No, Attacks on Civilian Infrastructure Are Not Banned Under International Law

By Andrew C. McCarthy

Tuesday, April 07, 2026

 

President Trump’s deadline for Iranian capitulation regarding the Strait of Hormuz is just over nine hours away, and he is reaffirming vows to destroy bridges and power plants unless this chokepoint on international trade is opened. (There is, natch, another unhinged post about about how “a whole civilization will die tonight.”)

 

In response, according to various reports, António Guterres, the secretary-general of the United Nations, has publicly admonished the president that “attacks on civilian infrastructure are banned under international law” (that’s how PBS described what Guterres said without quoting him).

 

This is not true. I won’t get into what I addressed yesterday regarding how the Western concept of “civilian” is alien to the ideology of Iran’s sharia-supremacist regime. Let’s stick with what Guterres and other transnational progressives say about civilian infrastructure, on their own terms.

 

In essence, they are turning international law on its head. By their lights, if objects having military value are somehow used by civilians, they become civilian infrastructure. This would cover, for example, the power plants and other structures around which the regime in Tehran has encouraged young Iranians to form human chains, so as to shield them from attack.

 

In reality, an object that makes an effective contribution to military action and whose destruction would confer a military advantage is a military object, not mere civilian infrastructure, under Article 52 of the first Additional Protocol (1977) to the Geneva Conventions (Protocol I).

 

Moreover, Protocol I has never been ratified by the United States, even though it was signed by the Carter administration. Indeed, President Reagan argued against its ratification, fearing that the pact would effectively legitimize guerrilla warfare and terrorism — a common tactic of both which is to exploit ostensible civilian infrastructure for military purposes.

 

In any event, the U.S. Defense Department’s Law of War Manual, which guides our forces, draws on Article 52’s careful qualification that objects having military value are not civilian; it also notes: “The law of war requires that civilian infrastructure not be used to seek to immunize military objectives from attack[.]” (Manual, p. 1034 n.50, quoting 2012 remarks by Obama State Department legal adviser Harold Hongju Koh.)

 

To be clear, as I acknowledged in yesterday’s post, I am not in a position to assess the military value of any specific infrastructure target. It would be a profound error, in my view, for American or Israeli forces to strike infrastructure that would cause immense pain to Iranian noncombatants (most of the Iranian people) while providing only marginal military advantage.

 

My purpose here is simply to refute the progressive talking point that it is a war crime to attack infrastructure that benefits civilians in any way. It is not . . . and legitimate military targets do not become civilian infrastructure by coercing noncombatants into acting as human shields.