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Why Trump’s latest threat against Iran could be a war crime

Is it illegal to bomb Iran’s bridges and power plants?

For someone who claims to be unconcerned about the Strait of Hormuz, President Donald Trump seems increasingly desperate to open it.

In a Truth Social post over the weekend that was extreme even by his standards, Trump instructed Iran to “open the fuckin’ strait” by this Tuesday or he would make good on earlier threats to destroy bridges and power plants across the country. He has threatened attacks against Iran’s desalination plants and the oil export facility on Kharg Island as well.

Asked Monday by reporters at the White House whether this would constitute a war crime, Trump replied that the Iranian leaders who had killed “45,000 people in the last month” were “animals.”

Trump’s renewed threats to target Iranian infrastructure that supplies civilians with basic necessities like power and water, and his increasingly harsh rhetoric — like threatening to send Iran’s government “back to the Stone Ages where they belong” — have led to accusations that he’s violating domestic and international laws of war. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer warned Sunday that Trump was “threatening possible war crimes.”

To this point, most of the US strikes in Iran appear to have followed a pre-determined target set and focused on degrading the country’s nuclear, missile, and naval capabilities — all legitimate military aims. The killing of a head of state like Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is probably also lawful, even if extremely unusual, though Israel’s apparent targeting of diplomatic officials involved in negotiations is harder to justify. The strike on a girls’ school in Tehran that killed around 150 students on the first day of the war appears to have been the result of negligence rather than intent.

Is this the beginning of the end of the war in Iran?

World leaders are almost never killed in war. Why did it happen to Iran’s supreme leader?

A shift toward the deliberate targeting of Iran’s civilian infrastructure, however, could mark a hard........

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