Iran’s vice president for science, Hossein Afshin, has said Tehran is systematically documenting U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iranian universities and scientific centers. The evidence is being compiled through the Legal Affairs Department of the Presidency for submission to international legal forums.
The Iranian government claims more than 20 universities have been damaged since the war began. Afshin called the strikes “an attack on the foundations of knowledge” and an assault on Iran’s cultural foundations.
A column in The Jerusalem Post, written by a Middle East Forum fellow who is a policy analyst based in Morocco, reads that language as deliberate. In the writer’s view, it is vocabulary borrowed from international humanitarian law, and Iran is using it with strategic intent. The argument below is the columnist’s, not an established finding.
From proxies to the presidency
The writer says the method itself is not new. Hezbollah spent years before the 2006 Lebanon war building documentation networks meant to portray Israeli military responses as disproportionate or unlawful, and Hamas did the same in Gaza. What has changed, according to the column, is that the Islamic Republic is now running this work from the presidency, so lawfare has moved from a tactic of Iran’s proxies to a core tool of state strategy.
The column points to South Africa’s December 2023 case against Israel at the International Court of Justice under the Genocide Convention. Many Israeli officials first dismissed it as political theater. The writer says European governments later cited the proceedings to justify diplomatic pressure, and several states moved to suspend bilateral agreements with Israel. Iran, the column says, has studied that outcome closely.
Why universities
Under international humanitarian law, educational and cultural institutions have explicit protected status. The columnist argues that strikes on such sites, whatever the military justification, produce evidence that does well before international tribunals and in UN General Assembly resolutions. A strike a Pentagon briefer describes as counterproliferation targeting could be presented at the ICJ as the deliberate destruction of civilian educational infrastructure. “Both descriptions reference the same physical damage,” the writer says.
The column also takes aim at the forums themselves. The ICJ, the UN Human Rights Council and the treaty bodies Tehran would approach are described as political venues where non-democratic blocs, including the Organization of Islamic Cooperation and aligned states, hold outsized influence. On this reading, the point of the filings is not a conventional judicial win. It is a steady flow of proceedings, reports and resolutions that give cover to European governments already under domestic pressure to distance themselves from Israel and the United States.
The proposed answer
The writer says Washington and Jerusalem should not wave this off as propaganda, noting that the mistake was made once already. Instead the column calls for a counter-documentation effort of equal rigor. It would assemble the dual-use nature of the struck facilities, Iranian military activity located alongside the universities, and the targeting methodology into a legal record shared with allied governments before Iran’s filings set the terms of debate.
More broadly, the column urges a dedicated lawfare strategy: legal arguments prepared before conflicts, allied coalitions able to contest Iranian narratives in multilateral forums, and legal exposure treated as a factor in military planning. Both countries, it says, are strong in kinetic operations and consistently underprepared for the legal and diplomatic fight that follows.
