U.S. President Donald Trump on Wednesday stateside warned that if Iran continued targeting Qatar’s energy facilities, America would “massively blow up the entirety of the South Pars Gas Field.”
Tehran had attacked a key energy facility in Qatar after Israel bombed the South Pars Gas in Iran, signaling a sharp escalation in the conflict and sending energy prices soaring.
Trump denied any prior knowledge of Israel attacking South Pars, pushing back against reports that the strike was coordinated with and approved by his administration.
In a social media post Wednesday night stateside, Trump said that “the United States knew nothing about this particular attack, and the country of Qatar was in no way, shape, or form, involved with it, nor did it have any idea that it was going to happen.”



I’m not certain that that’s legal under the Geneva Convention — oil facilities might well be a military target, but given the context in which Trump is talking, the goal probably isn’t its value as a military target — but then again, Iran hitting Qatari energy facilities is at least as egregious in that degree.
EDIT: I do think that, in general, the laws of war may not have great mechanisms to respond to someone else wiping out civilian infrastructure. Like, setting aside this particular incident, maybe there should be some sort of mechanism added to deal with it.
Ordinarily, you’d think that a country wouldn’t want to spend time destroying civilian infrastructure if it could hit military targets, but in this case, Iran has very limited ability to really attack US or Israeli military targets, but does have the ability to destroy civilian targets in their neighbors. That creates misincentives, I think, and I could certainly imagine similar such situations showing up down the line.
My major concern is that, in the past, there have been cases where attempting to protect civilian infrastructure using deterrence via threatening civilian infrastructure on the other side has resulted in escalation spirals. For example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_bombing_during_World_War_II
Like, maybe that would have been unavoidable, if Hitler wanted to do it and was looking for any political rationale, but you view it as an escalation spiral where it’s very easy for either side to inadvertently start a raging bonfire, that raises some obvious risks of deterrence via threatening civilian infrastructure. Ideally, whatever structure you have discourages attacks on civilian infrastructure and tends to encourage de-escalation if some does occur.