3 min readNew DelhiApr 19, 2026 01:47 AM IST
“I love my mother a lot. I miss her when I go to school. My father drops me to school” — these sentences in Persian feature in a drawing of a heart connected by two flowers, roughly shaded in red with a yellow centre.
Another drawing, this one by six-year-old Arsha Mirani, shows two cars colored in blue, red, orange and pink. A sun shines above, with three hearts on the right. It, too, has a small message in Persian: ‘the sun is yellow… Arsha has a car and mother is cooking food’.
The two drawings are among 28 photos on display at the Iran Embassy in Delhi, drawn by young children who were killed when a missile destroyed their school in Southern Iran’s Minab on February 28 — the day the Iran-US-Israel war broke out.
The artworks were recovered from school bags, buried beneath the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school, by Red Crescent rescue teams. It was then scanned and emailed to the Iranian Embassy.
The Embassy is displaying them in an exhibition, ‘Minab Children Still Draw the Sun’. The scanned paintings are torn and smudged — signs of the horror witnessed that day when 160 children, aged between 5 to 7 years, died.
Visitors, wearing white and black turbans and long buttoned tunics under sleeveless outer cloaks, sob as they look at the drawing of a Mercator globe by Fatema Rahdar, with oceans coloured in blue and continents in green.
A panel in the exhibition read: “These are drawings that have been brought out from beneath the rubble of a school in Minab… pages that were recovered through the efforts of the Red Crescent rescue teams, and have been recovered only to the extent that they can be seen… Children in no war should be victims; yet in every war, many worlds collapse with their extinguishing.”
Story continues below this ad
Photographs show rows of graves of the children and coffins wrapped in the national flag, carried on the shoulders of those grieving.
According to sources in the Embassy, medicines worth 2.5 million euros, which were stocked where the exhibition is being held, have been sent to Iran in three phases. All these medicines were purchased from donations by Indians. The fourth phase of medicines will also be sent shortly, sources said.
