A United Nations investigative body has concluded that there are reasonable grounds to believe that a US airstrike in February targeting an elementary school and sports facility in Iran, which killed some 170 civilians including children, constitutes a war crime.

According to foreign media outlets including the US daily The New York Times on September 17, the UN Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Iran is scheduled to officially report these findings in an 18-page report to the UN Human Rights Council convening in Geneva, Switzerland, on September 21.

In the report, the mission stated that, as previously known, an airstrike hitting an elementary school in Minab, southern Iran, on February 28—the first day of the conflict—killed a total of 157 people, including 123 children under the age of 13.

A second airstrike on the same day targeting a sports center and residential area in Lamerd, central Iran, claimed the lives of 22 civilians, including 5 children, with around 170 others injured.

The mission pointed out that "there are reasonable grounds to believe that the United States committed war crimes by carrying out indiscriminate attacks that could cause civilian casualties or destruction of civilian objects," adding that "the US military failed to fulfill its obligation to take all feasible measures to verify that targets were military objectives."

Officials from the Donald Trump administration have explained that the strike on the school was due to an error stemming from the use of outdated target data.

President Trump also stated to reporters regarding the incident last June that "nobody did that intentionally. Everybody makes mistakes. War is a nasty business."

The UN investigative team concluded that the school building itself was explicitly targeted.

It criticized that "even if the US military relied on outdated information, proceeding with the attack while fully aware of the risk of hitting civilian facilities and ignoring it goes beyond simple negligence and amounts to reckless conduct."

The mission also noted that the US military's use of precision-strike missiles to scatter approximately 180,000 tungsten shrapnel fragments over a densely populated area during the Lamerd sports center airstrike was "a reckless decision that disregarded the risk of lethal harm."

In response to the UN report, the US Department of Defense avoided a direct answer, stating, "We do not comment on reports from outside organizations," and adding that "our own investigation is still ongoing and there is nothing to announce at this time."

Meanwhile, the report also details the Iranian authorities' crackdown and crimes against humanity committed against their own citizens prior to February 28, when the US and Israel launched airstrikes on Iran.

According to the report, from late last year through early this year, the Iranian government violently suppressed anti-government protests across all 31 provinces nationwide, resulting in an official death toll of 3,038 and leaving more than 25,000 injured.

The investigative team believes the actual scale of casualties is much larger.

Iranian authorities have executed at least 58 people this year on charges related to threatening national security, and it has been verified that around 70 Iranians, including 5 women and 3 minors, currently face the imminent threat of execution, according to the findings.
 
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