President Donald Trump and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth flatly denied that U.S. forces targeted civilians after a missile strike destroyed a girls’ school in Minab, Iran. Trump said the information he reviewed suggested Iran may have caused the explosion itself, while Hegseth repeated that U.S. forces don’t deliberately attack civilians and confirmed the Pentagon is reviewing the incident.
That didn’t stop Western media outlets from rushing to repeat Tehran’s accusations.
This may be a shock to you, but Iranian state media quickly blamed the United States and Israel for the February 28 explosion at Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ school, which killed 168 people, injuring dozens more.
The claim rapidly spread through Western coverage, even though it came from the same government currently fighting the United States.
In other words, the source behind the accusation wasn’t a neutral investigator, a verified battlefield report, or an independent intelligence agency.
It was the Iranian regime.
Reports describing a preliminary U.S. intelligence review added more fuel to the story; an assessment suggested American forces were “likely” responsible for the strike while targeting an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps naval facility located nearby.
The same early review also stated the school may have been struck accidentally after outdated targeting data misidentified the structure as part of the military compound.
Even with those caveats, many outlets ran headlines that treated Tehran’s accusation as a fact rather than an allegation from an adversarial government.