Independent investigators commissioned by the UN Human Rights Council have found “reasonable grounds” to believe the United States committed war crimes in two separate strikes in Iran on February 28, in a report published on September 17.
The findings came from the UN’s Fact-Finding Mission on Iran, chaired by Bangladeshi jurist Sara Hossain, an independent panel established by the Human Rights Council in 2022. According to the report, US forces struck the Shajareh Tayyebeh Primary School in the southern city of Minab using Tomahawk missiles, killing 157 people, including 123 children. Although the school sat near an Iranian naval base, investigators said they found no evidence it was being used for any military purpose, and concluded the building itself was the intended target rather than the result of a stray strike on a nearby military site.
The same day, a separate strike hit a sports complex and residential area in the southern city of Lamerd, using precision strike missiles that dispersed tungsten pellets, killing 22 civilians and injuring more than 100 others, according to local officials cited in the report. Investigators said the type of munition used could not be precisely directed at a specific military target, and concluded there were reasonable grounds to believe the US had committed the war crime of launching an indiscriminate attack resulting in civilian deaths, injuries or damage to civilian property.
The US has not accepted responsibility for either strike. US Central Command has specifically denied responsibility for the Lamerd strike, and the Trump administration has yet to release the findings of a separate Pentagon investigation into the school bombing. The US State Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment following the report’s release.
The same report also found that Iran’s government had committed crimes against humanity against its own citizens, citing violent state crackdowns on protesters between 2025 and 2026 that included killings, torture, arbitrary detention and denial of legal counsel to those arrested. The mission said Iranian civilians were increasingly caught between their government’s crackdown on domestic dissent and the deadly conflict between Iran, the US and Israel.
While the UN report itself is not legally binding, it adds to a growing body of international evidence surrounding the conflict, and could eventually be used to support future efforts at accountability in international courts.
