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By Ellie Cook
Senior Defense Reporter
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President Donald Trump's threats to target Iran's critical infrastructure have raised fresh concerns over whether U.S. military action in the country could violate international law.
Trump, in an expletive-littered social media post, said on Sunday American troops could target bridges and power plants in Iran if Tehran's leadership did not allow vessels to pass unscathed through the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran has effectively blocked for more than a month, as global fuel prices soaring and concerns about oil and gas supplies spiralling.
Trump appeared to give Tehran a deadline of 8 p.m. ET Tuesday. Iran's military said attacks on civilian targets would trigger "much more devastating and extensive" retaliatory strikes.
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U.S. and Israeli bombardment of Iran, now in its sixth week, has pummeled the country while Iran has kept up its targeting of Israel and America's Gulf allies with drone and missile salvos. Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia said they intercepted new attacks overnight, while at least two people were killed in the northern Israeli city of Haifa.
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Israeli officials and Iranian state media confirmed the death of the intelligence chief for Iran's powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in strikes on Tehran on Monday and Iran's semiofficial Fars news agency said 13 people had been killed in an attack on the outskirts of the capital.
Deliberate attacks on civilians and non-military infrastructure are generally banned under several international agreements designed to limit the horrors of war, like the Geneva Conventions and the United Nations Charter.
The Geneva Conventions rule out targeting sites that are "indispensable to the survival of the civilian population." The Pentagon's own legal guidelines say that "persons, objects, and locations that are not military objectives may not be made the object of attack."
Trump's comments drew sharp criticism from some Democrats, and a lengthy statement from former Georgia Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene.
"He has gone insane," she said. "This is not making America great again, this is evil."
"President Trump's latest threats on Truth Social, if carried out, would violate the law of armed conflict as laid out in the Geneva Conventions and the DoD [Department of Defense] Law of War Manual," said Michigan Democrat, Senator Elissa Slotkin on X.
The Pentagon's Law of War Manual says civilians, military medical or religious personnel are off limits, as well as people considered hors de combat—not able to fight because of injury or because they have been captured.
Unless cultural buildings, monuments, facilities and other sites are "military objectives," they should not be targeted. There are few exceptions to this rule.
"It is both irresponsible and wrong to indiscriminately kill civilians in Iran and destroy civilian infrastructure like bridges and power plants — particularly when the President said this war was to aid the Iranian people," Slotkin added.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said Trump was "ranting like an unhinged madman" and "threatening possible war crimes and alienating allies."
"This is who he is, but this is not who we are," Schumer said.
"Any strike on infrastructure does not automatically equal a war crime," argued John Spencer, a former U.S. Army officer and the chair of war studies at the New York-based think tank, the Madison Policy Forum.
"Saying every strike on a bridge or power plant is illegal, without checking its actual military role, the advantage it was meant to provide, and the steps taken to limit civilian harm, is not real legal analysis [or] opinion," he said in a post to social media.
The second line of the Pentagon's more than 1,200-page Law of War Manual describes following legal rules in wartime as "part of who we are."
"I don’t need international law," Trump told The New York Times in early January, describing the only cap on his power was his "own morality."
International law experts expressed anxiety over U.S. military operations in Iran after Trump posted images of a strike on a bridge near Tehran. "Much more to follow," Trump said.
More than 100 international law experts said in an open letter on Friday the opening attacks on Iran on February 28 was a "clear violation of the United Nations Charter" and the weeks of strikes since "raise serious concerns about violations of international humanitarian law, including potential war crimes."
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt has said U.S. forces and Trump's administration "will always act within the confines of the law."
But Trump will "move forward unabated," Leavitt told reporters.
Observers and current and former officials told Newsweek in late 2025 the U.S. government's strike campaign on alleged drug vessels off the Venezuelan coast, which kicked off in early September, had a shaky legal basis and would likely put the U.S. soldiers tasked with carrying out orders at risk.
These strikes ebbed in the wake of the capture of former Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, who was taken to New York from Caracas by U.S. troops in January to face narco-terrorism charges. Although less frequent, attacks on suspected narco boats have continued.
At least 163 people have been killed in these attacks.
Update 4/6/26, 9:30 a.m. ET: This article has been updated with further information.
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