Stand with Iranian Researchers, Academics, and Health Workers

 Mohammad S Razai, Maide Baris, Hossein Dabbagh, and Muhammad Asghari

The US-Israeli strikes on universities, schools, research centres, and hospitals in Iran are attacks on the civilian systems that sustain the functioning of a society. The rhetoric accompanying these acts has been alarming: “A whole civilisation will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” the US president wrote about Iran. These assaults on Iran’s intellectual, scientific, health and civic infrastructure must be condemned without equivocation including by the global academic community in order to prevent the normalisation of such violations.

At least 30 Iranian universities and over 300 hospitals have reportedly been affected by US and Israeli strikes since the war began on 28 February 2026. Sharif University of Technology, often described as Iran’s MIT, suffered severe damage to laboratories and campus buildings. Shahid Beheshti University’s Laser and Plasma Research Institute has been reduced to rubble. The flagship Pasteur Institute, founded in 1920 and central to vaccine production, microbiological surveillance, diagnostics and outbreak response, has also been bombed. Such attacks violate core principles of international humanitarian law, international human rights law, and breach the ethical duties that should govern conduct during war.

Article 52 of Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions protects civilian objects and states that, in cases of doubt, objects normally used for civilian purposes, including universities, must be presumed not to be military objectives. Article 57 requires parties to a conflict to verify targets, take all feasible precautions, minimise civilian harm, and refrain from any operation expected to cause civilian loss. Article 19 guarantees that medical facilities may in no circumstances be attacked. The Rome Statute identifies intentionally directing attacks against buildings dedicated to education or science, and hospitals, as war crimes, provided they are not military objectives. The 1954 Hague Convention also protects cultural property, including scientific collections and institutions of cultural value, from hostile acts except in narrowly defined circumstances of military necessity.

If specific facilities are used for military purposes, the burden lies with the belligerent powers to provide evidence of that use, the precautions taken, the warnings given, and the proportionality calculation. The dual-use argument cannot justify the targeting of whole academic institutions and must be handled with caution. Almost every field of academic inquiry has potential military applications: microbiology underpins vaccines and biological weapons; aerospace engineering builds satellites and missiles; computer science enables cancer screening and cyberattacks. If potential military use was enough to remove civilian protection, universities everywhere would become fair game.

The ethical case is equally clear, resting on basic restraints on violence: civilian protection, necessity, proportionality, justice, and the protection of human capabilities. Civilians and public infrastructure must not be used as instruments for weakening an enemy state. This is the moral basis of distinction and proportionality. Universities and research centres are civilian infrastructure: they train professionals, produce knowledge, maintain laboratories, preserve records, and protect public welfare.

The harm is not limited to the immediate strike. Destroyed laboratories mean lost samples, broken surveillance, interrupted research, abandoned trials, damaged archives, and halted collaborations. The effects extend beyond Iran through weakened vaccine production, disease monitoring, antimicrobial resistance work, emergency preparedness, and clinical training.  The ethical breach lies in causing foreseeable, avoidable, and disproportionate harm to civilian life, while also eroding a society’s capacity to protect life. The deliberate destruction of hospitals results in injured civilians not having access to life saving care, causing immediate loss of life and inflicting long-term medical deprivation on entire communities.

These attacks undermine the rights to education and health, and to benefit from scientific progress, all recognised in international human rights law. The Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights frames health and scientific progress as shared social responsibilities, not assets to be destroyed for military advantage. Bombing universities and research centres therefore damages the civilian capacities through which a society protects health and care for the sick, trains future professionals, and preserves knowledge and memory for future generations.

The academic community, including universities, journals, learned societies, and funders, must call for prompt, independent, and public investigation of reported strikes, including target selection, intelligence, weapon choice, warnings, and civilian harm. Universities should support Iranian students and academics whose work has been disrupted, by offering fellowships, fee waivers, remote access to libraries and journals, emergency placements, and protection for scholars at risk. States involved in unlawful attacks must be held accountable through international legal mechanisms, and those responsible should be brought to justice.

The destruction of universities is civilisational vandalism: an attempt to leave a society unable to educate, investigate, heal, and advance. Scholars and professional bodies must demand accountability, stand with Iranian researchers and students, and refuse to normalise violence against the institutions on which public health and scientific life depend.

Mohammad S Razai, NIHR clinical lecturer in primary care, Department of Public Health and Primary Care, University of Cambridge, UK.

Maide Baris, assistant professor of medical ethics, Faculty of Medicine, Başıbüyük Campus, İstanbul, Türkiye.

Hossein Dabbagh, assistant professor of philosophy, Department of Philosophy, Northeastern University London and Department for Continuing Education, University of Oxford, UK.

Muhammad Asghari, professor of philosophy, Department of Philosophy, University of Tabriz, Tabriz, Iran.

Please address correspondence to Mohammad S Razai. Email: msr37@cam.ac.uk