US Military Refuses to Endorse Trump's Girls' School Bombing Claim

On the morning of February 28, 2026 — the first day of the U.S.-Israeli military campaign against Iran — a missile tore into the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls' elementary school in the southern coastal city of Minab. The building collapsed during the school day, burying children aged 7 to 12 beneath the rubble. Iranian authorities say at least 168 people were killed, the vast majority of them schoolgirls and their teachers [1][2].

It was, by every measure, the single deadliest civilian casualty event of the war. And within days, it triggered something almost unprecedented in modern American civil-military relations: the U.S. military's own leadership publicly distancing itself from the president's account of what happened.

Trump's Claim: "Done by Iran"

On March 7, President Donald Trump told reporters that he believed the school strike "was done by Iran." When pressed on whether U.S. forces had bombed the school, Trump was emphatic: "No. In my opinion and based on what I've seen, that was done by Iran." He added that Iran is "very inaccurate with their munitions, they have no accuracy whatsoever" [3][4].

The claim was immediately met with skepticism — not only from journalists and independent investigators, but from within his own administration.

The Pentagon's Careful Distance

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, a Trump loyalist and former Fox News host, notably declined to echo his commander-in-chief. When asked directly whether Trump's assertion was accurate, Hegseth said only: "We're certainly investigating." On multiple occasions over the following days, he repeated the same line: "All I can say is that we're investigating that. We, of course, never target civilian targets, but we're taking a look and investigating that" [5][6].

U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), the military command overseeing operations in the Middle East, went further. Asked for comment on the bombing, a CENTCOM spokesperson said it "would be inappropriate to comment given the incident is under investigation" — language that, in the context of presidential claims already on the record, amounted to a quiet rebuke [5].

The gap between the White House podium and the Pentagon briefing room was stark. While Trump declared Iran responsible, the people actually running the war declined to say the same — or anything close to it.

The Evidence Trail

The reasons for the military's reticence became clear as independent investigations mounted throughout the first week of March.

Bellingcat and Open-Source Analysis

On March 8, Bellingcat — the Netherlands-based investigative collective — published a detailed analysis of footage originally released by Iran's Mehr News Agency [7]. The video, roughly seven seconds long, showed a cruise missile slamming into a building inside a walled compound in Minab. Bellingcat geolocated the footage and identified the munition as consistent with a U.S. Tomahawk cruise missile — a weapon system that neither Iran nor Israel possesses in this conflict.

Trevor Ball, a Bellingcat researcher, confirmed the finding. Jeffrey Lewis, a professor of global security at Middlebury College who reviewed the footage independently, told NPR that "the missile appears consistent with a Tomahawk cruise missile" and "did not appear to be consistent with known, Iranian-made cruise missile designs" [8].

Major News Investigations

The findings cascaded across the world's leading newsrooms:

• NPR was among the first to report on satellite imagery from Planet Labs showing that multiple buildings in the compound — including a health clinic adjacent to the school — were struck in what appeared to be a precision strike on what had once been an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) naval base [8].
• The New York Times conducted its own investigation and concluded that U.S. forces struck the school during airstrikes on the nearby IRGC base [9].
• The Washington Post published new footage on March 9 that "raises the likelihood the US struck an Iranian school where a blast killed at least 165" [10].
• CNN reported that satellite imagery, geolocated videos, and expert munitions analysis all suggested U.S. responsibility [11].
• CBC News worked with Bellingcat to produce a joint investigation reaching similar conclusions [12].

The Internal Assessment

Perhaps most damaging to the president's account: CBS News reported that a preliminary internal U.S. assessment concluded the United States was "likely" responsible for the strike. The assessment indicated that the military did not intentionally target the school, and may have struck it in error — possibly because of outdated intelligence that wrongly identified the area as still part of the IRGC naval installation [2][13].

Reuters independently confirmed that U.S. military investigators themselves believed it was likely that American forces carried out the strike [9].

Source: GDELT Project

Data as of Mar 10, 2026CSV

The Outdated Intelligence Question

The emerging picture suggests a potential catastrophic intelligence failure. The Shajareh Tayyebeh school sat within or immediately adjacent to a compound that had, at some earlier point, served as an IRGC naval base. According to Al Jazeera's investigation, the attack was either based on "outdated intelligence" from before 2013 — which "would constitute grave negligence" — or was intentionally carried out "to inflict maximum societal shock and undermine popular support for Iran's military establishment" [14].

Multiple buildings were hit in the strike on the compound — seven in total, according to NPR's satellite imagery analysis — suggesting a systematic, multi-warhead attack on what military planners apparently believed was a legitimate military target [8].

The question of when the school was built, when it replaced or was co-located with military facilities, and whether strike planners had access to current intelligence about the site's civilian use, is now at the center of the investigation.

International Condemnation

Human Rights Watch

On March 7, Human Rights Watch issued a formal call for the strike to be investigated as a war crime under Article 8 of the Rome Statute, which prohibits intentional attacks on educational buildings that are not military objectives [15].

"Human Rights Watch has seen no information to indicate that the Shajareh Tayyebeh school was used for military purposes," the organization stated. It noted that the available evidence indicates "the attack was carried out by highly accurate, guided munitions, rather than errant weapons whose guidance or propulsion systems failed" — directly contradicting the narrative that the school was struck by an inaccurate Iranian missile [15].

The United Nations

UN human rights experts characterized the strike as a potential war crime under the Rome Statute. The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child said it was "alarmed by reports of strikes on civilian infrastructure, including schools and hospitals, which have injured and traumatised children, and claimed many young lives" [16].

The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) called for an independent investigation, describing the incident as "horrific" [16].

Congressional Pressure

The school strike has created fissures on Capitol Hill. A group of senior Democratic senators — Mark Warner, Brian Schatz, Patty Murray, Jeanne Shaheen, Jack Reed, and Chris Coons — issued a joint statement calling the incident "appalling" and demanding a full investigation [17].

Their statement was pointed: "Independent analysis credibly suggests the strike may have been conducted by US forces, which, if true, would make it one of the worst cases of civilian casualties in decades of American military action in the Middle East" [17].

The senators urged Defense Secretary Hegseth to ensure the Pentagon's investigation is "thorough, including whether any policy decisions may have contributed to the catastrophe" — language that implicitly questioned whether the speed or scope of the air campaign contributed to inadequate target vetting [17].

The Broader Civilian Toll

The Minab school strike is the deadliest single incident, but it is far from the only civilian casualty event in the war's first two weeks. According to the Iranian Red Crescent, as of early March, 65 schools and 32 medical facilities had been damaged since hostilities began. Rights groups reported more than 1,000 civilian deaths in the first five days alone, including 181 children under the age of ten [18][19].

TIME magazine reported that a U.S.-based human rights organization documented the broader toll, estimating more than 1,000 civilians killed in U.S.-Israeli bombing [18].

American Public Opinion

The school strike has intensified already deep public skepticism about the war. A Quinnipiac University poll released on March 9 found that 56 percent of voters oppose U.S. military action against Iran, with 74 percent opposing the deployment of ground troops. Trump's approval on Iran stands at just 38 percent, with 57 percent disapproving [20].

A CNN/SSRS poll found 59 percent of Americans disapprove of the Iran strikes, with most expecting a long-term conflict [21]. A separate Marist poll found only 36 percent of Americans approve of Trump's handling of Iran [22]. Even a Fox News poll found a majority saying Trump's handling of Iran has made the U.S. less safe [23].

The partisan divide remains vast — 79 percent of Republicans approve while 86 percent of Democrats disapprove — but the overall numbers represent some of the lowest approval ratings for a sitting president's military action in recent American history [20].

Source: Quinnipiac University / CNN / Marist / Fox News Polls

Data as of Mar 10, 2026CSV

A Credibility Crisis

The Minab school strike has crystallized a pattern that critics say has defined the early days of the Iran conflict: the White House making claims that the Pentagon's own leadership will not corroborate.

When a president declares that a foreign adversary bombed its own children — and his defense secretary, his military command, the open-source intelligence community, and his own internal investigators all indicate otherwise — it represents something more than a factual disagreement. It is a credibility crisis at the highest levels of wartime decision-making.

The CENTCOM statement that it would be "inappropriate to comment" while the president had already publicly assigned blame was, in the understated language of military communications, a remarkable act of institutional self-preservation. It signaled that the uniformed military would not put its credibility behind a claim unsupported by evidence — even when that claim came from the commander-in-chief.

What Comes Next

The Pentagon's investigation remains officially ongoing. But with the preliminary assessment already pointing toward U.S. responsibility, the questions ahead are less about what happened and more about what follows.

Will there be accountability for an apparent intelligence failure that killed 168 schoolchildren? Will Congress receive classified briefings on the target selection process? Will the investigation examine whether the broader pace of the air campaign — with hundreds of simultaneous strikes across Iran — created conditions where target vetting was insufficient?

And perhaps most fundamentally: how does the United States reckon with a wartime claim by its president that was contradicted not by adversaries or critics, but by the institutions charged with executing his orders?

The children of Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school cannot wait for those answers. But the credibility of American military operations — and the civilian protection norms that are supposed to constrain them — depends on whether those answers come at all.