While Western attention remains fixed on ceasefire timelines and naval confrontations in the Strait of Hormuz, the Islamic Republic has quietly institutionalized a lawfare strategy designed to outlast the current conflict and erode the international legitimacy of both countries for years to come.
Iran’s vice president for science, Hossein Afshin, recently confirmed that Tehran is systematically documenting US-Israeli strikes on Iranian universities and scientific centers, compiling evidence 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. The language Afshin used was precise and deliberate: the strikes represent “an attack on the foundations of knowledge” and an assault on Iran’s cultural foundations.
That language is not rhetorical improvisation. It is the carefully chosen vocabulary of international humanitarian law, and Iran is deploying it with strategic intent.
The model is not novel, but its application at the level of the Iranian state is significant. Hezbollah spent years before the 2006 Lebanon war building documentation networks designed to frame Israeli military responses as disproportionate or unlawful. Hamas institutionalized the same practice in Gaza.
Lawfare - a core instrument of Iranian state strategy
What is new is that the Islamic Republic itself is now centralizing this function within the presidency, signaling that lawfare has graduated from a tactic of Iran’s proxies to a core instrument of Iranian state strategy.
The implications for Israel are serious and familiar. In December 2023, South Africa filed proceedings against Israel before the International Court of Justice under the Genocide Convention. Many Israeli officials initially dismissed the case as political theater.
It proved to be considerably more consequential. European governments cited the proceedings to justify diplomatic pressure. Several states moved to suspend bilateral agreements with Israel.
The case provided institutional scaffolding for a sustained erosion of Israel’s political relationships in Europe and the Global South, an erosion that continues regardless of the military situation on the ground. Iran has studied that outcome carefully.
The specific choice to document strikes on universities is not incidental to Iran’s legal strategy. It is central to it. Under international humanitarian law, educational and cultural institutions carry an explicit protected status. Strikes on such facilities, whatever their military justification, generate precisely the kind of evidence that performs well before international tribunals and in UN General Assembly resolutions.
Iran’s legal team understands that a strike a Pentagon briefer describes as counterproliferation targeting will be characterized before the ICJ as the deliberate destruction of civilian educational infrastructure. Both descriptions reference the same physical damage. Only one of them is designed for international legal consumption.
It is worth being clear-eyed about the nature of the institutions Iran intends to exploit. The ICJ, the UN Human Rights Council, and the treaty bodies Tehran will approach are not neutral arbiters of international law. They are political forums in which non-democratic blocs, including the Organization of Islamic Cooperation and its aligned states, exercise disproportionate influence.
Iran knows this. The purpose of the legal filings is not to achieve a judicial outcome in any conventional sense. It is to generate a sustained stream of proceedings, reports, and resolutions that provide cover for European governments already under domestic pressure to distance themselves from Israel and the United States, and that progressively narrow the political space in which both countries can operate.
Mere propaganda or a threat?
The appropriate response from Washington and Jerusalem is not to dismiss this threat as mere propaganda. That mistake has already been made once, with costly results. The response must be a counter-documentation effort of equal rigor.
The dual-use nature of the facilities struck, the Iranian military activity co-located with the universities in question, and the targeting methodology that distinguished these sites from purely civilian infrastructure must be compiled into a coherent legal record and made available to allied governments now, before the Iranian filings set the terms of debate.
More broadly, the United States and Israel need a dedicated lawfare strategy, not an improvised response to each new filing. This means pre-positioning legal arguments before conflicts rather than after, building allied coalitions capable of contesting Iranian narratives in multilateral forums, and treating international legal exposure as a strategic variable in military planning rather than an afterthought.
The Islamic Republic has correctly identified a structural vulnerability in American and Israeli statecraft: both countries are formidable in kinetic operations and consistently underprepared for the legal and diplomatic warfare that follows. Military victories do not automatically translate into durable strategic outcomes when they are subsequently relitigated in juridical forums over years and decades.
The writer, a fellow at the Middle East Forum, is a policy analyst and writer based in Morocco. Follow him on X: @amineayoubx