving to retrieve their children among the dead. [2] CNN's earlier reporting found U.S. Central Command created the target coordinates from outdated Defense Intelligence Agency information about a nearby IRGC naval base. [3]
The press-infrastructure context shrinks as the silence holds. CBS News Radio, founded in 1927 and reaching roughly 700 affiliated stations, signs off May 22 under Bari Weiss's restructuring. [4] Stars and Stripes lost its ombudsman last week. The Pentagon press corps that would have followed the Minab story over months — the radio reporters, the wire-service stringers, the smaller-paper Pentagon hands — is the press corps being thinned in the same window. The combined effect on accountability is the story the casualty list cannot tell on its own.
Makan Nasiri, age seven, remains the only child officially listed as missing from the strike. The Pentagon's "taking a look" answer to the UN office demand for clarification has not advanced. The Day Six count is not a clock the paper invented; it is the time the institution has chosen for itself.
-- ANNA WEBER, Berlin