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Ben Norton for Geopolitical Economy Report
The United States and Israel are intentionally devastating civilian areas in Iran, brutally bombing schools, hospitals, and residential neighborhoods, in an attempt not only to destroy the state but also to collapse Iranian society itself.
US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth described the scorched-earth strategy in a Pentagon press briefing on March 4.
“This was never meant to be a fair fight, and it is not a fair fight. We are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be”, Hegseth boasted.
He added with pride that the US and Israel are raining upon Iran “death and destruction from the sky, all day long”.
Hegseth noted that, in the first four days of the war on Iran (named Operation Epic Fury), the US military employed “twice the air power” that it had used in the “shock and awe” invasion of Iraq in 2003.
In another press briefing on March 2, the US secretary of war condemned international organizations like the United Nations and proclaimed, “America, regardless of what so-called international institutions say, is unleashing the most lethal and precise air power campaign in history”.
Hegseth bragged that the US is fighting with “no stupid rules of engagement”. By his admission, the Pentagon is purposefully targeting civilian areas, and does not care about the rules of war.
US and Israel bomb 20 schools and 13 hospitals in Iran in one week
According to the World Health Organization, the US and Israel bombed at least 13 hospitals and health facilities in Iran in the first five days of the war, which Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu launched on February 28.
Washington and Tel Aviv bombed at least 20 Iranian schools in the first week of the war, according to UNICEF.
They also destroyed a desalination plant, depriving dozens of Iranian villages of water.
The US and Israel killed more than 1,300 Iranians in the first week. Children made up 30% of the victims.
CNN and the New York Times both independently confirmed that the US military bombed an elementary school in the city of Minab in southern Iran on the first day of the war.
The children massacred by Trump at their elementary school in the city of Minab pic.twitter.com/YSlGtgannz
— Seyed Mohammad Marandi (@s_m_marandi) March 7, 2026
The US bombed the school twice, 40 minutes apart, to make sure there were no survivors.
The US military killed at least 168 children and 14 teachers.
War Secretary Hegseth published a map of the areas in Iran that were bombed by the US, and the Minab primary school was clearly in the strike zone.
This is what Hegseth meant when he bragged that the US empire is “punching them while they’re down”, with “no stupid rules of engagement”.
The US-Israeli slaughter is so extreme that even some right-wing media outlets in the West, like the UK’s conservative newspaper The Telegraph, were forced to admit that “Tehran [is] an ‘apocalypse’ of hospitals in flames and children buried beneath rubble”, as the US and Israel intentionally bomb civilian areas.
US and Israel want a failed state and societal collapse in Iran
What Washington and Tel Aviv want to unleash in Iran is not just regime change; it is the destruction of the state and the collapse of Iranian society.
This was openly admitted by some Israeli officials, in a report in the Financial Times.
The FT cited Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz, who declared that “every leader appointed by the Iranian terror regime . . . will be an unequivocal target for elimination”.
Tel Aviv’s plan is to kill all Iranian leaders, so the country cannot be governed and simply falls into chaos.
This was further confirmed by a former top Israeli intelligence official.
The Financial Times interviewed Danny Citrinowicz, who worked for 25 years in Israel Defense Intelligence (IDI) and was the chief of the Research and Analysis Division’s Iran branch.
Citrinowicz told the FT that what Israel wants is the “total destruction of this regime, of the pillars of this regime, of everything that holds it together”.
The former head of Israeli military intelligence’s Iran analysis said this is how Tel Aviv sees the war (emphasis added):
If we can have a coup, great. If we can have people on the streets, great. If we can have a civil war, great. Israel couldn’t care less about the future . . . [or] the stability of Iran.
In other words, the US and Israel want to repeat in Iran the same kind of war of extermination that they carried out in Gaza, which a UN commission determined to be a campaign of genocide.
US-Israeli war on Iran blatantly violates international law
It goes without saying that the US-Israeli war of aggression against Iran flagrantly violates international law.
The United Nations education agency, UNESCO, emphasized that the bombing of Iranian schools by the US and Israel “constitutes a grave violation of the protection afforded to schools under international humanitarian law”.
Legal experts have clearly stated that the US-Israeli war violates international law. They also noted that Washington was engaged in supposed “negotiations” with Tehran, and Iran was willing to make significant concessions for a deal, when Trump launched this surprise war of aggression, sabotaging the talks.
Stanford University’s elite law school published an interview with an expert on international law, Professor Allen Weiner, who stated, “From an international law perspective, my judgment is that the attack was quite clearly illegal”.
States do have a right to self-defense under international law, Weiner noted. Iran has exercised this right.
The US and Israeli regimes claimed they launched “preemptive” attacks on Iran, but Weiner stressed that this is not valid under international law.
In order to claim self-defense, states may only strike when they have evidence that “they face an imminent threat of attack”, he argued.
This does not apply in this situation, Weiner emphasized. The Stanford law professor explained:
The notion that Iran presents a general security threat to U.S. interests does not constitute a threat of imminent attack. Nor does the possibility that Iran might at some point in the future acquire either nuclear weapons or intercontinental missiles capable of reaching the U.S. homeland amount to a threat of an imminent attack.
US-Israeli war on Iran is based on lies
All of the talking points that the Trump administration has used to try to justify this illegal war have fallen apart.
The Pentagon admitted in a closed-door briefing to Congress that Iran was not going to attack the US and Israel first, and that it only had plans to retaliate in self-defense.
Similarly, the Trump administration claimed that Iran was close to developing nuclear weapons. This was false as well.
The director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Rafael Grossi, said clearly in an interview on CNN that Iran was not on the verge of having nuclear weapons.
This was another lie promoted by the US government to justify an illegal war.
“Were the Iranians days or weeks away from building a [nuclear] bomb, from having a bomb?”, CNN host Becky Anderson asked Grossi.
“No”, he replied, bluntly.
The IAEA chief explained, “We never had information indicating that there was a structured, systematic [Iranian] program to build, to construct, a nuclear weapon”.
Benjamin (Ben) Norton is a journalist, analyst, and political economist. Ben is founder and editor of Geopolitical Economy Report. After years in Latin America, he now lives in Beijing, China.
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