When a university is hit, war changes its grammar. It is no longer attacking only depots, power grids or military compounds. It is entering the space where a state reproduces its engineers, scientists, governing class and future capacity. That is what makes the recent strikes on Iranian academic sites more than another episode in a widening U.S.-Israeli air campaign.
Tehran has framed the attacks as an assault on science and civilian life, while bodies tied to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps have warned staff and students at American universities in the region to stay away from their campuses. The warning was serious enough that the American University of Beirut moved classes online for two days as a precaution.
Israel, for its part, has tried to impose a different frame: not an attack on education, but a strike on military infrastructure embedded inside academic institutions. The Israeli military said it targeted Imam Hossein University in Tehran because it was being used for missile and chemical-weapons-related research under the cover of a civilian university.
In Deikom’s assessment, that is where the real danger of this moment lies. War is moving into a zone where civilian status, scientific work and military utility can overlap — and where almost every attack can be justified, by one side or the other, through the language of “dual use.” Once that threshold becomes normal, the legal and moral boundaries meant to protect education begin to erode very quickly.
Under customary international humanitarian law, civilian objects may not be attacked as such; parties must distinguish between civilian objects and military objectives. Schools and universities do not lose protection merely because they are symbolically important or politically influential. But that protection can be weakened if they are actually being used for military purposes — a fact that must still be judged against the rules of distinction, proportionality and precautions in attack.
That legal nuance matters because universities are not just another set of buildings on a target map. Even if part of a campus is tied to military research, a strike on an academic institution carries broader consequences: it damages laboratories, interrupts education, chills international exchange and reinforces the idea that knowledge itself has become part of the battlespace. The Safe Schools Declaration was built around precisely this fear — that once education is militarized, societies pay for it long after the war ends.
In Iran, the symbolism is sharper still. Universities have been more than educational institutions; they have also functioned as spaces of political unrest and social mobilization. That means a strike on a campus reverberates in two directions at once: it may hit a technical node of the state, but it also touches a site where young Iranians imagine alternatives to the state.
For Tehran, that creates an opening as much as a wound. The regime can present the attacks not simply as military aggression, but as a war against national dignity, scientific capacity and the country’s right to reproduce its own elite. In wartime, that narrative is powerful because it shifts public attention away from internal repression and toward injured sovereignty.
For the United States and Israel, the strategic risk runs in the opposite direction. Even if some of the targeted facilities were genuinely connected to military development, striking universities hands Iran a potent political argument and invites mirror-image retaliation. Tehran has already extended the logic outward by threatening U.S.-affiliated campuses across the region, turning universities in Beirut and beyond into newly ambiguous security spaces.
That shift is especially revealing in a war already spreading across civilian and economic systems. The broader conflict has disrupted energy routes, rattled oil markets and widened regional insecurity well beyond Iran’s borders. Once universities are added to that map, it becomes harder to argue that the war is still confined to strictly military objectives. It begins to look more like a campaign against a state’s ability to sustain normal life and imagine a postwar future.
This is why the university strikes matter beyond their immediate tactical value. A campus is where a society stores continuity. It is where doctors are trained, engineers are formed, research is accumulated and political generations are shaped. When war starts treating those spaces as negotiable, it does not just destroy structures. It hollows out the institutions meant to carry a country beyond the war itself.
The most unsettling conclusion is therefore not simply that the conflict is escalating. It is that the category of what counts as a legitimate target is expanding in ways that are hard to reverse. And once universities enter that category — whether as alleged military sites, symbols of national resilience or retaliatory hostages — the war has already crossed into a more dangerous phase than its official justifications are willing to admit.
