Human rights experts commissioned by the UN’s top human rights body say they have found “reasonable grounds” to believe the US committed war crimes in two strikes in Iran on February 28, AP reports.

The international fact-finding mission says its findings on US war crimes center on a pair of US airstrikes that killed at least 178 civilians, including women and children. At the start of the US-Israeli war against Iran in February, at least one US missile hit the Shajareh Tayyebeh school in Minab, according to an AP investigation.

Iranian state media have said 168 people were killed in the strike, most of them children. In March, CBS News sources reported that the US side's initial assessment was that the US was highly likely responsible for the strike. Moreover, according to these data, the school was not a deliberate target; it was assumed that the reason could be the use of outdated intelligence data, which mistakenly continued to consider the area as part of an Iranian military facility.

The second incident, which the UN experts referred to, took place on the same day in the city of Lamerd. According to them, American Precision Strike Missiles dispersed tungsten pellets over a “clearly identifiable sports complex and residential area.” The UN-backed team said 22 civilian men and women were killed. The UN-backed experts believe that in both cases there are grounds to assume that the US committed war crimes when carrying out indiscriminate attacks, which led to the death or injury of civilians, as well as damage to civilian objects.

Also, the team found that killings by state security forces in Iran have occurred on a “staggering scale,” and civilians faced “gross human rights violations and crimes against humanity committed by their own government.” The White House and the US military have not yet officially responded to the UN-backed experts' statement. US Central Command has repeatedly denied Iran's accusations of targeting civilian targets, stating that the US military does not intentionally target civilians.