When Israeli aircraft struck the Mobarakeh Steel Company near Isfahan in late March, during the wider air campaign against Iran, they hit more than a factory. They reopened one of the oldest and least settled arguments in the law of armed conflict: how far a country may go in attacking the economy that sustains its enemy's war, and at what point a civilian workplace becomes a lawful target. Mobarakeh is Iran's largest steel producer, and its partial destruction has become a case study in that dispute, as New Lines Magazine reported.
What was hit
The plant was struck on March 27 and again days later, damaging power equipment and a production line, according to that reporting. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the strikes had destroyed a large share of Iran's steelmaking capacity. Precise figures on casualties were contested in the immediate aftermath, with early accounts differing on how many workers were killed or hurt, and newsparlor was not able to confirm a definitive toll. What is clearer is the human cost that followed at the plant itself: Iran International reported that tens of thousands of Mobarakeh employees faced lost wages or idleness once the works were crippled, with only a fraction able to return.
Israel's case
Israeli officials cast the steelworks as a legitimate military objective, not a civilian one. A security source said the plants were partly owned by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, tying them to Iran's military apparatus, and the broader argument was that degrading Iran's steel output would hamper its ability to build weapons, particularly ballistic missiles. On that logic, a factory that helps arm the state is a target like any other node in a war machine.
Where the lawyers disagree
International lawyers are not of one mind. The governing test, set out clearly by Just Security, is that an object may be attacked only if it makes "an effective contribution to military action" and if destroying it offers "a definite military advantage." A facility that genuinely feeds weapons production could meet that standard; the burden, the same analysis stresses, falls on the attacker to show it does, on reliable and specific evidence.
Others argue the link here was too remote. Adil Haque, a laws-of-war scholar, told New Lines that merely raising revenue for the state or the Guards would not by itself make an industrial site a military target, because any military benefit is slow and indirect: steel must be sold, the money spent, the weapons built. He noted that Iran appeared to be drawing down existing stockpiles rather than manufacturing arms at scale, and that its cheaper drones use little steel, weakening the claim of a "definite" advantage. Human Rights Watch added a further principle: where there is doubt about whether something is being used for military purposes, a warring party must presume it civilian.
The proportionality test
Even if a target is lawful, a second rule applies: the expected civilian harm must not be excessive next to the military gain, and an attacker must take feasible steps to spare civilians. That calculation is where much of the disagreement over Mobarakeh settles, because it turns on facts that neither side has fully laid out for outside scrutiny, how much of the plant's output was really destined for the military, how quickly it could have been converted to arms, and whether a narrower strike would have done.
Why it still matters
Months on, the episode remains unresolved in law precisely because it is unresolved in fact. Dual-use targets, factories, power stations, ports that serve soldiers and civilians alike, are among the hardest problems in modern warfare, and Mobarakeh has become a marker of how contested that ground is. The verdict, in the end, depends on evidence about the plant's military role that has not been tested independently, which is why careful observers describe its legality not as settled either way, but as genuinely in dispute.
