An independent UN fact-finding mission on Iran announced on Thursday that it found US involvement in two military strikes involving a school and a sports facility in February, calling them war crimes.The mission also found that Iranian authorities committed crimes against humanity in their lethal crackdown on anti-government protests in late December.The report from the independent international fact-finding mission on Iran examines both America’s actions during the Iran war and Tehran’s handling of the nationwide unrest.According to Reuters, the report is to be presented to the UN Human Rights Council.
Strike on the Minab school
The UN investigators said there were reasonable grounds to conclude that US forces carried out the attack on Shajareh Tayyebeh Primary School in Minab. According to Iranian officials, the strikes killed more than 150, including nearly 120 schoolchildren.The mission noted that the strike caused civilian deaths and damaged civilian infrastructure, making it a war crime under international law.The report states that the US acted on intelligence indicating a senior Iranian military commander was at the location, but did not sufficiently confirm this before carrying out the strike. Investigators said the failure to refresh the targeting information and verify that the building was a legitimate military target went beyond mere carelessness.According to the report, the US would have struck the school while knowing there was a real chance of hitting a civilian site, and would have behaved recklessly about the possibility that this would occur.In June, US President Donald Trump stated that “nobody” purposefully attacked a girls’ school in Iran in February, pointing to an ongoing inquiry into the episode. Reuters had earlier reported that a preliminary internal US military inquiry indicated American forces were probably to blame for the deadly Minab strike in southern Iran.The Pentagon has since escalated the level of the inquiry but has not released any interim conclusions.UN investigators said the school was plainly a civilian site and found nothing to suggest it had any military use.The mission reached a comparable finding regarding a strike on a sports centre in Lamerd, which it said damaged nearby homes and a school and killed or wounded 22 civilians. It judged this strike, too, to have been indiscriminate and therefore a war crime.US central command said in a March statement that American forces carried out no strikes on Lamerd that day.
Iranian crackdown
The UN mission’s inquiry also concluded that Iranian authorities led a widespread and systematic campaign against civilians during the anti-government protests, including unlawful killings, torture, arbitrary detentions, enforced disappearances, and heavy curbs on freedom of expression.According to the Reuters news agency, the mission said it was unable to confirm the death toll independently, but believes the true number of dead and injured is likely considerably higher than the official figures of 3,038 killed and 25,000 injured.The government’s response to the protests, which included violence, killings, internet shutdowns, and the use of capital punishment, was a major escalation compared with how dissent had previously been suppressed.Tehran has attributed the unrest to “terrorists and rioters” supported by exiled dissidents and by foreign adversaries, namely the US and Israel.US officials have consistently maintained that their military operations comply with the law of armed conflict, while Iran has repeatedly denied claims of systematic human rights abuses.
