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On the first day of the war, reports emerged that a missile struck a girls’ primary school in southern Iran. According to the Iranian Red Crescent, at least 175 people were killed, most of them children between the ages of seven and twelve. A subsequent US military assessment acknowledged that American forces were likely responsible and that no military target had been identified at the site. That was five weeks ago. Since then, the Pasteur Institute, a century-old disease research centre that has spent decades fighting cholera and COVID-19, was bombed this week. The WHO director-general said the strike left the institute unable to function and called it an attack on global health. A newly built bridge connecting Tehran to Karaj was destroyed on April 3 while families were out celebrating Nature Day, killing eight people and wounding 95 others. Trump shared a video of the bridge collapsing on social media and wrote that much more would follow. Desalination plants that provide drinking water have been targeted. And on Wednesday, the President of the United States went on national television and told Iran he would bring them back to “the Stone Age, where they belong".
On Thursday, more than 100 American legal scholars from Harvard, Yale, Stanford and the University of California published an open letter in the Just Security policy journal. The letter said the war, from the very first strike on February 28, was a clear violation of the United Nations Charter. It said the conduct of American forces raises serious concerns about war crimes. The letter was co-authored by Yale Law School’s Oona Hathaway and Harold Koh, Philip Alston of NYU, and former Human Rights Watch chief Kenneth Roth. It was signed by former government legal advisers, military law experts and former Judge Advocates General who spent careers serving inside the American military system. These are not protesters holding signs outside an embassy. These are the people who write the books that American military officers study. When they use the language of war crimes, they are invoking specific legal thresholds under international humanitarian law, not offering political opinion.
Their argument is not complicated. Under Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter, the use of force against another state is prohibited except in self-defence against an actual or imminent armed attack, or when authorised by the Security Council. Iran had not attacked the United States or Israel on February 28. The Security Council had not authorised anything. As the letter states plainly, that makes the initiation of this war a violation of the UN Charter.
Beyond how the war started, the scholars raise concerns about how it is being fought. They point to strikes on schools, hospitals and civilian homes. They cite Trump’s mid-March comment that the US might strike Iran “just for fun". They note Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth’s declaration that the US does not fight with “stupid rules of engagement". Perhaps most alarming, they document how the Pentagon under Hegseth has systematically dismantled the internal legal safeguards designed to protect civilians during military operations, including removing senior military lawyers and abolishing civilian protection teams. The 2026 National Defence Strategy, they note, omits any reference to civilian protection or international law entirely. These concerns go to the core principles of international humanitarian law: distinction, proportionality, and the obligation to protect civilians.
The ICRC President said in late March that “war on essential infrastructure is war on civilians". The UN Human Rights chief has called the conflict reckless and said it is disproportionately impacting civilians. None of this denies the complexity of regional security concerns or Iran’s own troubled record in the region. But complexity does not nullify law. If anything, it makes adherence to it more necessary, not less. Yet much of the mainstream coverage remains fixated on oil prices, missile counts and diplomatic positioning, while the legal and human stakes fade into the background.
Bangladesh has a stake in this conversation that goes beyond general principle. Six Bangladeshi workers have been killed in the Gulf since the war began. Forty-seven more have been injured. Nearly six million Bangladeshis live and work in the Middle East, sending home remittances that sustain families across this country. For the families of those six workers already buried in Gulf cemeteries, this war is not geopolitical. It is personal. The government announced a series of austerity measures on April 3, cutting office hours to nine to four, ordering all shops and shopping malls to close by six in the evening, reducing government fuel and electricity consumption by 30 per cent, and halting all purchases of government vehicles, watercraft, aircraft and computer equipment. The government has indicated that separate directives on educational institutions will follow, with officials already considering a hybrid system combining online and in-person classes to reduce energy consumption.
These are not abstract policy adjustments. They are the daily life consequences of a war that Bangladesh had no part in starting and no power to stop. The reason a shop owner in Dhaka must now close two hours earlier is that two countries eight thousand kilometres away chose to go to war while diplomacy was still working.
This is where international law matters for a country like Bangladesh. We cannot prevent a war between great powers. But we can insist that wars be governed by rules. That insistence is not anti-American. It is what every nation without nuclear weapons and without a veto in the Security Council depends on for its own survival. The moment powerful countries decide that international law applies only to others, smaller nations are left entirely at the mercy of decisions they did not make and cannot influence.
The American legal scholars who signed that letter understand this. So does every Bangladeshi family that has buried a son or daughter in a Gulf cemetery over the past five weeks. The letter itself urged those with constitutional responsibilities, including the US Congress, to act. One signatory described a legislature flailing in the face of illegal actions by the executive.
Thirty-five days into a war that began during active negotiations, that has killed more than 2,000 people in Iran, according to official government figures; that has bombed a medical research institution serving global health; and that is now threatening the water supplies of 90 million people, the world’s silence is becoming a verdict of its own.
When America’s own lawyers call it a war crime, the rest of the world does not get to call it complicated.
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The writer is Associate Professor, Department of English and Modern Languages, IUBAT-International University of Business Agriculture and Technology