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President Donald Trump dismissed a question on whether he’d hold members of his administration accountable for a strike on an Iranian elementary school in the early days of the war, continuing to deny that the U.S. was involved in the massacre despite evidence suggesting otherwise.
A reporter asked Trump on Wednesday whether he would “hold anyone in your administration accountable for the strike on a school that killed more than 100 children on the first day of the war.”
Trump answered with a definitive “no” before saying the strike was still “under investigation.” He then said the query from the reporter was “a strange question to be asked.”
“You’re talking about a long time ago,” Trump said, before adding that “nobody did that on purpose.”
“Mistakes are made, and war is nasty,” Trump concluded.
The February 28 strike on Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab, Iran, happened mere hours after the war in Iran began. Preliminary findings from the Pentagon indicated that the U.S. was responsible for the strike, but the administration quickly backed away from that conclusion, and has since insisted that a more definitive report was being crafted.
At several points over the past several months, U.S. officials have claimed that the report’s findings would be released soon, only for there to be further delays. In response to the continued delays, Senate lawmakers are threatening to withhold most of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s travel budget in order to force him to provide more details.
“We’ve been asking for these kinds of things for some time,” a Senate staffer told The Washington Post. “We’re trying to use all the tools for more enforcement now.”
Based on the type of missile used, along with satellite imagery, on-the-ground videos, and other accounts of the strike, there is a high likelihood that the attack on the school was conducted by the U.S.
Notably, even if Trump’s characterization of the strike is correct — that it was meant to hit a different target — that doesn’t mean the bombing wasn’t a war crime, as international law bars indiscriminate attacks on civilian infrastructure.
In March, just a few weeks after the bombing of the school, a report from the Iranian Red Crescent Society found that tens of thousands of civilian sites had been damaged in the war. The report documented that 498 schools had been damaged by U.S. or Israeli attacks, as well as 281 medical centers, hospitals, and pharmacies.
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