Pentagon Confirms Its Own Missile Killed 165 Children in Minab, and Nobody Has Been Held Accountable

March 15, 2026

On the morning of February 28th, 2026, roughly ten hours after President Trump authorized Operation Epic Fury and the United States began its bombing campaign against Iran, a Tomahawk cruise missile struck the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls' elementary school in the southern city of Minab, Hormozgan province, at approximately 10:45 AM local time, while the building was full of students in their morning classes. The strike killed at least 165 people, the vast majority of them girls between the ages of 7 and 12, along with their teachers and a number of parents who had been on the grounds, making it the single deadliest civilian casualty event of the war and one of the worst incidents of its kind in the history of US military operations.

The school, a two-story building painted with pink flowers and green leaves and surrounded by a children's soccer field with colorful murals, sat adjacent to an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps naval facility in Minab, but satellite imagery analyzed independently by Al Jazeera's Digital Investigations Unit, Bellingcat, the New York Times, BBC Verify, and Human Rights Watch all confirmed the same thing: the school had been physically separated from the military compound by walls and independent street entrances since at least 2013, with clearly visible civilian features like parked cars at school gates and brightly colored children's murals going back at least eight years on satellite imagery. It was not a military building. It had not been a military building for over a decade.

More Lies from Trump

For the first eleven days after the strike, the President of the United States lied about it repeatedly. On the day of the bombing, Trump told reporters "based on what I've seen, that was done by Iran," adding that Iran is "very inaccurate with their munitions." When video evidence emerged showing a Tomahawk missile striking the area, footage that Bellingcat researchers Trevor Ball, Carlos Gonzales, Giancarlo Fiorella, and Merel Zoet geolocated and verified, and that eight separate munitions experts confirmed showed an American BGM-109 Tomahawk, Trump pivoted to claiming that "Iran also has some Tomahawks" and that the weapons are "very generic" and "sold to other countries." Military experts dismissed this immediately since Iran is under comprehensive US sanctions and cannot purchase American weapons systems, and only five nations on earth operate Tomahawks, none of them Iran. By day four, Trump had retreated to "I just don't know enough about it," and by day five he was saying "whatever the report shows, I'm willing to live with," which is a remarkable thing to say about a report that shows your military killed 165 children. How many more children have to die in this desperate attempt to distract from the Epstein files?

On March 11th, the New York Times reported that the Pentagon's own preliminary investigation had determined that a US Tomahawk cruise missile struck the school, and that the strike resulted from CENTCOM officers using outdated targeting data provided by the Defense Intelligence Agency, data that apparently still classified the building as part of the adjacent IRGC compound despite the fact that it had been visibly, obviously, unmistakably a school for more than ten years. NPR reported the same findings, noting that the investigation is expected to take months and will include interviews with planners, commanders, and operators. The Pentagon itself declined to comment. White House spokesperson Anna Kelly offered: "Unlike the terrorist Iranian regime, the United States does not target civilians."

The children who knew nothing of politics or wars

Drop Site News reporter Mahmoud Aslan was one of the only journalists to talk to the families in the aftermath, and the details he documented are the kind that Pentagon spokespeople and White House press secretaries never have to reckon with. Mohammed Shariatmadar, the father of six-year-old Sara, a second grader, stood outside the wreckage and told Aslan "I cannot understand how a place where innocent children learn can be bombed." Amina Ansari spent the entire day searching for her nine-year-old daughter Fatima al-Zahra Mohammad Ali before the girl's body was finally recovered around 4 PM. Seyyed Ibrahim Mirkhayali, a municipal employee from Bandar Abbas, lost his nine-year-old daughter Zeinab, a fourth grader who had memorized the Quran and was preparing for a national recitation competition in Tehran. Zeinab's head was crushed by falling stones when the roof of the school collapsed on top of the students.

There were approximately 170 students inside the building when the missile hit. Time magazine confirmed at least 108 children dead. Iranian authorities put the total death toll at 165, with 95 wounded. Witnesses and satellite analysis described a triple-tap strike pattern, three distinct impacts on the same target, which Iran's Foreign Ministry characterized as a double-tap, a tactic where the second strike is deliberately timed to hit first responders. Al Jazeera's video analysis showed separate smoke columns rising simultaneously from the school and the military base, with the distance between them matching satellite measurements, which means the school was not hit by debris or shrapnel from a strike on the base next door, it was hit directly, independently, by its own missile.

The "outdated intelligence" defense doesn't survive contact with the evidence

Every corporate outlet that covered the Pentagon's preliminary findings adopted the same framing: outdated intelligence, a tragic mistake, a targeting error. CNN framed it as the result of "outdated intelligence." The AP wrote it up as "outdated intel likely led US to carry out deadly strike." The Washington Post reported the school was on an AI-assisted target list and "may have been mistaken for a military site." The word "may" is doing extraordinary work in that sentence, given that the Pentagon's own investigation says it was their missile and their targeting data.

But the "outdated intelligence" narrative has a problem, and it's one that no American outlet has bothered to address. Al Jazeera's investigation found that the Martyr Absalan Clinic, which opened in January 2025, sits directly adjacent to the school and was precisely spared in the strike. If CENTCOM's targeting data was so outdated that it couldn't distinguish a school from a military barracks despite a decade of visible separation, how did it have accurate enough data to avoid hitting a clinic that had only existed for thirteen months? You can't simultaneously argue that your intelligence was too old to know a building was a school and precise enough to thread a needle around the brand new clinic next door.

The Washington Post added another layer when it reported that the school appeared on a target list generated in part by artificial intelligence systems. The US military had deployed Palantir's Maven Smart System, powered by Anthropic's Claude AI, to process targeting data for Operation Epic Fury, and Admiral Brad Cooper, head of CENTCOM, boasted publicly that AI tools enabled his forces to convert "processes that used to take hours and sometimes even days into seconds," allowing them to strike over 1,000 targets in the first 24 hours of the war and more than 5,500 in total. When 120 Democratic members of Congress wrote to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth asking specifically whether the Maven Smart System was used to identify the Shajareh Tayyebeh school as a target and whether a human verified the accuracy of that identification, the Pentagon said it would respond by March 20th. When Futurism asked CENTCOM directly whether AI was used to select the school as a bombing target, the response was: "We have nothing for you on this at this time."

What we do know is that Hegseth had already cut Pentagon civilian protection offices by 90 percent after taking office, leaving CENTCOM with a single staffer responsible for casualty mitigation operations across the entire theater.

One person.

To review thousands of AI-assisted targets.

Everyone, starting with the person "reviewing" these targets, and going all the way up to Hegseth and Trump needs to be tried and convicted as a war criminal for this egregious dereliction of duty.

Fox News found someone to question whether the dead children are real

Fox News covered the story by platforming Banafsheh Zand, an Iranian-American journalist, who questioned whether the casualty figures matched grave counts and asked why 65 boys would be at a girls' school on a Saturday morning, a question that reveals more about Zand's unfamiliarity with the Iranian school week, which runs Saturday through Thursday, than it does about the credibility of the death toll. Fox also framed the school as having an IRGC Navy "affiliation" and suggested Iran uses "civilian shields," effectively blaming the victims for the crime. Defense Secretary Hegseth, announcing the investigation on Fox, told viewers: "There's only one entity in this conflict that never targets civilians, literally never," a statement that is now directly contradicted by his own department's preliminary findings.

Meanwhile, Democracy Now featured investigative journalist Nilo Tabrizy, who verified strike footage and satellite imagery showing the school's civilian features were visible for years, and who documented disinformation campaigns on pro-monarchy Iranian Telegram channels that falsely attributed the bombing to an IRGC rocket failure, a narrative that then migrated to X and was effectively laundered into the English-language information space. The Intercept quoted former Pentagon senior analyst Wes Bryant calling it a "failure in fundamental targeting doctrine and standards" and an unnamed official calling it "colossal negligence." Human Rights Watch called for a war crimes investigation. UNESCO called it a "grave violation of humanitarian law." The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights demanded an independent investigation. Ten Democratic senators called it "one of the worst cases of civilian casualties in decades."

And none of it has resulted in a single person being held accountable, disciplined, or even publicly identified as responsible.

What accountability looks like when there isn't any

The only precedent we have for what happens when an AI-assisted US military strike kills a civilian is the case of Abdul-Rahman al-Rawi, a 20-year-old Iraqi construction student killed in February 2024 during a night of 85 Maven-assisted strikes near Basra. The Pentagon acknowledged the death nearly a year later in a condolence letter. When asked whether AI was involved in the specific strike that killed him, CENTCOM said "we have no way of knowing." His family received approximately £141 from the Iraqi Red Crescent and nothing from the United States. His mother suffered a heart attack.

If that is the model for accountability, if the best-case outcome for killing a civilian with an AI-assisted targeting system is a form letter and a shrug, then 165 dead schoolgirls in Minab aren't going to change anything either, not because the evidence isn't there or because the world isn't watching, but because the systems that are supposed to prevent this and the systems that are supposed to punish it have both been deliberately dismantled by the people who ordered the strikes in the first place.

President Masoud Pezeshkian said that "the American and Zionist aggression against Minab Elementary School will never be erased from the historical memory of our nation." He is almost certainly right. What remains to be seen is whether it will register in ours.

— dingo__dog

Sources

New York Times — “Preliminary Pentagon Investigation Finds U.S. Responsible for Tomahawk Strike on Iranian School” Broke the Pentagon investigation findings but frames the strike as a targeting error caused by outdated intelligence, accepting CENTCOM's narrative without addressing the spared clinic or the AI targeting question.
CNN — “US strike likely hit Shajareh Tayyiba school in Minab, Iran due to outdated intelligence, sources briefed on initial findings say” Frames the strike entirely around 'outdated intelligence' as a passive accident. Does not engage with Al Jazeera's evidence that the adjacent clinic was spared, which undermines the outdated data defense.
Washington Post — “U.S. target list may have mistaken Iranian elementary school as military site” Broke the AI target list angle but softens it with 'may have been mistaken,' doing heavy lifting to preserve ambiguity when the Pentagon's own investigation points to US responsibility.
Associated Press — “Outdated intel likely led US to carry out deadly strike on Iranian elementary school, AP sources say” Wire service framing accepts Pentagon's 'outdated intel' explanation at face value with minimal independent analysis or challenge.
Fox News — “Hegseth announces probe of US role in strike at girls school in Minab, Iran” Platforms Banafsheh Zand questioning casualty figures and suggesting IRGC affiliation. Hegseth quoted claiming the US 'literally never' targets civilians. Frames Iran as using 'civilian shields.' The only outlet actively undermining the victim count.
PressTV — “Small Children Who Knew Nothing of Politics or Wars” The only outlet with named families and firsthand parent accounts from Minab. Documented the human cost that no corporate outlet attempted to report.
Drop Site News — “Who bombed the Iranian girls' school, killing more than 170? What we know” Best investigative work on this story. Digital Investigations Unit analyzed a decade of satellite imagery proving the school was separated from the military compound since 2013, and found the adjacent clinic was precisely spared, directly undermining the 'outdated intelligence' defense.
Drop Site News — “Al Jazeera investigation: Iran girls' school targeting likely 'deliberate'” Published March 3, eight days before the Pentagon confirmed US responsibility. Satellite analysis and video geolocation pointed to deliberate targeting when the US and Israel were still denying involvement.
Democracy Now! — “BBC Verify confirms Tomahawk missile identification via geolocated footage” BBC Verify independently confirmed the Tomahawk identification from Mehr News footage, corroborating Bellingcat's analysis. Solid forensic journalism.
Xinhua — “Who Bombed Girls' School in Iran? Reporter Nilo Tabrizy on What We Know About Massacre, 175 Killed” Featured Nilo Tabrizy's open-source investigation and documented disinformation campaigns falsely blaming Iran for bombing its own school. Centered civilian deaths that corporate media minimized.