Guest post: Bill Boothby on “The 28 February 2026 Minab School Attack”
Today Lawfire® contributor Bill Boothby examines the case of the Shajarah Tayyebeh Elementary School, which allegedly was struck by a U.S. Tomahawk missile, resulting in the deaths of 168 people, including many children. This incident is currently under investigation by the Pentagon. Bill outlines the applicable law and suggests several specific questions the investigation should address.
The school was once part of the adjacent Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) facility (which was struck at about the same time), leading to suggestions that outdated intelligence was a culprit in the incident.
It also leads to questions as to why the Iranians would place a school next to a facility they knew, or reasonably should have known, would be a target in an armed conflict. Bill includes these observations about a defender’s obligations under international law in his analysis:
In the course of the inquiry, it may become apparent that the Iranian authorities may have breached their obligations to take feasible precautions to protect the civilian population, individual civilians and civilian objects under their control against the dangers resulting from military operations.
Locating the school so close to the military compound appears to be a clear breach of this rule. The inquiry should assess any information that shows why the school was located where it was and should comment as it deems appropriate.
Moreover, to put this incident in context, consider the March 25th report from The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) that finds that the U.S. and Israel have struck over 15,000 targets, and are attacking 300-500 more each day.
Of course. Every incident of civilian harm is a tragedy, and about 1,400 Iranians have reportedly been killed. Still, given the sheer number of strikes and Iran’s decision to use “heavily populated civilian areas to conduct military operations,” it is a remarkable testament to the U.S. and Israel’s efforts to avoid civilian casualties that the unfortunate figures are not higher.
Here’s Bill’s ‘deep dive’:
The 28 February 2026 Minab School Attack
By
Bill Boothby
The Shajarah Teyyebeh Elementary School in Minab, Hormozgan province, Iran was attacked on 28 February when the female pupils and their teachers were present. Reports suggest at least 165 schoolgirls aged between 7 and 12 years were killed and others were injured.
The New York Times observes that none of the parties to the on-going Iran War has accepted responsibility, but that ‘newly released satellite imagery, social media posts and verified videos — indicate the school building was severely damaged by a precision strike that occurred at the same time as attacks on an adjacent naval base operated by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.’
The NY Times goes on to point out that ‘official statements that U.S. forces were attacking naval targets near the Strait of Hormuz, where the I.R.G.C. base is located, suggest they were most likely to have carried out the strike.’ The White House Press Secretary and the US Secretary for War explained that the US Pentagon is investigating the attack.
The NY Times report explains that social media posts together with contemporary videos and photos indicate that the attack on the school coincided with an attack on a nearby Iranian naval base and a report from Reuters suggests that US investigators may believe that both attacks were the responsibility of US forces, with a further report indicating that at least 175 people, mostly children, were killed at the school as a result of the attack.
Minab is located in that part of Iran that is close to the Strait of Hormuz and the school was rather close to an Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps compound and military buildings. ‘Satellite imagery from 2013 appears to show the school building was part of the [military] compound before a wall is seen in 2016 separating it.’ The following discussion will proceed on the hypothesis that the US forces were responsible for the 28 February attack on Minab.
The law of armed conflict principle of distinction requires that all parties to the conflict only direct their military operations against military objectives. This will include objects that are being used by the enemy’s armed forces for military purposes, such as the IRGC compound and the military buildings.
Assuming that the school was not being used for military purposes and had not for some other reason become a military objective, it was a civilian object and the children and their teachers were all, it can safely be assumed, civilians. Additional Protocol I sets forth rules that in the following respects in the author’s opinion bind all States including the US, Israel and Iran none of which is party to the Treaty. Articles 51(2) and 52(1) prohibit making the civilian population, individual civilians and civilian objects the object of attack and the School attack appears to have breached both of these rules.
Human Rights Watch has suggested the attack should be investigated as a possible war crime. The attack would only amount to the war crimes of attacking civilians and/or civilian objects if the attack was intentionally directed against civilians and/or civilian objects with the required degree of knowledge.
If the suggestion is that the School attack was a mistake, Article 57(1) of Additional Protocol I requires attackers to take constant care to spare civilians and civilian objects when conducting military operations, i.e. all those involved in attacks must take care throughout. Article 58 of the same Treaty requires all parties to an armed conflict to take the necessary precautions to protect civilians and civilian objects under their control from the dangers resulting from military operations.
So attackers must do everything practically possible to verify that the object they are attacking is a lawful target, but the territorial State i.e. Iran should not locate the School in the vicinity of a military compound.
The Inquiry
The purpose of this second part of this paper is to suggest some of the issues that the inquiry announced by the White House Press Secretary and by the Secretary for War should examine, and to consider what should happen to the results of such an inquiry.
The inquiry report should explain the known details of the attack including: the precise date and time of the explosion; the exact location of the school; the full name of the school, its address and its status as an apparently civilian object; the information that is available as to the number of individuals that are believed to have been present in the building at the time of the attack; how many of those persons were respectively children and adults; whether there is any information to suggest that any of those persons were not civilians; and, so far as is known, how many of those persons were killed and how many were injured as a result of the attack.
The inquiry should then examine all available information, irrespective of its classification, to determine the exact type of munition that hit the school building, summarising its explosive yield, radius of destructive and injurious effect, damaging/injuring mechanism, fusing setting and other relevant information. If there is any available information as to fragments of the weapon found in the debris and if the inquiry can be confident as to its veracity, such information should be included.
Likewise, mission records, contemporary video footage or still photos in association with other relevant information may assist in determining: the author of the attack; the means employed; the platform from which the weapon was fired; the persons who decided on and/or were in command at the time of the attack; the persons who actually initiated the attack; exactly when the weapon was released; and the co-ordinates against which it was fired.
A vitally important part of the inquiry will be to determine the processes that led to the decision to fire the specific weapon against the building that has turned out to have been an Elementary School.
A relevant factor that should be reflected in the inquiry and in the subsequent report is that 28 February was the first day of the Iran War 2026 preceded by a protracted military build-up providing every incentive and opportunity to consider with the greatest care which objects and persons were to be made the object of the attacks on that first day, and to choose weapons, methods of attack, delivery platforms, attack sequencing, timing, targets and so on meticulously.
Key questions to be considered therefore include, but will not be limited to:
Who planned the relevant attack?
What were the objects of the attack?
Is there any evidence to suggest an intended attack of civilians or civilian objects?
Which maps, imagery, footage, social and other media data, and other information was considered when assessing the status of the relevant building as a military objective?
Which sources of relevant information were not considered and why not?
Was any information available to the operational planners in advance of the attack to indicate the building was, or might have been, a school?
What was the information on the basis of which it was concluded that the building was a military objective?
Did the information available to planners in advance of the attack raise doubts as to the status of the building as a military objective?
Was all relevant information, including any such doubts, made available to those tasked with deciding upon the attack?
Was a collateral damage estimate prepared in advance of this attack?
Did that estimate support the decision to proceed with the attack?
Did the CDE prove to be accurate and if not why not?
Was the weapon that attacked the school operator-controlled and equipped with a televisual sensor?
If so, does the footage derived from that sensor show imagery associated with a school such as to cause an operator paying attention to divert the weapon from its target?
Is there any evidence to suggest that technical malfunction may have caused the weapon to attack something other than the intended target?
Is there any evidence to suggest that enemy or third party action in any form may have adversely affected the conduct of the attack, for example by causing the weapon to attack a target other than that intended by the attacker(s)?
If there is such evidence of enemy or third party action, should it have been apparent to those planning, deciding upon or conducting the attack before the attack took place?
Overall, was the attack planned, decided upon and executed with an appropriate degree of care?
Clearly, there may well be further issues for the inquiry to investigate based on the answers to the questions noted above. Two things should however be emphasized. First, it is the responsibility of attackers to obtain as much relevant information as possible in advance of the attack so that the decisions as to targets, methods of attack and other matters take properly into account the information that is reasonably available.
Second, the judgments that are now made must be based on the information that was available to the relevant planners or decision-makers at the time when the planning or other decisions were being made.
The purpose of the Inquiry must therefore be to seek to recreate what was done in advance of the attack to establish the salient facts, to assess whether enough was done in that regard, to consider whether all available and relevant information was indeed considered by those decision-makers, and finally, of course, to work out what went wrong.
In the course of the inquiry, it may become apparent that the Iranian authorities may have breached their obligations to take feasible precautions to protect the civilian population, individual civilians and civilian objects under their control against the dangers resulting from military operations.
Locating the school so close to the military compound appears to be a clear breach of this rule. The inquiry should assess any information that shows why the school was located where it was and should comment as it deems appropriate.
The international law obligation to conduct an inquiry derives from the requirement in Common Article 1 to the 1949 Geneva Conventions to ‘respect and to ensure respect’ for the Conventions and, thus, for the law of armed conflict in general.
An attack that has had the dreadful consequences that occurred on 28 February must therefore be investigated to determine whether war crimes were committed, whether breaches of military discipline requiring prosecution or other measures occurred, whether breaches of the law of armed conflict took place, and to prevent a recurrence.
The inquiry must be thorough, independent, impartial and effective; effectiveness requires that the inquiry considers all relevant information and seeks to answer all of the pertinent questions that are raised by an incident of this magnitude and importance.
The requirement for independence implies that persons who are potentially implicated in the matter should not be involved in the conduct of the inquiry; it is therefore appropriate that the inquiry will, reportedly, be led by a General Officer from outside US Central Command.
The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), to which the US became party on 8 June 1992, stipulates in Article 6 that ‘[e]very human being has the inherent right to life.’ The Covenant only applies, however, to persons within the territory of a State and subject to its jurisdiction. The persons killed by the attack against the school were therefore not protected by the ICCPR.
The inquiry’s findings and supporting reasoning and evidence will, subject to national security considerations, need to be made public to show that a proper inquiry has in fact taken place and to disclose to those who have suffered most grievously as a result of this terrible incident exactly what occurred and why.
If it becomes clear as the inquiry proceeds that identifiable individuals may have committed offences, which may be war crimes, breaches of national domestic law or breaches of military discipline, it is likely to be necessary to ‘pause’ the inquiry to ensure that the conduct of criminal or military disciplinary proceedings is not prejudiced. Subject to this, the inquiry should be conducted expeditiously but thoroughly.
About the Author
Air Commodore Bill Boothby retired as Deputy Director of Royal Air Force Legal Services in July 2011. He has published books, inter alia, on Weapons Law, Targeting Law, nuclear weapons law, and on new technologies in warfare. His tenth book, dealing with the Law on Brain Technologies in Warfare, will be published in the Spring of 2026.
He has been a member of Groups of Experts that addressed Direct Participation in Hostilities, the Law of Air and Missile Warfare, the Law of Cyber Warfare and Peace Operations Law. He is a Visiting Professor at the University of Johannesburg.
Disclaimer
The views expressed by guest authors do not necessarily reflect my views or those of the Center on Law, Ethics and National Security, or Duke University. (See also here).
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