AP Probe: US Strike Killed Over 100 Iranian Children
More than 120 days after a US Tomahawk missile struck the Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab, Iran, killing an estimated 157 to 168 people — including 123 children — the Pentagon has yet to formally release its findings or accept responsibility. A detailed reconstruction by The Associated Press reveals that US officials possessed evidence almost immediately that the school had been hit, yet the Trump administration has remained silent.
The Attack
On the morning of Saturday, February 28, 2026 — a school day in Iran during Ramadan — students at the Shajareh Tayyebeh school in Minab, Hormozgan province, were settling into their classrooms. The school, located approximately 16 miles from the strategic Strait of Hormuz, served children from families tied to Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard as well as local children from the predominantly Sunni Baluch ethnic minority.
Around 9:40 that morning, teachers learned that strikes had begun on Tehran. They began calling parents to pick up their children. By 10:15, Iranian state media had announced a nationwide school closure. But at roughly 10:45, a US-manufactured Tomahawk cruise missile struck the school. Multiple munitions hit at least five buildings in the compound, collapsing the school building.
According to Amnesty International, which conducted its own investigation in March, the attack killed 156 people, including 120 children. The independent monitoring group Airwars documented 157 confirmed dead, including 123 children aged 13 or younger, 26 school staff members (one of whom was pregnant), and five parents who each lost at least one child.
“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,” said Erika Guevara-Rosas, Amnesty International’s Senior Director.
The Weapon and Responsibility
Multiple weapons experts, including Dr. N.R. Jenzen-Jones of Armament Research Services and Trevor Ball of Bellingcat, confirmed that the missile used was a US-manufactured Tomahawk cruise missile. Tomahawks are used exclusively by US forces in this conflict. Israel, the other belligerent, does not possess them.
Despite this evidence, President Donald Trump has denied US responsibility. “I don’t know that they’re ever going to solve that problem in terms of whose fault was it, because there were missiles flying all over the place,” he said last week. “I don’t think it was us.”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has said only that the Pentagon is investigating and will release findings “when the appropriate time is right.”
Intelligence Failures and Systemic Breakdown
The AP reconstruction revealed a critical intelligence failure. A US intelligence analyst had identified the site as a school in 2019, entering this information into a digital system. However, that system was not connected to the official intelligence database used for targeting. The building remained classified as a military target based on its former use as an IRGC command headquarters.
As CBS News reported, a preliminary US assessment suggested the United States was likely responsible but did not intentionally target the school, possibly due to dated intelligence that wrongly identified the area as still part of an Iranian military installation.
The school had been physically separated from the adjacent IRGC compound since at least 2016, with its own gated entrances and playground markings clearly visible in satellite imagery. Amnesty International’s analysis of satellite imagery dating back to 2013 confirmed that the building had been converted from a military command headquarters into a school years before the strike.
Civilian Protection Cuts
Under Secretary Hegseth, the Pentagon’s Civilian Protection Center of Excellence — created at the direction of Congress in late 2022 — was significantly reduced in size, halting work on updating “no-strike lists” of protected sites such as hospitals, schools, churches, and mosques. Hegseth also fired top military lawyers responsible for ensuring compliance with international humanitarian law.
Wes Bryant, who served as Branch Chief of Civil Harm Assessments at the Pentagon until 2024, told the AP that when he was working at the Pentagon, it was well known that the no-strike list was out of date. One former Pentagon official said the bombing came as a “natural result” of these changes.
An Accountability Vacuum
The Pentagon investigation has been completed internally but is under review by CENTCOM, with no public release date. This contrasts sharply with past incidents — when a Hellfire missile killed 10 civilians in Kabul in 2021, the Defense Department claimed responsibility in less than a month.
Sen. Mike Rounds (R-SD), a member of the Armed Services and Intelligence committees, said Congress has not gotten enough information on the bombing. The issue “has not gone away,” he said.
Amnesty International has concluded that the strike violated international humanitarian law. If the attackers failed to identify the building as a school, the organization stated, this would indicate “gross negligence in the planning of the attack and would point to a shameful intelligence failure on the part of the US military.”
What Comes Next
More than four months after the deadliest reported single incident of civilian casualties in the US-Iran conflict, the families of the victims remain without resolution. There is still no complete public list of the dead. The Iranian government has exploited the attack for propaganda purposes, forcing families to participate in state-organized funerals and using traumatized child survivors in media interviews.
Key questions remain unanswered: Will the Pentagon ever release a full public report? Will anyone be held accountable for the intelligence and targeting failures? How many other schools or protected sites are misidentified in US targeting databases? And what compensation, if any, will be provided to the victims’ families?
As the AP investigation makes clear, the strike on the Shajareh Tayyebeh school represents not just a single tragedy, but a failure of multiple systems designed to protect civilians in conflict — systems that were systematically weakened in the name of military efficiency.