Human rights experts commissioned by the UN’s top human rights body say they have found “reasonable grounds” to believe the United States (U.S.) committed war crimes in two strikes in Iran, including on a school in the southern city of Minab.
There has been no final accounting of what happened. The international fact-finding mission on Iran says the findings centre on a pair of airstrikes that killed at least 178 civilians, including women and children. Iranian state media have said 168 people were killed in the strike, most of them children.
At the start of the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran in February, at least one U.S. missile hit the Shajareh Tayyebeh school in Minab, according to an Associated Press investigation.
The fact-finding mission on Iran, chaired by jurist Sara Hossain of Bangladesh, is made of of independent experts and was created in 2022 by the Human Rights Council, the UN’s top human rights body. The Trump administration has yet to directly accept the blame or release findings of a Pentagon investigation into the school bombing.
It said civilians were caught between “gross human rights violations and crimes against humanity committed by their own government and the nation’s deadly conflict with the United States and Israel.
