UN-backed experts find grounds to believe US strikes in Iran were war crimes

Independent experts mandated by the UN's top human rights body said on Monday they had found "reasonable grounds" to believe that two United States airstrikes in Iran amounted to war crimes, including one that hit a primary school in the southern city of Minab.

The findings were presented to the Human Rights Council in Geneva by Sara Hossain, a jurist from Bangladesh who chairs the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on the Islamic Republic of Iran. The mission, composed of independent experts, was set up by the 47-member council in 2022.

According to the mission, the two strikes killed at least 178 civilians, among them women and children. In the first incident, two cruise missiles struck the Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school in Minab, in Hormozgan province, an easily identifiable civilian building. Citing credible sources, the mission said 157 people were killed, including 123 boys and girls.

"We found reasonable grounds to believe that the airstrike conducted by the United States amounted to the war crime of making a civilian object the object of an attack," Hossain told the council. The report concluded that the school building was the intended point of impact, and that the destruction was not the result of an errant strike or collateral damage from an attack on a nearby Revolutionary Guard compound.

Iranian state media have put the death toll from the school strike at 168, most of them children. The US State Department said it does not give credibility to the report's findings. The administration has not directly accepted responsibility for the bombing or released the conclusions of a Pentagon investigation into it.

The second incident examined by the mission was a US airstrike on a sports centre in a residential area of Lamerd, in Fars province. Local authorities determined that 22 people were killed, including ten women and 12 men. The mission said it found reasonable grounds to believe that strike amounted to the war crime of launching an indiscriminate attack causing loss of life or injury to civilians, or damage to civilian objects.

Hossain said the experts were gravely concerned by repeated airstrikes and threats of airstrikes on Iran, which she said continue to endanger civilians and worsen their suffering by destroying homes and livelihoods and disrupting access to basic services such as education and health.

The mission's report also accused Iran's theocratic government of carrying out crimes against humanity against its own people. It found that killings by state security forces had occurred on a staggering scale, and that civilians faced gross human rights violations at the hands of their own government.

Iranian security forces carried out violent repression over the past two years, the team said, including firing assault rifles into crowds, beating protesters and arresting healthcare workers. Hossain said the crackdown followed protests that began in December 2025, and that the hostilities involving the United States and Israel, which began on 28 February this year, had been used by Tehran as a pretext to intensify persecution of demonstrators.

"The report we present today reflects the devastating impact of these activities on the people of Iran," she said, adding that it set out the mission's findings on the suppression of the 2025 and 2026 protests, the continuing hostilities and the government's ongoing repressive acts.