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A United Nations fact-finding mission has concluded that the U.S. committed war crimes in two attacks on Iran that killed scores of civilians, including over 120 children, on the first day of the war.

In a report released Thursday, the UN’s Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Iran said that the U.S. violated international human rights laws regarding civilian harm in its attacks in Minab and Lamerd.

On February 28, during the opening salvo of the U.S. and Israel’s surprise attack on Iran, evidence has shown that U.S. forces bombed an elementary girls’ school in Minab, killing over 160 people, 123 of them children under 13 years old. Analysis of the strike and witness testimony found that the U.S. struck the school at least twice, if not three times, in what is known as a double- or triple-tap strike.

Other evidence has found that the U.S. was responsible for a strike that same day on an athletic facility in Lamerd where girls were doing their regular sports training. That strike killed 22 civilians, including children, and wounded over 100 others. It also damaged an elementary school and residential buildings in the area.

Both sites were “clearly identifiable” as civilian areas and thus could not have been attacked without violating prohibitions on targeting civilians or civilian infrastructure, the report says.

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“[T]he strikes [on Minab] are a violation of the obligation to distinguish between civilian objects and military objectives and the prohibition of making civilian objects the object........

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