US strikes in Iran may amount to war crimes, according to UN-commissioned human rights experts who said there were “reasonable grounds” to believe two attacks killed at least 178 civilians.
The UN fact-finding mission on Iran said the strikes, carried out after the United States and Israel launched attacks on 28 February, may have involved indiscriminate attacks against civilians and civilian objects.
“Following the United States and Israeli attacks on 28 February, the mission found reasonable grounds to believe the United States committed the war crime of launching indiscriminate attacks resulting in the loss of life or injury to civilians or damage to civilian objects,” the mission said.
One of the strikes hit the Shajareh Tayyebeh school in Minab, in southern Iran, where women and children were among those reported killed. Iranian state media said 168 people died in the attack, most of them children, although there has been no final accounting.
The findings centre on two air strikes which the mission said resulted in at least 178 civilian deaths. The experts did not provide a final determination on the incidents, but said the available evidence met the threshold for reasonable grounds to believe a war crime had been committed.
The mission also reported that killings by Iranian state security forces had taken place on a “staggering scale”.
It said Iranian civilians had been caught between “gross human rights violations and crimes against humanity committed by their own government and the nation’s deadly conflict with the United States and Israel”.
