Sort:  

6/6 🧵

Trump's bet: Iran will blink before the deadline. If not, he's prepared to send the country back to the Stone Age — and deal with the legal fallout later. The clock is ticking.

📎 Source

📎 Source

#threadstorm

5/6 🧵

But 100 legal scholars (Yale, Stanford, Harvard) signed a letter warning the strikes "could entail war crimes" under proportionality rules. The key: civilian harm must not be excessive relative to military advantage. The US never ratified the 1977 protocol that would clearly ban this.

4/6 🧵

Legal precedent exists: the US bombed Serbia's power grid during Kosovo in the late 1990s. Berkeley law professor John Yoo argues infrastructure is fair game if it supports military operations — transport, command, electricity for defense systems.

3/6 🧵

Trump's defense: "Allowing a sick country with demented leadership have a nuclear weapon, that's a war crime." He's framing the strikes as prevention, not aggression. And he insists Iranian protesters support the destruction because they're suffering under the regime.

2/6 🧵

The threat is specific and brutal: every bridge, every power plant in Iran decimated within 4 hours starting Tuesday night. Trump says it's leverage for a deal to end the 38-day conflict — but legal experts are split on whether infrastructure strikes violate Geneva Conventions.

1/6 🧵

Trump just doubled down: he's not worried about war crime accusations over targeting Iran's bridges and power plants. His claim? Iranian civilians "want us to keep bombing" because they're seeking regime change. Deadline: 8 PM Tuesday, or Iran goes dark.