Iran

NY Times - The Geneva Conventions require militaries to distinguish between civilians and combatants and to take precautions to protect noncombatants, including by ensuring that the attacks are proportional.

The U.S. military’s own law of war manual states that “the protection of civilians against the harmful effects of hostilities is one of the main purposes of the law of war.” The manual goes on to outline the duties the U.S. military has by not directly attacking civilians and minimizing harm to the civilian population.

What seems like straightforward terminology outlined in the Geneva Conventions or U.S. law can have varying interpretations.

Ground troops, commanders and states may even define “civilian” differently. One example comes from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; the United States used the presence of “military-aged males” as a contributing factor in justifying lethal force because a person looked like they might be a combatant, regardless if they were armed.

In Iran, with power plants as possible targets, scrutiny is rising over another military term, “dual-use objects” — infrastructure that can be used for both civilian and military purposes.

Power grids are civilian objects by default but can become lawful targets if they make an effective contribution to military action and offer definite military advantage, experts say.

“Power plants sit at the heart of civilian life, which is why the legal bar to attack them is so high,” Ms. Yager said. “The civilian harm from blackouts, water disruption and collapsing health care must be weighed. In Iran, bombing power plants and bridges would be devastating, and the U.S. military would have no way of saying they didn’t know that.”

Washington Post - [Last month] he Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released its latest provisional numbers for overdose deaths nationwide. It projected 71,542 deaths in the 12-month period ending in October 2025, a 17 percent drop compared with the previous 12-month period. Even more encouraging, the full year of 2025 is expected to mark a 35 percent drop from the peak number of deaths in 2023.

Many factors contributed to this trend, but I think the most important reason is clear: Fentanyl supplies have dropped thanks to collaborative and wide-ranging counternarcotics strategies. Nothing else explains the timing and abruptness of the decline.

Drug seizures tested by the Drug Enforcement Administration illustrate this well. In August 2023, the agency reported that the purity of seized fentanyl powder products peaked at more than 20 percent; by the end of 2024, it dropped to just above 10 percent. The purity of fentanyl in pills dropped as well, though with some fits and starts likely due to Mexican producers “having difficulty obtaining some key precursor chemicals,” the DEA reported.

Washington Post - President Donald Trump spent Monday fending off questions about whether his threat to bomb “every” bridge and power plant in Iran would amount to war crimes. He rejected the premise, arguing that Iran’s leaders were “animals” who needed to be stopped. On Tuesday morning, he doubled down.

“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, his social media platform. “I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.”

Such seemingly unrestrained statements have alarmed legal experts and former military officials, who argue that the president’s threat to conduct broad attacks on civilian infrastructure — “very little is off-limits,” he said Monday — could undermine America’s aims in Iran and create legal jeopardy for military leadership.

“I’m concerned that the president’s bombast is putting the operational commanders in a very difficult position,” said Geoffrey Corn, who served as a top law-of-war expert at the U.S. Army in Iraq in 2004-2005. “They know that you cannot just draw a circle around the country and say every element of the electrical grid is now a lawful target.”

Jameel Jaffer, a longtime human rights lawyer and lecturer at Columbia University, said Trump’s latest threat to extinguish a “whole civilization” meets the “very definition of terrorism — to seek to achieve political ends through violence or threats of violence directed at civilians.”

NPR - As the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, the International Rescue Committee and Save the Children tell NPR that clinics and humanitarian centers across the Middle East, Asia and Africa face the risk of running out of basic medication and food.

NBC News - Iran has rejected proposals for a temporary ceasefire, including a 45-day proposal that was recently delivered by Pakistan to both the U.S. and Iranian officials, sources said. Trump has not signed off on the proposal, a White House official said. 

Iran, for its part, has been demanding a permanent end to the war. Iranian state media IRNA reported that Tehran would reject a temporary ceasefire given that during previous rounds of negotiations with the U.S., the Trump administration launched military strikes while talks were ongoing. More

NY Times -  President Trump threatened to wipe out a “whole civilization,” and the United States hit military targets on Iran’s main oil export hub, as he ramped up pressure on Tehran to fully open the Strait of Hormuz or potentially face a wave of strikes on critical infrastructure in the coming hours.

Mr. Trump issued the grave warning in a post on social media on Tuesday as a new round of attacks was launched across the Middle East. The U.S. attacked Kharg Island, the export hub, Israel and Iran launched fresh attacks and Israel’s military warned Iranians to avoid traveling by train. The increasingly incendiary threats and the intense fighting reinforced the fragile state of diplomacy, with no public signs of a diplomatic breakthrough to end the war.

Zeeshan Aleem, MSNOW -  If the United States does in fact conduct such strikes, they would disable much of Iran’s economy, wreak havoc on its health care system and otherwise cause untold suffering across the civilian population.

The president’s advocacy of potential war crimes comes amid his increasingly desperate bid to get a leg up on Iran. But while the threats are ominous, the intimidation is highly unlikely to succeed strategically — and could even backfire.

Washington Post -   As President Donald Trump renews his threats to bomb “the entire country” of Iran, he is offering a new justification for the costly five-week conflict with no clear end in sight: God himself wants the United States to do it.

Trump said Monday that he believed God supports the United States’ actions in the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, a widening conflict that has killed thousands in the Middle East, wounded many more and left 13 U.S. service members dead.

“I do, because God is good,” Trump said in response to a Washington Post reporter’s question during a White House news briefing. “And God wants to see people taken care of.”