Nearly 1,500 Iranian civilians have been killed in dozens of U.S. and Israeli strikes that have hit schools, hospitals and other nonmilitary infrastructure since the Iran war began last month, a consortium of human rights groups alleged in a report issued Friday.
Researchers recorded 1,443 civilian fatalities — at least 217 of them children — from the start of hostilities on Feb. 28 through Monday, according to the report, which described the figures as “verified minimums” expected to rise as assessments — and airstrikes — continue. The findings, which appear to be the most comprehensive estimates yet of the war’s growing civilian toll, do not specify whether U.S. or Israeli forces are suspected to have conducted each of the individual strikes cited.
The report is certain to anger opponents of President Donald Trump’s decision to start the conflict alongside Israel and heighten scrutiny of the administration’s actions to de-emphasize the protection of civilians in military campaigns. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has publicly denounced what he says are the overly restrictive rules of engagement that guided recent U.S. wars, and the Pentagon under his leadership sought to dismantle a congressionally mandated office focused on mitigating civilian harm.
Critics have accused Israel, too, of disregarding international laws intended to safeguard civilians in war zones, notably in Gaza and Lebanon where tens of thousands have been reported killed amid its campaign to destroy adversaries supported by Iran.
“Children are being killed at school. Men are dying at checkpoints as they try to move their families … Women are being killed while waiting in line for bread. Medics are being killed while responding to emergencies,” Skylar Thompson, deputy director of Human Rights Activists in Iran (HRA), which co-authored the report, told The Washington Post. “These patterns of harm raise serious legal concerns regarding the conduct of hostilities and demand accountability.”
The report concluded that major factors contributing to the loss of civilian life have included “targeting errors and misidentification” linked to old or flawed intelligence, the use of explosives in dense urban areas and focused attacks on infrastructure that could serve both civilian and military needs, including transportation and energy systems.
Attacking civilian infrastructure is a violation of the laws of armed conflict, human rights experts have said. Trump in recent days has threatened to “obliterate” Iran’s electrical plants in a bid to gain leverage over Tehran as he demands that the Strait of Hormuz be reopened. The waterway’s closure has throttled global oil markets and caused gas prices to rise sharply, including in the United States.
The report states that public statements by U.S. officials show that the United States has not adhered to legal requirements to minimize civilian harm.
The report also cites what it says are the contradictory warnings to Iranian civilians issued by the U.S. and Israel. As hostilities began, Trump and the U.S. military instructed civilians to shelter at home. Israel urged people near military sites to evacuate. And both governments communicated many of their warnings via social media, a significant complication, the report notes, as most Iranians have had little to no internet access amid the conflict.
U.S. Central Command, which oversees military operations throughout the Middle East, declined to address questions about the report’s findings. In a brief statement, Navy Capt. Tim Hawkins, Centcom’s spokesman, said that “U.S. forces do not target civilians, unlike the Iranian regime which has indiscriminately targeted and attacked innocent people in neighboring countries more than 300 times” since the conflict began.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) issued a statement in response to the report that says the goal of its campaign is “to put an end to the existential threat posed by the Iranian regime to the State of Israel.” The IDF, it says, directs its strikes “exclusively against lawful military objectives in accordance with the Laws of Armed Conflict, including the principles of distinction, proportionality, and precautions during strikes.”
As The Post reported this month, flawed targeting probably played a role in a strike that hit a girls’ school in southern Iran. The building is adjacent to an Iranian military facility but in the last several years was walled off from the base, a development that may have been missed by military analysts responsible for studying changes at potential strike locations, according to people familiar with the issue.
At least 168 children were killed — and 110 civilians were injured — in the strike, according to the report, which Thompson says combined publicly available data and witness accounts to verify the death toll.
The Pentagon ordered a formal investigation of the school strike after an initial review, officials said, a tacit acknowledgment that the attack was carried out by U.S. forces and that civilian harm allegations appear to be credible. To date, U.S. officials have not explicitly accepted responsibility for the attack. If the investigation’s findings do affirm that U.S. forces were at fault, the incident would represent the largest confirmed civilian death toll from any single U.S. attack since 1991.
The report found that at least 43 other Iranian schools had been damaged in attacks since the conflict began.
HRA is an independent organization that researches suspected rights violations in Iran, including those committed by Tehran’s government. The organization is based in Washington and the Netherlands and relies on a decades-old network inside Iran to collect evidence.
Airwars, a Britain-based nonprofit that charts civilian harm through publicly available material, and the Center for Civilians in Conflict, a humanitarian protection group, also participated in the report.
“Airstrikes in populated areas have caused sudden loss of life, displacement, and damage to critical infrastructure, while intensified domestic repression has further restricted people’s ability to move, communicate, or seek medical care and safety,” the report said. “This is compounded by a dangerous narrative from the U.S. and Israel that frames harm as isolated or justified, obscuring the cumulative impact on civilians.”
Airwars has determined that at least a dozen separate attacks in Iran killed more than 10 civilians each, the report said. One attack, on a sports hall in southern Iran on Feb. 28, killed a reported 21 civilians, with another 110 injured, the report says. While it is unclear from the report whether that strike was carried out by Israel or the U.S., Pentagon officials have said that U.S. forces focused on destroying military targets in the southern region of Iran early in the war.
“The civilian toll, which we understand is likely an absolute minimum, will already go down in history as some of the deadliest opening weeks of any U.S. campaign,” said Emily Tripp, executive director of Airwars. She drew a comparison to the U.S.-led battle of Raqqa in Syria a decade ago, when her organization documented just under 3,000 civilian fatalities in four months of combat to dislodge the Islamic State from its stronghold there.
In Iran, most of the recorded attacks that left civilians dead occurred in and around Tehran, the capital, according to the report.
The deadliest day for civilians thus far was March 9, which saw 400 strikes and 262 civilians killed, the report says. On that day, one strike on an apartment building in eastern Tehran killed 20 people, including a child, according to the report.
“My children hid under the table. I didn’t know what to tell them. You can ’t explain to a seven-year-old why the sky over their city suddenly lights up, and then you hear an explosion,” said a 31-year old mother interviewed by researchers.
Lior Soroka in Tel Aviv contributed to this report.
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