In late March, President Trump threatened to “obliterate Iran’s energy grid,” if a ceasefire was not reached. In his public post, Truth Social, he listed explicit targets, such as power plants, oil facilities and desalination (water) infrastructure. This in addition to the already-massive regional costs and global losses.
On April 4, Trump gave a public ultimatum warning that “hell will rain down” if Iran did not reopen the Strait of Hormuz within 48 hours. The statement featured direct threats to energy infrastructure, water systems.
A day later, on Easter Sunday of all days, Trump posted an expletive-laden warning to Iran, threatening to strike civilian infrastructure if the Strait of Hormuz was not reopened. The President set a deadline, stating that if a deal was not reached to “open the F– in’ Strait,” the country would be “living in Hell”
The threats did not come out of the blue. They form a pattern. They have led over 100 international law experts to warn that the US strikes on Iran violate UN Charter and may be war crimes.
Whether Trump will deliver his threat or not, the damage has occurred. The administration has set the stage for the normalization of mass atrocity crimes.
Obliteration rhetoric as a prelude to mass atrocities
What is notable about these statements by Trump, Defense Secretary Hegseth and other members of the cabinet is that they are not just vague wartime rhetoric. They explicitly reference civilian infrastructure systems, including energy (electricity), water (desalination) and economy-wide assets. Presenting themselves as national security contingencies, they are a prelude to mass atrocities.
Since the onset of the Iran attacks, President Trump has repeatedly claimed that the U.S. military has “literally obliterated” Iran’s military capabilities and leadership as part of thea ongoing conflict.
Such statements are problematic because they strongly support allegations of war crimes, particularly targeting civilian infrastructure; collective punishment and disproportionate warfare. Since they are not anomalous but systematic, they also appear to support crimes against humanity. Even independently, they seem to constitute unlawful threats of force
Here’s the bottom line: in international law, words by senior officials are not just political; they are evidentiary. And this applies particularly situations when those words explicitly reference destroying civilian systems. As a result, they materially strengthen the legal case that ensuing actions were not accidental – but foreseeable, planned, or accepted.
What has been left unsaid is that the White House has embraced core aspects of the devastating military strategy that Israel developed in the early 2000s, tested in Dahiya, Beirut in 2006 and has executed broadly in Gaza’s genocide since fall 2023, as I showed in The Obliteration Doctrine (2025).
Tens of thousands of civilian sites damaged and destroyed
The US government typically describes its strikes as targeted against military, infrastructure, or nuclear sites, and has not officially verified the scale of civilian damage reported by Iranian authorities.
Yet, based on reports from the Iranian Red Crescent Society (IRCS) and Iranian officials as of late March and early April 2026, Iran reports that over 90,000 civilian sites – including homes, medical facilities, and schools – have been damaged or destroyed in joint US-Israeli air strikes. That’s over 300 health and emergency facilities. The IRCS has characterized this damage as a deliberate campaign against civilian infrastructure.
These claims come amid a rapid escalation of conflict starting in late February 2026, which has resulted in up to 3.2 to 3.5 million people being displaced within Iran.
IRCS numbers are not independently verified totals. But they are directionally consistent with all other evidence streams.
If the figures reported by the IRCS and Iranian officials are even broadly accurate, the legal implications under international law are extremely serious, because the scale itself becomes legally probative.
With the US at war with Iran and embroiled in conflicts around the world, the Trump White House is asking Congress to approve about $1.5 trillion for defense in the 2027 fiscal year. If enacted, that amount – a 40% increase to the current level – would set US military spending at its highest level in modern history.
It would also amount to a free license to export the Obliteration Doctrine worldwide.
Obliteration as violation of international law
As demonstrated in The Obliteration Doctrine, this doctrine prioritizes the total destruction of an enemy’s infrastructure and population over traditional military objectives. It relies on four old and brutal methods of devastation.
The scorched-earth policy is a longstanding military strategy of destroying everything that allows an enemy military force to fight a war, including the critical infrastructure, military and state institutions, buildings, crops, livestock, security and so on. Modern historical examples feature the American Civil War and American Indian Wars, and Nazi Germany’s war against the Soviet Union.
Nonetheless, the deployment of scorched-earth policy against non-combatants is banned under the 1977 Geneva Conventions.
Since collective punishment targets individuals who are not responsible for the perpetrated acts, it undermines modern legal systems, which restrict criminal liability to individuals. Yet, it has been widely deployed through history, from late medieval Florence to American Civil War and Nazi occupation of Poland and Yugoslavia, to postwar counter-insurgency campaigns.
Like scorched-earth policy, collective punishment is prohibited in both international and non-international armed conflicts.
Civilian victimization is the purposeful use of violence against noncombatants in a conflict. In civilian victimization, violence is often deployed to foster civilian cooperation and isolate the military adversary by removing civilians from an area, as applied in the U.S. Strategic Hamlet program during the Vietnam War.
Like scorched-earth policy and collective punishment, civilian victimization is prohibited by the Geneva Conventions.
In its contemporary form, the Obliteration Doctrine accounts for the decimation of urban infrastructure and the genocidal atrocities in the Gaza Strip since 2023. It was first tested in 2006 in Dahiya, a Shia Muslim enclave in Beirut. The net effect has been genocide.
In The Obliteration Doctrine, I argued that Gaza is “most likely a prelude of worse to come.” Now it is spreading to Lebanon, Iran and elsewhere in the Middle East.
Toward algocides
Since the postwar era, these old sources of obliteration have been coupled with largely indiscriminate area bombardment. In Gaza, it set a historical precedent.
In principle, aerial warfare should comply with laws of war, which regulates the conditions for initiating war (jus ad bellum) and the conduct of hostilities (jus in bello). In particular, aerial operations should comply with the principles of humanitarian law: that is, of military necessity, objective, and proportionality.
Based on Article 51 of Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions, carpet bombing has been considered a war crime since 1977, conveniently after the Vietnam War.
There is one more ingredient to the contemporary Obliteration Doctrine: Israel’s mass assassination factories deploying artificial intelligence for maximum devastation. After October 7, 2023 the Israeli military gave officers sweeping approval to embrace the kill lists of the Lavender program, knowing that the system made “errors” in about 10% of cases and occasionally targeted individuals who had no connection to militants.
For every Hamas operative marked by Lavender, it was permissible to kill up to 15-20 civilians. Backed with AI, the military purposely used “dumb bombs” to hit these homes. Algocide can be defined as a deliberate effort to use the algorithms of artificial intelligence in genocidal atrocities.
In the past weeks, Israel and the US have deployed AI-powered warfare in Iran and Lebanon, using advanced systems for intelligence analysis, target generation, and drone/missile tracking to accelerate the “kill chain”. Israel is using AI tools like “Lohem” and AI-driven data analysis for targeting in Lebanon, while the US relies on Pentagon AI program “Project Maven” to analyze data in the conflict with Iran.
Reports on Israeli AI deployment and US AI-warfare indicate these technologies have enhanced targeting speed while raising serious questions about deliberate civilian damage. These systems were largely matured in the Gaza.
The rules-based order of butchery
Here’s the problem: the interlocking core aspects of Obliteration Doctrine directly violate several fundamental principles of International Humanitarian Law (IHL), also known as the laws of war:
- Collective punishment is strictly prohibited by Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Conventionand Customary IHL Rule 103;
- Scorched earth tactics is illegal under Additional Protocol I, Article 54;
- Indiscriminate bombing is prohibited by Article 51 of Protocol I;
- Under Geneva Conventions intentionally targeting civilians is a war crime (Principle of Distinction);
- IHL prohibits attacks with excessive civilian loss (Principle of Proportionality).
Nonetheless, AI-enabled warfare does not exempt from these laws. If anything, using AI to facilitate “mass assassination” without human oversight is considered a violation of the obligation to prevent genocide.
The Obliteration Doctrine represents a shift from collateral damage to deliberate civilian victimization, by the countries of the West in the Global South. It is now transforming “war” which is no longer war, and warfare which can no longer called “warfare.”
The blatant destruction of civilians and civilian infrastructure is not war. It is illegal destruction. Nor is it warfare. It is butchery by the mighty.
The world of brutal great power rivalry has a dark track-record. It goes back to capitalist modernity and lethal colonialism in the 19th century. But the new variant is far more lethal and ambitious. It seeks to globalize obliteration.
Dr Dan Steinbock, an expert of the multipolar world, is the founder of Difference Group and has served at the India, China and America Institute (US), Shanghai Institute for International Studies (China) and the EU Center (Singapore). He is also the author of The Obliteration Doctrine (Sept. 2025) and The Fall of Israel (Oct. 2024). For more, see https://www.differencegroup.net/
The commentary was published by the Informed Comment (US) on April 7, 2026
