Desk correspondent , Tehran - Her name was Elham. She was eleven years old. She had only been on the volleyball team for two years, but she had already developed a serve that surprised everyone who watched her play. Her father told an Iran based journalist that Elham had big dreams to become a professional volleyball player one day. On the same day that a strike killed about 200 students and teachers at a girls' school in the city of Minab on the first day of the US-Israeli war with Iran, Elham was killed in another attack that has gotten less media attention. A newly developed US missile struck civilian sites in southern Iran on February 28, targeting a sports hall and an adjacent elementary school near a military compound in the city of Lamerd. She never came home.

On February 28, Day 1 of the US-Iran War, a cutting edge US Precision Strike Missile (PrSM), confirmed by a New York Times-citing official as its first combat use, devastated Lamerd in Fars Province, southern Iran, with three strikes hitting a sports hall packed with teenage volleyball players, an adjacent elementary school, and a nearby residential area, killing at least 21 civilians including a day laborer from Afghanistan and a pedestrian en route to a pharmacy. Munitions experts Jeffrey Lewis ("this is the first look we've gotten at the business end of the PrSM"), Frederic Gras (noting matching tungsten pellet fragmentation patterns), and BBC Verify analyzed videos/photos linking the shrapnel damage to PrSM's airburst design, amid the same day's deadlier Minab girls' school attack (175-180 mostly child deaths from a "targeting error" mistaking it for an adjacent IRGC base, per Pentagon preliminary findings despite President Trump's March 9 claim of "Iran or somebody else" responsibility); Joint Chiefs' Dan Caine confirmed Tomahawks fired that day, DoD now probes Lamerd ("inappropriate to comment"), as ex-USAF vet Wes J. Bryant warns the war's initial target barrage overwhelmed pre-strike reviews far beyond early ISIS ops.

The Precision Strike Missile was built for precision. On February 28, it debuted in a sports hall where teenage girls were practising volleyball. At least 21 people died. The weapon performed as designed. The humans who aimed it did not. Elham, with her volleyball dreams, did not survive. Her story, and the children of Minab, represent the human cost of a war that began without warning, moved at a pace that overwhelmed its own rules of engagement, and is still being accounted for strike by strike, school by school, child by child.