Human rights experts commissioned by the UN’s top human rights body say they have found “reasonable grounds” to believe the United States committed war crimes in two strikes in Iran, including on a school in the southern city of Minab.
They also accuse Iran’s government of carrying out crimes against humanity against its own people in a report published Thursday. The report, while not binding, adds to international evidence gathered about crimes in the war in Iran, and could eventually be used in efforts to reach justice in international courts.
The Fact-Finding Mission on Iran, chaired by jurist Sara Hossain of Bangladesh, is made up of independent experts and was created in 2022 by the Human Rights Council, the UN’s top human rights body, which is based in Geneva.
The experts were expected to present their findings on Monday to the council, which is made up of 47 UN member countries.
The international fact-finding mission says its findings on US war crimes centre on a pair of US airstrikes that killed at least 178 civilians, including women and children.
At the start of the US-Israeli war against Iran in February, at least one US missile hit the Shajareh Al-Tayyibah school in Minab, according to an Associated Press investigation. There has been no final accounting of what happened.
Iranian state media have said 168 people were killed in the strike, most of them children.
“Following the United States and Israeli attacks on 28 February, the mission found reasonable grounds to believe the United States committed the war crime of launching indiscriminate attacks resulting in the loss of life or injury to civilians or damage to civilian objects,” a UN statement about the team’s findings said.
In their report, the experts concluded that “the building of the school was the intended point of impact” and the resulting damage wasn’t the result of an errant strike or collateral damage from an attack on a compound of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps next to the school.
