A UN fact-finding mission says there are reasonable grounds to believe US forces struck a school and a sports facility in Iran in February, arriving while the Pentagon's elevated investigation into the Minab strike stays open and the same report documents mass atrocities by Tehran's security forces.
GENEVA - A United Nations fact-finding mission on Iran said Thursday there are reasonable grounds to believe that United States forces carried out two strikes on a school and a sports facility in February, concluding that both attacks were indiscriminate and amounted to war crimes. The finding lands in the middle of a widening accountability fight over the Iran war, and it arrives while the Pentagon's own expanded investigation into the deadliest of the two strikes remains open. The same report also documents a brutal crackdown by Tehran's security forces that the panel says rises to crimes against humanity.
The independent international fact-finding mission's conclusions will be submitted to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, giving them a formal venue and a lasting paper trail. They are not a court ruling and carry no enforcement power, but they sharpen a dispute the administration has already been litigating in public for months.
The mission centered its investigation on the Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school in the southern city of Minab, where Iranian officials say more than 150 people were killed, including roughly 120 schoolchildren. Investigators concluded the school was a clearly identifiable civilian object and found no evidence it was being used for military purposes.
The report states that American planners relied on intelligence suggesting a senior Iranian military commander was present at the site but failed to verify that information adequately before launching. Investigators described the failure to update targeting intelligence and to confirm the building as a military objective as more than simple negligence.
"Rather, the US 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," the mission wrote. It called the attack indiscriminate and therefore a war crime under international law.
The panel reached a parallel conclusion about a strike on a sports center in Lamerd, saying the attack damaged nearby homes and a school and killed or injured 22 civilians. US Central Command said in March that American forces did not launch strikes into Lamerd that day, a claim the mission's report does not squarely address.
Washington has maintained that its operations are conducted in accordance with the law of armed conflict, and the military has not waited on outside bodies to examine its own conduct. The Pentagon inspector general's first accounting of the Iran war already detailed munitions strain, base damage, and a $37.5 billion price tag, and the inquiry into the Minab strike has been elevated to a higher level of review rather than closed out quietly.
President Trump said in June that nobody purposefully attacked the school, pointing to the investigation into the incident. Reporting on an initial internal military review indicated US forces were probably responsible for the fatal strike in Minab, and the Pentagon has so far published no preliminary findings of its own.
The mission did not stop at American conduct. It found that Iranian authorities carried out a widespread and systematic attack on civilians during protests that erupted in late December, an operation it said involved unlawful killings, torture, arbitrary detention, enforced disappearances, and severe restrictions on freedom of expression.
Iran's government says 3,038 people were killed and 25,000 injured. The investigators said they could not independently verify those numbers but believe the true toll is probably far higher, and they described the crackdown as a significant escalation from earlier patterns of suppressing dissent. Tehran blamed terrorists and rioters backed by exiled opponents and by the United States and Israel, while rejecting allegations of systematic rights violations.
That half of the report matters politically. It gives the administration a documented counternarrative against a regime that has spent months casting itself as the victim of American aggression, and it places the mullahs' internal record on the same page as the accusations against Washington.
The findings now head to the Human Rights Council, where they will be debated and where advocacy groups will use them to press for further international action. Expect the report to resurface in litigation, in sanctions debates, and in any future push for accountability proceedings in The Hague.
The White House's likeliest course is to keep attention on the open Pentagon review, on the Iranian regime's documented brutality, and on the broader argument that the Iran campaign degraded a nuclear-adjacent threat. Congress is already moving on the surrounding fights, with the House having taken repeated votes on war powers limits during the campaign.
Watch three things: whether the Pentagon releases preliminary findings from the elevated Minab inquiry, whether the Human Rights Council turns the mission's conclusions into a formal resolution, and whether Tehran uses the report as cover to walk back from any diplomatic opening. For now, the most consequential investigation into the school strike remains the one inside the US military itself.
A UN fact-finding mission says there are reasonable grounds to believe US forces struck a school and a sports facility in Iran in February, arriving while the Pentagon's elevated investigation into the Minab strike stays open and the same report documents mass atrocities by Tehran's security forces.
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