The New York Times reports:

In the city of Isfahan, Israeli airstrikes have damaged several of Iran’s most cherished cultural jewels, Iran’s Ministry of Culture and Heritage said. The Ali Qapu Palace and the Chehel Sotoun palace and garden, dating to the 17th-century Safavid dynasty, sustained serious harm, photos and videos released by the ministry show.

The blast waves on Monday also sent the turquoise tiles of the iconic Jameh Mosque crashing to the ground, with ministry photographs showing a massive plume of smoke rising from behind the mosque. The mosque, with its brightly colored minarets and domes covered in Persian calligraphy, is renowned as a gem of Persian and Islamic architecture.

The strikes on Isfahan on Monday came a week after another cultural icon, the Golestan Palace, was badly damaged during an attack on a police station in downtown Tehran, according to the ministry. Golestan Palace dates to the 14th century and eventually became the seat of the Qajar dynasty. Its famed hall of mirrors was shattered, and its symmetrical garden was covered in debris, photos and videos show.

Israeli military strikes in Isfahan were targeting the governor’s building, which sits near Naqshe Jahan Square, according to Iranian government officials. Many cultural landmarks also sat in close proximity.

The images of renowned historic sites shattered by missiles has left many Iranians enraged. In interviews and in posts on social media, some are asking how a war waged by Israel and the United States supposedly against the Islamic republic’s government and military has ended up damaging their cultural identity and sites.

“For me, ancient monuments are as important as human lives, because they connect me to my past,” Mojtaba Najafi, a prominent Iranian scholar and researcher, said in one post. “And their destruction means my memory is being demolished.”

A spokeswoman for UNESCO, the United Nations agency that seeks to protect global culture, said her organization had been able to verify damage at several World Heritage sites in Iran. They include the Golestan Palace; the Chehel Sotoun pavilion of the Persian Garden, the Masjed‑e Jameh of Isfahan, as well as on buildings located near the buffer zone of the prehistoric sites of the Khorramabad Valley. [Continue reading…]

In January 2020, NPR reported:

Iran’s cultural heritage is suddenly a topic of urgent global interest, after President Trump threatened to strike such sites if the country retaliates for the United States’ killing of Gen. Qassem Soleimani last week.

In a series of tweets Saturday evening, Trump wrote that “if Iran strikes any Americans, or American assets,” the U.S. has targeted 52 Iranian sites — “some at a very high level & important to Iran & the Iranian culture, and those targets, and Iran itself, WILL BE HIT VERY FAST AND VERY HARD.”

Iran’s foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, tweeted that targeting Iranian cultural sites would be a war crime.

On Monday, Defense Secretary Mark Esper indicated that U.S. forces wouldn’t carry out Trump’s threat, saying, “We will follow the laws of armed conflict.”

On Sunday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had appeared to walk back Trump’s statements on ABC’s This Week. “We’ll behave lawfully. We’ll behave inside the system. We always have, and we always will,” he said on Sunday morning.

Nonetheless, Trump doubled down on his threat. “They’re allowed to kill our people. They’re allowed to torture and maim our people. They’re allowed to use roadside bombs and blow up our people,” he told reporters on Sunday evening. “And we’re not allowed to touch their cultural sites? It doesn’t work that way.”

The targeting of cultural properties by the U.S. is indeed not allowed. The U.S. is a signatory to the 1954 Hague Convention, which requires “refraining from any act of hostility” directed against cultural property. [Continue reading…]