In war, some targets leave little room for doubt: missile depots, launchers, headquarters, air-defense systems. But there are others — factories, bridges, railways, power plants, industrial complexes. It is there that modern war becomes dangerous not only for armies, but for the very idea of a boundary.
Israeli strikes on Iran’s steel plants, including Mobarakeh Steel near Isfahan, became one such episode. Formally, Israel explained the attacks by arguing that metallurgical giants provide revenue to the regime and may supply the material base for weapons production. But the consequences reached far beyond military logic.
Mobarakeh Steel is not a small plant on the periphery. It is one of the key symbols of Iran’s industrialization, a vast complex tied to construction, machinery, jobs, local communities and entire supply chains. Shutting it down means striking not only the state, but the daily lives of thousands of people.
According to Daycom’s earlier analysis, the central question is not whether Iran’s economy has links to the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. It does, and often deeply. The question is whether such links are enough to turn an industrial site that sustains the civilian economy into a lawful military target.
Iran’s economy has long been structured in a way that makes it almost impossible to draw a clean line between the state, security forces, religious foundations, pension assets and major business. The IRGC, affiliated entities, the Basij and foundations controlled by the supreme leadership have spent decades embedding themselves in the country’s most profitable sectors. Steel, oil, construction, banking and logistics have all become parts of this shadow state capitalism.
That is why Mobarakeh Steel was a convenient target for Israel’s argument. The company had an opaque ownership structure, its shareholders included state and semi-state funds, and part of its revenues may have indirectly supported structures connected to Iran’s repressive apparatus. For a country at war with Iran, that does not look like a neutral factory, but like a component of the regime’s ecosystem.
But international law demands more than political suspicion or financial connection. A civilian industrial facility may become a military objective only if it makes an effective contribution to military action and if striking it offers a concrete and direct military advantage. Revenue for the state or its security forces alone is generally not enough to justify an airstrike.
That is where the danger lies. If a plant produces special alloys for missiles, armored vehicles or transporter-launcher systems, its military significance may be real. If, however, it mainly supplies steel for the civilian economy, construction and industry, an attack becomes far more problematic. War cannot automatically declare the entire economic skeleton of an adversary a military target.
Israel’s logic is understandable: deprive Tehran of revenue, complicate weapons production, weaken the regime’s industrial base and show that war will reach not only missile hangars, but also the economic centers of power. Yet such logic can expand to a dangerous point. If financial benefit to a regime is enough, then almost any major factory, port, bank or energy hub can be declared part of the war.
That opens a path to the destruction of a civilian economy in the language of military necessity. In the case of Mobarakeh Steel, the consequences were immediate: production shutdowns, idle workers, disrupted steel supplies to domestic manufacturers and a blow to a region where the plant was not only an employer, but a social center.
For many Iranians, such plants carry a double image. On one hand, they are indeed embedded in systems of corruption, opaque privatization and security control. On the other, for decades they provided jobs, professional pride, engineering careers, support for local communities and a sense of national development after war and sanctions. A strike on such an enterprise is not perceived only as a strike on the regime.
That is what makes industrial attacks politically risky. They may weaken the state machine, but they can also deepen a sense of collective injury. A person who despises his own government may still see the destruction of a factory as the destruction of part of the country. In that space, military effectiveness can collide with long-term political consequences.
The Iranian regime has used the economy as an instrument of control for decades. It handed assets to loyal structures, blended state companies with security-linked funds and turned privatization into the redistribution of resources toward opaque players. But that toxic model created a moral trap: in punishing the regime’s economic pillars, an external strike often punishes the society that depends on them.
Mobarakeh Steel illustrates that trap clearly. If the company financially supported structures linked to the Basij or the IRGC, that may make it a legitimate target for sanctions, asset freezes, export restrictions and technology controls. But the logic of sanctions and the logic of an airstrike are not the same. What can be frozen in the banking system cannot always be legitimately bombed.
In the war against Iran, this boundary is becoming increasingly important. The United States has already struck logistics infrastructure, framing it as military supply routes. Trump has publicly threatened bridges and power plants. Israel has attacked steel production. Each episode moves the war closer to a model in which civilian infrastructure becomes a field of coercion.
This does not mean industrial sites are always untouchable. Modern war does not allow that kind of simplicity. A factory can make missile parts, steel for launch platforms, materials for armored vehicles or components for military logistics. But that is exactly why the evidence must be concrete, not rhetorical. Statements about regime revenue should not replace an analysis of military function.
Otherwise, the law of war becomes a flexible decoration. Powerful states will be able to justify strikes on economies by arguing that every economy ultimately feeds an army. Weaker states will answer in the same way. The line between a military objective and a civilian object will disappear not in a single day, but through a sequence of “exceptions,” each convenient in its own war.
For Iran, the destruction of such sites has another consequence. It complicates any postwar recovery. If negotiations ever return to economic incentives, reconstruction and limits on the nuclear program, companies like Mobarakeh will inevitably come into focus. They are necessary for the country’s development, yet they remain tied to security and corruption networks.
The attack on Mobarakeh Steel therefore raises a question larger than one factory. It forces a harder debate about how to fight a regime that has captured the economy without turning that economy into one vast target. How to punish the IRGC without multiplying the suffering of workers. How to weaken a war machine without destroying the foundations of civilian life.
The answer cannot be comfortable for either side. The Iranian regime has no right to hide military and financial structures behind workers’ backs. Israel and its allies have no right to expand the definition of a military objective so far that it absorbs the industrial economy of an entire country. The true boundary of lawful war runs through that tension.
A strike on the steel complex may have had military meaning if it was genuinely connected to weapons production or military transportation. But if the main argument was revenue, political ties and a desire to hit the regime’s economic base, then the attack moves into a far more dangerous realm. In that case, war begins to strike not only the army, but a society that has already spent years trapped between repression from its own government and blows from outside.
