United Nations investigators said Thursday that there were affordable grounds to conclude that two U.S. airstrikes on Iran in February in which at least 178 civilians died had been indiscriminate and amounted to battle crimes.
The first of the attacks hit the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary college on Feb. 28 and killed 157 people, including around 123 boys and women below the age of 13, the investigators said. They cited what they described as credible unbiased info.
The second strike took place the same day and hit a sports activities heart and close by residential buildings in the central metropolis of Lamerd. Iranian sources reported that 22 civilians were killed, including 5 youngsters, the investigators said. They said a “credible organization” reported that close to 170 people were injured, among them youngsters who sustained life-threatening accidents.
The findings were contained in an 18-page report by the U.N.’s Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Iran and are to be offered to the Human Rights Council in Geneva on Monday.
The report also particulars abuses it said amounted to crimes against humanity that were dedicated by the Iranian authorities in their crackdown on authorities protesters.
Addressing the strike on the elementary college in Minab, a city in southern Iran, the report said: “The mission finds reasonable grounds to believe that the U.S. committed the war crime of launching an indiscriminate attack resulting in loss of life or injury to civilians or damage to civilian objects.”
“The U.S. failed in its obligation to do everything feasible to verify that it was a military objective,” it said.
American officers refused to talk about the findings. “The Department declines to comment on a report conducted by an outside organization,” the Defense Department said in a assertion. “Our investigation remains ongoing, and we have nothing to announce at the moment.”
In March, The New York Times reported that an evaluation confirmed that missile fragments purporting to be from the college strike bore the markings of an American cruise missile. The remnants had serial numbers and other particulars that were constant with how the Defense Department and its suppliers label munitions. They appeared to be from a U.S.-made Tomahawk cruise missile.
American officers have ascribed the college strike to a concentrating on error brought on by outdated knowledge.
The college was hit during an attack on a close by Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps naval advanced, but the U.N. investigators said it was clearly identifiable as a college. They also concluded that the web site had been “the intended point of impact” and that it had not been hit by an errant strike. They also said it was not collateral injury.
The mission famous that a Defense Department preliminary investigation had acknowledged that the U.S. was most likely accountable. The Pentagon has not revealed the outcomes of its investigation.
“Nobody did that on purpose,” President Trump instructed journalists in June. “Mistakes are made. War is nasty.”
U.S. forces did seem to have relied on outdated intelligence, but the failure to confirm their goal “went beyond negligence,” the U.N. report said.
“Rather, the U.S. directed the strikes at the building of the school while being aware of a substantial risk of striking a civilian object and acting recklessly as regards the possibility that this would happen,” it said.
The Lamerd sports activities heart was adjoining to, but visibly separate from, a Guards Corps building, the report said. It said U.S. forces had employed a Precision Strike Missile that dispersed roughly 180,000 tungsten pellets over a broad space.The weapon’s use in a populated civilian space was “reckless as to the likely extent of death or injury,” it said.
In reaching their conclusions, the investigators said they had taken into account public statements by American officers, including Mr. Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, that were dismissive of U.S. obligations under worldwide law to distinguish between civilian and army targets.
The investigators said they had written to the U.S. authorities requesting info on the airstrikes and conferences with American army officers. They did not obtain a response, they said.
The investigators said they had also regarded into Iran’s brutal therapy of protesters in the period before the United States and Israel launched their battle against Iran. In December 2025 and early this yr, the report said, the Iranian authorities engaged in killing of dissidents “on a staggering and unprecedented scale” across all 31 of Iran’s provinces.
The report famous official estimates that 3,038 people had been killed in the violence and some 25,000 injured, many severely. But the investigators said they strongly believed the actual quantity of people killed and injured was considerably greater.
In the ensuing crackdown, Iranian security forces arrested hundreds of people. And since the begin of the yr, the authorities has executed at least 58 people on security-related fees, the report said. More than 70 Iranians, including at least 5 ladies and three boys, stay at imminent risk of being sentenced to death or executed over the protests, the report said.
Eric Schmitt contributed reporting.
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