Trump threatens to destroy all of Iran’s bridges and power plants: This is a war crime.

“An entire civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back,” Donald Trump warned Tuesday in a Truth Social messagethe most extreme threat the president has yet issued in nearly 40 days of war with Iran.

The latest message was a follow up mail over the weekend in which he instructed Iran to open “the Fokken Strait” of Hormuz by Tuesday evening, otherwise he would make good on earlier threats. to destroy all bridges and power plants across the country. (Notably, it’s been less than a week since Trump claim that they don’t care about the Street and promised that it would open on its own once the war ended in a few weeks.)

I did threatening attacks against Iran’s desalination plants and the oil export facility on Kharg Island as well. Tuesday, US strikes on Kharg Island began before Trump’s deadline, although Fox News reported them was focused on military targets.

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

Trump’s renewed threats to target Iranian infrastructure that supplies civilians with basic necessities such as power and water, and his increasingly harsh rhetoric — such as threatening to send Iran’s government “back to the Stone Ages where they belong” — have led to accusations that he is violating domestic and international laws of war.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer warned on Sunday that Trump “possible war crimes loom.” Even some Republican allies are getting worried: Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) said on a podcast Monday that he “hope and pray” that Trump’s threats to attack civilian infrastructure were “blower” because they would let down the same ordinary Iranians the White House allegedly wanted to liberate.

Up to this point, most of the US strikes in Iran appear to have followed a predetermined target set and focused on dismantling the country’s nuclear, missile, and naval capabilities—all legitimate military goals. The assassination of a head of state like Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is likely also legal, though extremely unusualalthough Israel’s apparent target of diplomatic officials involved in negotiations is difficult to justify. The strike at a girls’ school in Tehran, which killed around 150 students on the first day of the war, appears to be the result of negligence rather than intent.

However, a shift to the deliberate targeting of Iran’s civilian infrastructure could be a sharp turn into deliberate lawlessness, as well as a dramatic escalation of a conflict that the president has vowed is close to ending. And while not every attack on energy or bridges is inherently a war crime, the scale of destruction Trump threatens, if carried out, would have dire implications — sending a signal that the nation that helped establish and police the modern rules of warfare is now flouting them proudly and openly.

What makes a bombing illegal?

Under international law, also codified in US military regulations, s military targeting is legal if it meets a two-part test: The target must “make an effective contribution to military action” and its destruction or capture must “provide a definite military advantage.”

Legal experts who spoke to Vox said that while there are certainly cases in which a power plant or bridge, and possibly even a desalination plant, could be a legitimate military target, those determinations would have to be made on a case-by-case basis, contrary to Trump’s threat to destroy them en masse to pressure Iranian leaders into concessions. Monday, Trump specifically threatened to destroy every bridge and every power plant in Iran if his demands are not met.

“The targeting is not driven by considerations of military advantage, but to politically coerce and inflict pain on the opposing party, things that would not be legitimate goals,” said Brian Finucane, a former State Department legal adviser who is now with the International Crisis Group.

The United States has targeted electricity grids in previous bombing campaigns in Iraq during Desert Storm and Serbia in 1999. In both cases it used specially designed graphite bombs designed to cause short circuits without permanent damage. There was a deadly and controversial bombing of a civilian bridge in Serbia campaign too.

But “indiscriminate strikes” like those described by Trump are not only a violation of the laws of armed conflict by the US, but could probably be considered “war crimes by those involved in the strikes,” said Michael Schmitt, a former US Air Force judge advocate who now teaches at the University of Reading in the UK. Although the two terms are often used interchangeably, “war crimes” are offenses serious enough for the political leaders and military commanders involved to face criminal charges.

By prevailing standards, many of Iran’s own strikes — from hitting gas fields, desalination plants and data centers in the Gulf to using cluster munitions in Israel — are also illegal, clearly intended to impose economic costs or terrorize populations rather than gain military advantage.

Enforcing violations is a more complicated story. Neither Iran nor the United States recognize the authority of the International Criminal Court — and, in fact, the Trump administration does sanctions imposed on it – but Schmitt notes that war crimes are matters of universal jurisdiction, meaning that any country can theoretically initiate a prosecution for them.

For his part, he is hopeful that, whatever rhetoric comes out of the White House, “at the military level, cooler heads will prevail, and there will be a very surgical assessment by the numbers of each target intended to be hit to ensure that it is a military objective, that harm to civilians is justified under the rule of proportionality, and that every feasible effort is made to avoid civilian harm.”

So far, Trump has generally drawn a distinction between the Iranian people and his regime. After all, the escalation to this war began when Trump threatened strikes against the Iranian government for his mass killing of protesters in January. And while it is almost impossible to gauge public opinion in Iran at the moment, at least that’s clear a significant segment of the population hopes that these strikes, regrettable as they may be, may still bring down the regime.

Trump made a point in the first few weeks of the war to say he was avoid targeting Iran’s power infrastructure. After Israel bombed a major gas field, raising global energy prices, Trump promise it will never happen again. In his public statements, Trump appeared to hope to allow a more flexible and militarily weakened new Iranian government to rebuild its economy after the war.

However, more recent strikes have begun to test these limits. Last week, an American airstrike destroyed a major Iranian highway bridge. U.S. officials suggested it used to transport drone and missile partsalthough other reports suggest that it was still under construction and not opened to traffic. The United States and Israel have also stepped up attacks on non-military targets in recent days, including steel and petrochemical plants.

Trump appears, at least in his rhetoric, to be shifting toward a strategy of collective punishment of Iran as a whole for the actions of his government. When he threatened to bomb Iran back to the “Stone Age” in his speech last week, it didn’t sound like just a reference to its nuclear enrichment facilities.

Intentional or not, Trump’s description of Iranian leaders as “animals” evokes Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant’s 2023 description of Hamas as “human animals“to justify the “total siege” of Gaza. The Israeli government’s consistent justification for the damage done to civilians was that it was the result of the actions of Hamas.

This is not to say that the level of physical destruction in Iran will come anywhere near Gaza. But aside from questions of legality and morality, the comparison raises troubling strategic questions for the US.

Trump often seems to hesitate between a plan to simply pack up and leave Iran once a certain set of military objectives are completedand to continue the war until Iran’s leaders agree to concessions. The latest threats seem to suggest the latter, but there is little to suggest that Iran’s leaders are close to making concessions, particularly on the Strait of Hormuz, which has emerged as their main form of deterrence and leverage in this conflict.

A government that, as Trump noted, is willing to kill tens of thousands of its own people to stay in control is probably not one that is likely to surrender because its people are suffering without power.

Update, April 7, 10:45 a.m. ET: This piece was originally published on April 6 and has been updated with Trump’s latest comments.