On the first day of Trump's war with Iran, an American missile hit an elementary school in the southern Iranian city of Minab.

Now the Pentagon has decided when Americans get to read what went wrong: after they vote.

Bloomberg reported Thursday that top Pentagon officials intend to hold off on releasing their internal report on the attack "until after the US midterm elections at the earliest." Advisers to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have told some Pentagon staff about the plan, according to people familiar with it.

What happened in Minab

The school was the Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school. NPR reported in April that at least 165 civilians were killed, many of them children, and that a preliminary assessment found the United States was at fault. The building may have still been listed as a military site on an outdated American target list, because the grounds used to be part of an Iranian Revolutionary Guard naval base.

Common Dreams, summarizing the reporting, puts the death toll at more than 150 people, including 120 children, and notes that early findings in March pointed to a Tomahawk missile fired on "outdated" targeting information.

The investigation into what went wrong has been running for months. According to Bloomberg's reporting as summarized by Common Dreams, investigators found "flawed intelligence, outdated imagery, and an overreliance on AI" contributed to the strike — and the assessment is believed to have been effectively finished for months.

Why the timing matters

The line the Pentagon drew isn't a deadline in the investigation. It's November 3 — the day voters decide who controls Congress.

President Trump has already shown how he wants the strike remembered. Asked about it in June, he said: "Mistakes are made. War is nasty."

Brian Finucane, an international policy analyst, wrote sardonically that officials don't "want to remind voters before the midterms of the mass killing of schoolchildren."

Ryan Costello of the National Iranian American Council called the delay "a shameful exercise to dodge accountability."

Bloomberg reports that Minab is one of a series of civilian-casualty incidents that have followed in recent months. In a statement quoted by Common Dreams, Costello listed a strike on a sports hall hours after Minab, a bombing that killed a family in their home on Qeshm Island, and a strike on a wedding party in Kuhestak that killed five people, two of them children.

Congress never voted for this war

Voters have a right to know what's being done in their name — especially in a war their representatives never approved. Congress has never voted to authorize Trump's war with Iran. When House Democrats showed up in April asking for a vote to limit it, the Republican presiding, Chris Smith, held the gavel for three minutes and used them to block a vote on the Iran war.

Now the same administration that started the war without Congress wants to get through the election before the public sees how one of its first strikes killed so many children.

What we know

On the first day of Trump's Iran war, a U.S. missile struck an elementary school in Minab, killing more than 150 people, many of them children, after a preliminary assessment found it was likely on an outdated target list. Bloomberg reports that Pete Hegseth's advisers intend to keep the Pentagon's report on the strike — believed to have been effectively finished for months — from the public until after the November 3 midterm elections at the earliest.

Source

Pentagon Plans to Hold Report on School Strike Past Midterms — Bloomberg