Who Bombed the Iranian School? Experts Say America — Trump Says Iran

The Shajareh Tayyebeh school in Minab, Hormozgan Province, southern Iran, was a girls' elementary school serving students roughly aged 7–12. The compound had for years shared a boundary with the adjacent IRGC naval base, but multiple analyses — including a legal review by the New Lines Institute — found the school had been administratively and physically separated from the base, with satellite imagery showing it as a distinct, clearly civilian facility since around 2016. ^{[3] [23]}

At approximately 10:23–10:45 AM local time on February 28, 2026 — the first day of the joint US-Israeli campaign the Pentagon code-named Operation Epic Fury — a Tomahawk cruise missile struck the school compound during class hours. According to a paramedic quoted in contemporaneous reporting, after the first strike hit the school building, the principal and a teacher moved surviving students to the school's prayer hall for safety, and the principal called parents to come collect their children — but a second missile then struck the prayer hall as well. "Only a small number of those who had taken shelter survived," the paramedic said. This double-strike pattern is what accountability advocates have since cited as aggravating the case for a war-crimes review. ^{[1] [17]}

Death-toll figures have varied across sources and over time, and no single number has been authoritatively finalized in the reporting reviewed for this piece. The Iranian Red Crescent's early count, cited by Amnesty International and Chinese state broadcaster CGTN, put the toll at 168 dead. Iranian state media reported figures as high as 175–180. Al Jazeera's running tally described the toll as "more than 170" as of March 12. The dead were overwhelmingly schoolgirls aged 7–12, along with teachers and staff; at least 95 more were injured and taken to Hazrat Abolfazl Hospital roughly 2 km away. ^{[10] [28] [17]}

Iran held a mass funeral for victims on March 3, 2026, attended by large crowds, and the government announced plans to convert the school site into a memorial. ^[17] Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Dan Caine confirmed at a March 2 briefing that US Navy vessels had fired Tomahawk missiles into southern Iran on February 28. Reporting attributes the strike to outdated Defense Intelligence Agency data that had not been updated to reflect the school's separation from the adjacent naval facility. ^[2]

The evidence chain in this case is unusually deep for a wartime disinformation dispute, combining open-source video analysis, forensic authenticity checks, missile-fragment identification, and satellite imagery — gathered independently by several different organizations.

Video Footage: Footage filmed near the strike and geolocated by Bellingcat researchers Trevor Ball, Carlos Gonzales, Giancarlo Fiorella and Merel Zoet shows a missile diving steeply in its terminal phase, consistent with a Tomahawk's known flight profile; the team matched surrounding terrain and shadow angles to satellite imagery to confirm where and when the video was captured. ^[4] Separately, digital-forensics researchers examined the footage for signs of AI manipulation: UC Berkeley's Hany Farid analyzed the missile's flight path and found it followed "a straight trajectory, which would be tricky to fake as the camera moves between the frames," while Siwei Lyu of SUNY Buffalo said his analysis "found no artifacts in the video that indicate it had been created using artificial intelligence." ^[35]

Munitions Experts: Reporting describes at least eight independent munitions experts, across multiple outlets, who reviewed the video and fragment photos and identified the weapon as an American UGM-109 Tomahawk. Among those quoted by name: TIME's John Gilbert of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, who said "The video taken on February 28, 2026, conclusively shows a Tomahawk cruise missile diving almost vertically into the area of the medical clinic adjacent to an IRGC facility" ^[5]; NBC News's N.R. Jenzen-Jones of Armament Research Services, who said the footage "appears to show a Tomahawk missile"; and Jeffrey Lewis, who called the munition "clearly a Tomahawk. It's long, cylindrical. It has a set of wings." A UC Berkeley summary of the reporting put the total number of munitions experts who concurred at eight. ^[35] Separately, targeting expert Wes Bryant told The Intercept the incident reflected a "failure in fundamental targeting doctrine and standards," and an unnamed US official called it "colossal negligence." ^[6]

Missile Fragments: Photos from the site showing airframe debris were analyzed by CNN with rocket expert Markus Schiller of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, who identified one piece as "a Globe Motors actuator motor" and another as part of the missile's jet engine — both consistent with Tomahawk components and matching debris types previously recovered from other Tomahawk strikes. Bellingcat's Trevor Ball independently assessed the fragments as "part of a Tomahawk missile," while cautioning it wasn't possible to confirm their exact origin from photos alone. ^[18]

Satellite Imagery: Commercial Planet Labs imagery reviewed by NPR showed that the strike damaged multiple structures across the compound beyond the school itself, including a nearby health clinic — evidence of a broader multi-point strike rather than a single stray missile. Historical satellite imagery separately supported the school's status as a distinct civilian facility in the years before the strike. ^[3]

Corroborating Bellingcat Investigation: On March 11, Bellingcat published a second investigation geolocating Tomahawk missiles transiting Iraqi and Kurdish airspace en route to Iranian targets, corroborating that US Tomahawks were being flown into the region during the relevant window. ^[30]

The Minab strike raises a question beyond who fired the missile: what role, if any, did AI-assisted targeting play in generating coordinates that led to a Tomahawk hitting a school?

Multiple outlets reported that Palantir's Maven Smart System — which The Register reported has, per Pentagon chief digital and AI officer Cameron Stanley, consolidated "eight or nine" separate military intelligence systems into one targeting pipeline — was in active use during Operation Epic Fury, and that Anthropic's Claude model was integrated into that pipeline. Responsible Statecraft reported the US used AI targeting tools that "still employ Claude" to help strike over 1,000 targets in the first 24 hours of the war. ^{[25] [26] [27]} Separately, Iran's HRANA human-rights monitor tallied nearly 6,000 attacks nationwide by the end of the war's second week — a measure of the campaign's overall scale, not a confirmed count of Maven-processed targets specifically. ^[32]

On March 12, Rep. Jason Crow (D-CO) led a letter, with Reps. Yassamin Ansari (D-AZ) and Sara Jacobs (D-CA), signed by 120 House members, demanding Pentagon answers by March 20. The letter asked: "What is the role of artificial intelligence, if any, in selecting targets... during Operation Epic Fury? ... Was artificial intelligence, including the use of Maven Smart System, used to identify the Shajareh Tayyebeh school as a target? If so, did a human verify the accuracy of this target?" ^{[21] [22] [12]}

CENTCOM Commander Adm. Brad Cooper publicly confirmed the use of "advanced artificial intelligence tools" during the operation and said such tools "can turn processes that used to take hours and sometimes even days into seconds," while maintaining that human personnel retain final authority over strike decisions. ^[13] Whether AI tools specifically generated the Minab school's targeting coordinates — as opposed to the underlying DIA data simply being stale — has not been publicly confirmed by the Pentagon. Legal scholar Marko Milanovic, writing separately on EJIL: Talk!, noted it remains genuinely unclear whether AI was used to inform the Minab targeting decision specifically, a point this piece treats as unresolved rather than settled. ^{[24] [25]}

The Anthropic-Pentagon relationship adds complexity. On February 27, 2026 — the day before the war began — the Defense Department designated Anthropic a "supply chain risk," and President Trump directed federal agencies to phase out Claude use, following Anthropic's refusal to drop contractual restrictions barring the use of Claude for mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons. Agencies were given a roughly six-month transition window, meaning Claude was reportedly still in use within CENTCOM's systems when the war began the next day. Anthropic has since sued the administration over the designation. ^[26]

Three elements of the evidence record deserve particular attention: the satellite imagery's scope, the cross-outlet casualty verification, and the double-strike detail.

Satellite Imagery Scope: NPR's review of Planet Labs imagery found the strike damaged multiple structures across the compound — not a single stray missile, but a broader pattern consistent with a multi-point strike on the wider complex, including a nearby clinic. Retired US Marine Corps colonel Mark Cancian, quoted by Al Jazeera, said: "It seems that the United States Central Command did not keep its target list up to date." ^{[3] [17]}

The Double-Tap Strike: Contemporaneous reporting describes a two-strike pattern: the first missile hit the school building; the principal and a teacher then moved surviving students to the school's prayer hall, and the principal began calling parents to retrieve their children — before a second missile struck the prayer hall as well. "Only a small number of those who had taken shelter survived," a paramedic told reporters. This pattern — a follow-up strike on the location where survivors gathered — is central to why accountability advocates argue the incident goes beyond a single negligent targeting error. ^{[1] [17]}

CENTCOM's First Statement: On March 1, 2026, CENTCOM spokesperson Capt. Tim Hawkins issued a deliberately non-attributive statement: "We are aware of reports concerning civilian harm resulting from ongoing military operations. We take these reports seriously and are looking into them." The statement did not deny US involvement.

Pentagon Photographer Restrictions: Around the same period that NPR and The Intercept published reporting pointing toward US responsibility, Military.com reported the Pentagon had, without explanation, blocked photographers from Defense Secretary Hegseth's briefings on the Iran war — a departure from established practice that press-freedom advocates criticized, though Military.com's reporting did not establish a confirmed causal link between the two events. ^[33]

The international response to the Minab strike has been swift and largely unified among humanitarian and legal bodies.

Amnesty International concluded on March 16 that the US was responsible and called for accountability. Erika Guevara-Rosas, Senior Director for Research, Advocacy, Policy and Campaigns, said: "This harrowing attack on a school, with classrooms full of children, is a sickening illustration of the catastrophic and entirely predictable price civilians are paying during this armed conflict." ^[10]

Human Rights Watch called for the strike to be investigated as a potential war crime. HRW's Sarah Yager said the Pentagon's own preliminary findings "show a violation of the laws of war that cannot be boiled down to a blameless mistake," adding that accountability requires that "failures in intelligence, target verification, or decision-making are identified and fixed so this never happens again." ^[14]

UN human rights experts (OHCHR) said in a joint statement: "A strike on a school represents a grave assault on children, on education, and on the future of an entire community... There is no excuse for killing girls in a classroom." ^[20]

UNESCO, through UN News, called the strike "a grave violation of humanitarian law," noting that students and teachers "are protected under international humanitarian law" and that attacks on schools "undermine the right to education." ^[29]

International Criminal Court: Iran's Red Crescent asked the ICC prosecutor to open a war-crimes investigation into US and Israeli strikes. Legal commentary has noted that Iran, though not an ICC member, could unlock full ICC jurisdiction over the conflict by lodging an Article 12(3) declaration with the Court — the mechanism Ukraine and Palestine previously used — though there is no confirmation Iran's government had filed such a declaration as of this writing. Separately, the US has never joined the ICC and its 2002 American Servicemembers' Protection Act reflects long-standing US opposition to the Court's jurisdiction over US personnel, a structural complication for any prosecution regardless of Iranian action. ^[31]

New Lines Institute analyst Susanna Kelley published a legal analysis concluding the Minab strike violated core principles of International Humanitarian Law: distinction, proportionality, and military necessity.

Distinction: Kelley's analysis emphasizes that despite the school's roughly decade-long physical and administrative separation from the adjacent military complex, and despite publicly available information establishing its civilian status, the strike proceeded without adequate protective measures.

Proportionality: With well over 150 civilian deaths — overwhelmingly children — and no corresponding military advantage, Kelley concluded: "The attack was manifestly disproportionate, as it caused extensive civilian casualties without yielding any concrete or direct military advantage." ^[23]

Precaution failures: Kelley wrote that "the attackers failed to exercise due diligence to distinguish civilians from combatants" despite information that would have allowed them to do so. ^[23]

The Prosecution Problem: Prof. Marko Milanovic, writing on EJIL: Talk!, argued that AI involvement does not, by itself, create a fundamentally new accountability gap — human commanders remain responsible for decisions made using AI-assisted tools. He also noted, importantly, that it remains unclear whether AI targeting tools were actually used to generate the Minab school's specific coordinates. His broader analysis suggests that under the Rome Statute's mistake-of-fact provisions, officers who "honestly but negligently" misidentify a target may be difficult to prosecute criminally, even for a single mass-casualty incident, absent evidence of deliberate or systematic targeting of civilians — meaning meaningful accountability, if it comes, is more likely to run through domestic channels such as a court-martial or congressional inquiry than through international prosecution. ^[24]

Historical Precedent: Al Jazeera drew a parallel to the 1999 NATO strike on the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, where outdated maps led to a strike on a building that had been misidentified as a military facility, and to the 1991 Amiriyah bunker strike in Baghdad, which killed hundreds of sheltering civilians. In both cases the US acknowledged error and offered limited compensation but faced no criminal prosecution. ^[17]

As of March 17, 2026, roughly two and a half weeks into the war, the Minab strike stood out even against a rising overall civilian death toll. The Intercept reported that, as of March 11, more than 1,300 Iranian civilians had been killed in the conflict overall, per Iranian Red Crescent figures — meaning the roughly 156–175 killed at the Minab school alone likely represented somewhere in the range of one-tenth of all confirmed civilian deaths in the war to that point, a striking concentration for a single strike. ^{[6] [10]}

Republican Senator John Kennedy publicly stated the US was behind the strike, calling it "a terrible, terrible mistake" and saying "I can assure you it wasn't intentional" — becoming the first Republican lawmaker to acknowledge American responsibility, alongside dozens of Democratic senators and the 120 House members who signed Rep. Crow's letter demanding answers by March 20.

The Minab strike exposed a divergence between how quickly different outlets converged on the physical evidence.

US right-wing media initially amplified Trump's March 7 claim, framing it as exoneration. The false claim that Iran had "confessed" — rated FALSE by PolitiFact — spread widely before the correction caught up, a pattern common in wartime disinformation: false claims travel fast, corrections travel slower. ^[15]

International outlets — Al Jazeera, euronews, and others — treated the Tomahawk identification as well-established within days of the video's release, citing Bellingcat's and other outlets' geolocation and expert analysis. ^{[1] [4] [16]}

The claim's spread followed a familiar amplification path: Trump's public statement → amplification in sympathetic media → social spread → the false IRGC "confession" as a secondary, separately-debunked claim. The correction path — expert consensus, fact-checks, and the Pentagon's own preliminary investigation becoming public around March 11–13 — moved more slowly. ^{[9] [11]}

The Pentagon's restriction on photographers at Hegseth's briefings, discussed above, occurred in the same window that investigative reporting on US responsibility was published — a timing overlap that press-freedom advocates flagged, even though no source reviewed here established the restriction was explicitly ordered because of that reporting. ^[33]

Trump's claim that Iran bombed its own school is not supported by the evidence, and the available evidence points to a US Tomahawk missile. Independent video geolocation, forensic authenticity analysis, missile-fragment identification by named munitions experts, satellite imagery, and the US military's own preliminary investigation all point to an American UGM-109 Tomahawk. Multiple experts confirmed Iran does not possess Tomahawks. Reporting attributes the strike to CENTCOM's use of outdated Defense Intelligence Agency data that had not been updated to reflect the school's years-earlier separation from an adjacent IRGC naval facility.

Trump was, according to The New Republic, initially given intelligence suggesting the missile was not a Tomahawk — intelligence the CIA itself corrected within 24 hours. It is not established that he was ever briefed on the correction, but he never revised his public claim; when weapons experts contradicted him, he added the separate, also-false claim that Iran possesses Tomahawks. Defense Secretary Hegseth ordered a formal investigation, and a Republican senator has publicly acknowledged US responsibility while Democratic lawmakers in both chambers have demanded answers about the role AI-assisted targeting tools may have played.

Different tallies place the death toll at Shajareh Tayyebeh school between roughly 156 and 180, overwhelmingly schoolgirls aged 7 to 12, with the discrepancy reflecting the fog of an active war rather than a resolved final count. Whatever the precise number, independent reporting and international bodies including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the UN's own human rights experts agree it represents one of the deadliest single incidents of the war — the product of a targeting system built on outdated data, deployed at wartime speed, whose precise reliance on AI tools remains, as of this writing, not fully confirmed.