Senior American military commanders approved a strike on an Iranian facility despite embedded warnings in Pentagon targeting systems that the underlying intelligence was years out of date, according to three sources cited by CNN. The 28 February attack hit the Shajareh Tayyiba primary school in Minab, southern Iran, killing at least 168 children and 14 teachers, Iranian state media reported. The intended target was a neighbouring installation of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Satellite imagery from 2013 showed the school and the IRGC base as a single compound, but by 2016 a fence and separate entrance had been built to divide them; images from December 2025 showed dozens of people in the school courtyard.

Viewed from Washington, the White House has stated that an investigation is ongoing and that “the United States does not target civilians.” The Pentagon has not released its internal findings, though one source told CNN that military officials knew within days that the error stemmed from “obviously old information.” President Donald Trump initially suggested Iran might be responsible for the bombing, later saying that responsibility might never be determined. Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth promised a “thorough” investigation. The Pentagon referred questions to Central Command, which declined to comment, citing the active inquiry.

According to the sources, the two main targeting databases—the legacy Modernized Integrated Database (MIDB) and the AI-assisted MARS platform—both flagged that the intelligence on the IRGC facility required re-verification before use. The alerts were overridden in the interest of “speed,” as commanders faced intense pressure to generate target lists rapidly at the outset of hostilities. Analysts had prioritised updating records for mobile, high-threat targets such as missile and aircraft sites, while fixed locations like the one adjacent to the school were treated as lower tier and largely left unverified. A separate surveillance tool had detected changes at the site, but that finding was never linked to the main targeting database or passed to senior decision-makers.

Analysts in European capitals note that the incident has drawn attention to structural factors within the US targeting process. The civilian harm mitigation and response team at Central Command was reduced from ten staff to a single full-time position under Hegseth’s broader cuts to the programme. The pressure to accelerate target development, combined with the reliance on intelligence that was more than a decade old, created conditions in which the database warnings were bypassed. The strike is described by CNN as the single deadliest civilian casualty event in modern US military history. The dossier remains open: the Pentagon has yet to publish its conclusions, and the White House says the investigation continues even as Trump threatens renewed large-scale strikes against Iran amid parallel diplomatic talks.