Since fall 2023, Israel has implemented its ‘obliteration doctrine’ in Gaza and now in Lebanon. The US has adopted elements of it in Iran. In the process, mass atrocity crimes are being normalized in the Global South.
ON Easter Sunday, United States President Donald Trump posted an expletive-laden warning to Iran, threatening to strike civilian infrastructure if the Strait of Hormuz was not reopened. Setting a deadline, he said that if a deal was not reached to “open the F****n’ Strait,” the country would be “living in Hell.”
The administration has paved the way for the normalization of mass atrocity crimes.
Obliteration rhetoric as a prelude to mass atrocities
Since the onset of the Iran attacks, President Trump has repeatedly claimed that the US military has “literally obliterated” Iran’s military capability and leadership as part of the ongoing conflict.
Here’s the bottom line: In international law, words by senior officials are not just political; they are evidentiary. And this applies particularly in situations when those words explicitly reference destroying civilian systems.
What has been left unsaid is that the White House has embraced core aspects of the devastating military strategy that Israel developed in the early 2000s, tested in Dahiya, Beirut, in 2006 and has executed broadly in Gaza’s genocide since fall 2023, as I showed in my book “The Obliteration Doctrine” (2025).
Tens of thousands of civilian sites damaged and destroyed
The US government typically describes its strikes as targeted against military, infrastructure or nuclear sites, and has not officially verified the scale of civilian damage reported by Iranian authorities.
Yet, based on reports from the Iranian Red Crescent Society and Iranian officials as of late March and early April 2026, Iran reports that over 90,000 civilian sites — including homes, medical facilities and schools — have been damaged or destroyed in joint US-Israeli air strikes.
These claims come amid a rapid escalation of conflict starting in late February 2026, which has resulted in up to 3.2 to 3.5 million people being displaced within Iran.
The Obliteration Doctrine prioritizes the total destruction of an enemy’s infrastructure and population over traditional military objectives. It relies on four old and brutal methods of devastation.
Obliteration as violation of international law
The scorched-Earth policy is a long-standing military strategy of destroying everything that allows an enemy military force to fight a war, including the critical infrastructure, military and state institutions, buildings, crops, livestock, security, and so on. Historical examples feature the American Civil War and American Indian Wars, and Nazi Germany’s war against the Soviet Union.
Nonetheless, the deployment of scorched-Earth policy against noncombatants is banned under the 1977 Geneva Conventions.
Since “collective punishment” targets individuals who are not responsible for the perpetrated acts, it undermines modern legal systems, which restrict criminal liability to individuals. Yet, it has been widely deployed through history, from late medieval Florence to the American Civil War and Nazi occupation of Poland and Yugoslavia, to postwar counterinsurgency campaigns.
Like scorched-Earth policy, collective punishment is prohibited in both international and non-international armed conflicts.
“Civilian victimization” is the purposeful use of violence against noncombatants in a conflict. In civilian victimization, violence is often deployed to foster civilian cooperation and isolate the military adversary by removing civilians from an area, as applied in the US “strategic hamle” program during the Vietnam War.
Like scorched-Earth policy and collective punishment, civilian victimization is prohibited by the Geneva Conventions.
In its contemporary form, the obliteration doctrine accounts for the decimation of urban infrastructure and the genocidal atrocities in the Gaza Strip since 2023.
Aerial warfare should comply with laws of war. Based on Article 51 of Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions, carpet bombing has been considered a war crime since 1977.
Toward algocides
There is one more ingredient to the contemporary obliteration doctrine: Israel’s mass assassination factories deploying artificial intelligence (AI) for maximum devastation in Gaza.
“Algocide” can be defined as a deliberate effort to use the algorithms of artificial intelligence in genocidal atrocities.
In the past weeks, Israel and the US have deployed AI-powered warfare in Iran and Lebanon, using advanced systems for intelligence analysis, target generation and drone/missile tracking to accelerate the “kill chain.”
Israel is using AI tools like “Lohem” and AI-driven data analysis for targeting in Lebanon, while the US relies on the Pentagon AI program “Project Maven” to analyze data in the conflict with Iran.
War crimes and crimes against humanity
Here’s the problem: the interlocking core aspects of Obliteration Doctrine directly violate several fundamental principles of International Humanitarian Law (IHL), or the laws of war:
– Collective punishment is strictly prohibited by Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention and Customary IHL Rule 103.
– Scorched Earth tactics are illegal under Additional Protocol I, Article 54.
– Indiscriminate bombing is prohibited by Article 51 of Protocol I.
– Under Geneva Conventions, intentionally targeting civilians is a war crime (Principle of Distinction).
– IHL prohibits attacks with excessive civilian loss (principle of proportionality).
– AI-enabled warfare does not exempt from these laws. Using AI to facilitate “mass assassination” without human oversight is considered a violation of the obligation to prevent genocide.
The rules-based order of butchery
The West’s obliteration doctrine represents a shift from collateral damage to deliberate civilian victimization in the Global South.
The blatant destruction of civilians and civilian infrastructure is not war. It is illegal destruction. Nor is it warfare. It is butchery by the mighty.
The world of brutal great power rivalry has a dark track record. It goes back to capitalist modernity and lethal colonialism in the 19th century. But the new variant is far more lethal and ambitious. It seeks to globalize obliteration.
In “The Obliteration Doctrine,” I argued that Gaza is “most likely a prelude of worse to come.” Now it is spreading to Lebanon, Iran and elsewhere in the Middle East.
If this madness is not halted in time by the international community, it will one day spread to its ultimate target — Asia.
Dr. Dan Steinbock, an expert of the multipolar world, is the founder of Difference Group and has served at the India, China and America Institute (US), Shanghai Institute for International Studies (China) and the EU Center (Singapore). He is also the author of “The Obliteration Doctrine” (September 2025) and “The Fall of Israel” (October 2024). For more, see https://www.differencegroup.net/.
This is a highly abbreviated version of a commentary that was published by the Informed Comment (US) on April 7, 2026.
