On Saturday, one week after a deadly strike on the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school building in Iran, Donald Trump finally commented on the horrific incident. Asked by a reporter whether the United States was responsible, the president replied, “No. In my opinion and based on what I’ve seen, that was done by Iran. … We think it was done by Iran.”
As a rule in the Republican administration, officials are expected to endorse everything Trump says without regard for evidence or propriety. But in this instance, when Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Mike Waltz were asked whether the president was correct about Iran’s culpability for the strike on a girls’ school, they both hedged and said the matter was being investigated.
At a press conference on Monday, Trump addressed the same subject and made matters noticeably worse.
A reporter reminded the president that there’s footage that suggests a Tomahawk missile was likely responsible for destroying the school and asked whether the U.S. will accept any responsibility for what happened. Initially, Trump again suggested that Iran still might have launched the strike, claiming that Iran “has some” Tomahawk missiles.
That wasn’t true. As The New York Times reported, “Tomahawk cruise missiles were developed in the latter part of the Cold War by the United States, and first used in combat during the 1991 Gulf War. Only three countries are known to have them: Australia, Britain and the United States. Two additional countries have agreed to purchase them, Japan in 2024 and the Netherlands in 2025.”
At the same event, a reporter followed up with a very good question: “Mr. President, you just suggested that Iran somehow got its hands on a Tomahawk and bombed its own elementary school on the first day of the war, but you’re the only person in your government saying this. Even your defense secretary wouldn’t say that. … Why are you the only person saying this?”
Trump replied, “I just don’t know enough about it.”
Oddly enough, that was very easy to believe, though it was hard not to wonder why, if the president just doesn’t know enough about it, why he made the spurious claims in the first place.
At issue is a strike launched on the first day of the U.S. war, which was soon followed by a Reuters report that noted that U.S. military investigators “believe it is likely that U.S. forces were responsible for” the deadly incident.
While the Reuters report was not independently verified by MS NOW, it dovetailed with a detailed analysis from The New York Times that indicated the school building “was severely damaged by a precision strike that occurred at the same time as attacks on an adjacent naval base operated by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.” On Monday morning, a related Times report elaborated, “A newly released video adds to the evidence that an American missile likely hit an Iranian elementary school where 175 people, many of them children, were reported killed.”
If these assessments hold, the strike on the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school building would rank among the worst cases of U.S.-caused civilian casualties in decades. Watch this space.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
