A broad consensus of international law scholars maintains that there are compelling grounds to classify the illegal attacks by the United States and Israel against Iran as a crime of aggression.
The joint military operations against Iran represent an undeniable erosion of the global legal order. Far from being a lawful act of preemption, these strikes are being characterised by scholars as a manifest violation of international law.
International law is not a mere suggestion. It is a binding architecture of treaties and universally accepted rules.
The joint strikes on Iran fall squarely outside this framework, violating Article 2(4) of the UN Charter - a prohibition against the use of force and signalling a dangerous disregard for the global legal order.
The US-Israel war on Iran is an illegal conflict rooted in lies and deception. It lacks any valid preemptive or lawful basis, representing a total collapse of international legal constraints.
Schrödinger’s nukes
The inconsistency is glaring: Trump now justifies these strikes as a necessity to dismantle Iran’s nuclear programme, yet he previously boasted of that very programme’s total destruction.
This pivot suggests the current military action isn’t based on new intelligence, but on a recycled and contradictory narrative.
From the 2018 withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action to the blatant disregard for the March 2025 testimony of the US director of national intelligence, the path to this war has been paved with mala fide (bad faith).
Trump’s 11-hour claim that he wanted to “give negotiators more time” was the final lie in a campaign designed to ensure diplomacy failed.
This isn’t a defensive operation. It’s an illegal war built on the ruins of verified intelligence.
Ultimately, the narrative that Iran was secretly sprinting toward a nuclear weapon didn’t just leak - it completely bottomed out. It was a manufactured casus belli, plain and simple.
When your own intelligence agencies and international monitors are providing the “all clear”, and you strike anyway, you aren’t fighting a threat; you’re executing a script written in bad faith.
The facade of a nuclear threat has been systematically dismantled by those within the intelligence community itself.
Former CIA analyst Larry C Johnson has been categorical: the claims against Iran are “bogus”, a manufactured narrative built on a foundation of deceit.
He points to a critical truth often ignored in the West - that the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei himself issued a binding religious fatwa strictly prohibiting the development of nuclear weapons, a decree that served as a moral and legal barrier the US chose to overlook in favour of war.
Ergo, the irony is sharp: while the US pushed a narrative of clandestine weapons, Iran’s supreme leadership had long ago placed a religious ban on such technology.
By dismissing Khamenei’s fatwa and belittling the intelligence info, the current administration didn’t just ignore the facts - they invented a new reality to justify an illegal conflict.
I would therefore argue that to strike Iran now, based on claims already proven false by both religious decree and intelligence data, is the height of international lawlessness.
Strictly speaking, the right to wage war is not absolute under international law. It is governed by jus ad bellum, which serves as the ethical and legal threshold for entering a conflict.
Since the recent strikes on Iran lacked both a defensive necessity and international authorisation, they failed the test of “just cause”.
Consequently, the US-Israeli campaign cannot be classified as a lawful war, but rather as an illegal use of force that dismantles the very rules designed to preserve global peace.
Massacre at school
The international armed conflict is also governed by another legal doctrine, namely jus in bello (Latin for “law in war”), which refers to the legal and ethical framework governing the conduct of parties once an armed conflict has begun.
It is also known as International Humanitarian Law. Its primary goal is to minimise human suffering by protecting those not participating in hostilities (civilians, medics, and aid workers) and those who can no longer fight (prisoners of war and the wounded).
The massacre at the Mina elementary school proves that the US and Israel have abandoned the constraints of jus in bello.
Just as the international community has witnessed in Gaza, the principles of International Humanitarian Law are being treated as optional.
Murdering 100 innocent girls under the guise of a “decapitation strike” isn’t just a strategic failure - it is a moral and legal atrocity that reveals the true face of this illegal conflict. - Mkini
MOHAMED HANIPA MAIDIN is former deputy law minister.
The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of MMKtT.
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