On June 15, the United States and Iran reached a memorandum of understanding that ends more than a hundred days of war. Indeed, if one were to count the days since Operation Midnight Hammer, when the U.S. bombed three nuclear facilities in Isfahan, Fordow, and Natanz, some 360 days of hostilities may finally be coming to an end. A formal signing ceremony has been announced for Geneva on June 19.
In my second op-ed, on the China–Pakistan framework, and again in my third, after the April ceasefire, I insisted that no deal could hold without a final settlement ratified by a binding United Nations Security Council resolution. The memorandum provides for exactly that, committing the parties to a final deal to be endorsed by a binding Security Council resolution. It also supports the argument of my first op-ed: that any viable off-ramp would have to grapple with Iran’s threshold for strategic deterrence, not Israel’s security alone. By reopening the Strait of Hormuz under Iranian arrangements, the memorandum does precisely that. This is the architecture of a durable peace, and its inclusion is a real achievement.
Now, while a permanent ceasefire ends the killing, it does not resolve the outstanding questions that Americans and civilized people everywhere deserve answers to. The conduct of this war, a war of choice launched without a Security Council mandate and without evidence of any imminent threat, cannot be allowed to dissolve quietly into a signing ceremony. Before the world moves on, it is worth stating plainly what happened, and what is still owed.
The Crimes a Ceasefire Cannot Bury
On February 28, the United States and Israel cynically murdered Seyed Ali Khamenei, an 86-year-old clerical head of state, in his residence in Tehran, killing five people including members of his family. Launching armed force across sovereign borders without mandate or imminent threat is the crime of aggression, what the Nuremberg tribunal called the supreme international crime, because it contains within it the accumulated evil of everything that follows.
And everything did indeed follow. As I documented after the April ceasefire, a February 28 strike on the Shajareh Tayyebeh school in Minab killed at least 156 people. Sky News has since put names to 152 of the dead, among them all 120 students, aged six to thirteen, and every one of their 26 teachers. This was no tragic accident. The school was struck twice: after the first missile, the principal moved the surviving children into an interior prayer room and called their parents to come for them, and the second missile hit that room directly. This was an indiscriminate attack on civilians, on children, by a military that could and should have known it was striking a school. So far, the United States has not apologized for it. The Pentagon’s own preliminary inquiry concluded that American forces were likely responsible and that the strike followed from outdated intelligence. And in some ways more shocking still, the United States openly threatened the civilian infrastructure on which millions depend, and over the course of the campaign struck bridges, steel plants, and energy installations. This has happened before, as it did in the Second World War, but it has rarely happened so openly, and never with such a lack of pretense or expression of regret.
On March 30, President Trump threatened to “obliterate” Iran’s desalination plants, infrastructure on which millions of Iranians depend for water, to force political concessions. Threatening the survival of a civilian population amounts to collective punishment and to starvation as a method of warfare, both war crimes under the Geneva Conventions and their Additional Protocols. And war crimes were not just committed by President Trump. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced a policy of “no quarter, no mercy”, a directive forbidden by customary international law and by the United States’ own War Crimes Act.
And the cruelty did not stop at Iran’s borders. In Lebanon, more than 1.1 million people, roughly a fifth of the population, have been driven from their homes, and United Nations human rights experts have found that Israel’s deliberate destruction of Shia communities in the south amounts to a crime against humanity and “points to ethnic cleansing”. Iran’s defense of Lebanon’s Shia is rooted in genuine religious solidarity, not merely the calculus of proxy warfare. No Iranian commander could look at what is being done to the Shia of the south and treat it as someone else’s concern.
The Architecture of Impunity
Here the obvious objection arrives: no court can touch a sitting American president. The United States is not a party to the International Criminal Court. It holds a permanent veto on the very Security Council that created the tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda. The powers that be, in this telling, are simply beyond accountability.
But that objection is not a suitable defense. A state that invokes international law against its adversaries while engineering its own immunity has not proven its innocence. The impunity should be the scandal. War crimes tribunals, from Nuremberg to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, which tried a sitting head of state, Slobodan Milošević, for precisely this kind of conduct, exist to affirm that there is a standard higher than raw force, and that no office places a person above it. The law’s legitimacy has never depended on convictions being easy.
What Accountability Requires
First, the American public is owed the truth about who authorized the killing of Seyed Ali Khamenei and his family. We now know the CIA tracked his movements for months and supplied his location to Israel; this was an American decision as much as an Israeli one. The citizens in whose name it was carried out deserve to know the chain of command and the individuals who made the call.
Second, those at the top of that chain must answer for the documented conduct of this war. President Trump, as commander-in-chief, and Pete Hegseth, as Secretary of War, should be brought before a tribunal modeled on the one that judged the atrocities of the former Yugoslavia.
A Peace That Does Not Heal
The United States had expected this war to break Iran. It did the opposite. An elderly cleric killed in his home rather than cowering in a bunker was received not as a humiliation but as a martyrdom, evoking the foundational Shia memory of Karbala and hardening society. As the scholar Vali Nasr has observed, wars of this kind forge states and leaders; Iran is emerging from this one harder, prouder, and less inclined than ever to bend. Washington’s failure even to anticipate this exemplifies the failure beneath its entire campaign, a lack of curiosity about Iran so total that it is captured in then-Senator (now Homeland Security Secretary) Markwayne Mullin’s inability, in a televised interview, to distinguish Ruhollah Khomeini from Ali Khamenei. The Trump administration has, in its profound ignorance, committed a great disservice to the American people.
With all this being said, a settlement ratified by the Security Council is the right framework to move forward. I have argued for such a development for months, and given my studies in international law and my commitment to the United Nations Charter’s pledge to “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war,” I welcome this memorandum of understanding between the United States and Iran. But we should remain clear-eyed. As Ali Vaez, the International Crisis Group’s Iran Project Director, told the Financial Times, an agreement like this would “stop the bleeding,” but “it is not going to heal the wound.” Here, that wound will not close without accountability, the kind that only a public war tribunal can deliver.
Kian Jamasbi holds a Juris Doctor from Fordham University School of Law, with a concentration in International, Comparative, and Foreign Law. He earned a Bachelor of Science in Economics from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His professional website is kianjamasbi.com. He is the founder of Oxuz News, where this commentary is published.