Vance’s ‘Never Targets Civilians’ Claim Faces Scrutiny

U.S. Vice President JD Vance says American forces “never target civilians,” drawing a sharp line between U.S. military conduct and that of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). The claim is now being tested against two incidents in Iran that produced substantial civilian casualties — and against a legal standard that asks a narrower, harder question than intent alone.

In February, a U.S. strike near Minab hit a primary school, killing more than 100 people, many of them children. The Washington Post later reported, citing people familiar with the strike, that the school had appeared on a U.S. target list and may have been mistaken for a nearby military site. The Pentagon has not closed its investigation.

The latest controversy came on September 1, when a U.S. strike in Kuhestak, southern Iran, hit a family compound hosting a wedding. Iranian officials reported five civilian deaths and more than 60 injuries. Reuters’ analysis of verified imagery, damage patterns, and assessments from weapons experts concluded the destruction was consistent with a direct hit from a U.S. munition. Washington says it was targeting military infrastructure nearby and has opened an investigation.

Vance’s statement is a claim about intent. International humanitarian law asks a separate question about conduct. Article 57 of Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions obliges an attacking party to take “all feasible precautions” in choosing targets and verifying that they are military objectives — not merely to avoid choosing civilians deliberately. If the Washington Post’s reporting is correct, the Minab case points to a potential failure at the target-selection and verification stage: a school may have been included or misidentified before the strike was carried out. That is not a story about restraint failing under pressure; it is a story about whether the precautionary duty was met at the planning stage. Vance’s formulation answers a question the law does not primarily ask, while leaving the one it does ask — were feasible precautions taken — unresolved by his own account.

The comparative test is where this matters most for how the incidents get read. When non-Western militaries — Russian forces in Ukraine, or the IRGC’s own missile and drone strikes on populated areas — are found to have hit civilian sites near legitimate military targets, the same principle should apply regardless of which government is under scrutiny: proximity to a legitimate military objective does not, by itself, remove the obligation to verify the target and take feasible precautions to protect civilians. The evidentiary standard should not soften because the state under scrutiny is the one making the assurance.

That leaves the accountability question distinct from the rhetorical one. The available evidence does not establish that U.S. forces deliberately targeted civilians at Minab or Kuhestak. It does, however, raise serious questions about whether targeting, verification and precautionary safeguards worked as intended — particularly at the target-selection stage. Washington’s credibility will depend less on categorical assurances about intent than on whether its investigations can explain how these civilian casualties occurred and what follows from those findings.