United States President Donald Trump has said he does not believe American forces were responsible for a missile strike on a girls primary school in southern Iran that killed more than 175 people, most of them children, on the opening day of military operations against the country in late February. His denial came even as his own military’s preliminary investigation reportedly found the opposite to be true.
Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office on Wednesday alongside NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, Trump said plainly: “I don’t think it was us.” He pointed to the confusion of the opening hours of the conflict as an explanation for why definitive responsibility was difficult to assign. “It’s horrible what happened, but there were missiles flying all over the place, and somebody said it was our missile. Well, maybe it wasn’t our missile,” he said.
The school was the Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in the city of Minab, in southern Iran. The strike on the 28th of February this year, the first day of what the United States named Operation Epic Fury, reduced part of the building to rubble. Iranian officials put the final death toll at more than 175 people, including large numbers of girls aged between seven and twelve years old, along with teachers and other school staff. The attack drew immediate international condemnation and became one of the most discussed incidents of the entire conflict.
The weapon involved has also become central to the dispute over who was responsible. Video footage of the strike reviewed by multiple news organisations and independent analysts showed characteristics consistent with a Tomahawk cruise missile, a weapon manufactured in the United States and not held by Iran or Israel. The United States military confirmed separately that it used Tomahawk missiles during its opening strikes on Iran that same day, and a Pentagon map of initial attack sites released last week showed strike locations that included Minab. When Trump was confronted with this and asked to explain how Iran could have fired an American weapon, he told reporters that Iran also possessed Tomahawks. That claim was dismissed by military experts and weapons analysts, who noted that Iran has been under heavy American sanctions for decades and has no legal or practical means of acquiring weapons from the United States. Trump subsequently pulled back from the claim, telling reporters: “I just don’t know enough about it.”
The New York Times reported on Wednesday that a preliminary investigation conducted by the Department of Defense had concluded that United States forces were responsible for the strike. The investigation found that the attack was the result of outdated targeting information: intelligence records used to identify the building showed it as part of a base belonging to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. Those records had not been updated to reflect that the site had since been converted into a primary school for girls. The building that American planners believed was a military installation had been a school for several years by the time the missile struck it.
As reported, the incident has generated serious political pressure on the administration in Washington. House Democrats introduced impeachment proceedings against Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth following the strike. Senate Democrats last week threatened to block funding for Hegseth’s travel unless the Pentagon handed over unredacted civilian harm investigation records, including those related to Minab. Nearly all Senate Democrats sent a letter to Hegseth demanding details of how civilian harm procedures were applied during the early strikes and what role various targeting tools played in selecting sites. Trump, asked at the G7 summit last week whether he would hold anyone accountable for what happened, replied: “No. Mistakes are made.” He added that nobody had struck the school on purpose.
Republican Senator John Kennedy, a close ally of the president, went further in acknowledging responsibility, telling CNN that he believed the United States was behind the strike but that it was not intentional. “I think that it was a terrible, terrible mistake,” Kennedy said. “The investigation may prove me wrong. I hope so. The kids are still dead.” He said he was sorry it had happened.
The school strike has also become a focal point for Iran in its diplomatic manoeuvres following the ceasefire. The Iranian government named its formal negotiating team the Minab 168 team and had the slogan painted on the side of the special government aircraft carrying the Iranian president, the parliament speaker and the foreign minister to international summits in Switzerland, Pakistan, Oman and India. The number 168 refers to the count of children Tehran says were killed. The decision to stamp the name of the strike on the plane carrying the country’s most senior officials to peace talks was a deliberate and pointed signal to international partners about how Iran intends to frame the legacy of the conflict.
Iran has said it will continue to raise the question of civilian casualties, and the school strike in particular, in every forum available to it. Whether the American investigation, when it concludes, will lead to any formal acknowledgement of responsibility or any measures of accountability remains deeply uncertain given the tone of the president’s public responses.
