Trump vowed over the weekend to bomb civilian power plants and bridges if Iran did not open the strait, a strategic chokepoint for global oil and gas shipments that the country has effectively blocked amid the ongoing war, by 8:00 p.m. Eastern Time on Tuesday.
He has since brushed off concerns about committing war crimes, saying when asked about the matter during a press conference on Monday that he was “not at all” worried about it, and has continued to ratchet up his threats as his deadline approaches.
“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Tuesday morning. “We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World.”
The previous day, Trump said the U.S. would bring Iran “back to the stone ages” while speaking at a press conference.
TIME spoke with four legal experts about whether Trump’s threatened strikes would constitute war crimes, how such determinations are made under international law, and who could be held responsible.
Oona Hathaway is a professor at Yale Law School who served in the U.S. State Department and the Department of Defense. Harold Koh is a Yale Law professor who served for nearly four years as the Legal Advisor of the Department of State. New York University Law School professor Ryan Goodman served as special counsel for the Defense Department. Tom Dannenbaum is a Stanford University Law School professor of nuclear security.
Hathaway and Dannenbaum were among the co-authors of an open letter from international law experts raising concerns about war crimes in the Iran conflict. Koh was one of more than 100 experts who signed the letter.
The following interviews have been condensed and edited for clarity.
Q: Trump has threatened to bomb Iranian infrastructure, including power plants, desalination plants, bridges. Can you explain what constitutes a war crime, and where those targets fall in that definition?
Hathaway: So war crime is a serious violation of international humanitarian law … That law is captured in the Geneva Conventions in 1949 … and the threat to destroy civilian infrastructure and to destroy “a whole civilization” clearly violate those rules, because it is not connected to any lawful military objective. It doesn't meet the basic principle of international humanitarian law, which is that states that are engaging in use of force have to distinguish between combatants and civilians and can only lawfully target military objectives. So it's clear that if he actually makes good on his threat, that he will be ordering war crimes, and that U.S. military forces will be carrying out war crimes.
Koh: There are some things that are permitted by the laws of war, including killing combatants of the other side. But it doesn't extend to targeting civilians, torturing people and other kinds of acts. What's being proposed here is attacks on essential civilian infrastructure.
Dannenbaum: Everything that is not military by nature, [which] would include things like tanks, munitions, military bases and fortifications … is presumptively civilian. In other words, there's not a distinction between civilian infrastructure and other things. There's a distinction between civilian objects and military objectives. And everything starts as a civilian object, until, by its nature, purpose, location or use, it makes an effective contribution to military action, such that its destruction or neutralization would yield a definite military advantage.
[Trump’s threats] seem to indicate targeting on the basis of the objects' contribution to the viability of a modern society. That would be a standard for targeting that is completely unrelated to any question of effective contribution to military action—the standard required by law …
Whatever uncertainties may exist regarding any specific strike, at the macro level, we can see the way that this campaign is being articulated from the top. That articulation is in direct contradiction with the principles and requirements of international humanitarian law.
Q: Could the Trump Administration legally justify bombing civilian infrastructure?
Koh: Not if it's carried out to the scope of what Trump is saying and what [Defense Secretary Pete] Hegseth is saying. Those are threats that are themselves in violation of the Geneva Conventions.
Goodman: The best argument that they could make is that power stations are not off limits. They are sometimes placed on no-strike lists, but that is a policy determination, that is not a legal determination, and especially if it is civilian infrastructure that … does have some part of its use for military purposes. If it's generating electricity and the electricity is going to a military site, for example, then this object becomes dual use. It's got a civilian characteristic, but it also has a military characteristic, and it makes it a legitimate target, because there is a military purpose to the target, and so it becomes targetable, would be the argument.
And now one just has to engage in a proper proportionality analysis to ensure that the expected loss of civilian life and suffering of the civilian population is not in excess compared to the military benefit gained from destroying that target. That's their best argument.
The problem for them is, at least what the President has articulated is going after every power station in the country. And the reason that he's given for it—it seems to have no nexus to a military purpose in the first place.
I can't fathom how the catastrophic implications for the civilian population would not be in excess of whatever that military advantage is, including that the President, at the same time, is telling us that Iran is militarily defeated already.
Q: Where do nuclear power plants fall in the mix?
Dannenbaum: With respect to nuclear power plants in particular, the law applies a heightened set of protections against targeting. The way that the law characterizes this class of specially protected objects is "works or installations containing dangerous forces.” The core examples are nuclear power plants, dams, dikes. The reason is that destroying those things would potentially cause a release of dangerous forces with severe losses for the civilian population. Directing attacks against such objects is presumptively unlawful.
Even when the object in question qualifies as a military objective, it can only be targeted if the collateral harm would be proportionate. For that, the question is balancing the military advantage with the expected civilian harm.
Koh: If they say that what they're doing is an attack with a military purpose, like hitting a reactor that has underground nuclear material, they still have to make sure that those bombs are not going to release the radioactive material, because the catastrophic consequences could affect and harm the health and safety of millions of civilians across several countries.
Q: Trump said that “a whole civilization will die tonight.” Is there any international law that prohibits this kind of language?
Goodman: There is actually a very clear provision of the laws of war that apply to the threat itself … The provision states that it's prohibited to threaten violence against the civilian population and to spread terror among the civilian population through that threat of violence, and this is exactly the scenario that that provision has in mind.
So when the Secretary of Defense basically said that enemy forces would have no quarter—in other words, that U.S. forces would kill even people who had surrendered or were no longer in the fight. The war crime is not simply ordering one's troops to do that. It is making the statement, because the laws of war try to prohibit those kinds of statements from being made by military leaders. [Editor’s note: Hegseth pledged during a press briefing in mid-March that “We will keep pushing, keep advancing, no quarter, no mercy for our enemies.”]
Hathaway: So speech can in some instances constitute violations of international humanitarian law. But what really matters, first and foremost, is action.
Q: Under international law, is the U.S. responsible for the actions of Israel, say, if it had knowledge of an attack that was a war crime?
Koh: If they intentionally aid and abet those attacks through the sharing of intelligence, then they are co-conspirators in the war crime.
Q: What is the international body that makes these interpretations?
Koh: There are two different bodies you want to talk about. There's the International Committee of The Red Cross in Geneva, which has monitored the functioning of the Geneva Conventions for centuries, and it's won three Nobel Peace Prizes, which is more than any other entity … They have delegates who are both lawyers and non-lawyers, and these people are extraordinarily knowledgeable and extraordinarily creative. They go to scenes of these kinds of war zones and monitor whether the rules of the Geneva Conventions are being followed at unbelievable risk to themselves.
Then, ex-post, afterwards, evidence of the war crimes can be gathered by international prosecutors as well as domestic prosecutors, and used for either a prosecution at the International Criminal Court or, as in the case in Ukraine, there's a public prosecutor that's gathering evidence on hundreds of cases and bringing these cases against named individuals of the Russian military.
Q: Who would be held responsible for war crimes? Trump, soldiers?
Koh: This goes back to the Nuremberg Trials. Before Nuremberg, everybody had an out. If you were the leader, Hitler, you would say, “I didn't know what my ground forces were doing.” And then if you were the person carrying out the order killing civilians, you would say, “I was just following orders.” And everybody got off. After Nuremberg, it was flipped so that everybody's responsible. You can't take just following orders as a defense, and someone who gives an order with knowledge that it’s going to be carried out a particular way has command responsibility.
I think this creates a huge issue for the soldiers on the ground and the targeters. They have orders, completely irresponsible orders, and wildly overbroad statements that clearly, if implemented, would exceed the scope of the law. And the question is, can they somehow narrow that to something that could be defended? What do you do? You're going to be prosecuted for just following orders if you commit a war crime. And Trump might be immune, but under domestic law, they're not. So this puts incredible pressure on people who didn't want to be there in the first place.
Q: How could Trump be punished?
Hathaway: There have been instances in the past where leaders of countries who seemed, at the time, completely unlikely to ever be held to account––Augusto Pinochet comes to mind––were eventually tried and subjected to justice. So that is possible.
Honestly, I'm not holding my breath. I think that the chances of the President being subjected to criminal prosecution is pretty slim. What I'm concerned about right now is stopping him from doing worse than what he has already done. I think Congress absolutely has got to step in here … We've got three more years of this ahead of us and for the President to be able to carry out these illegal strikes here and be allowed to get away with it suggests that he might be permitted to do the same in other places.
Q: Do you think the U.S. or Israel has committed war crimes in the Iran war thus far?
Koh: You have to prove these things with both facts on the ground and with proof of intent.
There are certainly causes of great concern. The letter that we signed said there are causes for concern, particularly with regard to, say, the killing of 175 children at the Minab School. The bombs, the tomahawks, were clearly from the United States. It could have been a mistake, or it could have been deliberate targeting, or could have been somewhere in between…
When lots of civilians die, the chances are high that war crimes have occurred, but they still have to be proven on an incident-by-incident basis
Q: If a war crime is committed against Iran, is it then justified under international law to carry out similar military action?
Hathaway: The short answer is, Iran is legally obligated not to resort to the same tactics that President Trump is threatening. That said, what the President is doing is going to erode those legal protections. It's going to create the impression that maybe these rules don't apply anymore. It's going to be seen by some as licensing similar kinds of action, and I would not say that we should be terribly surprised if we see retaliatory strikes on electrical plants in the region, or on data centers or on other forms of civilian infrastructure in the area.
And more generally, I think we should be concerned about what this does to the protections for civilians in future wars, not just in this war. Once you erode these legal principles, once the United States, which has historically played a critical role as a leader in the international and global legal order, is throwing these rules out the window and deciding that they don't apply it will license many other states to feel that they too can ignore these rules. And so the United States is setting an example by which the world is measuring itself.
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