US Preliminarily is Found Responsible for Deadly Iran School Attack

(MENAFN) A US military investigation has preliminarily attributed responsibility for a missile strike on an Iranian elementary school to American forces, according to reports. The attack on the Shajarah Tayyebeh girls’ school on February 28 killed at least 175 people, most of them children, and coincided with the start of US-Israeli operations that also resulted in the deaths of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, senior Iranian commanders, and hundreds of civilians. It is considered the deadliest single strike in the current campaign.

Officials familiar with the investigation said the school was struck as part of the opening wave of attacks targeting facilities used by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy. Investigators found that US Central Command personnel relied on outdated targeting data from the Defense Intelligence Agency that still identified the building as a military compound, even though it had been converted into a school over ten years ago. Civilian markers, such as a sports field, murals, and brightly painted walls, were reportedly visible.

Preliminary analysis suggests that the failure to verify the updated status of the building was not primarily caused by the use of new artificial intelligence systems, such as Anthropic’s Claude. Investigators noted that military targeting typically involves multiple intelligence and operational agencies with several layers of review, but these safeguards can fail during the early phases of a conflict, when a large number of targets must be processed under tight time constraints.

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