Pete Hegseth, the US defense secretary, offered few details and was evasive when asked about the deadly strike on a girls’ school in Iran, saying only that the US was “investigating” the incident.
Iranian officials say the attack, which happened on Saturday, killed at least 165 students.
“All I can say is we’re investigating that,” Hegseth said when asked about the bombing of the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ school in Minab. “We, of course, never target civilian targets, but we’re taking a look and investigating that.”
The school was struck on the first day of US and Israeli attacks on Iran. In addition to the many killed, Iranian state media also reported that 96 others were injured, many of them students attending classes at the Shajarah Tayyebeh school in the town.
On Tuesday, the United Nations human rights office called on what it described as “the forces behind a deadly attack on a girls’ school in Iran” to conduct an investigation and provide information about the incident, though it did not identify who it believed was responsible.
Iran’s ambassador to the UN in Geneva, Ali Bahreini, had previously raised the matter with Volker Turk, the UN human rights chief, in a letter dated 1 March, describing the attack as “unjustifiable” and “criminal”.
The UN committee on the rights of the child said in a statement that “the Committee is alarmed by reports of strikes on civilian infrastructure, including schools and hospitals, which have injured and traumatised children, and claimed many young lives”. Children must be protected from war, the committee added.
The UN committee on the rights of the child is composed of 18 independent experts responsible for monitoring how countries implement the convention on the rights of the child, an agreement designed to protect children’s rights to education and shield them from violence.
Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, said on Monday that US forces “would not deliberately target a school”.
On Tuesday, thousands of mourners gathered in the streets of Minab in southern Iran for the funeral of those killed in the airstrike on the girls’ elementary school.
More than 800 people have been killed in the conflict across the Middle East since the US and Israel launched their opening attacks on Iran, killing the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Iran responded with waves of retaliatory attacks against several countries in the region.
The US military has claimed that the number of strikes carried out on Saturday in the first 24 hours of its war on Iran was nearly double that of the “shock-and-awe” strikes on Iraq in 2003, and that nearly 2,000 targets had been hit so far in Iran.
