Collateral Damage, Permanent Loss
The war’s assault on humanity’s shared heritage exposes the limits of international law — and the moral failures of every party
I was five or six years old when Isfahan first entered my imagination — not through books or school, but through a neighbor’s slide projector. Uncle Anwar Shah had just returned from Iran, and in his darkened sitting room, image after image clicked into being on a white wall: turquoise domes, soaring minarets, archways lined with gorgeous geometric tilework in colors that were as foreign to me as the place itself.
I did not know then that what I was seeing was Naqsh-e-Jahan Square, one of the world’s largest public squares and a supreme achievement of Islamic architecture. I knew only that I wanted, someday, to stand inside those pictures.
In the winter of 2015, I finally did. The square exceeded even a child’s hyperbole. Enclosed on four sides by a royal mosque, a private mosque, a palace, and a bazaar that has traded without interruption for four centuries, it is a space that makes the Piazza San Marco — itself no modest undertaking — feel like an antechamber. I climbed the Ali Qapu palace on the square’s western flank, where Safavid kings once watched polo from a high terrace.
The music room near its summit is carved with the silhouettes of vessels — vases, ewers, bottles — hollowed into the plaster ceiling to improve the acoustics for court musicians. It is among the most ingeniously delicate things I have ever encountered. I photographed it, knowing even then that the image would be a poor substitute for standing in a space where the 17th century felt genuinely present.
Those photographs feel different to me now.
Since early March, blast waves from US-Israeli strikes on government and security infrastructure in Isfahan’s historic center have shattered the windows and doors of Ali Qapu, driven a crack down the center of a 400-year-old fresco at the nearby Chehel Sotoun palace, dislodged calligraphic tilework from the Shah Mosque, and scattered debris through the Persian garden that Shah Abbas planted when Shakespeare was still alive. UNESCO — which had furnished all parties with the precise coordinates of protected sites before hostilities began — has independently verified the damage. The Blue Shield emblems that Iranian authorities had hurriedly affixed to monuments and museum facades in the days before the strikes did not stop the blast waves. They rarely do.
(And it’s not just in Isfahan that historical structures have been damaged. On March 2, blast waves from a strike on Arg Square tore through Golestan Palace — Tehran’s only UNESCO World Heritage Site, a Qajar-era masterpiece of mirrored halls and intricate tilework whose origins stretch back to the Safavid dynasty. Windows, wooden doors, and sections of the palace’s celebrated mirrorwork were damaged. UNESCO confirmed this the same day, noting that the strike had landed inside the palace’s designated buffer zone.)
I am aware that it can seem morally misaligned to grieve buildings while people are dying. More than 1,444 Iranians have been killed since the campaign began on February 28, according to Iran’s Health Ministry; 13 American service members have died and some 140 more have been wounded; 773 people have been killed in Lebanon, as well as 15 in Israeli, and at least 16 civilians across Gulf states. The human cost renders any tally of cracked plasterwork and shattered tiles feel secondary.
Yet Iranians themselves are not drawing that hierarchy. Reporting from inside the country describes a population that is as anguished by the damage to their cultural inheritance as by the military toll — and there is nothing irrational about that response. Heritage sites are not decorative amenities. They are the material record that a civilization existed, endured, and periodically achieved greatness. “War fans say that whatever gets destroyed, someone will build a better one later,” wrote Mojtaba Najafi, a prominent Iranian scholar, on social media after the strikes. “Fine, go ahead and build a new Golestan Palace, a new Chehel Sotun.” The sarcasm was its own argument.
For specialists in international humanitarian law, moreover, what is happening in Isfahan is not merely lamentable — it is a stress test of a legal architecture that has been showing cracks of its own for decades.
The 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, drafted explicitly in response to the industrialized destruction of World War II, establishes a tiered framework for protecting heritage in wartime. At its apex sits an “enhanced protection” category for sites of outstanding universal value; below that, general protections that prohibit deliberate attacks and require parties to refrain from using cultural property in ways likely to result in damage.
The Blue Shield emblem is the convention’s operational symbol, a cultural analog to the Red Cross. Under the Rome Statute, deliberate attacks on protected historical monuments constitute war crimes in both international and non-international armed conflicts.
The convention’s central weakness has always been the “military necessity” exception, a waiver so undefined in the treaty text that it has functioned, in practice, as a nearly unlimited escape clause. Courts have pushed back: the ICC’s 2016 conviction of Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi for the destruction of Timbuktu’s mausoleums established that deliberate cultural destruction is prosecutable, full stop, regardless of military rationale. ICTY rulings on Dubrovnik and the Bosnian mosque demolitions similarly anchored the principle in case law.
But those prosecutions all rested on demonstrable intent. The damage to Isfahan’s monuments was caused by blast waves from strikes aimed at adjacent government buildings — collateral damage in the strict legal sense, making criminal prosecution of the attacking forces essentially untenable under current doctrine.
What the law cannot resolve, the moral analysis must. And here culpability runs genuinely, uncomfortably in both directions.
Critics of the US-Israeli campaign have been quick to invoke the heritage damage as evidence of disregard for international norms. They have a point, but the argument is sharpest when it focuses not on intent but on foreseeability. UNESCO’s transmission of protected-site coordinates to all parties was not merely a bureaucratic formality — it was a direct notice that striking government targets in the historic core of Isfahan would put irreplaceable Safavid structures in the blast radius. When Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth declared that the United States would prosecute this war without “stupid rules of engagement,” he was not simply streamlining battlefield procedures. He was signaling an institutional posture of indifference to precisely the kind of foreseeable collateral harm now documented in Chehel Sotoun.
Foreseen harm, in most serious moral frameworks, cannot be fully laundered by the absence of direct intent.
The proportionality test embedded in Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions demands that attacking parties weigh anticipated civilian harm, which courts have extended to include cultural property, against concrete military advantage. Whether striking an IRGC intelligence office and a provincial governorate building in a UNESCO World Heritage Square satisfies that test is, at minimum, a question that deserves a formal answer. No such accounting has been offered.
Iran, for its part, has moved quickly to present itself as the aggrieved custodian of civilization, and on the heritage question it has a legitimate grievance. But it is not without culpability.
The popular claim that Iran deliberately sited its nuclear and missile infrastructure adjacent to its cultural monuments does not survive geographic scrutiny. The Isfahan Nuclear Technology Center — Iran’s largest nuclear research complex, established in 1984, and a primary target in strikes both last year and this — lies nearly 10 miles southeast of Naqsh-e-Jahan Square. The nuclear program and the heritage damage are connected by the city’s name, not by physical proximity.
The strikes that cracked the Shah Tahmasp fresco were aimed at an IRGC intelligence building and the provincial governorate — urban administrative targets, not the missile complex on the city’s periphery.
The more precise charge against Iran is different, and no less real. The Hague Convention imposes an affirmative duty on state parties to separate military functions from protected cultural property, in peacetime, as a matter of preventive obligation, not merely during hostilities. Housing IRGC offices in a complex physically attached to 17th-century Safavid structures that Iran itself had registered as requiring protection was a violation of that obligation. The convention’s Article 7 requires parties to establish specialized procedures to ensure compliance; Article 3 requires peacetime safeguarding measures.
Iran’s failure to relocate security functions away from the Dawlatkhaneh complex — the historic royal precinct where Chehel Sotoun, Ashraf Hall, and the Timurid Hall all stand — created the very conditions the convention was designed to prevent. The fact that Iran has now loudly demanded international accountability for the resulting damage has a quality of chutzpah that the convention’s framers did not anticipate.
The responsibility-shifting argument that follows from this — if you co-mingle military functions with protected heritage, you bear some moral responsibility for the damage when those functions are targeted — has genuine force. But it also has genuine limits, and specialists will note that those limits matter. Responsibility shifts partially, not entirely. The attacker retains an independent obligation to exercise proportionality. And the argument, taken to its logical conclusion, licenses strikes on almost any urban environment in the modern world, since virtually every state houses government functions in historic city centers. It is a doctrine that tends to expand in proportion to the military power of whoever invokes it.
Americans reading this in a foreign policy context might consider a precedent closer to home. In April 2003, US forces established Camp Alpha — a 150-hectare base, at its peak housing 2,000 troops — directly inside the ruins of ancient Babylon, one of the most consequential archaeological sites on earth. I visited in 2004-5 and saw the results: a 2,600-year-old brick pavement crushed by heavy vehicles, bricks bearing the stamp of Nebuchadnezzar II scattered across the site, cuneiform-marked soil repurposed for sandbags. A British Museum investigation described the damage as “substantial.” UNESCO called it “very serious.”
The US eventually contributed $800,000 toward rehabilitation — a figure that was not so much inadequate as categorical in what it revealed about how the decision-makers valued the site. No one was prosecuted. The military necessity exception was never seriously invoked, because the occupation of Babylon served no discernible military necessity. It was pure institutional negligence, which the law handles even less well than deliberate destruction.
The parallel is not perfect. Isfahan is not Babylon, and the dynamics of an active air campaign differ from a ground occupation. But the thread connecting them is the same: a posture, at the level of military culture and political leadership, that treats the protection of cultural heritage as an optional refinement to be discarded when it becomes inconvenient. That posture predates the current administration. It has simply become more explicit.
Wars end. The buildings and frescoes and carved plaster ceilings that survive them become part of how civilizations reconstruct a sense of who they were before the killing began. The ones that don’t survive are a permanent subtraction — from the archaeological record, from the sum of human memory, from the set of things that can make a skeptical journalist, standing in a cold square in December, feel briefly that civilization is worth the trouble.
The music room of Ali Qapu, with its vessel-shaped acoustic niches, is one of those things. You can fill the cracks in the plaster. You cannot restore what the craftsman knew, or the patience with which he worked, or the four centuries of use and presence that made standing in that room feel like a conversation across time. What the law calls collateral damage, history will record as loss. The distinction matters for the courtroom. It does not much matter for the fresco.
