It Took the UN to Notice the School Was a School

The Pentagon's targeting database still listed the school as part of a military base, until the United Nations looked at the satellite photos and noticed the murals, the playground, and the children.

"The UN Human Rights Council has accomplished nothing for human rights, spouting unserious nonsense for decades."

— Anna Kelly, White House Deputy Press Secretary

That is the official American answer to a United Nations finding, made on "reasonable grounds," that the United States committed war crimes in Iran. The report of the UN's Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Iran went to the Human Rights Council in Geneva on Thursday. The White House's response arrived the same day, and it addressed not a single piece of evidence. It addressed the messenger.

The finding, in the flat language of the lawyers who wrote it, is that two strikes on February 28, 2026, the first day of the war the United States and Israel opened against Iran, "resulted in loss of life or injury to civilians or damage to civilian objects" and amounted to "the war crime of launching an indiscriminate attack." One strike hit a primary school in Minab. The other hit a sports complex in Lamerd. The combined death toll was at least 178 civilians, the great majority of them children. The United States never answered the mission's two letters, which asked for an explanation and a meeting with the commander in the Middle East.

Start with the school.

The Shajareh Tayyebeh Primary School in Minab, Hormozgan Province, taught boys and girls between the ages of six and thirteen. It stood roughly 72 meters from the nearest building of an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps naval complex, separated by a wall, with its own entrance off a public street. It had operated there since around 2016 in converted IRGC structures, which is a detail that later proved useful to the people who dropped the missiles. Before the strike, satellite imagery showed what any human being looking at the pictures would have seen: child-oriented murals, school signage, a playground, children gathered in the courtyard.

At about 10:30 a.m. on February 28, the school was struck as part of an attack on the adjacent base. Survivors told Iranian media what happened next, and the report preserves their account. The first missile hit the lower floor. The principal and the teachers moved the children upstairs to a prayer room. The second missile hit the upper floor. The Minab prosecutor's final count: 156 dead. One hundred and twenty children, 73 boys and 47 girls, 26 teachers, all of them women, seven parents, a bus driver, and a technician from a nearby pharmacy. Independent monitors: 157, including fifteen six-year-olds. A video shot within hours shows a man holding the severed arm of a young child.

The targeting database called it a military installation. The murals said otherwise.

The second strike, the same afternoon, landed on the Shahid Haj Khalil Naimi cultural and sports complex in Lamerd, visibly separate from the adjacent IRGC compound. Children were training there when the missiles detonated in the air above it and the neighborhood. Twenty-two dead: ten women and twelve men, including two schoolgirls, two schoolboys, and a two-year-old girl playing in front of her home. More than 100 injured. The walls were pocked with thousands of small holes, which is what the weapon does.

The weapons identified their own shooter, which is the part of the report that cannot be met with a statement. Fragments from the Minab site, including a steering mechanism and an antenna, and the missile's silhouette in geolocated video, identified an RGM/UGM-109 Tomahawk. The United States is the only party in the conflict that owns Tomahawks. The Lamerd missile airburst, dispersing roughly 180,000 tungsten pellets across a radius Airwars put at 170 meters, matches the Lockheed Martin Precision Strike Missile, a weapon CENTCOM confirmed on March 4 it had used in Iran for the first time in combat. The United States is the only party in the conflict that owns PrSMs.

And yet the denials came anyway. Three weeks later, CENTCOM said it had not struck Lamerd at all and suggested an Iranian Hoveyzeh cruise missile instead. Weapons experts disagreed: the Hoveyzeh has delta wings and a turbojet mounted under its fuselage. Neither appears in the footage. In March, The New York Times and Reuters reported that a preliminary military investigation attributed the Minab strike to targeting coordinates generated from outdated intelligence that listed the school as part of the adjacent base. On May 19, CENTCOM's commander, Adm. Brad Cooper, said the findings "correlated" the strike with a United States attack. In June, President Trump said that "nobody" purposefully attacked the school, citing an investigation whose results remain unpublished.

Missiles do not disavow their own serial numbers. The mission read the sequence and drew its own conclusion: "the building of the school was the intended point of impact and that the damage did not result from an errant strike."

This is where the report moves from attribution to intent, which is the difference between an accident and a crime. Nobody alleges a pilot aimed at a school. The legal standard applied is recklessness, dolus eventualis: acting with awareness of a substantial risk of killing civilians and doing it anyway. The mission found that the United States' failure to update its targeting data "went beyond mere negligence," and that the strikes were carried out "wilfully, that is, with the requisite mental element of recklessness." It grounds that finding in the public record of the administration itself: "public statements by senior United States leadership, including the President and the Secretary of Defense, that dismiss binding obligations under international humanitarian law."

Those statements have a paper trail. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, ProPublica reported, polled the nation's top commanders in early 2025 about dismantling the Pentagon's civilian harm mitigation program, betting they would call civilian-safety work "woke" and out of step with "maximum lethality." Every commander pushed back. CENTCOM, the command that would later drop missiles on Minab and Lamerd, argued in a memo that cutting the staff "result[ed] in decreased efficiency of U.S. lethal operations due to an increased risk of target misidentification." Hegseth cut it anyway. The program shrank from a little under 200 people to a couple of dozen, and CENTCOM's team went from sixteen to one. At a gathering of generals and admirals, the secretary announced, "No more politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement."

The office that would have flagged the school was gutted before the school was hit.

The White House response to the finding reveals what the administration believes it is arguing against. Kelly said the "only party in this conflict that has committed war crimes is the Iranian regime," which has "murdered thousands of its own people, killed Americans overseas, executed acts of terrorism in the Strait of Hormuz, and launched indiscriminate attacks against its neighbours." She added that the president is "courageously" ensuring "that such an evil country never possesses a nuclear weapon."

The same report found the Iranian regime guilty of crimes against humanity in its crackdown on the 2025-2026 protests: killings "on a massive scale in all provinces," at least 221 children killed, some as young as two, at least 29 men executed after summary trials, five of them publicly hanged, a nationwide internet blackout, and more than 70 people, including five women and three boys, still facing the execution chamber. The administration's defense requires reading only the first half of the document, and only the parts about the enemy.

The report indicts both sides of the map. The White House read the page about the other side only.

There is no tribunal coming, at least not soon. The finding carries no automatic legal force. The United States has withdrawn from the International Court of Justice and sits outside the prosecutor that tries individuals, and the lawyers who spoke about the report to Al Jazeera were blunt that the document is not a subpoena. It is, in one expert's phrase, "a hook" for a Congress that has grown bolder as the midterms approach, including demands for the Pentagon to publish its internal investigation. The mission asked both sides for the things the war has not yet produced: an immediate end to hostilities, full compensation for the victims, and accountability for the responsible.

The school in Minab is the record, and the record is not ambiguous. It is a room with children's murals and a playground, 72 meters from a military base, walled off, visible from space, struck twice, in a database that still called it part of the base. It took the United Nations to notice that the school was a school. The question the report leaves behind is not whether the missiles were American. They were. The question is what a government is doing when it calls the documentation of a massacre "nonsense." The paperwork, it turns out, is the part it cannot live with.