Minab Revisited

Because all of you absolutely love my LOAC posts, Joseph Orenstein at Just War has an exhaustive look at the legal implications of the Minab school strike:

The Shajarah Tayyebeh school was not a military target on Feb. 28, 2026. It had not been a military facility for a decade. Its civilian character was visible, documented, and verifiable. That a U.S. military strike nonetheless destroyed it—killing more than 165 people, most of them children—is a tragedy whose legal dimension cannot be resolved by characterizing it as a simple accident.

The failure to maintain current, verified intelligence before approving a strike against a fixed installation in a non-denied environment is an independent violation of Article 57’s precautionary obligations—separate from any distinction violation. The triple-tap pattern raises an additional question the investigation must answer: whether the second and third missiles were released without any reassessment of first-strike observations.

And the potential role of AI-assisted geospatial tools in possibly laundering a decade-old misclassification into an approved strike package raises questions about the institutional architecture of target verification that extend well beyond this case. As targeting processes increasingly incorporate machine learning and automated analysis, the legal responsibility for verification cannot be delegated to an algorithm. A human—a targeting officer, a JAG, a commander—must remain accountable at the point of approval.

None of this necessarily rises to the level of a war crime under the Rome Statute’s willfulness standard. But it rises well above the threshold of an unremarkable mistake. Article 92 of the UCMJ provides a more realistic vehicle for individual accountability than the Rome Statute in this context — one that does not require proof of intent to strike a school, only proof that a legal duty existed and was culpably neglected. The law of armed conflict demands that we take that seriously—not in a spirit of adversarial prosecution, but in the spirit that animates the Geneva Conventions themselves: the obligation to learn, to reform, and to prevent the next Minab.

A thorough, independent, and publicly disclosed investigation is not optional. It is the law.

Orenstein is thorough, and if you want a better understanding of how LOAC functions I’d recommend a full read. TL;DR the strike was a clear violation of IHL (International Humanitarian Law), but to be considered a “war crime” you’d have to establish intentionality and that’s rough here. Dereliction and negligence are not sufficient for that elevation. However, the strike may well include a violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) which does include dereliction of duty. But there are also considerations that have to deal with intel process, with AI, and with double-tap policies. Worth your time.