'He should resign': Senator calls for Pete Hegseth to step down over Iran school bombing

A Democratic senator called on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to resign over the bombing of an elementary school in Iran that killed scores of children.

An ongoing military investigation has determined that U.S. forces fired a Tomahawk missile on Feb. 28 that struck Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school, killing 175 people, most of them children, based on faulty coordinates, and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) said the secretary of defense should take responsibility for the error and step down.

"I have very deep concerns about how this site was targeted," Gillibrand told CNN's "Situation Room." "Obviously, it was next to naval operations, but even in New York Times reporting this morning, they were able to see the site clearly in publicly available data that shows this was clearly a school. So I have very serious questions that I asked in the Armed Services Committee hearing this morning of our top generals, asking specifically, how was this location targeted? What tools were used? Was AI used? What is the oversight responsibility of commanders to make sure these sites aren't targeted?"

"I want to know what Secretary Hegseth knew about this targeting," she added. "He has undermined the resources that we put aside in the armed services to ensure that civilians are not targeted in any military operations, and he has degraded those sets of personnel and resources."

The senator complained that President Donald Trump and his administration have kept Congress in the dark about the war since before launching it nearly two weeks ago.

"I don't think we've had the oversight and accountability that we are entitled to," Gillibrand said. "We have yet to have an open hearing on the Iran war in the Armed Services Committee, so I have a great deal of questions, and I think Secretary Hegseth should resign because of this failure in being more precise. This operation was on the first day of operations, all sites were selected, pre-targeted by our military with arguably great care and great precision, and so how they missed that – this was a girls school – is very concerning to me."

"If Secretary Hegseth did not cut the funding for this area of review by 90 percent, if Secretary Hegseth did not continually try to undermine the rules and the procedures that our service members and our generals take, I think he should resign because of this failure," she added.

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