By Roxana Niknami
I. Historical Precedents: Infrastructure as Military Target
The targeting of civilian infrastructure in armed conflict is as old as warfare itself. Its systematic employment as a military doctrine intended to coerce civilian populations and degrade state functioning by destroying the physical systems on which civilian life depends is a distinctly modern phenomenon.
The phenomenon of evolution across the twentieth century has been simultaneously a story of technological escalation and legal response. Understanding where the 2026 Iran war sits within this history requires tracing that evolution with analytical precision.
The Second World War established both the modern template of systematic infrastructure attack and the legal response it generated. Germany’s Blitz bombing of British cities, the Allied firebombing of Dresden, and the US strategic bombing campaigns against Japanese industry demonstrated that industrial-era warfare regarded civilian infrastructure as a legitimate military target, either directly (factories, railways, power plants) or indirectly (residential areas near military production).
The post-war legal response, the 1949 Geneva Conventions and their 1977 Additional Protocols was a direct attempt to draw legally enforceable lines around civilian infrastructure that the war had systematically crossed. The problem that would recur across the following eight decades is that the states most capable of conducting infrastructure attacks were simultaneously the states with the greatest structural incentives to resist binding legal constraints on their conduct.
The Vietnam War is the most directly relevant American precedent for the current Iran campaign both for its targeting logic and its political consequences. Operation Rolling Thunder (1965-68) and Operation Linebacker II (1972) systematically struck North Vietnamese power infrastructure, oil storage, bridges, and transportation networks in the explicit theory articulated by Robert McNamara and his systems analysis team that degrading economic infrastructure would reduce the military capacity of an adversary whose war-fighting capability was assumed to depend on it. The theory proved empirically wrong: North Vietnam adapted, dispersed, and maintained military effectiveness despite sustained infrastructure attack. The political consequence of widespread international condemnation that delegitimized the American war effort without producing military results was the first major demonstration of the strategic liability that infrastructure attacks create when conducted without decisive military effect.
The 1991 Persian Gulf War produced the most comprehensively documented case of civilian infrastructure destruction in modern warfare before the current Iran conflict. American and coalition strikes destroyed 88 of Iraq’s 92 power generation facilities within the first weeks of the campaign. The subsequent Harvard Study Team estimated that within one year, infrastructure destruction had caused approximately 70,000 Iraqi civilian deaths (primarily from disease, contaminated water, and collapsed healthcare) above what would have occurred without the strikes. The legal and humanitarian assessment was damning: the ICRC concluded that the strikes violated Article 54 of Additional Protocol I (prohibiting attacks on civilian survival infrastructure); a subsequent UN report described the destruction of water and sanitation systems as “near-apocalyptic”; and subsequent scholarship identified the infrastructure destruction as a possible violation of the prohibition on collective punishment. Yet no prosecution occurred. The absence of legal accountability for the 1991 infrastructure campaign established a precedent of impunity that shaped subsequent American targeting doctrine.
NATO’s 1999 Yugoslavia campaign introduced a new technological instrument. Graphite bombs designed to short-circuit electrical systems without physical destruction combined with conventional strikes on power plants, bridges, and oil refineries, but reproduced the same accountability gap. Amnesty International documented civilian casualties from infrastructure strikes as potential violations of IHL. No UNSC authorization existed. No prosecutions followed. The pattern of legal condemnation without legal consequence was by this point a structural feature of Western military conduct rather than an exception.
Russia’s systematic targeting of Ukrainian civilian infrastructure (power grids, heating systems, water treatment, and culminating in the catastrophic destruction of the Kakhovka dam in June 2023) represents the contemporary benchmark against which international accountability responses are measured. The contrast with the accountability responses to comparable Western conduct is the subject of Section IV. What matters analytically is that the Ukrainian case finally triggered the full machinery of international legal response, ICC arrest warrants, ICJ orders, UNSC resolutions (vetoed by Russia but passed in UNGA), comprehensive sanctions, and a near-universal Western political condemnation that prior infrastructure campaigns had consistently escaped.
Table 1: Historical Comparison of Infrastructure Targeting in Armed Conflict (WWII to Iran 2026)
II. The Scale and Nature of Infrastructure Destruction in Iran 2026
The scope of infrastructure damage in Iran as of day 40 is, by any metric, extraordinary and the data available, even accounting for the difficulty of independent verification in an active conflict zone, supports an assessment of systematic rather than merely incidental civilian harm. Iran’s Red Crescent Society documented damage to 81,365 civilian sites based on field assessments as of late March a figure so large as to initially strain credibility, but one consistent with CENTCOM’s own announcement of having struck more than 3,000 targets in the first week alone and with independent satellite imagery analysis. Iran’s Energy Minister Abbas Aliabadi confirmed that the country’s vital water and electricity infrastructure had suffered “heavy damage” from strikes targeting “dozens of water transmission and treatment facilities” and destroying “parts of critical water supply networks.”
The targeting of water desalination infrastructure deserves specific analytical attention because of its direct relationship to survival. On March 7, Iranian Foreign Minister Araghchi documented a US strike on a desalination plant on Qeshm Island that disrupted water supply to thirty villages. On March 8, Iran retaliated with a drone strike on a desalination plant in Bahrain. Trump subsequently threatened to strike Iranian desalination plants more broadly if the strait was not reopened. Attacking Iran’s water-related infrastructure will immediately spark a crisis of disease, hunger, and thirst among Iran’s civilian population. With only fifty-six plants responsible for more than ninety percent of Persian Gulf desalinated water, the mutual vulnerability is catastrophic for the entire region. Qatar, Kuwait, and Bahrain all have less than one week of water reserves; the UAE has sixteen to forty-five days; Saudi Arabia varies from days to two weeks. The mutual targeting of desalination infrastructure is the closest the current conflict has come to the textbook IHL prohibition on attacks on objects indispensable to civilian survival.
The Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant has been struck three times during the conflict, representing perhaps the most legally unambiguous single category of violation in the entire campaign. Article 56 of Additional Protocol I provides absolute protection to nuclear power stations: they shall not be attacked “even where these objects are military objectives, if such attack may cause the release of dangerous forces and consequent severe losses among the civilian population.” The legal standard is not intent but risk: the provision applies regardless of whether the attacker intends to cause radiation release, as long as the attack “may cause” it. Three strikes on an operating nuclear facility, even one surrounded by military assets, is a categorical violation of Article 56 on its face. IAEA Director-General Grossi confirmed strikes on the facility; Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization stated there were no casualties or radiation leaks, but the absence of actual radiation release does not retroactively cure the legal violation.
The South Pars gas field strike on April 6 Iran’s largest petrochemical facility, the world’s largest gas field shared with Qatar marks a significant escalation in the scope of economic infrastructure targeting. Israel’s Defense Minister Katz described the objective as eliminating “a major source of revenue for Iran” a formulation that moves explicitly into the territory of economic warfare against the civilian population rather than degradation of military capability. Iran’s military runs primarily on diesel fuel, not grid electricity and not natural gas. Destroying South Pars provides minimal direct military benefit while inflicting massive economic harm on Iran’s 92 million civilians and simultaneously disrupting the energy supply to Iraq, which depends on Iranian gas for a third of its electricity and water treatment infrastructure in Basra.
The Minab school strike, which killed at least 170 people (most of them girls aged seven to twelve) on March 3, represents a category of civilian harm distinct from infrastructure destruction but analytically inseparable from the broader targeting pattern. Independent investigations by Al Jazeera and Amnesty International concluded that a US-manufactured Tomahawk missile was “likely used” and that the strike was “likely deliberate”. meaning it was not a munitions malfunction or collateral damage but an intentional strike on a site that, if it was properly identified, was an elementary school. If it was misidentified, reveals catastrophic failures of targeting intelligence. Neither explanation exonerates the conduct under IHL.
III. The Legal Framework:
The international legal framework governing attacks on civilian infrastructure in armed conflict is among the most developed bodies of rules in international humanitarian law, constructed across seven decades of treaty negotiations, customary law development, and judicial elaboration. Its application to the documented conduct in Iran 2026 generates a legal assessment that is, by the standards of IHL analysis, unusually clear.
Table 2: International Legal Framework
The most significant legal development in the current conflict is the explicit threat articulated by Trump and documented by NPR to strike Iranian power plants and desalination plants as coercive leverage for reopening the Strait of Hormuz. International law expert Gabor Rona, quoted by NPR on April 3, identified this threat with precision: it constitutes “a threat to commit war crimes both under international and U.S. law.” This assessment is correct under two distinct legal frameworks. Under international law, threatening to conduct an attack on civilian infrastructure in violation of IHL is itself a violation of the obligation under Article 36 of Additional Protocol I to ensure that military operations conform to legal requirements.
Under American domestic law, the US War Crimes Act (18 USC 2441) prohibits grave breaches of Geneva Conventions by US nationals and a threat to commit such breaches, if followed by planning and preparation, may constitute conspiracy under domestic law. That this explicit legal warning, delivered on a major American public radio network, has generated no congressional action, no DOJ investigation, and no presidential retraction demonstrates the degree to which legal constraints have been operationally suspended in the current conflict.
The proportionality analysis under Article 51(5) (b) of Additional Protocol I is perhaps the most analytically powerful legal argument against the infrastructure campaign, because it does not require proof of intent — only proof that anticipated civilian harm is excessive relative to expected military advantage. The Atlantic Council’s April 6 analysis provides precisely the factual foundation required for this assessment: destroying Iran’s power grid would give the military “only minor disruptions” (because Iranian military systems run on diesel, not grid electricity) while endangering all 92 million Iranian civilians (who depend on grid electricity for cooling, hospital operations, groundwater wells, sanitation, and food preservation). This is a proportionality analysis with unusual analytical clarity: the military benefit is demonstrably minimal; the civilian harm is demonstrably catastrophic; the attacks are therefore disproportionate on their face, regardless of the intent behind them.
Neither the United States nor Israel has ratified the Rome Statute, which significantly limits the ICC’s direct jurisdictional options. However, this does not render criminal accountability impossible. The UN Security Council has the power to refer any situation to the ICC regardless of the nationality of the alleged perpetrators or the location of the crimes as it did with Sudan in 2005 and Libya in 2011.
Such a referral would be vetoed by the United States, as it was in relation to Syria. But the political and legal significance of a UNSC referral attempt even a failed one, is not negligible: it establishes the formal international legal position that the conduct merits criminal investigation, creates a record that constrains future impunity claims, and generates the kind of political pressure that ultimately influenced American conduct in subsequent conflicts. The absence of even an attempted referral, compared to the immediate ICC arrest warrant for Putin following Bucha, is the most precise single indicator of the accountability gap that the Iran conflict has exposed.
IV. The International Response: Accountability Gap and Double Standards
The international community’s response to the infrastructure destruction in Iran 2026 must be assessed against two baselines: the established legal standards reviewed in Section III, and the comparative responses to comparable conduct in other conflicts particularly the Ukrainian case, which has become the contemporary benchmark for international accountability.
Table 3: International Response to Iran Infrastructure
The comparative table reveals a pattern of accountability failure that extends beyond mere political pragmatism into a structural feature of the post-Cold War international order: the rules of international humanitarian law are applied to adversaries with near-complete consistency, and to allies with near-complete inconsistency. The single UNSC resolution passed on the Iran conflict Resolution 2672 of March 11, which demanded the end of Iranian attacks on Gulf states focused exclusively on Iranian conduct, making no reference to US-Israeli infrastructure strikes, the Minab school massacre, or the Bushehr nuclear plant attacks. This is not a neutral legal document but a political one, shaped by the veto power of the conflict’s principal belligerents.
The UN Human Rights chief’s assessment is notable for its directness in a context of institutional paralysis. Volker Turk’s statement that the “reckless” war is “disproportionately impacting civilians in the Middle East and beyond” employs precisely the language of disproportionality that Article 51(5)(b) of Additional Protocol I uses to define unlawful attacks — but it generates no legal consequences because the institutions capable of converting that assessment into accountability are either vetoed (UNSC) or jurisdictionally limited (ICC) or politically constrained (EU, US allies). The result is a situation in which the world’s most senior human rights official publicly identifies conduct as disproportionate and potentially unlawful, and the international system responds with the diplomatic equivalent of a shrug.
The political explanation for this accountability gap is structurally similar across all its dimensions. The United States’ veto power in the UNSC makes Security Council accountability for American-conducted or American-endorsed military operations functionally impossible without American consent. European states’ dependence on the transatlantic alliance for security guarantees makes sustained public condemnation of American military conduct politically costly. The ICC’s non-jurisdiction over US and Israeli nationals makes criminal accountability impossible through that channel without a UNSC referral that the US would veto. And the absence of any economic lever comparable to the sanctions applied to Russia which was vulnerably integrated into Western financial and energy markets means that the coercive tools that have been effective in other contexts are not available in the Iran case.
V. Military and Political Effects: Does Infrastructure Destruction Work?
Beyond the legal and moral dimensions of infrastructure targeting, the military and political efficacy of the strategy deserves analytical scrutiny that the current commentary has largely elided. The historical record reviewed in Section I offers a sobering assessment: infrastructure attacks have rarely achieved the strategic objectives their planners articulated, and have frequently generated political and strategic consequences that undermined the broader war effort.
The Vietnam precedent is directly relevant. Rolling Thunder’s three-year campaign of infrastructure destruction did not break North Vietnamese military capability or political will; it adapted, dispersed, and fought on. The 1991 Persian Gulf War destroyed Iraq’s electrical and water systems with devastating humanitarian consequences but did not prevent Saddam Hussein from maintaining power for a further twelve years. The Yugoslavia campaign achieved its immediate objective — Serbian withdrawal from Kosovo — but analysts continue to debate whether the infrastructure strikes contributed to that outcome or whether Serbian public opinion and allied diplomatic pressure were the decisive factors. The Gaza precedent is grimly instructive: eighteen months of systematic infrastructure destruction reduced Gaza to rubble, killed over 45,000 people, and generated the ICJ’s finding of a plausible risk of genocide — without defeating Hamas or creating the conditions for sustainable peace.
The Atlantic Council’s assessment of the Iran power grid question is particularly rigorous on the military efficacy dimension: “The Iranian military has only limited ties with the national electricity system. Outside of some grid-connected manufacturing facilities which can be targeted independently, without destroying the entire power system the Iranian military would face only minor disruptions.” Iran’s military, like most modern military forces, operates on diesel-powered mobile generation rather than grid electricity precisely because fixed grid infrastructure is a known vulnerability. Destroying the grid that powers Iranian hospitals, water treatment, and residential cooling therefore provides minimal military benefit while inflicting maximum civilian harm which is the definitional profile of a disproportionate attack under IHL, and also the profile of a tactically counterproductive military action that generates political costs exceeding its operational benefits.
The political effects of the infrastructure campaign on Iranian domestic opinion are, by all available evidence, the opposite of what the targeting logic anticipated. even Iranians who had been critical of their own government increasingly view the war as an assault on the Iranian people rather than its leadership. Former Iranian Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, the son of the deposed Shah, a committed opponent of the Islamic Republic, and a figure whose political interests should be served by the regime’s collapse, explicitly called on Trump and Netanyahu to spare civilian infrastructure, stating that Iranians would need it to rebuild their country. If the regime’s most prominent Western-allied opposition figure is publicly condemning the infrastructure campaign, the assessment that the attacks are generating nationalist consolidation rather than popular uprising against the government is well-founded.
Conclusion
The historical analysis conducted in this article supports a conclusion that is both analytically clear and politically uncomfortable: the systematic destruction of civilian infrastructure has been a recurring feature of modern warfare, it has generated a progressive legal response across seven decades, it has rarely achieved its stated military objectives, and it has consistently escaped legal accountability when conducted by states with the structural power to prevent it.
The 2026 Iran war represents the culmination of this trajectory a conflict in which the most legally developed rules of international humanitarian law are being violated at documented scale, in which the international accountability machinery that was constructed precisely for this purpose has been rendered non-functional by the political interests of the conflict’s principal belligerents, and in which the strategic logic driving the infrastructure campaign rests on empirical assumptions that the historical record systematically refutes.
The irony that Trump’s threat to strike Iranian power plants was publicly identified as a threat to commit war crimes by international law experts on American public radio without generating any legal or political consequence captures the essential paradox of the current moment in international humanitarian law. The rules are clear; the violations are documented; the legal expertise is available and publicly articulated; and the accountability gap is total. What this demonstrates is not the failure of international humanitarian law as a body of rules but the failure of the political conditions required for its enforcement conditions that exist when the violating state is Russia or Sudan or Libya, and that evaporate when the violating state is the United States or Israel.
The historical record predicts what comes next with reasonable confidence: the infrastructure campaign will not decisively break Iranian military capability or political will; it will generate long-term civilian suffering that outlasts the conflict by years; and it will escape legal accountability in the immediate term while contributing to the slow erosion of the international legal order’s credibility. Whether that erosion, in this case as in others, eventually generates the political conditions for legal reform, as the post-WWII infrastructure campaigns generated the 1977 Additional Protocols or simply entrenches the impunity of the powerful, is the question that the 2026 Iran war will answer for a generation of international lawyers, diplomats, and ordinary civilians who have learned, once again, that the laws of war are most robustly applied to the wars of others.
Author: Roxana Niknami – Professor of Regional Studies, University of Tehran, Tehran. Iran.
Image Credit: AFP (The rubble of residential buildings near Niloufar Square in Tehran, which were hit during the joint military strike by the United States and Israel against Iran on March 2, 2026).