Israel's Chemical Warfare War Crime: 10 Million Poisoned
On the night of March 7th, 2026, Israeli warplanes struck four oil storage facilities ringing Tehran, a city of ten million people, igniting the Shahran oil depot in the northwest, the Aghdasieh oil warehouse in the northeast, the Tehran refinery complex at Shahr-e Rey in the south, and the Karaj oil depot to the west in Alborz province, and within hours a river of burning oil was flowing through the streets of the Shahran district while black, oily rain began falling on one of the most densely populated metropolitan areas on earth. Israel struck more than 30 oil facilities nationwide that night, but the four sites around Tehran were the ones that turned the sky over a city the size of New York into what Trita Parsi of the Quincy Institute described as "armageddon": "Though it is day, the sun cannot be seen in Tehran today because of all the smoke following the US and Israel bombing Tehran's oil refineries."
The World Health Organization warned within 24 hours that the strikes "risk contaminating food, water and air" for the nine million people in the Tehran metropolitan area, and WHO spokesperson Christian Lindmeier confirmed that the black and acidic rain falling across the city was "indeed a danger for the population, respiratory mainly." The Iranian Red Crescent measured rainfall acidity at pH 4.0, significantly more acidic than normal rain (pH 5.6), and warned that the precipitation contained "toxic hydrocarbon compounds and sulphur and nitrogen oxides" capable of causing "chemical skin burns and severe lung damage." Iran's Deputy Health Minister Ali Jafarian told Al Jazeera that the acid rain was "already contaminating the soil and water supply" and that "the toxic air poses a life-threatening risk to the elderly, children, and those with pre-existing respiratory conditions."
"Acid rain"
Gabriel da Silva, associate professor of chemical engineering at the University of Melbourne, wrote in The Conversation and told PBS NewsHour that the term "acid rain" actually understates the danger, because the precipitation falling on Tehran contained far more than just acids. The UK's Conflict and Environment Observatory (CEOBS), which published the most detailed technical analysis of the event, identified a long inventory of compounds released by the burning oil facilities: carbon monoxide, sulphur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, volatile organic compounds including acetone and toluene, near-pure carbonaceous soot that penetrates deep into the lungs and enters the bloodstream, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), dioxins and furans, and trace metals including nickel and vanadium that cause respiratory irritation and inflammatory effects. Benzene, a known carcinogen, and methylene chloride were also present. Da Silva put it simply: "All smoke is toxic; if you can smell it, it can be at levels that are harming you."
Long-term exposure to these compounds is linked to cancers, neurological conditions, cardiovascular disease, and lower birth weights from prenatal exposure, and that exposure didn't end when the fires eventually burned down. CEOBS noted that many of the released compounds are semi-volatile, meaning they shift between gas and particle phases as temperatures change, and that deposited pollutants on roads, rooftops, soils, and croplands can be resuspended into the air during Tehran's dry summer dust storms. Tehran's PM2.5 levels already exceeded WHO guidelines by 4.5 times before a single bomb fell, and the city's geography, a semi-enclosed basin surrounded by the Alborz Mountains rising two to four kilometers, creates temperature inversions that trap pollutants at ground level. CEOBS described how Tehran's urban canyon effects create recirculating vortices at pedestrian height, and how the city's buildings have leaky envelopes that allow indoor particle concentrations to track outdoor levels almost exactly. There was nowhere to hide from what was in the air.
"Our fingernails were caked in chemical grime"
Drop Site News published the best on-the-ground reporting from Tehran, with named sources describing what it was like to live through the aftermath. Saghar, a 24-year-old who lives near the Aghdasieh oil depot in northeastern Tehran, described the moment the strikes hit at approximately 10:30 PM: "The house shook, it truly shook. Far worse than an earthquake. The kitchen and living room windows shattered instantly, and the chandelier swung violently like a pendulum. My mother was at the sink washing dinner plates when the blast hit. The shockwave threw her so hard she landed head-first on the floor." By morning, everything in the apartment was coated in soot: "Our white refrigerator was entirely black. If you ran your finger across any surface, it came away stained black. We went through rolls of paper towels and bottles of detergent, but the oily film just smeared before it lifted. By the time we finally packed our bags and locked the door, our fingernails were caked in chemical grime, and our lungs were burning just from breathing inside our own living room."
Sina, a 42-year-old father of a five-year-old in central Tehran's Sattarkhan neighborhood, woke up the next morning thinking it was overcast. It wasn't clouds. "The air smelled horrific, but it wasn't just the smell," he told Drop Site. "A brief rain shower had turned everything greasy and black. My white car was covered in dark, oily spots." The 15-minute drive to his office left his throat burning and his head pounding, and two days later he was still experiencing chest heaviness and difficulty breathing. Sara, 36, sheltering with her husband Mehdi in the Ekbatan neighborhood, described walking outside briefly and finding that "despite the blue sky, it felt like acid had been poured down our throats." Her dormant skin allergy reactivated: her hands became inflamed and covered in hives. Amnesty International documented similar testimony from eyewitnesses across the city, including one who described the scene on March 8th: "The sky over Tehran was black today. Then black rain started to fall. The ground everywhere has turned black, as if a layer of light cement had been poured over."
Every one of these people is someone for whom international humanitarian law was written to protect, and the strikes that poisoned them were carried out by a government that knows exactly what burning crude oil does to a population. Tens of thousands of people fled north to Mazandaran province, 220 kilometers away on the Caspian Sea, trying to find air they could breathe, but citizens reported black soot falling 70 miles north of Tehran, and the contamination followed them there too.
The same playbook, the same people
Netanyahu invoked the story of Amalek from 1 Samuel 15:3, the passage commanding total destruction of a people including their livestock and their land, when he spoke about Gaza. The ICJ cited that invocation as evidence in the genocide case. He used the same language about Iran. In Gaza, Israel systematically destroyed hospitals, schools, water treatment plants, power infrastructure, bakeries, and farmland until the territory was functionally uninhabitable, a pattern that the International Court of Justice found plausible grounds for genocide. The targeting of Tehran's oil infrastructure fits the same logic: you don't need to kill every person in a city of ten million if you can poison their air, contaminate their water, and destroy their fuel supply so completely that daily civilian fuel rations are slashed from 30 litres to 20.
Retired Jordanian Major General Mamoun Abu Nowar told Al Jazeera that "the primary objective of the strikes is to break the resilience of the Iranian people and paralyse the country's logistics and economy," and that the coalition was "preparing the Iranian environment for an uprising against the regime." Israeli affairs researcher Adel Shadid was more direct: the strikes were designed to "make life hell for ordinary Iranians." RAND Corporation's Raphael S. Cohen noted that strategic bombing campaigns "consistently fail to achieve their primary goal of breaking a population's will" and "typically produce a rally-around-the-flag effect, unifying societies against a common foe rather than causing them to capitulate." The military objective fails. The civilian suffering is the only outcome that works as designed. This is the same calculus that turned Gaza into rubble and called it self-defense.
A country already on the edge of water bankruptcy
The toxic rain didn't fall on a pristine environment. Iran was already approaching what journalist Nik Kowsar, writing for Foreign Policy, described as "water bankruptcy": years of drought have desiccated rivers, lakes, and marshlands, the regime has dammed waterways and drained aquifers, snowpack that supplies the country's fresh water is depleting, and the governance failures that produced this crisis left Iran with no margin for an environmental catastrophe. Yale E360 reported that Israeli forces also bombed a desalination plant on Qeshm Island in the Persian Gulf that supplied water to 30 Iranian villages, and while Iran blamed the US and the US denied involvement, the plant is destroyed either way. International humanitarian law gives special protection to drinking water installations, and Kowsar warned that "if water infrastructure is now considered a military target, whether deliberately or through reckless escalation, then the region is entering a far more dangerous phase of war."
Oil from the Shahran depot leaked into Tehran's storm drains and explosively ignited, and CEOBS noted that the contamination was expected to follow Tehran's north-to-south drainage slope into natural water bodies, agricultural soils, and shallow groundwater. An unnamed Iranian activist told The Guardian: "Most of Tehran's water comes from dams. If those become polluted, what happens then?" What happens is that ten million people lose access to clean drinking water in a country where the alternatives are already exhausted. In Gaza, Israel destroyed the water infrastructure and then controlled what got in. In Iran, the geography is doing the containment for them: the Alborz Mountains trap the pollution over the city, and gravity carries the runoff into the water supply.
5 million tonnes of CO2 in two weeks
The Climate and Community Institute, in an analysis by researchers Fred Otu-Larbi, Patrick Bigger, and Benjamin Neimark published on March 21st, calculated that the first 14 days of the war released 5,055,000 tonnes of CO2 equivalent into the atmosphere. The largest source wasn't the oil fires: it was the destruction of homes and buildings, which accounted for nearly 2.5 million tonnes on its own, with destroyed fuel facilities contributing 1.9 million tonnes, military fuel consumption adding 529,000 tonnes, and the embodied carbon in destroyed equipment and munitions making up the remainder. The total exceeds Iceland's entire 2024 annual emissions (4.28 million tonnes) and equals the combined yearly output of the 84 lowest-emitting countries on earth. The climate damage alone has been valued at $1.3 billion.
CEOBS used NOAA's HYSPLIT atmospheric dispersion model to track the smoke plume over 12 hours and found it moving northeast toward Kazakhstan, Russia, and potentially the glaciers of the Golden Mountains of Altai in Siberia, where black carbon deposition accelerates warming, the same mechanism observed after the 1991 Kuwait oil well fires that created a regional environmental catastrophe. Air quality alerts were triggered in Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, western Afghanistan, and Pakistan. The researchers were blunt about the stakes: "The most significant climate impact of the attack on Iran will not be the emissions of the conflict itself, but from its aftermath."
These emissions don't show up in the Paris Agreement, and no country is accountable for them. The 84 poorest nations whose combined output they exceed are mostly in the Global South, the same countries least responsible for climate change and most vulnerable to its effects, and now two weeks of a war launched by the world's largest military emitter (the US military ranks as the 55th worst global polluter if counted as a country, per Brown University research) have wiped out whatever gains those nations collectively managed.
International law is meaningless
Israel will argue the oil facilities had military value, and some of them may have. Under international humanitarian law, an oil refinery can be targeted if it qualifies as a military objective, meaning it makes an effective contribution to military action and its destruction yields a definite military advantage. But even when those prerequisites are met, the attacking force is obligated to take all feasible precautions to minimize collateral damage, including the release of toxic substances, and to assess whether civilian harm would be "excessive to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated." Amnesty International's Middle East director Heba Morayef stated that "the potential for vast, predictable, and devastating civilian harm arising from strikes targeting energy infrastructure, including uncontrolled deadly fires, major disruptions to essential services, environmental damage, and severe long-term health risks for millions, means there is a substantial risk such attacks would violate international humanitarian law and in some cases could amount to war crimes."
CEOBS put the legal calculation in practical terms: "It is highly unusual for this many sites to be attacked in such a densely populated area that is so geographically vulnerable to poor air quality. These factors should have influenced Israel's legal and military calculus, if the protection of civilians was being viewed as a priority." The UN Human Rights Office spokesperson Ravina Shamdasani raised "serious questions" about whether proportionality obligations under IHL were met, noting that the targeted sites "do not appear to be of military exclusive usage." The ENMOD Convention prohibits deliberate environmental manipulation with "widespread, long-lasting or severe effects," and Down to Earth argued that this conflict "represents a test of whether international environmental law in wartime has any real force."
Iran's head of the Department of Environment, Shina Ansari, called it "a blatant act of ecocide," noting that "the environment remains the silent victim of the war." Iran's Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baqaei went further, stating that "these attacks on fuel storage facilities amount to nothing less than intentional chemical warfare against the Iranian citizens. By targeting fuel depots, the aggressors are releasing hazardous materials and toxic substances into the air, poisoning civilians, devastating the environment, and endangering lives on a massive scale." Baqaei characterized the strikes as "war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide, all at once."
MSM failure to report
Fox News, the most-watched cable news network in the United States, published zero articles on toxic rain falling on ten million people. Their coverage of the oil depot strikes consisted entirely of satellite imagery framed as military success, with no mention of environmental damage, health effects, or the WHO warnings. The Washington Post published its piece on March 15th, a full week after the rain fell, sourced from an AP wire story. NPR waited until March 17th. Meanwhile Al Jazeera published five separate pieces within 48 hours, including a feature-length analysis with expert sourcing and on-the-ground reporting, and Drop Site News had named witnesses describing their burning lungs before most American newsrooms had filed a single paragraph. The gap between what independent and international journalists documented in real time and what corporate American media eventually got around to mentioning is, at this point in the war, a pattern so established that it barely registers as surprising, which is exactly the problem.
Assal Rad, a fellow at the Arab Center in Washington, put it plainly: "On top of everything else, Israel and the US have unleashed an environmental disaster in Tehran. How many ways can they show you they have no regard for human life?"
72 hours after the strikes, only the Karaj fire appeared to be extinguished, and MSF's Tehran clinic had closed due to the bombing. No international environmental monitoring team has been granted access to measure what is actually in the air, no independent air quality data has been published, and no one has announced a framework for tracking the long-term health consequences for the ten million people breathing benzene, PAHs, dioxins, and soot, drinking water that may already be poisoned, and living on soil that will carry these toxins for years. The Fardis oil depot strike in Alborz province killed six people and injured 21, and the ensuing fire destroyed a dialysis center.
— dingo__dog