ANALYSIS

Minab, the school nobody checked

7 October 2026 — Iran

Series “Artificial intelligence” · 2 of 6

Transparency note: this piece was prepared with the assistance of Claude, Anthropic's artificial intelligence model. According to the Washington Post, Claude was integrated into the military system discussed below.

It was Saturday morning, and in Iran Saturday is a school day. Shortly after ten, in the first hours of the US and Israeli bombing of Iran, a cruise missile struck the Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab, a city in Hormozgan province, near the Strait of Hormuz. The girls studied on the upper floor, the boys on the lower floor. Many of them were between seven and twelve years old. This piece reconstructs how a precision-guided missile ended up on a school that, for years, anyone could see on satellite images, on the school's website and on its social media accounts. And it is the story of what happens when choosing targets becomes faster than checking them.

The facts

On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel attacked Iran (the war, told here). At around 10:45 a.m. local time, according to the Iranian authorities, the Minab school was hit. The death toll varies by source: the Iranian authorities, cited by Amnesty International, speak of 168 dead, including at least 110 children; Human Rights Watch of at least 175. The UN Fact-Finding Mission on Iran reports more than 150 dead, about 120 of them children (Amnesty, March 16; HRW, April 20; OHCHR, September 17). According to an analysis published by Just Security, it is the highest toll of a single US strike on civilians since 1991 (Just Security).

Next to the school there was a Revolutionary Guard naval base. Satellite images show that until 2013 the building was inside the military compound; by 2016 a wall had separated it, and in the following years the signs of a playground and painted walls had appeared (Just Security).

On March 7 President Trump blamed the attack on Iran, saying its munitions are very inaccurate. A video verified by the research group Bellingcat and an analysis by the New York Times instead pointed to a US Tomahawk, a missile Iran does not possess (PolitiFact). Two days later Trump said he would accept whatever the investigation found. On March 11 the Pentagon's initial internal findings, reported by the US press, attributed the strike to the United States and to outdated intelligence. On March 13 Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced an administrative investigation, entrusted to a general from outside US Central Command.

The chain of errors

The Pentagon's investigation has not been published. In September Bloomberg reported its findings based on officials who took part in it: not a single error, but a series of avoidable errors (Bloomberg; free version on Gizmodo). There are four links in the chain.

The data. The main military intelligence database still classified the site as a Revolutionary Guard facility. In 2019 an analyst had noticed the changes, but the observation ended up in a system not connected to the database used for targeting. In July CNN had revealed that the intelligence systems had also flagged that the information on that target was old, and that the warning had been ignored (CNN, July 7).

The machine. The campaign's targets passed through the Maven Smart System, the platform built for the Pentagon by Palantir, a US data analytics company founded in 2003 that works mainly for governments, armed forces and intelligence services. The Pentagon awarded it Maven in 2024 with a $480 million contract, raised in 2025 to about $1.3 billion; according to the Pentagon, more than 20,000 service members use it (DefenseScoop). Maven fuses satellite images, radar data, intercepted communications and other sources and proposes targets. According to the Washington Post, Maven ran on Claude, Anthropic's model. In the first 24 hours of the war it proposed hundreds of targets, ranked them by importance and supplied their coordinates (Responsible Statecraft, citing the Washington Post). According to the Pentagon's chief AI officer, Cameron Stanley, during the 38 days of the campaign Maven was used to strike 13,000 targets. Stanley also said that in the weeks of the war the use of Maven surged, and that there is always a human being analyzing the situation and applying context and rules (Breaking Defense). According to the investigation reported by Bloomberg, Central Command personnel had relied too heavily on Maven: some expected the system to flag outdated data on its own, something it was not designed to do. Maven had cut the work of selecting targets from hours to minutes. Palantir maintains that it is not responsible for the quality of the data and that nothing proves its software caused the error. No public source says which part of Maven, Claude included, pointed to the school: the investigation reported by Bloomberg does not make that distinction. Anthropic's chief executive, Dario Amodei, said in June that he did not know exactly how his models had been used. He did, however, maintain that the company's principle had been respected, because the final decision was made by a person (The Next Web, citing Bloomberg). On February 27, the day before the strike, President Trump had ordered federal agencies to stop using Anthropic's products within six months. The company had refused to allow its models to be used for fully autonomous weapons and for mass surveillance of American citizens (TechCrunch). The next day, Claude was still working inside Maven.

The people. Between 2025 and 2026 the Pentagon drastically cut the offices that were supposed to assess and prevent harm to civilians. The Civilian Protection Center of Excellence went from 40 people to 9; at Central Command the team responsible fell from ten people to one (The Intercept). In May the Department's inspector general described these efforts as "largely inactive." According to the investigation reported by Bloomberg, no specialist examined the Minab site before the strike.

Time. According to the Washington Post, in the first 24 hours of the war the United States struck more than a thousand targets (Responsible Statecraft).

Some former officers have argued that the fault lies with human beings, not with artificial intelligence, because it was people who entered the wrong data and failed to update it. The two things are not mutually exclusive.

Who is investigating

• The Pentagon. The administrative investigation announced on March 13 was nearly complete by May, according to the commander of Central Command, Admiral Brad Cooper. It has not been published. As far as is known, nobody has been disciplined.
• Congress. On March 11 more than 40 senators, led by Elizabeth Warren and Chris Van Hollen, called for a full investigation. In their letter they point out that artificial intelligence had been used to select targets (US Senate). The next day more than 150 House members demanded answers on civilian casualties. On July 13, 25 senators called for the publication of the investigation, which had been delivered in April (US Senate). As of early October the investigation is still not public.
• The UN. On September 17 the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Iran, established by the Human Rights Council, concluded that there are reasonable grounds to believe that the United States committed a war crime. According to the Mission, the school was the intended point of impact, and the failure to update the information or verify the target went beyond mere negligence (OHCHR; Time). The US administration, which left the Human Rights Council in 2025, called the report not credible.
• Human rights organizations. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have called for an independent investigation, publication of the findings, criminal prosecutions if there is evidence, and reparations for the families.

Legal reading

1. When in doubt, a school is civilian. International humanitarian law prohibits attacking civilians and civilian objects (Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions, Articles 48 and 52). In case of doubt, a building normally dedicated to civilian purposes, such as a school, must be presumed not to be used for military purposes (Article 52(3)). Since 2023 the Pentagon's own Law of War Manual has also recognized this presumption as customary law (Lieber Institute). A school does not lose its protection because it was once inside a base.

2. Verification is an obligation, not a courtesy. An attacker must do everything feasible to verify that the target is military (Article 57). The United States has not ratified Additional Protocol I, but this rule is considered customary law and therefore binds it anyway; the Pentagon's own Law of War Manual acknowledges as much. In Minab the information needed to verify existed: the satellite images, an analyst's observation in 2019, the school's website, the warning that the data was outdated. That it did not reach the decision-makers, according to the UN Mission, does not lessen the obligation.

3. Error, negligence or crime? Here the experts disagree, and it is right to say so. For the UN Mission the conduct went beyond negligence and was reckless: awareness of a substantial risk is enough, according to part of international case law, to establish a war crime. Human Rights Watch takes the same line. An analysis published by Just Security, on the other hand, considers a war-crime conviction under the Rome Statute, which requires intent, unlikely. It points to the US Uniform Code of Military Justice as the more realistic route, since it punishes dereliction of duty, including through simple negligence (Article 92). On one point, however, all three readings converge: the required precautions were not taken.

4. Responsibility cannot be transferred to the machine. In 2019 the States parties to the UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, the United States included, recognized by consensus a principle that is non-binding and was developed for autonomous weapons, but whose logic also applies to a system like Maven: human responsibility for decisions on the use of weapons must be retained, because it cannot be transferred to machines (Guiding Principles). Before the law, "the system got it wrong" is not an answer: the State is responsible for the acts of its armed forces, whatever tool they used, and must make reparation for the harm (International Law Commission Articles on State Responsibility, Articles 4 and 31).

5. Who can judge. Neither the United States nor Iran is a party to the Rome Statute: Iran signed it in 2000 but never ratified it. The International Criminal Court could intervene only if Iran accepted its jurisdiction by a special declaration (Article 12(3) of the Statute), which, however, would also cover crimes committed by Iranian nationals, including domestic repression. The Security Council could refer the case to the Court, but the United States has a veto. That leaves national courts: US military courts and, according to some Iranian jurists, Iranian courts, on the basis of the Geneva Conventions ratified in 1957 (EJIL: Talk!).

The symmetry test

On July 8, 2024, a Russian missile struck the Okhmatdyt children's hospital in Kyiv. UN monitors concluded that it was highly likely a direct hit by a Russian cruise missile, and international condemnation was immediate and almost unanimous (Kyiv Independent). On this site, in the manifesto on Russia, we applied the rules on the protection of civilians to Moscow. In Minab there are more victims, the attribution is admitted by the internal investigations of those who fired, and the official response was first to deny, then to investigate without publishing. The standard cannot depend on who launched the missile.

The same rule applies in the opposite direction. The UN Mission that accuses the United States over Minab also accuses the Iranian government of crimes against humanity for the repression of the 2025–2026 protests, with killings, torture and at least 29 executions between March and August. Its mandate covers Iranian territory: it does not examine the Iranian attacks on Israel and the Gulf States, which we considered unlawful in the piece on the war. And Israel, which waged the war together with the United States, has been accused of using similar systems for years. In April 2024 the Israeli magazine +972 and the website Local Call published the testimony of six intelligence officers about a system called Lavender. According to their account, in the first weeks of the war in Gaza the system had flagged about 37,000 Palestinians as suspected militants. The estimated error rate was one in ten, and human verification took about twenty seconds per name (+972 Magazine). The Israeli army denied it: Lavender, it said, is a database for cross-referencing intelligence sources, and the army does not use systems that identify who is a terrorist (Fortune). The problem does not belong to a single army. The same rules apply to the rest of the campaign. According to Amnesty International, three bombings of residential neighborhoods in Tehran, between March 1 and 13, killed at least 41 civilians; neither Israel nor the United States has claimed them, and Amnesty is calling for an investigation into whether they are war crimes (The Defense Post).

Editorial judgment

What follows is our assessment, not a fact.

Minab is not the story of a machine that decided to kill children. It is the story of a system in which every link can point to another link. The data was old, but someone had flagged it. The machine was not built to notice, but someone thought it did. The team that was supposed to check had been cut to one person, by a political choice. And the time, on the first day of a war with a thousand targets, was not there.

Artificial intelligence is not the culprit of Minab, and it must not become its alibi. It did what it was built for: making target selection faster. The problem is that speed was increased and oversight was cut, at the same time and in the same Department. The rules on precautions exist because war is made of errors: they demand slowing down precisely where a machine makes it possible to speed up.

Finally, there is a question of trust. An investigation that reaches serious conclusions and stays in a drawer, a president who blames the attack on the enemy against all evidence, a UN report rejected without being discussed: this is how impunity is built, one step after another. The families of Minab have the right to know who made that decision. The United States has the duty to say so.

What to watch

• The publication of the Pentagon's investigation and any disciplinary or criminal measures.
• The changes to the targeting system announced after Minab and whether they are actually implemented.
• The report of the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, whose publication was expected in summer 2026.
• Iran's initiatives on the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court or in its own courts.
• The Review Conference of the UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, in November, which will decide whether to negotiate binding rules on autonomous weapons.

Sources: Amnesty, March 16 · HRW, April 20 · OHCHR, September 17 · Just Security · Just Security · PolitiFact · Bloomberg · Gizmodo · CNN, July 7 · DefenseScoop · Responsible Statecraft, citing the Washington Post · Breaking Defense · The Next Web, citing Bloomberg · TechCrunch · The Intercept · US Senate · US Senate · Time · Lieber Institute · Guiding Principles · EJIL: Talk! · Kyiv Independent · +972 Magazine · Fortune · The Defense Post

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