An independent group tapped by the United Nations’ top human rights body reported Thursday that it found “reasonable grounds” to believe that the U.S. committed war crimes in Iran.
The cited atrocity was a pair of Tomahawk missile strikes on the “clearly identifiable” Shajareh Tayyebeh Primary School in Minab—a city in the southern Iranian province of Hormozgan—and a sports complex in Lamerd that occurred in February. The two attacks killed 178 civilians, most of them children.
The findings were documented in a report by the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Iran and submitted to the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva.
At the time of the strikes, U.S. military officials denied that they were behind the attack. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth insisted that the U.S. “never” targets civilians during foreign conflicts. Early reports indicated that outdated Pentagon intel had led them to believe that the school was actually an Iranian base.
The fact-finding mission found that the U.S. “failed in its obligation to do everything feasible to verify” that the school site “was a military objective.” It also declared that the U.S. had acted willfully and recklessly, and had failed to do basic due diligence, such as updating its databases or examining publicly available data that would have revealed the site was a school.
“The Mission considers that the U.S.’s 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,” the report reads. “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 group confirmed that the U.S. was behind the attacks by analyzing the damage the strikes inflicted on the surrounding area as well as to the victims’ bodies. The group said the distinctive pockmarking left behind by a wide spray of tungsten bullets suggested that the weapon of choice was Lockheed Martin’s Precision Strike missiles, also identified as “PRsM.” The U.S., the independent body concluded, was the only nation in the conflict that possessed such weapons.