Guardian: Four months after horrific Minab school bombing, truth remains buried

The attack on the Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in Minab, located in Iran's Hormozgan province, was one of the deadliest bombings of civilian targets by the US military in recent decades. Nearly four months on, the Pentagon has provided no answers as to why the military fired a Tomahawk cruise missile at a girls' school on the first day of the war, killing at least 175 people, mostly children.

The London-based newspaper wrote that some critics doubt the Pentagon will ever do so, or will bury the results under classification to keep its worst mistakes hidden from the public.

The investigation into this attack has also become a test case for the new approach of US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth to what he calls "warfighting." As he stated in early March, nearly two weeks after the attack, "our rules of engagement are bold, precise and designed to unleash American power, not shackle it".

Shortly after the attack, Donald Trump falsely claimed that Iran was responsible. However, later evidence, including images of the missile that struck the school, confirmed that a US-made Tomahawk missile was used in the attack – a weapon Iran does not possess.

While Trump signed a ceasefire agreement with Iran last week and celebrated the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, he attempted to deflect questions about the investigation during a press conference at the G7 in France. He dismissed the issue, claiming: "It's such a strange question to be asked at this date, because you're talking about a long time ago. But nobody did that on purpose".

According to The Guardian, another critical aspect of the Minab school attack is that the location was struck twice. Mohammadreza Ahmadi lost both his children in the bombing. His seven-year-old daughter, Hanieh, was killed along with all her classmates in the girls' section when the first missile hit. According to witnesses, her 10-year-old brother, Sobhan, survived the initial explosion but ran back to look for his sister and was killed in the second blast.

A former senior Pentagon official, speaking in an attempt to justify the atrocity, said: "It's very rare that you would have a military operation and not have some incidents where there was a mistaken target and civilians are harmed or killed, but then there is a system for investigating, assessing accountability, and taking responsibility." However, he added: "I'm very doubtful that the Hegseth Pentagon will follow through.

The report noted that the US military has shuttered or reduced units meant to review civilian casualty incidents, and has broadly indicated that decisions made in combat by "warfighters" would not be subject to such close scrutiny. The reduction in civilian oversight at the Pentagon under Hegseth may make it easier to evade responsibility for the incident.

The Minab school attack is comparable to some of the worst mass-casualty incidents of past US wars, including the 2017 Mosul airstrike that killed at least 105 civilians, the 2015 Kunduz hospital airstrike that killed 42 people, and the 1991 Amiriyah shelter bombing that killed over 400 Iraqi civilians.

Despite US officials' claims that the investigation into the Minab atrocity is still ongoing, media reports indicate that it has been completed. Preliminary results suggest the attack occurred because the US used outdated targeting data. According to these findings, the targeting data had not been updated, and military officials continued to revalidate the site as a legitimate target for bombing.

Wes Bryant, a former US Air Force special operations targeting expert and former chief of civilian harm assessments at the Pentagon, said his few remaining colleagues overseeing civilian harm reduction had been prevented from seeing the preliminary results of the investigation.

"I believe Hegseth and Trump are both going to do everything they can to suppress this investigation," he said. "So, even if there is one really sitting there, it's not getting out any more, unless we have a brave whistleblower".

he former US official also said that the strikes in Iran, which have killed thousands of civilians, are a sign of rising "aggregate harm" that the United States is willing to accept as part of a culture pointing to "pure negligence and recklessness, and also to a degradation of culture at senior leadership levels in the military".