UNITED NATIONS HUMAN rights experts have said there are “reasonable grounds to believe” that the US committed war crimes in two strikes on Iran that killed 177 people. 

A report by the independent international fact-finding mission on Iran said a strike on a primary school in Minab and a sports centre in Lamerd on 28 February, the first day of the US-Israel war on Iran, constituted indiscriminate attacks causing civilian deaths and damage to civilian infrastructure. 

It said both the school and the sports centre were clearly identifiable, and there is no indication that either was being used for military purposes. 

The US has yet to release the findings of an investigation into the strike on the school, which was first announced in March, and has denied responsibility for the attack on the sports centre.

The Shajareh Tayyebeh Primary School in Minab was struck twice, often described as a ‘double-tap’ strike, with Tomahawk missiles on the first day of the war. 

Iran has said those killed included 120 schoolchildren, 26 educators, seven parents of students, a school bus driver and a male technician from a nearby pharmacy.

Preliminary findings of a US military investigation reported by The New York Times states that the cruise missiles hit the school due to a targeting mistake. 

The UN experts concluded that the building of the school “was the intended point of impact and that the damage did not result from an errant strike or collateral damage” from the attack on an adjacent Islamic Revolutionary Guard compound.

On the same day, the sports centre in Lamerd city was struck by a US-made Precision Strike Missile (PrSM). Designed to detonate above its target, the missiles disperse around 180,000 tungsten pellets over a wide area, producing a perforation impact.

Iran has said 22 people were killed in the strike, including 10 women and 12 men. 

The UN experts again found that, based on the totality of the evidence, it had reasonable grounds to believe that the munitions used in the airstrike on and around the sports centre was carried out by the US, adding that it is “the only party to the conflict that possesses PrSM missiles”. 

The report said the mission observed the detonations seen in verified videos which occurred directly above the target, and not upon impact, which is consistent with a PrSM’s “airburst” mechanism.

Verified images and video also showed the extensive pock marking of the surfaces of the airstrike sites, which is “a hallmark of the PrSM’s airburst dispersal of tungsten pellets”, it said. 

The report also said the Iranian government’s repression of domestic protests that began in late 2025 over the rising cost of living represented “a significant escalation… of its well-established pattern of suppressing dissent”.

State security forces killed protesters “on a staggering and unprecedented scale” across all 31 provinces – reportedly including at least 221 children, attacked healthcare facilities and arrested tens of thousands of people, it said.

“People in Iran are caught between intensified repression and violence by their government and renewed armed conflict and insecurity resulting from the hostilities between Iran and the US and Israel,” the report states.

It said the Iranian government’s response to the protests “cannot be understood as a mere continuation of its well-established pattern of suppressing dissent”.

“It represents a significant escalation from the past – in the scale of violence and killings, in efforts to sever contact between communities and with the outside world, in the use of repressive laws, and in the ever-increasing use of the death penalty as a tool of intimidation and control.”

Concluding, the experts said the parties to the conflict should “immediately cease hostilities” and all UN member states should take prompt diplomatic action to implement a permanent peace.

“They should also ensure that allegations of violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law by all parties are independently investigated and those responsible held to account.”