Pentagon probe: AI, faulty intel, outdated imagery led to Iran school strike killing 123

In late February, as the United States entered armed conflict with Iran, two Tomahawk cruise missiles struck an elementary school in the city of Minab. The building was Shajarah Tayyebeh Elementary School. When the smoke cleared, more than 150 people were dead, the majority of them children. It would become one of the deadliest incidents of civilian harm caused by American military operations in recent memory.

A Pentagon investigation, reported by Bloomberg, has now documented how the strike happened. The inquiry found that the military's targeting process relied heavily on artificial intelligence, worked from faulty intelligence assessments, and used imagery that was outdated. Pentagon personnel, according to officials involved in the investigation, knew within hours that the United States was responsible for the attack. The broader context mattered: in the first twenty-four hours of the war, American forces struck more than a thousand targets. But this one—a school full of children—stood apart in its consequences.

The building itself presented a particular intelligence problem. It had once been part of a military compound. At some point it was walled off and began operating openly as a school. Pentagon investigators found that cuts to civilian-protection personnel had left gaps in the understanding of what the site actually was. No one in the targeting chain had current information that the location was now a functioning school. The reliance on AI systems to process and prioritize targets, combined with these intelligence failures and the age of the imagery being used, created a cascade of errors that ended in the deaths of 123 children.

Palantir, the company that built some of the software used in the targeting process, stated that it bore no responsibility for the underlying data or for any intelligence deficiencies in how the system was used. The company noted there was no evidence its software itself was at fault. But after the attack became public, Palantir developed new tools designed to re-examine the underlying intelligence, to identify factors that should disqualify a target, and to flag inconsistencies and inaccuracies that human reviewers might otherwise miss. The implication was clear: the human review process had failed.

The incident did not remain a matter of internal Pentagon accounting. An independent fact-finding mission, working on behalf of the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, examined the strike along with a second American attack—this one on a sports complex and residential area in the city of Lamerd, which killed twenty-two people and dispersed clouds of tungsten pellets across the neighborhood. The UN team's eighteen-page report concluded that there were reasonable grounds to believe the United States had committed war crimes by launching indiscriminate attacks that resulted in civilian deaths and damage to civilian infrastructure.

The report itself carries no binding legal force. It is not a judgment. It is not a conviction. But it represents a formal finding by an international body, and it joins a growing collection of evidence that could eventually be used to pursue accountability in international courts. The question of whether that evidence will ever be acted upon remains open. For now, the investigation stands as a record of how a school became a target, and how 123 children came to be among the costs of war.