Here’s What Doves And Hawks Think About The UN’s Iran War Crime Report

Foreign policy hawks and anti-war advocates are sharply divided over a new United Nations report accusing U.S. forces of committing war crimes during strikes in Iran, with critics demanding accountability and defenders of the campaign pushing back on the findings.

The Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Iran said Thursday there are reasonable grounds to believe U.S. forces carried out two strikes on civilian sites that constituted war crimes, according to the U.N. Human Rights Office. U.N. investigators said the Minab school was a clearly identifiable civilian site and found no evidence it was being used for military purposes, while concluding that U.S. forces failed to adequately update targeting information before the strike, according to the U.N. mission.

One of the U.S. findings centered on the Shajareh Tayyebeh Primary School in Minab, which was struck on Feb. 28 near an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps naval complex, according to the U.N. Human Rights Office. More than 150 people were killed in the attack, including roughly 120 schoolchildren, according to the mission.

The administration’s public account of the Minab strike shifted over time. Trump initially said the attack “was done by Iran” on March 7, according to CBS News. Two days later, Trump said he “just [didn’t] know enough about it,” acknowledged that the strike was under investigation and said he was “willing to live” with whatever the investigation found, according to CNN.

“The U.S. attack on the Minab school was – at best – indiscriminate and without regard to the very real possibility that there would be civilian deaths,” Gerry Condon, a Vietnam-era veteran and member of Veterans For Peace’s board of directors, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “That is the very definition of a war crime, and it is important that the U.N. fact-finding mission has established these facts.”

“This has been the finding of numerous media outlets and human rights groups,” World BEYOND War Executive Director David Swanson told the DCNF. “Under the U.N. Charter, every constituent part of the illegal war on Iran is without the shadow of a doubt a crime. If we play along with the general practice of avoiding that fact, and treating even the most widely confirmed and egregious atrocities as, at worst, ‘possible war crimes,’ then these attacks on schools are obvious members of that class.”

The Trump administration snapped back at the U.N. report, saying that Iranians are the only group that has perpetrated war crimes during the Iran War.

“The U.N. Human Rights Council has accomplished nothing for human rights while spouting unserious nonsense for decades,” White House Principal Deputy Press Secretary Anna Kelly told the DCNF. “The only party in this conflict that has committed war crimes is the Iranian regime, which has murdered thousands of its own people, killed Americans overseas, executed acts of terrorism in the Strait of Hormuz, and launched indiscriminate attacks against its neighbors in the region. The President is courageously ensuring that such an evil country never possesses a nuclear weapon, which will make the entire world safer and more stable.”

Some experts piled onto the comments from the White House, even going a step further and calling for sanctions against the individuals at the U.N. who produced the report.

“This three-member U.N. team is a cabal of left-wing radicals colluding with the Iranian terrorist regime,” Max Primorac, a senior research fellow at The Heritage Foundation’s Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom, told the DCNF. “Like many U.N. institutions, they are anti-American, antisemitic and soft on terrorists, especially those in the Middle East … These people are national security threats to the United States. Secretary of State Rubio would be justified in banning this team from entering the United States and to consider placing sanctions on each of them.”

UNICEF said the strike killed 168 children while classes were in session and stressed that schools and children are protected under international humanitarian law.

“The U.N. findings are extremely serious and demand a serious response from the United States,” Omid Memarian, a senior Iran analyst at DAWN, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank focused on reforming U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, told the DCNF. “More than 150 people, most of them children, were killed at the primary school in Minab, according to the mission, and it has now concluded that there are reasonable grounds to believe that the attacks in Minab and Lamerd violated international humanitarian law and amounted to war crimes. The United States should not dismiss these findings or treat them as a public relations problem.”

Investigators found no evidence that the school was being used for military purposes and determined it was a clearly identifiable civilian object, according to the report.

“It is hardly unusual for [the] U.S. to target civilians and civilian infrastructure, as President Trump has repeatedly and publicly threatened,” Gordon told the DCNF. “It is routine for the U.S. military to deny they have targeted civilians, what they call ‘collateral damage,’ and to carry out cover-ups of such killing.”

Trump’s rhetoric toward Iran grew especially stark in April, when he warned that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” adding that he did not want that outcome but believed it “probably will,” according to Trump’s Truth Social post.

“The problem is the bombast and the rhetoric that the president continues to engage in, and the suggestion repeated many times that this may be a mechanism or a method of punishing the Iranian regime, and that’s not a definite military advantage,” Texas Tech University School of Law George R. Killam Jr. Director of the Center for Military Law and Policy, Geoffrey Corn, previously told the DCNF. “So it’s just the language and the bombast that comes out of the White House, in my humble opinion, has undermined the normal presumption that when we’re attacking a target, there was a credible and good faith assessment of a military objective.”

The mission concluded that U.S. forces failed to adequately update targeting information concerning the school and failed to confirm that the building was a military objective, the U.N. report states. Investigators determined the circumstances amounted to more than negligence and said the strike was carried out despite a substantial risk of hitting a civilian object.

One expert previously told the DCNF that three specific circumstances must be met for a target to be justifiable under international law.

“There’s a pretty common fallacy that if something is capable of having a military function as well as a civilian function, that makes it a legitimate target,” Gabor Rona, a professor of practice at Cardozo Law School, previously told the DCNF. “That’s not the test … but rather, is it actually being used in a way that effectively supports military operations?”

“There’s a second step, and that deals with what’s called the principle of proportionality … If an attack on even something that is being used for military purposes creates civilian harm that is clearly in excess, or is anticipated to create civilian harm clearly in excess to any military value gained, that too makes the attack a violation of the laws of armed conflict of the Geneva Conventions,” Rona previously told the DCNF.

Rona previously explained that civilian harm must still be minimized, even if these two criteria are met.

“There is one more hurdle that has to be met in order for something to be targetable,” Rona previously told the DCNF. “So even if the harm is not disproportionate to civilians, even if the object is being directly used for military purposes by the enemy, there is still an obligation on the part of the attacking party to take feasible precautions to minimize civilian harm.”

President Donald Trump said in June that the Minab incident remained “under investigation,” but maintained that “nobody did that on purpose,” according to the White House.

“The United States should also cooperate with the U.N. fact-finding mission and provide investigators with relevant information,” Memarian told the DCNF. “Accountability should not stop at determining that civilians were killed. If the evidence shows violations of the laws of war, there must be appropriate disciplinary or legal consequences; if systemic failures contributed to the attacks, those policies and procedures need to change. And where civilians were unlawfully harmed, the United States should provide acknowledgment and appropriate redress to victims and their families.”

The mission also examined a strike on a sports facility and surrounding residential area in Lamerd that killed and injured 22 civilians and damaged nearby civilian buildings, according to the U.N. Human Rights Office. Investigators concluded that the attack was indiscriminate and constituted a war crime, according to the mission.

U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) previously rejected allegations that American forces conducted the Lamerd strike, saying U.S. forces “did not launch any strikes at any time” inside Lamerd or within 30 miles of the city on Feb. 28, according to CENTCOM.

CENTCOM also disputed claims that imagery from the attack showed a U.S. Precision Strike Missile, saying the munition appeared roughly twice as long as a PrSM and was consistent with the dimensions and silhouette of an Iranian Hoveyzeh cruise missile, according to CENTCOM.

“No amount of public diplomacy can fully repair the loss of credibility that comes from appearing to demand one standard for adversaries and another for ourselves,” Memarian told the DCNF. “The most effective response is much simpler: investigate, disclose the facts, acknowledge wrongdoing where it occurred, provide redress to victims, and hold responsible officials accountable. That would strengthen, rather than weaken, America’s ability to demand the same from the Iranian government and other repressive government around the world.”

The U.N. report simultaneously leveled sweeping allegations against Tehran over its response to protests that erupted in late December, according to the U.N. Human Rights Office.

Iranian authorities carried out unlawful killings, arbitrary arrests, torture, enforced disappearances and severe restrictions on freedom of expression as part of a widespread and systematic attack against civilians, according to the U.N. Human Rights Office. The mission concluded that some of the conduct amounted to crimes against humanity.

The mission said the crackdown included killings, restrictions on communications and the use of the death penalty, according to the U.N. report. Iranian authorities have denied allegations of systematic rights abuses and have blamed violence surrounding the demonstrations on rioters, terrorists and foreign-backed actors, according to the mission’s account of Tehran’s position.

The fact-finding mission called for accountability for violations committed during both the conflict and the Iranian government’s crackdown and urged the parties to comply with their obligations under international law, according to the U.N. report.

“You cannot credibly demand international legal consequences for Iran, as for Russia, while simultaneously blocking them for Israel and the U.S. government itself,” Swanson told the DCNF. “The United States should join, respect, and uphold the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court. It should submit to the same standards that it seeks to impose on others.”