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geneva conventions
60 Monuments Under Fire: The US-Israeli Assault on Iran’s Cultural Memory
The deliberate targeting of sites that have withstood centuries of conquest, colonial incursion, and modern warfare—including World War II and the Iran-Iraq War—constitutes a flagrant violation of international norms.
Mar 26, 2026
In modern warfare, destruction is not limited to armed forces or strategic installations. When historic sites are bombed and ancient cities violated, the target becomes civilization itself. The ongoing US-Israeli offensive in Iran exemplifies this brutal calculus with stark clarity: a deliberate campaign not merely to dominate the battlefield, but to erase the memory of a people and the tangible heritage of human history.
According to the Iranian Ministry of Cultural Heritage, nearly 60 museums and historical sites have suffered damage in the first days of the campaign. This staggering figure is more than a statistic; it constitutes a cultural massacre, erasing millennia of accumulated knowledge and artistry. These sites are not inert monuments—they are living archives of human endeavor, ranging from ancient Persian dynasties to Islamic empires, where palaces, mosques, markets, and gardens coalesce into an irreplaceable cultural mosaic.
In Isfahan, long celebrated as “Half the World,” the Ali Qapu Palace has sustained damage to its 17th-century carved wood and frescoes. The iconic Chehel Sotoun Garden, with its elaborate tiled halls and painted pavilions, has seen its delicate ornamentation destroyed. Even the Naqsh-e Jahan Square, one of the world’s largest historic plazas, has witnessed structural damage to surrounding heritage buildings. The Grand Mosque of Isfahan, a millennium-old architectural jewel, has lost portions of its turquoise tiles from domes and minarets.
Tehran has not been spared. The Golestan Palace, dating back to the 14th century and later the Qajar royal residence, has endured shattered stained glass, damaged wooden ornamentation, and debris scattered across its historic gardens after strikes on nearby structures. In western Iran, Falak-ol-Aflak Castle in Khorramabad, an ancient Sassanian fortress hosting local museums, has been partially destroyed following an airstrike on a cultural ministry building.
What moral authority does a nation claim when it devastates the heritage of others while asserting itself as a defender of human values?
The offensive has also struck smaller, yet historically significant, urban areas. In Bushehr province, the old quarter of Siraf—a centuries-old maritime trade hub—has suffered damage to traditional homes and heritage structures. Tehran alone has registered damage to 19 historical sites, highlighting the scale and indiscriminate nature of the strikes.
The deliberate targeting of sites that have withstood centuries of conquest, colonial incursion, and modern warfare—including World War II and the Iran-Iraq War—constitutes a flagrant violation of international norms. Both the Geneva Conventions and UNESCO conventions clearly mandate the protection of cultural property during armed conflict. The United States, in its orchestration of these strikes, has shown contempt for these legal frameworks, weaponizing heritage itself as a means of coercion and terror.
UNESCO has expressed profound concern over the attacks, warning that continued military operations threaten dozens of other cultural landmarks. This is not a local loss—it is a global one. Every destroyed site erases a chapter of shared human history; every shattered mosque, palace, or fortress obliterates a fragment of collective memory. Cultural heritage is not merely aesthetic; it is the anchor of identity and the repository of human civilization. Its deliberate destruction is an attack on the concept of history itself.
What is unfolding in Iran transcends conventional warfare; it is a war against memory, against the very idea of civilization. When historic squares, palaces, mosques, and fortresses are reduced to rubble, the moral bankruptcy of the aggressors is exposed. The US, in coordination with Israel, is not only waging a military campaign—it is perpetrating a calculated assault on cultural identity, turning its technological might against the living archives of humanity.
This is a conflict in which the battlefield is not only territory, but memory; not only cities, but the centuries of human achievement embedded in stone, tile, and timber. The deliberate targeting of Iran’s cultural heritage raises profound questions: What kind of civilization sanctions the obliteration of history? What moral authority does a nation claim when it devastates the heritage of others while asserting itself as a defender of human values?
The answer is stark. The United States has weaponized history itself, converting museums, mosques, and palaces into collateral in a broader agenda of coercion. In doing so, it has shown the world that its power is not measured in justice or civilization, but in the ruthlessness of its ability to erase the past. The human story, in Iran as elsewhere, is under siege—and the consequences reverberate far beyond its borders.
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War Is Hell for People and the Earth
Given the increasing violence across the world, it is essential that the international community more seriously address the environmental impacts of war as a persistent threat to the biosphere.
Mar 23, 2026
By any measure, Homo sapiens is one of the most violent animals on Earth. At any one time today, humans are engaged in over 100 armed conflicts and wars across the world, many with a resource component—oil, diamonds, gold, timber, territory, water. In the 20th century alone, over 130 million people were killed directly in war, 210 million if including government killings in non-war situations. The United Nations now reports that the world is entering “a new era” of increasing violence and conflict, and that “unresolved regional tensions, a breakdown in the rule of law, absent or co-opted state institutions, illicit economic gain, and the scarcity of resources exacerbated by climate change, have become dominant drivers of conflict.” Such extraordinary intraspecific violence seems to be unique to humans.
Strict economic losses from war exceed $1 trillion each year, and global military spending continues to rise, now approaching $3 trillion annually, compared to roughly $5 billion (0.2%) per year spent on peacekeeping. Global arms sales now exceed $150 billion each year, and there are over 500 million military assault weapons in circulation.
And often overlooked in assessing the toll of war is that, in addition to its humanitarian and economic cost, war often causes severe, long-lasting impacts on the natural environment.
War significantly impacts every part of the environment—air, water, land, habitat, biodiversity. This includes massive oil spills (e.g. enormous amounts of oil and other hazardous substances spilled from thousands of ships sunk in war, Iraqi forces during the 1990-1991 Persian Gulf War intentionally releasing over 4 million barrels of oil into the Gulf and setting wellheads ablaze, the 2006 Israeli bombing of fuel depots in Lebanon causing the large Eastern Mediterranean oil spill, and millions of barrels of oil spilled in the Niger Delta conflict); air pollution from explosive detonations and fires; land contamination; wildfires; deforestation (the loss of millions of hectares of forests in Vietnam from the spraying millions of gallons of the toxic defoliant “Agent Orange,” and vast areas burned by incendiary napalm); habitat destruction (thousands of hectares of mangroves lost in Vietnam); physical impacts to land (erosion, compaction) from war machinery; and mortality of wildlife (killing tens of thousands of Norwegian reindeer during WWII, and thousands of camels killed during the 1990-1991 Gulf war). Fuel use and carbon emissions during war, and in preparation for war, are enormous, and the US military is the world’s largest institutional user of petroleum.
War and environment are reciprocal drivers of decline—environmental degradation leads to war, and war leads to environmental degradation.
But perhaps the most troubling aspect of modern civilization is the development and threatened use of nuclear weapons, now numbering roughly 14,000 across the world, with a combined explosive yield more than 360,000 times that of the Hiroshima detonation. This global nuclear weapons stockpile, many of which are on a hair-trigger ready to launch, creates significant risk of accidental launch, as well as unsecured weapons (“loose nukes”) being acquired and used by malevolent actors.
The environmental effects of full-scale nuclear war would put at risk much of human civilization and the planetary biosphere. Firestorms from a full-scale nuclear war would suspend millions of tons of black soot into the upper atmosphere, leading to abrupt and unprecedented climate impacts including “nuclear winter,” with global cooling and reduced photosynthesis, causing years of crop failures, famine, and ecological collapse.
As nuclear tensions have risen, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has now set its “Doomsday Clock” at 85 seconds to midnight, closer than ever in history to nuclear annihilation, a move it says “should be taken as an indication of extreme danger and an unmistakable warning that every second of delay in reversing course increases the probability of global disaster.”
We are, and must be, better than this.
UN secretaries general have called the environmental consequences of war widespread, devastating, and debilitating, prompting the initiation of the United Nations’ International Day for Preventing the Exploitation of the Environment in War and Armed Conflict (November 6).
Theoretically, all nations are governed by international rules of war, and those rules specifically prohibit inflicting unnecessary environmental harm.
For instance, Paragraph 18 of the Geneva Conventions stipulates that:
All armed forces, whether regular or irregular, should continue to observe the principles and rules of international environmental and humanitarian law to which the parties to the conflict are bound in times of peace. Natural and cultural resources shall not be pillaged under any circumstances.
In Additional Protocol I, Article 35 states:
It is prohibited to employ methods or means of warfare which are intended, or may be expected, to cause widespread, long-term, and severe damage to the natural environment.
And Protocol I, Article 55—Protection of the Natural Environment—states:
1. Care shall be taken in warfare to protect the natural environment against widespread, long-term, and severe damage. This protection includes a prohibition of the use of methods or means of warfare which are intended or may be expected to cause such damage to the natural environment and thereby to prejudice the health or survival of the population.
2. Attacks against the natural environment by way of reprisals are prohibited.
It is notable that while the US has signed, but not ratified, Protocol I, it is generally felt that the Protocol has achieved status as Customary International Law that is to be abided by all nations, irrespective of ratification.
As well, the Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), established by the 1998 Rome Statute, stipulates in Article 8(2)(b)(iv) that the following constitutes a war crime:
Intentionally launching an attack in the knowledge that such an attack will cause incidental loss of life or injury to civilians or damage to civilian objects or widespread, long-term, and severe damage to the natural environment which would be clearly excessive in relation to the concrete and direct overall military advantage anticipated.
While there are 129 nation-state members to the ICC-Rome Statute, several countries with significant military activities are not, and thus do not abide by its rules—e.g., the US, China, Russia, India, Israel, Egypt, Sudan, Iran, and Syria.
And unfortunately, the laudable provisions cited above are often ignored by both state actors and non-state actors, without consequence. The terms widespread, long-term, and severe are not specifically defined. And the ICC statute requires evidence of intent and knowledge in order to prosecute violators, as such, it has yet to be employed due to this high threshold. Perhaps most importantly, these rules of war lack clarity regarding accidental or collateral environmental damage, which is by far the largest environmental impact of war.
War and environment are reciprocal drivers of decline—environmental degradation leads to war, and war leads to environmental degradation. Put simply, war and environment don’t mix—war is hell on people and the natural environment.
Given the increasing violence across the world, it is essential that the international community more seriously address the environmental impacts of war as a persistent threat to the biosphere. The Geneva Conventions must be updated to specifically and unambiguously define their environmental protections; to establish an international legal mechanism—independent of nation-states—to arbitrate and prosecute claims of environmental damage from war and to impose sufficient consequences for violators; and to hold the perpetrators of conflict financially liable for environmental damage and restoration post conflict.
For now, all combatants, including those in the current Persian Gulf war, must abide by these agreed environmental protections during conflict.
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'Cowardly and Despicable': Hegseth Condemned for Sinking of ‘Defenseless’ Iranian Ship
"If the United States is at war, then Pete Hegseth is a war criminal. If the United States is not at war, then Pete Hegseth is a murderer."
Mar 05, 2026
US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Thursday was condemned for his boasts on Wednesday about sinking an Iranian military ship after allegations emerged that it was "defenseless" at the time it was torpedoed in international waters by a US submarine.
Military.com reported Thursday that the Iranian ship had been departing from a biennial multinational naval training exercise that it had been invited to participate in by the Indian government.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has so far remained silent on the US attack on the ship, but other politicians in India delivering sharp condemnations.
According to the Times of India, opposition leader Rahul Gandhi tore into Modi for not speaking up after the US torpedoed a boat that his government had invited into its waters.
"The conflict has reached our backyard, with an Iranian warship sunk in the Indian Ocean," Gandhi said. "Yet the PM has said nothing. At a moment like this, we need a steady hand at the wheel. Instead, India has a compromised PM who has surrendered our strategic autonomy."
In a social media post, former Indian Foreign Secretary Kanwal Sibal said there was no way that the Iranian ship could have been perceived as any kind of military threat.
"I am told that as per protocol for this exercise ships cannot carry any ammunition," he wrote. "It was defenseless... The attack by the US submarine was premeditated as the US was aware of the Iranian ship's presence in the exercise to which the US navy was invited but withdrew from participation at the last minute, presumably with this operation in mind."
Drop Site News reporter Ryan Grim noted that, in addition to striking what appears to have been a defenseless boat, the US also didn't help rescue any of the shipwrecked men who were aboard the vessel.
"The Sri Lanka Navy was left to pull the dead bodies from the water," Grim commented. "I am hard pressed to think of any other nation throughout history that would do something so cowardly and despicable. We are genuinely in a league of our own, and American media—mostly shrugging off the bombing of a girls school and acting as if carpet bombing Tehran is a normal military tactic—is deeply complicit."
Author Bruno Maçães also pointed to the decision to leave the shipwrecked crew at sea as an act of historic depravity.
"Really quite extraordinary that the US bombed an Iranian ship and then left the surviving sailors to drown," Maçães wrote. "There are many many accounts of the Nazis or Imperial Japan saving survivors at sea. I see we have now dropped below that level."
Mohamad Safa, executive director of PVA Patriotic Vision, an international multilateral organization with special consultative status at the United Nations Economic and Social Council, said that the US attack on the Iranian ship constituted either a war crime or straight-up murder.
"What Pete Hegseth ordered the military to do violates international law," he wrote. "The Iranian ship was near Sri Lanka, in international waters outside the combat zone and on a training exercise. Under the Geneva Conventions, you are obligated to rescue the crew of a ship that you sink during war. Abandoned any survivors and leaving them to drown is illegal and a war crime."
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