President Donald Trump on Wednesday offered his closest public acknowledgment yet of U.S. responsibility for the deadly airstrike that hit a school in southern Iran, describing the attack as a tragic consequence of war while insisting it had not been intentional.
Speaking to reporters during the Group of Seven summit in France, Trump was asked who should be held accountable for the U.S. strike on the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab, an attack that killed 175 people, most of them children, on the opening day of the conflict in Iran.
“Mistakes can happen. War is terrible,” Trump said, according to The New York Times.
“No one did that on purpose,” he added.
Although Trump stopped short of explicitly accepting responsibility, the remarks appeared to represent his most direct public acknowledgment of the incident since it occurred more than 100 days ago.
The strike remains under investigation by the Pentagon, which has yet to release the findings of its internal review. When asked whether the results would eventually be made public, Trump declined to elaborate and instead referred further questions to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
Privately, U.S. military officials have acknowledged that American forces carried out the strike and have characterized the incident as a significant intelligence failure rather than an intentional attack on civilians.
According to officials familiar with the investigation, the school was located adjacent to a base operated by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy. The site where the school stood had previously been part of the military installation before later being converted into an educational facility.
Investigators have reportedly determined that personnel responsible for selecting targets relied on satellite imagery that had not been updated for seven years. As a result, the images still depicted the location as part of the military base and failed to show that a functioning elementary school had been established there.
Officials involved in the review said at least two military personnel conducting the preliminary assessment recognized that one of the structures appeared to have been converted into a school. However, that information was never passed to commanders responsible for approving the target list.
Because the updated assessment did not reach senior decision-makers, intelligence analysts and military planners continued to classify the location as a legitimate military objective.
The first wave of airstrikes killed dozens of students inside the school. Many more civilians died when additional munitions struck the area during what military officials have described as a follow-up or “double-tap” strike.
Satellite imagery reviewed by The New York Times indicated that several precision-guided weapons struck at least six Revolutionary Guard buildings as well as the school compound, suggesting the educational facility was hit during a broader operation targeting nearby military infrastructure.
The Minab attack has become one of the most controversial episodes of the conflict, drawing renewed scrutiny over U.S. targeting procedures and the safeguards intended to prevent civilian casualties during precision air operations.
Military investigators continue to examine how outdated intelligence remained in operational databases and why warnings raised during the target assessment process failed to reach senior commanders before the strike was authorized.
If confirmed by the Pentagon’s final review, the Minab bombing would rank as the deadliest civilian casualty incident involving the U.S. military in more than three decades.
The attack has frequently been compared with the 1991 bombing of the Amiriyah civilian air shelter in Baghdad, where a U.S. stealth aircraft mistakenly struck a shelter during the Gulf War, killing more than 400 civilians, most of them women, children and elderly people.
While the Pentagon’s investigation remains ongoing, families of the victims and international human rights organizations have continued to call for a full public accounting of the events leading to the strike, including whether military officials will face disciplinary action for what internal reviews have reportedly described as preventable intelligence failures.
