The only account of how the Minab school was struck comes from one unnamed official

The Reuters file carries a correction notice, verbatim: “(Corrects paragraph 8 to remove reference to Iranian commander and replace with proximity to IRGC naval complex).” The uncorrected sentence placed an Iranian commander in the frame at the school site; the corrected one offers only the geography of an adjacent IRGC naval complex. The first supplies a military-target rationale, the second does not. Meanwhile the only causal explanation in circulation is TIME’s: the Pentagon opened a formal command investigation into the Minab strike in March and has not released its preliminary findings, and a US official told the Associated Press the strike was likely the result of outdated target coordinates supplied by the Defense Intelligence Agency. That is one unnamed person inside the institution under investigation, and it has been repeated widely. Axios, citing the report, says the mission sought information from US officials and received no response.

The tolls tell the same story in miniature. Reuters, AP, Al Jazeera, IBTimes UK and The Week put the combined 28 February total at 178 civilians; Democracy Now! ran 177. For the school, Al Jazeera, Reuters via CBC and TIME carried “more than 150, including approximately 120 children”; Stars and Stripes quoted the report’s “credible independent information” asserting 157 killed, 123 of them children aged 13 or younger; CNN wrote “at least 156, including 120 children and 26 teachers,” attributed to Iranian officials rather than to the report. CNBC put Lamerd at 22. The arithmetic only closes one way: 156 plus 22 makes 178; 157 plus 22 makes 179. Countercurrents alone called it a “girls' school” — a detail appearing in no other captured source, and unverified.

On the US response, CNBC was the only outlet in this capture to put Washington’s rejection above the fold: “A State Department Official said the U.S. does not give credibility to the report’s findings” — paraphrased, unnamed, with no on-record statement located. The AP file notes the administration “has yet to directly accept the blame or release findings of a Pentagon investigation into the school bombing.” There is at least one testable document in this record that nobody quoted in the window: Axios refers to CENTCOM commander Adm. Brad Cooper testifying to the House Armed Services Committee in May about the Minab attack. We have not read the transcript and will not characterise it. Even the UN’s own newsroom slipped, writing that the report was “released Monday” under a Thursday dateline — an error the globalsecurity.org mirror reproduced.

Assessment: Nothing here is a lie, and that is the point. Each step is individually defensible: a correction is a correction, a background briefing is standard practice, a seven-death spread on a 157-body count is rounding by any newsroom’s standards. The compound effect is a record in which the single most consequential claim — that this was bad coordinates from the DIA rather than a deliberate targeting decision — rests on one anonymous official and cannot be tested until the command investigation is published, which it has not been. Treat “outdated coordinates” as an unconfirmed institutional account, not an established cause, until the Pentagon or Cooper’s May testimony supports it.