Attacks on schools and hospitals and eviction orders: the US and Israel violate humanitarian law in Iran | International

Shajareh Tayyebeh It is a Koranic expression in Arabic that means “the pure tree.” A nice name for a primary school like Minab, in the south of Iran, which is how it was named. Within its colorful walls, 165 children – most of them girls, but there were some boys – and five teachers died on February 28, the first day of the war, according to official Iranian figures.

It was the first school day of the week, which in Iran begins on Saturday. When the , “one of the teachers and the director moved a group of students to the prayer room to protect them,” a doctor from the Iranian Red Crescent told the media. Then the second projectile arrived; The roof and the upper floor of the building collapsed inwards and buried the children, between 7 and 12 years old. Only 95 survived. The rest remained there; many under the rubble with their backpacks by their side. The image of a dead girl’s arm sticking out of the dust and rubble, or the image of the rows of girls’ corpses wrapped in white shrouds, make it almost inevitable to think of Gaza.

The United States acknowledged having attacked targets of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Naval Force that day in the Minab region. The bombed school was located in a compound of that parallel Iranian army, although it was delimited by several walls and had independent entrances.

Until this Saturday — when the president of the United States, Donald Trump, blamed Iran for the bombing — Washington had limited itself to stating that it “will investigate” what happened and that its army “does not attack civilians,” according to Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense. On Friday, Reuters revealed the existence of a preliminary military report from the Pentagon that studies the bombing as the responsibility of the United States.

However, Minab’s school has not been the only one attacked by the United States and/or Israel in the war that turned one week this Saturday. On the same day as that bombing, another student died at a boys’ school in Abyek, in the northern province of Qazvín. The next day, , as well as an Iranian Red Crescent building in Tehran, were also damaged by bombs. In another of these similarities, one of the destroyed departments at the Gandhi hospital was the fertilization department. in vitro, where many Iranians had placed their hope of becoming parents.

These civilian targets are not the only ones targeted by a military campaign in theory directed against military targets and “infrastructure of the Iranian regime,” according to Israel. There is a long list published this week even by local media relatively critical of the regime such as the newspaper Shargh Daily.

This list includes preschool schools; other hospitals in Tehran such as Motahari, Vali-e Asr, or the Trauma and Burns Hospital and the Amneh Neonatal Care Center. Also residential buildings and even parks where there were only swings.

As Israel often did in Gaza, the United States has in turn attacked a water desalination plant on the Iranian island of Qeshm, the country’s Foreign Minister, Abbas Araghchi, denounced this Saturday. Days before, , exiled in the United States, had warned of the “growing similarities between the bombings in his country and in Gaza” and pointed out the hypothesis that a children’s park in Tehran had been bombed after some type of artificial intelligence “without human supervision” identified it as a target only by its name: “Police Park.”

On Thursday, the president of the Iranian Red Crescent, Pir Hossein Kolivand, estimated that the bombings had already affected 3,643 civilian buildings, of which 3,090 were homes, 528 businesses, 13 medical centers and nine headquarters of the Iranian Red Crescent. That day, the death toll in Iran had already reached 1,300, without it being clear how many were civilians. Of them, 181 were children, UNICEF confirmed.

Neither these deaths nor attacks like the one at the Minab school can “be justified in any way” in light of international humanitarian law, Ana Manero, professor of Public International Law at the Carlos III University of Madrid, said by phone. The reason is that those rules for which Israel and the United States are demonstrating “absolute contempt,” Manero laments, prohibit any attack, direct or indirect, that kills or harms civilians.

That and other red lines “are now being violated again in Lebanon and Iran,” as they were before “during the genocide in Gaza,” the professor points out.

Esteban Beltrán, director of Amnesty International in Spain, also adds by phone another “possible war crime” in this war, but also in Iran. These are Israeli eviction orders. “In Gaza, there were people who were displaced a dozen times, hundreds of thousands of people and also in Iran these types of orders are now being issued.” In the case of that last country, they are disseminated on the official Persian profile of the Israeli army, which the majority of citizens cannot access because the Iranian authorities have cut off Internet access.

What Israel and the United States are doing is “bombing disproportionately and with attacks that target military and civilian targets,” underlines the director of Amnesty. On Thursday, Defense Secretary Hegseth boasted that his country was going to start using bombs weighing up to one ton on Iran. A weapon of these characteristics destroys everything within 400 meters of the place of its impact.

Eldar Mamedov, a non-resident researcher at the American think tank Quincy Institute, goes further. He believes that Israel and the United States are directly applying “the Gaza script” in Iran, although in a less lethal way, due to the different characteristics of both. Compared to the small occupied Palestinian enclave, where more than two million people were crowded with no escape in just 365 square kilometers, Iran is “a sovereign State”, not occupied, with a population of about 90 million people and a territory three times that of Spain.

Mamedov points out by telephone from Brussels an aspect that seems key to proving his hypothesis: the use of “messianic rhetoric” by the Israeli leaders, identical to that used in the first days of their invasion of the Strip.

Last Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited the remains of Beit Shemesh, in central Israel, where 10 people died. “Remember what Amalek did to you,” Netanyahu said. He was alluding to verse 1 Samuel 15:3 of the Torah, which orders the destruction of the Amalekites, a people who opposed the Israelites, and the killing of “men, women, and children, even at breast.”

The Israeli Prime Minister uttered those same words when the ground invasion of Gaza began, after the Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023. That phrase, included in the genocide case against Israel opened by South Africa in the International Court of Justice, indicates for the Quincy Institute researcher that Israel intends to carry out a war “of extermination” in Iran, something for which “they need the United States.” Its president, Donald Trump, threatened Iran this Saturday

Artificial intelligence

A piece of information corroborates the suspicions of those who believe that artificial intelligence (AI) is also being used in the Iran war to identify targets and accelerate bombings. The British NGO Airwars, which monitors the impact of air wars on civilians, said this Saturday that Israel and Washington have claimed to have bombed some 4,000 targets in the first four days of attacks on Iran.

This figure, which almost doubles that of the bombings of the first four days of the offensive in Gaza, is due to the NGO’s opinion of the use of that military AI that was so deadly in the overpopulated Palestinian territory. Media like The Wall Street Journal They consider that in Iran the , from the company Anthropic, has probably been used, despite the fact that on the eve of the start of the war Trump of the Pentagon with that company.

The big problem with this type of program – or the Lavender that was used in Gaza – is that they have a high margin of error in the identification of targets, explains by phone from London Mariarosaria Taddeo, professor of Digital Ethics and Defense Technologies at the Oxford Internet Institute of the British university of the same name.

The Lavender demonstrated “a false positive error of 10% during the testing phase,” recalls this specialist. Of 37,000 Palestinians identified by that program as Hamas militants to be killed in the early phases of the Israeli invasion of the Strip, 3,700 were attacked with little, or no connection at all, to that armed group.

“When we talk about the use of artificial intelligence in a war, we are introducing unsound, opaque technologies into these conflicts that make big mistakes,” highlights Taddeo. This expert is also concerned that, if AI is used for “criminal attacks like the one at the school [de Minab]”, serves to make those responsible “wash their hands” and this results in a “vacuum in accountability.”

“For some, international humanitarian law no longer exists,” emphasizes Taddeo. However, the teacher warns, “you have to be very careful with that logic, because those who say that it no longer exists are the ones who really have an interest in it disappearing.”