More than 150 people died at the Shajareh Tayyebeh Primary School in Minab, according to Iranian officials, around 120 of them schoolchildren. A UN fact-finding mission now says it has reasonable grounds to believe United States forces were responsible, and that the strike was a war crime.
The finding came on Thursday, in a report by the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Iran. The report goes to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, where states are due to discuss it on Monday.
What the mission concluded
Investigators called the attack indiscriminate, causing civilian deaths and damage to civilian infrastructure. The school sat next to an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps naval complex, and the report says the US failed to update its targeting databases or to confirm the building was a military objective. That, the mission said, amounted to more than mere negligence. “Rather, the U.S. directed the strikes at the building of the school while being aware of a substantial risk of striking a civilian object and acting recklessly as regards the possibility that this would happen.”
The experts described the school as a clearly identifiable civilian object and found no evidence it was used for military purposes.
They reached a similar conclusion about a strike on a sports centre in Lamerd. The report says the attack damaged nearby homes and a school and killed or injured 22 civilians, and calls it indiscriminate and a war crime. U.S. Central Command said in a statement in March that American forces launched no strikes on Lamerd that day.
Washington’s response
The Pentagon declined to comment on a report by an outside organization. “Our investigation remains ongoing, and we have nothing to announce at the moment,” it said. White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said the Human Rights Council had “accomplished nothing for human rights” and that Iran was the only party in the conflict to have committed war crimes.
The record on Minab is not new. In June, President Donald Trump said “nobody” purposefully attacked a girls’ school in Iran, citing an investigation. Reuters had earlier reported that an initial internal US military inquiry found American forces were likely responsible. The Pentagon has since elevated that probe but has published no preliminary findings.
Findings against Iran
The mission did not spare Tehran. It found that Iranian authorities carried out a widespread and systematic attack on civilians during the protests that erupted in late December: unlawful killings, torture, arbitrary detention, enforced disappearances and severe limits on free expression. Those acts, it concluded, were crimes against humanity.
Official figures put the dead at 3,038 and the injured at 25,000. The mission could not verify them independently but believes the real numbers are likely far higher. Tehran blamed “terrorists and rioters” backed by exiled opponents and by the US and Israel.
A UN fact-finding mission is investigative, not judicial, and opens no criminal cases itself. Its findings can, however, be used by national courts or by bodies such as the International Criminal Court.
