Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth helped “set the stage” for a U.S. strike that killed at least 123 children by slashing former President Joe Biden’s civilian protection teams, officials said.
The officials, who are involved in the Pentagon’s internal investigation of the Feb. 28 strike on an elementary school in Minab, Iran, described their findings in a Bloomberg report published Friday. They said the investigation’s report has been “all-but-complete for several months” but has not been released. The United States has not publicly accepted responsibility for the strike, Bloomberg reported.
Two Tomahawk missiles struck the Shajarah Tayyebeh Elementary School on the first day of the U.S. attack on Iran, killing more than 150 people, including at least 123 children, according to the report.
Bloomberg called it the deadliest U.S. military targeting error of the 21st century in terms of child deaths.
Teachers had moved children from the playground into a prayer room for cover after the first missile hit, according to an account Bloomberg drew from rights advocates and the watchdog group Airwars. Within minutes, a second missile struck, and part of the roof collapsed, and only a few children in the prayer room survived, the account said.
President Donald Trump’s administration demanded an overwhelming air assault in the final days of February, and the officials said that order squeezed the time available to finalize targets.
That urgency, combined with gaps in information about the site, “cuts in civilian-protection personnel” and an overreliance on artificial intelligence, “set the stage for the deadly error,” they told Bloomberg.
Officials involved in the probe pointed to “gaps … left after Hegseth dismantled” most of the Pentagon’s civilian harm mitigation units, Bloomberg reported.
Staffing across those teams fell roughly 90% to fewer than 20 people, and the team at U.S. Central Command, which carried out the strike, shrank from 10 people to one, people with direct knowledge told Bloomberg.
No member of those teams reviewed the Minab site before the strike, the officials said, partly because of the staffing cuts and partly because of a decision to leave the group out of planning. Those reviews map civilians near a target and look for lower-risk ways to strike it, according to the report, though Bloomberg said it is unclear whether one would have raised questions about the school.
The Biden administration had built up the civilian protection efforts after an August 2021 drone strike in Kabul, Afghanistan, killed 10 civilians when U.S. forces mistook an aid worker for a threat, the outlet reported.
Hegseth announced a shift in Pentagon spending in a February 2025 video on X, saying $50 billion would be redirected toward new priorities, Agence France-Presse reported.
“We will move away from woke, Biden-era, non-lethal programs, and instead spend that money on President Trump’s America First, peace through strength, priorities,” Hegseth said.
The Pentagon’s civilian harm mitigation plan and its Civilian Protection Center of Excellence were tagged for elimination under that push, the national security publication War on the Rocks reported the following month. Bloomberg reported that Hegseth has described his cuts to those efforts in the same terms.
In past conflicts, preparing lists of proposed targets “had taken hours for staffers to complete,” according to the report.
Before the Iran attack, much of that work was “condensed into several minutes” using Maven Smart System, an artificial intelligence tool made by Palantir Technologies, people involved in the review told Bloomberg.
A Palantir spokesperson told Bloomberg there is no evidence the company’s software was at fault in the Minab strike.
“America, regardless of what so-called international institutions say, is unleashing the most lethal and precise air power campaign in history,” Hegseth told reporters on March 2, two days after the strike. “All on our terms with maximum authorities. No stupid rules of engagement, no nation-building quagmire, no democracy building exercise, no politically correct wars.”
On Thursday, United Nations investigators said there were reasonable grounds to conclude that the Minab strike and another U.S. attack that day amounted to war crimes, Bloomberg reported.
The Pentagon declined to comment beyond saying the incident remains under investigation, and a senior administration official also cited the probe, according to the report.
“The United States does not target civilians,” the official added.
Rep. Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican, cited the Minab strike on Tuesday when he filed eight articles of impeachment against Hegseth, accusing him of “ignoring laws that minimize civilian casualties,” Truthout reported.
“By directing the Department of Defense in a manner that foreseeably dismantled the safeguards necessary to distinguish civilian objects from military objectives, Secretary Hegseth thereby effected the murder of civilians,” one article says.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) sent members home early on Wednesday for a seven-week campaign recess before the midterm elections, CNN reported. Massie’s resolution had started a clock requiring a vote within days, but the early exit pushes that vote to November.
Johnson said the early exit had nothing to do with Hegseth, according to CNN.
“It is a publicity stunt by someone who wants attention. It will immediately be tabled of course,” the speaker said, referring to a procedural vote that would set the articles aside without debate. “But we probably won’t do that today, we will do it when we come back.”
“We should not be playing games with national security,” Johnson added.
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