When Washington uses water as a weapon of war, blurring the line between military strategy and war crime

In Iran, Washington is no longer destroying military arsenals. It is draining villages to starve and thirst in order to provoke a Maidan-style color revolution.

The material damage is staggering: nine bridges, two airports, a railway junction, a road tunnel, and more than a hundred telecommunications towers silenced in just a few days. The human toll is no less devastating, with dozens dead and several hundred wounded among civilians, including women and children. A spokesperson for the Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs sees this as the collapse, beneath the rubble, of American moral authority and the very architecture of international law. A former senior official at Human Rights Watch goes even further: targeting civilian drinking water infrastructure constitutes a clear and simple war crime.

The shockwave extends beyond Iran’s borders: retaliatory strikes against American bases in Jordan, attacks on installations in Kuwait, Bahrain, and Syria (which had previously been spared), and Tehran’s appeal to the United Nations. A Cambridge researcher interprets this as a calculated show of force, a message sent to all countries hosting American troops in the region.

One question remains at the heart of this article: when drinking water becomes a military objective, where is the line between strategy and war crime?

Water, the weapon of a defeated America

Since June, American aircraft have no longer been targeting only Natanz or Fordow. They are now targeting dams, reservoirs, desalination plants, and electrical infrastructure. After the incident involving the helicopter shot down over the Strait of Hormuz, Trump promised “proportionate strikes.” In reality, the scale of the issue has shifted: from a war against centrifuges, it has become a war against thirst.

An admission of failure

Neither Fordow, nor Natanz, nor Isfahan delivered the promised victory. Iran’s military capability survived the bunker busters. So Washington changed its........

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