US military investigators believe American forces were probably responsible for a strike on an Iranian girls' school that killed scores of children during the first day of the Iran war, according to reports.
Reuters on Thursday cited two US officials as saying investigators have not reached a final conclusion or completed their probe. The Wall Street Journal on Friday published a similar story, also citing a US official.
According to unverified reports from Iranian authorities, Saturday's air strike in Minab in southern Iran killed more than 150 people, many of them schoolgirls.
At a Wednesday news conference, Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth said the Pentagon is investigating the strike.
“We, of course, never target civilian targets, but we’re taking a look,” he said.
Israel is bombing Iran alongside the US, and has said it was not operating in the Minab area at the time of the strike.
Satellite images of the targets show the school was located next to an Iranian military facility.
Israeli and US forces have largely divided their attacks in Iran both geographically and by target type, a senior Israeli official and a source with direct knowledge of the joint planning told Reuters.
While Israel was striking missile launch sites in western Iran, the US was attacking such targets, as well as naval ones, in the south.
Some Iranians irate with the country’s rulers have claimed that Iranian officials are responsible for the strike and sought to make the US look bad.
Deliberately attacking a school, hospital or any other civilian structure would likely be a war crime under international humanitarian law.
If a US role were to be confirmed, the strike would rank among the worst cases of civilian casualties in decades of American-led conflicts in the Middle East.
UN human rights chief Volker Turk has called for “a prompt, impartial and thorough investigation into the circumstances of the attack”, and said that the “onus is on the forces that carried out the attack to investigate it".
The school strike is also calling into question the role of artificial intelligence in the war. The Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal have reported that the US military used Anthropic's AI tools to assist with planning strikes on Iran.
It is not yet known if AI played a role in the Minab strike.
