Iran does not care whether the United States pulled the trigger on leadership strikes or merely provided the aircraft, intelligence, and diplomatic cover that made them possible. When Tehran launched retaliatory attacks against at least 27 bases hosting U.S. troops across the Middle East, struck American embassies, and targeted oil infrastructure in the Strait of Hormuz, it treated the United States and Israel as a single enemy. The legal parsing that Washington attempted — claiming it struck nuclear and missile sites but not leadership targets — was a distinction without a difference to a regime watching its Supreme Leader, defense minister, and top military commanders die under a rain of jointly coordinated munitions.
The February 28, 2026 strikes, dubbed Operation Epic Fury by the Pentagon and Operation Roaring Lion by the IDF, hit targets across 24 of Iran’s 31 provinces with roughly 2,000 strikes in just 48 hours. The scale and coordination alone told Tehran everything it needed to know about shared responsibility. This article examines why Iran’s retaliation made no distinction between the two attackers, what the international legal debate actually looks like, why the U.S. rhetorical distancing strategy failed, and what the civilian toll reveals about the costs of this campaign.
Table of Contents
- Why Does Iran Refuse to Distinguish Between U.S. and Israeli Roles in the 2026 Strikes?
- What Does International Law Actually Say About the Strikes?
- How Iran’s Retaliation Proved the Distinction Was Dead on Arrival
- The Leadership Decapitation Problem and Its Consequences
- Civilian Casualties and the Accountability Gap
- Why Gulf States Got Dragged In
- What Comes Next When Legal Lines Are This Blurred
- Conclusion
- Frequently Asked Questions
Why Does Iran Refuse to Distinguish Between U.S. and Israeli Roles in the 2026 Strikes?
The simplest answer is that the cooperation was never hidden in the first place. The joint decision to strike Iran is believed to have been made during Netanyahu’s visit to Washington approximately two weeks before the operation launched. The International Institute for Strategic Studies described the military operations as reflecting “exceptionally close cooperation” between U.S. forces and the IDF, and between trump and Netanyahu personally. When two governments plan an attack together, execute it simultaneously, and publicly acknowledge their partnership, the target of that attack has no reason to treat one attacker differently from the other. Netanyahu’s public address claimed responsibility for leadership decapitation strikes while explicitly stating he acted “together with the U.S.
military” on ballistic missile sites. Trump’s statement, by contrast, tried to draw a line — claiming no responsibility for targeting Iranian leadership and instead issuing a direct ultimatum to IRGC personnel. But this rhetorical separation collapsed under the weight of operational reality. You cannot jointly plan a war, fly combined sorties across 24 provinces, and then claim you bear no responsibility for what your partner did with the same aircraft and intelligence infrastructure. Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian made this explicit when he said Iran “considers it its legitimate duty and right to avenge the perpetrators and masterminds of this historic crime,” framing both countries as jointly responsible. This was not bluster. Iran’s IRGC backed it up by simultaneously attacking Israeli military facilities and U.S. military installations across the region, including targets in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and the UAE — Gulf Arab countries whose only offense was hosting American forces.
What Does International Law Actually Say About the Strikes?
The legal debate over Operation Epic Fury is real, but it is also largely academic from Tehran’s standpoint. UN Special Rapporteur Ben Saul stated bluntly: “This is not lawful self-defence against an armed attack by iran, and the UN Security Council has not authorised it.” Under the UN Charter’s prohibition on aggression, launching roughly 2,000 strikes across a sovereign nation without Security Council authorization is difficult to justify regardless of how the attacking parties divide up their target lists. The U.S. and its allies offered a different legal theory. Washington, along with Argentina, Germany, and Ukraine, argued the strikes were justified to prevent nuclear proliferation. Some analysts contended that israel has a legal right to eliminate an existential threat.
However, this argument runs into a well-established problem in international law: preventive attacks require an immediately imminent threat. Critics, including analysts cited by the House of Commons Library, argued that no such imminent threat existed at the time of the strikes. The distinction between a “preventive” strike and a “preemptive” one matters enormously in legal terms, even if it matters not at all to the people on the receiving end. This is where the legal debate becomes irrelevant to Iran’s calculations. Whether the strikes were legal or illegal under international law, Iran was going to retaliate. The legal framing matters for diplomats, for the International Court of Justice, and for future precedent. It does not matter to a government that just lost its Supreme Leader and its entire senior military command structure within 48 hours.
How Iran’s Retaliation Proved the Distinction Was Dead on Arrival
Iran’s retaliatory strikes were designed to make a point: if you attack us together, we hit you both. The IRGC launched attacks on at least 27 bases across the Middle East where U.S. troops are deployed, alongside strikes on israeli military facilities. Iran struck U.S. embassies, military installations, and oil infrastructure, including vessels in the Strait of Hormuz. It also attacked Gulf Arab countries hosting American forces — Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and the UAE — drawing those nations into a conflict they had tried to stay out of. The targeting pattern was deliberate. By hitting American assets with the same ferocity it directed at Israeli ones, Iran communicated that it would not play the game Washington wanted.
The U.S. had attempted to position itself as a supporting actor rather than a lead belligerent, perhaps hoping to contain the diplomatic fallout or limit the scope of Iranian retaliation. That strategy failed completely. When your partner in a military operation publicly credits you for the strikes, and the operation itself is described by independent observers as “exceptionally close cooperation,” there is no credible way to claim you were merely along for the ride. The extension of attacks to Gulf states hosting U.S. forces was particularly significant. It showed that Iran was willing to escalate beyond the two primary attackers and target the infrastructure that made the strikes possible. Basing rights, overflight permissions, logistics support — all of it became fair game in Tehran’s eyes.
The Leadership Decapitation Problem and Its Consequences
The killing of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei within 48 hours of the strikes, along with his defense minister, army chief of staff, and IRGC commander-in-chief, created a particular problem for the American rhetorical strategy. Trump’s statement explicitly denied responsibility for targeting Iranian leadership. Netanyahu’s statement claimed credit for it. But the strikes that killed these figures were part of the same coordinated operation, using the same airspace, the same intelligence, and the same operational planning. This created an uncomfortable tradeoff for Washington. On one hand, eliminating Iran’s top leadership could theoretically create conditions for regime change or negotiation with successor leadership. On the other hand, it made the U.S. denial of involvement in leadership strikes look absurd to anyone paying attention — which included every surviving member of Iran’s political and military establishment.
The people who would need to agree to any future ceasefire or negotiation watched their government get decapitated in an operation the U.S. co-planned and co-executed. Expecting them to then accept the legal distinction between who bombed which building is not serious diplomacy. The comparison to previous U.S. military operations is instructive. In the 2020 killing of IRGC commander Qasem Soleimani, the U.S. acted unilaterally and took full responsibility. The clarity of that action, while controversial, at least allowed for a contained diplomatic response. Operation Epic Fury’s blurred lines of responsibility made containment impossible because Iran had no incentive to limit its retaliation to just one attacker.
Civilian Casualties and the Accountability Gap
The civilian toll from Operation Epic Fury raises urgent questions about accountability that the U.S.-Israel distinction only makes harder to answer. As of early March 2026, Human Rights Activists in Iran reported 742 civilians killed, with the Red Crescent reporting over 600 as of March 3. Among the most devastating incidents was a strike on a girls’ primary school in Minab that reportedly killed nearly 100 children. On the military side, the Kurdish human rights organization Hengaw estimated over 4,000 Iranian military personnel killed as of March 10. When two governments jointly conduct an operation of this scale and civilians die, the question of which government bears legal responsibility for which strike becomes critically important — and almost impossible to answer. If the Minab school was hit by an American munition launched from a U.S.
aircraft, that is a matter for U.S. military law and potentially the International Criminal Court. If it was hit by an Israeli munition using American intelligence, the legal picture gets murkier. If neither government will clarify which assets struck which targets, accountability becomes a fiction. This is the real danger of the blurred operational lines. It is not just that Iran refuses to distinguish between the two attackers. It is that the attackers themselves may use the ambiguity to avoid accountability for specific strikes, each pointing to the other when difficult questions arise about civilian harm.
Why Gulf States Got Dragged In
Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and the UAE found themselves under Iranian attack not because they participated in Operation Epic Fury, but because they host U.S. military forces. This is a concrete example of how the failure of the U.S. legal distancing strategy had cascading consequences. If the United States could not convince Iran that it played a limited role, it certainly could not shield third-party countries from retaliation simply because those countries provided basing rights rather than combat forces.
For Gulf states, this created an impossible position. Their security relationships with the United States — long considered a stabilizing force in the region — became the very thing that made them targets. The implicit bargain of hosting U.S. forces in exchange for security guarantees looked far less attractive when those forces drew Iranian missiles to your territory. PBS, CNN, and NPR all reported on the expansion of Iranian strikes to these Gulf nations, confirming that Iran’s retaliation respected no distinction between combatants and enablers.
What Comes Next When Legal Lines Are This Blurred
The long-term consequence of Operation Epic Fury’s blurred command structure is a precedent problem. If two nations can jointly plan and execute a massive military campaign, then selectively claim or deny responsibility for individual components of that campaign, it undermines the entire framework of international humanitarian law. Accountability depends on knowing who did what. When that knowledge is deliberately obscured, neither domestic courts, international tribunals, nor the court of public opinion can function properly.
Looking ahead, any ceasefire negotiations, war crimes investigations, or diplomatic resolution will have to contend with the fact that Iran views the U.S. and Israel as co-equal aggressors — and that the operational evidence largely supports that view. The legal distinction that Washington tried to draw did not deter Iranian retaliation, did not protect U.S. assets in the region, and did not shield Gulf allies from attack. Whatever its value in a courtroom, it failed as a strategic tool.
Conclusion
Iran’s response to Operation Epic Fury settled the question of whether legal distinctions between U.S. and Israeli roles would matter in practice. They did not. Tehran attacked both nations’ assets simultaneously and indiscriminately, struck Gulf countries hosting American forces, and framed both governments as co-conspirators in its public statements.
The roughly 2,000 strikes across 24 Iranian provinces, the killing of Supreme Leader Khamenei and his top military leadership, and the reported deaths of over 700 civilians all resulted from what international observers described as exceptionally close U.S.-Israeli cooperation. No amount of rhetorical separation could undo that reality. For those tracking government accountability, the key issue going forward is whether the deliberate ambiguity about which nation struck which targets will be used to evade responsibility for civilian harm. The legal debate about whether the strikes constituted lawful prevention of nuclear proliferation or unlawful aggression under the UN Charter will continue in academic and judicial forums. But on the ground, the lesson is already clear: when you plan a war together, execute it together, and celebrate it together, you own the consequences together — regardless of what the press statements say.
Frequently Asked Questions
Did the U.S. directly participate in strikes on Iranian leadership?
Trump’s official statement denied responsibility for targeting Iranian leadership, while Netanyahu claimed credit for those strikes and acknowledged acting “together with the U.S. military” on ballistic missile sites. Independent observers described the overall operation as reflecting exceptionally close cooperation, making precise attribution of individual strikes difficult.
Was Operation Epic Fury legal under international law?
This is actively disputed. UN Special Rapporteur Ben Saul stated it was not lawful self-defense and lacked Security Council authorization. The U.S. and allies including Argentina, Germany, and Ukraine argued the strikes were justified to prevent nuclear proliferation. International law experts note that preventive attacks require an immediately imminent threat, which critics say was not present.
How did Iran retaliate against the United States specifically?
Iran’s IRGC attacked at least 27 bases in the Middle East hosting U.S. troops, struck U.S. embassies and military installations, targeted oil infrastructure and vessels in the Strait of Hormuz, and attacked Gulf Arab countries — Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and the UAE — that host American forces.
Was Ayatollah Khamenei killed in the strikes?
Yes. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed within 48 hours of the initial strikes on February 28, 2026, along with Iran’s defense minister, army chief of staff, and IRGC commander-in-chief, according to CSIS and other sources.
How many casualties resulted from the strikes?
As of early March 2026, the Kurdish organization Hengaw estimated over 4,000 Iranian military personnel killed. Human Rights Activists in Iran reported 742 civilians killed, with the Red Crescent reporting over 600 as of March 3. A strike on a girls’ primary school in Minab reportedly killed nearly 100 children.