Four months after one of the deadliest single attacks on civilians in recent memory, the White House is still casting doubt on who pulled the trigger while investigators say the answer is already sitting in plain sight.
On June 24, 2026, President Donald Trump stood alongside NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte and told reporters that determining who fired the missile that destroyed Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in Minab, Iran, might simply be impossible.
“I don’t know that they’re ever going to solve that problem in terms of whose fault was it because there were missiles flying all over the place. And it’s horrible what happened… but maybe it wasn’t our missile,” Trump said.
That statement, measured and careful in its ambiguity, landed awkwardly against a backdrop of weapon fragments stamped with American contractor logos, satellite imagery, Pentagon briefing maps, and Trump’s own earlier words at the G7 Summit where he described the strike as a “mistake” that was “not intentional.”
Beside him, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said only that the Pentagon takes the ongoing investigation “very seriously” and will share results “when the appropriate time is right.”
For the families of the 156 to 175 civilians killed including roughly 120 children, 26 female teachers, and several parents present that morning, that time has not yet come, four months on.
What Happened at Shajareh Tayyebeh School on February 28
The attack came during the opening hours of Operation Epic Fury, the joint U.S.–Israeli airstrike campaign that launched on February 28, 2026, targeting high-value Iranian military assets.
Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School sits in Minab, a city in Iran’s Hormozgan province and crucially, it sits directly adjacent to the Sayyid al-Shuhada military complex, a naval headquarters used by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Asif Brigade.
That proximity, investigators now believe, is exactly what made it a target and exactly why it should never have been one.
Between 10:23 and 10:45 a.m., the school was struck three separate times over a 22-minute span. Eyewitnesses and medics described a horrifying sequence: after the first impact, school staff moved surviving children into a prayer hall for shelter. That prayer hall was hit by a second missile. A third strike followed minutes later.
Investigators would later call this a “triple-tap”, a multi-strike sequence that, in a coordinated precision campaign, would only make sense if the target was logged as an active military command post. Which, according to Pentagon targeting databases, is exactly what it was just a decade out of date.
A Building That Changed But Wasn’t Updated in the System
The school building had once been part of the adjacent IRGC complex. But by September 2016, it had been permanently walled off from the base with a physical boundary wall and three separate civilian entrances. It was converted fully into a civilian primary school, complete with an outdoor play area, soccer and volleyball pitch, and colorful murals visible in commercial satellite imagery going back to 2017.
Local records, satellite analysis, and international investigators all confirm the same story: this was unambiguously a functioning school for ten straight years before the strike.
The problem, according to reporting by The New York Times and findings from Amnesty International’s Evidence Lab, is that U.S. military targeting databases were never updated to reflect this reality. Planners reportedly relied on targeting data as old as seven years, which still classified the building by its pre-2016 military function. At least one U.S. military analyst had reportedly flagged the site as a school in a prior review but that update never made it into the active database.
When Operation Epic Fury launched, the building was still logged as part of a military compound. So it was struck. Three times.
The Evidence Investigators Say Points to the U.S.
Despite the White House’s public ambiguity, independent investigators, international journalists, and munitions experts have assembled a detailed evidentiary record pointing directly to a U.S. strike.
Weapon debris pulled from the rubble on March 10, 2026 told a specific story. Munitions experts including former Pentagon explosives analysts examined fragments and identified corporate logos from Globe Motors, an Ohio-based defense contractor that builds engine components for tactical weapons, and Ball Aerospace & Technologies. Serial numbers on the twisted metal matched the procurement format used exclusively by the U.S. Department of Defense. The components were identified as belonging to a Tomahawk land-attack cruise missile, a long-range, precision weapon used solely by U.S. forces in this conflict theater.
Video and satellite cross-referencing added another layer. On March 8, Bellingcat, the open-source investigative collective verified footage released by Iranian state media showing the moment of impact. By matching background landmarks including water towers, tree lines, roads, and surrounding structures, Bellingcat precisely geolocated the strike and confirmed the missiles arrived on a trajectory consistent with U.S. naval launch vectors.
The Pentagon’s own briefing materials didn’t help the ambiguity case either. In a March 4 press briefing, Hegseth presented an unclassified map of U.S. and Israeli airstrike locations during Operation Epic Fury. Though Minab wasn’t labeled by name, the coordinate plot points on the Pentagon’s own slides overlapped precisely with the location of the school and the neighboring IRGC naval base.
Then on March 11, The New York Times reported that internal military whistleblowers confirmed a preliminary Pentagon review had already concluded U.S. forces were responsible driven by an outdated targeting database that had never been corrected after the school’s conversion.
Trump Already Called It a Mistake Before He Walked It Back
Perhaps the most jarring element of Trump’s June 24 “maybe it wasn’t our missile” statement is what he said weeks earlier.
At the G7 Summit in France, Trump publicly described the Minab school strike as a “mistake” that was “not intentional,” adding: “Nobody did that on purpose… Mistakes are made. War is nasty.”
That acknowledgment made publicly on the world stage aligns directly with what leaked Pentagon findings reportedly concluded: a catastrophic intelligence failure, not an unidentifiable mystery strike.
The shift from “it was a mistake” to “maybe it wasn’t ours” in a matter of weeks has drawn sharp criticism from human rights groups and former defense officials, who see it as a deliberate walk-back designed to reduce accountability exposure ahead of any formal findings being released.
How Automated Targeting May Have Sealed the School’s Fate
Amnesty International, human rights watchdogs, and investigative journalists have raised a pointed question beyond who fired: why weren’t checks in place to catch the error before the missiles flew?
Operation Epic Fury required generating hundreds of strike coordinates simultaneously during its opening wave. Investigators argue that over-reliance on automated target generation software without adequate human review to verify whether sites were still serving a military function created the conditions for exactly this kind of tragedy.
Amanda Klasing of Amnesty International USA put it directly: “Whether the Pentagon used artificial intelligence or not when targeting the school, it clearly did not take all feasible precautions to avoid or minimize civilian harm… There is no question that the U.S. should have known that the building was a school, not a military target.”
Human rights groups stress that under international humanitarian law, military planners are required to take all feasible precautions to verify targets before striking including confirming current civilian status. A real-time visual check, investigators note, such as active drone surveillance during the strike sequence, would have shown children, parents, and teachers fleeing the building after the first impact which should have triggered an immediate abort for the follow-on missiles.
Hegseth’s Pentagon Is Sitting on Completed Findings
While Hegseth has consistently framed the Pentagon’s position as “the investigation is ongoing,” reports suggest the internal military review was largely completed by May 2026 and has not been released.
Preliminary findings reportedly acknowledged that the strike was an American error caused by an outdated intelligence database. Rather than going public with those conclusions, the Department of Defense has withheld the unredacted report, drawing accusations of deliberate stonewalling from Amnesty International and a growing coalition of lawmakers.
The friction with Congress escalated sharply in June 2026, when the Senate Armed Services Committee voted 18–9 to insert a punitive provision into the National Defense Authorization Act targeting Hegseth directly: a 75% cut to the Defense Secretary’s official travel budget until he delivers the full unredacted civilian harm investigation and all supporting documentation to Congress.
Lawmakers from both parties cited frustration with what they described as a “rote response” from the Pentagon, the same procedural deflections, week after week, with no substantive disclosure.
The Accountability Gap Four Months Later
What makes the Minab school strike so difficult to move past beyond its catastrophic human cost, is the gap between what the evidence shows and what the administration is willing to say on the record.
Independent investigators, international media outlets, munitions experts, satellite analysts, and reportedly even the Pentagon’s own internal review all point to the same conclusion: a U.S. Tomahawk missile, fired using outdated targeting data, killed over 150 civilians most of them children at a school that had been clearly operating as a school for a decade.
The U.S. president has already called it a mistake in public. His defense secretary is sitting on a completed report. And Congress is now withholding travel funds to force the documents out.
The question now isn’t really whose missile it was. Most of the people looking at the evidence already know the answer to that. The question is whether the American public and the families in Minab will ever get a government that says so clearly, on the record, in an official report, without a walk-back the following month.
