Case Explained: Secretary Of Defense Hegseth Casually Promises Iranians ‘No Quarter’ – A War Crime – Legal Perspective

WASHINGTON – Secretary of Defense and former Fox News host Pete Hegseth, who has mocked “stupid rules of engagement” for U.S. service members, on Friday declared that Iranians under attack in President Donald Trump’s war would receive “no quarter” — a war crime under the Geneva Conventions.

“We will keep pressing. We will keep pushing, keep advancing, no quarter, no mercy for our enemies,” he said at a Pentagon news briefing.

Neither the Defense Department nor the White House responded to HuffPost queries about Hegseth’s threat.

Trump, however, appeared to set the tone for it just after midnight Friday in a social media post in which he bragged about killing Iranian leaders.

“Watch what happens to these deranged scumbags today,” he wrote. “They’ve been killing innocent people all over the world for 47 years, and now I, as the 47th President of the United States of America, am killing them. What a great honor it is to do so!”

The international rules of armed conflict, codified by the Geneva Conventions, which the United States has ratified, state that combatants who offer to surrender shall be taken prisoner. “No quarter” means they are killed instead.

“Denying quarter is a war crime and recognized as such by the United States,” said Brian Finucane, a lawyer who spent a decade in the State Department.

Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee who represents a state with multiple military bases, said casting aside the rules of war threatens the safety of U.S. service members.

“The U.S. is party to the Geneva Conventions and bound by international humanitarian law,” Warner said. “Whether it’s the secretary’s comments this morning, or his assertion that the military won’t be governed by what he terms ‘stupid rules of engagement,’ rhetoric like this is unacceptable and actually endangers U.S. service members.”

Marko Milanovic, an international law professor at the University of Reading in England, said Hegseth’s words should not necessarily be construed as actually encouraging war crimes and could instead be the sort of over-the-top, violent language commonly used by Trump and his top advisers.

“In this particular context, this was just some kind of general political statement, the type of Trumpian hyperbole that one can expect from Hegseth et al,” Milanovic said. “The ‘no quarter’ war crime applies in a different context, if a commander or political leader says that if enemies try to surrender, no such surrender will be accepted and they will all be killed.”

Laurie Blank, an international law expert at Emory University, said that even if Hegseth was speaking only colloquially and not literally, it is not a good message for someone in his position to communicate.

“The comment is entirely at odds with the concepts of honor and good faith that are part of the underpinnings of the law of war,” she said.

The U.S. military under Trump and Hegseth have already undertaken multiple actions that may have violated international law, from the extrajudicial killing of more than 150 non-combatants suspected of smuggling drugs in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific to the failure to help rescue survivors of an Iranian frigate sunk by a U.S. submarine to the targeting of an elementary school that led to the deaths of 175 civilians, most of them schoolgirls, in the first hours of the attack on Iran.

Under Hegseth, in fact, U.S. forces appear to have already violated the “no quarter” prohibition last September by returning to the wreckage of a destroyed alleged drug boat and killing two survivors clinging to debris.