UN mission finds grounds for US war crimes in two Iran strikes, and for crimes against humanity by Tehran

The Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Iran said on 17 September that it had reasonable grounds to believe the United States committed war crimes in two strikes on 28 February, the first day of the war. The same report said Iranian authorities committed crimes against humanity during the protest wave that began in late December 2025. States are due to hear the findings at the Human Rights Council in Geneva on Monday.

The mission is a three-expert body commissioned by the Council. It does not sit as a court. Its threshold is reasonable grounds, not proof beyond doubt. That is still the most detailed public account yet of the two civilian sites that have hung over the war since winter.

The Minab school

Local authorities say Tomahawk missiles hit Shajareh Tayyebeh Primary School in Minab and killed at least 156 people, including about 120 children. Some tallies in the report and later briefings run to 168 dead. The school stood next to an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps naval complex. The experts said the building was a clearly identifiable civilian object and that they found no evidence it was being used for military purposes.

They said the United States failed to update targeting databases and failed to confirm that the building was a military objective. They described that failure as more than negligence. They said the United States directed the attack at the school even though the civilian risk was obvious. The mission pointed to two further facts: public reporting that a preliminary US military inquiry correlated the strike with American forces, and the point that only the United States fields Tomahawk missiles in this war.

In June, President Trump said nobody did that on purpose and that mistakes are made. In May, Adm. Brad Cooper of US Central Command told the House Armed Services Committee that the Minab attack correlated with a US strike. The White House response to the UN paper, issued through a statement on the Council itself, said the body had accomplished nothing for human rights while spouting unserious nonsense for decades.

The Lamerd sports complex

On the same day, Precision Strike Missiles dispersed tungsten pellets over a sports complex and residential streets in Lamerd. Local authorities recorded at least 21 civilian deaths, including seven children. Other counts in the report say 22. The experts said the sports centre was visibly separate from an adjacent IRGC compound and that nothing showed it was a military target. They called the strike indiscriminate.

US Central Command said in March that American forces did not launch any strikes into the city of Lamerd that day. The mission still assigned responsibility to the United States on the basis of the munition type and the pattern of the attack. Combined, the two incidents account for at least 177 civilian deaths in the figures used by the Council's experts.

What the mission said about Iran

The second half of the report concerns the Iranian state's response to protests that erupted in late 2025. The experts said the authorities carried out a widespread and systematic attack on civilians. They listed unlawful killings, torture, arbitrary detention, enforced disappearances and tight limits on speech. They said the death toll from the protests likely exceeds official figures. They recorded at least 58 executions announced since the start of 2026, including 29 men hanged in connection with the protests. They also said the nationwide internet shutdown restricted the right to seek and receive information.

The dual finding is the political core of the paper. Governments that want to use the Minab and Lamerd passages against Washington will have to swallow the passages on Tehran, and the reverse. The Council will not issue an arrest warrant. National prosecutors and any future special tribunal can still pick up the file. For now the document sets a public record: two American strikes judged indiscriminate, and an Iranian crackdown judged systematic, written by the same three people and tabled in the same week that Iranian officials have been told they may sit at the UN General Assembly in New York under strict conditions.