The U.S. military’s investigation into a strike that destroyed an Iranian girls’ school on the first day of the war is “complex” because the building sat on an active Iranian cruise missile site, the head of U.S. Central Command, Adm. Brad Cooper, testified before Congress on Tuesday.

The Feb. 28 strike on the Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in the southern city of Minab killed 168 children, mostly girls between the ages of 7 and 12, along with teachers and parents, according to Iranian officials. Reuters first reported that an initial internal U.S. military assessment found that American forces were likely responsible for the destruction of the school, and the Pentagon has since elevated the probe.

Multiple independent investigations, including reviews by The New York Times, the Associated Press, Amnesty International and the open-source collective Bellingcat, have concluded that a U.S. Navy BGM-109 Tomahawk Land Attack Missile struck the school in a salvo of three impacts in rapid succession, with the second strike hitting an interior prayer room where the principal had moved students after the first explosion. The preliminary U.S. inquiry, as reported by The Times, found that Central Command planners generated the target coordinates using outdated Defense Intelligence Agency data that still classified the school grounds as part of an adjacent Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps naval facility.

President Trump initially attributed the strike to Iran, calling the Tomahawk a “generic” weapon and asserting falsely that Tehran also operated them. That account has been contradicted by the preliminary Pentagon findings, by munitions experts, by geolocated video evidence and by the Senate Minority Leader on the floor of the U.S. Senate.

Adm. Cooper, appearing again before lawmakers Tuesday, also said Iran has hanged dozens of people since the April 7 ceasefire took effect and has targeted civilians in the Middle East thousands of times. He did not detail the specific incidents he was describing. Iranian authorities have carried out a wave of executions across the country since the start of the conflict, with rights groups documenting hangings of detainees accused of spying for Israel and of dissident activity.

The testimony built on Adm. Cooper’s appearance before the Senate Armed Services Committee on May 14, when he told lawmakers that Operation Epic Fury had set back Iran’s defense industrial base by 90 percent through more than 1,450 strikes on weapons-manufacturing facilities. He said it would take Iran “a generation” to rebuild its navy and years for its drone and missile production to recover, and that U.S. forces had destroyed 161 Iranian vessels across 16 classes of warship, eliminated more than 90 percent of Iran’s 8,000-mine inventory and rendered Iran’s air force incapable of flying a single sortie. Before the war, the Iranian air force flew between 30 and 100 sorties a day, he said. “Today that number is zero.”

“Iran has a significantly degraded threat, and they no longer threaten regional partners, or the United States, in ways that they were able to do before, across every domain,” Adm. Cooper told the Senate panel.

He declined this week, as he did on May 14, to directly address a series of reports by Reuters, the Washington Post, The New York Times and other news organizations that Iran, which stockpiled arms in underground facilities, has retained the bulk of its prewar missile and drone arsenal. A confidential CIA assessment reported by the Post estimated that Iran retained roughly three-quarters of its mobile launchers and 70 percent of its missile stockpile. A New York Times report this month cited U.S. intelligence agencies as believing Iran has held onto about 70 percent of its prewar missiles and a similar share of its launchers. Almost all of Iran’s underground storage facilities have reportedly been restored and reopened.

“The numbers I’ve seen in open source are not accurate,” Adm. Cooper told Sen. Richard Blumenthal, the Connecticut Democrat, last week, declining to elaborate, citing classification. “It’s more than just the numbers. It’s the command and control that’s been shattered. It’s the significant degradation and capability. And it’s the lack of any ability to then produce any missiles or drones on the backend.”

The CENTCOM chief has also acknowledged that Iran retains what he described as “nuisance capability,” including fast-boat harassment, drones, rockets, mining activity, GPS interference, proxy attacks and isolated strikes on commercial shipping. He told Sen. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan that Iran maintains “a very moderate if not small capability to continue strikes” in the region.

The Minab strike remains the only formal civilian-casualty investigation Central Command has opened, despite a New York Times report in April that identified 22 schools and 17 healthcare facilities as having been hit or damaged since the war began. Pressed by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, the New York Democrat, last week on how many schools the United States had struck, Adm. Cooper responded that “there is one active civilian casualty investigation from the 13,629 munitions” used against Iran, and that there was “no indication” any of the other reported incidents had occurred. He acknowledged when pressed that Central Command had not investigated them.

(YWN World Headquarters – NYC)