Minab School Strike and the Law of War

Introduction

The Minab School Strike has already emerged as one of the most legally significant incidents reported during the 2026 Iran war. On 28 February 2026, during the opening phase of joint United States and Israeli attacks on Iran, the Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school in Minab was struck during school hours. The public record summarized in the attached case study states that children were present, that the building had long been visibly identifiable as a school, and that independent investigations found no public evidence that it had become a military objective at the time of attack (Could the Minab School Strike Constitute a War Crime, 2026).

The scale of the reported harm immediately places the incident within the core concerns of contemporary international humanitarian law and international human rights law. The same case study records reports that at least 165 schoolgirls were killed and many others injured, while other reports placed the death toll at 168 girls in the school itself. Even allowing for minor variation in casualty reporting, the essential legal point is stable: this was a strike on a functioning educational site filled with children.

The Minab School Strike must also be read against a wider pattern. The Secretary-General’s 2025 annual report on children and armed conflict recorded a 25 per cent increase in grave violations against children in 2024 and identified government forces as the main perpetrators of attacks on schools and hospitals (UN Secretary-General, 2025). GCPEA’s recent guidance on accountability for attacks on education reaches a similar conclusion, stressing that students, teachers, and educational facilities are increasingly exposed to direct attack, indiscriminate violence, military use of schools, and persistent impunity (GCPEA, 2025).

Legally, the starting point is straightforward. Under Additional Protocol I, the civilian population and civilian objects are protected against attack, and those who plan or decide upon an attack must do everything feasible to verify that the objectives are neither civilians nor civilian objects and are not specially protected sites (Additional Protocol I, 1977, arts. 48, 52 and 57). The same instrument gives children special protection in armed conflict, which sharpens the gravity of an attack on a primary school during class hours (Additional Protocol I, 1977, art. 77).

A school is, as a rule, a civilian object. It loses that protection only if it makes an effective contribution to military action and its destruction, capture, or neutralisation offers a definite military advantage in the circumstances ruling at the time (Additional Protocol I, 1977, art. 52(2)). The attached Minab analysis correctly identifies this as the central legal framework, noting that the school’s proximity to an IRGC compound is relevant but not decisive, because adjacency does not by itself convert an educational building into a lawful military objective.

International criminal law adds a second layer of analysis. The Rome Statute expressly criminalises intentionally directing attacks against buildings dedicated to education, provided they are not military objectives (Rome Statute, 1998, art. 8(2)(b)(ix)). GCPEA’s 2025 guidance explains the point with useful precision: for this war crime, the prosecution must show that the perpetrator directed an attack, that the object was a protected educational building and not a military objective, and that the perpetrator intended that protected object to be the object of attack (GCPEA, 2025). The legal difficulty in Minab is not only object-status. It is also proof of mens rea.

That distinction is essential. The attached case study argues persuasively that the present public record is stronger on civilian status and possible unlawfulness than on final criminal guilt. It notes that the school had visible murals, playground markings, a separate entrance, and an established public identity as a school, while the internal records that would be needed to prove individual criminal responsibility remain unavailable, including the target folder, coordinate history, collateral-damage estimate, no-strike status, review process, and launch authorisation chain. On that basis, the article does not need to overclaim. The more rigorous position is that the available evidence already supports the need for an urgent, independent, and transparent investigation.

Method also matters. The Berkeley Protocol explains why open-source investigations can be highly valuable in situations where investigators cannot promptly access the crime scene, but it also stresses the need for authenticity, preservation, verification, and chain of custody if such material is to support legal accountability (OHCHR and Human Rights Center, 2022). That warning is directly relevant to the Minab School Strike. Publicly available imagery, archived online material, witness accounts, and weapons analysis may strongly support legal assessment, but criminal adjudication still depends on a disciplined evidentiary method.

This article proceeds from a narrow and defensible claim. The Minab School Strike is best analysed not as a generic instance of wartime tragedy, but as a focused legal problem involving the protection of schools, the law of targeting, the duty of feasible precautions, the status of children in armed conflict, and the threshold between an unlawful attack and a war crime. The discussion that follows examines those issues in sequence, with particular attention to the relationship between public proof of civilian status and the more demanding proof needed for individual criminal responsibility.

1. The Incident and the Limits of the Public Record

A careful legal analysis of the Minab School Strike must keep four questions distinct. First, what happened? Second, who can be attributed responsibility on the present public record. Third, whether the strike appears unlawful under the law of armed conflict. Fourth, whether the available evidence is sufficient to establish the mental element required for war-crime liability. These questions are connected, but they are not interchangeable. If they are collapsed into one, uncertainty on attribution or mens rea can wrongly obscure a serious preliminary case of unlawfulness under international humanitarian law (OHCHR, 2026a; Additional Protocol I, 1977; Rome Statute, 1998).

That separation matters because the public record is uneven. It is relatively strong on the existence of the strike, the educational character of the site, the presence of children, and the scale of the reported harm. It is much weaker on the internal decision-making process behind the attack. This unevenness affects the legal analysis in different ways. Publicly available facts may already sustain a rigorous preliminary assessment under the law of targeting, while still falling short of the proof usually needed to support individual criminal responsibility for a war crime (ICC, 2013; OHCHR and Human Rights Center, 2022).

1.1 What can already be stated with confidence

Several facts appear stable across the strongest official and institutional materials. The strike occurred on 28 February 2026 in Minab during the opening phase of the hostilities involving Iran, the United States, and Israel. The site identified in the public record was the Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school. The strike occurred during school hours, and children were present when the school was hit (OHCHR, 2026a; UNICEF, 2026).

The precise casualty total should still be handled cautiously. Different public sources report slightly different numbers. What can be stated with confidence is that the strike caused mass child casualties on a very large scale. OHCHR experts reported that at least 165 schoolgirls were killed and many others were injured. UNICEF reported 168 girls killed at the school. The safest legal formulation is not to insist on a final number, but to state that the strike caused exceptionally grave loss of child life at a functioning educational institution (OHCHR, 2026a; UNICEF, 2026).

The available record also supports the proposition that the site was an educational facility protected, in principle, as a civilian object. Under Additional Protocol I, civilian objects are protected against attack, and where there is doubt whether an object normally dedicated to civilian purposes, such as a school, is being used to make an effective contribution to military action, it must be presumed not to be so used (Additional Protocol I, 1977, arts. 52(1) and 52(3)). That rule is central in any analysis of a school strike. It means that the legal starting point is protection, not targetability.

The official response is also clear. OHCHR experts publicly condemned the attack and called for an independent investigation. The Human Rights Council later held an urgent debate on the Minab school strike within the broader question of protecting children and educational institutions in international armed conflict. These official reactions do not by themselves establish criminal liability, but they confirm that the incident raises serious questions under international law and requires structured legal scrutiny (OHCHR, 2026a; OHCHR, 2026b).

Attribution should still be presented cautiously at this stage. The public record supports close legal examination of the conduct, but it does not yet provide a fully public evidentiary basis for a definitive conclusion on which actor carried out the strike. For present purposes, the central point is narrower and more defensible: a school functioning during class hours was struck, children were present, mass casualties followed, and the incident has already triggered official international concern. Those facts are sufficient to begin serious legal analysis under the law governing attacks on civilians and civilian objects (OHCHR, 2026a; UNICEF, 2026).

1.2 What remains unknown and why it matters

The major gaps concern the internal operational record. What is not publicly available includes the target folder, the coordinate history, the collateral-damage estimate, the school’s protected-site or no-strike status, the legal review process, the approval chain, and the post-strike assessment. These are precisely the materials that would normally show what decision-makers knew, what warnings were available, whether contrary indicators were considered, and how the strike was reviewed after the fact. Their absence does not block legal analysis, but it does limit the strength of any final criminal conclusion (OHCHR and Human Rights Center, 2022; ICC, 2013).

These missing materials matter differently at different legal stages. They matter less for a preliminary assessment of possible unlawfulness under international humanitarian law. Even on the public record alone, there is already a serious basis to ask whether target verification was adequate, whether the presumption of civilian status was respected, and whether all feasible precautions were taken before and during the attack. Those questions arise directly from the treaty rules themselves, especially the duties of distinction, verification, and precaution (Additional Protocol I, 1977, arts. 48, 52 and 57; ICRC, 2005, Rules 1, 7, 14–18).

They matter much more for criminal liability. A war-crime case requires more than proof that a school was hit and that civilian casualties were severe. It requires proof of the mental element for the specific crime charged. Under the Rome Statute, intentionally directing an attack against a building dedicated to education requires not only that the object was protected and not a military objective, but also that the perpetrator meant to direct the attack against that protected object. The Elements of Crimes make this requirement explicit. For that reason, internal records become crucial in determining whether the strike reflected deliberate targeting, culpable disregard of clear civilian indicators, or some other form of unlawful but differently characterised conduct (Rome Statute, 1998, art. 8(2)(b)(ix); ICC, 2013).

A second unresolved issue concerns the precise object of the attack. Without access to aimpoint selection, target-development materials, strike authorisation, and battle-damage review, it is difficult to determine whether the school itself was selected as the object of attack, whether it was unlawfully struck during an attack directed at a nearby military site, or whether faulty target verification caused the school to be treated as something it was not. This distinction matters because it affects the applicable legal theory. A direct attack on a protected educational building raises one type of war-crime analysis. An attack on a nearby objective carried out without adequate precautions or with defective verification may raise another (Additional Protocol I, 1977, arts. 52 and 57; ICC, 2013; ICRC, 2005).

The missing post-strike record matters as well. A full legal assessment requires knowing whether the attack triggered immediate review, whether any protected-site concerns were identified after the strike, whether relevant databases or procedures were re-examined, and whether disciplinary or corrective steps were considered. These issues do not only affect institutional accountability. They may also matter for command responsibility, especially if later evidence shows awareness of serious legal risk combined with failure to prevent, investigate, or punish (Rome Statute, 1998, art. 28; ICC, 2013).

The present evidentiary picture supports a careful conclusion. The public record is already strong enough to justify serious legal analysis and an independent, transparent investigation. It is not yet complete enough to support confident final conclusions on individual criminal guilt. That is not a sign of legal weakness. It reflects a basic distinction in international law: preliminary unlawfulness can often be assessed on publicly available facts, while criminal conviction usually depends on a deeper internal evidentiary record bearing directly on knowledge, intent, and decision-making (OHCHR, 2026a; ICC, 2013; OHCHR and Human Rights Center, 2022).

2. Conflict Classification and Applicable Law

Before assessing any specific targeting rule, the Minab School Strike must be placed within the correct legal framework. The opening question is not whether a war crime was committed, but what body of law governs the hostilities in which the strike occurred. On the facts publicly described, the relevant hostilities are best classified as an international armed conflict because they involved the resort to armed force by one or more states against another state. In the law of armed conflict, that classification is a threshold issue. It identifies the applicable legal regime. It does not, by itself, establish that any particular strike was unlawful or criminal (Geneva Conventions, 1949, common art. 2; Tadić, 1995, para. 70).

That threshold matters because the legal consequences are substantial. Once the situation is treated as an international armed conflict, the applicable framework includes the four Geneva Conventions, Additional Protocol I for states bound by it, customary international humanitarian law, and the international criminal law rules that define war crimes committed in international armed conflict. The classification also sharpens the relevance of the Rome Statute provisions dealing with attacks on civilians, civilian objects, disproportionate attacks, and attacks on buildings dedicated to education (Additional Protocol I, 1977; Rome Statute, 1998, art. 8(2)(b)).

2.1 International armed conflict as the legal frame

The orthodox test for an international armed conflict is low. Common Article 2 provides that the Geneva Conventions apply to all cases of declared war or any other armed conflict arising between two or more High Contracting Parties, even if the state of war is not formally recognised. Modern jurisprudence has consistently treated any resort to armed force between states as sufficient to trigger this classification, without requiring a minimum duration or intensity comparable to the threshold used in non-international armed conflict analysis (Geneva Conventions, 1949, common art. 2; Tadić, 1995, para. 70; ICRC, 2016, pp. 32–33).

On that basis, the hostilities surrounding the Minab strike are best analysed as part of an international armed conflict. The legal significance of that conclusion is straightforward. It activates the treaty rules governing attacks on the civilian population and civilian objects, the special protections applicable to children, and the more specific war-crime provisions applicable in interstate armed conflict. In a case involving an alleged strike on a functioning primary school, this classification makes Additional Protocol I and Article 8(2)(b) of the Rome Statute particularly important (Additional Protocol I, 1977, arts. 48, 52, 57 and 77; Rome Statute, 1998, art. 8(2)(b)(i), (ii), (iv) and (ix)).

The classification of the hostilities should not be confused with criminal attribution. A conflict may clearly qualify as international, while the evidence remains incomplete on who launched a given strike, what object was selected as the aimpoint, or what mental element can be proved against specific individuals. Conflict classification answers the question of the legal regime. It does not answer the later questions of unlawfulness, state responsibility, or individual criminal responsibility. That distinction is essential in the Minab case, where the threshold issue is relatively clear but the deeper evidentiary record remains incomplete (Milanović, 2011, pp. 73–75; Dinstein, 2022, pp. 31–34).

The same point affects the choice of the Rome Statute provisions. If the strike occurred in an international armed conflict, the most relevant offences are the international-conflict war crimes in Article 8(2)(b), not the distinct list in Article 8(2)(e) that applies to non-international armed conflict. For a school strike, the most important provisions are intentionally directing attacks against civilians, civilian objects, and buildings dedicated to education, along with the prohibition of launching an attack expected to cause excessive incidental civilian harm in relation to the anticipated military advantage (Rome Statute, 1998, art. 8(2)(b)(i), (ii), (iv) and (ix); ICC, 2013, pp. 12–15).

2.2 Treaty law, custom, and concurrent human rights law

The legal framework governing the Minab School Strike is layered rather than singular. Treaty law provides the most direct starting point. Additional Protocol I lays down the basic rule of distinction in Article 48, protects civilians in Article 51, protects civilian objects in Article 52, and requires feasible precautions in attack in Article 57. These rules structure nearly every serious legal question raised by a school strike: whether the object retained civilian status, whether the attacker verified the target adequately, whether the expected civilian harm was lawful, and whether the timing, method, or means of attack complied with precautionary obligations (Additional Protocol I, 1977, arts. 48, 51, 52 and 57).

Article 52 is especially important because it defines military objectives negatively against the background of civilian protection. A school is presumptively a civilian object. It loses protection only if it makes an effective contribution to military action and its destruction, capture, or neutralisation offers a definite military advantage in the circumstances ruling at the time. Article 52(3) adds a rule of doubt that is central to this article: where there is doubt whether an object normally dedicated to civilian purposes is being used to make an effective contribution to military action, it must be presumed not to be so used. For an allegedly struck school, that is one of the most important treaty rules in the entire analysis (Additional Protocol I, 1977, art. 52(2)–(3)).

Customary international humanitarian law reinforces this framework and broadens its practical reach. The ICRC study identifies the distinction between civilians and combatants, the distinction between civilian objects and military objectives, proportionality, and feasible precautions in attack as customary rules applicable in international armed conflict. It also recognises the duty of target verification and the obligation to choose means and methods of warfare that minimise civilian harm where feasible. These customary rules matter because they help stabilise the legal analysis even where treaty participation, interpretation, or operational practice is disputed (ICRC, 2005, Rules 1, 7, 14–18).

International criminal law adds a second normative layer. The Rome Statute does not merely restate the general law of targeting. It criminalises particular forms of unlawful attack when the required elements and mental state are proved. In the present context, four provisions stand out: intentionally directing attacks against civilians, intentionally directing attacks against civilian objects, launching a disproportionate attack, and intentionally directing attacks against buildings dedicated to education, provided they are not military objectives (Rome Statute, 1998, art. 8(2)(b)(i), (ii), (iv) and (ix)). The Elements of Crimes are especially useful because they clarify that criminal liability depends not only on the protected character of the object, but also on proof of the specific conduct and mental element required for each offence (ICC, 2013, pp. 12–15).

The law applicable to the Minab School Strike is not exhausted by international humanitarian law and international criminal law. International human rights law continues to operate alongside them. The International Court of Justice has repeatedly affirmed that human rights obligations do not cease in armed conflict, although their application may be informed by the lex specialis of humanitarian law where the two bodies of law overlap. That concurrent framework is highly relevant in a school-strike case involving child deaths, educational disruption, and the need for an effective investigation (Nuclear Weapons Advisory Opinion, 1996, para. 25; Wall Advisory Opinion, 2004, paras. 106–113).

The right to life is central here. Under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, every human being has the inherent right to life, and states must protect that right by law. The Human Rights Committee has made clear that this obligation has procedural as well as substantive dimensions, including duties of effective investigation where potentially unlawful deprivations of life occur. In a case such as Minab, that procedural dimension is not secondary. It is one of the main ways in which human rights law remains legally relevant even where humanitarian law governs the substantive assessment of attack conduct (ICCPR, 1966, art. 6; Human Rights Committee, 2018, paras. 27–28).

The right to education is also directly implicated. The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights recognises the right of everyone to education, and the Convention on the Rights of the Child protects both the child’s right to education and the child’s right to special protection in armed conflict. These norms do not replace the targeting rules of humanitarian law, but they deepen the legal significance of an attack on a functioning school and shape the duties of remedy, rehabilitation, and non-repetition after the event (ICESCR, 1966, arts. 13–14; CRC, 1989, arts. 28 and 38).

Child protection norms sharpen the analysis further. Additional Protocol I requires that children be the object of special respect and be protected against any form of indecent assault, and it requires the parties to provide them with the care and aid they need because of their age. In a strike on a primary school during class hours, this rule does not create a separate targeting regime, but it intensifies the legal gravity of failures in verification, precaution, and civilian protection (Additional Protocol I, 1977, art. 77; ICRC, 1987, paras. 3179–3187).

The result is a layered but coherent legal framework. The Minab School Strike must be analysed first under the law of international armed conflict, especially the treaty and customary rules on civilian objects and precautions. It must then be assessed against the specific war-crime provisions of the Rome Statute if criminal responsibility is considered. Alongside both bodies of law, human rights law remains relevant in the protection of life, the protection of children, the protection of education, and the duty to investigate and provide a remedy. That is the legal frame within which the rest of the article proceeds.

3. Schools, Civilian Objects, and Loss of Protection

The central legal question is not whether schools are socially valuable. That is obvious. The real question is how the law classifies them, when that protection may be lost, and who must justify the claim that a school had become a lawful military objective. On that point, international humanitarian law is more precise than much public commentary suggests.

A school is, as a starting point, a civilian object. It is protected under the general rules on distinction and civilian objects, and attacks may be directed only against military objectives (Additional Protocol I, 1977, arts. 48 and 52(1); ICRC, 2005, Rules 7 and 8). That classification does not depend on the moral importance of education. It depends on the legal structure of the law of attack. Civilian objects are protected because they are not military objectives.

This matters because schools are not protected by absolute immunity. Like other civilian objects, they can lose protection if they meet the legal test for military-objective status. That possibility is real, but it is narrower than many military or political narratives imply. The fact that a school is near soldiers, linked to a state institution, or located in a politically sensitive environment does not, by itself, satisfy the legal standard. The burden is on the attacker to have a reasonable basis for treating the object as military at the time of attack.

In criminal proceedings, the prosecution bears the burden of proving the protected status of the object beyond a reasonable doubt, but that evidentiary point does not dilute the operational rule that doubts must be resolved in favour of civilian protection (Kordić and Čerkez Appeal Judgment, 2004, para. 53; Galić Trial Judgment, 2003, para. 51).

3.1 The presumption of civilian use in case of doubt

Article 52(3) of Additional Protocol I is one of the most important provisions for analysing a school strike. It states that, in case of doubt whether an object normally dedicated to civilian purposes, such as a school, is being used to make an effective contribution to military action, it shall be presumed not to be so used (Additional Protocol I, 1977, art. 52(3)). Weak legal analysis often overlooks this rule or treats it as rhetorical. It is neither. It is a concrete decision rule for targeting.

The provision does two things. First, it identifies schools expressly as paradigmatic civilian objects. Second, it assigns legal weight to doubt. Doubt does not create discretion to attack. It triggers a presumption of civilian use. The attacker must proceed on the basis that the school remains protected unless the available information reasonably supports the contrary conclusion. The rule is designed precisely for difficult cases, where information is incomplete, mixed, or old.

The ICTY’s case law is useful here. In Galić, the Trial Chamber held that an object normally dedicated to civilian purposes must not be attacked when it is not reasonable to believe, in the circumstances and on the information available, that it is being used to make an effective contribution to military action (Galić Trial Judgment, 2003, para. 51). This is a practical standard, not an abstract one. It directs attention to the quality, freshness, and reliability of the information on which the attack decision was made.

The ICRC Commentary supports the same reading. It explains that schools and similar places must be presumed to serve civilian purposes in cases of doubt, and that the rule exists because many civilian objects can be turned to military use without losing their ordinary civilian appearance (ICRC Commentary, 1987, para. 2022). A school can look like a school even when being misused. That is exactly why the law requires disciplined verification rather than assumption.

The burden point needs careful handling. In operational terms, the presumption runs against the attacker. A commander or planner cannot lawfully attack a school merely because there is some suspicion, some association, or some unresolved ambiguity. In criminal proceedings, by contrast, the prosecution must prove the relevant elements of the offence, including the civilian or protected character of the object if that is contested. The Appeals Chamber in Kordić and Čerkez made this distinction clearly: Article 52(3) governs the conduct expected of military decision-makers, while the criminal burden of proof remains on the prosecution (Kordić and Čerkez Appeal Judgment, 2004, para. 53). The two ideas are fully compatible. One governs battlefield decision-making; the other governs courtroom proof.

3.2 When a school becomes a military objective

A school loses protection only if it satisfies the two-part test in Article 52(2). It must, first, make an effective contribution to military action by its nature, location, purpose, or use. It must, second, be such that its total or partial destruction, capture, or neutralisation offers a definite military advantage in the circumstances ruling at the time (Additional Protocol I, 1977, art. 52(2); ICRC, 2005, Rule 8).

Both elements matter. The first asks what role the object plays. The second asks what military gain would result from attacking it. An object is not targetable merely because it is linked in some broad way to the enemy state or war effort. The law requires an effective contribution to military action and a definite, not speculative, military advantage.

The four criteria in the first limb are also distinct. “Nature” refers to objects inherently military, such as weapons depots or command facilities. “Use” concerns present military function. “Purpose” concerns intended future military use. “Location” concerns cases where the object’s position itself makes an effective contribution to military action, such as a bridge, narrow pass, or site of operational significance (ICRC Commentary, 1987, paras. 2018–2024). These categories are legal criteria, not invitations to treat anything associated with the enemy as targetable.

For schools, the most common path to loss of protection is use. A school may become a military objective if it is actually being used as barracks, a command post, a firing position, a detention site, a logistics node, or weapons storage. That is why military use of schools is such a serious issue in contemporary armed conflicts (GCPEA, 2025, pp. 11–12). But even here, the legal conclusion must be tied to the actual function of the building at the relevant time. Historic use, past use, rumoured use, or anticipated ideological value is not enough.

The second limb is equally restrictive. The expected military advantage must be definite in the circumstances ruling at the time. The ICRC Commentary stresses that attacks are not legitimate where the supposed advantage is merely potential or indeterminate (ICRC Commentary, 1987, para. 2024). This excludes loose arguments based on symbolic value, political messaging, or institutional affiliation. A school does not become a military objective because it belongs to an enemy-run educational network, carries the social prestige of a state institution, or is thought to have propaganda value. Those are not the criteria in Article 52(2).

This point is critical in school-strike cases because public narratives often blur military action with state identity. A school may be ideologically important, publicly visible, or administratively linked to a military or political apparatus and still remain a civilian object. International humanitarian law does not permit attacks on educational buildings because they symbolize the enemy, reproduce its values, or are associated with its institutions. The object must make an effective contribution to military action, and the attack must offer a definite military advantage in concrete operational terms.

Even when a school has become a military objective, that does not end the legal analysis. Proportionality and precautions still apply in full. The presence of students, teachers, or nearby civilians remains legally significant, and the attacker must still verify the target, choose feasible means and methods that reduce civilian harm, and refrain from attack if expected civilian harm would be excessive (Additional Protocol I, 1977, arts. 51(5)(b) and 57; ICRC, 2005, Rules 14–18). Loss of object protection does not create a free-fire zone.

3.3 Proximity to an IRGC compound

The hardest factual complication in the Minab case is the reported proximity of the school to an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps compound. That fact is legally relevant. It is not legally decisive.

The law does recognise location as one route by which an object can become a military objective. The ICRC Commentary notes that some sites, by virtue of their position, may make an effective contribution to military action, especially where seizure, denial, or control of that site matters operationally (ICRC Commentary, 1987, para. 2021). But this criterion cannot be read so broadly that civilian protection collapses whenever a civilian object stands next to a military one.

Adjacency is evidence. It is not a shortcut. A school does not lose protection merely because it is beside a military compound, inside a securitised district, behind a military installation, or administratively linked to a military-affiliated network. None of those facts appears in Article 52(2) as an independent basis of targetability. The legal question remains whether the school itself, by its own nature, location, purpose, or use, made an effective contribution to military action and whether attacking it offered a definite military advantage.

That distinction matters because otherwise the location criterion would swallow the rule. If mere proximity were enough, any school, hospital, apartment block, or market near a military installation could be treated as targetable. That is not the law. Customary IHL accepts that civilians or civilian objects near military objectives may be exposed to the risk of incidental harm, but it does not allow their direct reclassification as military objectives merely because of that proximity (ICRC, 2005, Rule 8, pp. 29–32).

The better view is that proximity may affect three things. It may shape the attacker’s verification burden, because nearby military facilities can create a real possibility of confusion or dual use. It may shape the proportionality analysis, because civilian objects adjacent to military objectives face heightened foreseeable risk. And it may shape the precautions analysis, because targeters must be especially careful with aimpoint selection, timing, weapon choice, and blast effects in such environments. What proximity does not do, without more, is dissolve the school’s civilian status.

Historical or administrative association is even weaker as a basis for attack. A school does not become a military objective because it was once part of a military compound, was previously used by security forces, or belongs to an educational network associated with a military institution. The law asks what the object was doing at the time of attack, or what clearly intended future military use had been established. It does not permit guilt by institutional association.

For the Minab School Strike, this means the reported relationship between the school and the nearby IRGC compound is a serious factual issue, but it cannot by itself justify the school’s treatment as a military objective. To reach that conclusion lawfully, the attacker would need reliable and sufficiently current information showing that the school itself met the Article 52(2) test. In the absence of that showing, Article 52(3) directs the opposite conclusion: the school must be presumed to retain its civilian function.

That is why this issue sits at the core of the case. If the school itself was not being used for military action, proximity may explain operational risk, but it does not legalise direct attack. If the school was being used for military action, the burden falls on the attacker to show a concrete basis for that judgment. Either way, the law does not allow the move from “near a military site” to “lawful target” without passing through the strict requirements of military-objective analysis.

4. Distinction and the Duty to Verify Targets

The Minab School Strike is not only a question of object-status. It is also a question of process. The law of attack does not regulate targets only at the moment of impact. It regulates how targets are identified, how information is assessed, how doubt is handled, how intelligence is updated, and when an attack must be halted. In legal terms, the issue is not simply whether the school was protected. It is also whether those planning or deciding upon the strike did what the law required before, during, and, if necessary, immediately prior to execution (Additional Protocol I, 1977, arts. 48, 52 and 57; ICRC, 2005, Rules 15–19).

This process dimension is often underplayed in public discussion. Yet it is central in school-strike cases because educational buildings may retain a civilian appearance even when false assumptions, outdated coordinates, or poor database management distort the targeting picture. A planner does not comply with the law by making a one-time classification and never revisiting it. The obligations of distinction and precaution require an active and continuing decision-making process (ICRC Commentary, 1987, paras. 2190–2201; Sassòli, 2019, pp. 325–329).

4.1 Effective contribution and definite advantage

The concept of “military objective” is narrow and concrete. Article 52(2) of Additional Protocol I does not permit an attack on any place connected in a broad way with security, state authority, or political symbolism. The object must make an effective contribution to military action, and its destruction, capture, or neutralisation must offer a definite military advantage in the circumstances ruling at the time (Additional Protocol I, 1977, art. 52(2)).

That wording is restrictive by design. “Effective contribution” excludes loose or speculative claims. “Definite military advantage” excludes vague expectations, political satisfaction, or symbolic gain. The rule demands operational specificity. It asks what the object was actually contributing to military action and what concrete military benefit was expected from attacking it. Terms such as “security-related site” or “sensitive area” have no independent legal value unless they are translated into the two-part legal test (Dinstein, 2022, pp. 129–136; Boothby, 2012, pp. 104–111).

This is especially important in the Minab context. A school near military infrastructure may generate suspicion, but suspicion is not the legal standard. The relevant question is whether the school itself, not merely the surrounding area, made an effective contribution to military action and whether striking it offered a definite military advantage at that time. Unless those two elements are shown, the school remains a civilian object protected against direct attack (Additional Protocol I, 1977, arts. 52(1)–(3); ICRC, 2005, Rules 7 and 8).

The law also requires that this assessment be temporal and situational. An object may change status over time. A school used as a command post on one day may be fully civilian on another. A site that once had military relevance may later lose it. For that reason, the classification of a target cannot rest safely on historical association alone. The attack decision must be tied to the circumstances ruling at the time, not to stale or generalised assumptions (ICRC Commentary, 1987, paras. 2022–2024; Sassòli, 2019, pp. 319–323).

4.2 Feasible verification and stale intelligence

Article 57(2)(a)(i) of Additional Protocol I requires those who plan or decide upon an attack to do everything feasible to verify that the objectives to be attacked are neither civilians nor civilian objects and are not subject to special protection (Additional Protocol I, 1977, art. 57(2)(a)(i)). This is one of the most important operational duties in the law of attack. It is not satisfied by minimal checking or by reliance on a single untested source. “Feasible” means what is practicable or practically possible in the circumstances ruling at the time, taking into account both humanitarian and military considerations (ICRC Commentary, 1987, para. 2198; ICRC, 2005, Rule 16).

The duty to verify is not static. It requires a fresh assessment where the available information may have changed. That is where stale intelligence becomes a distinct legal problem. Old coordinates, outdated facility databases, obsolete imagery, or failure to update protected-site information may point to more than ordinary error. If a target database no longer reflects the actual civilian use of a building, continued reliance on it can undermine the lawfulness of the strike decision. The problem is not simply that the attacker was wrong. The problem is that the attacker may have failed to take feasible steps to avoid being wrong when clear civilian indicators were available (Dinstein, 2022, pp. 161–166; Sassòli, 2019, pp. 326–327).

This matters acutely for schools. Educational sites may be publicly identifiable through their architecture, school markings, entrances, play areas, local records, public listings, or routine civilian activity. If such indicators are visible and accessible, the duty to verify becomes more demanding, not less. A planner cannot rely comfortably on an old classification if more recent information strongly points to ongoing civilian school use. Article 52(3) reinforces that point by requiring doubt to be resolved in favour of civilian protection (Additional Protocol I, 1977, art. 52(3); ICRC, 2005, Rules 10 and 16).

The same logic applies to special protection. Article 57 does not only require verification that the object is not civilian. It also requires verification that it is not specially protected. In practice, this means targeters and commanders must account for information that a site is a school, hospital, cultural property site, or other protected place. Failure to maintain or consult updated protected-site information can become legally significant where the protected nature of the building was reasonably ascertainable (Additional Protocol I, 1977, art. 57(2)(a)(i); Boothby, 2012, pp. 121–124).

In a case such as Minab, the legal issue is not exhausted by asking whether the school was civilian in an abstract sense. The further question is whether those responsible used a verification process capable of recognising that civilian status. If the public record later shows that recent civilian indicators existed but were ignored in favour of old data, the problem moves beyond a simple factual mistake. It begins to suggest a flawed decision-making process inconsistent with the precautionary obligations imposed by the law of attack (ICRC Commentary, 1987, paras. 2195–2201; OHCHR and Human Rights Center, 2022, pp. 58–65).

4.3 Cancellation, suspension, and warning duties

The attacker’s legal obligations do not end once a strike package is approved. Article 57 requires continuing review. Under Article 57(2)(b), an attack must be cancelled or suspended if it becomes apparent that the objective is not a military one, is subject to special protection, or that the attack may be expected to cause excessive incidental civilian harm in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated (Additional Protocol I, 1977, art. 57(2)(b)).

This rule is critical because it makes targeting a dynamic process. Information may change between initial planning and final execution. New imagery may arrive. Civilian movement may be observed. Doubt may deepen rather than disappear. A responsible legal assessment cannot focus only on the original decision to list the target. It must also ask whether later opportunities existed to halt the strike and whether those opportunities were used (ICRC, 2005, Rule 19; Dinstein, 2022, pp. 166–170).

The cancellation or suspension of duty is closely tied to proportionality. Even if the object was initially believed to be military, the attack must still be stopped if updated information shows that the expected civilian harm would be excessive. In a school environment, this is especially important because the presence of children may fluctuate by hour, day, or school schedule. Timing is not a secondary matter. It is a central part of lawful attack planning and execution (Additional Protocol I, 1977, arts. 51(5)(b) and 57(2)(b); Sassòli, 2019, pp. 323–325).

Article 57(2)(c) adds the duty to give effective advance warning of attacks which may affect the civilian population, unless circumstances do not permit (Additional Protocol I, 1977, art. 57(2)(c)). This is not an absolute obligation, and it may be displaced where warning would defeat the operation or where the strike unfolds too quickly. Even so, the rule remains important. In cases involving fixed sites such as schools, questions of warning, timing, and civilian presence are often legally significant because they show whether the attacker genuinely tried to reduce civilian harm where feasible (ICRC Commentary, 1987, paras. 2223–2226; ICRC, 2005, Rule 20).

Warning also has limits. A warning does not convert an unlawful target into a lawful one, and it does not cure an attack on a protected civilian object. Nor does a general warning to evacuate an area automatically satisfy the requirement if the object itself remained protected or if the warning was ineffective in practical terms. In school-strike analysis, warnings must be judged by their reality, clarity, and timing, not by their formal existence alone (Boothby, 2012, pp. 134–136; Sassòli, 2019, p. 328).

For the Minab School Strike, these rules make the process as important as classification. Even if one assumed, for argument’s sake, that a nearby military objective existed, the law would still require continuous verification, updated assessment, possible suspension, and feasible harm-reduction measures. The case is not only about whether a school was protected. It is about whether the decision-making process respected the structure of restraint built into the law of attack.

5. Direct Attack, Indiscriminate Attack, and Error

The same incident can generate more than one theory of unlawfulness. That is true of the Minab School Strike. A school strike may be analysed as a direct attack on a protected educational building, as an indiscriminate or otherwise unlawfully executed attack on or near a military objective, or as a strike affected by error in a way that may or may not cross the threshold into war-crime liability. These are not interchangeable categories. Each one turns on different facts, different legal elements, and different mental-state requirements (Additional Protocol I, 1977, arts. 51, 52 and 57; Rome Statute, 1998, art. 8(2)(b); ICC, 2013).

The discipline of the analysis matters. If the school itself was selected as the aimpoint and remained a protected civilian object, the strongest theory is a direct attack against a building dedicated to education. If the intended target was a nearby military facility but the strike process was defective, the better theory may be an indiscriminate or otherwise unlawfully executed attack. If the event resulted from a mistake, the legal result depends on the nature of the error and the mental element that can be proved. The law does not treat all errors alike.

5.1 Directing an attack at a school

If the school itself was selected as the object of attack, and if it had not become a military objective, the most specific legal theory is intentionally directing an attack against a building dedicated to education. The Rome Statute expressly criminalises that conduct in international armed conflict, provided the building is not a military objective (Rome Statute, 1998, art. 8(2)(b)(ix)).

This is a stronger and more precise theory than generic civilian harm. It focuses on the status of the object and the direction of the attack. The Elements of Crimes require proof that the perpetrator directed an attack, that the object was a building dedicated to education, that it was not a military objective, and that the perpetrator intended that protected object to be the object of attack (ICC, 2013, p. 15). For a school strike, that specificity matters. It identifies the protected nature of the site as central rather than incidental.

The same facts may also support the broader war crimes of intentionally directing attacks against civilians or civilian objects under Article 8(2)(b)(i) and (ii). Even so, where the object is a school, the education-specific offence is analytically stronger because it captures the precise character of the protected site. GCPEA is right to treat attacks on schools as requiring focused charging analysis rather than subsuming them automatically within broader categories of civilian harm (GCPEA, 2025, pp. 34–42).

This does not mean that every strike on a school is automatically a war crime under Article 8(2)(b)(ix). The protection depends on the school not having become a military objective. If the building was being used in a way that satisfied Article 52(2), the education-specific charge would not fit, although other forms of unlawfulness might still remain possible. The school’s protected status is central to the charge, not a secondary issue (Additional Protocol I, 1977, art. 52(2); ICC, 2013, p. 15).

The key factual issue, then, is direction. Was the school itself chosen as the aimpoint, or was it hit in the course of an attack directed elsewhere? Without that distinction, it is impossible to choose the correct legal theory. If the school was the object of attack, direct-attack offences move to the center of the case. If not, other theories become more relevant.

5.2 Indiscriminate methods and faulty targeting data

The alternative theory is that the strike was unlawful, not because the school was deliberately selected as the target, but because the attack process failed to distinguish the lawful target from the school. This matters especially if the intended target was the adjacent IRGC facility. In that scenario, the legal focus shifts away from direct targeting of the school and toward the method, means, and execution of the attack.

Article 51(4) of Additional Protocol I prohibits indiscriminate attacks. These include attacks that are not directed at a specific military objective, attacks that employ means or methods which cannot be directed at a specific military objective, and attacks whose effects cannot be limited as required by the Protocol (Additional Protocol I, 1977, art. 51(4)). Customary law adopts the same approach and adds that area bombardment of distinct military objectives and civilians without distinction is prohibited (ICRC, 2005, Rules 11–13).

In practice, a weapon does not need to be inherently indiscriminate for its use to become indiscriminate. A precision-guided munition used on the basis of wrong coordinates, outdated imagery, or a flawed target database may be unlawfully employed because the attack is no longer truly directed at the specific military objective. The legal defect lies not only in the hardware but in the targeting process. A strike based on stale coordinates may look technically precise while being legally indiscriminate in effect because the decision-maker failed to distinguish the lawful target from the protected object actually hit (Boothby, 2012, pp. 122–129; Sassòli, 2019, pp. 326–329).

That point is especially important in a case like Minab. If the school was adjacent to the intended military site, poor target verification, bad geolocation, or outdated protected-site information could explain how a strike reached the school without making the school itself the selected aimpoint. In that scenario, the unlawfulness may arise from defective verification and execution rather than from a direct decision to attack the school. The duties in Article 57 become central: verify the target, choose feasible means and methods to reduce civilian harm, assess likely effects, and refrain from attack where those obligations cannot be met (Additional Protocol I, 1977, art. 57; ICRC, 2005, Rules 16–18).

The term “faulty targeting data” should also be treated as a legal, not merely technical, problem. If a military actor relied on old coordinates or obsolete facility classifications despite accessible evidence of current civilian school use, the issue is not simply that the strike was inaccurate. The deeper issue is that the attack process may have failed to do what the law required to keep civilian objects outside the target set. That can support a finding of unlawfulness even where proof of a deliberate attack on the school is absent.

The Rome Statute does not contain a stand-alone war crime labelled “indiscriminate attack.” For that reason, the criminal theory usually has to be translated into a recognised offence. Depending on the facts, that may be intentionally directing attacks against civilians or civilian objects, or launching an attack in the knowledge that the incidental civilian harm would be clearly excessive in relation to the anticipated military advantage (Rome Statute, 1998, art. 8(2)(b)(i), (ii) and (iv)). The exact fit depends on what the evidence can show about direction, knowledge, and expected effects.

5.3 Mistake, negligence, and criminal fault

The law draws an important line between operational error, negligence, and criminal fault. Not every unlawful strike is automatically a prosecutable war crime. A violation of distinction or precaution may exist at the level of state responsibility or military unlawfulness without the evidence being strong enough to prove the mental element required for individual criminal conviction (Melzer, 2021, pp. 85–89; Werle and Jessberger, 2020, pp. 470–476).

For principal war-crime liability under the Rome Statute, the default rule is Article 30. Unless otherwise provided, crimes require intent and knowledge. A person has intent in relation to conduct when he or she means to engage in it, and in relation to consequences when he or she means to cause them or is aware that they will occur in the ordinary course of events. A mistake of fact may exclude criminal responsibility only if it negates the required mental element (Rome Statute, 1998, arts. 30 and 32).

Ordinary negligence is usually not enough for direct-attack offences. A bad judgment, careless failure, or flawed procedure may show serious unlawfulness, but that does not by itself establish that the accused intended to attack a protected school or knew that the object of attack was civilian. That is why criminal law does not collapse into operational review. The proof burden is much heavier (ICC, 2013; Werle and Jessberger, 2020, pp. 471–472).

At the same time, not every invocation of “mistake” defeats criminal liability. A claimed mistake becomes less exculpatory when it rests on disregard of clear civilian indicators, refusal to update old data, or reliance on information that a legally compliant targeting process would have recognised as unreliable. In such cases, the evidentiary issue is whether the decision-maker merely erred or acted with a level of awareness that satisfies the mental element of the specific offence charged. The answer depends on the records, communications, and surrounding facts, not on the word “mistake” alone (Ambos, 2022, pp. 148–153; Melzer, 2021, pp. 87–88).

Recklessness occupies a difficult position. Public commentary often treats it as an easy bridge between error and intent. The Rome Statute is more demanding. Its mental-element structure does not clearly adopt broad recklessness as a general standard for principal perpetration. For that reason, it is safer to say that conscious disregard of obvious civilian indicators may support inferences of knowledge or intent in some cases, but the legal sufficiency of that inference depends on the charge and the quality of the evidence (Rome Statute, 1998, art. 30; Ambos, 2022, pp. 149–151).

For the Minab School Strike, this distinction is decisive. If the school was deliberately selected as the aimpoint, the direct-attack theory becomes central. If the strike resulted from defective verification, outdated coordinates, or poor distinction between the lawful target and the school, the unlawfulness may still be grave, but the criminal path becomes more fact-sensitive. The law allows both possibilities. What it does not allow is the shortcut that treats every major operational failure as either automatically criminal or automatically excused by “mistake.”

6. Proportionality and Expected Civilian Harm

Proportionality is one of the most misunderstood rules in the law of attack. Weak analyses often treat it as a reaction to the final death toll, as if very high civilian casualties automatically prove disproportionality and lower casualties automatically defeat the claim. That is not the legal test. Under Additional Protocol I, an attack is prohibited if it may be expected to cause incidental civilian death, injury, or damage that would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated at the time of the decision (Additional Protocol I, 1977, art. 51(5)(b)). The question is ex ante, not retrospective.

This matters sharply in the Minab School Strike. The issue is not only how many children were killed, grave as that fact is. The issue is what level of civilian harm a reasonable attacker should have expected before launch, given the information available or reasonably obtainable at the time. Final casualties may illuminate foreseeability, but they do not replace the legal inquiry into what was anticipated when the attack was planned and approved (Dinstein, 2022, pp. 148–154; Sassòli, 2019, pp. 323–325).

6.1 The ex ante nature of proportionality review

The ex ante structure of proportionality is built into both treaty law and customary law. Article 51(5)(b) speaks in terms of harm that “may be expected,” and Article 57 links that inquiry to precautionary decision-making before and during attack (Additional Protocol I, 1977, arts. 51(5)(b) and 57). The ICRC study expresses the same rule in customary form: launching an attack expected to cause excessive incidental civilian harm is prohibited (ICRC, 2005, Rule 14).

This means that the proportionality analysis depends on concrete operational inputs. In a case such as Minab, some of the most important missing inputs are the expected school occupancy, any collateral-damage estimate, the military advantage anticipated from striking the alleged target, and the mitigation options available to planners and commanders. Without these materials, no final criminal conclusion on disproportionality can be made confidently. At the same time, the absence of these inputs does not remove the legal problem. It shows where the evidentiary deficit lies.

Expected school occupancy is central because proportionality is sensitive to the likely presence of civilians, not just to the formal status of the building. If planners knew, or should have known, that the building was functioning as a primary school during class hours, the anticipated incidental harm would be very high. A collateral-damage estimate would ordinarily translate that risk into operational terms by assessing likely deaths, injuries, blast effects, and structural damage. If no such estimate was made, or if it was based on outdated assumptions, that failure could be highly relevant to the lawfulness of the attack process (Boothby, 2012, pp. 121–129).

The military-advantage side of the equation also has to be stated with precision. Proportionality does not weigh civilian harm against broad strategic gain, political value, or punitive effect. The advantage must be concrete and direct. In the Minab context, the relevant question is not whether attacks on Iranian military infrastructure were valuable in a general sense. It is what concrete and direct military advantage was anticipated from the particular strike that endangered or hit the school. Without that specificity, proportionality analysis becomes too vague to be legally useful (Dinstein, 2022, pp. 149–151; ICRC Commentary, 1987, paras. 2208–2218).

Ex post evidence still has a limited role. Final casualties, photographs of the site, and later investigative findings can help test the plausibility of what should have been expected. If the actual effects were catastrophic in a way that was plainly foreseeable, they may cast doubt on any claim that the expected incidental harm was modest. Even so, the legal wrong lies in the decision to attack under the conditions known or knowable at the time, not in the later visibility of the damage alone (Sassòli, 2019, p. 324).

6.2 Child presence, school hours, and foreseeability

Timing is legally significant because it shapes foreseeability. A strike on a functioning primary school during school hours creates a far stronger expectation of concentrated civilian presence than a strike on the same structure late at night, during holidays, or after verified evacuation. In other words, the same object can present radically different proportionality implications depending on when it is attacked.

Here, the reported facts matter. If the school were operating normally and children were present in large numbers, then the likely civilian cost of any strike affecting the building would have been foreseeable at a very high level. That does not merely strengthen the humanitarian case against the attack. It intensifies the legal difficulty of defending the strike as proportionate. A planner or commander cannot reasonably assess incidental harm without accounting for ordinary school rhythms, child density, and the predictable inability of young children to react rapidly to sudden attack (OHCHR, 2026a; UNICEF, 2026).

The presence of children also has normative weight beyond raw numbers. Additional Protocol I provides that children shall be the object of special respect and shall be protected against the effects of hostilities (Additional Protocol I, 1977, art. 77). The Convention on the Rights of the Child adds a broader framework of child protection and respect for the child’s right to life and education (CRC, 1989, arts. 6, 28 and 38). These rules do not alter the proportionality formula as such, but they sharpen the legal seriousness of foreseeable harm to children in a school setting.

For a strike affecting a primary school during class hours, the foreseeability problem is difficult to avoid. Even if the intended target was the adjacent military facility rather than the school itself, the ordinary expectation would still be that children were nearby in substantial numbers. That makes civilian harm not merely possible but highly predictable. Where such predictability exists, the proportionality defence becomes much harder to sustain unless the anticipated military advantage was exceptionally strong and no feasible harm-reduction measures were available (Melzer, 2021, pp. 355–359; Dinstein, 2022, pp. 152–154).

This is one reason why proportionality cannot be separated cleanly from object-status. If the school itself was selected as an aim point, the problem may be a direct attack on a protected educational building. If the intended target was a nearby military site, proportionality still remains central because the known presence of children in the school would bear directly on expected incidental harm. Either way, school hours and child presence are legally weighty facts, not background details.

6.3 Means, methods, and alternative aimpoints

Proportionality is closely linked to the choice of means and methods of attack. Article 57 requires attackers to take all feasible precautions in the choice of means and methods with a view to avoiding, and in any event minimising, incidental civilian harm (Additional Protocol I, 1977, art. 57(2)(a)(ii)). For that reason, proportionality review cannot stop at the abstract balance between expected harm and expected advantage. It must also ask whether that balance could have been improved by feasible operational adjustments.

In a case like Minab, several possibilities become legally relevant. Were alternative weapons available with a smaller blast radius or more controllable effects? Could the timing of the strike have been changed to reduce school occupancy? Could the attack angle, fuze setting, or point of detonation have been modified to reduce the risk to the school? Could a different aimpoint within the alleged military compound have preserved the anticipated military advantage while lowering civilian risk? These are not technical afterthoughts. They sit at the intersection of proportionality and precautions (Boothby, 2012, pp. 129–136; ICRC, 2005, Rules 17 and 18).

Alternative aimpoints are especially important in adjacency cases. If a lawful military objective lies close to a protected school, the attacker must consider whether the same military gain can be achieved by striking another point on the target, at another time, or by another method that poses less risk to civilians. A decision to use the most dangerous option when safer feasible alternatives were available can weaken both the proportionality case and the precautions case. The law does not require zero civilian risk. It does require serious effort to reduce foreseeable harm where practicable (Sassòli, 2019, pp. 327–329).

This interaction between proportionality and precautions is often missed. Proportionality asks whether the expected incidental harm would be excessive in relation to the anticipated military advantage. Precautions ask whether feasible steps were taken to reduce that harm in the first place. In practice, the two inquiries often overlap because the existence of feasible alternatives affects how the expected harm should be judged. An attack that seems marginally proportionate in the abstract may become much harder to defend if the same advantage could have been achieved by a significantly less harmful method.

For the Minab School Strike, this means that the legality of the attack cannot be assessed only by asking whether a nearby military objective may have existed. The further question is whether the strike planners and decision-makers examined feasible ways to preserve military advantage while reducing the risk to a functioning school full of children. Without that inquiry, proportionality analysis remains incomplete.

7. Children, Education, and Concurrent Human Rights Law

A legal analysis of the Minab School Strike should not be reduced to conduct-of-hostilities rules alone. The core targeting questions remain central, but a strike on a functioning school that kills children also engages a wider body of protection. That wider framework helps explain why such an incident is not only a possible breach of the law of attack, but also a matter of special concern for international institutions concerned with children, education, investigation, and remedy.

This broader frame does not replace international humanitarian law. The rules on distinction, military objectives, proportionality, and precautions still govern the legality of the attack itself. Even so, child-specific protections and concurrent human rights obligations deepen the legal significance of the incident. They shape how the strike should be assessed institutionally and what must follow after it, especially in relation to investigation, transparency, accountability, and reparation (ICJ, 1996, para. 25; ICJ, 2004, paras. 106–113).

7.1 Special protection of children in hostilities

International humanitarian law gives children special protection in armed conflict. Additional Protocol I provides that children shall be the object of special respect and shall be protected against any form of indecent assault. It also requires the parties to provide them with the care and aid they need because of their age (Additional Protocol I, 1977, art. 77(1)). This rule does not create a separate targeting test for schools or for children. The ordinary rules on civilian protection still apply. Its legal function is different. It reinforces the seriousness of harm to children and makes clear that the law treats their vulnerability as a distinct humanitarian concern.

That point matters in a school-strike case. The prohibition on attacking civilians and civilian objects already protects children as members of the civilian population. Article 77 adds something more. It recognises that children are not only civilians in the abstract. They are a category of persons whose age, dependence, and limited capacity for self-protection make the effects of hostilities especially severe. In practical terms, this sharpens the relevance of foreseeability, timing, evacuation limits, and the need for heightened care when military action risks affecting schools, playgrounds, or other child-concentrated spaces (ICRC Commentary, 1987, paras. 3179–3187).

Customary international humanitarian law reaches the same conclusion. The ICRC study treats respect and special protection for children affected by armed conflict as a customary rule in both international and non-international armed conflict (ICRC, 2005, Rule 135). That rule does not displace the general law of attack. It works alongside it, strengthening the legal expectation that parties must account for children’s particular exposure to harm when conducting military operations.

UN child-protection practice also supports this reading. The Secretary-General’s children and armed conflict framework treats attacks on schools as one of the grave violations that warrant sustained international monitoring. The 2025 annual report records a major increase in grave violations against children and identifies attacks on schools and hospitals as a central pattern of harm in contemporary conflicts (UN Secretary-General, 2025, paras. 5–8). That practice is not a substitute for treaty law, but it reflects an institutional judgment that schools and children require focused legal and political protection in conflict settings.

The same logic appears in the Convention on the Rights of the Child and its Optional Protocol on the involvement of children in armed conflict. Article 38 of the Convention requires states to respect and ensure respect for rules of international humanitarian law relevant to the child and to take all feasible measures to ensure the protection and care of children affected by armed conflict (CRC, 1989, art. 38). The Optional Protocol reinforces the wider protective framework by treating armed conflict as a setting in which the child requires heightened legal attention, not merely ordinary civilian status (Optional Protocol to the CRC on the involvement of children in armed conflict, 2000).

For Minab, the point is not that child-specific rules create a new standard for deciding whether the school was a military objective. They do not. The point is that once children are known or expected to be present in large numbers, the legal framing becomes more exacting. The core targeting rules remain the same, but their application takes place against a background in which the law expressly recognises children as entitled to special respect and protection.

7.2 Right to life, education, and effective remedy

International human rights law runs alongside international humanitarian law in armed conflict. The International Court of Justice has made this clear more than once. In the Nuclear Weapons Advisory Opinion, the Court stated that the protection of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights does not cease in times of war, except by lawful derogation. In the Wall Advisory Opinion, it reaffirmed that human rights treaties continue to apply alongside humanitarian law, even where the latter may operate as the more specific body of law for evaluating battlefield conduct (ICJ, 1996, para. 25; ICJ, 2004, paras. 106–113).

This concurrent application matters in a case like the Minab School Strike. Humanitarian law governs the legality of the attack as an attack. Human rights law does not displace those rules. It adds parallel obligations concerning the protection of life, the protection of children, the protection of education, the duty to investigate, and the availability of a remedy.

The right to life is central. Article 6 of the ICCPR recognises that every human being has the inherent right to life and that this right shall be protected by law (ICCPR, 1966, art. 6). The Human Rights Committee has explained that the right to life has both substantive and procedural dimensions. States must not arbitrarily deprive life, and they must investigate potentially unlawful deprivations of life promptly, effectively, independently, and transparently (Human Rights Committee, 2018, paras. 27–28). In a school-strike case, this procedural obligation has direct significance. Even where the lawfulness of the attack is contested under humanitarian law, the state still bears a duty of serious investigation and public accountability.

The right to education is also directly engaged. Articles 13 and 14 of the ICESCR recognise education as a protected right and impose obligations on states to ensure its availability and accessibility (ICESCR, 1966, arts. 13–14). Article 28 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child does the same in child-specific form (CRC, 1989, art. 28). A strike on a functioning school harms more than physical safety. It disrupts educational continuity, destroys a protected social institution, and undermines one of the central rights associated with childhood and development. This does not change the attack rules under humanitarian law, but it changes the legal depth of the consequences that follow from the event.

The right to an effective remedy and reparation also becomes important. Human rights law is not satisfied by the absence of future strikes alone. Where grave violations occur, states must investigate, disclose relevant facts, and provide accessible remedies. The UN Basic Principles and Guidelines on the Right to a Remedy and Reparation identify restitution, compensation, rehabilitation, satisfaction, and guarantees of non-repetition as core components of redress for serious violations of international law (UN General Assembly, 2005, paras. 18–23). In the context of a school strike, this may include compensation for victims’ families, medical and psychological support, educational reconstruction, public acknowledgment, and measures to prevent recurrence.

Transparency is especially important here. Humanitarian law often focuses on the legality of the strike decision itself. Human rights law adds pressure on what happens afterward. A state cannot answer a school-strike allegation solely by invoking military necessity in general terms. It must also confront procedural duties: what inquiry was opened, how independent it was, what evidence was reviewed, what findings were reached, and whether victims were given any meaningful form of redress. That is one reason why concurrent human rights law matters so much in cases of this kind.

For Minab, the combined effect of these norms is clear. The strike must be judged first under the law of armed conflict. Even so, the killing of children in a functioning school also engages the right to life, the right to education, child-specific protection norms, and the duty to provide investigation and remedy. This wider legal frame does not alter the core targeting rules. It explains why a school strike of this kind has institutional significance far beyond the immediate conduct-of-hostilities analysis.

8. War Crimes Charges Most Likely to Matter

The legal analysis now moves from primary rules of conduct to criminalization. The question is no longer only whether the attack may have breached distinction, precautions, or proportionality. The question is which criminal charges best fit the conduct if the evidentiary threshold can be met. That issue should be organized by charge theory rather than moral gravity, because different offences require different factual showings and different mental elements (Rome Statute, 1998, arts. 7 and 8; ICC, 2013).

For the Minab School Strike, four charging paths matter most. The strongest and most specific is the war crime of intentionally directing an attack against a building dedicated to education. Broader fallback charges concerning civilians and civilian objects also remain important. Disproportionate attack is plausible, but more fact-dependent. Crimes against humanity should be treated cautiously because they require proof of a broader attack context that cannot be inferred from one catastrophic strike alone (Rome Statute, 1998, art. 8(2)(b); ICC, 2013; GCPEA, 2025, pp. 34–49).

8.1 Attacking a building dedicated to education

The headline criminal charge is Article 8(2)(b)(ix) of the Rome Statute. It criminalizes intentionally directing attacks against buildings dedicated to education, provided they are not military objectives (Rome Statute, 1998, art. 8(2)(b)(ix)). For a strike on a functioning primary school, this is the most exact fit because it captures the protected character of the object directly, rather than treating the site only as a generic civilian building.

This offence has four core elements. First, there must be an attack. In the law of armed conflict, an attack means an act of violence against the adversary, whether in offence or defence (Additional Protocol I, 1977, art. 49(1)). In criminal terms, the issue is not simply whether violence occurred, but whether the school was made the object of that violence. If the school itself was selected as the aimpoint, this element is straightforward. If it was struck while the attack was directed elsewhere, the fit becomes much weaker.

Second, the object must be a building dedicated to education. This is not an abstract cultural label. It refers to the actual institutional character of the building at the relevant time. A functioning school used for ordinary educational activity falls squarely within the protected category. The prosecution would not need to prove that the building was socially important or widely known. It would need to prove that it was, in fact, an educational building at the time of the strike (ICC, 2013, p. 15; GCPEA, 2025, pp. 35–38).

Third, the building must not have been a military objective. This negative element is critical. The charge fails if the school had lost protection under Article 52(2) of Additional Protocol I. That is why the earlier analysis of military-objective status is so important here. The prosecution would need to show that the school did not make an effective contribution to military action and that its destruction, capture, or neutralisation did not offer a definite military advantage in the circumstances ruling at the time. Article 52(3) strengthens this path because, in case of doubt, a school must be presumed not to be used for military action (Additional Protocol I, 1977, art. 52(2)–(3); ICC, 2013, p. 15).

Fourth, there must be an intent that the protected building be the object of attack. This is the hardest element. It is not enough that the school was hit. It is not enough that the attacker knew civilian harm was possible. The prosecution would need to show that the accused meant to direct the attack against that protected school, or at a minimum possessed the mental state required by Article 30 in relation to the object of attack. This is why the internal targeting record matters so much. If the evidence later shows that the school itself was selected as the strike object while not being a military objective, Article 8(2)(b)(ix) becomes the strongest charge. If the intended object was something else, the charge becomes harder to sustain (Rome Statute, 1998, art. 30; ICC, 2013, p. 15; Werle and Jessberger, 2020, pp. 470–472).

8.2 Attacking civilians and civilian objects

The broader charges in Article 8(2)(b)(i) and Article 8(2)(b)(ii) remain important even if the education-specific charge is available. Article 8(2)(b)(i) covers intentionally directing attacks against the civilian population as such or against individual civilians not taking direct part in hostilities. Article 8(2)(b)(ii) covers intentionally directing attacks against civilian objects, that is, objects which are not military objectives (Rome Statute, 1998, art. 8(2)(b)(i)–(ii)).

These offences matter because they provide a fallback analytical path if proof of school-specific intent is incomplete. A prosecutor may be able to prove that the school was a civilian object without proving that the accused attacked it because it was a school. In that situation, the civilian-object charge may be easier to sustain than the education-specific offence. The protected educational character of the building would still remain evidentially important, but it would not need to carry the entire charge theory (ICC, 2013, pp. 12–13; GCPEA, 2025, pp. 38–42).

The civilian attack charge under Article 8(2)(b)(i) is narrower in one way and broader in another. It is narrower because it requires proof that civilians themselves were the object of attack, not merely that civilians were foreseeably present. It is broader because it is not tied to a specific kind of protected building. In the Minab context, this charge becomes especially relevant if the evidence later shows that those executing or approving the strike knew the building was occupied by children and still treated the civilian presence as the very target of the operation. Without that level of proof, Article 8(2)(b)(ii) may remain the more realistic broader charge (Rome Statute, 1998, art. 8(2)(b)(i); ICC, 2013, pp. 12–13).

These broader offences also matter because they reflect the structure of charging practice in difficult evidentiary cases. A prosecutor does not need to rely on one theory alone. The same strike may support alternative counts, with the education-specific charge expressing the strongest case where object-specific intent can be shown, and the civilian-object charge preserving a route to liability if the object’s protected educational identity is not the decisive element in the accused’s mental state.

8.3 Excessive incidental harm

A third possible theory is Article 8(2)(b)(iv) of the Rome Statute, which criminalizes launching an attack in the knowledge that it will cause incidental loss of life or injury to civilians or damage to civilian objects that would be clearly excessive in relation to the concrete and direct overall military advantage anticipated (Rome Statute, 1998, art. 8(2)(b)(iv)). This is the criminal expression of the proportionality rule.

For Minab, this charge is plausible but more fact-dependent than the direct-attack theories. Its attraction is obvious if the intended target was the adjacent military facility rather than the school itself. In that scenario, the school casualties would be analysed as incidental rather than direct. The central question would become whether the expected civilian harm to children in or around the school was clearly excessive when compared with the military advantage anticipated from the strike.

The evidentiary demands are substantial. This offence requires proof of the anticipated military advantage, the expected civilian harm, and knowledge on the part of the accused. It is not enough to show that the civilian toll was appalling after the fact. The prosecution would need evidence about what was expected before launch: likely school occupancy, blast effects, collateral-damage modelling, risk to nearby children, and the military value assigned to the alleged target. On the present public record, many of those inputs remain unknown. For that reason, disproportionate attack should be treated as a serious possibility, but not overclaimed (ICC, 2013, pp. 13–14; Dinstein, 2022, pp. 148–154).

This charge also contains a deliberately high threshold. The harm must be clearly excessive, not merely arguably excessive. The requirement of knowledge further narrows the offence. A grave proportionality violation at the level of state responsibility or operational unlawfulness does not automatically satisfy this criminal standard. That is why the proportionality path is often more difficult than it first appears, especially where the internal targeting record is not yet public (Melzer, 2021, pp. 355–359; Werle and Jessberger, 2020, pp. 472–476).

8.4 Why crimes against humanity need separate proof

Crimes against humanity should be treated as a separate and more demanding question. Under Article 7 of the Rome Statute, acts such as murder or other inhumane acts become crimes against humanity only when committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of that attack (Rome Statute, 1998, art. 7(1)). Article 7(2)(a) adds that the attack must involve a course of conduct pursuant to or in furtherance of a State or organizational policy.

This contextual element is decisive. One horrific strike, even one involving mass child deaths at a school, does not by itself establish a crime against humanity. The prosecution would need broader proof that the strike formed part of a larger attack directed against a civilian population and carried out pursuant to or in furtherance of policy. That requires evidence of repetition, pattern, organizational direction, or some wider civilian-targeting framework. Without that additional context, the legal path remains one of war crimes, not crimes against humanity (ICC, 2013, pp. 3–8; Ambos, 2022, pp. 86–94).

This boundary matters because there is a strong temptation to treat the worst wartime atrocities as crimes against humanity simply because they are shocking. Criminal law does not work that way. The label depends on contextual proof, not only on gravity. In the Minab case, crimes against humanity could become relevant if future evidence shows that the strike formed part of a broader campaign of attacks on civilians, schools, or children. On the present record, a larger contextual showing has not been established. The analytically disciplined position is to treat crimes against humanity as possible only if much broader evidence emerges.

For the current stage of analysis, the most legally grounded criminal framework remains the war-crimes regime in Article 8. Within that regime, the education-specific charge is the most focused and normatively exact; the civilian and civilian-object charges remain important alternatives, and the disproportionate-attack theory stays plausible but dependent on evidence that is still missing.

9. Mens Rea and Modes of Liability

The hardest legal issue in the Minab School Strike is not object-status alone. It is a mental element and participation. Publicly available material may strongly suggest that a functioning school was hit, that children were present, and that the civilian risk should have been obvious. A war-crime case, however, requires more than a persuasive account of unlawfulness. It requires proof connecting particular persons to the relevant state of mind and to a recognised mode of liability (Rome Statute, 1998, arts. 25, 28, 30 and 32; ICC, 2013).

That distinction is central. The public record may already support a serious argument that the school retained civilian protection and that the strike process may have been deeply flawed. What still requires proof is who knew what, when they knew it, how they acted on that knowledge, and whether their conduct fits principal liability, accessorial liability, or superior responsibility. Criminal law is exacting on those points, but it does not require a written admission or a confession. Mental element may be inferred from the surrounding circumstances where the evidence is strong enough (Werle and Jessberger, 2020, pp. 470–476; Ambos, 2022, pp. 145–153).

9.1 Intent, knowledge, and conscious disregard

For war crimes under the Rome Statute, the default rule is Article 30. Unless the Statute provides otherwise, a person is criminally responsible only if the material elements are committed with intent and knowledge. Intent covers both conduct and, where relevant, consequences. Knowledge means awareness that a circumstance exists or that a consequence will occur in the ordinary course of events (Rome Statute, 1998, art. 30).

In a strike case, actual knowledge may be proved directly. The clearest forms of evidence would include the target folder, no-strike or protected-site records, target-development documents, collateral-damage estimates, legal advice, coordination messages, approval logs, and post-strike review material. If those records show that decision-makers knew the building was a school and still selected it as the object of attack, the mental element for direct-attack offences becomes much easier to establish (ICC, 2013; Ambos, 2022, pp. 146–148).

Knowledge may also be inferred. International criminal courts have long accepted that the mental element can be established through circumstantial evidence where the inference is strong and grounded in the facts. In a school-strike case, the relevant indicators may include visible school markings, clear evidence of ordinary school use, known class hours, the expected presence of children, separate civilian entrances, playground or sports features, and recent imagery inconsistent with military use. If those indicators were obvious and accessible, claimed ignorance becomes less persuasive (Galić Trial Judgment, 2003; Strugar Trial Judgment, 2005; Werle and Jessberger, 2020, pp. 474–476).

Conscious disregard is especially important in cases involving defective data. If planners or targeters deliberately relied on old coordinates, outdated facility classifications, or stale target packages despite the availability of clear contrary indicators, the problem may move beyond carelessness. It may support an inference that they were aware of a substantial risk that the object was civilian and proceeded regardless. That does not mean that every bad process proves intent. It does mean that deliberate reliance on obviously defective information can be evidentially powerful in proving knowledge or in negating a claimed mistake of fact (Rome Statute, 1998, art. 32; Melzer, 2021, pp. 87–89; Ambos, 2022, pp. 149–151).

At the same time, mens rea should not be diluted into mere carelessness. Ordinary negligence is usually not enough for principal liability for direct-attack war crimes. A planner may be careless, disorganised, or badly supervised and still fall short of the mental threshold required by Article 30. The legal task is to identify a state of mind more serious than incompetence but not to demand impossible proof. The standard is not “smoking gun or nothing.” It is proof of intent or knowledge, which may sometimes be inferred from the objective circumstances if ignorance would be implausible (Rome Statute, 1998, art. 30; ICC, 2013; Werle and Jessberger, 2020, pp. 471–472).

For Minab, the strongest public inference is not yet final proof of direct intent. It is the possibility that the civilian character of the site and the risk to children should have been obvious to anyone using a legally adequate targeting process. That may support arguments about knowledge, conscious disregard, or the weakness of any mistake claim. It does not by itself prove which individual possessed the relevant mental state for which offence.

9.2 Ordering, aiding, and common planning

Responsibility in targeting cases is rarely confined to the person who physically launches the weapon. Article 25 of the Rome Statute recognises multiple routes to liability, including committing a crime individually, jointly, or through another person, ordering, soliciting or inducing, aiding and abetting, and contributing to a group crime with the required knowledge and purpose elements (Rome Statute, 1998, art. 25(3)).

Ordering is likely to be one of the most relevant routes in a strike case. A commander or senior decision-maker who authorises or directs the strike on the basis of the relevant target package may incur liability if the order encompasses the crime charged. The legal focus is not on physical proximity to the weapon. It is on authority, decision, and causal contribution. If a protected school was knowingly approved as the object of attack, those who gave the operative approval may be more central than the crew or operator that executed the launch (Strugar Trial Judgment, 2005; Cryer et al., 2019, pp. 463–467).

Aiding and abetting is also important. Targeteers, intelligence analysts, imagery specialists, legal advisers, and battle staff may materially contribute to the attack without making the final decision. If they knowingly provide coordinates, assessments, technical support, or other assistance that substantially contributes to the crime, accessorial liability may arise. The key questions are contribution and knowledge. The law does not require that the aider share the full criminal purpose of the principal offender in every formulation. It does require knowing assistance to the criminal conduct (Rome Statute, 1998, art. 25(3)(c); Werle and Jessberger, 2020, pp. 221–227).

Common planning, including co-perpetration, may become relevant where the strike results from an integrated targeting process in which multiple actors exercise joint control over the operation. In modern targeting systems, object selection, legal validation, collateral-damage review, platform assignment, and strike approval may be distributed across several actors. Where those actors share a common plan, and each makes an essential contribution, liability may extend beyond a single decision-maker. ICC jurisprudence has treated control over the crime as a key marker of co-perpetration, though its exact contours remain debated in scholarship and case law (Lubanga Judgment, 2012; Katanga Judgment, 2014; Ambos, 2022, pp. 169–177).

For Minab, the practical point is clear. If the evidence later shows that the strike was rooted in a flawed but collective targeting process, criminal liability may attach at several points in the chain. The person who launched the munition may be only the endpoint of a larger decision structure. A legally serious investigation would need to examine planners, target developers, approving officers, and operational commanders, not just operators.

9.3 Command responsibility

Command responsibility is a distinct mode of liability. It is not a shortcut to principal perpetration, and it is not based on rank alone. Under Article 28 of the Rome Statute, military commanders and other superiors may be responsible for crimes committed by subordinates where they had effective command and control, or effective authority and control, knew or should have known, or in the case of non-military superiors consciously disregarded clear information, and failed to take all necessary and reasonable measures to prevent, repress, or submit the matter for investigation and prosecution (Rome Statute, 1998, art. 28).

The first element is effective control. This means the material ability to prevent or punish the commission of the crimes. Formal position is relevant but not enough by itself. The question is functional: could the superior actually control the conduct of the subordinates involved in target development, strike approval, execution, or review (Čelebići Appeal Judgment, 2001; Halilović Trial Judgment, 2005; Bemba Appeal Judgment, 2018)?

The second element concerns knowledge. For military commanders, Article 28 adopts the “knew or, owing to the circumstances at the time, should have known” standard. That threshold is distinct from principal intent under Article 30. It reflects the special duties of command. A commander may incur responsibility not because he intended the attack, but because the surrounding circumstances were such that he should have appreciated the risk and acted on it. For non-military superiors, the standard is framed differently and refers to conscious disregard of information clearly indicating that subordinates were committing or about to commit crimes (Rome Statute, 1998, art. 28(a)–(b); Ambos, 2022, pp. 191–199).

The third element is failure to prevent or punish. This includes failure to stop a strike, failure to suspend an unlawful targeting practice, failure to correct defective protected-site systems, and failure to initiate a proper investigation after the fact. This is where systemic evidence becomes crucial. If a school strike was not an isolated anomaly but the product of broader failures in protected-site databases, stale-target practices, or known verification defects, command responsibility becomes more plausible. Repeated warnings, recurring database errors, or prior incidents may help show both knowledge and failure to act (Strugar Trial Judgment, 2005; Bemba Appeal Judgment, 2018; Werle and Jessberger, 2020, pp. 253–262).

In the Minab setting, evidence of broader protected-site database failures or repeated reliance on outdated targeting information could become legally important even if direct proof of personal intent remains limited. Such evidence may not prove that a commander wanted a school to be struck. It may, however, support the claim that those in command knew or should have known that serious violations were likely and failed to prevent them. That is a different route to liability, but it is often a central one in complex targeting cases.

The key analytical point is that mens rea and modes of liability must remain separate but connected. Public facts may strongly suggest the foreseeability of civilian harm and major flaws in the targeting process. What still requires proof is the legal path from those facts to the mental state and participation of identifiable persons. That path may run through direct intent, knowledge inferred from obvious indicators, accessorial participation in a collective process, or superior responsibility grounded in effective control and failure to act.

10. Evidence, Verification, and Proof

A serious legal article on the Minab School Strike cannot discuss substantive law without discussing proof. In war-crimes analysis, the method is not secondary. The strength of any conclusion depends not only on the legal rule invoked, but on the quality of the evidentiary path used to support it. This is especially true in a case where the site is difficult to access, state records are not public, and much of the first available material comes from digital and open sources rather than from immediate in-person investigation (OHCHR and Human Rights Center, 2022, pp. 17–28).

The distinction between unlawfulness analysis and criminal proof remains important here. Publicly available material may be enough to support a strong preliminary legal assessment, especially on the civilian character of a school and the apparent scale of the harm. Criminal adjudication is more demanding. It requires reliable methods of collection, preservation, authentication, corroboration, and inference. In a case like Minab, external evidence can establish a great deal, but it cannot establish everything (OHCHR and Human Rights Center, 2022, pp. 53–72; ICC, 2021, art. 69).

10.1 Satellite imagery, remnants, and open-source video

Satellite imagery is often the starting point in inaccessible conflict environments. It can help establish geolocation, site layout, blast effects, proximity to adjacent facilities, and visible indicators of civilian use. In a school-strike case, imagery may reveal playground markings, separate entrances, classroom blocks, school yards, and temporal changes in the site’s physical structure. Time-series imagery can also test claims that a school had been converted to military use by comparing the site across different dates (OHCHR and Human Rights Center, 2022, pp. 56–63).

Archived visual material is equally important. Photographs, cached webpages, school announcements, public-facing social media posts, and archived institutional records may help establish that the building was functioning as a school over time. This type of material is especially relevant where one of the core disputed issues is not only what was hit, but what the site was at the time of the strike. In legal terms, archived civilian-use evidence can be highly probative of protected status, even though it must still be tested against the possibility of later military use (GCPEA, 2025, pp. 19–22; OHCHR and Human Rights Center, 2022, pp. 56–58).

Open-source video can help reconstruct strike sequence, timing, angle of approach, blast pattern, and in some cases the likely order of impacts. Geolocation and chronolocation techniques may place a video at a specific site and time, while comparison across multiple clips can help distinguish a single strike from several waves of attack. In a school case, that sequencing matters because it may help determine whether the school itself was struck first, whether it was affected by a nearby detonation, or whether the pattern suggests a mistaken or shifted aimpoint (OHCHR and Human Rights Center, 2022, pp. 62–66).

Fragments, remnants, and crater analysis can also be significant, but they require methodological caution. Weapon remnants may indicate the family or likely type of munition used. Crater patterns may help identify the direction of force, detonation characteristics, and the likely point of impact. These forms of evidence can strengthen or weaken claims about what object was being targeted and how the strike unfolded. At the same time, fragment analysis is vulnerable to contamination, misidentification, planted material, and incomplete recovery. For that reason, remnants should be treated as important corroborative evidence, not as self-sufficient proof in isolation (OHCHR and Human Rights Center, 2022, pp. 58–60; Strugar Trial Judgment, 2005).

Open-source material is often indispensable when the battlefield is inaccessible or politically controlled. That is one of the main reasons the Berkeley Protocol was developed. In many contemporary conflicts, investigators cannot promptly secure the scene, inspect official records, or interview witnesses under stable conditions. Digital evidence may be the only early route to preserving perishable information before sites are altered, debris is removed, or online material disappears. In that sense, open-source investigation is not a substitute for proper legal method. It is often the only way to begin it (OHCHR and Human Rights Center, 2022, pp. 1–5, 53–66).

10.2 Chain of custody and evidentiary reliability

Open-source material is not self-proving. A video clip online is not automatically authentic merely because it is vivid or widely shared. The Berkeley Protocol is valuable because it insists on preservation, authentication, and documentation as legal essentials rather than technical extras. Investigators must record where the material came from, when it was collected, how it was preserved, whether metadata was retained, what verification steps were used, and whether the file remained unchanged after collection (OHCHR and Human Rights Center, 2022, pp. 60–65).

A crucial distinction exists between evidentiary copies and working copies. An evidentiary copy is the preserved original or exact forensic duplicate kept in a way that protects integrity and permits later verification, often through hash values and documented storage procedures. A working copy is the version used for analysis, annotation, enhancement, translation, clipping, or comparison. The two should not be confused. Analysis should usually be conducted on working copies, while the evidentiary copy remains preserved in its original state so that later users, including courts, can test authenticity and integrity (OHCHR and Human Rights Center, 2022, pp. 60–61).

This distinction matters acutely in a war-crimes inquiry. If investigators crop footage, adjust contrast, overlay maps, or add captions without preserving the original file separately, the evidentiary value of the material may be weakened. The issue is not that enhancement is improper. The issue is that enhancement must be documented, reversible where possible, and clearly separated from the preserved source file. Courts and investigators need to know what is original and what has been processed (OHCHR and Human Rights Center, 2022, pp. 60–65).

Authentication also requires corroboration. A single clip or image should usually be tested against other material: satellite imagery, witness accounts, maps, topographic features, metadata, shadow analysis, weather records, known building layouts, or additional videos from other vantage points. The more central the piece of evidence, the stronger the case for cross-checking it through multiple independent methods. This is one reason why a legally serious Minab analysis should resist overclaiming on the basis of one visual source alone (OHCHR and Human Rights Center, 2022, pp. 62–66; ICC, 2021, art. 69).

Reliability is also shaped by provenance. Material gathered directly from the device of the original recorder, or from a verified institutional archive, is usually stronger than material downloaded from an unknown reposting account. Anonymous online uploads are not useless, but they require greater scrutiny. In practice, the evidentiary weight of open-source material depends not only on what it shows, but on how convincingly its origin, integrity, and context can be demonstrated (OHCHR and Human Rights Center, 2022, pp. 58–65).

10.3 Missing internal military records

External proof can establish much, but not everything. It may strongly support the conclusion that the site was a functioning school, that children were present, that the strike sequence followed a certain pattern, and that the weapon type likely fell within a particular class. It may even support a strong preliminary inference that the school was not being used for military purposes. What it cannot easily establish on its own is the internal logic of the strike decision (OHCHR and Human Rights Center, 2022, pp. 20–28, 65–72).

That is where internal military records become decisive. The target folder, coordinate history, collateral-damage estimate, no-strike or protected-site status, legal review, approval chain, and post-strike assessment are likely to be the most important evidence for mens rea and institutional fault. These records may show whether the school was identified correctly, whether it was confused with a nearby site, whether warnings were raised, whether civilian indicators were ignored, whether protected-site databases were outdated, and who approved the final strike package.

Internal records are also central to modes of liability. If the case later turns on ordering, aiding and abetting, or command responsibility, the decisive evidence is likely to lie in communications, review memoranda, operational logs, and post-strike reporting rather than in external imagery alone. Open-source evidence may show what happened on the ground. Internal records are more likely to show what particular individuals knew, what risks they appreciated, and whether they failed to prevent or punish unlawful conduct (Rome Statute, 1998, arts. 25, 28 and 30; ICC, 2021, art. 54).

This is especially important for mistake claims. External evidence may show that the school’s civilian character was obvious to a careful observer. It may not show whether the actual decision-makers had access to accurate updated data, whether they were alerted to contrary information, or whether the strike resulted from known database defects. Without the internal record, it is difficult to move confidently from a strong case of apparent unlawfulness to a final conclusion on criminal intent or knowledge.

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Methodological Takeaway for Minab

The methodological takeaway for Minab is evident: publicly accessible evidence can significantly advance the analysis. It can support a serious and disciplined case that the school retained civilian status on the available record and that the strike raises grave legal concerns. Final criminal qualification, however, is likely to depend on internal records that remain unavailable. That is not a weakness in the use of open-source evidence. It is a reminder that external proof and internal documentation perform different legal functions, and a credible war-crimes assessment requires both.

11. Attribution, Responsibility, and Reparation

A rigorous analysis of the Minab School Strike must separate state responsibility from individual criminal responsibility. The two tracks are related, but they are not the same. State responsibility asks whether conduct is attributable to a state and whether that conduct breached an international obligation. Individual criminal responsibility asks whether identified persons committed an international crime with the required mental element and through a recognised mode of liability. Confusing these tracks is a common analytical error in commentary on contemporary armed conflict (ILC, 2001, arts. 2, 4 and 58; Rome Statute, 1998, arts. 25, 28 and 30).

This distinction matters immediately in a strike case. A persuasive showing that a state’s armed forces carried out an unlawful attack can establish state responsibility even if no individual has yet been prosecuted or convicted. By contrast, a criminal case cannot rest on the general proposition that a state acted unlawfully. It must identify persons, conduct, mental element, and participation with much greater precision. For Minab, both tracks matter, but they should be analysed separately from the outset (Crawford, 2013, pp. 81–88; Werle and Jessberger, 2020, pp. 79–84).

11.1 State attribution and the duty to investigate

Attribution to a state is governed by the law of state responsibility. Under the Articles on State Responsibility, the conduct of any state organ is attributable to the state, including the conduct of military forces acting in that capacity, even if the organ exceeds authority or contravenes instructions (ILC, 2001, arts. 4 and 7). In the Minab context, if the strike was carried out by the armed forces of a state, attribution to that state does not depend on proving the criminal guilt of particular individuals. The legal question is institutional and objective: was the conduct that of a state organ, and did it breach an international obligation?

International humanitarian law states the same principle in specific terms. Article 91 of Additional Protocol I provides that a party to the conflict that violates the Conventions or the Protocol shall, if the case demands, be liable to pay compensation and shall be responsible for all acts committed by persons forming part of its armed forces (Additional Protocol I, 1977, art. 91). Hague Convention IV contains a closely related rule in Article 3 (Hague Convention IV, 1907, art. 3). For a school-strike case, these provisions are important because they make clear that state responsibility does not wait for criminal conviction.

Once state conduct is plausibly in issue, the legal consequences are broader than punishment. The responsible state may owe cessation, assurances and guarantees of non-repetition, and full reparation for the injury caused (ILC, 2001, arts. 30 and 31). If the strike was unlawful, the legal consequences extend beyond the battlefield and beyond any single criminal case. They include the obligation to address the wrong at the state level.

The duty to investigate is especially important here. Under the right to life, states must investigate potentially unlawful deprivations of life promptly, effectively, independently, and impartially. The Human Rights Committee has stressed that this is part of the positive obligation to protect life under Article 6 of the ICCPR (Human Rights Committee, 2018, paras. 27–28). The Minnesota Protocol develops the same point in operational terms, stressing independence, thoroughness, preservation of evidence, transparency compatible with the investigation, and meaningful engagement with victims’ families (OHCHR, 2017, paras. 21–33).

For Minab, a credible investigation is not a political courtesy. It is part of the legal response required once there is a serious allegation that children were killed in a school strike. A purely internal review that does not preserve evidence, disclose methodology, examine targeting records, or address civilian-site indicators may be insufficient. The issue is not whether the state may investigate its own forces. It may. The issue is whether the investigation is capable of commanding legal confidence.

The state-responsibility track also matters even if attribution remains contested in public. If later evidence identifies one state as the actor, the consequences attach to that state. If a joint operation is established, attribution questions may become more complex, especially where planning, intelligence, and execution were shared. Even in that scenario, the analytical framework remains the same: attribution first, breach second, consequences third (Crawford, 2013, pp. 113–131; ILC, 2001, arts. 4, 8 and 31).

11.2 Individual criminal responsibility and its limits

A persuasive case for state responsibility does not automatically establish individual war-crime guilt. This is a basic but often overlooked point. Article 58 of the Articles on State Responsibility makes the separation explicit by providing that the law of state responsibility is without prejudice to questions of individual responsibility under international law (ILC, 2001, art. 58). The two bodies of law address different subjects, different standards, and different consequences.

State responsibility can arise once attributable conduct breaches an international obligation. Individual criminal responsibility requires much more. It requires a specific person, a specific offence, a recognised mode of liability, and the mental element required by the crime charged (Rome Statute, 1998, arts. 25, 28 and 30). In the Minab setting, one may conclude that a state is likely responsible for an unlawful strike before one can conclude that a particular planner, commander, or approving officer is criminally guilty of a war crime.

This difference is not technical. It protects analytical clarity. A state may bear responsibility because its armed forces committed an unlawful act attributable to it, even if the available evidence does not yet permit proof beyond a reasonable doubt that a named individual intended to attack a protected school or knew that the strike would be clearly excessive. Criminal law is personal. State responsibility is institutional.

The point also works in another direction. Individual criminal responsibility is not limited to the person who physically launches the weapon. Planners, targeters, approving officers, and commanders may incur liability under Article 25 or Article 28 of the Rome Statute if the evidence supports the relevant form of participation or superior responsibility. Even so, each of those routes requires proof of personal conduct and the relevant mental element. Broad statements about what “the state” knew or intended are not enough on their own (Rome Statute, 1998, arts. 25, 28 and 30; Ambos, 2022, pp. 145–153, 191–199).

For Minab, this means two conclusions can coexist. First, the public record may eventually justify a strong case that state conduct was attributable and unlawful. Second, the same record may still be insufficient to convict any particular individual until internal records, communications, target-development files, and approval chains are disclosed. That is not a contradiction. It reflects the normal structure of international law.

11.3 Reparation for victims and families

If responsibility is established, reparation becomes central. The law does not treat reparation as a symbolic add-on. It is a core consequence of internationally wrongful conduct. Under the Articles on State Responsibility, the responsible state is under an obligation to make full reparation for the injury caused, whether material or moral (ILC, 2001, art. 31). The classic forms are restitution, compensation, and satisfaction, used singly or in combination (ILC, 2001, arts. 34–37).

In a school-strike case, compensation is only one part of the picture. Families who lost children may be entitled to financial compensation for death, injury, medical costs, loss of support, and related harms. Even so, cash payments alone are not an adequate legal or moral response to the destruction of a school and the killing of children. The injury is individual, familial, and communal at the same time.

Acknowledgment matters because denial or concealment can deepen the harm. Satisfaction may include public acknowledgment of the facts, official apology where appropriate, publication of investigative findings, and commemoration of the victims (ILC, 2001, art. 37; UN General Assembly, 2005, paras. 22–23). In the Minab context, memorialization is not ornamental. It is part of recognising the wrong done to children, families, and the school community.

Rehabilitation is equally important. For survivors and families, this may include medical care, psychological support, trauma services, and social assistance. For children and school communities, rehabilitation also has an educational dimension. Article 39 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child requires states to promote the physical and psychological recovery and social reintegration of child victims of armed conflict and related abuses (CRC, 1989, art. 39). In a school-attack case, that obligation has obvious practical significance.

Reparation should also address educational continuity. A strike on a school does not only kills and injures. It disrupts learning, destroys records and infrastructure, displaces students, traumatises teachers, and may interrupt education for months or years. A legally serious reparations framework should include rebuilding or replacing school facilities, temporary classrooms, support for teachers, restoration of educational records, transport and safety measures, and, where needed, scholarships or long-term educational support for survivors and affected families. The right to education is directly engaged in this dimension of the response (ICESCR, 1966, arts. 13–14; CRC, 1989, art. 28).

Guarantees of non-repetition are especially important in Minab-type cases. If the strike was linked to stale target data, poor protected-site databases, inadequate review procedures, or failures of warning and suspension, reparations should include institutional reform. That may involve updated protected-site mapping, stricter no-strike procedures, better verification protocols, improved legal review, independent oversight, and training on attacks affecting schools and children (UN General Assembly, 2005, para. 23; GCPEA, 2025, pp. 19–24, 51–52).

For Minab, the reparations question should be framed broadly. The law should not treat the case only as a matter of individual injury, important as that is. It should also recognise the destruction of educational continuity, the damage to a civilian institution, and the long-term effects on a community of children and families. That is what a serious reparations analysis requires in a school-attack case.

12. Forum, Jurisdiction, and Enforcement

A legal analysis of the Minab School Strike should not end with abstract illegality. The next question is where accountability could actually occur. In practice, enforcement is fragmented. Domestic proceedings, military inquiries, the International Criminal Court, universal-jurisdiction cases, and United Nations investigative mechanisms each occupy a different place in the accountability landscape. None is sufficient in every case. Each has distinct legal powers, evidentiary limits, and political constraints (Rome Statute, 1998, arts. 1, 13 and 17; OHCHR, 2017; ICRC, 2005, Rule 157).

The practical importance of forum selection is obvious. A strong legal theory without a viable forum remains incomplete. For Minab, the key issue is not simply whether international law was violated, but which institutions could investigate, preserve evidence, attribute responsibility, and, where possible, impose legal consequences.

12.1 Domestic proceedings and military inquiries

National proceedings remain the first forum in most cases of alleged war crimes. This reflects both legal structure and practical reality. States control access to the crime scene, witnesses, military records, personnel, classified material, and operational review processes. They are often the only actors able to secure prompt evidence from within the chain of command. In addition, the Rome Statute is built on complementarity, which presumes that national systems bear primary responsibility for investigation and prosecution unless they are unwilling or unable genuinely to act (Rome Statute, 1998, arts. 1 and 17).

In an interstate strike case, the most immediate domestic route is often a military inquiry by the suspect state. Such inquiries have clear strengths. They can access targeting logs, no-strike lists, legal reviews, collateral-damage estimates, after-action reports, and personnel involved in planning and execution. Civilian investigators outside the chain of command usually cannot obtain that material quickly, or at all. A serious military inquiry can also identify procedural failures that would be invisible from outside, including database errors, stale coordinates, and review breakdowns.

Even so, internal military investigations have structural weaknesses when the suspect state investigates itself. Independence is the main concern. Investigators may sit within the same institutional system that planned, approved, or executed the strike. Secrecy is another problem. National security claims may limit public disclosure of the methodology, evidence, and conclusions. A third weakness is legal scope. Internal reviews may focus on operational error, lessons learned, or disciplinary compliance while avoiding the harder question of criminal responsibility for war crimes. These risks do not make self-investigation invalid as such, but they affect credibility (OHCHR, 2017, paras. 21–33; Human Rights Committee, 2018, paras. 27–28).

For a military inquiry to command legal confidence, it should be prompt, independent in fact as well as form, adequately resourced, and capable of reviewing both the strike decision and the broader system behind it. In Minab-type cases, that includes the target-development process, protected-site information, verification methods, approval chain, and post-strike response. A narrow inquiry limited to whether the weapon functioned correctly would be legally inadequate if the real issue lies in target classification or command decision-making.

Domestic civilian proceedings may also matter. Prosecutors, administrative courts, compensation bodies, or constitutional courts may provide routes for criminal review, civil claims, or public-law scrutiny. These routes vary sharply across legal systems. Their availability depends on domestic jurisdictional rules, immunities, military-secrecy doctrines, and the willingness of national authorities to litigate wartime conduct. Even where prosecution does not occur, domestic processes may still matter for disclosure, compensation, and acknowledgment.

12.2 ICC routes and complementarity barriers

The ICC framework should be stated carefully and without exaggeration. The Court does not exercise universal jurisdiction. It may act only where one of the jurisdictional gateways in the Rome Statute is satisfied. The most relevant routes are territorial jurisdiction, nationality jurisdiction, ad hoc acceptance by a non-party state under Article 12(3), and Security Council referral under Article 13(b) (Rome Statute, 1998, arts. 12 and 13).

Territorial jurisdiction exists when the conduct in question occurred on the territory of a State Party or a state that has accepted the Court’s jurisdiction. Nationality jurisdiction exists when the accused is a national of a State Party or of a state that has accepted jurisdiction. In a strike case, those links may be straightforward or highly contested, depending on where the conduct is located legally and which actors are involved in planning, approval, and execution. Missile strikes complicate this analysis because relevant conduct may span several states and multiple stages of decision-making.

Article 12(3) offers another route. A non-party state may accept the Court’s jurisdiction with respect to a particular situation. That mechanism has been used before in international criminal practice, and it provides a lawful path where ordinary State Party links are absent. Its relevance to Minab would depend on whether a state with the relevant territorial connection or another legally significant connection chooses to lodge such a declaration. It is a jurisdictional possibility, not an automatic path.

Security Council referral under Article 13(b) is also legally available. A referral can activate ICC jurisdiction even where ordinary Article 12 links are absent. This route is well known in theory and difficult in practice. Its legal basis is clear, but its use depends on Council politics, including the veto structure. In an article like this, the point should be stated soberly: Security Council referral is a real legal gateway, but one whose activation is heavily conditioned by political feasibility.

Even when jurisdiction exists, complementarity remains a major barrier. Under Article 17, the Court must find a case inadmissible if it is being genuinely investigated or prosecuted by a state with jurisdiction, unless that state is unwilling or unable genuinely to carry out the proceedings (Rome Statute, 1998, art. 17). This means that the ICC is not a first-instance tribunal for every contested strike. It intervenes only where national systems fail in the specific sense defined by the Statute.

That complementarity inquiry is often decisive in targeting cases. A state may argue that it has opened an investigation, commissioned a military review, or initiated prosecutorial assessment. The harder question is whether those steps are genuine. Independence, scope, access to evidence, treatment of command-level decisions, and willingness to pursue criminal liability all matter. A superficial or strategically limited inquiry may not satisfy the Statute’s requirement of genuineness, but the threshold is demanding and fact-sensitive.

For Minab, the ICC route should be understood as legally structured but evidentially and politically constrained. Jurisdiction would depend on a valid gateway. Admissibility would depend on complementarity. Prosecution would then depend on evidence strong enough to identify suspects, the mental element, and modes of liability. The Court is part of the accountability map, but not the only part, and not always the most immediate one.

12.3 Universal jurisdiction and UN mechanisms

Universal jurisdiction provides another possible route, though it is uneven in practice. Many national legal systems allow prosecution of core international crimes, including war crimes, on a universal or quasi-universal basis, especially through specialized war-crimes units. The legal foundation varies across jurisdictions, but the broader principle is well established in doctrine and reflected in the ICRC study, which identifies universal jurisdiction over war crimes as a rule of customary international humanitarian law (ICRC, 2005, Rule 157).

In practice, universal jurisdiction cases usually face major limits. Prosecutors may require the suspect’s presence, substantial evidentiary files, witness cooperation, or a strong national connection before proceeding. Even so, these cases matter because they prevent accountability from depending entirely on the territorial state or the suspect state. If a suspect later travels to a jurisdiction with an active war-crimes unit and relevant statutory authority, domestic prosecution may become possible even years after the event.

United Nations mechanisms are also important, though they do not usually impose criminal punishment themselves. Fact-finding missions, commissions of inquiry, special rapporteurs, and OHCHR-led investigative bodies can document incidents, preserve evidence, identify patterns, and clarify legal issues. Their contribution is often preparatory rather than punitive. They help build the record on which later judicial or prosecutorial action may depend. In inaccessible or politically blocked environments, that role can be decisive (OHCHR and Human Rights Center, 2022, pp. 17–28).

These mechanisms are especially relevant in school-strike cases because they can connect the individual incident to broader patterns. A domestic inquiry may focus narrowly on one strike. A UN body may ask wider questions: Were schools repeatedly affected? Were protected-site systems inadequate? Were children and educational institutions exposed to a recurring targeting problem? This broader institutional view does not prove individual guilt, but it can be crucial to establishing context, foreseeability, and the need for reform.

Additional Protocol I also contains the International Fact-Finding Commission in Article 90, although it has been used rarely in practice (Additional Protocol I, 1977, art. 90). Its underuse should not obscure its legal relevance. It represents a standing treaty-based mechanism for inquiry into serious violations of humanitarian law, even if political consent has often limited its practical role.

For this attack, the realistic accountability map is plural rather than singular. Domestic proceedings remain primary. ICC jurisdiction is legally structured but contingent. Universal jurisdiction may become important if suspects or evidence move across borders. UN investigative mechanisms can preserve facts, support later prosecutions, and keep the incident within an official accountability framework even when courts are not immediately available. That plural structure is often frustrating, but it is how enforcement in contemporary international law usually works.

13. Defences, Counter-Arguments, and Weak Claims

A serious legal analysis of the Minab School Strike must test the strongest contrary arguments rather than ignore them. That is not a concession to weak claims. It is part of a disciplined method. In targeting cases, credibility is built by asking what a legally serious defence would need to show and whether the available framework can support it. The most important counter-arguments here are that the school was effectively inside a military zone, that the school may have been hit by some other missile or by a stray munition, and that any error was made in good faith. Each argument must be taken seriously. None should be accepted based on a slogan, assumption, or mere possibility.

13.1 The school-inside-a-military-zone argument

The strongest defence of the facts is usually not that schools are unprotected. It is that this particular school was so entangled with nearby military infrastructure that its civilian character had been displaced or at least substantially weakened. That argument deserves careful treatment because modern conflicts often place military and civilian sites in close physical proximity. In practical terms, adjacency can increase uncertainty, heighten incidental-risk calculations, and complicate verification.

Legally, though, proximity is not enough. Additional Protocol I does not say that a civilian object loses protection because it stands next to a military installation. The governing rule remains Article 52. A school is protected unless it becomes a military objective by making an effective contribution to military action and by offering a definite military advantage through its destruction, capture, or neutralisation in the circumstances ruling at the time (Additional Protocol I, 1977, art. 52(2)). Article 52(3) then adds the decisive rule of doubt: where there is doubt whether an object normally dedicated to civilian purposes is being used to make an effective contribution to military action, it must be presumed not to be so used (Additional Protocol I, 1977, art. 52(3)).

That structure matters because the “inside a military zone” argument often smuggles in a much weaker standard than the law permits. It relies on association, not function. A school may be adjacent to a military compound, historically linked to one, or even administratively connected to a state or military-affiliated network and still remain a civilian object. The legal question is not whether the site is near military power. It is whether the school itself, by its nature, location, purpose, or use, was making an effective contribution to military action at the relevant time (ICRC Commentary, 1987, paras. 2020–2024; ICRC, 2005, Rule 8).

The location criterion should also be handled carefully. International humanitarian law does recognise that an object’s location may, in some cases, make an effective contribution to military action. Even so, this criterion cannot be interpreted so broadly that any civilian building near a military site becomes targetable. If mere adjacency were enough, the protection of schools, hospitals, apartments, and markets in urban or securitised environments would collapse. That is not the law. The better reading is that proximity may sharpen the attacker’s duties of verification, proportionality, and precautions. It does not by itself erase civilian status (Dinstein, 2022, pp. 129–136; Sassòli, 2019, pp. 319–323).

The same point applies to any suggestion that the defender’s own siting choices dissolved the school’s protection. Even if military infrastructure was placed too close to civilian buildings, the attacker’s obligations remain. The defender may incur separate responsibility for locating military objectives near civilians, but that does not convert the nearby school into a lawful target as a matter of attack law (ICRC, 2005, Rules 22–24). The school-inside-a-military-zone argument is strongest when used to explain why proportionality and precautions were especially demanding. It is weak when used as a shortcut to claim that the school had ceased to be civilian.

13.2 The stray-missile theory

A second line of defence is causation-based rather than classification-based. The argument is that the school was not struck by the relevant attacker at all, or not in the way alleged, because a stray missile, malfunctioning munition, air-defence intercept, or unrelated blast caused the damage. Such theories cannot be dismissed simply because they are inconvenient. In strike litigation and war-crimes investigation, alternative-cause claims must be tested. At the same time, they do not become persuasive merely because they can be imagined.

A legally serious stray-missile theory requires evidence of a particular kind. At minimum, it would need a credible reconstruction of the strike sequence, geolocated and time-synchronised imagery, blast-pattern analysis, weapon remnants or fragment analysis, crater assessment, and some coherent explanation of how the alternative munition reached the school and why that explanation fits the physical scene better than the competing account. Radar data, launch logs, or sensor records would strengthen such a claim considerably. Without this package, a stray-missile theory remains an assertion rather than a serious evidentiary rebuttal (OHCHR and Human Rights Center, 2022, pp. 56–66).

The Berkeley Protocol is particularly useful here because it shows why causation claims in inaccessible conflicts must be method-driven. Investigators should not treat videos, fragments, or online claims as self-proving. They must be geolocated, authenticated, preserved, and compared across sources. The same discipline applies to alternative-cause theories. A state or commentator cannot rebut a war-crimes allegation by invoking “possible misfire” or “possible intercept” in the abstract. The claim must be grounded in verifiable material that explains the site, timing, damage pattern, and weapon effects more convincingly than the contrary account (OHCHR and Human Rights Center, 2022, pp. 60–65).

This is where many weak defences fail. They confuse theoretical possibility with evidentiary plausibility. In any strike environment, it is usually possible to speculate that some other munition caused the damage. The legal question is whether the available material supports that proposition. If it does not, the alternative theory has little weight. Courts dealing with contested shelling and strike attribution have consistently relied on technical evidence, witness testimony, site analysis, and cross-corroboration rather than on bare denial or conjecture (Prosecutor v Galić, Trial Judgment, 2003; Prosecutor v Strugar, Trial Judgment, 2005).

For Minab, the correct approach is cautious but not agnostic. A stray-missile theory should be treated seriously only if a coherent evidentiary account of source, trajectory, weapon effects, and timing supports it. Without that, it does not neutralise the legal case. It merely raises a hypothetical alternative that has not been substantiated.

13.3 Good-faith mistake and what it cannot excuse

The most important defence conceptually is good-faith mistake. International criminal law does recognise mistake of fact as relevant in some circumstances. Under Article 32 of the Rome Statute, a mistake of fact shall be a ground for excluding criminal responsibility only if it negates the mental element required by the crime (Rome Statute, 1998, art. 32). In a strike case, this means that a genuine factual mistake about the character of the target may affect mens rea.

That principle should neither be denied nor overstated. A good-faith mistake may matter where the attacker acted on a legally adequate verification process, where the available information strongly but wrongly indicated military use, and where the error genuinely negates intent or knowledge. Criminal law should not treat every tragic mistake as proof of war-crime guilt. At the same time, “good faith” is not a blanket defence. It does not excuse failures to verify, failures to update target data, or disregard of obvious civilian indicators.

This distinction is crucial. A mistake grounded in a careful, current, and properly documented assessment is very different from a mistake grounded in stale intelligence, outdated coordinates, ignored school markers, or defective protected-site systems. The latter may still be called a mistake, but the label does not solve the legal problem. If decision-makers deliberately relied on defective data or failed to examine readily available contrary indicators, the issue is no longer simply whether they were mistaken. The issue is whether the claimed mistake is compatible with the level of care, awareness, and legal verification required by the law of attack and by the mental element of the relevant offence (Additional Protocol I, 1977, art. 57; Rome Statute, 1998, arts. 30 and 32; Melzer, 2021, pp. 87–89).

The same point applies to negligence. Carelessness may fall short of Article 30 intent and knowledge for some principal war-crime charges. Even so, negligence does not make the underlying strike lawful. It may still establish state responsibility, operational unlawfulness, disciplinary liability, or, in some circumstances, support command-responsibility arguments if superiors knew or should have known of systemic failures and did not act (Rome Statute, 1998, art. 28; ILC, 2001, arts. 2 and 31). Good-faith mistake, then, is relevant chiefly to individual criminal liability. It is not a general answer to the lawfulness of the attack itself.

In this situation, the primary conceptual point is evident. A genuine mistake can weaken or eliminate a path to criminal liability if it genuinely negates intent or knowledge. It cannot excuse a process that ignored the presumption of civilian status, relied on stale information without adequate checking, or failed to account for obvious signs of ordinary school use. That distinction is one of the most important in the entire article because it prevents two opposite errors: treating every unlawful strike as automatically criminal, and treating every claim of error as automatically exculpatory.

Conclusion

The present public record strongly supports treating the Minab School Strike as a candidate war-crime case. On the available evidence, the site appears to have been a functioning school, children were present during school hours, and the legal presumption remains that a school is a civilian object unless it was being used to make an effective contribution to military action at the relevant time (Additional Protocol I, 1977, art. 52(3); OHCHR, 2026a; UNICEF, 2026). At this stage, the strongest legal concerns do not lie in abstract debates about the value of education. They lie in the concrete law of attack: target verification, treatment of doubt, the adequacy of precautions, the handling of expected civilian harm, and the mental element needed for criminal liability.

The most specific criminal theory remains the war crime of intentionally directing an attack against a building dedicated to education, provided it was not a military objective (Rome Statute, 1998, art. 8(2)(b)(ix)). Broader charges concerning attacks on civilians or civilian objects also remain legally relevant, and the disproportionate-attack framework cannot be excluded. Even so, the present record supports stronger confidence in the school’s apparent civilian character than in the precise criminal theory that would ultimately be provable. That gap exists because the hardest issue is no longer only the classification of the object. It is proof of mens rea and participation.

The article has shown that proximity to a military facility does not by itself remove civilian protection, that stale intelligence may become a legal failure rather than a mere operational flaw, and that claims of mistake must be tested against the duties of verification and continuing review. It has also shown that the legal significance of Minab extends beyond conduct-of-hostilities rules alone. A school strike killing children engages child-specific protection, the right to life, the right to education, the duty to investigate, and the obligation to provide meaningful remedy and reparation (ICCPR, 1966, art. 6; ICESCR, 1966, arts. 13–14; CRC, 1989, arts. 28, 38 and 39).

At the same time, analytical discipline requires restraint. Final criminal judgment must remain contingent on evidence that is not yet public, especially the target folder, coordinate history, collateral-damage estimate, protected-site status, legal review, approval chain, and post-strike assessment. External evidence can establish much. It can show the apparent civilian status of the school, the likely sequence of events, and the gravity of the harm. It cannot, on its own, fully resolve what particular decision-makers knew, what warnings they received, and whether they intentionally attacked a protected school or acted with the degree of awareness required for war-crime liability (ICC, 2013; OHCHR and Human Rights Center, 2022).

The narrow and defensible conclusion is clear. The Minab School Strike should already be treated as a legally serious case of war crimes centered on a school that appears civilian on the available evidence. The strongest unresolved questions concern target verification, precautions, and mens rea. A final criminal conclusion, however, must depend on disclosure of internal operational records and on a genuinely independent investigation capable of testing both the strike itself and the wider targeting process behind it (OHCHR, 2026a; Human Rights Committee, 2018, paras. 27–28).

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