Donald Trump and Hegseth could be ‘personally liable’ for war crimes

Even as the United States and Israel continued to bomb civilian targets in Iran, a pushback from international law experts is growing to flag what they believe constitute war crimes.

US President Donald Trump in fact posted on Thursday images of a bridge being blown up in Tehran and reiterated his warning of reducing Iran to the ‘stone age’. Israel had earlier bombed the Pasteur Institute in Tehran engaged in research to develop medicines and vaccines. There is also growing evidence of US and Israeli planes bombing civilian housing complexes.

Iran has retaliated in kind, as one of the petitions points out, and may be equally responsible of committing war crimes. Reacting to President Trump’s latest outburst, Iranian foreign minister Seyed Abbas Araghchi posted on X, “Striking civilian structures, including unfinished bridges, will not compel Iranians to surrender. It only conveys the defeat and moral collapse of an enemy in disarray. Every bridge and building will be built back stronger. What will never recover: damage to America's standing.”

More than 100 international law experts have warned that US strikes on Iran violate the UN Charter (no evidence that Iran posed an imminent threat that could justify a self-defence claim) and may be war crimes (attacks on civilian sites). Reza Nasri, one of the international lawyers leading the pushback, posted on Thursday, “War crime apologists, like Lindsay Graham often invoke World War II — especially Allied actions against Germany — to justify targeting civilians in Iran. They entirely omit the fact that those excesses are precisely why the Geneva Conventions were adopted after the war in 1949, why the Genocide Convention was established in 1948, why we had additional protocols, and why international humanitarian law has since been progressively reinforced by ad hoc and permanent criminal courts. The World War experience is precisely why we claim to live under a UN Charter–based order today, where law exists to prevent aggression and atrocities.”

Warning that the US president and secretary of defence (war) could be personally liable for war crimes, the lawyers have pointed out that both of them have made statements which implicate them and remove any alibi of ignorance or claim of military necessity. “The explicit threat to “bomb Iran back to the Stone Age” and to destroy electric generating plants, objects indispensable to civilian survival, constitutes a prohibited act or threat of violence whose primary purpose is to spread terror among the civilian population,” Nasri demanded that the UN should ask the Internation Criminal Court to initiate preliminary investigation.

Meanwhile, as many as 100 US-based ‘international law experts, professors, and practitioners’ have also voiced concern about serious violations of international law and ‘alarming rhetoric by the United States, Israel, and Iran’. The initiation of the campaign against Iran, the statement signed by them says, was a clear violation of the United Nations Charter, and the ‘conduct of United States forces since, as well as statements made by senior government officials, raise serious concerns about violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law, including potential war crimes.’

Recent statements from secretary Pete Hegseth describing rules governing military engagement as “stupid” and prioritising “lethality” over “legality”, his “gloves off” approach to warfare and the statement that the U.S. does not fight with “stupid rules of engagement” have been referred to. The statement also expresses concern over President Trump’s ‘disturbing comment’ that “I don’t need international law” and that the US may conduct strikes on Iran “just for fun”.

President Trump is also on record saying, “I could take out things within the next hour, power plants that create the electricity, that create the water… We could do things that would be so bad they could literally never rebuild as a nation again.” He also threatened to “obliterate” power plants in Iran. Pointing out that international law prohibits attacks on civilian energy and other infrastructure, the statement calls for international efforts to rein in the warring parties.