120 Iranian children killed after Pentagon bypassed targeting warnings
US commanders bypassed warnings that intelligence was outdated before a Tomahawk killed 120 children at an Iranian school in February.
Reyhaneh Mehdi-Khah is 11 years old. Her younger sister, a first-grader, died beside her when a US Tomahawk cruise missile tore through the Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab, southern Iran, on the first morning of America’s war. “It’s just the government that’s cruel and dirty,” she told PBS NewsHour months later, still trying to make sense of a grief that has no sense to make of.
The US strike on the Iran school killed 120 children. It killed 156 people in total: 66 boys, 54 girls, 26 teachers and four parents, according to figures from Iran’s judiciary cited by Amnesty International. Iranian officials have at times put the toll higher, as far as 175. Most of the dead were girls between seven and twelve years old.
For four months the Pentagon has let this sit inside the language of accident. Donald Trump told reporters at the G7 in June that “nobody did that on purpose. Mistakes are made. War is nasty.” That framing collapsed on 7 July, when CNN reported that senior US commanders bypassed explicit warnings in their own targeting systems that the intelligence behind the school strike was years out of date, and added the site to the target list anyway.
The warning commanders overrode
According to CNN, the US military’s targeting databases, MIDB and MARS, carried flags stating that intelligence on Iranian sites needed to be re-vetted before it could be relied on. Adding a target required senior-officer sign-off. Three sources told the network the warnings were bypassed “for expediency” at the start of the war, so strike lists would not be delayed. One source said officials knew within days how the mistake had happened.
Satellite imagery reviewed by CNN shows why the intelligence was worthless. In 2013, the school and a nearby IRGC facility shared a single compound. By 2016, a fence had gone up and the school had its own separate entrance. The military’s targeting file did not reflect that change, or did not matter enough to check. Some of the intelligence relied on across Iranian targets was more than a decade old. The nearest IRGC buildings, roughly 250 metres from the school, were left standing.
Iran’s account of the strike describes a “double-tap”, two hits minutes apart. Press TV’s coverage of the CNN report calls it a “triple-tap”, three missiles. The discrepancy is unresolved and worth stating plainly rather than smoothing over. What is not contested is that a school full of children was hit more than once.
Hegseth’s guardrails, gone
Before the war began, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth dismantled the Pentagon’s Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response programme, the unit built after two decades of Iraq and Afghanistan specifically to stop this kind of failure. CNN reports the cuts reduced CHMR staffing at combatant commands by more than 90%. CENTCOM’s ten-person civilian-harm team was cut to one full-time staffer. Civilian-harm specialists were removed from target-development teams altogether.
Senators Chris Van Hollen and Elizabeth Warren opened a formal investigation into Hegseth’s role in dismantling those safeguards in April. Hegseth has not answered publicly for it. Admiral Brad Cooper was pressed on the strike by Representative Adam Smith, the ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, who said in June: “Eighty days on, we have not taken responsibility,” and accused the department of “callous disregard.”
The Pentagon’s own civilian-harm investigation into the Minab strike, promised in the weeks after the attack, remains unpublished more than 130 days later. Senate Democrats used the June 2026 defence funding bill to try to block Hegseth’s travel budget until the unredacted report is released. It still has not been.
Trump: mistakes are made
Trump’s response to the deaths of 120 children has been to treat the question itself as an imposition. Asked in June whether the US bore responsibility, he called it “such a strange question to be asked at this date,” before adding that war is nasty and mistakes happen. That was three weeks before CNN’s reporting established that this was not the fog of war. It was a chain of command that had been told, in writing, to check its intelligence, and chose the pace of the war over the accuracy of the target list.
Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi has said Iran’s schools bore a “calculated, phased” cost in the war, citing more than 600 damaged school buildings and over 1,000 students and teachers killed or wounded across the conflict. Iran’s UN ambassador, Amir Saeid Iravani, called the Minab strike a war crime. Amnesty International has said the US failed to take feasible precautions required under international humanitarian law, and that the strike amounts to either gross negligence or a reckless indiscriminate attack, either of which could constitute a war crime. Human Rights Watch has posed the war crime question directly and not received an answer from Washington. We report those verdicts as theirs, not ours; the documented fact, that a specific warning was overridden for the sake of speed, needs no further adjective.
That is the honest limit of what is proven here. Nothing in the CNN reporting shows commanders intended to kill children. What it shows is that they were told the information they were acting on could not be trusted, and struck anyway. Recklessness of that scale, at the cost of 120 children, does not require intent to be a scandal.
The British parts in the missile
British involvement did not end with rhetoric. Investigators at Action on Armed Violence and Declassified UK have identified a satellite data-link antenna recovered from the strike site bearing the name of Ball Aerospace and Technologies, owned by BAE Systems, and traced guidance and electronic components in the Tactical Tomahawk programme to Raytheon UK’s plant in Glenrothes, Scotland, which has appeared in Tomahawk supply contracts as recently as 2025. Roughly 4% of Tactical Tomahawk production runs through the UK. That is a multinational supply chain, not proof this specific missile was assembled with Scottish parts, and the distinction matters. It does not change the fact that UK factories build components for the weapon that killed these children.
Keir Starmer authorised what his government called “limited defensive” operations on 1 March, then expanded UK support to strikes launched from Diego Garcia and RAF Fairford by 20 March. Fairford hosted US B-1 and B-52 bombers through the war; Lakenheath and Mildenhall staged aircraft. Britain’s role was not bystander.
What was overridden
The dead of Minab do not appear in the Pentagon’s account as anything more than an open file. Makan Nasiri’s remains have still not been recovered. Fazel Alinejad, who dug through the rubble that morning, remembers it as digging “like a madman,” his hands and fingernails bleeding. Asma Mogheirnin still hears the children’s voices in her mind. What CNN’s sources confirmed on 7 July is that none of this needed to happen the way it did: a warning existed, a system flagged it, and a command structure decided a faster war mattered more than 120 children’s lives.
