UN Mission Finds "Reasonable Grounds" US Strikes on Iran School Were War Crimes

A UN-backed fact-finding mission on Iran released findings Thursday saying it has reasonable grounds to believe the United States was behind two military strikes in February that hit a school and a sports facility in Iran — strikes the mission says amount to war crimes. The same report also found that Iranian authorities committed crimes against humanity during their crackdown on anti-government protesters. Both findings are conclusions of an independent panel, not verdicts from a court.

The mission's findings center on Tomahawk missile strikes on the Shajareh Tayyebeh Primary School in Minab, which local authorities say killed more than 150 people. The Minab prosecutor put the final death toll at 156, including 120 schoolchildren. The mission says the strikes, which also hit a nearby sports facility, killed at least 178 civilians combined — women and children among them.

The mission didn't limit its findings to the U.S. strikes. It also concluded that Iranian authorities committed crimes against humanity in their response to the 2025–2026 protest movement, describing an escalation in violent repression beyond past crackdowns — mass use of lethal force, widespread arrests, and, between March and August 2026, at least 29 men executed after expedited trials, five of them in public, all tied to the protests.

The fact-finding mission is chaired by jurist Sara Hossain of Bangladesh and made up of independent experts. It was created in 2022 by the UN Human Rights Council, the UN's top human rights body, based in Geneva. "Reasonable grounds to believe" is the mission's own evidentiary threshold — short of a legal finding of guilt, but the standard the mission uses before naming a party responsible in its reporting.