Forty-six United States senators, every member of the Senate Democratic caucus except one, sent a formal letter to Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth on Wednesday demanding written answers by March 18 on whether American forces were responsible for the destruction of the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in Minab, Iran, on the opening day of Operation Epic Fury, a strike that killed at least 168 people, the majority of them girls aged seven to twelve.
The letter, led by Senate Foreign Relations Committee ranking member Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire and co-authored by Senators Chris Van Hollen, Tim Kaine, Elizabeth Warren, and Brian Schatz, represents the most formally coordinated congressional challenge to the administration’s conduct of the Iran war since it began on February 28.
No Republican senator signed the letter.
Members of the president’s party, which holds a 53-seat majority, have almost unanimously backed the strategy, with only a handful expressing doubt about any aspect of the war.
The sole Democratic abstention was Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, who has publicly supported Operation Epic Fury and promoted the administration’s framing that the campaign is designed to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. Fetterman said separately that an investigation into the school strike was appropriate, while declining to sign the letter.
The letter arrived on the same day the New York Times reported the preliminary findings of a Pentagon probe that found the strike on the Minab school was the result of a targeting mistake by the US military, which was conducting strikes on an adjacent Iranian naval base of which the school building was formerly a part.
The preliminary conclusion, which has not been confirmed as final, aligns with the assessment reported by CBS News on March 5, which cited a person briefed on the internal review as saying American forces were “likely” responsible and that the error stemmed from intelligence that wrongly identified the compound as an active military installation. The school had been walled off from the adjacent Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps naval base and operating as a civilian educational facility since at least 2016, according to satellite imagery analysis published by the Associated Press and NPR.
“The results of this school attack are horrific. The majority of those killed in the strikes were girls between the ages of 7 and 12 years old. Neither the United States nor the Israeli Government has yet taken responsibility for this attack,” the senators wrote.
They characterised the Minab strike as potentially one of the worst single instances of US-caused civilian casualties in the country’s modern military history, and said the findings of the internal review must be made public as soon as the investigation is concluded, along with any accountability measures that follow.
The letter poses a series of specific and pointed questions to Hegseth, beginning with whether US forces conducted the strikes that hit the school on February 28. It asks what the intended target was, what led to the alleged misdirection, at what command level authorisation was granted, and what assessments of the building were made before the strikes were carried out.
Read Also: School Strike Kills Dozens Of Girls As Iran Civilian Toll Mounts
The senators also specifically raised concerns about the reported use of artificial intelligence tools to select and prioritise targets in Iran, a reference to reporting by the Washington Post that the Anthropic AI system Claude played a central role in targeting operations for the campaign. They asked directly whether AI-assisted targeting contributed to the Minab strike.
The letter also addressed the hollowing out of the Pentagon’s Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan office, a congressionally mandated body established after widespread civilian casualty criticism of operations in Syria and Afghanistan. One former Pentagon official told the Associated Press that under Hegseth, the office’s staffing was slashed and work on updating so-called “no strike lists” — databases of protected civilian sites maintained to prevent targeting errors, had stopped entirely.
US Central Command spokesman Captain Tim Hawkins denied that only a single person remained assigned to the civilian harm mission but declined to provide further details, citing the ongoing investigation.
The senators directed particular attention to Hegseth’s public statements. In a press conference shortly after the war began, the Defence Secretary said Operation Epic Fury would have “no stupid rules of engagement” and that there would be “death and destruction from the sky all day long.” “As Secretary of Defense, you set the tone for U.S. military conduct, and your recent comments send a clear message of disregard for the laws of war,” the letter states, adding that the rhetoric “only serves to endanger civilians, including American citizens, in the region and around the globe.”
The senators stated that the United States is a party to the Geneva Conventions and bound by international humanitarian law, including the principles of distinction, proportionality, and precaution, and described these as “binding and non-negotiable standards designed to protect innocent human life.”
Read Also: Iran Threatens $200 Oil As Hormuz Shipping Crisis Deepens
They asked Hegseth directly whether he had complied with rules designed to prevent the commission of war crimes.
Former CIA Director and retired US Army General David Petraeus, who commanded US Central Command from 2008 to 2010, told BBC News on Wednesday that the available evidence pointed toward American responsibility.
“The Americans, tragically, were probably the ones, we were the only ones that have Tomahawk missiles in this particular exercise, this war,” Petraeus said, while noting he had not directly reviewed the evidence under examination by investigators. He said it appeared that the strike on the school may have been executed using outdated data from a period when the building was part of a larger Iranian naval compound, before it was converted to civilian educational use.
Video authenticated by BBC Verify from Iran’s semi-official Mehr News Agency showed a missile in the seconds before impact at the adjacent IRGC base. Weapons identification experts who reviewed the footage said the missile’s configuration was consistent with a Tomahawk cruise missile, a weapon not known to be in Israel’s or Iran’s arsenals, and that the pattern of multiple simultaneous strikes on the compound indicated a US air operation rather than a unilateral Israeli one.
Israel has stated it was not aware of any operations in the area on February 28 and that the targeting was not discussed with the Israeli military, according to two Israeli officials who spoke to the Washington Post.
The Democrats’ letter to Hegseth came one week after Senate Republicans blocked a bipartisan war powers resolution, introduced by Senator Tim Kaine, that sought to halt the air war and require congressional authorisation for any hostilities against Iran. Every member of the Democratic caucus except Fetterman voted in favour of the resolution; all Republicans voted against it.
The Pentagon did not respond to media requests for comment on the letter on Wednesday. Senators demanded Hegseth’s written responses by March 18, 2026. No indication has been given by the Defence Secretary’s office as to when that deadline will be acknowledged or met.