President Trump on Wednesday brushed aside questions about who was responsible for U.S. strikes that hit an Iranian school on the first day of the war, telling reporters at the Group of 7 summit in France: “Mistakes are made. War is nasty.”
The answer was perhaps the closest Mr. Trump has come to acknowledging U.S. responsibility for the strikes, which Iranian officials say killed at least 175 people, most of them children. “Nobody did that on purpose,” the president added.
More than 100 days after two airstrikes demolished the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school in the southern Iranian city of Minab, the incident is still under investigation by the Pentagon, Mr. Trump said. Asked whether he would release details of the investigation to the public, he referred further questions to the secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth.
Privately, U.S. military officials have acknowledged American forces carried out the strikes and cast them as an intelligence failure. The school was located near a base used by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps Navy, and the school’s exact site had originally been part of the base.
Those officials said that an internal investigation found that the military’s personnel in charge of choosing targets were using imagery that had not been updated in seven years. That imagery, they said, did not show a school next to the base. At least two people involved in the military’s assessment of the site, however, had been aware that a building on the base appeared to have been converted into a school.
That assessment did not make it to officials in charge of targeting, and intelligence and military officials continued to classify the site as a legitimate target for bombing.
Dozens of students were killed in the first strike on the school. Dozens more were killed after a second strike, called a “double tap” by the military. Imagery assessed by The New York Times showed that multiple precision strikes hit at least six Revolutionary Guards buildings along with the school.
The strikes were the worst civilian casualty incident caused by the U.S. military since 1991, when a U.S. stealth aircraft bombed a civilian air-raid shelter in Baghdad, killing more than 400 people, primarily women, children and older Iraqis.
