U.S. Missile Strike on Minab Elementary School and the Role of Palantir’s Maven AI

In February 2026, two Tomahawk missiles struck Shajarah Tayyebeh Elementary School in Minab, Iran, killing more than 150 people, including at least 123 children. The site had been listed for years in U.S. databases as an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) facility, but commercial satellite imagery from 2018 showed a brightly painted school with a soccer pitch, walls, and playground markings. Notes about the conversion were entered into a separate, disconnected database and never reached the strike-package planners.

Gizmodo

Officials who spoke to a Bloomberg investigation said personnel at U.S. Central Command relied heavily on Palantir’s Maven Smart System, an AI-powered data-integration platform, to compress target-selection timelines from hours to minutes. Maven recommended the Minab site as a “day-one” target based on the outdated IRGC label. The review also highlighted three additional failures: bad intelligence, outdated satellite imagery, and a 90 % reduction in civilian-harm-mitigation staffing—dropping from ten analysts to a single person across the Defense Department, with Centcom’s team shrinking from ten to one.

Gizmodo

More than 120 House Democrats wrote to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in March requesting an explanation of Maven’s role. The United Nations Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Iran concluded there were reasonable grounds to believe the United States committed a war crime, stating the U.S. The Pentagon has declined to comment publicly, citing the ongoing investigation. President Donald Trump later said, “I don’t think anybody’s going to ever be able to say what happened there.” “I don’t think anybody’s going to ever be able to say what happened there.” — President Trump

Gizmodo

• “I don’t think anybody’s going to ever be able to say what happened there.” — President Donald Trump

Gizmodo