Iran Responds, Trump's 48 Hour Ultimatum : Destroy Civil Energy (War Crime)

Bombing Schools was not enough....Trump now wants to pull a Putin by targeting civilian infrastructure.

Speaker of Iran’s Parliament, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf: “Immediately after the power plants and infrastructure in our country are targeted, the critical infrastructure, energy infrastructure, and oil facilities throughout the region will be considered legitimate targets and will be destroyed in an irreversible manner, and the price of oil will remain high for a long time. And throw down what is in your right hand; it will swallow up what they have made.”

The ICC needs to issue an arrest warrant for Donald Trump. Americans need to pack their shit, and move their military bases out of countries around the world. They are more trouble than they were wroth.

Shame, poor Iran, the innocent victim...

The ICC needs to issue an arrest warrant for Donald Trump. Americans need to pack their shit, and move their military bases out of countries around the world. They are more trouble than they were wroth.

The Gulf states are reported to be furious, they spent a fortune hosting American military bases, investing in America and effectively bribing Trump. Now they find that instead of the American military bases protecting them, they are what's getting them attacked, and they also find for all that time and money they spent on him seem to have no influence over Trump in preventing him from doing something that was directly against their interests.

It's not just America first, it will be if it's not already, America alone.

Shame, poor Iran, the innocent victim...

So your response to a potential serious war crime is, shame but Iran deserves it?

I thought this operation was at least partially about helping the people of Iran...I'm not sure how destroying their energy supply is suppose to help them.

It's a punitive threat to deter them from committing terrorism in straight of Hormuz.

And the blocking of the strait came after what? Terrorism, nothing less...

Shame, poor Iran, the innocent victim...

It is very funny. The big speculation of them all; liberals are en route to kill hundreds of millions people. Which requires a specific mindset. The idea that rights are suspended following certain behaviours (which is very funny, considering that many liberal posters are white people hailing from South Africa, they would not accept this mindset coming from their black skinned co-citizens)

Remember, peeps, liberals have now a long history of criminalising poverty... And they are doubling down on the trend. Extremely promising.

It's a punitive threat to deter them from committing terrorism in straight of Hormuz.

It's still a war crime that will affect the civilian population...you're arguing in favour of war crimes now.

What is a WAR CRIME Superidiots?

Your posts Mike...for crimes against brain cells.

No body else invovled in war crimes - only Trump, Weird idea.

If Trump were actually to carry out a threat to “obliterate” or “destroy all of Iran’s energy infrastructure” in the way his current rhetoric suggests, that would certainly amount to war crimes under international law,

What his threat looks like under IHL

International humanitarian law (IHL) prohibits:

1. Direct attacks on civilian objects, including energy infrastructure that is primarily or overwhelmingly civilian in function.
2. Attacks that are “wanton” or “without objects of military advantage,” or that are designed to cause widespread suffering or collective punishment rather than to gain a specific military advantage.

If the stated purpose is to “make the Hormuz blockade economically and politically unbearable” by systematically destroying power plants, gas processing facilities, and grid infrastructure across Iran, that is effectively a threat to use energy deprivation as a weapon against the civilian population. That aligns closely with what experts and courts have described as war crime type conduct (e.g., the Russia–Ukraine energy attacks).

When it would not be automatically unlawful

Energy infrastructure can be a lawful target if:

1. A specific plant or node is predominantly used to power major military facilities or directly supports combat operations, and its destruction offers a concrete, direct military advantage.
2. The attack is proportionate: the expected civilian harm (loss of heat, water, hospitals, basic services) is not excessive compared with that military advantage.

Even then, a blanket or “obliterate all” campaign across the national grid would almost certainly violate the principles of distinction, proportionality, and the prohibition on wanton destruction.

Likely war crime type elements here

If Trump follows through along the lines of his current threat, the pattern would raise strong indicators of war crimes:

1. Purposely targeting civilian dependent systems on a national scale to inflict hardship rather than to disable specific military capabilities.
2. Executing a systematic campaign against energy infrastructure that foreseeably causes mass civilian suffering (blackouts, hospitals offline, water treatment failure, etc.) without clearly bounded military advantage.
3. Using civilian infrastructure as leverage in an ultimatum: “open the Strait of Hormuz in 48 hours or we destroy your power plants” is a classic sign of collective punishment, which is expressly prohibited under IHL.

Practical law enforcement caveat

Whether anyone is actually prosecuted is a separate question. The Rome Statute lists “extensive destruction of property not justified by military necessity” and “wanton destruction of cities, towns or villages” as war crimes, but enforcement depends on jurisdiction, political will, and whether courts can reach the responsible officials. What is clear, however, is that the planned act would be unlawful under existing treaty law and customary IHL, even if not every state is in a position to hold it accountable.

Yes, the deliberate blowing up of civilian shipping is a war crime. International Humanitarian Law (IHL) strictly prohibits intentionally targeting civilians or civilian objects, which includes merchant vessels and their crews, unless they are being used for a military purpose

… But not a peep about that from the Trump derangement crowd. Even back in WW1 it was a major reason for US to enter the war. You chaps are so biased you just keep tripping over your own arguments

A no win situation. The only way to defeat Iran is to destroy the global economy for years -itself an act of terrorism.

And yet no deliberate attack has been made by the US on Iranian power plants…..whereas 20 civilian vessels have actually been attacked. Let alone all the other civilian targets they have deliberately already hit. Pure bias,

When will the Americans finish their investigation into the girls primary school that was hit by not just one but at least three missiles? The school was "triple tapped" as they apparently call it. Three separate missile hits, not just one as we all thought.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5yqqyly9n0o

If I was a Trumpanzee, I'd shut up about war crimes until that tragedy is cleared up . . . especially as Bozo still refuses to admit it and and last I saw he pretended that he didn't know anything about it.

Civilian vessels being shot at is pretty tame compared to the deaths of 176 schoolgirls aged between 7 and 12.

If it can be proven that it was a deliberate targeting of the school by the Trump admin, he will be impeached and removed from office and will probably put behind bars...I suspect subotage from a deranged until Trump mole somewhere in the intelligence community.

"I suspect subotage from a deranged until Trump mole somewhere in the intelligence community."

I see . . . so according to you it was someone with TDS trying to make Bozo look bad?

Is that more convenient for you to believe? Do you have anything to back that up?

But the question remains, when will this investigation be completed?

I think we all know if it was an American promary school hit by an Iranian missile the investigation would have been completed within an hour. Here we are three and a half weeks later and they're still trying to find someone to blame.

"I see . . . so according to you it was someone with TDS trying to make Bozo look bad?"

More likely a foreign plant.

United States military investigation

On 5 March, Reuters reported that two American military personnel involved in an internal investigation believed the attack was likely perpetrated by the US, although a final conclusion had not yet been reached. The US and Israel had divided their strikes geographically, with the US responsible for striking targets in southern Iran where the school was located. Independent analysis of satellite imagery suggested that the school and the Sayyid al-Shuhada military complex had been struck near-simultaneously by air-delivered munitions.[39]

On 11 March, the New York Times reported that the preliminary findings of the investigation determined that the US was responsible for the strike. The inquiry suggested that the school was likely targeted due to outdated coordinates provided by the Defense Intelligence Agency.[40][41]

On 13 March, US secretary of defense Pete Hegseth promised a thorough probe into the strike, in what the Washington Post described as a tacit acknowledgement of US responsibility for the attack.[42]

Opinion

The Editorial Board

March 21, 2026

Credit...Illustration by Rebecca Chew/The New York Times

By The Editorial Board

The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate from the newsroom.

From his first announcement of the attack on Iran on Feb. 28, President Trump has issued a stream of falsehoods about the war. He has said Iran wants to engage in negotiations, though its government shows no sign of it. He has claimed that the United States “destroyed 100% of Iran’s Military capability” when Tehran continues to inflict damage throughout the region. He has said the war is almost complete even as he calls in reinforcements from around the globe.

Lying is standard behavior for Mr. Trump, of course. His political career began with a lie about Barack Obama’s birthplace, and he has lied about his business, his wealth, his inauguration crowd size, his defeat in the 2020 election and so much more. A CNN tally of Mr. Trump’s falsehoods during one part of his first term found that he averaged eight false claims per day. Many people are so accustomed to his lies that they hardly notice them anymore.

Yet lying about war is uniquely corrosive. When a president signals that the truth does not matter in wartime, he encourages his cabinet and his generals to mislead the country and one another about how the war is going. He creates a culture in which deadly mistakes and even war crimes can become more common. He makes it harder to win by hiding the realities of conflict and by making allies wary of joining the fight. Ultimately, he undermines American values and interests.

There is a reasonable debate to have about the wisdom of this war. Iran’s murderous government does indeed present a threat — to its own people, to its region and to global stability. Mr. Trump could make a fact-based argument for confronting the regime now, especially to prevent it from menacing its neighbors and, above all, from developing a nuclear weapon. We are skeptical, but we acknowledge that there is a case to be made.

Mr. Trump is not making it. Instead, he has lied about the reasons for the war and about its progress, in an apparent attempt to disguise his poor planning and the war’s questionable basis.

The president was only a few minutes into his Feb. 28 announcement of the start of the conflict when he offered an obviously contradictory rationale for it. He repeated his claim that American attacks last June “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program while also citing that program as a reason to go to war. The claim of obliteration is false: Iran retains about 970 pounds of highly enriched uranium, potentially enough for 10 warheads.

The lies have continued since then. Days later, Mr. Trump said the U.S. military had a “virtually unlimited supply” of high-end munitions. The Pentagon nevertheless has had to withdraw weapons from South Korea to sustain its efforts in the Middle East. He has also asserted that “nobody” believed Iran would retaliate by attacking Arab countries. On Monday, he said that “no, the greatest experts, nobody thought they were going to hit” neighboring countries. In truth, some experts had warned of precisely this scenario.

In another instance, Mr. Trump has used false information to continue his alarming penchant to portray people who contradict him as un-American. Last weekend, he posted an allegation that “Iran, working in close coordination with the Fake News Media” had spread fake videos of an American aircraft burning in the ocean. The White House has offered no examples of American media outlets having done so. Instead, several debunked fake online videos, CNN reported. Nonetheless, Mr. Trump wrote that “you can say that those Media Outlets that generated it should be brought up on Charges for TREASON for the dissemination of false information!”

A shocking falsehood came on March 7, when Mr. Trump claimed in his typically offhand way that a strike on an elementary school in the town of Minab during the first hours of the war “was done by Iran.” The attack killed at least 175 people, most of them children. The U.S. military has conducted an investigation and preliminarily concluded that an American missile mistakenly hit the school. The military deserves credit for its honesty. The commander in chief, however, still has not retracted his statement.

This pattern is an echo of the wars in Vietnam and Iraq, when small lies grew into bigger ones, such as the covered-up massacres in My Lai and Haditha. The consequences of those untruths were long-lasting. Americans’ faith in government never recovered from the deceptions of Vietnam. And the second Iraq war, which George W. Bush’s administration sold on the grounds of fictitious weapons of mass destruction, represents the start of our cynical modern political era. Since that war began in 2003, every Gallup poll asking about the country’s direction has shown that most Americans are dissatisfied with it.

Lies about war also make it harder to achieve victory: The more one spreads falsehoods, the less one feels obliged to face reality. In retrospect, Americans understand that their leaders’ refusal to confront the truth in Iraq and Vietnam led to strategic errors. The pattern is repeating. Before Mr. Trump began this war, he brushed aside warnings from his top military adviser that Iran could close the Strait of Hormuz to traffic it does not approve. The global economy is now dealing with the consequences of his overconfidence.

He may yet learn a more personal lesson about lying in war. Lyndon Johnson and George W. Bush will forever be remembered as having misled Americans about U.S. military action. They learned that falsehoods can boomerang on the leaders who tell them.

Starting a war is the most serious action that a political leader can take. It ends lives and can change history. The decisions that guide war must be based in reality, and presidents owe American service members and their families the truth about why they are being asked to fight. Whatever short-term gain Mr. Trump thinks he is getting by lying about the war in Iran is far exceeded by the cost, for him, the country and the world.