More than four months after a US strike killed at least 168 children and 14 adults at an elementary school in southern Iran, the Pentagon still has not completed the standard intelligence review normally used to determine what went wrong, and has withheld from Congress the findings of a separate investigation submitted in April. The pattern, according to three sources familiar with the matter cited by CNN, traces back to Pentagon leadership's desire to avoid a repeat of an earlier episode in which a similar review publicly contradicted President Trump's account of a different strike on Iran.
What happened on February 28
The strike hit the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls' elementary school in Minab, a town in Iran's Hormozgan province, on the opening day of Operation Epic Fury, the joint US-Israeli military campaign against Iran that began on February 28 and ran until a ceasefire in early May. Iranian state media put the death toll at 168 children and 14 teachers, most of them girls between the ages of 7 and 12; other reports citing local officials and the United Nations have cited figures as high as 175. The school sat roughly 200 feet from an Iranian naval base belonging to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which US and Israeli forces were striking at the same time.
