After a US military strike killed more than 150 people, including 120 schoolchildren, at the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab, Iran on February 28, 2026, President Trump initially blamed Iran for the bombing. When evidence mounted that a US Tomahawk missile was responsible (a weapon neither Iran nor Israel possesses), Trump shifted to claiming he 'does not know the details.'
A preliminary Department of Defense investigation found the US military was responsible, identifying the strike as a 'targeting error' — the military mistook the school for part of an adjacent Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps navy base. Open-source intelligence analysis by CNN, Time, The Intercept, and PolitiFact all concluded the strike was carried out with a US Tomahawk missile.
Nearly all Senate Democrats sent a letter to Defense Secretary Hegseth demanding answers about civilian harm mitigation measures and the role of artificial intelligence in selecting targets. Trump gave contradictory answers over the course of a week, struggling when pressed by reporters on his initial claim that Iran struck the school.
In July 2026, reporting deepened the accountability question. CNN reported that senior military commanders had ignored warnings that their targeting intelligence “was severely out of date” before approving the strikes, and that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had cut civilian-harm-mitigation programs by more than 90 percent beforehand, including the staff who maintained the “no-strike lists” meant to protect sites like schools and hospitals. Citing the revelation, Rep. Yassamin Ansari (D-AZ), one of two Iranian Americans in Congress, revived articles of impeachment against Hegseth: “Children were murdered in the first days of Trump's illegal, pointless war that has wreaked havoc across the world. It is an abomination. It is a war crime.”
Asked in a Fox News interview aired July 14 whether the official investigation's findings would ever be released, Trump did not answer. The inquiry remains under wraps; Democratic senators have urged its release, the Pentagon says it is ongoing, and the United States has never officially accepted responsibility, even as reporting indicates officials have privately acknowledged U.S. culpability.
On September 17, 2026, a UN fact-finding mission reported “reasonable grounds to believe” the United States committed the war crime of an indiscriminate attack in the strike. It concluded that “the building of the school was the intended point of impact,” that the U.S. failure to verify the target “went beyond mere negligence,” and that the U.S. had not answered the mission's requests for information (see UN Fact-Finding Mission Finds Reasonable Grounds to Believe the U.S. Committed War Crimes in Strikes on an Iranian School and Sports Center).
Correction (September 17, 2026): an earlier version of this entry described the Minab school as a girls' school and the dead as mostly girls aged 7 to 12. A September 2026 report by a United Nations fact-finding mission describes it as a primary school “for girls and boys aged 6 to 13” and cites the local prosecutor's final toll of 156 killed, including 120 schoolchildren (73 boys and 47 girls); Iranian state media reported 168.
Update (September 21, 2026): Bloomberg has published the first account of what the Pentagon's own investigation found. It is one outlet's reporting, based on unnamed officials involved in an inquiry whose report has not been released, and no other major newsroom had matched it when this was written. With that said: Bloomberg reported on September 18 that some Pentagon personnel knew “within hours” that the United States had hit the school, and that investigators found “a cascade of preventable failures” rather than one decision. The site had been cataloged years earlier as a Revolutionary Guard facility and never reclassified. Some Central Command personnel “relied too much on the artificial intelligence embedded in Maven Smart System,” the Palantir targeting software that put the site on the first day's list, apparently expecting it to catch stale information it was not built to catch. And “No CHM team member reviewed the Minab site before the strike”: after Defense Secretary Hegseth's cuts to the civilian harm mitigation units, “Centcom's team was reduced from 10 to 1.” Bloomberg adds its own caution that “It's unclear whether such checks” would have been enough.
One official involved in the inquiry told Bloomberg, “We were confident in our intel. Minab proved you should never be too confident.” Officials said the report has been “all-but-complete for several months.” The Pentagon's only comment was that the incident “remains under investigation.” A senior administration official said, “The United States does not target civilians.” Palantir said it “is not responsible for the underlying data.” Sen. Richard Blumenthal said of the delay, “It is unforgivable.” The Pentagon has not blamed the software or anything else on the record, and headlines saying it has are wrong. Bloomberg puts the dead at more than 150 including at least 123 children; this entry continues to use the United Nations mission's figures.
Update (October 1, 2026): An earlier remark belongs in this record. Asked at the G7 meeting in France on June 17 whether anyone would be held accountable for the strike, Trump said, “It's such a strange question to be asked at this date, because you're talking about a long time ago,” and then, “Nobody did that on purpose,” and, “Mistakes are made. War is nasty. But I know it's under investigation,” adding, “I would ask Pete Hegseth.” NBC News reported the next day that Central Command had completed its investigation and that four congressional officials and a person familiar with it feared the administration would classify the results. Sen. Mark Kelly told NBC, “Of course they are going to try to classify the report.”
On September 30, Drop Site News published a long investigation built on interviews with survivors, parents and medical staff in Minab. The governor of Hormozgan province told Drop Site that the former Revolutionary Guard compound was redeveloped for civilian use beginning in 2014 and that the school “obtained its establishment license in 2015 and has operated officially and publicly since that year”; that is an Iranian government statement and is attributed as such. Drop Site reported that satellite imagery from late 2025, about two months before the strike, showed children in the school yard and on a soccer field, and that the school ran a public website with photos of plays and classroom activities. It quoted Wes Bryant, a former senior targeting adviser at the Pentagon, on Adm. Brad Cooper's May testimony that the school sits on an active IRGC cruise missile base: Bryant said he had seen no indication of that, and that “it doesn't matter if a school is on the base and not even closed off, it's still a protected entity.” The Pentagon's report has still not been released.