UN investigators find "reasonable grounds" that US strikes on Iran school, sports complex were war crimes

A UN-mandated panel of independent investigators has found reasonable grounds to believe the United States committed war crimes during two air strikes in Iran in February, including one that hit a primary school and killed more than 150 people, most of them children. The findings, formally presented to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva this week, mark one of the first times a UN inquiry has concluded a strike by the United States military amounted to a probable war crime.

The Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Iran examined the opening hours of the war the United States and Israel launched against Iran on February 28, when American forces struck the Shajareh Tayyebeh Primary School in the southern city of Minab and a sports complex in Lamerd, roughly 250 miles to the west. Investigators said US forces "failed in its obligation to do everything feasible to verify" that the school was a legitimate military objective before striking it, and found that a Precision Strike Missile, not an Iranian weapon as Washington had claimed, hit the Lamerd complex.

The toll

The mission put the combined death toll from the two strikes at roughly 178 civilians. At Minab, more than 150 people were killed, including approximately 120 children who were inside or near the school when the missile struck; the Lamerd strike, on a residential area around a sports facility, killed 22 civilian men and women. The same report also documented Iran's own crackdown on the nationwide protests that began in late December 2025, finding that state security forces killed civilians "on a massive scale" in all 31 provinces, that at least 221 children died in the unrest, and that at least 29 men were executed following summary trials, with more than 70 others — including women and boys — at risk of imminent execution.

Investigators said they reached their conclusions despite being denied access to Iran and receiving no cooperation from either the US or Israeli governments, relying instead on satellite imagery, forensic analysis of munitions fragments, and remote interviews with survivors.

A war seven months old

The strikes came on the first day of a war that began after three rounds of indirect nuclear talks, mediated by Oman, collapsed in late February. The United States and Israel launched an air campaign against Iranian nuclear, military and leadership targets that killed Iran's supreme leader within its opening hours; Iran responded with missile and drone strikes on Israel, American bases in the region, and Gulf states hosting US forces before a conditional ceasefire took hold on April 8. The fact-finding mission itself predates the war: the Human Rights Council created it in 2022 after the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, and extended its mandate for two more years in a January vote, broadening its brief to cover both the December 2025 protest crackdown and the conduct of all parties to the war.

Families of the dead in Minab and Lamerd, along with detained protesters and their relatives inside Iran, are the people most directly named in the report. Investigators also flagged earlier, smaller strikes on a wedding party in the Baloch-majority town of Kuhestak and on a home in the Sunni-majority town of Qeshm, saying members of Iran's ethnic and religious minorities appeared to have borne a disproportionate share of civilian casualties from the air campaign.

Washington rejects, allies take note

The reaction split along familiar lines. The Trump administration dismissed the findings outright and cited the report when it confirmed its formal exit from the Human Rights Council.

"The UN Human Rights Council has accomplished nothing for human rights while spouting unserious nonsense for decades. The only party in this conflict that has committed war crimes is the Iranian regime," White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said.

European governments were more circumspect but did not dispute the mission's work. In its statement to the Human Rights Council's interactive dialogue on September 21, the United Kingdom said "independent documentation of violations is essential to accountability, justice for victims and survivors, and the prevention of future abuses," while stopping short of naming the United States directly. The European Union's statement to the same session focused mainly on Iran's crackdown, condemning executions and "transnational repression" of dissidents, while noting the mission's broader findings on civilian harm from the war. Iranian officials, for their part, said the report vindicated long-standing accusations against Washington while dismissing its parallel findings on Tehran's own conduct. Human rights lawyer Reed Brody, who has tracked the case, said the report gives victims' families "more ammunition" for future accountability efforts but is "not a binding legal tool" on its own.

No court with clear jurisdiction

The mission's report carries no automatic legal force. Neither Iran nor the United States is a member of the International Criminal Court, so the court has no jurisdiction over the strikes absent a UN Security Council referral, which Washington could veto. A case at the International Court of Justice is also unlikely, since the US does not accept the court's compulsory jurisdiction. Lawyers involved in the case have instead pointed to "universal jurisdiction" statutes in countries such as France and Belgium, which in principle allow national courts to prosecute war crimes regardless of where they occurred, as a more plausible — if slow — path to any courtroom accountability. In the near term, the mission's mandate keeps it in Geneva through 2028, and its next update is expected to press UN member states for what it called in its report "third-state accountability" and full reparations to the families of those killed at Minab and Lamerd, neither of which has occurred.