Snopes discusses claims that the destruction of a girl’s school in Minab in Iran resulting in great loss of life was due to a misfired Iranian missle rather than the US-Israel bombardment, and that Iran had supposedly admitted as much (urls in original):
Did Iranian authorities claim responsibility?
In short, no. Iranian authorities have not issued any official statements taking responsibility for the attack on the girls’ school. Numerous posts spread the claim on X (archived here, here, and here) and shared the same screenshot of a Telegram account that reportedly shared an IRGC statement written in Farsi.
Difficulties with the claim ought to have been obvious from the start. The school is close to an IRGC compound that was likely to have been the intended target, and even if Iran had done it, it seems unlikely that an autocratic regime would admit to it. And why would the story not have made its way into mainstream media in Israel at the very least? (1)
The second of the three links noted by Snopes belongs to none other than Richard Tice, Deputy Leader of Reform UK. And he he did not just “spread” the claim – he presented it accusingly as proof that the mainstream media and Zack Polanski (leader of the Green Party) were “spreading fake news” about the attack. (2)
This is part of a pattern in which Tice and Reform leader Nigel Farage express absolute confidence that they have penetrated the truth of some matter of public concern, based on dubious evidence that they have no inclination to look into before mouthing off. Some instances are relatively trivial, but the ideologically driven misattribution of a mass child casualty event during military conflict ought to raise serious alarm bells as to how easy it would be for bad actors to manipulate UK policy under a Reform government.
Some previous examples
Last summer, Farage was confident that he had “proof” that Essex Police had transported counter-prostestors to the site of anti-asylum seeker protests in Essex – in fact, the video he relied showed counter-protestors being taken away from the area; and before that, he and Tice both misinterpreted screenshots from IMdB to make wild accusations that a racist Reform activist had been a paid actor sent in by Channel 4 News (3). And most notoriously, of course, Farage gave spurious credibility to a false rumour about the identity of the Southport attacker, although in that instance he was more careful to couch his words in vague generalities.
Tice also appears to believe that what an unnamed “cancer expert” reportedly told Piers Morgan over lunch proves that mass Covid vaccination was disastrous (4); that the juxtaposition of two weather maps suggests that “we are being played” by meteorologists; and the fact that a scraper website in Pakistan helped to spread pre-existing fake news about the Southport attacker means that the whole matter can be laid at the door of “a gentleman in Pakistan”.
Notes
1. Further detail in the Guardian:
Shortly after the attack, misinformation began to proliferate online. Some social media accounts claimed the footage of the school was old footage shot in Pakistan, a claim that has been debunked. Several X accounts also made viral claims that the school had been struck by a misfired IRGC missile, but the photographs of the misfire that they present as evidence were taken about 1,600km (994 miles) away from Minab, in the city of Zanjan.
2. Although not mentioned by Snopes, the same line was taken by the Telegraph‘s Alison Pearson, who asked why BBC News had not retracted its reporting. The BBC had in fact quite properly reported on the matter as “Iran has blamed the US and Israel”, flagging up a lack of independent verification.
3. After the evidence collapsed under scrutiny, was announced via Paul Staines that an unnamed “senior barrister” was investigating the claim on behalf of a group called “Ofcom Watch”. It is reasonable to suspect here a contrivance by which Reform UK could “move on” while not appearing to back down.
4. Almost certainly this was Angus Dalgleish.
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