Was the Attack on an Iranian Primary School a War Crime?

On Feb. 28, on the first day of joint U.S.-Israeli strikes, a primary school in southern Iran was attacked, killing at least 175 people—including many children. Despite President Trump’s immediate denial of responsibility for the incident, the U.S. military’s initial assessment has found that its forces are likely behind the attack on the school in Minab. We don’t yet know if a full investigation, which may take months to reach final conclusions, will confirm these reports. But if it does, the attack on the Minab school may well be one of the largest civilian casualty events attributable to the U.S. military in decades.

The Pentagon has already begun an Army Regulation 15-6 investigation, a commander-directed fact-finding inquiry to determine what happened and make recommendations for further action. The inquiry is being led by a general outside the chain of command of those involved and will determine “not if this happened, but how this mistake happened and also confirm that it was indeed civilians that were killed in the strike,” an unnamed official told NPR.

When asked about the attack on Minab, administration officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, and White House Press Secretary Karoline Levitt have said that the U.S. would not “deliberately target” a school or civilians. Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) has similarly characterized the strike as a mistake, telling reporters that “other countries do that sort of thing intentionally, like Russia. We would never do that intentionally. I’m sorry. I’m just so sorry it happened. It was a mistake.” Framing the attack as a mistake or an accident has rhetorical value—but what are the legal implications of such a characterization?

To be sure, there is a difference between deliberate attacks on protected objects and attacks that result in incidental civilian casualties. However, a finding that mistakes were made in the target selection for the Minab attack does not excuse responsibility. If U.S. forces failed to take the necessary measures to avoid civilian casualties, including maintaining updated “no strike” lists, they could be considered in violation of international humanitarian law (IHL)—and, if individuals acted sufficiently recklessly, they may be guilty of a war crime. Consequently, the investigation should also consider whether recent moves by Secretary Hegseth to dismantle the military architecture built to reduce civilian harm played a part in enabling the attack.

As the U.S. military’s inquiry goes forward, it is essential for the investigators to treat this incident with the seriousness such recklessness warrants under IHL, and to consider whether it meets the mens rea (criminal intent) standard for war crimes.

Evaluating the Minab Attack Under the Precautionary Principle

The law of war, sometimes referred to as the law of armed conflict (LOAC) or international humanitarian law, prohibits indiscriminate attacks, including attacks not directed at a specific military objective. For members of the U.S. military, the Defense Department’s Law of War Manual provides “authoritative legal guidance for DoD personnel in implementing the law of war and executing military operations.” In its 2023 update, the manual was amended to enhance its treatment of this issue and now describes “the legal duty to presume that persons or objects are protected from being targeted for attack unless the available information indicates that they are military objectives.”

Under IHL, the general rule of precautionary measures—which the U.S. accepts as custom—requires combatants to take “constant care” to spare the civilian population, civilians, and civilian objects. While the U.S. has not ratified the instrument, Articles 57(1) and 57(2)(a) of the First Additional Protocol to the Geneva Conventions are also understood as customary law and are therefore binding on the United States. These impose on combatants an obligation to do “everything feasible” to verify that an objective is a lawful target and to take “all feasible precautions” to avoid or minimize civilian harm.

The Law of War Manual confirms that

[A]n object dedicated to civilian purposes (such as a place of worship, a house or other dwelling, or a civilian school) is a civilian object and may not be made the object of attack, unless the available information evaluated in good faith indicates it is a military objective in the circumstances.

The manual refers to precaution as “affirmative duties” (actions one must take), which it distinguishes from essentially negative duties (or actions one should not take). The standard for what precautions must be taken is one of due regard or diligence, but not an absolute requirement to do everything possible. In 2016, an executive order on pre- and post-strike measures to address civilian casualties directed agencies to

[T]ake feasible precautions in conducting attacks to reduce the likelihood of civilian casualties, such as providing warnings to the civilian population (unless the circumstances do not permit), adjusting the timing of attacks, taking steps to ensure military objectives and civilians are clearly distinguished, and taking other measures appropriate to the circumstances.

Articles 57(1) and 57(2) place the additional obligation on commanders to avoid—or at least minimize—civilian harm through activities to verify targets and avoid civilian harm well in advance of deciding, planning, or launching an attack. Some commentators have noted that

[W]hat might be a feasible measure for a very high-level commander to take might be well beyond the authority of a lower-level commander. For that reason, the obligation to obtain information in advance of any attack, when applied correctly, can run up the chain of command to potentially the highest levels.

Many countries, including Australia, Côte d’Ivoire, the Netherlands, and France, have interpreted these obligations to mean that an attack requires accurate intelligence about the operational environment, including the location of protected objects and patterns of life of civilian populations, before mounting an attack.

The Law of War Manual, in contrast, simply states that “persons using force must discriminate between legitimate and illegitimate objects of attack in good faith based on the information available to them at the time.” In practice, and in line with the duty to take “constant care,” the U.S. military has often worked in advance of attacks to do pattern-of-life analysis and create lists of protected objects not to strike, which it refers to as “no strike” lists.

Applying the precautionary principle to the attack on the Iranian school does not bode well for the United States. A group of UN experts found “the victims were mainly girls aged between 7 and 12, and large parts of the school building were destroyed while classes were underway[,]” concluding that “an attack on a functioning school during class hours raises the most serious concerns under international law and must be urgently, independently, and effectively investigated, with accountability for any violations.”

The New York Times reported that the government’s preliminary investigation found that U.S. Central Command officers created the target coordinates for the Minab attack using outdated data provided by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency. While the building that housed the school was originally part of a base belonging to a naval brigade in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), multiple open-source investigators have been able to confirm that the property was walled off from the base over a decade ago. High-resolution satellite imagery reviewed by Human Rights Watch showed that, between February and September 2016, a wall was built to separate the school from the rest of the compound.

Separately, Reuters found years of publicly available and easily discoverable online activity about the primary school, which calls into question U.S. military vetting procedures and review of strike locations. Photos on the school website also showed girls dressed in uniforms.

Available evidence suggests the school was hit by deliberate strikes on most buildings in the compound rather than incidental damage as a part of an attack on another target. Low-resolution satellite imagery from March 2 shows at least seven impact sites within the Revolutionary Guard compound, which shared a wall with the school, including a clear impact on the roof of a medical clinic, another protected object. Some of the impacts visible in satellite imagery reviewed by Human Rights Watch appear circular and centered on the middle of the targeted buildings.

The U.S. military’s apparent failure to update their target folders to include the most fundamental aspects of the target’s perimeter and pattern of life around the compound in Minab raises important questions for a war crime investigation. It should be noted that while the failure to take all feasible precautions is a violation of the laws of war, it is not considered a “grave breach” and so is not automatically considered a war crime in and of itself. While all enumerated “grave breaches” are war crimes, it is possible for other “serious violations” to be found to be a war crime too.

For the Minab attack to be characterized as a war crime, a court would need to find both that it was committed with intent (either willful or reckless) and that it infringes a rule protecting important values and involves grave consequences for the victim. So the issue for an investigation is whether the failure to take all feasible precautions, resulting in an indiscriminate attack causing harm to civilians and civilian objects, demonstrated recklessness sufficient to establish the mens rea requirement used to evaluate if conduct is a war crime.

Recklessness as the Requisite Intent to Commit a War Crime

Requiring updating satellite imagery on a regular frequency would be a step any reasonable commander would take as a feasible precaution to prevent forces from having to operate blindly in situations where they do not have the time to collect and analyze information. This raises a number of questions: If the inquiry shows U.S. forces did not take such steps prior to launching the Feb. 28 attack, did they recklessly disregard a substantial and unjustifiable risk that unnecessary harm would result from their decision? Given the amount of public information available about the school, was it placed on a “no strike” list prepared prior to the onset of hostilities? (If no list was prepared for the town of Minab, it may have been reckless to strike, particularly on a Saturday, which is known to be a school day in Iran.) If the school was on a “no strike” list, why was the list not referenced prior to targeting Minab?

The answers to these questions must be sought in any investigation to determine if the individuals involved were sufficiently reckless to meet the mens rea standard for war crimes. The laws of war define war crimes as serious violations of the laws of war committed by individuals with criminal intent. The International Committee of the Red Cross, in its Customary International Humanitarian Law Study, spells out that war crimes must be committed willfully—that is, either intentionally or recklessly.

There isn’t complete agreement among scholars and legal experts over whether recklessness is sufficient to establish mens rea. But Antonio Cassese, the acclaimed Italian jurist writing in 1999, found “current international law must be taken to allow for recklessness” to be included among the indicators for intent to commit a war crime. He explained,

[F]or example, it is admissible to convict a person who, when shelling a town, takes a high and unjustifiable risk that civilians will be killed — without, however, intending, that they be killed — with the result that the civilians are, in fact, thereby killed.

Additionally, international fact-finding missions and commissions of inquiry have consistently referred to recklessness as an element in their legal analysis of the mental intent needed to find that someone is responsible for war crimes. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) has as well. In its 1998 decision on Delalić, the ICTY determined that while “it is clear that some form of intention is required … this intention may be inferred from the circumstances, whether one approaches the issue from the perspective of the foreseeability of death as a consequence of the acts of the accused, or the taking of an excessive risk which demonstrates recklessness.” In 2003, the ICTY Galić trial chamber reinforced the standard in which a “perpetrator who recklessly attacks civilians acts willfully.”

Speaking during a 2004 guest lecture to the International Criminal Court, W.J. Fenrick, a Canadian expert on international law and former prosecutor at the ICTY, said, “[T]he ICTY use[s] ‘wilful’ as our mental element as that is the language of the Additional Protocols and ‘wilful’ incorporates both intention and a high degree of recklessness.”

However, for the U.S. military, “willfully” generally means that the act was intentional or deliberate; that is, those responsible had to know what they were doing and intended the conduct or result. Under this approach, recklessness alone would be insufficient to establish mens rea. Further, the Law of War Manual notes that “mere poor military judgment (such as mistakes or accidents in conducting attacks that result in civilian casualties) are not by themselves “a violation of the obligation to take precautions.” But the narrower interpretation of willfulness currently prevailing within the U.S. military justice system would not shield individuals potentially responsible for war crimes from international criminal responsibility.

Indeed, Yale Law School professor and former Defense Department special counsel Oona Hathaway has argued, alongside Columbia University’s Azmat Khan, that “mistakes” are often the result of identifiable and predictable systemic failures rather than unpredictable one-off events. Khan and Hathaway find evidence that international law would consider these failures “war crimes.” Over 100 U.S.-based international law experts, including Hathaway, Harold Koh, and Michael Schmitt, issued a joint statement on April 2 that determined that “the strike likely violates international humanitarian law, and if evidence is found that those responsible were reckless, it could also be a war crime.”

The timing of the attack—a school day—and the failure to check whether the targeting information was up to date raise questions about the efforts taken to avoid civilian harm, and whether the individuals involved acted in a sufficiently reckless fashion to meet the criminal intent requirement of a war crime. 

As things stand, however, it’s unclear if the investigators at the Department of Defense will even reach this question. As retired judge advocate general Brian Cox explains, ordinarily in the U.S. system, persons subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) are “charged with a specific violation of the UCMJ rather than a violation of the law of war.” The UCMJ does not delineate any specific war crimes, a gap that some scholars have dubbed a “sinister war crimes accountability deficit” and emphasized the need to reform. Former military lawyers and criminal law professors Geoffrey S. Corn and Rachel E. VanLandingham elaborate:

In the U.S. military system, the same generic murder offense used to convict a service member of murdering his or her spouse in downtown Los Angeles is used to prosecute a service member for killing a prisoner of war in U.S. custody in Iraq. This approach fails to capture the full harm of the war crime, thereby degrading the law’s retributive, deterrent, and international signaling effects.

Even Cox, who generally is skeptical that mistaken strikes are unlawful, has acknowledged that “attempting to contort the elements for existing UCMJ offenses, such as murder and involuntary manslaughter, to apply to a targeting context is the prosecutorial equivalent of forcing a square peg through a round hole.”

Indeed, past investigations into strikes by the U.S. military have failed to even consider the question of war crimes. A review of the United States’s track record in responding to similar incidents is not encouraging. From Belgrade in 1999 to Baghuz in 2019, administrative inquiries have focused on rules of engagement without investigating incidents as possible war crimes. In addition to making ex gratia payments, which don’t admit wrongdoing or seek to meet international standards for reparation or adequate compensation, the Defense Department has disciplined personnel in only a few cases.

While then-President Obama called Doctors without Borders to personally express regret for a 2015 U.S. military strike on a hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, minimal disciplinary measures were imposed on U.S. personnel involved. The U.S. military found that its repeated strikes on that facility were not war crimes, arguing that while the “investigation concluded that certain personnel failed to comply with the rules of engagement in the law of armed conflict,” this did not rise to the level of war crime, since “the label ‘war crimes’ is typically reserved for intentional acts—intentional targeting [of] civilians or intentionally targeting protected objects or locations.”

Similarly, although the UN Commission of Inquiry on Syria found that the “United States forces failed to take all feasible precautions to avoid or minimize incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, and damage to civilian objects, in violation of international humanitarian law” by striking a mosque in Syria and killing 38 people—including 5 children—the U.S. stopped short of finding fault.

In the present case, with its administrative inquiry the U.S. has taken a step toward understanding the circumstances around the attack on Minab. But a government responsible for violating the laws of war is obligated to make full reparation for the loss, including compensation, rehabilitation, and other appropriate redress. Governments also bear state responsibility to appropriately prosecute violations of international law, including war crimes, committed by their own forces. A 15-6 investigation on its own won’t meet these requirements.

Systematic Recklessness

Beyond the particular facts of the Minab case, there may be a larger, more systemic pattern of recklessness that enabled the attack—and that could enable future ones.

Since the start of the Trump administration’s second term, Secretary Hegseth has publicly expressed skepticism about the value of constraints on warfighters and systematically weakened the U.S. domestic protections meant to ensure compliance with the laws of armed conflict. In September 2025, Hegseth stood in the Oval Office and announced a focus on “maximum lethality, not tepid legality.” In a speech addressing general and flag officers at Quantico around the same time, Hegseth announced the end of the “woke” military, dismissing “stupid” and “overbearing rules of engagement,” suggesting that he intended to “untie the hands of our warfighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt and kill the enemies of our country.” In recent days, Hegseth has also publicly threatened that “no quarter” would be given to Iranians, while ordering or declaring that no prisoners be taken (a war crime).

This rhetoric has been accompanied by an effort to dismantle the structures and processes that had previously been put in place to help promote greater adherence to the law of armed conflict. This marks a shift away from prior efforts to improve targeting and mitigate civilian harm, which at least one former Pentagon staff member has speculated could have contributed to the authorization of the attack on Minab.

The U.S. military under Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin had committed to further improved processes including the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response (CHMR) initiative, which was formalized through a 2022 action plan and a 2023 Defense Department instruction. At the time, Alexus Grynkewich, then a lieutenant general in the Air Force and now the Supreme Allied Commander Europe, described it as a “watershed moment—the world’s superpower has committed to a policy that might limit military options for the sake of humanity.” In 2023, Congress codified the creation and maintenance of a Civilian Protection Center of Excellence. But in July 2025, retired military leaders spoke out to express concerns about planned cuts to these functions. A recent investigation by ProPublica found that 90 percent of the civilian harm mitigation teams established previously have been dismantled under Hegseth’s command.

Hegseth has also removed senior military lawyers without publicly citing misconduct, and replaced the Army, Navy, and Air Force judge advocates general, undermining legal oversight of combat operations. Hegseth abolished “civilian environment teams” and other mechanisms intended to limit harm.

If the attack on Minab relied on outdated or incomplete information about the site or if other changes in the targeting process resulted in less oversight of strikes, it suggests a breakdown in those safeguards—and further evidence of recklessness.

There is growing interest from lawmakers around this question. More than 120 Democratic members of Congress have asked if the Defense Department will investigate the Minab school attack as a possible war crime. Forty-six Democratic senators have written separately to Hegseth asking, “Are you complying with rules to prevent the commission of war crimes?”

Although Hegseth’s own role is still an open question in this case, the scale of civilian harm in Minab is undeniable. Even in the context of a government-imposed internet shutdown that makes independent research in Iran challenging, the information emerging about the attack on the school in Minab is heartbreaking. Rows of graves are visible in imagery of the local cemetery. An image of a bespectacled young boy waving goodbye to his mother for the last time has gone viral. Researchers at Human Rights Watch reviewed lists with dozens of names of children and adults reportedly killed in the attack, and were able to immediately match some names with ages and other identifying information on body bags and caskets.

Excusing the Minab attack as a mistake without further investigation would be a disservice to the victims and their families. In the meantime, reinstating the civilian harm reduction efforts that Secretary Hegseth has dismantled might help avoid another tragedy.