10 ms·
Iran school bombing: grounds to believe US was behind atrocity, UN finds
- r_lee 17d agolet me guess, the end result of this will be "strong condemnation"?
- boesboes 17d agoThat was never a question right?
- throwaway198846 17d agoYes which is why this is an uninteresting thread
- bragr 17d agoWell the US government tried to deny it was a school at first, so that's put to bed at least.
- master_crab 17d ago[flagged]
- shevy-java 17d agoI remember that too. Initially they tried to go the "Iran caused this". Then the analysis quickly showed that it were US weapons. Suddenly the "Iran caused this" narrative disappeared. There are professional liars in media. Their job is to lie and obfuscate.
- tokai 17d ago>the analysis quickly showed Wasn't the analysis a literal image with the Tomahawk caught mid air, clearly identifiable?
- NorwegianDude 17d agoThe US even said it was Iran who did it. The US has literally become the least trustworthy nation in the world by lying about everything, threatening to go to war against allies for no other reason than wanting the land...
- chrocni380 17d ago[flagged]
- shimman 17d agoIf the only thing you care about is money, you truly have a sad existence of a life.
- chrocni380 17d ago> If the only thing you care about is money, you truly have a sad existence of a life. You invest in European ETFs? o7
- shimman 17d agoDefinitely not beating the rap with that comment LMAO.
- paulddraper 17d agoOverstated. It was never given as a fact. Was literally "in my opinion" speculation. A dumb opinion? Okay. But not statement of fact.
- Rooster61 17d agoThis has very little value when everything gets prefaced with "in my opinion". Government officials should be held to a higher standard when it comes to releasing these types of statements.
- hirvi74 17d agoWell, if the map image I saw initially after the bombing was correct, then the facility did not used to be a school. The building had different, military purposes as it was attached to a military base, and later was converted into a school. My understanding is that the AI that was used to facilitate this attack was trained on maps where the building was still used for military purposes some years back. It absolutely does not excuse anything, but I suppose that might explain the denial at first. I cannot explain any further denial though.
- alistairSH 17d agoGoogle says the building was converted 11 years ago. We waged an AI-directed attack based on decade+ maps. That should be criminal.
- shevy-java 17d agoTrump claimed it was an accident. Then again he seems to be similar to Putin: both lie almost all of the time. Edit: Actually, others pointed out that at first the narrative was that Iran did it. That's indeed true that the media used that; perhaps one can even build up a timestamp of media reporting falseness here. I forgot which media reported the above lie first.
- runmanny 17d ago[flagged]
- chrocni380 17d ago[flagged]
- phoghed 17d ago> Do you see Anthropic/OpenAI engineers defending against Meta/Google SWEs Yes, Dario is constantly whining about China
- saadn92 17d agoThey’d like us to believe otherwise (the administration)
- jvanderbot 17d agoColloquially, I think it is well accepted that US launched the missiles. The question is whether they indiscriminately targeted civilians. NYT did an excellent analysis showing that the US probably did intentionally target the building, believing it to be part of the nearby compound that received several direct strikes. This analysis is really good [1] The definition of war crime is not "Killed civilians" it is "targeted civilians" or "reckless indiscriminate attacks". My understanding of the NYT analysis is that this was very plausibly misunderstood to still be part of the iran national guard compound. Everyone gets their own opinion on this. There were 900 or so strikes in the first 12h, and only one school hit, and that school was actually part of the compound before. A horrific accident that was brought on by unnecessary hostilities, i think. 1: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/11/us/politics/iran-school-missile-strike.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/11/us/politics/iran-school-m...
- jvanderbot 17d agoI'll add the definition from the Rome statute that, by my read, establishes a war crime when there is intent to commit the civilian strikes: Unless otherwise provided, a person shall be criminally responsible and liable for punishment for a crime within the jurisdiction of the Court only if the material elements are committed with intent and knowledge. A mistake of fact shall be a ground for excluding criminal responsibility only if it negates the mental element required by the crime. Still this is a legal defense that might plausibly be used during a trial, not necessarily a reason to skip a trial.
- toast0 17d agoFrom that text, it sure sounds to me that these attacks are going to be legal. The article describes them as 'indescriminate', but they were specifically targetted based on a mistake of fact. There's certainly evidence that the US was neglegent in relying on old information without verifying. That's serious and reprehensible, but I don't know that that rises to the level of a war crime. I'll add that it's not what I want my country's military to be doing and that if I had any power, there would be consequences for the people involved in decision making that led to this, as well as changes in procedure to reduce this type of mistake in the future, and a settlement paid to the people affected by this strike.
- dgellow 17d agoI mean, for the general public it was pretty clear the US was very likely to be at fault here. But for a UN report you generally expect a way higher level of evidence and standard for the analysis (in practice it’s not always the case though, some UN reports are sometimes fairly shallow, always good to skim through them and not rely only on the reporting if you want the nuanced story)
- cumshitpiss 17d ago[dead]
- gcanyon 17d ago> failed to adequately verify the information before launching the strike I'm so proud to be an American today :-(
- megous 17d ago[flagged]
- MomsAVoxell 17d agoThen do something about it - inform yourself about the other days. The USA has been dropping bombs on innocent people on average for the past 25 years every 15 minutes. The only force capable of reining in the US’ out of control military industrial complex, is the American people themselves. Until they do, the atrocities continue unabated.
- zzgo 17d agoI can't even get the government to take masked federal agents off my streets, how the hell am I going to rein (not reign) in the military industrial complex?
- runmanny 17d agoI can’t stop them from tracking our posts to use against us under NPSM7 at some point in the future.
- MomsAVoxell 17d agoDon’t use political violence, intimidation, and domestic terror. Use your democracy while you still can.
- jackmott42 17d ago[flagged]
- zzgo 17d ago[flagged]
- tokai 17d agothe classic gotcha that doesn't work on outsiders that don't care about the partisan devide. All US presidents going back for quite a while are war criminals.
- _menelaus 17d agoChristians aren't bad people. Its just that the older ones (and a few young ones) get their information from terrible sources. They watch Fox News, where every day Trump is presented as the hero fighting against the evil democrats. They don't notice the propaganda like a fish doesn't notice water. Bad inputs bad outputs.
- krapp 17d agoChristians aren't bad people, but it's undeniable that the one demographic that supports Trump more than any other are Christians. Trump is the face, heart and soul of American Christianity. Where else are Christians arguing that genocide on behalf of Israel is a moral imperative, or that empathy is a sin? If so many Christians were so easily swayed by hateful propaganda then that's still a fault and failure of the religion, as is the utter failure of the "good" Christians to do anything about it. People aren't machines that blindly process inputs into outputs, at least not in any useful sense that takes morality and ethics into account. People have agency, they're responsible for their own decisions. And these people have a Bible probably at arms reach at all times and they know what it says.
- ReptileMan 17d agoECHR, UN and ECJ will find any and everything as crime against humanity so it is best to ignore them and make your own judgement. It is like asking ADL if something is antisemitism or SPLC if something is racism - the answer will always be yes, so why bother.
- Zealotux 17d agoOh ok, so then how do you qualify this event? As whoopsie? A misclick?
- iAMkenough 17d agoOkay. My own judgement is targeting strikes on an elementary school full of hundreds of school children is a war crime. Do you not want to see accountability for that? Are you not pro-life?
- ReptileMan 17d agoOf course I want to see accountability. Two valuable and expensive ammunitions were wasted and pilots were exposed to unnecessary risk due to sloppy intelligence work. Also there should be punishment for the civilian deaths I guess. But unless the school was deliberately targeted because it was a school, double taping on military barracks that are attached to a military base shouldn't be looked as a war crime. USG is under no obligation to have up to date information. >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 attacks were obviously not indiscriminate. Indiscriminate is covering an area with napalm and throwing a match.
- iAMkenough 17d agoIt was clearly a school and deliberately targeted. You caring more about munitions than the lives of innocent children says a lot about who you are.
- 17d ago
- shevy-java 17d agoGPS spies on everyone. Flock cameras too. Meta-spy glasses continue that trend. Now officials tell the public "we used old maps" when bombing a school with kids. That's a deliberate lie. It wastes our time to even want to lend any credibility to wanting to believe such a lie.
- ranger_danger 17d ago> GPS spies on everyone. That's... not how GPS works.
- runjake 17d agoI think what the commenter meant is that by using the GPS in mobile devices, these devices and their apps report their locations to various other places, including data collectors, which is probably how the US determined there was an Iranian commander at or near the school.
- t2r3121 17d ago> GPS spies on everyone. Point of clarification - GPS/GNSS does not work that way. The GPS in your phone only _listens_ to GPS signals and is not transmitting to/observable by the satellite. https://ciechanow.ski/gps/ https://ciechanow.ski/gps/
- CommanderData 17d agoWhenever I read the US or Israel wanting to free Iran from it's "horrible regime", remember this incident plus the hospitals targeted during their attack.
- bushbaba 17d agoAnd remember how Iran slaughtered tens of thousands of its own citizens a few weeks prior. And the continual killing of Iranian citizens having differing political options of the regime. War is never pretty or perfect. Winning a war comes with great cost
- Windchaser 17d ago> And remember how Iran slaughtered tens of thousands of its own citizens a few weeks prior. And the continual killing of Iranian citizens having differing political options of the regime So, that's over, then? We changed the regime and now things are better?
- ndiddy 17d agoThe purpose of starting a war is to extract concessions from the other side that you were unable to get through diplomacy, not to kill a lot of people because you think they deserve it. So far Iran has not been willing to make any concessions that it wasn't willing to make before the start of the war, and has shown that it can disrupt Gulf oil exports, which it didn't do prior to the US starting the war. Nothing has been achieved besides pointless bloodshed.
- watwut 17d agoIran was attack as it was making concessions.
- tasuki 17d ago> And remember how Iran slaughtered tens of thousands of its own citizens a few weeks prior. Yes? How is that a reason to kill even more Iranians, especially schoolgirls?
- sschueller 17d agoI hope it was not deliberate but it may have been. Blowing up the kids of military generals is a strategic move when you ignore the "rules of war".
- BariumBlue 17d agoWasn't it right next to a military base, and previously used as part of that military base? And therefore a reasonable part of the targeting list that should've gotten more scrutiny but just didn't? This feels like someone wanted to slander the US military actions, could only find one unambiguously negative thing, so then they pontificated on that.
- trehalose 17d agoI don’t understand your attitude. The slaughter of hundreds of children seems genuinely inherently upsetting and unacceptable to me. I don’t see why an element of negligence would make this something to just “not pontificate on” in a court of law or in public discourse.
- BariumBlue 17d ago[flagged]
- GordonS 17d agoCome on, this is really laying it on thick! I'd like to see some pretty strong evidence of that almost comically over-the-top list you open with.
- carefree-bob 17d agoHow exactly does an atrocity "trigger" a bombing of a school? Do you feel entitled to some atrocity credits when your opponent commits an atrocity? Fill in the gaps for me. I feel like you are missing some steps there.
- BariumBlue 17d agoYou're implying it was intentional, when it clearly was not. I'd be OK with calling it criminal negligence. My annoyance was the focus on something that aligns with a narrative some people love to push (US bad), and ignoring the bigger issues that actually plague the Iranian people that just get ignored because no one actually cares.
- pmkary 17d agoYes because normal people have tomahawks they can shoot to schools in their basements, and it required a court to find out who was responsible: United States, Dr. Evil, or the Cookie Monster?
- pickleglitch 17d agoI don't know, Cookie Monster is pretty suspicious. Never trust a junkie.
- pmkary 17d agoYes but I'm sure there was oil under the school and it was all for the best. After all "it’s more fun doing it this way."
- preg_match 17d agoHe’s not a junkie, he can quit at any time.
- skeledrew 17d agoSo... what's gonna be done about it? The recent precedent has been to invade the country, grab the president and try them.
- pmkary 17d agoA very good one minute summary of exactly what is about to happen: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2Whrat_Rn0I https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2Whrat_Rn0I
- awakeasleep 17d agoIf anyone else got their hopes up: this was a funny video not a serious reply
- deleted 17d ago[deleted]
- threecheese 17d agoThis is a flagrant mischaracterization and you should be ashamed. They even issued a retraction: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5SZYz7lZRRI https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5SZYz7lZRRI
- deleted 17d ago[deleted]
- thrance 17d agoSimilar sketch by the Onion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPfVkuPmpc8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPfVkuPmpc8
- pmkary 17d agoThis was just great... It was so real I couldn't really distinguish the scenes with animate scenes that were clearly CGI from reality.
- deleted 17d ago[deleted]
- chrocni380 17d ago[flagged]
- evolve2k 17d agoPropaganda machine running on overdrive on this one. Quick quick make some extra accounts to post doubt. Pathetic.
- chrocni380 17d ago[flagged]
- BoxOfRain 17d agoDemonstrably false from this thread alone. How can you meaningfully participate in a democracy when the world is so globalised without at least a basic understanding of international affairs?
- ianaye 17d agoWe all know this happened. What I find hilarious in the discussion here is that everyone also knows it was caused by AI replacing humans on the battlefield, but because so many here have deeply conflicted interests they pretend they don’t know and act as though some human somewhere did this intentionally. Greed really corrupts the dialog around military use of AI.
- jmathai 17d ago> so many here have deeply conflicted interests What do you mean by this? I use AI both personally and for work but I'm not conflicted at all about its use for things we generally agree are harmful.
- blueoranges 17d ago[dead]
- brewcejener 17d ago[dead]
- theplumber 17d ago[flagged]
- Georgelemental 17d agoPlenty of schools on American military bases! And a school across the street from the IDF headquarters.
- ukblewis 17d ago[flagged]
- text0404 17d agoThey did try to evacuate. The building was hit while they were doing so: > Hundreds of students are believed to have been inside the building by the time teachers and administrators received the news that bombs had begun falling on Tehran around 9:40 a.m. > Teachers and administrators thought it prudent to send the children home. They called parents on landline phones, summoning them for an early pickup, two people told the AP. A recently released report by Airwars, a London-based independent group that tracks recent conflicts, also found that parents were called to pick up their children. > At 10:15 a.m., Iran’s state media sent out an advisory, closing schools across the country. - https://apnews.com/article/iran-school-strike-baluch-trump-2a134a5c74d80db763db4c3eb6d0d847 https://apnews.com/article/iran-school-strike-baluch-trump-2... > if you think that America would leave children in that school for longer than 10 minutes after a war was launched Dude, the US doesn't even protect American schoolchildren from other Americans, let alone a foreign power: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uvalde_school_shooting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uvalde_school_shooting
- theplumber 17d agoMaybe someone should tell them that’s not a good idea? You don’t have to be too bright to see the risks of doing that. I wonder if they have a school in Jordan near that military base. It was pretty targeted from what I’ve read.
- Wildgoose 17d agoSeeing as it was a "double tap" it was clearly a deliberate target. Bomb the school, wait until officers from the nearby base with kids at the school arrive to try and rescue their daughters and hit it again. Clearly a war crime, possibly using Israeli targeting information, which clouds which State is ultimately responsible.
- jvanderbot 17d agoYes, the definition of war crime is not "intentionally targeted building" it is "intentionally targeted building that it knew was non-military and full of civilians". If you plausibly believed it to be a military target, then it's plausibly not a war crime. The question about whether US launched the missiles is not really in dispute, the intent and knowledge is in dispute. NYT did a great analysis essentially concluding it was plausibly a mistake, not an intentional or indiscriminate civilian attack. More here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49739018#49741081 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49739018#49741081
- pphysch 17d agoHow can anyone take this argument seriously when the DoW was simultaneously committing dozens of extrajudicial executions of small boat users in the Gulf?
- mthoms 17d agoIn all sincerity, people take it seriously because it helps them sleep at night.
- wand3r 17d agoI am not defending this morally, but these are clearly a group of the least competent stewards of the military in a long while. They were "completely clear on OPSEC", with a left-leaning Atlantic reporter in the signal group chat. This bombing also coalesced support in Iran and had a big rally around the flag effect. Data in Iran is hard and the timetable was extremely fast, again, due to incompetence and the inability to constrain a vassal. So its appalling to say, but a bunch of morons with LLMS and outdated targeting, pushed to meet the objectives of corrupt idiots is almost certainly the cause. I personally consider it a war crime, but I am not sure if it meets the legal definition.
- deleted 17d ago[deleted]
- hmokiguess 17d agoI'm gonna guess they will blame AI and say we need more AI safety, bonus if they claim it was an open weight model.
- jmyeet 17d agoOne great thing about the Internet is it lets you see how other people live, if you want to go looking for it. Think about all the things you want in your life: a house to live in, a car to drive, children (maybe), your children being able to get an education safely, good health, time with family and friends and so on. The point is that Iranian families want all of those things too. Because they're people just like you are. You can see videos of ordinary Iranians going to the market, going to work, having family over, eating a meal together and so on. It saddens and frightens me how easy it seems to dehumanize other people and basically be OK with killing them en masse. Now I want you to think about what you'd do if you sent your 11 year old daughter to school one day and some foreign government double tapped that school with 2 Tomahawk missiles killing almost 200 people, most of them children. We kind of do know because it's basically what happened after 9/11. We spent $8T+ on a 20 year war to kill over a million people in vengeance that really didn't do anything else. Remember that Afghanistan offered to hand bin Laden over after 9/11 [1]. The Trump administration tried (badly) lying about what happened. First it never happened. Second, it wasn't us. But nobody else has Tomahawk missiles so that was never going to work. The only question is where the targeting information came from and what verification was done. I am not convinced that Israel didn't supply this information so the US military would commit atrocities to keep them in a war that Israel had desperately wanted for decades. Every president since Reagan had been begged by Israeli PMs to invade Iran. All of them refused. It's widely believed that Netanyahu threatened to use nukes if Obama wouldn't do it. Obama called his bluff. Until Trump. And here we are. [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/oct/14/afghanistan.terrorism5 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/oct/14/afghanistan.te...
- SV_BubbleTime 17d ago[flagged]
- jameshilliard 17d ago> The point is that Iranian families want all of those things too. Because they're people just like you are. You can see videos of ordinary Iranians going to the market, going to work, having family over, eating a meal together and so on. It saddens and frightens me how easy it seems to dehumanize other people and basically be OK with killing them en masse. The IRGC/regime is what prevents them from living normal lives. The Iranian diaspora is protesting in favor or removing the regime since they know who the real enemy is.[0] [0] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy4w728kl4ko https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy4w728kl4ko
- BrunoDCDO 17d agoWater is wet
- codedump 17d ago[dead]
- SV_BubbleTime 17d ago[flagged]
- ukblewis 17d ago[flagged]
- bigyabai 17d agoWhich regime? SAVAK tortured and murdered tens of thousands of their own citizens with the CIA's help. If it's "devil worship" to protest my taxes being spent on torturing civilians, then so be it.
- goatlover 17d agoDevil worship? Who makes a comment like that on HN? The Iranian regime being worse doesn't justify bombing a girl's school! That's a war crime. Pointing it out isn't "devil worship".
- mahboi 17d agoThey're unrelated. It's not like there's an either-or, we had both happen and the regime is still going to stay.
- MomsAVoxell 17d agoWhy is this flagged?
- stronglikedan 17d agoTypically, it's because one or more users have selected the "flag" link just under the title.
- MomsAVoxell 17d agoYes but why flag it?
- stronglikedan 17d agoI suspect because some folks don't think this is topical for this audience. I tend to agree, since the conversation always devolves, but I'm not a flagger.
- albatross79 17d agoArguing whether it was intentional or a mistake is stupid. It doesn't matter, the enormity of it should shake everyone involved. That it doesn't is the real tell of what kind of people these are.
- senordevnyc 17d agoIt makes a huge, huge difference. Gross criminal negligence that results in the deaths of many civilians should of course be fully investigated and prosecuted, but it’s not the kind of pure evil that would do this intentionally. And I don’t believe you think they’re actually the same either.
- albatross79 17d agoIt is the same. At a certain level, intentions don't matter any more.
- mahboi 17d agoThis is what you say when there's been a repeated pattern of negligence. They struck a school once (edit: well one event with multiple strikes). The school was attached to a navy building. There should still be an investigation into the attack.
- albatross79 17d agoMagnitude matters just as much. If they struck your child's school im pretty sure you wouldn't care if it was the first or second occurrence.
- cogman10 17d agoThere was no reason to strike Iran in the first place. The absurd claim that "they were about to get nukes in 3 days!" is something that Israel has been claiming for 20 years. Our own intelligence agencies have said that they were not developing nukes. If this was a military command center, this would still be a war crime. The US was not at war with Iran before it attacked them. Unprovoked aggression is completely wrong.
- davidguetta 17d agoWas it not a former miiltary building wrongly designated by claude as a target ?
- Viliam1234 17d agoDo we have any evidence that it was actually designated by Claude as a target? Or is it just someone's convenient excuse.
- cineticdaffodil 17d ago[dead]
- nojvek 17d ago“Are we the baddies?” The guy who campaigned on ending wars sure loves killing children.
- hn_submit 17d agoThese are baseless and misleading accusations. In WWII many tens of thousands of civilians died because of erroneous bombings and no one ever got accused of "war crimes" over them. In a war mistakes are made and people will die as a result. But that doesn't mean they're war crimes. Blaming the U.S. whilst leaving Iran alone, which blatantly attacks civilian infrastructure, makes the U.N. look biased and nefarious.
- mahboi 17d agoThe UN doesn't leave Iran alone though, not even in the same article that mentions the US strike. https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/hrbodies/hrcouncil/sessions-regular/session63/advance-versions/a-hrc-63-61-auv-ffmi.pdf https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/hrbodies...
- hn_submit 16d agoIt's plain wrong to accuse U.S. forces of war crimes over this. You could say it was negligent of them to use old maps of the military base, but that's not a war crime. Trump should close the U.N. headquarters in New York and demolish it. Nothing useful is coming out of the U.N. these days anyway. It has outlived its purpose.
- mahboi 13d agogood guy
- ProllyInfamous 17d agoIIRC the guy who blew up his Tesla truck (in front of Trump Tower) was a drone pilot involved in this (or a similar) mass-casualty bombing. Perhaps he was leadership – but the released parts of his manifesto... were revealing about his opinion on US-motives. rug_sweep.gif
- pvaldes 17d agoOk. Everybody knew that. The first war crimes were free. Now what? Vote me again so I can keep bombing more girls tomorrow? Without action this is just a barely veiled attempt to appease the furious voters just before an election. All talk, no real will to fix this mess.
- Nevaeh 17d agoTheir families should receive an apology and compensation if it can be done covertly with a neutral third party I suppose. Even if it take decades. One day. For now I can only process it better knowing that The Red Cross Society of China allocated $200,000 to the Iranian Red Crescent Society specifically as special funds for the bereaved parents who can apply for it. Each family basically receive about an entire year of earnings, which isn't much but at least it is something to help cover funeral costs.
- MetroWind 16d agoI mean... of course it's the US. Who else could it be?