Donald Trump last night vowed to bomb Iranians “back to the Stone Ages, where they belong.”
That’s a phenomenally racist, crude and cruel thing to say.
But it’s also a promise to commit war crimes. It would require the mass destruction of civilian targets.
International law is clear: Intentionally attacking civilian infrastructure is a war crime. Even if the destruction offers a definite military advantage, attacks are outlawed if they may cause disproportionate harm to civilians.
Trump’s targets are clearly civilian. If there is no “deal,” he said – and there are no signs of any sort of deal – “we are going to hit each and every one of their electric generating plants very hard and probably simultaneously,” he said. He might even destroy their oil facilities, he said, acknowledging that “it would not give them even a small chance of survival or rebuilding.”
Major news organizations are not covering this with the appropriate level of alarm or urgency. Trump has been making extreme threats like this for nearly two weeks now, but political journalists convey his remarks stenographically. Most of the time, they don’t mention the term “war crime” at all, preferring to characterize his comments with descriptions like – I kid you not — “freewheeling”.
This morning, the Associated Press and the New York Times quoted Trump’s “Stone Ages” threat, but didn’t even hint at any moral or legal concerns.
Even worse, the Washington Post actually gave Trump credit for not threatening Iran’s drinking-water supply — which he did on Monday. Cleve R. Wootson Jr. and Karen DeYoung wrote that “while he said the U.S. will hit power grids, he pulled back from naming desalinization plants as a target, something that was widely decried as a potential war crime.” (DeYoung’s original report mentioning Trump’s threat to water plants, said no such thing.)
Ask These Questions Before It Starts
So yes, news organizations need to properly situate Trump’s threats as war crimes in the making.
But they also need to start aggressively raising questions like:
- Are we really going to do this?
- Will there be any political opposition?
- Are these unlawful orders?
- Should members of the military refuse orders to bomb civilian targets?
- How would that work?
- Is there any discussion of that in the military ranks?
- Are there any high-ranking officers willing to go on the record against bombing civilian targets?
- What do veterans think?
- What do Vietnam veterans think?
This would be a good time to revisit the video released by six members of Congress in November reminding members of the military that they can – and must – refuse illegal orders.
Speaking shortly after Trump began illegally bombing alleged drug boats off the coast of Latin America, the lawmakers took turns reading a statement in which they cautioned that the “threats to our Constitution aren’t just coming from abroad, but from right here at home.”
Federal prosecutors, egged on by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, attempted to indict the lawmakers for “interfering with the loyalty, morale, or discipline of the U.S. armed forces” – but were soundly rebuffed by a grand jury of ordinary citizens.
What the six lawmakers said was accurate, and lawful, and is more important now than ever.
Teaching the Public About War Crimes
This would, of course, not be Trump’s first use of unlawful force. In fact, the entire war – as a war of aggression – violates international law.
We are now in the eighth month of lethal strikes on those alleged drug boats, whose crews Trump condemns to death with no due process and outside of any armed conflict. The most recent strike was just last week. It was the 47th in a series that has killed 163 people. You probably didn’t hear about it.
“The fact that these strikes have faded from public attention does not make these violations any less grave or unlawful,” Human Rights Watch’s Sarah Yager said in a statement.
On the very first day of Trump’s bombing campaign in Iran, U.S. missiles accidentally hit not one but two schools. A Tomahawk missile hit an elementary school full of children, killing at least 175 people, most of them young girls. And a new kind of missile, designed to detonate just above its target and spray lethal tungsten pellets, struck a sports hall and adjacent elementary school, killing at least 21 people. If the Pentagon failed to take reasonable precautions to avoid civilian harm in carrying out those attacks, they too would be war crimes.
Trump’s new strikes on civilian targets, of course, would be intentional. And they would be at a massive scale, the kind the world hasn’t seen since, well, Gaza.
So more than ever, the public needs to hear from experts about the law and the consequences.
Human Rights Watch warns of the “geographic spread, speed of escalation, and open disregard for international norms by all parties”:
Statements by top officials from the United States, Israel, and Iran demonstrate a willingness to violate fundamental protections of international humanitarian law, reveal callous disregard for civilian life and property, and signal that those in power do not consider themselves bound by the law. All world leaders should urgently speak out in defense of the rules that protect civilians everywhere, strongly condemn violations, and demand accountability.
The harm to civilians, in this case, would be vast. As Amnesty International explained in a statement:
By threatening such strikes, the USA is effectively indicating its willingness to plunge an entire country into darkness, and to potentially deprive its people of their human rights to life, water, food, healthcare and adequate standard of living, and to subject them to severe pain and suffering.
Al Jazeera frequently talks to experts:
Yusra Suedi, assistant professor in international law at the University of Manchester, said Trump’s threat “reinforces the climate of impunity around collective punishment in warfare”.
“This is clearly an act of collective punishment, which is prohibited under international humanitarian law. You can’t deliberately harm an entire civilian population to pressure its government,” Suedi told Al Jazeera.
Also:
Raed Jarrar, advocacy director at the rights group DAWN, said Trump’s threats represent “clear, public evidence of criminal intent”.
“Threatening to obliterate a nation’s power grid, oil infrastructure and water supply to coerce its government is not a negotiating tactic; it is textbook collective punishment and a war crime,” Jarrar told Al Jazeera.
The online journal Just Security is publishing a series of scholarly essays on the war, including an excellent primer on targeting.
The New York Times Knows Better
The New York Times’s lame and euphemistic coverage of Trump’s threats is particularly egregious not just because of its extraordinary influence but because, as an institution, it knows better.
I say that with confidence, because Thomas Gibbons-Neff and John Ismay – notably not political reporters – wrote an article right after Trump’s initial rant about attacking power plants that, in the Times print edition, was headlined “Power Grid Hit Would Be War Crime, Experts Say.” It had a strong opening paragraph:
President Trump’s threat to “obliterate” power stations in Iran if its leaders failed to open the Strait of Hormuz suggests that the United States is willing to violate international humanitarian law as part of its military campaign, according to current and former human rights officials.
It offered essential background:
In 2024, the International Criminal Court issued four arrest warrants to Russian military officers and officials charging them with war crimes for attacking “Ukrainian electric infrastructure.”
And it included informative and insightful quotes from experts:
“What we are seeing from all sides — the United States, Iran and Israel — is a race to the bottom in which threats against civilian infrastructure are becoming normalized,” said Sarah Yager, the Washington director at Human Rights Watch. “This kind of rhetoric doesn’t just escalate tensions irresponsibly, it signals a dangerous willingness to erode the very rules designed to protect civilians in war.”
Also:
“Trump is openly threatening a war crime,” said Kenneth Roth, a former executive director of Human Rights Watch. “And people aren’t saying anything because they’re numb to it.”
The fact that the Times’s political reporters and its top editors act like that article never came out speaks volumes to their intent. They’re not ignorant. They’re covering up.
Reporters Need to Be Persistent
One last point: Trump needs to be personally confronted about his unlawful orders – and reporters are the only people with the opportunity to do that.
Similarly, war crimes ought to be a consistent topic at White House press briefings. Kudos to NBC’s Garrett Haake, who asked the right question at Monday’s briefing:
Under international law, striking civilian infrastructure like that is generally prohibited. Why is the president threatening what would amount to potentially a war crime with the U.S. military? And how do you square that with this administration repeatedly saying that the U.S. does not target civilians?
Karoline Leavitt of course ducked the issue, while attacking Haake for asking. “I’m sure some experts are telling you that in your ear, to try to ask me that question,” she said, as if that would be a bad thing.
Then Leavitt called on Scripps News’s Haley Bull, who chose not to follow up. Share on her and her colleagues.