“I’d love to keep that a secret,” Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Monday when President Trump pressed him in front of a room packed with reporters to disclose how many people were sent to rescue an American airman shot down over Iran.
But the president, who was breathlessly recounting the details of the operation as though it was the script of an action-adventure film, ignored the general and revealed: “It was hundreds.”
The eagerness on the part of Mr. Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to publicly recount the complex rescue operation stands in stark contrast to their approach to a Tomahawk missile strike on an Iranian girls’ elementary school that killed at least 175 people, most of them children. The Pentagon has so far refused to provide a public accounting.
A preliminary military investigation into the deadly attack on Feb. 28 found that the United States was responsible for the killings, appearing to confirm a Times visual investigation that found that American forces were most likely to have carried it out. But the secretary has repeatedly refused to answer questions about the strike, and Mr. Trump early on sought to sidestep blame.
On Tuesday, more than two dozen Senate Democrats demanded that the Armed Services Committee launch its own bipartisan investigation and hold a public hearing on the findings.
The school strike could be “remembered as one of the most devastating and tragic errors in modern American military history,” the Democratic senators wrote to the Republican chairman of the committee, Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi. They called on him to carry out a “thorough investigation of this incident in a transparent manner for the preservation of our military’s integrity and reputation.”
“The United States’ global reputation is tied to our adherence to rules of engagement and laws of war,” the senators added. “Failure to follow these rules and laws risks hardening our adversaries’ resolve.”
Democrats in Congress have for weeks demanded accountability and for the Trump administration to explain how the civilian casualties occurred when the building struck had been clearly identifiable as a school from publicly available satellite imagery.
They have requested that the Pentagon inform lawmakers how the target was identified, whether artificial intelligence had been used in the attack, and the steps taken by the administration during the war to follow the laws of armed conflict and mitigate civilian harm.
But the Pentagon said in recent days that the investigation into the attack on the school remained ongoing, and that it would share the findings with Congress only once it was completed.
House Democrats who had also pressed for more information on the Tomahawk strike said the Defense Department’s unwillingness to engage lawmakers alarmed by the civilian deaths was “completely unacceptable.”
“The American people deserve transparency and accountability,” Representatives Yassamin Ansari of Arizona, Jason Crow of Colorado and Sara Jacobs of California said in a joint statement. “We must do more to protect civilians in combat zones, in accordance with U.S. laws, international commitments, and our values of human dignity.”
From the outset of the war, Mr. Hegseth has reveled in the fact that “Operation Epic Fury” would have, in his words, “no stupid rules of engagement,” and that under his leadership, the might of the U.S. military could be unleashed on the enemy without constraints.
The president has threatened that “all Hell will reign down” on Iran, disregarding that striking Iranian schools and universities, power plants, bridges and other civilian infrastructure would likely amount to war crimes under international law.
On Tuesday morning, Mr. Trump warned that “a whole civilization will die tonight” if a deal is not reached with Iran.
Megan Mineiro is a Times congressional reporter and a member of the 2025-26 Times Fellowship class, a program for early-career journalists.
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