The senior U.S. officer overseeing combat operations in Iran told the Senate on Thursday that the military had identified only one potential incident in which Iranian civilians were mistakenly killed out of about 13,600 U.S. airstrikes, a statement that human rights groups and some lawmakers said was not remotely credible.
The sole incident identified by Adm. Brad Cooper, the head of U.S. Central Command, occurred on the first day of the war when a Tomahawk missile struck an Iranian elementary school. Iranian officials have said the death toll was at least 175 people, most of them children. The U.S. military still has not taken responsibility for the strike, which Admiral Cooper said remained under investigation.
Admiral Cooper’s testimony suggested that he believed that the U.S. military’s record since that Feb. 28 strike had been near perfect, a fact belied by investigations from human rights groups and news media organizations.
The New York Times has verified damage to 22 schools and 17 health care facilities. The Iranian Red Crescent Society, the country’s primary humanitarian relief organization, said on April 2 that at least 763 schools and 316 health care facilities had been damaged or destroyed in the war.
At least 1,700 Iranian civilians have been killed in the war, according to the Human Rights Activists News Agency.
“How do you explain the publicly available information that 22 schools have been hit and multiple hospitals?” asked Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, Democrat of New York, citing the Times report.
“There’s no way we can corroborate that,” Admiral Cooper replied. “No indication of that whatsoever.”
In his testimony, Admiral Cooper described the prevention of civilian deaths on the battlefield as “a matter that I’m passionate about.” But he also conceded that his staff had not investigated any of the incidents documented by The Times or human rights groups.
“The idea that they only are looking into one is pretty ridiculous,” said Emily Tripp, the executive director of Airwars, a British nonprofit that investigates civilian deaths in war.
Airwars has recorded at least 300 civilian casualty events in Iran, many of which resulted from large bombs being dropped on heavily populated areas.
“Why are they not looking into any of those?” Ms. Tripp asked. “We know they have the team and the infrastructure to do so.”
Capt. Tim Hawkins, a spokesman for U.S. Central Command, said other preliminary reviews of suspected civilian casualty incidents would occur, but he did not specify which incidents would be covered or when they might be initiated.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has terminated dozens of positions across the Pentagon and the major U.S. combatant commands that focus on preventing and responding to incidents of civilian death caused by the U.S. military. Most of these positions worked under the umbrella of the Pentagon’s Civilian Harm Mitigation Response office, which was created by Lloyd J. Austin III, Mr. Hegseth’s predecessor.
Admiral Cooper said that the team focused on civilian casualties at U.S. Central Command had shrunk from 10 officers to just one over the course of the last year.
Most of those officers were reassigned to new positions within the command and continue to play a role in preventing civilian deaths, he said. But it was unclear from Admiral Cooper’s testimony what role they were playing.
Some investigations, previously led by the team at U.S. Central Command, have been offloaded to a small skeleton staff working out of the Pentagon, military officials said. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive work.
Admiral Cooper told the lawmakers that his staff had been proactive in trying to prevent civilian deaths. “Our staff specifically warned the Iranian people more than 100 times about the threat of them being used as human shields,” he said. “I personally warned the Iranian people.”
And he pledged to be transparent and release the results of the command’s investigation into the Feb. 28 strike on the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school. In early March, a continuing investigation determined made that the errant strike was the result of a targeting mistake by the U.S. military, which was conducting strikes on an adjacent Iranian base.
Officials have described those findings as preliminary. It’s unclear why, more than two months after the strike, military officials have not released any formal statements regarding the apparent mistake.
“It was frankly pretty clear from the very beginning that we were probably responsible,” William H. McRaven, a retired admiral and former commander of U.S. Special Operations Command, told ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday. “It seems to be taking longer than I would think. But again, not being in the inner circle, I can’t tell you whether this is too long or not.”
Senator Mark Kelly, Democrat of Arizona, pressed Admiral Cooper on Thursday to reassign the officers removed from the Civilian Harm Mitigation Response office back to their previous jobs.
“If you were to find out that there was an error in the targeting process, would you reinstate some of those people that were removed from that team?” Senator Kelly asked.
Admiral Cooper was noncommittal.
“Sir, it’s a hypothetical,” he replied. “We’ll just see what the investigation says.”
Eric Schmitt contributed reporting.
Greg Jaffe covers the Pentagon and the U.S. military for The Times.
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