Pentagon withholds Minab school massacre report until after midterms

The Pentagon will withhold its internal report on the bombing of an Iranian elementary school until after the November 3 midterm elections, Bloomberg reported Thursday. Advisors to Secretary of War Pete Hegseth have conveyed to Pentagon personnel that the report on the strike on Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in Minab, southern Iran, will not be shared with the public before the elections.

The investigation has been all but complete for several months, officials told Bloomberg. Its findings are already known inside the building: flawed intelligence, outdated imagery and an overreliance on AI contributed to the attack. Bloomberg puts the number of children killed at 123. The general prosecutor in Minab has published a final toll of 156 — 120 students, 73 boys and 47 girls, along with 26 female teachers, the unborn child of a pregnant teacher, seven parents, a school bus driver and a technician from a nearby clinic. According to an earlier Bloomberg investigation, Pentagon personnel knew within hours that the United States was responsible. The Trump administration has never admitted carrying out the strike.

Representative Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican, introduced a resolution last month to impeach Hegseth over the bombing. The resolution alleges that the secretary ignored US laws meant to minimize civilian harm, dismantled the department's civilian-harm mitigation infrastructure, removed the senior-most Judge Advocates General responsible for independent legal oversight, and stripped civilian protection from the National Defense Strategy — while publicly describing legal restraints on military force as obstacles to "maximum lethality." Drop Site News has published an account of the massacre drawn from parents of children who were killed, survivors, rescue workers and teachers.

The report will now surface in the weeks after a national election. The voters who might have weighed its findings will read them, if they read them at all, after they have voted.

The general prosecutor in Minab published his final death toll in early April. The Pentagon's report on the same strike will wait until after November 3.