As the shadow of war spreads across Iran, the Islamic Republic appears to be turning a tactic long used by its regional proxies inward: the militarization of civilian spaces and the use of civilians as human shields.

On the morning of February 28, 2026, according to Iranian state media and subsequently corroborated by satellite imagery analysis from the Associated Press and NPR, airstrikes hit the Sayyid al-Shuhada military complex in Minab, Hormozgan Province. Approximately 600 meters away stood the Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school. According to local officials and the education ministry, the school had once been part of the IRGC compound but had been separated and operating as an all-girls civilian institution for over a decade. Iranian state media reported that between 150 and 180 people were killed, many of them reportedly schoolgirls aged seven to twelve. The figures have not been independently verified; neither the United States nor Israel has accepted responsibility for the strike, though satellite imagery analysis by the Associated Press and The New York Times indicates the damage pattern is consistent with a precision airstrike, though responsibility has not been confirmed.

The world rightly mourned. But most observers asked the wrong question. They asked: why did the attackers strike so close to a school? The more urgent question is: why was a school still operating at full capacity, 600 meters from a major IRGC naval base, on the first morning of a war that had been anticipated for weeks? Why were no air-raid sirens activated? Why was there no evacuation?

The answer lies in a strategy that Israeli readers know intimately. It is the same playbook that Hamas refined in Gaza and Hezbollah deployed in Lebanon: the deliberate reversal of military and civilian infrastructure functions, transforming schools into barracks, hospitals into command centers, and civilian populations into human shields. The Islamic Republic is now executing this playbook on its own soil, against its own people. And this is not merely a military tactic — it is a full-scale psychological operation.

A Playbook Israelis Have Seen Before

For nearly two decades, Israel has confronted adversaries who weaponize civilian spaces. The pattern is consistent across Hamas, Hezbollah, and now the Islamic Republic itself, revealing not coincidence but doctrine — a shared operational playbook refined through years of proxy warfare.

Hospitals as command centers. In Gaza, Hamas operated command infrastructure beneath Al-Shifa Hospital, using thousands of patients and staff as a protective layer. The IDF recovered weapons, military equipment, and tunnel access points beneath the facility. Senior Hamas operatives were documented wearing medical robes to move undetected. A 2019 NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence report catalogued how Hamas systematically placed “military or security-related infrastructures such as HQs, bases, armouries” within hospitals and other protected facilities.

In Iran today, the same pattern has emerged with striking precision. According to Iran International, citing hospital staff who spoke on condition of anonymity, senior IRGC commanders have been holding operational meetings inside hospitals in recent days, accompanied by security teams and conducting discussions entirely unrelated to healthcare. The three-man leadership team coordinating Iran’s war response convened in a hospital morgue in Tehran. Iranian analyst Jamshid Barzegar argues that when commanders enter hospitals with protection teams and hold non-medical meetings, they are effectively taking patients and medical staff hostage to their own security considerations.

Schools as military installations. The NATO report documented Hamas’s systematic pattern of “firing rockets, artillery, and mortars from or in proximity to heavily populated civilian areas, often from or near facilities which should be protected according to the Geneva Convention (e.g. schools, hospitals, or mosques).” In the 2014 Gaza conflict, the IDF documented Al-Wafa Hospital being converted into a command center, rocket-launching site, and observation post. In the 2023 war, weapons, uniforms, and tunnel infrastructure were found beneath Rantisi Children’s Hospital.

In Iran, the replication is unmistakable. Iran’s own Foreign Ministry spokesman, Esmaeil Baghaei, was photographed giving a press conference from inside a school. As IranWire reported, the briefing took place at the Shahid Mahallati School in Tehran, fueling suspicion that authorities are using civilian spaces as operational venues. Multiple reports from opposition media and human rights monitors indicate that military equipment has in some cases been relocated from bases into schools or nearby civilian facilities. Families living near schools have been forced to evacuate their homes after witnessing the gathering of armed forces in these locations. As the Norway-based human rights group Hengaw noted, “the establishment and expansion of military facilities in close proximity to schools and public spaces place civilians at heightened risk.”

Prisoners as shields. This is where the Islamic Republic’s strategy goes beyond what even Hamas attempted. Reports from NPR, Iran Human Rights Monitor, and the Center for Human Rights in Iran confirm that political prisoners from Evin Prison — many of them detained during the December 2025 uprising — have been transferred to intelligence complexes and military bases: precisely the facilities being targeted by airstrikes. Ward 209, which houses political prisoners, was evacuated and detainees moved to an undisclosed location.

The Iran Human Rights Monitor’s analysis is unequivocal: the transfers constitute “a punitive and security project rather than a protective measure,” designed to break prisoner resistance, sever family communication, and place detainees in locations of maximum vulnerability. In Mahabad, when prisoners protested being held near a Basij center that had just been bombed, they were met with tear gas from anti-riot forces. In Evin, according to reports received by Iran International, guards welded doors shut and abandoned their posts, leaving prisoners confined without adequate food or water. As NPR reported, one political prisoner’s sister confirmed he had been “relocated to an intelligence complex and then an army base — all places that are likely targets of these strikes.”

The absence of warning systems. Perhaps the most telling indicator of deliberate strategy is what is absent. When war began, Israel activated air-raid sirens nationwide and pushed warnings to every mobile phone within minutes. Bahrain sounded its alarms to warn of Iranian strikes on U.S. bases. Even during the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, Iran operated a functioning civil defense siren system — many Iranians alive today remember the sound from childhood.

Since February 28, 2026, no such sirens have sounded in Iran. While the government did issue evacuation advisories for Tehran and made the northern highway one-directional to facilitate departure, these measures were practically meaningless: destination cities had no capacity to absorb millions of displaced residents, no shelters were prepared, and no civil defense protocols were activated for those who remained. The regime effectively shifted the entire burden of survival onto the population itself — an abdication of the most basic governmental responsibility to protect civilian life.

Doctrine, Not Coincidence: From Proxy to Principal

The parallels are not coincidental. They represent the homecoming of a doctrine. For decades, the Islamic Republic exported this strategy through its proxy network: Hamas embedded fighters in Gaza’s hospitals; Hezbollah stored rockets in Lebanese apartment buildings; the Houthis launched missiles from residential neighborhoods in Yemen. In each case, the operational logic was identical: exploit the adversary’s commitment to international humanitarian law by making every military target inseparable from civilian life.

Jamshid Barzegar has argued that the Islamic Republic is now applying inside Iran the same pattern it long tested through its proxy forces — militarizing civilian spaces and exposing civilians to military risk. He noted that similar tactics had been employed by allied groups in Syria, Gaza, Lebanon, and Yemen, and that these same methods are now being applied domestically.

What is happening in Iran is not the improvisation of a desperate regime. It is the domestic deployment of a battle-tested doctrine, refined over decades of proxy warfare, now turned inward against the very population it claims to govern.

The People Are Not the Regime

International discourse frequently conflates the Iranian people with the Islamic Republic. This conflation is not merely inaccurate — it is the regime’s most valuable strategic asset. As long as the world sees “Iran” as a monolith, every civilian casualty becomes evidence of external aggression rather than internal betrayal.

The reality is starkly different. For years, Iranians have risen against the Islamic Republic — from the Green Movement of 2009, through the nationwide protests of 2017–2018 and the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising of 2022, to the massive demonstrations of December 2025 and January 2026, the largest since the 1979 revolution. The regime’s response has been consistent: massacres, mass arrests, and systematic repression. Tens of thousands of protesters remain in detention — many of them now transferred to the very military bases being bombed.

The Islamic Republic does not govern Iran. It occupies it. And the human shield strategy makes this occupation visible: a regime that places its own imprisoned citizens in the path of incoming strikes is not protecting its people. It is using them as ammunition in a war of narrative.

The Strategic Logic: Fighting Two Wars Simultaneously

The human shield strategy serves multiple objectives simultaneously, and understanding them requires recognizing that the Islamic Republic is not fighting one war but two: an external military conflict against the U.S. and Israel, and an internal war against its own population. The human shield doctrine is designed to serve both fronts.

In the external war, the strategy aims to delegitimize the military operation in international forums. Every bombed school, every damaged hospital, every killed child becomes a data point in the regime’s narrative at the UN, the ICJ, and in global media. The UN Human Rights experts’ statement condemning the strikes on schools and hospitals — without acknowledging the military assets deliberately placed within or beside them — demonstrates how effectively this strategy works. The ICRC’s calls for protecting civilian infrastructure, while essential in principle, inadvertently serve the regime’s narrative when they fail to address the prior militarization of that infrastructure.

In the internal war, the strategy serves a darker purpose. By engineering civilian casualties, the regime manufactures domestic rage — not against itself for failing to protect its people, but against the external enemy. This is psychological warfare directed inward: a population that was, just weeks ago, demanding the regime’s overthrow is now expected to rally behind it. Every image of a dead child is a tool of regime survival, designed to redirect anti-regime anger into anti-external sentiment and, in the regime’s calculus, to prevent the coordination of popular action that could accelerate its collapse from within.

As an Iranian, I say with confidence: this calculation will fail. The Iranian people know their enemy. They have identified it through years of repression, economic devastation, and state violence. They understand that the occupying regime — not external forces — is the source of their suffering. No manufactured grief will erase that knowledge.

Post-attack narrative management is the third objective. Regardless of the war’s outcome, the regime is constructing an archive of civilian suffering that will serve it for decades — in international courts, in propaganda, in recruitment. The Minab school is being shaped into the regime’s Guernica: a symbol of foreign brutality, with the regime’s own role in engineering the tragedy carefully erased from the record.

The Infrastructure Reversal: Anatomy of a PSYOP

What we are witnessing is not merely a military tactic but a large-scale psychological operation in the fullest doctrinal sense. The pattern suggests what appears to be a systematic reversal of infrastructure function: military bases are evacuated while schools and hospitals are militarized. Soldiers vacate their barracks while children remain in classrooms adjacent to military targets. Prisoners are moved from prisons into bases. The protected becomes exposed; the exposed becomes protected.

This reversal serves the same function it served for Hamas in Gaza: it transforms every legitimate military strike into a perceived war crime. It forces the attacking force into an impossible calculus — accept the civilian casualties and lose the information war, or refrain from striking and lose the military war. It is, as NATO’s strategic communications analysis described Hamas’s identical tactic, a form of “lawfare”: the weaponization of international humanitarian law against those who seek to uphold it.

For Israelis, this pattern requires no explanation. You have lived it in Gaza, in Lebanon, in every conflict where your adversaries turned hospitals into headquarters and schools into armories. What is new is the scale: an entire nation’s civilian infrastructure, weaponized against an entire nation’s population, by their own government. The source of the doctrine is the same. The playbook is the same. Only the theater of operations has changed.

Conclusion: Seeing the Pattern Whole

The Islamic Republic’s human shield strategy is not an aberration. It is the logical culmination of a doctrine it spent decades perfecting through proxies. From Gaza’s Al-Shifa Hospital to Beirut’s residential neighborhoods to Tehran’s schools and hospital morgues, the pattern is identical: militarize civilian spaces, ensure civilian casualties, control the post-attack narrative, and convert the suffering of innocents into strategic advantage.

But there is a fundamental difference between Gaza and Iran. Hamas used the people of Gaza — a population it governed but did not represent. The Islamic Republic is using the people of Iran — a population that has been in open revolt against it for years, across multiple uprisings. These are not citizens who chose this war. Many of them were in the streets demanding the regime’s end. And now they find themselves trapped between foreign bombs and a government that has deliberately placed them in the line of fire.

The international community must learn to see this pattern whole. When a hospital is struck in Iran, the first question must not be “why did the attacker target a hospital?” but “why were IRGC commanders holding meetings inside it?” When a school is bombed, the question is not only about the precision of the strike but about why children were still inside a building adjacent to a military complex during an active war. And when prisoners are transferred to military bases under bombardment, the question is not one of logistics but of calculated human sacrifice.

The people of Iran deserve to be seen as what they are: not shields for their occupiers, but hostages of them.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)