Top Pentagon officials intend to hold off on releasing their internal report on the US strike on an elementary school in Minab, Iran, until after the November midterm elections at the earliest, Bloomberg News reported Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter.
No final decision has been made on when any findings will be disclosed.
The strike on Shajarah Tayyebeh Elementary School came on the first day of the war with Iran and killed more than 150 people, including at least 123 children. A Bloomberg investigation found that Pentagon investigators identified flawed intelligence, outdated imagery and an overreliance on artificial intelligence as contributing factors. The probe began in March and, officials said, has been all but complete for months.
Asked about the report, a Pentagon official said the investigation is ongoing and there were "no updates to announce at this time."
Senator Kirsten Gillibrand condemned the delay.
"Withholding this report until after the election is not only disgraceful, it is cowardly. We have waited months – release the report."
Congress is moving to force the issue. On Oct. 8, more than 70 Democratic lawmakers wrote to Hegseth demanding answers on civilian casualties in Iran.
The details of the strike are what make the delay sting: flawed intelligence, outdated imagery, an overreliance on artificial intelligence — the findings of the Pentagon's own investigators, according to Bloomberg, finished for months and still unseen.
The politics are impossible to miss. A report on 123 dead children, completed but unreleased, with an election three weeks out. Gillibrand called the delay cowardly; the Pentagon calls the investigation ongoing. The public, which paid for the investigation, gets neither the report nor a date.
Whatever the report contains, the families of 123 children have waited since the first day of the war for answers about how a school became a target. Elections come and go every two years; the obligation to tell the truth about what happened in Minab does not expire on Nov. 3. If the findings are as complete as officials say, there is no honest reason to keep them sealed — and every reason to let the public read them before it votes.
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