The confirmed death count includes at least 300 children, with strikes leveling schools and hospitals as the US-Israeli campaign shows no signs of slowing.
More than 1,200 people are dead in Iran. The number keeps climbing.
Ten days into Operation Epic Fury, the joint US-Israeli campaign that began with the assassination of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Feb. 28, the human toll is coming into focus. And it’s brutal.
Iran’s Foundation of Martyrs and Veterans Affairs, a government agency, put the number at 1,230 as of last Thursday . That count, officials admit, is already outdated. The Iranian ambassador to the UN, Saeid Iravani, told the body over the weekend that at least 1,332 civilians have been killed . The activist group HRANA, which has a reliable track record tracking deaths during unrest, puts the number higher: 1,708 total, with more than 1,200 of them civilians .
But raw numbers don’t tell you where the bombs fell.
They fell on a primary school in the southern city of Minab. The Iranian Red Crescent says 165 students and teachers—kids aged 7 to 12—were killed in that single strike on the war’s first morning . They fell on residential squares in Tehran—Enghelab, Azadi, Niloufar—places where people buy bread and cigarettes, not where you’d stash a missile battery .
HRANA has documented at least 183 children among the dead . Other counts push that number past 300 . The Iranian Red Crescent reports that 7,943 homes have been hit. 65 schools. 32 health centers .
The military casualties are harder to pin down. Tehran isn’t releasing precise figures. The Israeli Defense Forces, for their part, claim they’ve killed roughly 1,900 Iranian soldiers and commanders . That’s a number designed for press briefings, not history books, and it’s impossible to verify independently. What is clear: at least 12 IRGC soldiers died in Isfahan province in the opening salvos . The elite Quds Force took a direct hit in Beirut last week when an Israeli strike leveled a hotel where four of its senior commanders were meeting .
And the war is widening, not shrinking.
On Day 10, the Israeli Air Force punched through what’s left of Iran’s air defenses—degraded by roughly 80%, according to their estimates—and hit Tehran’s oil depots . Massive fires burned for hours at the Shahran depot on the capital’s edge . That’s new. That’s energy infrastructure. That’s designed to choke.
The US has lost seven service members, all killed in Iranian retaliatory strikes on bases in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia . President Trump witnessed the return of the first six bodies at Dover on Saturday . Israel has reported 13 dead, including two soldiers fighting in southern Lebanon and nine civilians killed in a Beit Shemesh missile strike .
Lebanon’s health ministry says 486 people are dead there . In the Gulf, 23 more—civilians, soldiers, a child in Kuwait—killed by the back-and-forth of missiles that don’t read borders .
Nobody in the region believes this ends soon. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the war “has only just begun.” President Trump, shifting tones, said it will end “soon” but set “no time limits.”
Meanwhile, Iran has a new Supreme Leader. The Assembly of Experts elected Mojtaba Khamenei, the son of the man killed in the opening strike, in a session held under what members described as “heavy pressure” from IRGC commanders . The vote happened while Israeli jets were striking the building where they met .
The message from Tel Aviv and Washington is clear: no one is off the table.
What happens next? The coalition is hitting fuel now. That means the cost of heating homes and running trucks just spiked for every Iranian. And with Brent crude pushing past $110 a barrel and the Strait of Hormuz effectively closed to commercial shipping, the economic pain is going global . The G7 is scrambling to release strategic reserves. But for families in Tehran burying children, that doesn’t matter much.
The bodies keep piling up. And week three hasn’t even started.
