Preliminary Pentagon Findings Betray Trump's Outrageous Lies About Iranian School Massacre

The preliminary findings of a Pentagon investigation into the deadly bombing of an Iranian elementary school reportedly indicate that the US was responsible for the massacre—and that the building was intentionally targeted.

The findings, reported by The New York Times on Wednesday, further undercut President Donald Trump's lie that Iran carried out the February 28 strike, which killed at least 175 people—mostly children. According to the Times, US investigators determined that the strike on the girls' school in the southern Iranian city of Minab "was the result of a targeting mistake by the US military, which was conducting strikes on an adjacent Iranian base of which the school building was formerly a part."

"Officers at US Central Command created the target coordinates for the strike using outdated data provided by the Defense Intelligence Agency," the Times reported, citing unnamed people briefed on the investigation. "Officials emphasized that the findings are preliminary and that there are important unanswered questions about why the outdated information had not been double checked."

In a social media post reacting to the new reporting, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) wrote that the Iranian school massacre is "one of the most devastating military errors in decades."

"Trump lied about it. [Pentagon Secretary] Pete Hegseth gutted the office preventing civilian casualties. 175 are dead. Most were kids," wrote Warren. "Hegseth should be fired."

The advocacy organization Just Foreign Policy wrote in response to Warren, "Hegseth should be potentially charged and prosecuted for war crimes."

The Times' story is consistent with earlier reporting on internal Pentagon findings, US-marked missile fragments collected from the scene, video footage, outside investigations by news outlets, and analysis by human rights groups.

Al Jazeera concluded after examining satellite imagery, video footage, and other material that "either the bombing of the school was the result of a grave intelligence failure caused by reliance on outdated databases that did not keep pace with successive changes in the complex’s layout, or it was a deliberate strike based on a linkage that treats the school as part of the military system."

"Could be criminal negligence in a war that was illegal to begin with."

The Minab school appears to have been separated from the Iranian Navy compound a decade ago, NBC News reported last week.

Kenneth Roth, former executive director of Human Rights Watch, wrote in response to the Times' reporting that the Trump administration should not be allowed to get away with blaming the massacre on old targeting information.

"'Outdated data' is not an adequate explanation for why the US military attacked a girls' school in Iran, killing 175, mostly girls," Roth wrote on social media. "Why wasn’t the data updated before the attack? Do Iranian civilian lives not matter?"

Richard Painter, an attorney who served as the chief ethics lawyer in the George W. Bush White House, said the apparent US strike "could be criminal negligence in a war that was illegal to begin with."

Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One this past weekend, Trump said definitively—and without any evidence—that the school massacre "was done by Iran."

"They are very inaccurate, as you know, with their munitions," the president said. "They have no accuracy."

But arms experts have argued that all available evidence indicates a precision attack, not an errant missile.

“The targeting of this site is incredibly accurate,” Jeffrey Lewis, an expert in arms control and open-source intelligence, told NBC News. “The explosion damage is incredibly precise, and it doesn’t look like really anything missed, so that would tend to argue for precision munitions delivered by aircraft.”

Rich Weir, senior adviser of the Crisis, Conflict and Arms Division at Human Rights Watch, told the outlet that “the number of individual strikes across the compound and the apparent accuracy with which they appear to have struck individual structures across the compound, shown in part through the relatively small circular holes that were points of entry for the munitions on multiple rooftops, indicate that the attack struck multiple structures on the compound base with highly accurate, guided munitions.”

The Times' reporting came shortly after every member of the Senate Democratic caucus except Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) wrote a letter to Hegseth demanding a "swift" and transparent investigation into the school massacre.

"The findings must be released to the public as soon as possible, along with any measures to pursue accountability," the senators wrote.