A UN Human Rights Council investigation has concluded there are 'sufficient grounds to believe' the United States committed a war crime by launching Tomahawk cruise missiles at the Shajareh-Tayybeh primary school in Minab, southern Iran, on February 28, 2026. The attack killed at least 156 people, including more than 120 children aged six to 13.
The report, published alongside a parallel Bloomberg investigation into the Pentagon's internal review, points to a catastrophic failure in the US military's AI-assisted targeting pipeline. According to the findings, Palantir's Maven Smart System — used to aggregate, analyze, and prioritize targets — listed the school compound based on outdated US intelligence databases that still classified it as an active Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) military facility.
In reality, the school grounds had been physically separated from an adjacent IRGC compound by a wall for years and bore clear markers of a school: playgrounds, murals, and signage. Analysts at US Central Command were reportedly under extreme time pressure and incorrectly assumed Maven would flag or disqualify contradictory data points automatically — a capability the system did not have at the time.
The UN mission identified the munitions as RGM/UGM-109 Tomahawk missiles, which only the US possessed in the conflict zone. Survivors reported that the first missile struck the ground floor; when teachers moved children to an upstairs prayer room, the second missile hit that room, killing most of the victims.
A second US strike the same day in Lamerd — using a Precision Strike Missile that scattered approximately 180,000 tungsten balls over a sports center and primary school — killed 22 people and injured more than 100. The UN also characterized this as a war crime.
In response to the incident, Palantir has retrofitted Maven with new software filters that cross-check underlying data sources for plausibility and highlight factors that could disqualify a target. The company denied responsibility, stating it is not accountable for the underlying intelligence data or for identifying flaws in it.
The Pentagon's final investigation remains classified, and requests for information from the UN mission to Central Command and the Pentagon's civilian protection offices went unanswered.
