A United Nations independent fact-finding mission has concluded there is credible evidence to hold that the United States committed war crimes in two opening-day strikes against civilian targets during the US-Israeli military campaign on Iran, according to a formal report published Thursday.
The deadliest of the two attacks targeted Minab Elementary School, a clearly marked civilian education facility, claiming a minimum of 150 lives, roughly 120 of whom were children. A second assault hit an easily identifiable sports complex and surrounding residential neighborhood in Lamerd, another southern Iranian city.
In its official assessment submitted to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, the mission confirmed the finding of reasonable grounds to back the charge that the U.S. carried out the war crime of indiscriminate attacks that caused mass civilian casualties and widespread damage to civilian infrastructure. The document is not a binding judicial ruling, but carries significant diplomatic and moral weight for global human rights accountability efforts.
Investigators detailed that the Minab school was hit by a Tomahawk cruise missile, launched as part of a broader operation targeting an adjacent Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) base. Crucially, the mission ruled out the claim that the strike was the result of an off-target errant missile or unintended collateral damage from an attack on the nearby military site. According to the report’s text, the closest IRGC installation sits just 72 meters from the school building, and investigators confirmed the school itself was the intended impact point.
Citing anonymous sources briefed on an internal U.S. probe, The New York Times previously reported that U.S. Central Command officers generated target coordinates for the strike using outdated intelligence supplied by the Defense Intelligence Agency. While the internal U.S. investigation found the American military was most likely culpable for the attack, the Trump administration has repeatedly refused to accept any responsibility for the civilian deaths.
The UN report also outlines damning findings for the second strike on the Lamerd sports complex. The New York Times revealed earlier this year that the U.S. deployed a previously untested new ballistic weapon, the Precision Strike Missile (PrSM), for this combat attack. The PrSM is designed to detonate just above its target, dispersing thousands of lethal tungsten pellets across a wide area.
The mission concluded that by selecting the PrSM for use in a densely populated civilian area, U.S. forces launched an attack that intentionally put civilian lives and property at risk, with reckless disregard for the foreseeable scale of death and injury. Investigators added that the weapon system, which spread an estimated 180,000 tungsten pellets across the civilian area, could not be focused on a single specific military target, and its harmful effects on civilians could not be constrained as required by international law.
The UN assessment ultimately found both attacks qualified as indiscriminate assaults that violated the core principle of distinction between military and civilian targets laid out in international humanitarian law. This report marks one of the most high-profile global accountability findings against a major military power for actions in a recent Middle Eastern conflict.