The bombing of an Iranian elementary school that killed some 165 people, many of them schoolgirls, included more targets near the school than has been initially reported, a review of commercial satellite imagery by NPR has found.

The images suggest that the school was hit on Saturday as part of a precision airstrike on a neighboring Iranian military complex — and that it may have been struck as a result of outdated targeting information.

The new images come from the company Planet and are of the city of Minab, located in southeastern Iran. They show that a health clinic and other buildings near the school were also struck. Three independent experts confirmed NPR’s analysis of the additional strike points.

The strike points “look like pretty clean detonation centroids,” said Corey Scher, a postdoctoral researcher at the Conflict Ecology laboratory at Oregon State University.

“These certainly appear like detonation sites,” agreed Scher’s colleague, Oregon State associate professor Jamon Van Den Hoek.

Jeffrey Lewis, a professor at Middlebury College who specializes in satellite imagery, said the imagery was consistent with a precision airstrike.

The images show “very precise targeting,” Lewis told NPR. “Almost all the buildings [in the compound] are hit.”

A satellite image of an Iranian Revolutionary Guard compound taken on March 4, several days after an airstrike destroyed a school on the edge of the compound. The image reveals that half a dozen other buildings in addition to the school were struck.

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Iranian state media said 165 people died in the bombing, which struck a girls’ school. The school was located within less than 100 yards of the perimeter of an Iranian Revolutionary Guard naval base, according to satellite images and publicly available information. The clinic was also located within the base perimeter, although both facilities had been walled off from the base.

Israel has denied involvement. “We are not aware at the moment of any IDF operation in that area,” Israel Defense Forces spokesperson Nadav Shoshani told NPR on Monday. “I don’t know who’s responsible for the bombing.”

At a press conference Wednesday morning, U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said that the U.S. is looking into what happened at the school. “All I know, all I can say, is that we’re investigating that,” Hegseth said. “We, of course, never target civilian targets.”

Given Minab’s location in the southeastern part of Iran, Lewis believes it’s more likely the U.S. would have conducted the strike than Israel. As one gets farther south and east in Iran, “a strike is much more likely to be a U.S. strike than an Israeli strike because of the type of munitions and the geographic location,” he said.

Esmail Baghaei, the spokesman for Iran’s Foreign Ministry, called the strike “deliberate” and said that the U.S. and Israel bombed the school in part to tie up Iranian forces in the region with rescue efforts. “To call the attack on the girls school merely a ‘war crime’ does not capture the sheer evil and depravity of such a crime,” he said.

But Lewis said it’s more likely that the strike was the result of an error. Satellite images show that the school and clinic buildings were both once part of the base. The school was separated from the base by a wall between 2013 and 2016. The clinic was walled off between 2022 and 2024.

Lewis believes it’s possible American military planners had not updated their target sets.

“There are thousands of targets across Iran, and so there will be teams in the United States and Israel that are responsible for tracking those targets and updating them,” he said. “It’s possible that the target didn’t get updated.”

The Pentagon did not immediately respond to NPR’s request for additional information about the strike.

NPR’s Arezou Rezvani and NPR’s RAD team contributed to this report.

Mojtaba Khamenei, the second son of the assassinated Ali Khamenei, is being heavily tipped to succeed his father as supreme leader of Iran, which would pitch a hardliner into the task of steering the Islamic republic through the most turbulent period in its 48-year history and offer a powerful signal that, for now, it has no intention of changing course.

No official confirmation has been given and the announcement may be delayed until after the funeral of Ali Khamenei, which was on Wednesday postponed.

His son is believed to have been the choice of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), and the Israeli defence minister, Gideon Saar, has warned he will be assassinated.

Ayatollah Seyed Khatani, a member of the Assembly of Experts, the body that chooses the new supreme leader, said the assembly was close to selecting a leader.

Rigid in his anti-western views, Mojtaba Khamenei is not the candidate Donald Trump would have wanted. Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, said on Tuesday that Iran was run by “religious fanatic lunatics” – and Khamenei’s appointment is hardly likely to dispel that opinion.

The choice of supreme leader is made by the 88-strong Assembly of Experts, who in this case are picking from a field of six possible candidates. His election would be a powerful if unsurprising symbol that the government is not looking to find an accommodation with America.

Trump has said the worst-case scenario would be if Khamenei’s successor was “as bad as the previous person”.

There has been speculation for more than a decade that he would be his father’s successor, which grew when Ebrahim Raisi, the elected president and favourite of Khamenei, was killed in a helicopter crash.

Mojtaba Khamenei was born in 1969 and studied theology after graduating from high school. At the age of 17, he went to serve in the Iran-Iraq war, but it was not until the late 1990s that he came to be recognised as a public figure in his own right.

After the landslide defeat of Khamenei’s preferred candidate, Ali Akbar Nategh Nuri, in the 1997 presidential election, where he won only 25% of the final vote, various conservative Iranian groups realised the need to make changes to their structures and Mojtaba Khamenei was central to that project.

He was also seen as instrumental by reformists in suppressing the protests in 2009 that came after allegations the presidential election had been rigged, with his name chanted in the streets as one of those responsible. Mostafa Tajzadeh, a senior member of Iran’s reformist parties who was imprisoned after the vote, alleged that his and his wife, Fakhr al-Sadat Mohtashamipour’s, legal case was under the direct supervision of Mojtaba Khamenei.

In 2022 he was given the title of ayatollah – essential to his promotion. By then he was a regular figure by his father’s side at political meetings, as well as playing an influential role in the Islamic Republic’s Broadcasting Corporation, the government’s official media outlet often criticised for churning out dull political propaganda that many Iranians reject in favour of overseas satellite channels. He has also played a central role in the administration of his father’s substantial financial empire.

His closest political allies are Ahmad Vahidi, the newly appointed IRGC commander; Hossein Taeb, a former head of the IRGC’s intelligence organisation; and Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the current speaker of the parliament.

His rumoured appointment and its hereditary nature has long been resisted by reformists. The former prime minister Mir Hossein Mousavi, referring to the long history of rumours about Mojtaba Khamenei succeeding his father as leader, wrote in 2022: “News of this conspiracy have been heard for 13 years. If they are not truly pursuing it, why don’t they deny such an intention once and for all?”

The Assembly of Experts, in response, denounced “meaninglessness of doubts” and said the assembly would select only “the most qualified and the most suitable”.

Israel on Tuesday struck the building in the Iranian city of Qom, one of Shia Islam’s main seats of power, where the assembly was scheduled, but the building was empty, according to IRGC-affiliated media.