Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Foreign Policy Adviser, Ophir Falk, said on Wednesday that a missile strike on a girls' school in Iran, which has been blamed on the US and Israel, was caused by Iranian missiles.
The strike in question occurred at the Shajareh Tayyebeh school in the southern city of Minab, Hormozgan province. The attack occurred during school hours, with students present.
Iranian media reported at least 180 people were killed, the majority of which were young schoolgirls. Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi explicitly blamed the US and Israel for the strike, describing it as a deliberate attack on civilians and children and a war crime.
Speaking to CNN’s Erin Burnett on Wednesday, Falk was asked about the strike and replied, “From what I understand, it's clearly an Iranian strike. It's a misfire from the Iranians. That's what I understand."
He pointed out that similar incidents occurred in Gaza a number of times “and I guess that's what's happened in Iran. But regardless, it's on the Iranian regime's hands."
Falk added that while the US and Israel do not deliberately target civilians, Iran has done the opposite. “For us, every civilian casualty is a tragedy. You've got to understand that. We do everything to prevent civilian casualties. So for us, for Israel, and also for the United States, of course, we have the same moral values. Civilian casualties are a tragedy. For them, it's a strategy. They target us. You see that right now. They're targeting us right now. They want to kill as many civilians as possible."
When Burnett said that the US has not yet announced the results of its investigation into the incident, Falk stated, “I can tell you 100 percent, 100 percent sure that the American military did not intentionally kill civilians. I can tell you that for 100 percent. And from what I understand, those were Iranian missiles that misfired, and there's about 30 percent of those missiles are misfiring. So that's not something strange. We saw that a number of times in Gaza, often, and Hamas, they're like a proxy for Iran. It's the same, it's the same thing."