A United Nations-backed fact-finding mission has concluded that there are reasonable grounds to believe the United States committed war crimes in two strikes in Iran on February 28, while separately finding that Iranian authorities committed crimes against humanity during their repression of nationwide protests. The findings, released on September 17 and due to be presented to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, place alleged violations by both sides within the same accountability framework at a moment when the wider Middle East conflict remains active and diplomatic channels are under intense strain. The mission is not a court and its conclusions are not criminal verdicts, but investigators say the evidence they assembled could support future legal proceedings where jurisdiction exists.
A report that scrutinizes both the war and Iran’s internal repression
The Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on the Islamic Republic of Iran said its latest investigation had reached two sets of grave conclusions. The first concerns the conduct of United States forces during the war that began in February 2026. The second concerns the Iranian government’s response to protests that started in late December 2025, before the current phase of hostilities. By examining those issues together, the mission presents a picture in which Iranian civilians have faced danger from both external military action and domestic state repression.
According to Reuters and the Associated Press, the mission found reasonable grounds to believe that US forces were responsible for strikes on the Shajareh Tayyebeh Primary School in Minab and on a sports complex and surrounding residential area in Lamerd. The investigators concluded that the attacks were indiscriminate and therefore amounted to war crimes under international law. In parallel, they said Iranian security authorities carried out a widespread and systematic attack on civilians during the protest movement, involving unlawful killings, torture, arbitrary detention, enforced disappearances and severe restrictions on expression and communication. Those patterns, the mission said, amounted in multiple instances to crimes against humanity.
The report does not erase the distinction between the two categories of alleged wrongdoing. War crimes are serious violations committed in the context of armed conflict. Crimes against humanity require certain prohibited acts to form part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against a civilian population. The mission’s findings therefore rest on different legal tests, different bodies of evidence and different chains of responsibility. Their appearance in the same document is significant because it prevents the conduct of one side from being used as a legal answer to abuses alleged against the other.
The Minab school strike is at the center of the US findings
The most consequential part of the mission’s assessment concerns the Shajareh Tayyebeh Primary School in Minab, in southern Iran. Iranian officials have said more than 150 people were killed in the strike, including roughly 120 schoolchildren. Those figures have not all been independently verified, and reporting in the months since the attack has produced varying totals. The mission nevertheless concluded that the building was a clearly identifiable civilian object and said it found no evidence that the school itself was being used for military purposes at the time it was hit.
The school stood near a naval complex belonging to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a fact that had been central to earlier explanations of how the site came to be struck. But proximity to a military installation does not remove civilian protection from a school. The mission’s central criticism is that the United States allegedly failed to take all feasible steps to verify that the building it was targeting was a military objective. Investigators said the target information had not been adequately updated and that the physical characteristics of the site should have raised obvious questions about its current use.
The report goes further than describing a missile that simply went astray. The Associated Press reported that investigators concluded the school building was the intended point of impact, rather than collateral damage from a strike aimed elsewhere. Reuters reported that the mission found the United States directed the strike at the building while aware of a substantial risk that it was a civilian object. That is an important distinction. The mission did not say the United States set out to kill children. Its allegation is that the attack was intentionally directed at a building on the basis of inadequate verification and in circumstances where the risk to civilians was serious enough that proceeding was reckless.
Why the mission calls the attack indiscriminate
International humanitarian law requires parties to an armed conflict to distinguish at all times between military objectives and civilian objects. Commanders must also take feasible precautions in attack, including efforts to verify the nature of a target and to reduce expected civilian harm. The mission’s legal conclusion rests on its view that the verification process failed in a way that exceeded ordinary negligence. It said the school was visibly associated with young children, including through signage, exterior features and the layout of the site, and that there was no evidence available to the mission showing military use of the building.
That does not mean every targeting error automatically becomes a war crime. Military operations take place amid uncertainty, and the law does not impose perfect hindsight. The legal question is what decision-makers knew or should reasonably have known at the time, what precautions they took, whether the object qualified as a lawful target and whether the expected civilian damage was compatible with the rules governing attack. The mission said the evidence in Minab crossed the threshold it uses for attributing a serious international-law violation.
The phrase “reasonable grounds to believe” matters. It is the evidentiary standard used by many international investigative mechanisms when they conclude that a violation likely occurred and identify a responsible actor. It is stronger than speculation but it is not the same as proof beyond a reasonable doubt in a criminal trial. Any future prosecution would require an appropriate court with jurisdiction, admissible evidence, proof tied to specific individuals and satisfaction of the legal standard applicable in that tribunal. The mission’s finding is therefore best understood as a documented accusation by an independent investigative mechanism, not a final judicial determination.
Lamerd presents a second and separately disputed strike
The mission also examined a February 28 strike on a sports complex in Lamerd, in Fars Province. Investigators said the complex was visibly distinct from nearby military facilities and that the attack affected civilian areas, including residential buildings and another educational site. Reporting on the mission’s findings described civilian deaths and injuries at the location. The fact-finding team concluded that the strike was indiscriminate and constituted a war crime.
Responsibility for Lamerd remains more directly contested than responsibility for Minab. US Central Command said in March that American forces had not carried out strikes in the city on that day. The mission nevertheless said the available evidence gave it reasonable grounds to attribute the attack to the United States. The Associated Press reported that investigators assessed the weapons involved as Precision Strike Missiles that dispersed tungsten fragments over the sports complex and nearby area.
The disagreement illustrates why attribution is one of the most important and difficult tasks in conflict investigations. Weapons fragments, satellite imagery, launch capabilities, flight paths, blast patterns, official operational statements and witness accounts may all be relevant, but each has limitations. A UN fact-finding mission can assemble and analyze such material, yet it does not have the coercive powers of a criminal court or national prosecutor. It cannot force a government to turn over targeting logs, mission planning files or classified intelligence. Its conclusions therefore depend heavily on the quality and convergence of evidence it can obtain from outside closed military systems.
Washington rejects the report while its own investigation remains unfinished
The US government rejected the mission’s conclusions. The White House said the Human Rights Council lacked credibility and argued that Iran, not the United States, had committed war crimes in the current conflict. The State Department likewise dismissed the report’s findings, citing the Trump administration’s longstanding criticism of the Council. The Pentagon declined to discuss the substance of the UN report in detail and said its own investigation remained under way.
President Donald Trump said in June that nobody had intentionally attacked a girls’ school in Iran and referred to an investigation into the Minab incident. The Pentagon has not publicly released final findings from that inquiry. Reuters previously reported that an initial US military review indicated American forces were likely responsible for the school strike, after which the investigation was elevated. The absence of a published final report leaves a significant evidentiary gap between Washington’s public rejection of the UN mission and the internal review process that could establish what targeting information was used and how decisions were made.
The difference between intent to hit a building and intent to kill civilians is particularly important in evaluating official responses. Washington has emphasized that it did not purposefully target schoolchildren. The mission’s case does not depend on proving such a purpose. Instead, its finding centers on the alleged decision to strike a building despite a substantial risk that the target was civilian and despite what investigators describe as inadequate verification. That narrower legal question is likely to remain central to the dispute when the report is debated in Geneva.
Iran’s own record is condemned in the same investigation
The report’s findings against Tehran are equally severe. The mission said Iranian authorities carried out a widespread and systematic attack against civilians during protests that erupted in late December 2025. Investigators described unlawful killings, torture, arbitrary detention, enforced disappearances, severe restrictions on freedom of expression and sweeping measures to block communication. The use of lethal force, internet restrictions and the death penalty were described as part of an escalation beyond previous patterns of repression.
Iranian authorities have said 3,038 people were killed and roughly 25,000 injured during the unrest. The UN mission said it could not independently verify those totals and believed the true numbers of dead and injured were likely higher. That uncertainty is important. In closed information environments, casualty counts can become political instruments, and the mission has not presented an independently verified national total. Its legal conclusions instead rely on documented patterns, individual cases, interviews, visual material and other evidence that investigators say establish the character and scale of the crackdown.
Tehran has repeatedly rejected accusations that it systematically violated rights during the protests. Iranian officials have blamed much of the violence on armed rioters, terrorists and foreign-backed actors, including groups they say were supported by the United States and Israel. The mission’s task was not to determine whether every protest was peaceful or whether violence by non-state actors occurred. Its central question was whether state conduct complied with international obligations and whether particular violations formed part of a wider attack on the civilian population. On that point, investigators concluded that many violations met the legal definition of crimes against humanity.
The protest crackdown and the war are now legally intertwined
The chronology of the mission’s work helps explain why the report reaches across both internal repression and international conflict. The fact-finding mechanism was originally created by the Human Rights Council in 2022 after the death of Mahsa Amini and the subsequent “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests. Its mandate was later extended as serious allegations continued. In January 2026, the Council again broadened and extended the mission’s work following the violent response to protests that had begun on December 28, 2025.
Weeks later, the regional security crisis escalated into direct US-Israeli military action against Iran, adding the laws of armed conflict to an already extensive human-rights investigation. The result is unusual but not conceptually contradictory. International human-rights law continues to apply during war, while international humanitarian law governs conduct directly connected to hostilities. A state can simultaneously be the victim of an unlawful or reckless attack and the perpetrator of serious crimes against its own population.
That dual finding may make the report politically difficult for governments that prefer a simpler narrative. Tehran can point to the Minab and Lamerd findings as evidence of unlawful foreign attacks, but the same investigators accuse Iranian institutions of murder, torture and other crimes against civilians. Washington can highlight the mission’s condemnation of Tehran, but that does not answer the mission’s allegations about US targeting procedures. The report’s structure therefore reinforces a basic principle of the laws of war and human rights: one party’s violations do not cancel another party’s obligations.
How investigators built the case
The Associated Press reported that the mission used a victim-centered methodology based on interviews with 73 people inside and outside Iran, along with satellite imagery, photographs, videos, documentation from organizations and information supplied by specialists. Such mixed-source investigation has become increasingly important in conflicts where direct access is restricted. Satellite images can establish changes to a site over time, videos can help reconstruct damage and the presence of civilians, and witness accounts can provide context that remote sensing cannot.
But the mission also acknowledged major limitations. The continuing war, communication restrictions and lack of full cooperation from governments hindered its work. AP reported that nearly three dozen requests for information sent to Iranian authorities went unanswered, while requests made to the US government in June for information and meetings also received no response. Those gaps matter because state records could illuminate command structures, target-selection procedures, rules of engagement, arrest policies and internal investigations.
A responsible reading of the report therefore has to hold two ideas at once. The mission says the evidence it gathered is sufficient to meet its “reasonable grounds” standard. At the same time, the absence of cooperation means investigators did not have access to every potentially relevant record. That is not unusual for UN inquiries, particularly when the states under scrutiny dispute the legitimacy or competence of the investigating body. It does, however, mean future legal proceedings would have to test the evidence more rigorously and seek records the mission could not obtain.
What a UN fact-finding mission can and cannot do
The mission’s findings carry political and evidentiary weight, but they do not themselves create criminal liability. UN fact-finding missions are investigative mechanisms established by intergovernmental bodies. They gather information, preserve evidence, identify patterns and make legal assessments. They do not issue indictments, conduct criminal trials or impose sentences. Reuters noted that the Iran mission cannot initiate criminal cases on its own.
Its records could nevertheless become relevant to future proceedings. National courts in some countries can investigate certain international crimes under forms of universal or extraterritorial jurisdiction. International tribunals may also use independently gathered material if they possess jurisdiction over the conduct or the individuals concerned. In practice, jurisdiction over alleged crimes involving the United States and Iran is complicated, and no automatic route to prosecution follows from the report. Any case would depend on the legal authority of the forum, the nationality and location of suspects, the territorial basis for jurisdiction and the admissibility of evidence.
The report may have another impact before any courtroom becomes involved: preservation. Conflict evidence can disappear quickly as sites are rebuilt, digital material is deleted and witnesses disperse. An international mechanism that collects and authenticates material creates a record that can be revisited years later. That has been a central lesson from investigations in Syria, Ukraine, Myanmar and other conflicts. Even when immediate prosecution is unlikely, preserving a reliable evidentiary trail can shape sanctions, diplomatic inquiries, reparations debates and later legal action.
The report arrives during an active Middle East war, not after one
The timing of the findings gives them added significance. The Middle East conflict has not moved into a settled postwar phase. Fighting involving Iran and regional actors continues to affect shipping, energy infrastructure, Gulf security and neighboring states. Saudi Arabia and Yemen’s Houthi movement have exchanged strikes, while maritime routes through the Red Sea and Strait of Hormuz remain exposed to disruption. The United States and Iran remain locked in confrontation even as diplomatic intermediaries search for ways to limit further escalation.
That means the report is not merely an accounting exercise about past events. Its conclusions speak directly to targeting practices that may still be relevant to ongoing operations. Calls for distinction, proportionality and precaution are operational requirements, not retrospective slogans. If the mission is correct that failures in target verification contributed to the Minab strike, the immediate question for military planners is whether databases, intelligence-validation procedures and no-strike lists have been corrected before new missions are authorized.
The same is true inside Iran. If arrests, torture, disappearances and communication blackouts remain part of the state’s approach to dissent, accountability is not only about punishing past conduct but preventing recurrence. The mission’s warning therefore reaches both external belligerents and Iranian authorities: ongoing conflict does not suspend the rules that protect civilians, and national-security claims do not remove the obligation to investigate credible allegations of serious violations.
Civilian protection has become a strategic issue as well as a legal one
Modern warfare places enormous pressure on intelligence systems designed to distinguish civilian and military objects. Long-range missiles can strike with high technical accuracy while still hitting the wrong object if the underlying intelligence is outdated or mistaken. That distinction between weapon accuracy and target accuracy is central to the Minab allegation. A precision-guided munition does not make an attack lawful by itself. The legality of a strike depends on the status of the target, the expected effects and the precautions taken before launch.
The strategic consequences can be as serious as the legal consequences. A strike on a school can harden public opinion, weaken international support for the attacking state and provide adversaries with a powerful propaganda narrative. It can also undermine claims that a military campaign is narrowly focused on government, nuclear or military infrastructure. For states that rely on international coalitions, perceived disregard for civilian protection can create political friction even among partners that broadly support the campaign’s security objectives.
For Iran, the strategic calculation runs in the opposite direction but is no less important. Civilian suffering caused by foreign attacks can rally nationalist sentiment, yet allegations that Iranian security forces systematically killed, tortured or disappeared protesters can weaken the government’s effort to present itself solely as a victim of aggression. The UN report effectively separates those narratives. It treats civilian protection as a universal obligation rather than a tool that applies only when a state is under attack.
The dispute will move next to the Human Rights Council
The mission is expected to present the report to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva on Monday. The Council has 47 member states and has long been a venue for sharp political disputes over Iran, Israel, the United States and the wider Middle East. Washington’s decision to distance itself from the body under the Trump administration will shape the debate, as will criticism from countries that regard the Council as selective or politicized.
Those political arguments do not make the underlying evidence irrelevant. Governments hostile to Washington are likely to emphasize the war-crimes findings against the United States, while states critical of Tehran will highlight the crimes-against-humanity findings and Iran’s lack of cooperation with investigators. Some delegations may do both. The credibility of the process will depend in part on whether states apply the same evidentiary and legal standards to allegations against allies and adversaries.
The report also lands as the United Nations system faces broader divisions over Iran. On September 17, Russia and China vetoed a US-backed Security Council proposal to extend independent expert monitoring of sanctions on Iran. That dispute concerns a different legal and institutional mechanism, but the timing underscores how fragmented international oversight has become. The Human Rights Council can investigate and report, yet enforcement depends on states, courts and political bodies that often disagree fundamentally over both facts and legitimacy.
Accountability is complicated by the politics of jurisdiction
Calls for accountability frequently collide with the structure of international law. The United States is not a party to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, and Iran has signed but not ratified it. That does not make prosecution conceptually impossible, but it means there is no simple assumption that the ICC automatically has territorial or personal jurisdiction over every alleged crime described in the report. Other legal pathways would require a specific jurisdictional basis.
National systems may provide another route. Some countries allow prosecutors to investigate war crimes or crimes against humanity committed abroad, especially when suspects, victims or evidence have a connection to the prosecuting state. Universal-jurisdiction cases have produced convictions for crimes committed in conflicts far from the courtroom. Yet such cases are slow, resource-intensive and often dependent on the presence of a suspect who can be arrested or summoned.
Political immunity can pose additional barriers, particularly for serving senior officials. Evidence that establishes the circumstances of an attack does not automatically prove criminal responsibility by a specific commander or civilian leader. Prosecutors would have to determine who selected a target, who approved it, what intelligence they received, whether warnings were ignored and whether the mental element required for the offense can be proved. The mission’s report creates an evidentiary foundation, but the leap from institutional finding to individual criminal guilt is substantial.
The Minab case may test how militaries manage target databases
One of the most important operational questions raised by the report concerns the maintenance of target information. Militaries depend on databases built from intelligence collected over time. Facilities change use, units relocate, civilian development expands and buildings once connected to military activity can become schools, clinics or homes. A target that was valid months or years earlier may not remain valid indefinitely. That is why current verification is central to lawful targeting.
The mission’s description of the Minab strike suggests investigators believe the failure was not simply a last-second misidentification but a breakdown in the process used to keep information current. If that assessment is correct, the lessons extend beyond one strike. Large air and missile campaigns can involve hundreds or thousands of prospective targets, placing heavy demands on intelligence teams. The risk of stale data increases when planning tempo rises and forces operate with limited human intelligence on the ground.
Military organizations often respond to civilian-casualty incidents by reviewing target-development procedures, changing approval thresholds, improving civilian-harm mitigation and updating no-strike databases. The Pentagon’s still-unreleased investigation could therefore be as important for future operations as for retrospective responsibility. A transparent account would allow outside observers to compare the US military’s own evidence and legal analysis with the UN mission’s findings. Without it, the public record will remain dominated by external investigations and competing official statements.
For Iranian protesters, the report preserves a parallel record of abuse
The international focus on US military conduct carries a risk that the report’s extensive findings about Iranian repression will receive less attention. The mission’s mandate began with precisely those domestic violations. Its latest assessment describes a state response in which lethal force, mass detention, torture, disappearance and information control were not isolated excesses but elements of a broader pattern directed against civilians.
The use of internet shutdowns is particularly consequential in both human-rights and evidentiary terms. Communications blackouts can prevent protesters from organizing, families from locating detainees and journalists from verifying deaths. They can also make it harder to preserve evidence of abuse. The mission said restrictions on communication were part of the government’s broader response to unrest. Iranian authorities have framed such measures as necessary to counter violence, foreign interference and destabilization.
Executions linked to protest activity add another layer to the accountability debate. The Associated Press reported that the mission warned that dozens of people remained at imminent risk of execution. Capital punishment following proceedings that fail basic fair-trial standards can itself become a serious human-rights violation. For families of protesters, the report’s value may therefore be less about geopolitical arguments between Washington and Tehran and more about creating an authoritative record of arrests, deaths and mistreatment that might otherwise disappear into the secrecy of the security system.
A test of whether international law is applied consistently
The broader significance of the report lies in consistency. International humanitarian law loses credibility when governments invoke it against adversaries but dismiss it when allegations concern their own forces or allies. Human-rights law faces the same problem when states condemn repression abroad while overlooking similar conduct by partners. The Iran mission’s simultaneous findings against Washington and Tehran place that double-standard problem in unusually clear form.
For the United States, the strongest response would ultimately depend on the quality and transparency of its own investigation. If military investigators conclude that American forces were responsible for Minab, they will have to explain how a school came to be treated as a military objective, whether databases were outdated, what precautions were taken and whether disciplinary or procedural action followed. If they reject the UN mission’s assessment, publishing evidence that supports a different conclusion would strengthen the credibility of that rejection.
For Iran, the report creates a different obligation. Condemning foreign strikes does not answer allegations that state institutions carried out a widespread and systematic attack on protesters. A credible response would require transparent investigations, access for independent monitors, information about detainees and executions, and accountability for officials responsible for unlawful violence. Tehran has historically disputed the mission’s mandate and methodology, making such cooperation unlikely in the near term.
What happens next
The immediate next step is diplomatic rather than judicial. Human Rights Council members will debate the findings in Geneva, governments will contest the mission’s conclusions and rights groups will press for evidence preservation and accountability. The Pentagon’s internal investigation into the Minab strike remains one of the most important outstanding pieces of the factual record. Any publication of that review could either narrow or deepen the gap between the US account and the UN mission’s conclusions.
The war itself may determine how much urgency the report receives. If hostilities escalate, new strikes and new civilian casualties could overtake the political debate while making the report’s recommendations more immediately relevant. If diplomacy produces a reduction in fighting, the focus may shift toward reconstruction, reparations and demands for independent investigations. Either way, the mission has now placed detailed allegations about February 28 into an international record that will be difficult for any party simply to erase.
The central lesson is uncomfortable for all governments involved. Iran’s civilians can be harmed by foreign military action and by their own state at the same time. Evidence of repression by Tehran does not excuse unlawful attacks by an external power, and evidence of unlawful attacks does not absolve Tehran of responsibility for killings, torture or disappearances at home. The fact-finding mission’s report is likely to be fought over politically, but its core premise is straightforward: the rules protecting civilians are not reciprocal favors. They apply independently to every party, in war and in peace.
