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war crimes
UN and The Hague Confront Impunity for War Crimes
Has the world simply failed to learn the lesson of 1945 that “might makes right,” coupled with the destructive power of modern weapons, can only create a world plagued by endless war and chaos?
Oct 13, 2026
On October 9th, the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize Was awarded to Navi Pillay, the South African international lawyer who defended Nelson Mandela and the anti-apartheid political prisoners on Robben Island, and went on to serve as a judge on the UN International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and the International Criminal Court (ICC), then as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. In 2025, Navi Pillay led the UN Commission of Inquiry that confirmed that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
With the world in the grip of seemingly intractable war and chaos, the Nobel Committee clearly wanted to honor someone who has worked against the tide of militarism and violence to uphold international law. And yet, on the same day, the United States unveiled unilateral, illegal coercive measures or “sanctions” against the ICC, where Navi Pillay served as a judge from 2003 to 2008.
The UN General Assembly’s 2026 general debate in September also set out to uphold the UN Charter and international law, and to confront the reality that the UN system is failing in its most basic responsibility, to maintain international peace and security.
The foundational rules of the UN Charter are that countries must resolve disputes peacefully and refrain from the threat or use of force. But in the General Assembly debate, even as leaders recognized the urgent need to finally enforce the UN Charter, after decades of impunity for aggression and war crimes, they were reluctant to explicitly address the central role of the United States in undermining the rule of international law.
Many US allies loyally condemned Russia’s violation of the UN Charter against Ukraine. But none of them even tried to square their singular focus on Russia with the inconvenient truth that their own ally, the United States, has systematically violated the UN Charter for decades, against Grenada, Nicaragua, Panama, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Haiti, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, Venezuela, Cuba, Iran and other countries.
While US allies remain silent, US officials accept no responsibility or accountability for the violence and chaos they unleash, and instead keep doubling down on their failed imperial ambitions and military approach to international disputes, the very antithesis of what the UN Charter requires.
Many other leaders spoke out, but without explicitly naming the United States. Algeria’s foreign minister, the veteran diplomat Ahmed Attaf, pointedly asked,
“What sort of international order can function properly when principles are selected according to the identity of those who violate them? What confidence can remain in international law when the aggressor is granted the right to self-defense, while the victim is required to justify even the right to survive?”
So it is left to the officials of the countries the United States threatens or attacks to remind the world which country is illegally threatening them, as Cuba’s Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez Parrilla and Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian did clearly and accurately at the General Assembly.
Many other leaders made strong statements condemning Israel’s war crimes and genocide in Gaza, even as they neglected to condemn the essential US military and diplomatic role in them. King Abdullah of Jordan described Israel’s objective as “to make a viable Palestinian state impossible,” through “a system of subjugation… de facto annexation… forced displacement… (and) war crimes.”
“We have tools,” he reminded his colleagues, “Sanctions, asset freezes, embargoes, diplomatic isolation. And we have a record of using them elsewhere… The question now is: Will we act?”
Another of the UN’s tools is the power of the president of the UN General Assembly to convene Emergency Special Sessions (ESS) that can pass “uniting for peace” resolutions. This allows the General Assembly to act decisively on international problems when the Security Council fails to do so, wielding the kind of tools that King Abdullah outlined.
The General Assembly’s 10th Emergency Special Session on “Illegal Israeli Actions in Occupied East Jerusalem and the Rest of the Occupied Palestinian Territory” began in 1997, and has been reconvened more than twenty times.
In 2022, the 10th Emergency Special Session voted to ask the International Court of Justice (ICJ) some legal questions about the Israeli occupation, which the court answered in 2024, in a finding that the Israeli occupation is illegal and that Israel must “end its unlawful presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory as rapidly as possible,” and “evacuate all settlers.”
The next meeting of the 10th ESS in September 2024 passed a resolution demanding that Israel comply with the ICJ ruling and withdraw from the occupied territories within a year.
However, the 2025-6 General Assembly president, Annalena Baerbock of Germany, allowed her entire year as president to pass without reconvening the 10th ESS even once.
This allowed Trump and Netanyahu to seize the initiative and subject the people of Gaza to a new phase of the genocide under Trump’s Orwellian “board of peace,” a smokescreen for a war of attrition to keep killing civilians and making life intolerable for the people of Gaza, as they struggle to survive in the rubble of their bombed and bulldozed homes.
Many leaders at the General Assembly spoke of the urgency of reforming the Security Council, but the greatest leverage they have to achieve that is the General Assembly’s ability to act in an Emergency Special Session when the dysfunctional, corrupted Security Council fails to do so. Nowhere in the world is such action more urgently needed than in Palestine. And yet the 10th Emergency Special Session has not met since June 2025.
Now that Bangladesh’s Dr. Khalilur Rahman has taken Baerbock’s place as President of the General Assembly, he should reconvene the 10th Emergency Special Session to take the concrete actions for Palestine that people all over the world are calling for.
South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the ICJ is also important, but South Africa has slowed down the already tortuous pace of international justice by requesting 18 months to respond to Israel’s defense against genocide charges. Surely South Africa and the court can find a way to move faster, with the fate of an entire people in the balance. The Genocide Convention was intended to prevent and stop genocide, not just to pass judgment over mass graves and scattered refugee camps.
Many people justifiably fear that the United Nations and its institutions are simply too weak to enforce the laws of the UN Charter and the Geneva Conventions and hold the United States and Israel accountable for their crimes. But there was another event on September 16, 2026, which suggests that Benjamin Netanyahu and other US-allied war criminals might want to think twice before assuming that the United States will always shield them from accountability.
The week before the General Assembly met in New York, an international war crimes court in The Hague sentenced former Kosovo president Hashim Thaçi to 25 years in prison. The court found Thaçi and three other former leaders of the US-backed Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) guilty of 96 murders, 303 charges of torture, 49 charges of criminal cruelty and 385 cases of arbitrary detention, committed during the US-NATO war on Yugoslavia in 1999.
The Kosovo Specialist Chambers, the court that tried Thaçi, was established in 2011, in response to a Council of Europe Parliamentary Report titled “Inhuman Treatment of People and Illicit Trafficking in Human Organs in Kosovo.”
That report detailed extraordinary allegations unearthed by Carla Del Ponte, who was the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), which were then investigated for the Council of Europe by Swiss state prosecutor and member of parliament Dick Marty.
The report substantiated allegations that the KLA transported civilian prisoners from Kosovo to Albania and imprisoned them in a clinic known as the “Yellow House,” where they murdered them and extracted their internal organs to sell on the illicit organ transplant market.
As the court records show, these were only the most startling of Thaçi and the KLA’s crimes. The KLA also shot, tortured or beat to death dozens, or maybe hundreds, of civilian prisoners whom it labelled as “traitors” or “collaborators,” during and immediately after NATO’s illegal war to detach Kosovo from the remaining territory of Yugoslavia.
While no Americans were charged in these crimes, the CIA and other Western intelligence agencies had worked with the KLA since at least 1996, as it terrorized Serb civilians and attacked and killed Yugoslav police to provoke repression against the Kosovar Albanian population.
The escalating violence in Kosovo provided the pretext for a war in which the United States and NATO dropped 23,000 bombs and missiles on Yugoslavia, targeting and destroying vital civilian infrastructure as well as military targets. Then they invaded and occupied Kosovo and built a huge US military base, Camp Bondsteel, which the US also used as a secret prison during its “war on terror.”
US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was so personally invested in the march to war in Kosovo that Time dubbed it “Madeleine’s War.” Albright shunned the traditional political leaders of Kosovo’s independence movement, and instead embraced Hashim Thaçi and the KLA as the United States’ and NATO’s main allies in Kosovo, despite their well-known links to organized crime and heroin smuggling.
With Thaçi at her side at the Rambouillet conference in France, Albright delivered her coup de grace to Yugoslav President Milosevich: an ultimatum that would have given NATO the right to militarily occupy all the remaining territory of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.
Milosevich’s refusal to surrender his country’s sovereignty served as the final pretext for the US and NATO to violatethe UN Charter in an illegal war that set a precedent for US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and the endless wars and chaos that have followed.
At the UN General Assembly on September 23rd, Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić thanked the 107 countries that still refuse to recognize Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence from Serbia in 2008, and he placed NATO’s war on the remains of Yugoslavia in 1999 squarely at the root of the violence and chaos afflicting the UN and the world.
“...the order based on respect for the UN Charter and the law founded upon it no longer exists,” Vučić said. “It was destroyed by those who tore apart the territories of other countries for the sake of their own political and economic interests. They did so unscrupulously, recklessly, and shamelessly.”
So is it already too late to try to enforce the rules of the UN Charter?
Has the world simply failed to learn the lesson of 1945 that “might makes right,” coupled with the destructive power of modern weapons, can only create a world plagued by endless war and chaos?
Or, now that we are staring that world in the face, will we finally heed that lesson and make different choices?
It has taken 27 years for justice to catch up with Hashim Thaçi, but, as King Abdullah said, the world’s governments have the tools to enforce the rules of international law if and when they choose, and that is true even in the case of US allies like Thaçi and Netanyahu.
But Abdullah’s question remains: will the world’s leaders choose to use the tools at their disposal? First to free Palestine, but also to give our own children and grandchildren the chance to build a peaceful, sustainable world out of the militarism, war and chaos that is the global legacy of a generation of American leaders.
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After Former ICC Judge Wins Nobel Peace Prize, US Hits Court With New Sanctions
One US campaigner declared that "the Trump administration has taken a sledgehammer to the most important development in international justice in half a century."
Oct 09, 2026
Not long after a former International Criminal Court judge on Friday won the Nobel Peace Prize for "ensuring that war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide are prosecuted," US President Donald Trump—who has long sought the award—continued his administration's "campaign to dismantle" the ICC with new sanctions.
"Globalist experts that are an ocean away... want the International Criminal Court to do more, including the prosecution of American citizens and service members that are defending their country," US Secretary of State Marco Rubio claimed in a video posted on social media.
"They want to prosecute border patrol agents that are protecting our nation's borders, and they want to prosecute our elected leaders that are ensuring our national security," he continued. "President Donald Trump will never allow the International Criminal Court to prosecute Americans."
"We will ban transactions with this rogue court, cutting off their resources and crippling their ability to operate against us, because our message is clear: The United States and the American people are not subject to the jurisdiction of this fake ICC," Rubio said. "Both parties agree on this, but only President Trump has the resolve to take the action needed to end this threat once and for all."
"Either the ICC will end its threats, or we will end the ICC—and we expect our allies, many of whom are part of the ICC and that rely on American service members for their defense, to rein in this rogue court," he added. "If they do not, the United States will continue its campaign to dismantle the ICC piece by piece until Americans are threatened no longer."
The United States has never been a party to the Rome Statute, the treaty establishing the Hague-based tribunal to investigate genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression. Since 2002, a federal law known as the Hague Invasion Act has empowered the president to prevent the ICC from detaining US or allied personnel. Although the court has probed alleged crimes by US citizens, it has never prosecuted anyone from the United States.
Trump and Rubio have been particularly hostile toward the ICC and imposed a series of sanctions since the president returned to power last year. They are especially angry about the court's 2024 arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—who welcomed Friday's sanctions announcement—and his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant, over their ongoing US-backed assault on the Gaza Strip.
Israel's war on Gaza has killed over 74,000 Palestinians and has been widely denounced as genocide, including by a United Nations commission that was chaired by South African jurist Navanethem "Navi" Pillay, the recipient of the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize. In addition to serving on that panel and the ICC, she has been a High Court of South Africa judge, International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda president, and UN high commissioner for human rights. She remains an International Court of Justice ad hoc judge.
Trump has publicly demanded the prize for years—while threatening to invade various nations, abducting a foreign leader, killing hundreds of people by blowing up dozens of boats on the high seas, and bombing more countries than any other US commander in chief this century, including Iran, where his and Israel's illegal war is ongoing. Late-night host Jimmy Kimmel, who often ridicules the president, even compiled a supercut of his frequent comments about the award on Thursday, in anticipation of Friday's announcement.
After Pillay was revealed as the winner, Trump predictably attacked her. However, rather than commenting directly, he shared a post on his Truth Social platform in which US lawyer David I. Schoen claimed that the selection committee "shamed itself beyond repair and demeaned the once great Nobel Peace Prize" by giving it to Pillay, calling her "an unabashed hater of America and Israel" who has "celebrated terrorists and rewarded Hamas."
Schoen also suggested that Trump should receive the prize for the Abraham Accords, as well as because "he is making best efforts to end the Russia/Ukraine war, to stop Iran, the number one sponsor of international terrorism, and he is trying to rebuild Gaza despite the terrorists' best efforts to control it."
Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said Friday that the US leader "played a historic role in advancing peace in South Asia. His timely intervention helped bring Pakistan and India back from the brink and secure a ceasefire, that is holding till today. In recognition of his outstanding contribution, Pakistan had nominated President Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize."
Earlier this year, shortly after US troops invaded Venezuela to abduct President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado gifted her 2025 Nobel Peace Prize to Trump. Pillay joked to those applauding her on Friday that "if you clap a little bit more, I may share this prize with Trump."
"Navi Pillay has dedicated her career to defending human rights, fighting impunity and strengthening international justice," Alexis Deswaef, president of the International Federation for Human Rights, said Friday. "At a time when those who uphold international law are increasingly under attack, this award is a powerful reminder that justice is essential to peace, and that those who defend it must be protected."
While also celebrating Pillay's win, Amnesty International secretary general Agnès Callamard ripped the US war against the ICC on social media: "I am writing this from Nuremberg, where 80 years ago, American judges and lawyers played a crucial role in trying the highest Nazi leaders and commanders, and establishing the foundational principles of international criminal law. 80 years later, what a betrayal. The Trump administration's decision is appalling. But ultimately, it is not about them. It is about us."
The United States' "grotesque decision is a test for all European governments which have been tiptoeing, shying away from confronting and responding to the predatory actions from the Trump administration," said the French human rights leader. "They now need to rise to the moment. History demands of Europe that it stands for international justice and its institutions. There is only one possible response: impose immediately blocking orders. The US sanctions cannot and should not be implemented on European territory. This is not a USA moment. This is an 'Us' moment. Let's rise to it. Because humanity must win."
Isabelle Hayslip, advocacy associate at the US-based Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN), also highlighted that the European Union "has a tool built exactly for when rogue states use sanctions to further political aims: a blocking statute that can shield the court and Europeans from US sanctions."
"If states won't act now to protect the court as they have repeatedly vowed to do, then when?" Hayslip asked. "Every day they wait, European banks move closer to abandoning the court out of fear of Washington."
The European Commission—the EU's executive arm—said Friday that the bloc "has been a constant supporter" of the court, called the new sanctions "deeply regrettable," and pledged to "work closely with the ICC to ensure it continues to operate effectively."
"And we remain committed to working with all 125 states that are parties to the Rome Statute to preserve and respect its independence so that it can continue its vital mission," the commission continued. "As there is a six-month delay before the measures are applicable, there is room for dialogue. The EU stands ready to take any necessary measures to enable the court to carry out its work both in investigating and prosecuting war crimes and crimes against humanity, and to protect the interests of EU operators within the single market."
Noting that "ICC prosecutors also have tools when a state intimidates or retaliates to stop court officials from doing their jobs: The Rome Statute makes this a crime," DAWN's Hayslip argued that "they should investigate and prosecute Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, and other senior administration officials for obstructing justice."
Her organization and the Taxpayer Alliance Against Genocide previously took legal action in US court, suing over Trump's related Executive Order 14203 in July.
"In applying tools reserved for the most serious criminals to the world's only permanent international court, the US is claiming the power to jail for 20 years Americans who represent a victim, submit evidence, or handle payroll for the court," Raed Jarrar, DAWN's advocacy director, stressed Friday. "We have taken the Trump administration to court, because such brazen declarations trample the fundamental constitutional rights of millions of Americans. No president has that power."
The group's executive director, Omar Shakir, said that "by sanctioning the entire International Criminal Court, the Trump administration has taken a sledgehammer to the most important development in international justice in half a century."
Shakir warned that "US sanctions threaten to shut the last viable road to justice for millions of victims of serious crimes, from Gaza and Sudan to Afghanistan and Ukraine—all to shield Israeli officials who have perpetrated a genocide from justice."
The ICC itself forcefully condemned the Trump administration's latest "unprecedented" sanctions as "an attempt to obstruct the course of justice" as well as "an assault on the rule of law and on the very foundations of the international legal order which strikes at the simple principle that no one stands above the law."
ICC President Tomoko Akane vowed that "the court will continue to fully discharge its mandate, with independence and impartiality, acting only on the basis of the law and the evidence, for the sake of the countless victims of grave crimes."
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'Why Would You Need Courage to Speak the Truth?': Navi Pillay, Who Led UN Report on Gaza Genocide, Wins Nobel Peace Prize
"Thank you so much," said the international jurist in a moment of jest. "If you clap a little bit more, I may share this prize with Trump."
Oct 09, 2026
The international reputation of the Nobel Peace Prize, which has suffered in progressive and human rights circles over recent years, may be on the path to improvement after Friday's announcement that this year's award has been given to Navi Pillay, a person of "exceptional courage" who has been at the forefront of accountability efforts for apartheid, prosecuting war crimes, and upholding international law for decades.
In its statement, The Norwegian Nobel Committee said Pillay—who during her career served as a judge on the High Court in South Africa, her native country, and later the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and the International Criminal Court (ICC)—"has been instrumental in ensuring that war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide are prosecuted."
Pillay also served for six years as the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, from 2008 to 2014, and more recently chaired the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, which generated a 2025 report concluding that the Israeli government had committed genocide in Gaza.
"The last thing I did is the report on Gaza naming what is happening there as genocide. One of the main reactions to that report [was] paying tribute to me for my courage.. why would you need courage to speak the truth?" Navi Pillay upon winning the 2026 Nobel peace prize https://t.co/hYPA94eFLe
— Saul Staniforth (@SaulStaniforth) October 9, 2026
"The last thing I did is the report on Gaza naming what is happening there as genocide," Pillay said Friday. "One of the main reactions to that report is paying tribute to me for my 'courage.' And you can imagine our surprise—why would you need courage to speak the truth?"
"Is it true?" asked Pillay when first notified of the award, fittingly while at the Nuremburg Court where Nazi's were tried for their atrocities of last century.
In a moment of levity, surrounded by colleagues applauding her achievement, Pillay said, "Thank you so much. If you clap a little bit more, I may share this prize with [US President Donald] Trump."
Trump, accused of war crimes himself, has notoriously said he deserves the Nobel Peace Prize despite his record of violating international laws, kidnapping or assassinating foreign heads of state, initiating wars of aggression, and carrying out a lawless campaign of lethal attacks in the Pacific Ocean and Caribbean which human rights experts have denounced as "murder spree."
Volker Türk, the current UN high commissioner for human rights, said the award going to Pillay represents "a proud moment for the global human rights movement," and that to call it "well-deserved" would be "a understatement."
"At a time when human rights are under attack on so many fronts, including from those who wield enormous power, this award is particularly poignant," Türk continued. "It is an award to all those who, around the world, dedicate their lives to the defense of human rights—at great risk to their security."
Agnes Callamard, secretary general of Amnesty International, called Pillay's selection an "amazing moment" for human rights.
"We are at the Nuremberg Court; I cannot think of a stronger symbol for her Nobel prize," said Callamard. "We are all so thrilled!"
Amazing moment. Navi Pillay has received the Nobel Peace Prize ! https://t.co/HL3r1PJzLOWe are at the Nuremberg Court; I cannot think of a stronger symbol for her Nobel prize. We are all so thrilled! This is her first reactions upon hearing the news: https://t.co/Crbj6XdiyQ
— Agnes Callamard (@AgnesCallamard) October 9, 2026
"At a time of existential challenges—including more wars and conflicts than the world has seen in a long time—international law is no longer just a supplement to peace and security. It is an absolute necessity," the Nobel Committee said in its announcement.
Warning that "the system of international law is under tremendous pressure, and its institutions are under attack," the committee said "a shift towards power politics at the expense of legal frameworks and global respect for law and justice" threatens peace and stability worldwide, a veiled but clear reference to the antagonism the US government under Trump has shown to the ICC, the United Nations, and other legal institutions and frameworks.
"Whenever might overtakes right, it undermines stability, trust and peaceful co-existence," the statement said. And continued:
History has shown that a world operating without the rule of law is unjust, unwise and inhumane. The judges – those who guard the thin red line between order and chaos—are therefore highly deserving of our praise. But today, as these same judges are sanctioned, and their institutions are attacked, we need people of courage, vision and determination—qualities that Navi Pillay demonstrates in her work on the bench.
Pillay, it concluded, "is one of the great defenders of international legal principles in our time. Her distinguished career reminds us of the need to support, fortify and expand the global rule of law. Navi Pillay’s commitment to justice and human dignity is a source of hope and inspiration to all who seek to bring about a more peaceful world."
As Türk put it in his remarks, recognition of Pillay's work and legacy by the Nobel committee is "a reaffirmation that human rights, the rule of law and justice and accountability are fundamental to everything—to peace, security and prosperity."
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Deep-Dive Investigation Examines Minab School Bombing: ‘One of the Worst US War Crimes Since Vietnam’
“There was no school left,” said the father of a 6-year-old girl killed in the attack. “I thought I was asleep and having a nightmare.”
Sep 30, 2026
Survivors, parents, and first responders provided harrowing firsthand accounts of the US bombing of an elementary school on the first day of the US-Israeli war with Iran as part of a new Drop Site News investigation demonstrating that the school had publicly operated as a civilian institution for more than a decade.
The report, published Wednesday, provides new eyewitness accounts from those who lost loved ones when US Tomahawk missiles hit the Shajareh Tayyebeh School in Minab, which killed 120 children and dozens of others, and has been described as “one of the worst US war crimes since Vietnam.”
“The children were five years old and all they did was yell, ‘Miss! Miss!’ and were crying. I ran to the children. I just said, ‘Get under the table!” recalled preschool teacher Hossniyeh Salem. “I didn’t think they were going to strike the school. I just thought that some place had been hit. I said, ‘Don’t be afraid, sit down.’”
“Two simultaneous sounds. They’re still in my ear. My son even describes them—‘Wooosh, boom! Woosh, boom!’—and then the explosion very close by,” Salem said. “Plaster was falling, the ground was shaking, and at that moment I just looked at my preschool girls and my son, and I said to myself, ‘It’s over. Now is the time when we go under the rubble, it’s going to fall now,’” she continued. “Then there were no more sounds. The class was full of smoke and dust."
Yaghoub Yazdanpanah, a literature teacher at another school about eight miles from Minab, described the moment he learned that the school his 6-year-old daughter, Fatemeh, attended had been bombed.
“I left my classroom, ran home, took my car, and sped to Minab. When I arrived, I said, ‘Oh no!’ The unimaginable had happened," he said. “There was no school left. Two-thirds of the school, maybe more, had been destroyed. Smoke was rising from all over the school. It had turned into rubble. For a moment, I thought I was asleep and having a nightmare."
Yazdanpanah said he already knew the worst had happened well before he received his daughter’s body at an overwhelmed hospital that night.
“We knew our children had been martyred; we knew our children were no longer with us," he said. “When they brought Fatemeh, she was in one piece because she had been in her teacher’s arms [when she died].”
“There was no school left."
The US has still not accepted responsibility for the Minab attack, even though an internal Pentagon investigation has concluded that US forces struck the school using two Tomahawk missiles. In the initial days after the attack, President Donald Trump claimed that Iran had been responsible before backing off the claim, stating, “I just don’t know enough about it.”
Drop Site obtained images of the missile fragments from the site, which an independent weapons inspector said “all appear to be remnants of Tomahawk missiles." Iran is not known to possess Tomahawks. A UN fact-finding mission report released earlier this month determined that the school had been “the intended point of impact" rather than collateral damage.
People are seen scouring the wreckage at the site of the February 28, 2026 bombing of the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in Minab, Iran. (Photo by Mehr News Agency/Wikimedia Commons)
Adm. Brad Cooper, the commander of US Central Command (CENTCOM) told Congress in May that the school was "located on an active [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] cruise missile base."
Wes Bryant, a former senior targeting adviser at the Pentagon, told Drop Site he'd never seen any indication that the school was on an active missile site and explained that even if it was, "it doesn’t matter."
“Those children, all those civilians, are still non-combatants and protected, so it’s really disgusting to hear that," he said. "This wasn’t even fragmentation that hit a school next to another target. This was deliberately targeted very, very clearly and obviously. So at the very least, [it was a] complete mischaracterization of the target.”
There was abundant evidence of the school's civilian use that would have been available to those who conducted the strike. The school was part of a compound that included barracks for the elite IRGC but was redeveloped for civilian use beginning in 2014. It had publicly and officially operated as a school since 2015.
The school had a very active online presence with a website that prominently displayed classroom activities and school events. Meanwhile, satellite imagery captured just two months before the attack showed children standing in the schoolyard outside the building.
An investigation from Bloomberg found that the school had been placed on a list of targets for the war's opening salvo that was assembled in part using the Maven artificial intelligence system developed by Palantir, which reportedly did not classify it as a school.
The UN report emphasized that even if the attack can be boiled down to an intelligence failure, it still likely amounted to a war crime because the US attacked despite readily available evidence that the building was a school, a failure investigators said went “beyond mere negligence” and amounted to recklessness toward the risk of striking civilians.
US President Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth attend a dignified transfer event for US service members killed during operations in the Middle East, at Dover Air Force Base in Dover, Delaware, on July 22, 2026. (Photo by Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images)
Hala Rharrit, a career former US Foreign Service officer who spent 17 years at the State Department before resigning in 2024, remains unsatisfied by the government's efforts to downplay the attack as a "mistake."
“There’s no way to say that this was some type of error,” Rharrit told Drop Site. “You’re either saying that our US Military is completely incompetent, that despite the multiple layers of review, everybody messed up—or there was something very, very sinister about this strike.”
According to data from the Human Rights Activists News Agency, the vast majority of US-Israeli strikes during the first 40 days of the war did harm to civilians or civilian infrastructure, contradicting repeated claims that the US “never targets civilians.” At minimum, the data shows at least 1,701 civilians have been killed, but HRANA has stressed that the true death toll is likely substantially higher.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has spent his tenure dissolving guardrails meant to prevent civilian casualties, denouncing "stupid rules of engagement," and saying the military should pursue “lethality” over “legality.” Trump, meanwhile, has repeatedly threatened mass destruction upon Iran, including that the "entire civilization" would "die."
“The administration and Hegseth have made it quite clear that they don’t really care about civilian casualties. That may also have been true of previous bombing campaigns that predate the Trump administration, but it is even more the case than in the past, and they have made it clear that troops do not need to be concerned about consequences,” said Harrison Mann, a former US Army major and intelligence analyst for the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).
“There is no mystery about what coordinates those missiles hit, and that question would have been answerable on the day of the strikes," he told Drop Site. "The only way that CENTCOM would not know is that they are choosing to be willfully ignorant.”
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Hegseth and His Anti-Woke Military: An Assessment
The hard-nosed approach by the Trump administration and Secretary Hegseth toward the training and deployment of American armed forces is not only unwise and counterproductive. It is a disgrace to the reputation of the United States.
Sep 30, 2026
On September 30, 2025, a swaggering Secretary of Defense (“War”), Pete Hegseth, delivered his “warrior ethos” lecture to the 800 top generals and admirals of the American military, whom he had assembled for a command performance.
One year later, an assessment is called for.
“The military has been forced by foolish and reckless politicians to focus on the wrong things... we became the ‘woke’ department,” he said. We must “remove the social justice, politically correct and toxic ideological garbage,” he fulminated, adding that “serving with fat or unfit or under-trained troops” is a violation, in effect, of the Golden Rule. (You wouldn’t want to share a foxhole with a fat person, so don’t be fat yourself). Henceforth, the “highest standards” must be met. He told his audience that it is “completely unacceptable to see fat generals and admirals.”
Was our first president and commander-in-chief too “woke” for Secretary Hegseth?
Secretary Hegseth would see to it that “grooming standards” would be strictly enforced. “No more beardos!” He wants a “lethal department of war.” Furthermore, “words like bullying and hazing and toxic have been weaponized and bastardized... basic training is being restored to what it should be: scary, tough, and disciplined.”
“We’re empowering drill sergeants to instill healthy fear in new recruits, ensuring that future war fighters are forged... and yes, they can put their hands on recruits.”
In what way has Hegseth’s tough training regimen been helpful in the country’s pursuit of its war with Iran? Probably in no way. A drone operator obviously requires different skills from a WWI or WWII infantryman.
Finally, in his oration, Hegseth announced, “We don’t fight with stupid rules of engagement.” That particular point raises serious questions, discussed later. (The questionable legality of the Iran War itself cannot be discussed in this limited space.)
In his blustering speech, Secretary Hegseth either ignored or was unaware of important critiques published shortly after WWII. During that war, a team of social psychologists conducted for the Research Branch, Information and Education Division of the War Department, an extensive study, consisting of numerous opinion surveys, on the attitudes of American fighting men. It was an attempt to discover the motivations that made men fight. This four-volume study, edited by Samuel A. Stouffer and published in 1949, is known as The American Soldier: Combat and its Aftermath.
The study debunked the myth that discipline will crumble in combat in the absence of terror in training. It further debunked the myth that glorification of trivia (grooming and “spit and polish”) increases combat proficiency. It also shattered the illusion—prevailing in the officer corps at the time—that Black soldiers would prefer to serve under white officers rather than under Black officers.
In 1946, another in-depth military study, known as the Doolittle Board, issued even more striking assessments of officer-enlisted relations in the armed forces. Among other proposals, it recommended that the social distinctions between enlisted soldiers and officers be greatly eased.
Secretary Hegseth’s machismo, his atavistic and simplistic notions of warrior ethos, clearly drive his policy preferences. If he were aware of the Stouffer study or the Doolittle Board, he would likely deem their recommendations as too “woke.”
And yet, they were in step with the American military’s original philosophy of maintaining morale, good order, and discipline. For hundreds of years, army manuals have exhorted officers to recognize the intimate relationship between discipline and morale. Even Baron von Steuben, the Prussian military theorist whose codes were adopted wholesale by the American revolutionary army, realized the importance of morale in armies that reflected the caste systems of 18th-century Europe. These, for example, are some of von Steuben’s “Instructions for the Captain”:
His first object should be, to gain the love of his men, by treating them with every possible kindness and humanity, inquiring into their complaints, and when well founded, seeing them redressed.
The baron’s “Instructions for the Sergeants and Corporals” convey the same message:
In teaching the recruits, they must exercise all their patience, by no means abusing them, but treating them with mildness...
George Washington relied on Baron von Steuben’s manuals. Was our first president and commander-in-chief too “woke” for Secretary Hegseth?
There is an aspect of Hegseth’s bombastic oration which is even more problematical, his proclamation that henceforth, “we... don’t fight with stupid rules of engagement.” This dangerous notion has impelled Hegseth to launch policies which, in the opinions of many lawyers, military and civilian, have led to American officials and military personnel committing murder, war crimes, and crimes against humanity—both in the war against Iran and in the campaign to execute without trial suspected drug traffickers in small boats in the Caribbean.
Although military subordinates must obey all lawful orders or be subject to court-martial for violation of Article 92 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), they must disobey unlawful orders. What makes an order illegal? When an order is “so manifestly beyond the scope of the superior officer’s authority and the order is so obviously and palpably unlawful as to admit of no reasonable doubt of its unlawfulness,” there is actually a duty to disobey it. (U.S. v. Kinder, 14 CMR 742, 1953). “I was just following orders” in such a case is no defense. Examples of obviously illegal orders are those to target civilians; or abuse trainees; or torture or kill detainees; or otherwise to violate federal law or the Constitution. The prosecutions of Americans for their cruel actions at Mai Lai in the Vietnam War and Abu Ghraib in the Iraq War are situations where the defense of “just following orders” was not successful. In those situations, crucial rules of engagement were not followed. The bottom line: The law requires American soldiers to be reasoning agents, not unquestioning robots. Scaring trainees into unquestioning obedience does not prepare them for modern warfare.
Violations of international law, as embodied in the Geneva Conventions, can also subject a civilian or soldier to criminal prosecution. At least since 1949, the Geneva Conventions have prohibited “cruel treatment and torture” and “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment.”
Since his speech, Secretary Hegseth has announced that under his regime, American troops should “give no quarter,” meaning show no mercy, even to surrendering or disarmed combatants. This policy was applied to the drug-trafficking suspects in the Caribbean who, under Hegseth’s orders, were killed by American military personnel. The excuse given by him and President Donald Trump, is that the drug-runners are combatants in a “war,” which is nonsense. Trump and Hegseth claim they were given legal cover by an official opinion issued by the Office of Legal Counsel. That classified opinion—which purports to justify the killing of drug traffickers without legal proceedings—is strongly disputed by human rights organizations and many others. Unfortunately, it remains classified to this day. In my opinion, like the memo written by John Yoo purporting to render lawful the waterboarding of terrorism suspects during the Iraq War, it will someday be discredited. And the perpetrators of the Caribbean killings might find themselves indicted.
The hard-nosed approach by the Trump administration and Secretary Hegseth toward the training and deployment of American armed forces is not only unwise and counterproductive. It is a disgrace to the reputation of the United States.
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When War Crimes Become Normal: The Price of Impunity
If we truly believe that all human life has equal value, then we must demand that those who order and carry out attacks on civilians face the same scrutiny and consequences, whoever they are.
Sep 29, 2026
On Tuesday, September 1, 2026, the United States military struck a home in the town of Kuhestak, in Sirik County, southern Iran, where a wedding was underway, killing four people and wounding more than 50. The youngest victim was 4-year-old Amir Ali Karimi. Asked about the strike, US Vice President JD Vance told reporters: "What I can say with 100% confidence is that, unlike the IRGC, the United States never targets civilians in combat. We never will do that. We never have done that." However, he added, “Sometimes, things happen.”
It's worth remembering that the campaign the United States and Israel waged against Iran—launched without United Nations Security Council authorization—opened with a strike on the office of Iran's Supreme Leader that killed him along with his daughter, son-in-law, daughter-in-law, and his 14-month-old granddaughter. Roughly an hour or two later, the US struck the Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab with Tomahawk cruise missiles, killing 156 people, including 120 schoolchildren between the ages of six and 13. That same day, an attack on the small town of Lamerd used Precision Strike Missiles (PrSM)—munitions that burst in midair and scatter thousands of tungsten fragments—killing at least 21 people, including four children, among them 2-year-old Avina Barzegar, and wounding 100 more. In the months since, the US and Israel have struck not only military sites but universities, bridges, power plants, police stations, and even desalination plants serving remote islands in southern Iran. Whatever assurances Vance offers, the record is clear that the United States has a long history of striking civilians.
Of course none of this is new. More than two years have now passed since Israel launched its full-scale assault on Gaza, backed fully by the United States and most Western governments. Over those two years the world has watched strikes on hospitals, schools, and universities, the shooting of civilians, even an assault captured on camera—and despite an International Criminal Court arrest warrant for Israel's prime minister, no action has been taken either to enforce that warrant or to halt the war. It was hardly surprising that a year-plus of unanswered war crimes in Gaza—what many now call a genocide—normalized the same conduct elsewhere. Israel applied much the same pattern in Lebanon, violating that country's sovereignty to bomb schools, apartment buildings, universities, and villages. The absence of any serious response to crimes broadcast live to the world sent every power on Earth a clear message: If you are strong enough, you can commit any crime—including the crime of crimes.
Isn't it time that those responsible for striking a bridge, a wedding, a power plant, a desalination plant, be held to account?
President Donald Trump himself has, through his own public statements, documented attacks that could easily amount to war crimes. In one Truth Social post, he wrote, "A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again." In another, he shared footage of the strike that brought down Karaj's unfinished B1 bridge—a civilian structure, not yet even complete, hit on Sizdah Bedar, the 13th day of Nowruz, when most Iranians are out picnicking in nature and many families were gathered under and around the bridge. The strike was a so-called double tap: A second missile hit after rescue workers arrived to help the wounded, killing two more and injuring several others. In all, 13 people were killed and 95 wounded.
This scale of targeting civilians, met with so little response from the media or the international community, is itself a troubling kind of normalization—one we cannot afford to treat with indifference. Imagine, for a moment, that Iran had bombed the White House on a holiday morning, killing the American president along with members of his family, and then struck an elementary school in Texas, killing more than 120 American students along with their teachers. How would American society, and the West more broadly, have responded? Would the dead children be called a "necessary action" or "mistake"? Or would the entire West have mobilized to respond to such an atrocity?
This same Western indifference to the deaths of people in the Global South—particularly at American hands—is visible in the words of Afghanistan's former president, Hamid Karzai. Asked recently why he, perhaps alone among Afghan leaders, had wept in public, Karzai spoke of "our national helplessness before powers that had come in the name of helping Afghanistan," and recalled asking American officials a simple question: If their bombs killed Afghan children, was that terrorism? They told him no—terrorism, he said they told him, is when American interests are put at risk.
This becomes painfully concrete when you consider that the Sirik wedding was only the latest entry in a long, grim record of American strikes on wedding celebrations across Afghanistan, Iraq, and Yemen going back more than two decades—a pattern trackers have documented since at least December 2001.
Isn't it time that those responsible for striking a bridge, a wedding, a power plant, a desalination plant, be held to account? Don't the citizens of a country whose president launched a war on another nation without UN authorization, and whose forces have committed numerous documented war crimes in the process, bear some responsibility for holding their own leaders accountable? Would the West have stayed this indifferent if a wedding, or a school, had been hit at home—or would it have moved heaven and Earth to bring the perpetrators to justice? These are the questions that demand an answer. The world cannot continue to condemn violence selectively while treating the deaths of civilians in the Global South as an unfortunate but acceptable consequence of geopolitics.
Every time a war crime is ignored, the threshold for the next one becomes lower. Every time accountability is abandoned, impunity becomes stronger. If we truly believe that all human life has equal value, then we must demand that those who order and carry out attacks on civilians face the same scrutiny and consequences, whoever they are. The first step toward ending war-crime normalization is refusing to look away.
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Could Trump, Who Coveted a Nobel Peace Prize, Become the Worst War Criminal in History?
In his UN General Assembly speech this week, Trump told the world that he is in the process of deciding whether to “annihilate” Iran and “send them to hell,” implying that he might use nuclear weapons. He has to be convinced that this is totally unacceptable—before he does something even more crazy than usual!
Sep 24, 2026
In a highly aggressive 40-minute speech to the United Nations General Assembly on September 22, President Donald Trump once again issued ominous threats to Iran, saying: “I have a very big decision to make. Will a deal be made with Iran that lets them rebuild and create a far greater country than it ever was before, maybe one of the greatest in the Middle East or even the world? Or do I annihilate the Islamic Republic and do it quickly, never giving them a chance to kill or destroy people or countries again? Do I drive them into hell with no chance of survival and no hope of future greatness or generations?”
He implied that his “very big decision” would come after the midterms, suggesting that Iran is waiting to make a deal until then and, if one isn’t forthcoming, then he would choose annihilation.
Several commentators have noted that his extreme rhetoric was all the more shocking in the context of being delivered, as it was, at the world’s foremost international organization for the peaceful settlement of disputes, created in the aftermath of World War II “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind.”
Every one of us has an obligation to ensure that we don’t experience such a bleak future, and to totally reject the idea that anyone should be able to decide to “destroy a civilization” or “annihilate” a people and a culture.
Indeed, all states that become members of the UN agree to resolve their disputes peacefully and to refrain from the threat or use of force against one another, as an obligation of membership—an agreement that the US is currently violating.
Although some news outlets lamented the tone of Trump’s speech and fact-checked it (finding the usual errors), few have explicitly pointed out his not-so-veiled threat to use nuclear weapons. Most have simply ignored it, and a few have even seemed to excuse it, suggesting that it was simply a “negotiating ploy.”
But this threat is similar to others he has made over the last seven months of the war, at moments of extreme personal frustration. On Easter morning, for example, he wrote on his social media account, “Open the F***in’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell—JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.”
A couple of days later, he warned: “A whole civilization will die tonight never to be brought back again. I don't want that to happen, but it probably will… We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World.” He has also threatened on several occasions to “bomb Iran back to the Stone Ages.”
I have previously written about the extreme danger of the president of the United States having “sole authority” to launch nuclear weapons and the ease with which he can do so. As William Perry, former secretary of defense under Clinton, has written, “For President Trump, starting nuclear war is about as easy as sending a tweet.”
This is especially concerning given his mental state. On April 30, a group of 36 senior mental health professionals, experienced in the diagnosis of cognitive impairment and the evaluation of dangerousness, issued an update to their earlier 2024 report, concluding (after citing the reasons):
It is our professional opinion that the behaviors of Donald Trump, tragically, are neither momentary lapses nor political theater. It is our professional opinion that they reflect a rapidly worsening, reality-untethered, increasingly dangerous decline… For the reasons cited above, emphasizing that he presents a clear and present danger to our country and to the world, it is our expert opinion that Donald J. Trump is mentally unfit to be the president of the United States and that steps to remove him from office must be undertaken with the greatest urgency.
Although the use of nuclear weapons is a considered to be a taboo, Trump has previously broken international taboos (seemingly without even knowing they existed), such as the taboo against political assassination, which he violated on February 28, when Israel and the US attacked Iran, assassinating its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khameni, four of his family members, and a number of other senior Iranian leaders.
Most ghastly of all is what would happen if Trump were to use his “sole authority” to launch nuclear weapons against a country of 90 million people. The horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—already overwhelming in terms of human tragedy—would be unleashed exponentially against the population of Iran, with whom Trump has previously claimed to empathize.
Because of the dramatically increased power of today’s nuclear weapons and their sheer numbers, the results could be more monstrous than any war crime in human history. Even the use of tactical nuclear weapons would be appalling beyond comprehension, and the use of a full-fledged nuclear attack that would “annihilate” the country would, without doubt, bring about one of the darkest periods in world history. The death, destruction, and suffering would be beyond parallel.
It would also make Trump the worst war criminal in history, instantly convert the US into a state pariah, be a terrible blight on humanity, and lead to many unforeseen consequences.
One playbook of unforeseen consequences is that Russian President Vladimir Putin could follow suit in Ukraine (with equally horrific effects). NATO might then feel that it would have to respond in kind, and the resulting escalation could lead to World War III and nuclear Armageddon.
Even if there were no further iterations (which is unlikely), the results could lead to a nuclear winter, where smoke and soot from Iran’s burning cities and other infrastructure would loft into the upper atmosphere, blocking sunlight, darkening the sky, and chilling the Earth, creating massive crop failures and famine. Studies have shown that even a “limited” war could cause a nuclear winter that would (depending on the size of the attack) cause untold billions around the world to die of starvation.
It is no wonder that everyone wants to pretend that Trump’s threats weren’t really what they seemed and probably wouldn’t be acted upon because Trump would live up to his TACO (“Trump Always Chickens Out”) reputation.
But one of the very important, hard-learned lessons of international relations is that, when a leader makes a threat against another state, it should be taken with deadly seriousness. This has sometimes been overlooked, as, for example, in 1990, when Saddam Hussein amassed troops on his border with Kuwait and threatened to invade. No one took it seriously—until Iraq followed through, leading to the first Gulf War.
Much as we would all like to forget these terrible threats, we can’t. The leaders of the world must clearly communicate to Trump the likely consequences of his actions and the utter unacceptability of this path. Members of Congress must do the same, and we, the public, must collectively urge them to do so.
Legal means of removing Trump from office should also be undertaken, such as the 25th Amendment; Rep. Jamie Raskin’s (D-Md.) proposed nonpartisan “Commission on Presidential Capacity to Discharge the Powers and Duties of Office”; or impeachment. All of this is much more likely if the Democrats win the House and the Senate in the upcoming midterms, in which we, the public, can also make a significant difference—by voting accordingly.
Every one of us has an obligation to ensure that we don’t experience such a bleak future, and to totally reject the idea that anyone should be able to decide to “destroy a civilization” or “annihilate” a people and a culture (regardless of how we judge their behavior or our fears of their future actions). This is totally against international law, including international humanitarian and human rights law. Such a decision should NOT be made under any circumstances, especially by one individual, who is most likely cognitively impaired; definitely feeling frustrated and aggrieved; and who doesn’t have any understanding of the consequences of the extreme threats he is making—but who does have the capacity to carry out a nuclear launch at any time.
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With 'Blood-Soaked War Criminal' Set to Land in Mamdani's NYC, Calls Grow to Arrest Netanyahu
The mayor has said New York can’t enforce the ICC warrant against Israel’s prime minister, but one human rights lawyer argued it’s “not the only tool available to the US when it comes to holding Netanyahu accountable.”
Sep 23, 2026
As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu prepares to land in New York for a speech at the United Nations General Assembly on Thursday, calls are once again mounting for the accused war criminal to be arrested.
While campaigning last year, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani pledged that if the prime minister ever set foot in his city, he'd find himself in handcuffs, pursuant to an International Criminal Court (ICC) warrant, which accused him of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza, where Israel's genocidal military assault has killed nearly 74,000 people, including more than 21,000 children.
After becoming mayor, Mamdani backed off the pledge earlier this summer, stating that New York lacked the “independent legal authority” to detain him under the ICC warrant. However, he said Netanyahu should still be "arrested and tried" by the federal government.
In the days leading up to his visit to New York, which is expected to be brief, Netanyahu indicated he planned to address the mayor during his General Assembly speech, falsely accusing him of supporting Hamas and inciting riots against Jewish New Yorkers.
“I'm coming to the UN,” the prime minister said. “I'm going to tell the truth about our heroic soldiers, and I'm going to tell the truth about you."
Mamdani hit back during a CNN interview on Tuesday: "I have been clear about the way that I see the world. And I always owe New Yorkers that honesty. And when it comes to Benjamin Netanyahu, I have described him as I believe him to be: a war criminal and an architect of a horrific genocide of the Palestinian people."
Of the ICC warrant, he reiterated that it was "something that should be honored, because what we want to see... is a faith in our politics, a faith in accountability."
In July, a YouGov poll found that 49% of Americans believed the US government should arrest Netanyahu under the warrant, 27% said it should not, and 23% were unsure.
President Donald Trump stated earlier this summer that Netanyahu “will not be arrested, in any way, shape, or form" while visiting the US. His administration's position, as stated in a February 2025 executive order, is that Netanyahu can't be arrested. The ICC, it says, “has no jurisdiction over the United States or Israel” because, unlike most other nations, neither is a party to the Rome Statute, which created the court.
Jake Romm, a legal adviser for the Hind Rajab Foundation—a group named after a 5-year-old Palestinian girl killed by Israeli forces—argued Tuesday in The Nation that even if the ICC warrant can't be enforced on US soil, it "is not the only tool available to the US when it comes to holding Netanyahu accountable."
Romm noted the existence of "two robust federal criminal statutes," the War Crimes Act and the Genocide Statute, which he said incorporate "important international instruments into US law"—the Geneva Convention governing the laws of war and the Genocide Convention, respectively.
He wrote that both of these laws give the US jurisdiction over alleged war criminals “regardless of where the crimes have been committed” when the suspect is physically present in the US, or the crimes were committed against US nationals.
Romm acknowledged that Netanyahu is shielded from arrest during his official UN visit and that sitting heads of government generally enjoy immunity from national courts, but argued that those protections do not eliminate the United States' underlying authority to prosecute him under federal war crimes and genocide laws.
"The United States has the ability to arrest Netanyahu for crimes under US law and to prosecute him in US courts," Romm wrote. "I stress this not because I believe that an administration that has, at every turn, deepened its complicity in Israel’s crimes will suddenly change. I stress the US’s ability and obligation to arrest Netanyahu—and all Israeli perpetrators of the genocides in Palestine and southern Lebanon—in order to make one thing clear: Every day that Netanyahu remains free is a day that the US has allowed him to remain free."
It's not just the United States that has allowed Netanyahu to travel freely despite the warrant. Emma Fourreau, a French member of the European Parliament, accused her nation's government—which is obligated to arrest Netanyahu under the Rome Statute—of having "trample[d] on international law" by giving his aircraft clearance to pass through its airspace en route to New York.
Craig Mokhiber, a former senior UN human rights official who resigned in 2023 while accusing Israel of carrying out a “textbook genocide” in Gaza, said the fact that Netanyahu would be showing up at the UN unencumbered, even while being "universally despised, and blocked from travel to most countries on the planet," was a "stain" on the entire institution.
"He will even be allowed to enter UN premises and to address the [General Assembly], received as a VIP rather than the blood-soaked war criminal that he is," Mokhiber said on social media, describing it as one of many failures of the institution to respond to Israel's actions in Gaza.
He noted that the General Assembly had not stripped Israel of its credentials as it did with apartheid-era South Africa, that the UN Security Council had endorsed the Trump-led "Board of Peace" proposal to govern postwar Gaza, and that Secretary-General António Guterres had declined to use the word "genocide" to describe Israel's conduct, even while other top UN experts had.
"The genocidaires are not just walking among us, they are ruling over us. They are trying to normalize genocide and apartheid," Mokhiber said. "We, in our millions, must act to denormalize these scourges, to hold the perpetrators and accomplices accountable, and to ensure they never have a moment’s peace until justice prevails."
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'We Don't Waste Our Time' With Courts, Says Trump, Bragging of Extrajudicial Murders in Pacific and Caribbean
Critics have described Trump's boat strikes as extrajudicial killings that violate due process. At a meeting during this week's gathering of the UN General Assembly, he seemed to agree.
Sep 23, 2026
Critics have often described President Donald Trump's campaign of boat strikes in the Caribbean and Pacific—which have taken the lives of at least 234 mostly unknown people—as extrajudicial killings that flout the very basics of due process.
On Tuesday, Trump essentially described them that way too, seeming to suggest that killing people outside the law is the whole point.
"For years, administrations just played games, and they'd bring them to a court in Miami or something, and the judge would release them immediately, and they'd go back to selling drugs," Trump said. "But now, we don't waste our time doing it."
He was speaking at a meeting of the Washington-led "Shield of the Americas" coalition, an alliance of leaders and foreign ministers ostensibly dedicated to stamping out drug cartels and other criminal organizations across the Americas.
The boat strike campaign—known first by the Defense Department as “Operation Southern Spear” before it was rebranded last month as Joint Task Force Western Hemisphere—is part of this effort. The administration says the more than 70 vessels it has targeted with lethal strikes since last September were engaged in “narco-trafficking,” and that killing their operators is a justifiable form of self-defense.
The principal illicit cargo on the maritime routes targeted by Southern Spear is cocaine. But the White House rarely provides any evidence publicly to substantiate that the boats it targets are involved with drug trafficking, and members of Congress have complained that even classified briefings lacked hard evidence. Some of those killed in the strikes have later been identified as ordinary fishermen and other civilians with no known ties to the drug trade.
An investigation from the Washington Office on Latin America found in July that the military has relied on extraordinarily broad criteria to launch the strikes against anyone deemed to be "affiliated" with a secret list of designated terrorist groups. They do not require the commanders launching them to know the identities of those aboard a vessel or have any evidence that it is carrying drugs at all.
Even if the boats were engaged in drug trafficking as the administration claims, wrote Ben Saul, the United Nations special rapporteur on human rights and counterterrorism, in a report released earlier this week, there are no “international legal rights to unilaterally use military force” to counter drug cartels or other organized crime groups that have not mounted any “armed attack” against the US.
The strikes, Saul added, were not a “last resort” or “necessary or proportionate” since the US had not tried to use non-lethal means like intercepting or boarding them before resorting to bombings.
Concurring with several other UN experts, he said that the strikes were "contrary to international law, violate the human right to life, and plausibly constitute crimes against humanity," including "murder."
Trump's comments on Tuesday seemed to underscore what Saul and others critical of the boat bombings have emphasized: that rather than using lethal force as a last resort to repel an immediate threat, his administration was simply killing suspects as an alternative to avoid a cumbersome legal process.
Norman Ornstein, a political scientist and scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said in a post on social media that Trump's comments were "worthy of the International Criminal Court."
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has suggested the administration’s calls to “dismantle” the ICC are in part out of concern that the court, which prosecutes war crimes and other international criminality, could be used to prosecute members of the Trump administration over the boat strikes.
Trump described the ICC as “anti-American” and “evil" during a speech at the UN General Assembly earlier on Tuesday, in which he also threatened to "annihilate" Iran and celebrated that he was claiming the "spoils" of war from Venezuela.
During that same speech, he also boasted that his administration “has carried out dozens of strikes on cartel drug boats, destroying 97% of the drugs coming into the ocean and sea," a claim that his administration has not provided evidence to substantiate.
An internal analysis by the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), reported on in July by the Washington Post, found the opposite, in fact, stating that the strikes “failed to affect the supply or price of cocaine in the United States.”
As Trump heralded the boat strike campaign before the eyes of the world on Tuesday, a coalition of more than 70 lawmakers across the Americas called for the US to end what it said were "hundreds of extrajudicial killings of civilians."
The statement was signed by 15 Democratic members of the US Congress, including Reps. Jesús “Chuy” García (D-Ill.), Greg Casar (D-Texas), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.). It was also signed by lawmakers from Puerto Rico as well as 12 other countries across the Americas—Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay.
"The identities of nearly all the victims remain publicly unknown, and many families lack effective or safe avenues to obtain information or redress. Coastal and fishing communities face fear and uncertainty as these attacks put lives and livelihoods at risk," the lawmakers wrote.
"The rights to life, due process, and protections against the arbitrary use of force are core principles of democratic rule of law that our countries have committed to uphold," they added. "Allegations of drug trafficking, however serious, do not circumvent or override these protections, nor do they justify lethal force against people who pose no imminent threat."
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Stop Mad King Donald’s Iran War: An Open Letter to Members of the US Congress
The war with Iran is Trump’s folly but Congress’s disgrace for not stopping it.
Sep 23, 2026
Dear Members of Congress,
In truly deranged remarks to world leaders at the UN, Donald Trump declared that “I have a big decision to make,” whether to negotiate a deal with Iran or instead to “annihilate the Islamic Republic” and drive Iran “into hell with no chance of survival.”
He posed it as his personal choice. The fact that the American people are dead set against Trump’s war means nothing. And as for the voters, he added that he gives “absolutely no credence” to the coming midterm elections in deciding on his actions and on Iran’s fate.
The President’s threat to annihilate a member state of the United Nations, delivered from the General Assembly podium, disgraced Trump in front of the world.
Nothing binds this President. He is not bound by law, the Constitution, the UN Charter, or public opinion at home and abroad. When asked at the start of the year whether he has any limits on his power, he said “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
Trump opened his speech with the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, hailing America’s freedom. The fact is that Trump’s authoritarianism far outdoes that of King George III, against whom the colonies rebelled. Among the founders’ indictments of Mad King George was that “He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.” Yet our own mad king has decided that the survival of a whole civilization is in his hands alone.
Trump is emboldened in his contempt for Congress because the Republican members of Congress have abdicated their constitutional responsibilities, terrified of their own president, and forsaking their constituents for campaign lucre from AIPAC and the military-industrial complex.
The Constitution is unambiguous regarding Congress’s responsibility. Article I, Section 8 assigns Congress, not the President, the sole power to declare war. That is not a choice or an option. The Constitution doesn’t say that Congress can play dead and let the President declare war. The Framers made this choice deliberately, because they were explicitly rejecting the power of a king to take the nation to war.
In Federalist 69, Hamilton assured the public that the President’s war powers would be far less than the British monarch’s. Madison stated the principle plainly in a letter to Jefferson in 1798: “The constitution supposes, what the History of all Govts demonstrates, that the Ex. is the branch of power most interested in war, & most prone to it. It has accordingly with studied care vested the question of war in the Legislature.”
The founders’ careful design has been overturned because of the unconstitutional subservience of the Republican members of Congress to Trump and to the military-industrial-digital complex. And yes, under Democratic presidents, most Democratic members of Congress also looked the other way when those presidents chose to go to war.
The war with Iran is Trump’s folly but Congress’s disgrace for not stopping it. It is a war without a purpose that has created mass suffering in Iran, tens of billions of dollars of direct outlays, and staggering damage to American military bases in eight countries of the Middle East. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has sent world and American prices soaring for oil, gas, fertilizers, and more. And the world has duly noted that Iran can hold its own against US aggression, albeit at great sacrifice to the people of Iran and the region.
America’s much vaunted AI battlefield has been exposed in the most horrifying way. On the first day of the war, an American missile struck the girls’ elementary school there, killing more than 150 people, most of them girls aged seven to twelve, and the military’s own inquiry reportedly found that overreliance on artificial intelligence contributed to the targeting. Trump blamed “Iran or somebody else,” and seven months later the administration has offered no findings, no apology and no compensation to the families.
The President’s threat to annihilate a member state of the United Nations, delivered from the General Assembly podium, disgraced Trump in front of the world. It also violated Article 2(4) of the UN Charter, which prohibits even the threat of force against another state. Nearly all the world stands aghast.
I write to you because you cannot simply walk away from Trump’s recklessness, shaking your heads silently. You have a job to do, so do it. The craven Republican Party has to find even a minimal level of guts to tell Trump, “No, you do not have the power to destroy Iran. Any war with Iran depends on us, and we don’t support you and our constituents want this war to stop.” A clear majority of Americans oppose this war, and poll after poll shows that the opposition to the war is growing. A few Republicans have found that courage. Last week three more Republicans broke ranks to support ending the war. Their colleagues should follow.
Many of you receive campaign contributions from military contractors and technology companies deeply involved in the war. Many of you take money from AIPAC, which champions the war that Netanyahu did so much to help launch. This has to stop, as it is a dereliction of your constitutional duty and a violation of your oath.
Congress holds the power of the purse. The fiscal year ends on September 30, and every bill that funds the Pentagon is your opportunity to prohibit funds for unauthorized offensive operations against Iran.
The right course for the US is simple. Congress should cut off funding, and the US should stop further attacks and go home. We need no agreement with Iran or anyone else to stop the war that we started. By ending the war you will immediately restore some sanity and safety to the world energy markets, food supplies, and prices faced by Americans and others around the world.
How America has declined from the glorious moment when John F. Kennedy stood at the same podium at the UN on September 20, 1963, after having negotiated the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty with the Soviet Union. He told the assembled leaders that the treaty can be a lever, and Archimedes, in explaining the principles of the lever, was said to have declared to his friends: “Give me a place where I can stand—and I shall move the world.” My fellow inhabitants of this planet: Let us take our stand here in this Assembly of nations. And let us see if we, in our own time, can move the world to a just and lasting peace.
Members of Congress, to save our nation’s honor and our Constitution, you must do your duty to stop this war, and stop Trump’s brazen, destructive, and unconstitutional grab for power.
Respectfully,
Jeffrey D. Sachs
University Professor, Columbia University
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