Washington Post – Nearly 1,500 Iranian civilians killed in U.S., Israeli strikes, report says
Nearly 1,500 Iranian civilians have been killed in dozens of U.S. and Israeli strikes that have hit schools, hospitals and other nonmilitary infrastructure since the Iran war began last month, a consortium of human rights groups alleged in a report issued Friday.
Researchers recorded 1,443 civilian fatalities — at least 217 of them children — from the start of hostilities on Feb. 28 through Monday, according to the report, which described the figures as “verified minimums” expected to rise as assessments — and airstrikes — continue. The findings do not specify whether U.S. or Israeli forces are suspected to have conducted each of the individual strikes cited in the report.
“Children are being killed at school. Men are dying at checkpoints as they try to move their families … Women are being killed while waiting in line for bread. Medics are being killed while responding to emergencies,” Skylar Thompson, deputy director of Human Rights Activists in Iran (HRA), which co-authored the report, told The Washington Post. “These patterns of harm raise serious legal concerns regarding the conduct of hostilities and demand accountability.”
The findings appear to be the most comprehensive estimates yet of the growing toll of dead and wounded civilians in the month-long war.
The report concluded that major factors contributing to the loss of civilian life have included “targeting errors and misidentification” linked to old or flawed intelligence, the use of explosives in dense urban areas and focused attacks on infrastructure that could serve both civilian and military needs, including transportation and energy systems.
U.S. Central Command, which oversees military operations throughout the Middle East, declined to address questions about the report’s findings. In a brief statement, Navy Capt. Tim Hawkins, Centcom’s spokesman, said that “U.S. forces do not target civilians, unlike the Iranian regime which has indiscriminately targeted and attacked innocent people in neighboring countries more than 300 times” since the conflict began.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) issued a statement in response to the report that says the goal of its campaign is “to put an end to the existential threat posed by the Iranian regime to the State of Israel.” The IDF, it says, directs its strikes “exclusively against lawful military objectives in accordance with the Laws of Armed Conflict, including the principles of distinction, proportionality, and precautions during strikes.”
As The Post reported this month, flawed targeting probably played a role in a strike that hit a girls’ school in southern Iran. The building is adjacent to an Iranian military facility but in the last several years was walled off from the base, a development that may have been missed by military analysts responsible for studying changes at potential strike locations, according to people familiar with the issue.
At least 168 children were killed — and 110 civilians were injured — in the strike, according to the report, which Thompson says combined publicly available data and witness accounts to verify the death toll.
The Pentagon ordered a formal investigation of the school strike after an initial review, officials said, a tacit acknowledgment that the attack was carried out by U.S. forces and that civilian harm allegations appear to be credible. To date, U.S. officials have not explicitly accepted responsibility for the attack. If the investigation’s findings do affirm that U.S. forces were at fault, the incident would represent the largest confirmed civilian death toll from any single U.S. attack since 1991.
The report found that at least 43 other Iranian schools had been damaged in attacks since the conflict began.
HRA is an independent organization that researches suspected rights violations in Iran, including those committed by Tehran’s government. The organization is based in Washington and the Netherlands and relies on a decades-old network inside Iran to collect evidence.
Airwars, a Britain-based nonprofit that charts civilian harm through publicly available material, and the Center for Civilians in Conflict, a humanitarian protection group, also participated in the report.
“Airstrikes in populated areas have caused sudden loss of life, displacement, and damage to critical infrastructure, while intensified domestic repression has further restricted people’s ability to move, communicate, or seek medical care and safety,” the report said. “This is compounded by a dangerous narrative from the U.S. and Israel that frames harm as isolated or justified, obscuring the cumulative impact on civilians.”
Airwars has determined that at least a dozen separate attacks in Iran killed more than 10 civilians each, the report said. One attack, on a sports hall in southern Iran on Feb. 28, killed a reported 21 civilians, with another 110 injured, the report says. While it is unclear from the report whether that strike was carried out by Israel or the U.S., Pentagon officials have said that U.S. forces focused on destroying military targets in the southern region of Iran early in the war.
Most of the recorded attacks that left civilians dead occurred in and around Tehran, the capital, according to the report.
The deadliest day for civilians thus far was March 9, which saw 400 strikes and 262 civilians killed, the report says. On that day, one strike on an apartment building in eastern Tehran killed 20 people, including a child, according to the report.
“My children hid under the table. I didn’t know what to tell them. You can ’t explain to a seven-year-old why the sky over their city suddenly lights up, and then you hear an explosion,” said a 31-year old mother interviewed by researchers.