Democratic Sen. Jacky Rosen of Nevada on Sunday renewed pressure on the Department of Defense over its unreleased investigation into a February airstrike that killed at least 175 people, mostly children, at an elementary school in Iran, arguing that mounting evidence points to American responsibility and that the Pentagon owes the public a full accounting.
In a post on X published at 12:55 p.m. on July 26, 2026, Rosen said it is very likely that the U.S. military was behind the strike on the school and stressed that the United States has a duty to minimize civilian harm and to disclose the facts even when they are uncomfortable. She wrote that the Department of Defense “still has yet to release a report into the strike,” nearly five months after it occurred, and said she is demanding that the department release the information immediately.
Her full post reads: “It is very likely that the United States military bombed an Iranian elementary school nearly 5 months ago — killing at least 175 people, a majority of them innocent children. Yet, the Department of Defense still has yet to release a report into the strike.
The United States has an obligation to do everything we can to avoid civilian casualties, which is why we need to know the truth – no matter how difficult it may be to hear. I’m demanding the Department release this information now.”
The strike Rosen referenced hit the Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school in the southern Iranian city of Minab on Feb. 28, 2026, the opening day of the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran. Iranian officials have said the toll reached at least 175 people, the majority of them children, making it among the deadliest single incidents of civilian harm attributed to the U.S. military in decades.
According to reporting by The New York Times, an internal Pentagon investigation determined the school building had once been part of an adjacent Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy base and that U.S. targeting officers relied on outdated intelligence that failed to reflect the site’s conversion into a school years earlier. Satellite imagery reviewed by the Times showed watchtowers removed, public entrances added, and a painted sports field on the property well before the strike. Coordinates for the target were reportedly generated using old data supplied by the Defense Intelligence Agency and passed to U.S. Central Command.
Reuters was first to report on March 5 that internal military investigators believed U.S. forces were likely responsible for the strike, a finding Pentagon officials reportedly reached days later through their preliminary review, according to a letter later sent by lawmakers to the Defense Department.
The Pentagon publicly acknowledged an investigation was underway in mid-March. At a briefing that month, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that Central Command had appointed a general officer from outside the command to lead a formal review, telling reporters the command would determine what happened and share it once known. Hegseth also asserted at the time that U.S. forces do not target civilians, contrasting that with Iranian tactics, even as questions grew over how the school came to be classified as a legitimate military target.
President Trump has offered a shifting account of the episode. Days after the strike, he told reporters aboard Air Force One that he believed Iran was responsible, citing what he described as Iranian forces’ inaccurate weaponry, even as Hegseth stood beside him without contradicting the claim. Pressed later on why he was the only administration official pointing to Iran, Trump said he did not know enough about the details but would accept the outcome of the investigation, according to the Times’ reporting.
By mid-June, with the investigation still unresolved more than 100 days after the strike, Trump’s language shifted. Speaking to reporters at the Group of 7 summit in France, he said mistakes happen in war and added that nobody had done it on purpose, according to the Times. It was widely read as the closest the president had come to conceding U.S. responsibility, though he continued to defer questions about the findings to Hegseth and declined to commit to releasing them publicly.
Privately, U.S. military officials have described the strike as an intelligence failure rather than a deliberate act, telling the Times that personnel responsible for target selection worked from imagery that had not been updated in roughly seven years and that did not depict a school on the site. At least two individuals involved in assessing the location had reportedly recognized that a building on the former base appeared to have been converted for use as a school, but that assessment did not reach the officials responsible for approving the strike.
Pressure from Capitol Hill has built steadily in the months since. In June, a bipartisan group of senators sought to withhold Hegseth’s office travel funds in the annual defense authorization bill until the Pentagon submitted overdue civilian harm investigations to Congress, including an unredacted version of the Minab findings.
Around the same time, NBC News reported that a Pentagon spokesperson said the matter remained under investigation after Trump, asked whether anyone in his administration would be held accountable, again described the strike as a mistake and said war “is nasty.” NBC also reported growing concern among congressional and Pentagon officials that the administration could classify the findings and withhold them from the public entirely.
Earlier this month, Sen. Ruben Gallego of Arizona and two dozen Senate colleagues sent a letter to Hegseth and CENTCOM Commander Adm. Brad Cooper demanding the swift release of the investigation, which lawmakers said had reportedly been submitted for review in April but remained unreleased. The senators also noted that Hegseth’s tenure has included cuts of more than 90 percent to the Pentagon’s civilian harm mitigation and response programs, and called for the department to provide Congress and the public a clear accounting along with a plan to prevent future failures.
The lawmakers’ letter also called on the Pentagon to submit an unclassified version of the findings to Congress and the public, along with a remediation plan identifying corrective actions to prevent a repeat of the failure.
Rosen’s Sunday post places her among the growing number of lawmakers publicly pressing the Pentagon on the matter, and it is the latest sign that the delay in releasing the investigation’s findings has become a point of sustained bipartisan frustration on Capitol Hill, even as the Trump administration has yet to commit to a release date nearly five months after the strike occurred.
As of Sunday, the Department of Defense had not issued a public statement responding to Rosen’s post or announced a timeline for releasing the investigation’s results. The strike remains one of the deadliest incidents of civilian harm attributed to the U.S. military in recent decades, and the question of accountability for it continues to hang over both the Pentagon and the broader U.S. military campaign in Iran.