Four months after the horrific Iran school bombing, fears grow that Trump and Hegseth will bury the truth

A commemoration in Kerbala, Iraq of students who lost their lives in the attack on Minab. Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images View image in fullscreen A commemoration in Kerbala, Iraq of students who lost their lives in the attack on Minab. Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images Four months after the horrific Iran school bombing, fears grow that Trump and Hegseth will bury the truth A secretive investigation into the attack that killed at least 175 has reportedly ended. Will its findings see the light of day? T he attack on a girl’s elementary school in the Iranian town of Minab was one of the US military’s deadliest civilian bombings in decades. But nearly four months on, the Pentagon has produced no answers about why the military fired a Tomahawk cruise missile into a school on the first day of the war, killing at least 175 people, mostly children. Some critics doubt that the Pentagon ever will, or will bury the results under classifications to keep the worst mistakes secret from the public. As the US signs a shaky memorandum of understanding on a ceasefire with Iran, the secretive investigation into the attack has also become a test case for the self-styled secretary of war, Pete Hegseth’s new approach to what he calls “warfighting”. As he said in early March, nearly two weeks after the attack, “our rules of engagement are bold, precise and designed to unleash American power, not shackle it”. Shortly after the attack, Donald Trump suggested that it was carried out by Iran. When it became clear that the strike used a US-made Tomahawk missile , he suggested that Iran also had access to the cruise missiles. It does not. As he celebrated a ceasefire deal to open the Strait of Hormuz last week, Trump signalled he was ready to write off the attack as a mistake. “It’s such a strange question to be asked at this date, because you’re talking about a long time ago,” Trump said when he was asked about the investigation during a press conference at the G7 in Évian-les-Bains, France. “But nobody did that on purpose.” Debris lies spread across girls’ school in Iran in aftermath of deadly strike It was at the beginning of what Trump has taken to calling a “little excursion” into Iran – that the back-to-back or “double tap” strikes on the school building took place, killing mainly children under the age of 12. Officials have told media anonymously that the site was believed to be an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) base. Mohammadreza Ahmadi Tifakani lost two children in the school bombing. His seven-year-old daughter, Hanieh, was killed, along with all of her classmates in the girl’s section of the school when the first missile hit. According to witnesses, her 10-year-old brother, Sobhan, had survived the initial explosion, but ran back to look for his sister. He was killed in the second blast. “I personally went to the morgue and identified both of them,” Tifakani told the Guardian in an interview shortly after the attack. “Sobhan was missing an eye, and half