Within minutes of a strike on a school full of children on the first day of the war against Iran, Pentagon officials knew that the U.S. military was responsible for leveling the site. But they thought they had hit an Iranian base.
Within days of the strike, after a stream of news reports containing satellite images, videos and first-person accounts of the episode, American officials privately acknowledged what had become increasingly clear: that the U.S. military had made a tragic mistake and hit a school.
And within two weeks of the strike, the first part of a preliminary investigation into what happened was complete: Military officials concluded that the Feb. 28 Tomahawk missile strike on the school was the result of a targeting error caused by outdated data.
At least 175 people, most of them children, were killed, according to Iranian officials.
And yet, more than 100 days after the strike, U.S. officials have not publicly acknowledged responsibility for the deaths, among the thousands of civilians killed in the region before a tentative cease-fire was reached this weekend.
The investigation is now complete and awaiting sign-off from senior military leaders, Mr. Hegseth and the White House, according to military officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the report has not been released. When it will be made public, and whether anyone will lose their job, is unclear.
“The incident is still under investigation,” the Pentagon said in a statement last week when asked about the silence.
The reasons for the delay, according to officials with knowledge of the investigation, include a typically slow-moving bureaucratic review process involving several government agencies, a dose of Pentagon self-protection and disbelief on the part of the intelligence and targeting agencies involved that their data could possibly have been so catastrophically wrong.
That has combined with a civilian leadership at the Defense Department that views such tragedies as an unavoidable cost of war, the officials said.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has routinely espoused “lethality over legality,” and that American troops should not be constrained by concerns about civilian harm. “No stupid rules of engagement,” he has said.
Last year, Mr. Hegseth began moving to effectively terminate the Pentagon offices that focus on preventing and responding to civilian harm during U.S. combat operations. Employees at the Pentagon’s Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response office, which deals with policy related to limiting risk to noncombatants, were informed that their office would close. They were also told that the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, which handles training and procedures, would shut down as well.
The Pentagon’s inspector general concluded in a report released last month that the U.S. military no longer had the personnel or tools needed to comply with its civilian casualties and harm policy, which is required by federal law.
An Analyst Notices an Issue
For nearly a decade, U.S. officials said, their data indicated that the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school, in the town of Minab, was a military base.
The school is near buildings used by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps Navy, and the site was originally part of the base.
The investigation found, officials say, that targeting officials were using imagery that had not been updated in seven years. That imagery, they said, did not show a school next to the base.
But several years ago, one analyst noticed that the building appeared to be a school, three officials said.
That analyst informed one other person, the officials said. But the information did not make it to targeting officials, and intelligence and military officials continued to re-validate the site as a legitimate target for bombing.
On Feb. 28, the U.S. military was conducting missile strikes on an adjacent Iranian base and hit the school. It was a Saturday, the start of the Iranian workweek, when children and teachers were in class.
“People need to be fired and decertified for negligence,” said Wes J. Bryant, a former senior policy analyst and adviser on precision warfare and civilian harm mitigation at the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence. “Senior commanders need potentially to be held under U.C.M.J. violation because this was so incredibly negligent,” he added, referring to the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the legal framework for the U.S. military, which establishes penalties for killing civilians.
“There’s no ‘fog of war’ excuse here,” Mr. Bryant said in an interview.
The strike was the worst civilian casualty incident caused by the U.S. military since 1991, when a U.S. stealth aircraft bombed a civilian air-raid shelter in Baghdad, killing more than 400 people, primarily women, children and elderly Iraqis.
After that strike, the George H.W. Bush administration blamed the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein for placing civilians in harm’s way. Human rights activists said the United States should have tried harder to ensure that no civilians were at the site before it bombed the facility.
“The Pentagon has never been good about transparency about these things,” said Sarah Yager, a senior adviser on human rights in the office of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the first Trump administration. “Usually they just have this knee-jerk reaction of ‘oh, it wasn’t us.’”
The U.S. military’s reluctance to believe it made a mistake was on display in 2021, when an American drone strike on a Toyota Corolla in Afghanistan killed 10 civilians, seven of them children. Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs at the time, called it a “righteous” strike.
Three weeks later, the Pentagon acknowledged it had made a mistake.
A ‘Double Tap’ Strike
Dozens of students were killed in the first strike on the school in Minab. Dozens more were killed after a second strike, called a “double tap” by the military.
President Trump initially blamed the strike on Iran even though the country does not have Tomahawk missiles.
“In my opinion, based on what I’ve seen, that was done by Iran,” Mr. Trump said days after the attack. “They’re very inaccurate, as you know, with their munitions. They have no accuracy whatsoever. It was done by Iran.”
Imagery assessed by The New York Times showed that multiple precision strikes hit at least six Revolutionary Guards buildings along with the school. Four buildings on the base were destroyed, and two others showed impact points at the center of their roofs consistent with such precision hits.
But the U.S. military’s intelligence network should be capable of differentiating between a school and a military base, even those next to each other, critics say.
Some have questioned why the Trump administration has not at least acknowledged responsibility and apologized to the families who have lost loved ones, even while explaining that a full investigation is pending.
“Can you at this moment acknowledge that that mistake was made and that we were responsible for it and it’s something we didn’t want to do and don’t want to repeat?” Representative Adam Smith, Democrat of Washington, asked Adm. Brad Cooper, the head of Central Command, during a congressional hearing last month.
“The United States does not deliberately target civilians,” Admiral Cooper replied.
In a May 26 memo distributed throughout Central Command, Admiral Cooper said that “protecting civilian life” is “embedded in how we plan, how we target and how we fight.” It was unclear how those words, reported earlier by Breaking Defense, pertained to the decisions that led to the school strike.
Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, said this episode could harm the U.S. military’s reputation as a professional force. “I would like to see what happens in a highly professional military,” he said in an interview. “The facts are established, responsibility is determined and accountability is enforced.”
Greg Jaffe contributed reporting.
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