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  • UN Investigators Say US Strikes on Iranian School, Sports Center Amounted to War Crimes

    UN Investigators Say US Strikes on Iranian School, Sports Center Amounted to War Crimes

    Photo by Violaine Martin / UN Photo, via UN News

    More than 150 people, including roughly 120 children, died when Tomahawk missiles struck an elementary school in southern Iran on February 28, according to a new United Nations report that also documents a separate American strike, this one dispersing tungsten pellets over a sports complex and nearby homes, killing 22 civilians. Seven months later, the Pentagon still has not released its own account of how either target was chosen.

    The findings come from the UN Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Iran, an independent panel created by the Human Rights Council, in an 18-page report published as an advance version ahead of the Council’s 63rd session in Geneva. The mission concluded there are “reasonable grounds” to believe the United States committed a war crime by carrying out indiscriminate attacks on the Tayyiba Elementary School in Minab and on a sports facility and residential area in Lamerd, both of which the report describes as “clearly identifiable” civilian sites at the time they were hit.

    What the Mission Found

    The panel, chaired by Bangladeshi jurist Sara Hossain alongside fellow commissioners Shaheen Sardar Ali and Viviana Krsticevic, was not investigating a hypothetical. The strikes it examined followed the joint military campaign the United States and Israel launched against Iran in February 2026, and the mission’s language is unusually direct for a body more often tasked with scrutinizing authoritarian governments than a NATO-aligned power.

    According to the report, cited by UN News, the mission concluded that the United States committed a war crime by launching indiscriminate attacks that killed or injured civilians and damaged civilian property. A legal analysis published by Opinio Juris, drawing on specific paragraphs of the report, put the Minab toll at 157 dead, including 120 children and 26 school staff, with 95 more wounded, and the Lamerd toll at 20 killed and more than 100 injured. Other outlets, including NBC News and NPR, cited a combined figure of “at least 178” civilian deaths, while Democracy Now’s summary put it at 177. The variation appears to reflect differences in how each outlet aggregated the two incidents rather than any real dispute over what happened, and readers should treat any single combined number as an approximation drawn from a specific source rather than a settled count.

    The Minab findings echo earlier reporting: an Associated Press investigation had separately identified at least one US missile strike on the school, then referred to as Shajareh Tayyebeh. The mission’s report is the first to formally attach a war crimes designation to it.

    A Report That Cuts Both Ways

    The mission’s mandate was never limited to scrutinizing the United States. It was originally established by the Human Rights Council in November 2022 to investigate Iran’s crackdown on protesters following the death of Mahsa Amini, and its mandate was renewed last year to cover ongoing violations inside the country. That original focus dominates much of the new report.

    Investigators found that Iranian security forces carried out killings “on a massive scale in all provinces” during the government’s response to mass protests that began in late 2025 and continued into this year. At least 221 children, some as young as two, were among the dead, the mission said. It also documented tens of thousands of arbitrary detentions marked by torture, prolonged solitary confinement, and denial of access to legal counsel, along with at least 29 executions connected to the unrest. More than 70 people, including five women and three boys, remain at risk of execution over their alleged involvement in the protests, according to the report.

    Taken together, the mission concluded these actions amount to crimes against humanity, including murder, imprisonment, and torture. Iran’s government disputes the scale of that accounting entirely. Tehran has released its own figure of 3,038 people killed and 25,000 injured during the crackdown, framing most of the dead as “rioters” it alleges were directed by exiled opposition groups working with the United States and Israel. The mission said it could not verify an exact death toll but believes the real number exceeds what the government has acknowledged.

    Washington’s Response

    The reaction from the United States was immediate and unequivocal in its rejection. Anna Kelly, a White House spokesperson, told the Associated Press, in a statement reported by CNBC, that Iran’s government is “the only party in this conflict that has committed war crimes.” A broader White House statement, reported by Democracy Now, dismissed the Human Rights Council itself, saying it “has accomplished nothing for human rights while spouting unserious nonsense for decades.”

    A State Department official separately told CNBC that the department does not consider the report credible, and accused the Council of anti-American bias and of going easy on repressive governments elsewhere. That characterization was paraphrased by CNBC rather than presented as a verified direct quote from a named official, and should be read with that caveat.

    What Washington has not done, as the report itself notes, is release its own military investigation into how the Minab school and the Lamerd sports complex came to be targeted. That leaves the American side of the story, at least officially, largely unaddressed nearly seven months after the strikes.

    Why a UN Body Naming the US Matters

    Fact-finding missions convened by the Human Rights Council have, in recent years, mostly turned their attention toward governments in Syria, Myanmar, and similar settings, places without the diplomatic weight to shape the Council’s own membership. A body using that same evidentiary process to allege war crimes by the United States, a permanent member of the international system’s most powerful institutions, tests how far UN human rights mechanisms can reach when the country in question pushes back as forcefully as Washington has here.

    It also arrives at an awkward moment. The US-Israel-Iran conflict that produced these strikes remains unresolved, and a possible meeting between Gulf Arab states, the United States, and Iran has been floated around next week’s UN General Assembly session in New York, according to CNBC. Whether that diplomacy proceeds, and whether the Pentagon ever makes its targeting review public, will likely shape how much practical weight this report carries beyond Geneva.

    For now, the findings sit alongside each other awkwardly but deliberately: a UN panel accusing a global power of war crimes in the same document where it accuses the Iranian government of crimes against humanity against its own people. Both governments have rejected the parts of the report aimed at them. Neither has offered the kind of independent accounting that might settle the questions the mission raised. The Human Rights Council’s full 47-member body was expected to take up the report formally as its 63rd session continues in Geneva through October 7, and how member states respond, particularly whether any push for further investigation or referral, is the next thing worth watching.

  • DRC’s Ebola Outbreak Tops 7,400 Cases as UN Warns Response Is Only Half Funded

    DRC’s Ebola Outbreak Tops 7,400 Cases as UN Warns Response Is Only Half Funded

    Photo by Daniel Elombat / WHO, via WHO Newsroom.

    In a cramped isolation ward in Butembo, doctors are now watching for a pattern that has become grimly familiar this year: a cluster of fevers today usually means a cluster of deaths within the week. Nine months into an outbreak that has already killed more people than nearly any Ebola epidemic in recorded history, the numbers released by Congolese health authorities on September 16 make one thing clear. This crisis is not slowing down.

    The Democratic Republic of the Congo now has 7,404 confirmed cases and 3,577 deaths from Ebola disease caused by Bundibugyo virus, according to the country’s official situation report, cited by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC). In just the 24 hours before that count was taken, 59 new cases and 32 new deaths were recorded, a pace that has held largely steady for months even as the international response has scaled up around it.

    A Rare and Especially Lethal Strain

    Most people who have followed past Ebola outbreaks know the virus by its most infamous form, the Zaire strain, for which the world now has licensed vaccines and treatments. This outbreak is different. It is being driven by Bundibugyo virus, a rarer species of Ebola that has appeared only twice before, in Uganda in 2007 and DRC in 2012, and for which no approved vaccine or specific therapy exists.

    That gap in medical countermeasures helps explain why the case fatality ratio has held near 48 percent since the outbreak began, roughly one in every two confirmed patients has died. It also explains why health officials describe this as more than a humanitarian emergency. It is, as one WHO scientist put it, a live test of how the global health system responds when it has almost none of the tools it would normally reach for.

    The outbreak was first detected in Ituri Province in May 2026, after DRC’s National Institute of Biomedical Research confirmed Bundibugyo virus disease following an alert about an unusually deadly cluster of illness in the Mongbwalu health zone. It was the country’s 17th Ebola outbreak since the virus was first identified in 1976, arriving just five months after the previous one had ended. On May 17, WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus determined that the epidemic constituted a Public Health Emergency of International Concern, the organization’s highest level of alert short of declaring a pandemic emergency, a threshold he said the outbreak did not meet.

    From that initial cluster, the virus has spread into 62 of DRC’s 167 health zones across seven provinces, stretching from Ituri through North Kivu, South Kivu, Haut-Uélé, Tshopo, Bas-Uélé and Sud-Ubangi. Ituri remains the hardest-hit province by raw numbers, but it is North Kivu that is now drawing the most anxious attention from epidemiologists.

    Why North Kivu Is the New Flashpoint

    “Although the response has been unprecedented in its scale, the epidemic continues to expand,” said Dr. Olivier le Polain, WHO’s unit head for epidemiology and analytics for response, in comments reported by UN News on September 15. He said his team is watching North Kivu closely, “particularly Butembo and Katwa,” where weekly case counts have reportedly doubled from around 100 to around 200.

    Le Polain estimated the response would need “many, many months” to bring the outbreak fully under control, a sobering timeline for an epidemic the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has already called the second-largest Ebola outbreak ever recorded. At one point in August, tracking aggregators identified it as the fastest-growing Ebola outbreak on record, with the CDC noting the case count reached roughly 5,000 in its first 100 days alone, a pace it described in a MMWR report as unprecedented.

    The virus did briefly cross into Uganda, where 20 cases were confirmed between May and June. That linked outbreak was declared over by WHO on August 25 after 42 days passed without a new case, a rare piece of good news in an otherwise grim year. Three cases were exported outside Africa during the outbreak, two American aid workers evacuated to Germany and a French humanitarian doctor repatriated to France in late June. All three have recovered.

    The Money Isn’t There Yet

    Behind the case counts sits a second, quieter crisis: funding. Julien Harneis, the UN’s Special Ebola Coordinator, told reporters this week that the $1.3 billion humanitarian response plan for the outbreak is less than half funded, at 49 percent, with roughly $1 billion more needed to sustain operations beyond the first six months.

    “If we don’t have the resources, the epidemic will come back,” Harneis said, according to UN News. “It remains a deadly and massive epidemic.” He was blunt about what a funding shortfall would mean on the ground. “If you don’t provide the care, if you don’t finance the care, if you don’t provide the technical resources, then Ebola is a live enemy and will come back at us.”

    That warning lands against a backdrop of compounding hardship in eastern DRC, a region already strained by conflict. UN officials say the outbreak is worsening hunger, keeping people away from health facilities out of fear of exposure, driving up maternal mortality, and interrupting HIV treatment programs for patients who need consistent care to survive.

    Racing to Build Tools That Don’t Yet Exist

    With no licensed vaccine or treatment for Bundibugyo virus, researchers have spent the past several months trying to build one in real time. In July, the EBO-PEP trial launched in DRC and Uganda to test obeldesivir, an oral antiviral developed by Gilead Sciences, as a post-exposure prophylaxis for people who have had high-risk contact with confirmed patients. It is the first trial of this kind of drug for any filovirus, led by DRC’s biomedical research institute alongside French and international partners. No results have been reported publicly yet.

    A separate trial is testing whether the monoclonal antibody MBP134, combined with the antiviral remdesivir, can improve survival odds for patients already diagnosed, though outcomes from that trial have also not yet been confirmed. On the vaccine front, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations announced in June that it would accelerate development of three investigational Bundibugyo vaccines, including a candidate developed with the Oxford Vaccine Group.

    Tedros struck a note of cautious optimism when the post-exposure trial launched, saying that “every breakthrough begins with hope” and that a successful outcome “could mark a major step forward in preventing Bundibugyo Ebola.” For now, though, supportive care rather than any approved drug remains the only tool available to doctors treating patients in Ituri and North Kivu.

    What to Watch

    The coming weeks will likely turn on two questions that have nothing to do with each other and everything to do with whether this outbreak keeps growing. The first is scientific: whether the EBO-PEP and MBP134 trials produce results showing any real protective or therapeutic effect, which would be the first meaningful medical countermeasure this outbreak has had access to. The second is far more mundane and, right now, arguably more urgent: whether international donors close the gap on a response plan that is still less than half paid for.

    Until one of those things changes, the trajectory described by WHO’s own epidemiologists is likely to hold: an epidemic that keeps expanding despite an unprecedented response, with North Kivu’s Butembo and Katwa health zones the places most likely to determine what the next update looks like.