Operation Midnight Hammer: US Strikes on Iran's Nuclear Sites Without Congressional or UN Authorisation (June 2025)

What happened

On June 22, 2025, during the war between Israel and Iran, the United States bombed three Iranian nuclear facilities. President Trump announced: "We have completed our very successful attack on the three Nuclear sites in Iran, including Fordow, Natanz, and Esfahan" (Al Jazeera). Al Jazeera reported that 125 aircraft took part, that B-2 stealth bombers dropped 14 GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrators on Fordow and Natanz, and that a submarine fired more than two dozen Tomahawk cruise missiles at Isfahan.

At a Pentagon briefing, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said: "This mission was not and has not been about regime change," and that the strikes "did not target Iranian troops or the Iranian people." The Pentagon described "extremely severe damage and destruction" to the targets, and Gen. Dan Caine warned that US forces were "fully postured to respond to any Iranian retaliation" (PBS NewsHour). Iran's nuclear agency and the IAEA reported no rise in off-site radiation (Al Jazeera).

The strikes were carried out without congressional authorisation and without a UN Security Council mandate. Iran's Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said the US "has committed a grave violation of the UN Charter, international law and the NPT." UN Secretary-General António Guterres said: "This is a dangerous escalation in a region already on the edge" (Al Jazeera).

On June 27, 2025 the Senate rejected Sen. Tim Kaine's war powers resolution 47–53. Kaine said: "[W]ar is too big to be consigned to the decisions of any one person." Majority Leader John Thune told The Wall Street Journal that "the president has the authority legally and constitutionally to do what he did" (CBS News).

Legal analysis

The crime of aggression (Rome Statute Art. 8 bis) is analysed here as a definition of a crime under international law. The ICC could not exercise jurisdiction: Article 15 bis(5) excludes aggression committed by nationals of non-party states, and the United States is not a party.

Element 1: use of armed force by a state against another state's sovereignty or territorial integrity. Met. Bombardment of a state's territory by another state's armed forces is listed in UNGA Resolution 3314, Art. 3(b), which Article 8 bis(2)(b) incorporates. The strikes are acknowledged.

Element 2: inconsistent with the UN Charter. Contested; reasonable basis to believe. No Security Council authorisation existed, so lawfulness depends on Article 51 self-defence. Two theories are available to the US:

• Anticipatory self-defence against Iran's nuclear programme. Terry Gill (Lieber Institute) concludes that the action "does not qualify as self-defence on the basis of prevailing interpretations," citing insufficient evidence of imminence, concrete preparations or exhausted alternatives, and says it has "much more in common with preventive war."
• Collective self-defence of Israel. Israel and Iran were already exchanging attacks. Whether a third state may join an ongoing armed conflict in support of a belligerent depends on whether that belligerent itself was acting in self-defence, which was disputed for Israel's June 13 strikes. This entry does not resolve that question; no UN body has made a finding on it.

Element 3: a "manifest" violation by its character, gravity and scale. Not shown to the reasonable-grounds standard. The operation was a single night of strikes on three facilities, publicly framed as limited and non-regime-change, with no reported deaths from the US strikes in the sources fetched. Scale is far lower than in the 2026 war, which the archive grades separately as aggression at the probable level: that entry records nearly 900 strikes in 12 hours, the killing of Iran's Supreme Leader, a reported civilian toll of about 1,700 by the April 2026 ceasefire, and Adil Haque's assessment that the war began "in manifest violation" of the Charter. No comparable legal assessment of the June 2025 strikes as a manifest violation was found. Where the legal justification is contested among serious lawyers, the "manifest" threshold is hard to establish.

Element 4: leadership. Met if the other elements are met. The President ordered the operation.

Strongest defence argument. The strikes were a limited counter-proliferation measure taken in collective self-defence of Israel during an existing armed conflict, aimed at nuclear facilities rather than people, and were followed within days by a ceasefire. Even scholars who reject the self-defence claim describe a contested legal field; a contested Charter violation is, almost by definition, not a "manifest" one. This argument does not show the strikes were lawful, but it does defeat a top-grade aggression classification on the evidence available.

Domestic law. The Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war. The administration did not seek authorisation, and the Senate declined to require it. No court ruled on the question.

Why this grade

Critical, with potential aggression. There is a reasonable basis to believe the strikes violated Article 2(4) of the UN Charter (Art. 53(1) standard), so a specific international crime is plausibly in play. The reasonable-grounds standard is not met for the "manifest violation" element, so the grade is not extreme. The conduct is a structural attack on two legal constraints on war: the Charter's prohibition on force and Congress's war power. That fits the rubric's critical anchor. Because it opened direct US hostilities with Iran eight months before the 2026 war, it is recorded separately from the 2026 aggression entry.