Updated March 11, 2026 at 3:12 PM MDT
The U.S. has launched a formal investigation into a missile strike on an Iranian girls' school that killed at least 165 civilians, many of them children, after a preliminary assessment determined the U.S. was at fault, according to a U.S. official who was not authorized to speak publicly. The investigation is expected to take months and will include interviews with all those involved, from planners and commanders to those who carried out the strike.
If the U.S. role in the attack is confirmed, it would rank among the military's most deadly incidents involving civilians in decades. Congress created a special Pentagon office to prevent the accidental targeting of civilians but it was dramatically scaled back by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth soon after he took office last year.
"This investigation is ongoing. As we have said, unlike the terrorist Iranian regime, the United States does not target civilians," said White House spokesperson Anna Kelly.
The Pentagon did not respond to a request for comment.
At a press conference shortly after the war began, Hegseth criticized "stupid rules of engagement," and said such rules interfere with winning.
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NPR was the first news organization to report that the strike on the school appeared to be part of an attack involving precision weapons. Subsequent video of the strike released by Iranian state media gave visual indications that Tomahawk missiles struck a compound that included the school. Iranian state media also released pictures of Tomahawk missile components on a table in front of the school
NPR previously reported that the girls' school was once part of what had been an Iranian Revolutionary Guard naval base and may have been shown on outdated U.S. target lists as a military building.
The school was walled off from the base sometime between 2013 and 2016, according to historical satellite imagery reviewed by NPR. A public health clinic on the base was also struck. Satellite images show that clinic was walled off from the base around 2024, and opened in 2025 according to local media reports. Iranian Revolutionary Guard commander-in-chief Hossein Salami cut the ribbon for the clinic's opening. He was assassinated by Israel later that year.
At a press conference this week, President Trump suggested that Iran or another country fired the missile, calling the U.S.-made Tomahawks "very generic" weapons. But several military analysts told NPR this week that no Iranian missile resembled the one in the video.
"Tomahawks are only used and operated by a very small number of nations," said N.R. Jenzen-Jones, director of Armament Research Services, a technical intelligence consultancy that provides munitions analysis to governments and NGOs. He noted that the U.S. is the only country in the conflict that uses them.
"I think it's pretty clear from the emerging information that it's likely a strike that's gone wrong," he said. "The most likely scenario at this point is that somewhere along the way in the targeting process, there was an intelligence failure."
After a series of fatal strikes involving civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, Congress directed the Pentagon to reduce civilian casualties as part of a 2019 law. During the Biden administration, the Defense Department created the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response initiative.
The civilian mitigation teams – cut by 90% by Hegseth – work with military commanders on target planning, and making sure that targets are actually military sites. The teams help come up with "no strike" lists, including religious and cultural sites and schools. They have provided details on whether potential target areas have high concentrations of civilians. They have also suggested using precision munitions, or smaller weapons to mitigate harm.
"At every level, civilian protection has been deprioritized," said Oona Hathaway, a professor of International Law at Yale Law School and the director of its Center for Global Legal Challenges. "A modern army has to fight according to the law, and the law requires that you protect civilians."
The U.S. official told NPR that Hegseth's decision to scale back those efforts meant that the U.S. Central Command, which oversees U.S. forces in the Middle East, had only one staffer assigned to civilian casualty mitigation operations. The official also said that due to Hegseth's decision to cut Defense Department funding to prevent civilian casualties, military commands were paying out of their own budget for analysts to do the work that had once been centrally planned.
NPR's RAD team contributed to this report.
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