'Disgusting': Hegseth appalls by gloating at tower collapse

US Pentagon Secretary Pete Hegseth late Thursday gloatingly posted a photo of an Iranian tower collapsing due to the Trump administration’s massive, illegal assault on the Middle East country’s infrastructure, including bridges, railways, and power facilities.

The photo Hegseth posted to social media appeared to show the surveillance tower at Iran’s Chabahar Port enveloped in smoke and crumbling to the ground amid US forces’ aggressive bombing campaign. Ryan Costello, policy director at the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), called Hegseth’s post “disgusting online revelry in the bombardment of Iran and its infrastructure.”

The Associated Press reported that US strikes on bridges and other infrastructure in southern Iran overnight into Friday killed at least eight people.

“The highway and railway bridge strikes appeared aimed at cutting off Bandar Abbas, Iran’s main port, from roads leading into the Islamic Republic’s central region onward to Tehran, the capital,” AP noted.

US strikes, authorized by President Donald Trump, also targeted Iranian power infrastructure amid extreme heat.

The latest wave of US attacks came days after Trump threatened to “knock out all of [Iran’s] power plants” and bridges “unless they get to the table and negotiate.”

Deliberately attacking civilian infrastructure is a war crime. Kenneth Roth, former executive director of Human Rights Watch, said Friday that while “there may be some nominal military use of the bridges,” the US attacks “potentially disrupt the movement of goods needed for Iran’s 90 million people.”

“Trump doesn’t care, but military commanders, who could face prosecution, should,” Roth added.

NIAC said Friday that “the distinction between military and civilian infrastructure has become increasingly blurred,” as “bridges, ports, airports, railways, power networks, and communications facilities sustain civilian life and economic activity, even if they at times are used for military purposes.”

“Their destruction produces civilian casualties, isolates communities, interrupts emergency services, restricts food and fuel distribution, and leaves civilians without electricity during extreme summer heat,” the group added. “As the campaign expands, the humanitarian consequences are therefore likely to grow even if Washington continues to classify the targets as militarily relevant.”

On Thursday, NIAC released a report detailing the “civilian catastrophe” inflicted by the US-Israeli war on Iran, which began in late February. Estimates indicate that the civilian death toll from the war on Iran could be over 2,000—including hundreds of children, a majority of them killed in a US strike on an elementary school in Minab on the first day of the war.

Additionally, millions of Iranians have been displaced by the US-Israeli bombardment and more than 125,000 “civilian units”—including residential housing—have been damaged or destroyed,“ NIAC observed in its report.

“The evidence compiled in this report, independently corroborated across UN agencies, human rights organizations, and satellite analysis, points to a pattern of harm to civilians, homes, schools, and medical infrastructure that warrants urgent international attention,” NIAC said.