U.S. Did Bomb Girls’ School in Iran on First Day of War — Killing 175 People, Mostly Children

From The Washington Post / March 11, 2026

The Iranian elementary school building where scores of children were killed as the U.S. and Israel began their massive aerial campaign was on a U.S. target list and may have been mistaken for a military site, multiple people familiar with the strike told The Washington Post.

The deadly attack occurred in the first few hours of the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran — just as parents were hurrying to the two-story schoolhouse to take their kids home to safety — and killed at least 175 people, many of them children, according to Iranian state media.

It is still not clear why the building was hit, but one person familiar with the school strike said the building had been identified as a factory and had been an approved strike target. A second person familiar said there was an arms depot target located in the same area and did not know if the United States hit the school by mistake, or if U.S. officials had the wrong intelligence and thought the building was the arms depot.

“Initially there was some confusion on why it was on the target list,” said a third person familiar with the strike. The individual would not go into further detail, citing the military’s ongoing investigation into the strike.

Israel has said it did not have a role in the strike — and two Israeli officials told The Washington Post that this specific targeting was not cross-checked or discussed with the Israel Defense Forces before it took place.

The Post spoke to more than a dozen people to report this story in the United States and Israel, including those familiar with the incident and AI’s role in the Iran operations, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the issue.

Reuters first reported that military investigators believed it likely the U.S. was behind the attack, and the New York Times reported Wednesday that a preliminary Pentagon investigation had found the reason may have been due to outdated data. A U.S. official and a person familiar with the targeting confirmed to The Post that the initial investigation appeared to indicate that the school strike was conducted by the U.S. military. The mistaken strike was probably due to an intelligence error on the target location, the official said.

The school used to be part of an Iranian naval base and may still be affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy, but it had been walled off since 2015, and separate entrances were also added between mid-2015 and early 2016, according to a Post and expert analysis of satellite imagery. There is an outdoor play area that appears on Google Earth as early as 2017.

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