A Pentagon investigation finds a U.S. Tomahawk hit an Iranian elementary school.

The Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School, in Minab, in Hormozgan province, southern Iran, was struck by an American Tomahawk cruise missile in the early hours of February 28, 2026, the first day of the joint American and Israeli air campaign against Iran. The strike killed at least 156 people, of whom 120 were children. A second strike, on the same building, occurred minutes after the first. The school’s principal had, after the first strike, moved a group of surviving children into a prayer room, an area then struck by the second weapon.

The Pentagon’s preliminary investigation, the findings of which became public on Wednesday, identified the cause of the strike as the use of outdated targeting coordinates supplied by the Defense Intelligence Agency. The coordinates had, in an earlier targeting cycle, been associated with a military installation. The installation had, in the years since the coordinates were entered, been replaced by the school. The strike package, on the night of the operation, used the coordinates as listed.

The Defense Secretary, asked about the report at the daily briefing, said the Department of War would conduct a thorough investigation. He did not, at the briefing, name the figure of 156. He did not, at the briefing, describe the second strike. He did not, at the briefing, address the use of artificial-intelligence-assisted target generation, which the Washington Post’s reporting, on the same day, identifies as a contributor to the inclusion of the school’s coordinates in the operational target deck.

The use of an AI-assisted system in the production of a target list is, in the documentary record, a stated capability of the Department of War. The Department’s procurement filings, on the public record, include several active contracts for such systems. The Department’s policy guidance, on the public record, requires human verification at multiple steps before a target is approved. The verification, by the inquiry’s own preliminary findings, did not, in this case, identify the school.

The school’s principal, by reporting in the Iranian press, was killed in the second strike, with most of the children she had moved.

There is, in the standard literature of armed conflict, a body of law on the targeting of civilian objects, including schools. The law, in summary, prohibits the deliberate targeting of such objects and requires the taking of all feasible precautions to verify that targets are military in nature. The American government, in its formal positions, accepts these obligations. The American government’s preliminary inquiry, in this matter, identifies the failure of those precautions.

The strike on the school is, by the count of the Iranian Red Crescent Society, one of several civilian-casualty events of the war’s first three days. The total civilian death toll, by the Society’s count and the count of independent observers, is in the high three figures and rising. The Pentagon, on Wednesday, addressed the school. The Pentagon, on Wednesday, did not address the others.

A serious country, in a serious moment, would have issued a full accounting and a public apology. A less serious country would do what is being done: name the strike that has been independently confirmed by Western reporters, leave the others, and let the inquiry proceed at its own deliberate pace.

Calmly documenting the decline.