Unless Trump reaches a deal with Iran’s leaders, he says that tomorrow, at 5 pm on April 7, Pacific time, he will order our military to destroy every power plant and bridge in Iran within four hours. That destruction, Trump says, will take Iran 100 years to repair, sending the country “back to the Stone Age.”
This horrific act would be a war crime. No doubt about it.
I only hope that our military leaders have more sense than Trump and refuse to carry out his illegal orders. Unfortunately, that seems unlikely, since Pete Hegseth, the Defense Department Secretary, has been firing top military leaders who resist being used as pawns in Trump’s attempts to use war as the instrument of his authoritarian desires.
The Just Security web site has a statement from over 100 international law experts on the Iran war. This is how the statement starts out:
We, the undersigned U.S.-based international law experts, professors, and practitioners write to express profound concern about serious violations of international law and alarming rhetoric by the United States, Israel, and Iran in the present armed conflict in the Middle East.
Due to our connection to the United States, our focus here is on the conduct of the U.S. government, but we remain concerned about the risk of atrocities across the region including the continuing risks posed by the Iranian government to Iranians through violent crackdowns on dissent, and to civilians across the Middle East through Iran’s ongoing unlawful strikes on civilian infrastructure using explosive weapons in densely populated areas.
One month has passed since the United States and Israel launched strikes across Iran. The initiation of the campaign was a clear violation of the United Nations Charter, and the conduct of United States forces since, as well as statements made by senior government officials, raise serious concerns about violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law, including potential war crimes.
We collectively affirm the importance of equal application of international law to all, including countries that hold themselves out as global leaders. Recent statements from senior U.S. government officials describing the rules governing military engagement as “stupid” and prioritizing “lethality” over “legality” are profoundly alarming and dangerously short-sighted. These claims, particularly in combination with the observable conduct of U.S. forces, are harming the international legal order and the system of international law that we have devoted our lives to promoting.
I’m most concerned about Trump’s threat to destroy every power plant in Iran, which would lead to a near-total blackout of electricity for the country’s 93 million people. Hospitals soon would be unable to function. Iranians dependent on electricity for life-sustaining equipment would die. Iran’s economy would be severely hurt. Small businesses would close. Food, water, and medical care would become hard to find.
There’s simply no justification for punishing the Iranian people for what their country’s fundamentalist Islamic leadership has done. Those leaders will still live comfortable lives even if every power plant and bridge is destroyed by the United States and Israel. Those leaders will still be able to pursue uranium enrichment, attack their neighbors with drones and missiles, and keep the Strait of Hormuz closed.
With no electricity, opposition to Iran’s leadership will be even harder to mobilize. Iran will respond with intense attacks on Middle East oil infrastructure and other targets, escalating the war in response to Trump’s war crimes. Which are indeed war crimes. Here’s the portion of the statement from the international law experts about attacks on power plants.
c. Threats on energy infrastructure: President Trump threatened on March 13, 2026: “I could take out things within the next hour, power plants that create the electricity, that create the water… We could do things that would be so bad they could literally never rebuild as a nation again.” International law protects from attack objects indispensable to the survival of civilians, and the attacks threatened by Trump, if implemented, could entail war crimes.
On March 21, President Trump further threatened to “obliterate” power plants in Iran. U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Mike Waltz, defended power plant attacks the next day, and also said that striking nuclear power plants was not off the table. It is prohibited to attack civilian energy infrastructure. If a power plant has both civilian and military purposes (“dual-use”), it may be considered a military objective where it makes “an effective contribution to military action” and the attack “offers a definite military advantage.”
However, any strike must respect the principles of proportionality and precautions in attack. The proportionality principle prohibits attacks expected to cause incidental civilian harm that would be excessive in relation to the military advantage. The civilian harm to be considered includes foreseeable reverberating or indirect harm. In any attack, “all feasible precautions” must be taken to avoid civilian harm.
Attacks on nuclear power plants, even if they have a military purpose, require particular care because of the high risk of releasing radiation and radioactive material and consequent severe harm to the civilian population. Such a strike could harm the health and safety of millions of civilians. On March 23, 2026, the ICRC President Mirjana Spoljaric Egger expressed her deep concern, noting that “War on essential infrastructure is war on civilians” and described threats to nuclear power plants as “Most alarming.”
I’m worried that Trump is going to be pushed by Netanyahu to pursue the same strategy with Iran that Israel pursued with Gaza: reduce the entire country to rubble in hopes that this will eliminate the extremists in charge of Gaza and Iran. But Hamas still hasn’t disarmed in Gaza and remains in charge of the portion of Gaza not occupied by Israel. And this was after a ground invasion of Gaza by Israel.
Iran has 93 million people, hugely more than Gaza’s 2 million. Gaza is 141 square miles. Iran is 636,000 square miles, twice the size of Texas. There’s no way air power alone is going to bring the leadership of Iran to its knees. They will fight to the end, ignoring the suffering of the Iranian people. After all, reportedly Iran’s leaders killed 30,000 of their citizens after protests against the regime erupted.
My hope is that Trump will live up to his nickname of TACO: Trump Always Chickens Out. But if he persists in his vow to demolish Iranian infrastructure tomorrow, the fears expressed in a New York Times story will come to pass.
President Trump said on Monday that a cease-fire proposal put forth by mediators between the United States and Iran was a “significant step,” but he warned that it was “not good enough” as his deadline of Tuesday evening for a deal approached.
Iran, for its part, rejected any proposal for a cease-fire, mandating that any peace plan include a complete end of hostilities. Diplomatic talks coordinated by Pakistan and other regional countries were continuing, officials said, even as there appeared to be little agreement on what any cessation of hostilities would look like.
If Iran does not agree to reopen the Strait of Hormuz by Tuesday at 8 p.m. Eastern time, Mr. Trump has threatened to launch a massive attack targeting bridges, power plants and other civilian facilities that would, in his words, send Iran “back to the Stone Ages.” But the president has also extended self-imposed deadlines in recent weeks, and diplomats around the world were asking whether Mr. Trump would find an off-ramp again or if he would follow through this time with what could be a gigantic conflagration.
“We have a plan, because of the power of our military, where every bridge in Iran will be decimated by 12 o’clock tomorrow night, where every power plant in Iran will be out of business, burning, exploding and never to be used again,” Mr. Trump told reporters at the White House on Monday afternoon. “I mean complete demolition by 12 o’clock.”
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