Iranian School Appeared on US List of Targets

A school in southern Iran where more than 170 people, many of them children, were killed in the early hours of the US and Israeli airstrikes was on an American target list and may have been misidentified as a military site, the Washington Post reports. The ongoing military investigation has determined that the US is responsible for the Feb. 28 Tomahawk missile strike on Shajarah Tayyiba Primary School adjacent to a military base the US was hitting. US Central Command used outdated information from the Defense Intelligence Agency to set the target coordinates, people briefed on the findings told the New York Times.

People familiar with the operation said the building in Minab had been categorized as a factory and approved as a target, possibly confusing it with an arms depot nearby. Israel has said it neither conducted nor vetted the strike. Satellite imagery reviewed by the Post shows the school, once part of an Iranian naval compound and possibly still affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy, was physically separated by walls from the base by 2015, with a playground visible by 2017 and a separate clinic added later.

Legal and conflict experts said that proximity to an IRGC facility does not by itself make the school or clinic lawful military targets, and Human Rights Watch has called for a war crimes investigation. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has alleged that Iranian forces launch attacks from schools and hospitals, but his office offered no further evidence when asked. An attack on a school filled with children is certain to be considered one of the most tragic military errors in recent decades, the Times points out.

The episode is intensifying scrutiny of how the US and Israel are using artificial intelligence to build and prioritize large target lists in their campaign against Iran. Both militaries rely on Palantir's Maven intelligence platform; the US version is partly powered by Anthropic's AI system Claude. Officials say humans still approve all targets, but former and current Defense Department officials said the pace and volume of strikes—more than 5,500 US targets and 6,000 Israeli strikes so far—risk outpacing analysts' ability to keep information current. Officials stressed to the Times that the findings are preliminary and that there among the unanswered questions is why the target information was not double-checked.