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A United Nations fact-finding mission has concluded that the U.S. committed war crimes in two attacks on Iran that killed scores of civilians, including over 120 children, on the first day of the war.
In released Thursday, the UN’s Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Iran said that the U.S. violated international human rights laws regarding civilian harm in its attacks in Minab and Lamerd.
On February 28, during the opening salvo of the U.S. and Israel’s surprise attack on Iran, evidence has shown that U.S. forces bombed an elementary girls’ school in Minab, killing over 160 people, 123 of them children under 13 years old. Analysis of the strike and witness testimony found that the U.S. struck the school at least twice, if not three times, in what is known as a double- or triple-tap strike.
Other evidence has found that the U.S. was responsible for a strike that same day on an athletic facility in Lamerd where girls were doing their regular sports training. That strike killed 22 civilians, including children, and wounded over 100 others. It also damaged an elementary school and residential buildings in the area.
Both sites were “clearly identifiable” as civilian areas and thus could not have been attacked without violating prohibitions on targeting civilians or civilian infrastructure, the report says.
“[T]he strikes [on Minab] are a violation of the obligation to distinguish between civilian objects and military objectives and the prohibition of making civilian objects the object of an attack, as well as the principle of precaution,” the inquiry found. “[T]he 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.”
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The mission further says that there was intent to strike a civilian target in the Minab attack. Though previous reports have suggested that it was faulty or outdated targeting that led to the strike, the UN fact-finding mission said that the fact that the U.S. struck it multiple times is evidence that the “school was the intended point of impact and that the damage did not result from an errant strike.”
Intent was further established by the Trump administration’s “mental element of recklessness” in conducting military actions, it says. The group specifically points to actions and statements by President Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth that dismiss practices to avoid civilian harm, including those established by “binding obligations” under international humanitarian law.
The report goes on to say that the Lamerd attack was also a war crime.
“Irrespective of the intended target of the U.S. strikes in a populated area in Lamerd … the Mission found that these strikes constituted an indiscriminate attack in violation of the principle of distinction,” the report says. “Accordingly, the strike on Lamerd also amounted to 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. has not accepted responsibility for either strike, and did not respond to requests by the UN officials. But the fact-finding mission examined the strikes and found evidence that the strikes were carried out by the U.S. due in large part to the munitions used. On Minab, experts have said that the U.S. dropped at least one Tomahawk missile; and, in the strike on Lamerd, the U.S. used a new, untested missile called the Precision Strike Missile, or PrSM, that reportedly explodes into a massive spray of 180,000 tungsten pellets.
The U.S. is the only party in the conflict that has Tomahawks or PrSM missiles in its arsenal. The use of a PrSM missile on a civilian area alone lends to evidence that the U.S. did not take reasonable precautions to avoid civilian harm, the report says.
The aftermath of the attacks was horrific.
“One video shows a man holding the severed arm of a young child,” the fact finders wrote of Minab. “Bloodied backpacks and schoolbooks can be seen in additional footage. Sources interviewed by media described burned, dismembered, and headless bodies. Several families lost more than one child.”
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