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minab school bombing
Pentagon Plans to Withhold Report on US Massacre of Iranian Kids Until After Midterms
One policy analyst wrote sardonically that the administration doesn't "want to remind voters before the midterms of the mass killing of schoolchildren on the first day of Trump's glorious war."
Oct 15, 2026
The Pentagon is reportedly planning to withhold until after the midterm elections the completed findings of its investigation into a devastating US strike on an elementary school in southern Iran, which killed more than 150 people—including 120 children—on the first day of President Donald Trump's illegal and deeply unpopular war.
Bloomberg reported on Thursday that "top Pentagon officials have expressed their intention to hold off on releasing an internal report into the attack" on Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in Minab until after next month's midterms "at the earliest." The internal assessment is believed to have been effectively complete for months, and preliminary findings reported in early March determined that American forces hit the school with a Tomahawk missile due to "outdated" targeting information.
According to Bloomberg, Pentagon investigators "discovered that flawed intelligence, outdated imagery, and an overreliance on AI contributed to the attack," which is regarded as one of the US military's worst atrocities against civilians in decades. Trump brushed off the massacre in remarks to reporters in June, saying: "Mistakes are made. War is nasty."
Ryan Costello, policy director at the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), said in a statement that "the refusal to come clean about the attack on Minab is not just a shameful exercise to dodge accountability for a horrific war crime; it is actively risking these errors being repeated again."
"As the administration has dodged accountability on Minab and [a deadly strike on a sports hall hours later], it has engaged in further attacks that may be war crimes, including the bombing of a civilian home on Qeshm Island that killed a family and the bombing of a wedding party in Kuhestak that killed five, including two children," said Costello. "Ensuring these tragedies don’t repeat starts with accountability on Minab.”
International policy analyst Brian Finucane wrote sardonically that the Pentagon doesn't "want to remind voters before the midterms of the mass killing of schoolchildren on the first day of Trump's glorious war."
Bloomberg's reporting came as CNN published a story detailing internal US "strike plans" that include possibly dropping the so-called "mother of all bombs" on Iranian energy infrastructure.
The GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast Bomb (MOAB) is the largest nonnuclear bomb in the US arsenal. In 2017, Trump became the first US president to deploy the weapon, authorizing the military to drop it on Afghanistan.
Sina Toossi, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, warned that using the bomb against Iran would risk "triggering another major escalatory spiral, potentially including Iranian attacks on critical regional energy infrastructure, with consequences for global markets and the US economy."
"This only reinforces the fundamental problem: Trump has no viable military solution to the Iran conflict," Toossi wrote. "Is he looking for one spectacular strike to project strength and declare victory? Or is he prepared to plunge the US into an even deeper, potentially endless war that could devastate the rest of his presidency, legacy, and the economy?"
Costello of NIAC said that "the Trump administration’s threats to commit war crimes in Iran cannot be normalized."
"President Trump acts on many of his threats, necessitating more urgent action to bring this illegal war of choice to a definitive end," he added.
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Deep-Dive Investigation Examines Minab School Bombing: ‘One of the Worst US War Crimes Since Vietnam’
“There was no school left,” said the father of a 6-year-old girl killed in the attack. “I thought I was asleep and having a nightmare.”
Sep 30, 2026
Survivors, parents, and first responders provided harrowing firsthand accounts of the US bombing of an elementary school on the first day of the US-Israeli war with Iran as part of a new Drop Site News investigation demonstrating that the school had publicly operated as a civilian institution for more than a decade.
The report, published Wednesday, provides new eyewitness accounts from those who lost loved ones when US Tomahawk missiles hit the Shajareh Tayyebeh School in Minab, which killed 120 children and dozens of others, and has been described as “one of the worst US war crimes since Vietnam.”
“The children were five years old and all they did was yell, ‘Miss! Miss!’ and were crying. I ran to the children. I just said, ‘Get under the table!” recalled preschool teacher Hossniyeh Salem. “I didn’t think they were going to strike the school. I just thought that some place had been hit. I said, ‘Don’t be afraid, sit down.’”
“Two simultaneous sounds. They’re still in my ear. My son even describes them—‘Wooosh, boom! Woosh, boom!’—and then the explosion very close by,” Salem said. “Plaster was falling, the ground was shaking, and at that moment I just looked at my preschool girls and my son, and I said to myself, ‘It’s over. Now is the time when we go under the rubble, it’s going to fall now,’” she continued. “Then there were no more sounds. The class was full of smoke and dust."
Yaghoub Yazdanpanah, a literature teacher at another school about eight miles from Minab, described the moment he learned that the school his 6-year-old daughter, Fatemeh, attended had been bombed.
“I left my classroom, ran home, took my car, and sped to Minab. When I arrived, I said, ‘Oh no!’ The unimaginable had happened," he said. “There was no school left. Two-thirds of the school, maybe more, had been destroyed. Smoke was rising from all over the school. It had turned into rubble. For a moment, I thought I was asleep and having a nightmare."
Yazdanpanah said he already knew the worst had happened well before he received his daughter’s body at an overwhelmed hospital that night.
“We knew our children had been martyred; we knew our children were no longer with us," he said. “When they brought Fatemeh, she was in one piece because she had been in her teacher’s arms [when she died].”
“There was no school left."
The US has still not accepted responsibility for the Minab attack, even though an internal Pentagon investigation has concluded that US forces struck the school using two Tomahawk missiles. In the initial days after the attack, President Donald Trump claimed that Iran had been responsible before backing off the claim, stating, “I just don’t know enough about it.”
Drop Site obtained images of the missile fragments from the site, which an independent weapons inspector said “all appear to be remnants of Tomahawk missiles." Iran is not known to possess Tomahawks. A UN fact-finding mission report released earlier this month determined that the school had been “the intended point of impact" rather than collateral damage.
People are seen scouring the wreckage at the site of the February 28, 2026 bombing of the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in Minab, Iran. (Photo by Mehr News Agency/Wikimedia Commons)
Adm. Brad Cooper, the commander of US Central Command (CENTCOM) told Congress in May that the school was "located on an active [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] cruise missile base."
Wes Bryant, a former senior targeting adviser at the Pentagon, told Drop Site he'd never seen any indication that the school was on an active missile site and explained that even if it was, "it doesn’t matter."
“Those children, all those civilians, are still non-combatants and protected, so it’s really disgusting to hear that," he said. "This wasn’t even fragmentation that hit a school next to another target. This was deliberately targeted very, very clearly and obviously. So at the very least, [it was a] complete mischaracterization of the target.”
There was abundant evidence of the school's civilian use that would have been available to those who conducted the strike. The school was part of a compound that included barracks for the elite IRGC but was redeveloped for civilian use beginning in 2014. It had publicly and officially operated as a school since 2015.
The school had a very active online presence with a website that prominently displayed classroom activities and school events. Meanwhile, satellite imagery captured just two months before the attack showed children standing in the schoolyard outside the building.
An investigation from Bloomberg found that the school had been placed on a list of targets for the war's opening salvo that was assembled in part using the Maven artificial intelligence system developed by Palantir, which reportedly did not classify it as a school.
The UN report emphasized that even if the attack can be boiled down to an intelligence failure, it still likely amounted to a war crime because the US attacked despite readily available evidence that the building was a school, a failure investigators said went “beyond mere negligence” and amounted to recklessness toward the risk of striking civilians.
US President Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth attend a dignified transfer event for US service members killed during operations in the Middle East, at Dover Air Force Base in Dover, Delaware, on July 22, 2026. (Photo by Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images)
Hala Rharrit, a career former US Foreign Service officer who spent 17 years at the State Department before resigning in 2024, remains unsatisfied by the government's efforts to downplay the attack as a "mistake."
“There’s no way to say that this was some type of error,” Rharrit told Drop Site. “You’re either saying that our US Military is completely incompetent, that despite the multiple layers of review, everybody messed up—or there was something very, very sinister about this strike.”
According to data from the Human Rights Activists News Agency, the vast majority of US-Israeli strikes during the first 40 days of the war did harm to civilians or civilian infrastructure, contradicting repeated claims that the US “never targets civilians.” At minimum, the data shows at least 1,701 civilians have been killed, but HRANA has stressed that the true death toll is likely substantially higher.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has spent his tenure dissolving guardrails meant to prevent civilian casualties, denouncing "stupid rules of engagement," and saying the military should pursue “lethality” over “legality.” Trump, meanwhile, has repeatedly threatened mass destruction upon Iran, including that the "entire civilization" would "die."
“The administration and Hegseth have made it quite clear that they don’t really care about civilian casualties. That may also have been true of previous bombing campaigns that predate the Trump administration, but it is even more the case than in the past, and they have made it clear that troops do not need to be concerned about consequences,” said Harrison Mann, a former US Army major and intelligence analyst for the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).
“There is no mystery about what coordinates those missiles hit, and that question would have been answerable on the day of the strikes," he told Drop Site. "The only way that CENTCOM would not know is that they are choosing to be willfully ignorant.”
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Apologies to Caligula: Trump Is Out of His Goddamn Mind
Trump's horrific war in Iran as already shown that artificial intelligence can be an accessory to mass murder, and if we do nothing, it will kill again.
Sep 24, 2026
I feel like I need to apologize for a column a couple of months ago when I compared the current president of the United States to Caligula, the possibly mad Roman emperor who is said to have nominated his trusted horse for high office. I need to apologize to Caligula. From pitching his triumphal D.C. arch as a storage shed for deadly snipers’ bullets to banning reporters from the White House in a narcissistic rage, Donald Trump is losing his grip on reality. This is unsustainable.
Worried about AI killing humans? Bad news: It already is.
Which is it?
Are the robots of AI, or artificial intelligence, so smart that they’re on the verge of holding a secret meetup in the darkest corner of the dark web and developing a plot to kill all humans through germ warfare, to make sure we don’t kill them first by pulling the plug?
Or is AI so dumb — artificial stupidity, despite the billionaires of Silicon Valley showing up daily on our TV screen to brag about the sky-high IQ of their son, Claude — that the thing that will murder us is a crazy hallucination that will turn a false alarm into World War III?
The fact that we can’t answer this should give us pause, but maybe we aren’t even asking the right question. Maybe the real issue is how easy we’ve made it to kill off the human race — a capability that was already created by people even before we invented the computer.
One thing is certain. Artificial intelligence has already been an accessory to mass murder, and if we do nothing, it will kill again.
Remember the very first days of the now seemingly endless Iran war, and the news that two missile strikes had obliterated a school for young children in the Iranian coastal city of Minab, in an apparent “double-tap” strike in which the second attack from the skies killed young girls and boys and their teachers as they huddled in a prayer hall?
Those bombings, which killed 156 people on Feb. 28, caused the United Nations’ Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Iran to report last week that it found “reasonable grounds to believe that the United States committed a war crime by launching indiscriminate attacks …” The U.S. government has never taken responsibility for the bloodshed, despite overwhelming visual evidence that the bombs were precision-guided U.S. Tomahawk missiles.
It didn’t take long for additional speculation that an AI program had mistakenly targeted the school, perhaps using outdated maps and info from an earlier time when its buildings were attached to an Iranian military complex. After all, the Pentagon has been openly bragging about the death and destruction facilitated by its use of Palantir’s Smart Maven System and also Anthropic’s Claude.
Last week, Bloomberg News reported that the Pentagon’s overreliance on AI, and specifically the Palantir Maven program, was a major factor in the school tragedy, along with the outdated intelligence about the Minab site — the “garbage in.” Its exposé noted that U.S. military planners were racing to identify some 1,000 Iranian targets in the early hours of the war, giving humans little time to double-check the list. Kindergartners were slaughtered as a result.
This was hardly the first time robots have been linked to human death, both in war — in 2024, +924 Magazine reported the Israel Defense Forces were using an AI program code-named “Lavender” to target sites amid the mass killing in Gaza — and in peace, as shown by numerous accounts of robots helping troubled people die by suicide.
And yet, it could have been much, much worse. At the same time as the Bloomberg report on the AI link to the mass killing in Iran, the world also learned that a false report generated by robot intelligence nearly sparked a conflict between the United States and China that could conceivably have spiraled into major fighting.
CNN and other outlets have reported that a U.S. special operations command analyst working with AI generated an urgent report that a Chinese ship bound toward the Middle East was carrying components for a nuclear weapons system, which caused military leaders to scramble jets and assemble a team to seize the vessel.
Only at the last minute did the Pentagon dig deeper and learn the AI-generated report was completely false, a hallucination — one that nearly triggered a violent conflict between the world’s two largest military powers.
The two disturbing reports about the use, or misuse, of AI by the U.S. military in a time of war did make news but didn’t get nearly as much attention — either in the media or on sites like Bluesky or X — as warnings from both whistleblowers and CEOs in Silicon Valley that a swarm of robots could decide on their own and without any human intervention or awareness to try to kill off our so-called civilization.
The fear of an unprompted attack from AI secret agents is real, based on several incidents that have already occurred, including a well-planned and partly successful operation by OpenAI’s robot agents to hack into a company called Hugging Face.
Still, it says something about human intelligence that we are captivated by the unknown and mysterious possibility of a random attack, while the fact that people are currently misusing AI to cause death and suffering is a less compelling story. I noted in this space last week that the threat to humankind from climate change is arguably even more real — and yet this gets denied by many and ignored by others.
It’s also striking to me as a boomer born in 1959 that a generation that was born into a time of constant terror — backyard bomb shelters, “duck and cover” drills in the classroom, and sci-fi horror at the drive-in that an atomic arms race could kill us at any moment — is suddenly back to where we started.
Over 81 years, humans were smart enough never to drop another nuclear weapon (well, not intentionally) after the mass murders at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but not bright enough to figure out how to eliminate the nuclear threat altogether.
The fact that civilization managed to — so far — pause the number of world wars at two has given us the space and the false bravado to create new and much more insidious killing machines, and the threat from invisible robots on a hidden dark web is somehow even scarier than the radioactive mushroom cloud that we more or less understand.
Boomers who went to bed as kids in the 1950s and ’60s praying we wouldn’t die before we woke are now spending our senior-citizen-discount years fearful that something stranger than science fiction is coming for our children, or grandchildren. Over the course of a lifetime, the arc of that moral universe has not bent at all.
Still, humans were able, somehow, to prevent nuclear annihilation so far, and now it’s past time to get to work on the actual threats from AI and start on those workarounds. For example, the articles I’ve read speculating on how the robots plan to kill us frequently mention the prospect of AI agents developing bioweapons and releasing them, either on their own or prompted by a bad actor. (In theory, human development of bioweapons has been banned for a half century.)
From everything I’ve read so far about AI, it sounds like we’d have better luck safeguarding or eliminating the components that could make a biological agent rather than stopping the robots. Likewise, AI agents would not be able to start an atomic apocalypse if our human politicians went to work at finally eliminating nuclear weapons. Artificial intelligence won’t kill little girls in an Iranian school if humans don’t start dumb wars in the first place.
If Silicon Valley’s prophets of doom are serious, there’s no fix that’s too big or too ambitious. But understand that the biggest problem isn’t that AI wants to murder us, but that since 1942 we humans have been busy creating all the suicidal weapons AI agents could use.
Can you even “duck and cover” from a killer robot? I don’t intend to find out, and I don’t want my yet-to-be-born grandchildren to have to even think about it.
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UN Experts Say US War Crimes Likely in Iran School, Sports Complex Massacres
The report points to statements by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that signaled the "deprioritization of civilian harm mitigation and of compliance with international law."
Sep 17, 2026
Human rights experts who led a United Nations fact-finding mission in Iran are set to submit their findings to the UN Human Rights Council that the United States likely committed war crimes in the early days of the US-Israeli war there.
The experts examined evidence regarding two airstrikes that killed at least 178 civilians, including 120 children, according to Iranian authorities—the bombing of the Shajareh Tayyebeh School in Minab and an attack on a sports complex and residential area in Lamerd, both of which took place on February 28.
The report notes that the Pentagon has not released findings of its own investigation into the Minab school bombing and the US has not accepted responsibility for the attack, although Reuters reported on an internal probe that found US forces were likely behind the strike.
Despite the lack of a response from the US to the fact-finding mission's requests for information, the experts said they found "reasonable grounds to believe that the US committed the war crime of launching an indiscriminate attack resulting in loss of life or injury to civilians or damage to civilian objects."
The report pointed to the Trump administration's "deprioritization of civilian harm mitigation and of compliance with IHL [international humanitarian law], expressed through public statements by senior US leadership, including the president and the secretary of defense."
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said early in the war that the US would dispense with “stupid rules of engagement”—which are meant to protect civilians under international law—and said US forces would rain "death and destruction from the sky all day long."
The Pentagon also relied on "outdated targeting data" when deciding to bomb the school in Minab, which was clearly identified as a school for young children, said the report.
"The mission considers that the United States' failure to update information in relation to the school in its targeting databases and to verify that the building was a military objective before launching the attack went beyond mere negligence," reads the report. "Rather, the US 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."
More than 150 people were killed in the attack, including 120 children.
The experts also said the sports complex and residential area in Lamerd on February 28 were "clearly identifiable" as civilian targets, and that the weapon used in the attack—Lockheed Martin-manufactured Precision Strike Missiles (PrSM) that disperse tungsten pellets over a wide area—show that the strike "constituted an indiscriminate attack in violation of the principle of distinction" between civilians and military targets.
The missiles, said the experts, "could not be directed at a specific military objective and their effects on civilians and civilian objects could not be limited as required by IHL. The US was under the IHL obligation to employ weapons systems and ammunition that satisfied these requirements."
The UN team said 22 civilians were killed in the attack in Lamerd, including four schoolchildren and a two-year-old girl who was killed while playing in front of her home.
US Central Command has denied responsibility for the attack, but top US officials in March boasted that the military had "made history" by using the PrSM for the first time in the war.
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When Weddings Become Battlefields, the Laws of War Begin to Fray
The US strikes on a wedding in Kuhestak and a school in Minab expose a larger test: whether the laws protecting civilians constrain powerful states as well as their adversaries.
Sep 08, 2026
On September 1, a US airstrike hit a family compound in Kuhestak, southern Iran, as women and children gathered for a wedding celebration. At least five people were killed and dozens more injured. Associated Press reporters who visited the town documented extensive damage and civilian suffering. Reuters later reported that imagery, debris, and weapons assessments were consistent with a direct hit by a US munition, while US officials said the incident was under review. The immediate facts matter. But the larger question is already unavoidable: What happens to the laws of war when civilian spaces repeatedly become part of the battlefield?
The significance of Kuhestak extends beyond the number of casualties or the identity of the weapon. The deeper danger is what incidents like this can do to the norms meant to limit warfare. If homes, schools, hospitals, wedding gatherings, or refugee sites are repeatedly treated as tolerable consequences of military necessity, the distinction between battlefield and civilian life begins to lose practical meaning.
International humanitarian law was designed precisely to prevent that erosion. Its rules do not make war safe, and they do not prohibit every attack that may harm civilians. They do, however, require parties to distinguish between civilians and military objectives, prohibit attacks expected to cause excessive incidental civilian harm in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated, and require feasible precautions to minimize civilian loss. The principles of distinction, proportionality, and precaution are not political preferences. They are the legal architecture intended to preserve a minimum boundary between military necessity and human life.
International law rarely collapses in a single dramatic moment. More often, norms weaken when exceptional conduct is repeated, defended, or left without meaningful scrutiny.
That distinction matters when assessing the US position as well. Washington says it does not target civilians and that its operations in southern Iran were aimed at military infrastructure, including air-defense, communications, and maritime assets. The Associated Press reported those stated objectives alongside the civilian toll in Kuhestak. Under the laws of war, the existence of a legitimate military objective can matter greatly. Civilian casualties, by themselves, do not automatically prove an unlawful attack. But that is precisely why transparent investigation is essential: Was the target properly identified? Were the expected civilian risks assessed? Were feasible precautions taken? And was the anticipated military advantage sufficient to justify those risks?
Kuhestak is especially troubling because it follows another catastrophic episode in the same province. On February 28, a strike hit a school in Minab. In March, Amnesty International said its investigation found US forces responsible for the attack, which killed 156 people, including 120 children, and concluded that the United States had failed to take all feasible precautions to avoid civilian harm. Amnesty called for a transparent and thorough investigation and accountability for those responsible. Minab therefore cannot simply be treated as an unresolved rumor in the background of the current war.
Seen together, Minab and Kuhestak raise a deeper concern. One catastrophic civilian strike may be explained as a failure of intelligence, targeting, weapon performance, or judgment. A pattern of incidents, however, raises a different question: whether civilian protection is being pushed too far to the margins of operational decision-making. The danger is not only the immediate loss of life. It is the gradual normalization of exceptions.
If civilian protection becomes a principle honored only when convenient, the damage will not stop with one town or one conflict.
International law rarely collapses in a single dramatic moment. More often, norms weaken when exceptional conduct is repeated, defended, or left without meaningful scrutiny. Each time a serious civilian-harm incident is absorbed into the routine language of war without transparent findings or accountability, the practical force of the rule diminishes. What is described today as an exceptional mistake can become tomorrow's accepted risk.
Some will argue that this concern overstates the implications of incidents that occur in a high-intensity conflict. War is chaotic. Military assets may be located near civilian areas. Information can be incomplete, and even precision weapons cannot eliminate human error or unintended harm. Those points are real, and international humanitarian law itself recognizes that civilian casualties can occur even in attacks directed at lawful military objectives.
But acknowledging the realities of war is not the same as accepting the erosion of its limits. The law matters most precisely when military pressure is intense and operational decisions are difficult. If the protections owed to civilians become flexible whenever the strategic stakes are high, then their universality becomes conditional on power, geography, and political convenience. A rule that constrains only weak states, while powerful ones receive the benefit of endless exceptions, is not a universal rule for long.
The consequences would reach far beyond Iran. The laws of war function only if states expect them to apply across conflicts and regions. A standard weakened in the Middle East will not remain neatly contained there. Future belligerents in Europe, Africa, or East Asia can point to conduct tolerated elsewhere and demand the same latitude for themselves. Selective enforcement does more than produce unequal justice; over time, it changes what governments believe they can do.
A rule that constrains only weak states, while powerful ones receive the benefit of endless exceptions, is not a universal rule for long.
The appropriate response, therefore, is not to prejudge every disputed strike or to assume that every civilian death proves a war crime. It is to insist on independent, transparent, and verifiable investigations; publication of meaningful findings; and accountability wherever violations are established. The United States should be held to the same standards it expects other states to observe. The same standard must apply to Iran, Israel, and every other party to an armed conflict. Universality is the point.
The question raised by Kuhestak is ultimately larger than one wedding, just as Minab was larger than one school. It is whether the international community still believes that even in war there are people, spaces, and rules that military necessity cannot simply sweep aside. If civilian protection becomes a principle honored only when convenient, the damage will not stop with one town or one conflict. What will have been weakened is the boundary that keeps war from becoming limitless—and once that boundary disappears, no nation can assume that its own civilians will remain safely on the other side of it.
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Vance Says US 'Never Targets Civilians'—But Data From First Phase of Iran War Tells a Different Story
During the war's first 40 days, 77% of US attacks involved damage to civilian infrastructure or harm to civilians.
Sep 04, 2026
Following the US bombing of a wedding party in Iran earlier this week that killed at least five people—including two children—and left dozens more wounded, Trump administration officials repeated the mantra that the US military "never targets civilians."
In the days since the strike in the small southern town of Kuhestak, an analysis by Reuters found that the bombing was likely a direct hit by a US munition.
During a White House press briefing on Thursday following the report, Vice President JD Vance said the US was investigating the attack: “We’re investigating it because obviously we care," he said. "We want to know."
But, questioned about US responsibility, he reiterated: "What I can say with 100% confidence is that unlike the [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps], the United States never targets civilians in combat. We never will do that. We never have done that. And unfortunately, obviously, sometimes things happen."
He added: "And if we do make mistakes, again, this is a big difference between us and Iran. When our military makes mistakes, they learn from them to try to get better from them. So we’re investigating it very fully.”
The comments raised eyebrows immediately: The US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA) has documented that between February 28, when President Donald Trump launched the war, and April 7, when a ceasefire agreement was reached, at least 1,701 civilians were killed, including at least 307 children, and 714 more people have been killed who could not be classified as either military or civilians.
The first phase of the war brought several examples of mass civilian casualty events, including the double-tap bombing of an elementary school in Minab on the war's first day, which killed at least 150 children and teachers, and precision missile strikes on a sports hall and surrounding residential areas in Lamerd, which killed at least 21 civilians, including at least seven children.
Trump administration officials have brushed these attacks off as unfortunate mistakes and denied allegations that civilians were being targeted.
In the case of Minab, the administration has still never formally accepted responsibility, although an internal Pentagon assessment concluded that US forces were "likely" responsible, and several independent investigations have presented evidence demonstrating US responsibility.
But while intent remains an open question about these specific incidents, data from the first phase of the war show that the overwhelming bulk of incidents involved the targeting of nonmilitary infrastructure.
A May investigation by HRANA found that over the war's first 40 days, 77% of the 6,324 verified incidents it documented involved either civilian harm or damage to civilian objects. This included:
- 108 educational facilities;
- 50 healthcare facilities;
- 122 cultural and religious sites;
- 381 industrial and commercial facilities;
- 173 electricity generation and distribution sites; and
- 191 judicial and law enforcement facilities.
The group pointed to "several patterns that raise serious concerns under international humanitarian law," including "apparent failures in target verification, use of artificial intelligence with minimal human oversight, inadequate and inaccessible warnings, the use of large explosive weapons in populated areas, repeated or 'double-tap' strikes, [and] attacks targeting widespread civilian infrastructure."
During that same period, Iranian attacks across Israel and US-allied nations in the Middle East killed at least 36 civilians, according to a country-by-country tally from Reuters on April 7, with additional fatalities in Gulf countries whose civilian or military status is not always specified.
Trump has regularly made threats to rain down mass destruction upon Iran, including threatening that "a whole civilization will die" while promising to destroy "every" bridge and power plant in the country.
Wes J. Bryant, who served as the Pentagon’s chief of civilian harm assessments and now works as a war crimes analyst, rejected the Trump administration's contention that civilian casualties in the war have been the result of mere mistakes, saying they were instead the result of US forces "recklessly and negligently endangering and killing civilians."
"Is the US intentionally targeting civilians in Iran?" Bryant told Al Jazeera. "It is."
"I can tell you from experience, every single target location is recorded at multiple levels throughout the chain of command," he said, adding that in this week's wedding attack and others like the attack on the Minab school, the military would have been able “to report within hours” if a school or wedding was struck.
The anti-war activist group CodePink noted that the bombing of weddings by US forces long predates this week's attack, citing at least 10 other cases since 2001 in which wedding parties have been bombed, leading to dozens of casualties in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Yemen.
Pointing out that the wedding attack used three Boeing-produced missiles that the company markets as the "most accurate" in the US Navy's arsenal, Danaka Katovich, the national codirector of CodePink, said, "The Trump administration did not do this by accident."
"Even if they say they're 'investigating that'... like they did with the Minab school bombing, they are in a desperate situation," she said. "They are not winning the war, and they are running out of munitions, and they have no public support. They are resorting to tactics that attempt to inflict mass civilian harm."
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From Iraq to Gaza, We Are Failing in Our Debt to the Child
What heart refuses to protect and even worse, intentionally targets “the child” along with the people and institutions that provide the care and protection necessary to sustain the child’s life?
Aug 26, 2026
"Whereas mankind owes to the child the best it has to give…"—United Nations Declaration on the Rights of the Child, 1959
There were Iraqi children before Gaza, before Hind. Before Iran and the Minab School bombing. Iraqi children dying by the thousands, as many as 500,000 as a result of US-supported UN economic sanctions and wars in Iraq. Governments expressed “concern.” International scholars and lawyers called it a genocide. Former Secretary of State under Bill Clinton, Madeleine Albright, called it a price worth paying.
Who are we; what universe is this where one writes again and again in support of children, of “the child” as if they were some political cause. It’s the new abnormal, where everyday brings news of children suffering, injured and dying, in Iraq, in Ukraine, and Sudan. In Gaza and the Occupied West Bank, in Iran and Lebanon to name a few.
The child is trapped in a car, shot dead; they are buried under the rubble of their bombed-out house, of their school or the hospital where they have just been born. They’re wounded, missing eyes, arms, and legs; missing parents and siblings, aunts and uncles.They’re missing all the little as well as the significant “stuff” that is, that should be, a child's life. They’re sick and there are no doctors or medicines; they’re hungry and there’s no food or clean water. There’s no school, no mosque, no church, and no more neighborhood. Out of a house, in a tent or on the street, forcibly moved from here to there. What sort of world is this, what kind of culture. What heart refuses to protect and even worse, intentionally targets “the child” along with the people and institutions that provide the care and protection necessary to sustain the child’s life?
We know, everyone knows this is not the world “fit for Children” promised by global leaders at the UN some 30 years ago, yet it continues.
While instinct—some call it maternal—helps insure the future of a species, caring about and for one’s own offspring doesn’t necessarily translate to caring about all children. This enormous responsibility has been taken up by governments and international organizations; children need guaranteed special protections because they are “…innocent, vulnerable, and dependent.” The Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC, 1990), the most widely endorsed human rights document in history, committed world leaders to giving children the “first call” on human and financial resources and know-how to address critical issues such as: poverty, education, child and maternal health, and protection during armed conflicts. With great fanfare, they reaffirmed these aspirations, calling for a world “fit” for children in 2002 at the UN Special Session on Children, the largest ever gathering for a UN Special Session.
The disconnect of words to actions and to the actual situation for children in 2002, as the Special Session convened, was not lost on those of us who cared about Iraq and Iraqi children. An estimated half million had died. The alarming increase in birth defects and childhood cancers was stressing a medical system under siege. The overall health of Iraqi children as measured by the Under 5 Mortality Rate (U5MR) “…the single most significant indicator of the state of a nation’s children…” had declined by 160% in the decade since the CRC. It was the largest decline in well-being by far for children in any country in the world. And this, like the overall destruction of Iraq and Iraqi society was brought on by war and sustained by the severe US-supported UN economic sanctions imposed by the very agency pledging to take responsibility for the world’s children.
International law failed to protect Iraqi children; it has failed Palestinian children for decades despite their well-documented fragility under Israeli occupation. And now, we watch as the already precarious “child” in Gaza and the Occupied West Bank suffers unimaginable atrocities.“Atrocity in the ordinary sense of the term, as evoking simply the shock and horror that most would feel in the face of such enormous and gratuitous human damage; a circumstance in which we would be hard-pressed not to disparage the justifications” (Joy Gordon, Invisible War: The United States and the Iraq Sanctions, 2010).
UN and human rights organizations wring their hands and issue condemnations. Some do not call this a genocide. The majority that might help to end this catastrophe has stood by—including women, mothers, and global health and human rights organizations—and watched the occupation and genocide kill and maim thousands and thousands of Palestinian children and their extended families. Watched as the very country is rendered uninhabitable. Stood silently by as the very ones seeking to protect Palestinian children are treated and prosecuted as terrorists.
The moving promises of UN declarations and their aspirations on behalf of children have come to nothing. We’re being subjected to a form of global violence Joy Gordon warned about, that of "a single nation," or in today’s world, two nations—the US and Israel—"hijacking an institution of international governance, substituting their own agenda in place of the interests and will of the international community.” This should not stand.
According to the Ministry of Health, 73,386 Palestinians—including 21,000 children—were killed in the Gaza Strip and another 174,256 were injured between October 7, 2023 and August 9, 2026. This includes 1,258 fatalities and 4,295 injuries between the announcement of a ceasefire agreement on October 10, 2025 and August 9, 2026. We know, everyone knows this is not the world “fit for Children” promised by global leaders at the UN some 30 years ago, yet it continues. I’m at a loss. What can be said that hasn’t been said, or written that hasn’t been written. What poem or investigative article, what personal narrative could possibly bring an end to this carnage.
In 1915 Henry James declared, “The war has used up words, they have weakened, they have deteriorated…” Dr. Salma Al-Hadad, head of the pediatric oncology unit at Children’s Welfare Teaching Hospital in Baghdad since 1992, shared his view. After years of interviews revealing the struggles to save increasing numbers of patients with increasingly difficult cancers without even the most basic medicines and technology, she went silent. “The very hard times I’ve experienced over these years,” she wrote sometime in a mid-2000 email, “have rendered me silent. I find no comment.”
The moral universe owes a deep debt to the people of Palestine who have not gone silent, or ceased to document the atrocities against them. They pay for this every day with their lives, and in many cases the lives of other family members. I urge myself on. We have to repay that debt by breaking the silence even when we feel there is nothing more to say. Silence cannot be an option for those who are suffering under the weight of the atrocities being committed against children.
"All people,” wrote Leo Tolstoy, “live, Not by reason of any care they have for themselves, But by the love for them that is in other people.” If we truly care about “the child,” we have to increase our efforts on their behalf.
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'An Abomination': House Dem Revives Hegseth Impeachment Push After Iran School Massacre Revelation
"Children were murdered in the first days of Trump’s illegal, pointless war that has wreaked havoc across the world," said Rep. Yassamin Ansari.
Jul 08, 2026
The House Democrat who introduced articles of impeachment against Pentagon Secretary Pete Hegseth earlier this year revived her call for his removal on Wednesday following news that top US military commanders bypassed warnings about the reliability of their targeting information before authorizing the bombing of an Iranian school, killing more than 150 people—mostly young children.
"This is unconscionable," Rep. Yassamin Ansari (D-Ariz.), one of two Iranian Americans in Congress, wrote on social media in response to CNN's reporting on the US commanders' catastrophic decision. "Children were murdered in the first days of [President Donald] Trump’s illegal, pointless war that has wreaked havoc across the world. It is an abomination. It is a war crime. And it is why I’ve introduced articles of impeachment against Pete Hegseth."
Ansari urged her colleagues to support the Hegseth impeachment articles, which state that the Pentagon chief "has authorized, condoned, or failed to prevent the use of military force in a manner inconsistent with the law of armed conflict" and "demonstrated a willful disregard for the Constitution," among other alleged violations.
Currently, just 16 House Democrats are listed as co-sponsors of Ansari's impeachment articles against Hegseth, who dismantled the Pentagon's civilian harm mitigation programs before the Trump administration attacked Iran in late February. According to ProPublica, "Hegseth made deep cuts to the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response programs and slashed CHMR staff at military commands by more than 90%."
"That included removing civilian harm specialists from target development strike teams and reducing the team of 10 at Central Command to only one full-time staffer," the outlet added.
CNN reported on Tuesday that senior US military commanders ignored warnings that intelligence pertaining to possible targets in Iran "was severely out of date and approved some strikes"—including the bombing of Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in Minab, an attack that human rights groups say should be investigated as a war crime.
Months later, the Pentagon has not publicly released the findings of its investigation into the strike, and Trump recently said he doesn't believe the US was responsible for the Minab school attack, despite now-abundant evidence to the contrary. The attack is seen as one of the worst massacres of civilians in recent US military history.
Last week, The Associated Press reported that when news of the school bombing emerged on the first day of the US-Israeli assault on Iran, "the US military knew they had conducted strikes in the vicinity—though it took the military time to verify the Iranian claims that a school was struck and begin a formal investigation."
"One former Pentagon official, similarly speaking on condition of anonymity, said the bombing came as a natural result of changes made by the Trump administration to reduce staff to mitigate civilian harm and Hegseth’s emphasis on lethality," the outlet noted. "When Hegseth took charge, he slashed the size of an office called the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, created at the direction of Congress in late 2022. That stopped the office’s work on updating 'no-strike lists,' which are lists of protected sites such as hospitals, schools, churches, and mosques, that the Pentagon keeps."
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'I Don't Think It Was Us,' Trump Says of Iran School Massacre as Cover-Up Fears Grow
"It’s been four months since the deadliest US airstrike against civilians in recent memory, yet we are no closer to getting answers," said Amnesty International USA.
Jun 25, 2026
President Donald Trump said Wednesday that he doesn't believe the US military was responsible for the missile strike that massacred more than 100 schoolchildren in Iran in late February, contradicting the Pentagon's reported conclusions, the findings of outside analysts, and physical evidence from the scene.
"I don't think it was us," Trump told reporters gathered in the Oval Office. The president did not offer a shred of evidence to support his view and said he has not seen the Pentagon's findings, which have reportedly been finalized amid mounting fears of a cover-up attempt.
"It’s horrible what happened, but there were missiles flying all over the place," Trump claimed. The Pentagon's preliminary findings indicate that the US struck the elementary school in Minab, Iran with a Tomahawk missile while attacking "an adjacent Iranian base of which the school building was formerly a part," The New York Times reported in March.
Pentagon Secretary Pete Hegseth told reporters in the Oval Office on Wednesday that "we've taken the investigation very seriously" and that the findings would be released at the "appropriate time."
Watch:
Reporter: Have you seen the report into the Minab school attack, sir?
Trump: I have not seen it. I have to wait for it to be complete. I don’t know that they’re ever going to solve that problem. I don’t know that they’re ever going to say it was one of our missiles. Pete, I… pic.twitter.com/0csB46qL8d
— Acyn (@Acyn) June 24, 2026
Trump's latest remarks came days after he brushed aside persistent concerns about the deadly strike, saying the incident occurred "a long time ago" and that "nobody did that on purpose."
"Mistakes are made," added Trump, who initially tried to blame Iran for the Minab massacre. "War is nasty. But I know it’s under investigation."
Amnesty International USA lamented in a statement Thursday that "it’s been four months since the deadliest US airstrike against civilians in recent memory, yet we are no closer to getting answers from US authorities about why this happened and who was responsible."
"The Pentagon must urgently finish its investigation and publicly release the findings. The investigation must consider the military’s intelligence gathering and assessments, as well as targeting decisions, precautions taken, and its use of artificial intelligence. Where sufficient evidence exists, competent authorities must prosecute any person suspected of criminal responsibility," said Amanda Klasing, the group's national director for government relations and advocacy.
"Anything less," she added, "would amount to a cover-up of a serious breach of international humanitarian law and a betrayal of the victims and survivors of this horrific attack."
NBC News reported earlier this week that "there is growing concern in Congress and the Pentagon that the Trump administration will classify and shield" the results of its investigation from the public.
“Of course they are going to try to classify the report," said Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), who sits on committees with jurisdiction over the Pentagon.
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'Mistakes Are Made': Trump Rejects Accountability for US Massacre at Iran Girls' School
"War is nasty," the president said when asked about the February cruise missile strike that killed 156 students and staff in Minab, continuing the centuries-old presidential tradition of dismissing American atrocities.
Jun 18, 2026
President Donald Trump on Wednesday joined a long line of US leaders to brush off atrocities committed by American forces when he dodged questions about responsibility for the February cruise missile strike on an Iranian girls school that massacred students and staff.
On February 28—the first day of the illegal US-Israeli war of choice on Iran—a US strike on the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in Minab killed 156 people, at least 120 of them children, and wounded 95 others.
Satellite imagery analyses confirmed eyewitness accounts that the attack was a “triple-tap” airstrike, in which an initial bombing was followed up with two additional strikes meant to kill survivors and rescue workers.
Asked by a journalist at the G7 meeting in France if anyone would be held accountable for the bombing, Trump replied, "It's such a strange question to be asked at this date, because you're talking about a long time ago."
"Nobody did that on purpose," Trump said of the school strike. "Mistakes are made. War is nasty. But I know it's under investigation."
"I would ask Pete Hegseth," the president added, referring to his defense secretary, who said at the war's start that US forces would not be bound by “stupid rules of engagement” and would instead prioritize “lethality.”
Fragments of a Tomahawk cruise missile found at the school and marked with the names of US weapons companies, a Pentagon contract number, and “Made in USA” added to the body of evidence pointing to the United States as the perpetrator of what numerous experts called a likely war crime.
Trump first claimed that Iran bombed the school, and when it was revealed that a Tomahawk missile was used in the strike, he risibly asserted that Tehran had such highly restricted US missiles in its arsenal. The US has not sold weaponry to the Iranian government since the 1970s, with the extraordinary exception of during the Iran-Contra Affair, in which the Reagan administration secretly sold arms to Iran in the 1980s to fund anti-communist Contra terrorists in Nicaragua.
A preliminary Pentagon probe indicated US responsibility for the Minab massacre—and that the building was struck intentionally, raising questions about the possible use of artificial intelligence for targeting purposes. The US military has confirmed use of AI in the Iran War, which is being carried out in partnership with Israeli forces that have used artificial intelligence extensively in their genocidal assault on the Gaza Strip. More than 250,000 Palestinians have been killed or wounded—most of them civilians—since the Hamas-led attack of October 7, 2023.
Numerous investigative journalism outlets and rights groups—including Bellingcat, The New York Times, Sky News, NPR, The Associated Press, the BBC, Reuters, Al Jazeera, CNN, and Amnesty International—also investigated the attack and concluded the US was responsible.
Trump administration officials and Republican US lawmakers dismissed or stonewalled efforts by journalists, activists, and Democratic legislators to seek accountability for one of the deadliest US civilian massacres in modern times.
The Minab strike ranks up with the bombing of a Baghdad bomb shelter during the 1991 Gulf War—which killed more than 400 people, mostly women, children, and elders—and the March 2017 slaughter of at least 105 people in an apartment building in Mosul, Iraq during Trump’s first-term “war of annihilation” against the so-called Islamic State.
The school massacre also drew comparisons with the 1968 wholesale slaughter of 504 unarmed villagers, mostly women and children—at least some of them raped before being killed—by US troops at My Lai in Vietnam.
Trump joins a long line of US leaders who have ducked accountability for—or worse, tried to justify—atrocities committed on their watch.
Faced with what was then commonly called the "Indian problem," a young Virginia governor named Thomas Jefferson justified what he called "their extermination, or their removal," because "the same world would scarcely do for them and us.”
During the Civil War, Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, commander of an indiscriminate scorched-earth campaign during his March to the Sea, wrote that "war is cruelty, and you cannot refine it."
President Theodore Roosevelt attempted to defend US troops accused of mass murder and torture—including what's now known as waterboarding—during the Philippines War by shaming critics who condemned those crimes but turned blind eyes to the lynching of Black Americans in the South.
After ordering the only nuclear war in human history, against a defeated enemy making efforts to surrender, President Harry S. Truman said of his Japanese victims, "The only language they seem to understand is the one we have been using to bombard them."
After US forces killed hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian civilians in the 1960s and 1970s, US Army Chief of Staff Gen. William Westmoreland attempted to rationalize the slaughter by explaining: "The Oriental doesn't put the same high price on life as does the Westerner... Life is cheap in the Orient."
As US-driven United Nations sanctions reportedly killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children in the 1990s, Madeleine Albright, President Bill Clinton's secretary of state, opined that "we think the price is worth it."
During President George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq, US Central Command chief Gen. Tommy Franks said, "We don't do body counts" when asked about the staggering number of civilian casualties, while Vice President Dick Cheney dismissed waterboarding as a mere "dunk in the water" amid a worldwide torture scandal.
When President Barack Obama's drone war killed an American teenager in Yemen, administration spokesperson Robert Gibbs deflected blame by arguing that the child should have had "a far more responsible father.”
As Trump loosened rules of engagement meant to protect civilians during his first-term campaign to "bomb the shit out of" Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria and "take out their families," his defense secretary, James "Mad Dog" Mattis, announced that the US was shifting from a policy of “attrition” to one of “annihilation."
“Civilian casualties are a fact of life in this sort of situation,” he said.
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