More than 25 Democratic senators are demanding the Pentagon release the findings of its investigation into a US airstrike that hit a girls’ school in Minab, Iran, on February 28, the opening day of the war. Over 175 children and teachers were killed. It is the largest single civilian casualty incident involving US forces since the 1991 Amiriya shelter bombing in Baghdad.
Senator Kirsten Gillibrand led the letter, joined by Senate Armed Services Committee ranking member Jack Reed and other Democrats. They gave Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and CENTCOM commander Admiral Brad Cooper one week to provide an unclassified version of the probe’s findings along with a plan to prevent future failures.
“The United States military has a legal and moral obligation to take all feasible precautions to prevent civilian harm,” the senators wrote. “There is no justification for withholding an unclassified accounting of what happened, what went wrong, and what the Department is doing to prevent recurrence.”
The school sat next to an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps compound. US targeting packages relied on out-of-date intelligence, Reuters reported in March, citing sources familiar with an initial internal probe that found US forces were likely responsible.
President Trump has cast doubt on American responsibility. “Somebody said it was our missile, maybe it wasn’t our missile, but I have seen nothing to lead me to believe it was,” he said on June 24. The Pentagon has offered no public accounting. “The investigation is ongoing. We do not have any updates to announce at this time,” a defense official said.
The case has become a flashpoint in the debate over the Pentagon’s push to integrate artificial intelligence into targeting. A parallel investigation by Katie Livingstone for Defense News examined how the strike “casts a shadow” over the military’s AI targeting programs. One Ukrainian drone developer told her the incident illustrates the risks of handing lethal decisions to semi-autonomous systems.
Admiral Cooper told Congress in May that the investigation is “complex” because the school sat on an active Iranian cruise missile base. Iran has labeled the strike a war crime. The US maintains it never intentionally targets civilians.
The senators’ letter gives the Pentagon until July 20 to comply. If Hegseth and Cooper miss the deadline, the pressure for a public accounting will only grow, and so will questions about what the Department is trying to hide.