By Yousef Ramazani
In moments, laboratories that had produced life-saving vaccines for generations were reduced to rubble. International legal experts have condemned the attack as a war crime and an assault on the very foundations of public health sovereignty.
The ongoing US-Israeli aggression against Iran, now in its sixth week, has taken a dark and unmistakable turn lately with targeted attacks on scientific and academic centers.
The war – unprovoked and unjustified – has expanded into a systematic campaign against the country's civilian infrastructure – with a particular focus on healthcare, pharmaceutical production, and medical research.
The attack on the Pasteur Institute, one of the oldest and most prestigious public health institutions in West Asia, represents an escalation in this war of aggression.
As experts assert, this is not merely an attack on a public building. It is an assault on a century of scientific achievement, on the right of a nation to produce its own medicines and vaccines, and on the very principles of international humanitarian law that distinguish civilian from military targets.
The World Health Organization has documented more than twenty attacks on Iranian healthcare facilities since March 1, resulting in a number of casualties.
The pattern is unmistakable: this is a deliberate strategy to dismantle Iran's public health infrastructure, to deprive its people of essential medicines, and to weaponize disease and suffering in the service of political objectives.
The Pasteur Institute, a symbol of Iran's scientific resilience through epidemics, revolutions, and sanctions, now stands as a monument to the brutality of a war that respects no red lines and no international norms.
Century of service: Legacy of the Pasteur Institute of Iran
The Pasteur Institute of Iran was established on August 10, 1921, through a formal agreement between the Iranian government and the Institut Pasteur of Paris, following the devastating 1918–19 influenza pandemic that killed hundreds of thousands of Iranians.
Founded with land donated by the prominent statesman Abdol-Hossein Farman Farma, it became the tenth member of the international Pasteur network dedicated to combating infectious diseases.
For more than a century, it served as the bedrock of Iran's public health system, producing vaccines against smallpox, cholera, typhoid, tuberculosis, rabies, and hepatitis B, while training generations of Iranian scientists in bacteriology, virology, parasitology, and immunology.
The iconic institute's contributions to global health are immeasurable, as acknowledged by medical luminaries across the region and the world.
Under the directorship of Marcel Baltazard in the 1950s, its researchers shattered long-held epidemiological beliefs by proving that wild rodents – not rats – were the natural reservoirs of bubonic plague. That discovery reshaped international research and was subsequently funded by the World Health Organization across India, Indonesia, Syria, Turkey, and Iraq.
The institute's anti-rabies serum-vaccine protocol, developed after a dramatic wolf attack on a Kurdish village, established global standards for rabies treatment.
Its BCG tuberculosis vaccine reached tens of millions of children across multiple countries. In 1973, the institute was designated a WHO collaborating center for rabies research and control, a status it maintained for decades.
In the 21st century, the institute expanded into biotechnology and genetic engineering, producing recombinant hepatitis B vaccines. During the COVID-19 pandemic, it served as Iran's national reference laboratory for SARS-CoV-2.
In collaboration with Cuba's Finlay Institute, it manufactured PastoCovac and PastoCovac Plus, distributing approximately 15 million doses domestically.
The institute's six-pronged strategy, spanning reference laboratory operations, research, vaccine production, clinical management, data tracking, and long-term safety monitoring, helped stabilize Iran's national response despite crippling Western sanctions and global supply chain disruptions.
By 2024, the institute employed approximately 1,300 staff, including 300 PhD and MSc-level scientists, operated 28 departments and five branches, ran PhD programs in medical biotechnology, and published open-access journals of international standing.
On June 8, 2020, the Pasteur Institute's building in Tehran's Azarbayjan neighborhood was listed in the Iranian National Heritage Register under registration number 33248, recognizing its architectural and historical significance.
It was not merely a laboratory. It was a living museum of Iran's scientific modernization, a symbol of the country's determination to build sovereign capacity in public health despite a century of foreign interventions, sanctions, and now, outright military aggression.
US-Israeli attack
On the afternoon of April 2, 2026, American and Israeli warplanes carried out a deliberate and precision strike against the Pasteur Institute complex in central Tehran.
Iranian officials reported that multiple buildings, laboratories, and critical equipment were destroyed or rendered inoperable, abruptly halting vaccine production, diagnostic services, and ongoing research on multiple projects.
Images shared by Iranian authorities, including foreign ministry spokesperson Esmael Baghaei, showed extensive destruction: walls collapsed, equipment reduced to twisted metal, and the iconic building, a national heritage site, partially reduced to rubble.
Miraculously, no employees of the institute were harmed in the attack, as confirmed by local news agencies. However, the material damage has been massive.
The institute’s vaccine production lines, including those for hepatitis B, BCG, rabies, and other essential biologics, were forced to suspend operations after the attack.
Its diagnostic reference laboratory, which served as a national hub for detecting infectious diseases, was rendered non-functional.
Ongoing research projects in medical biotechnology, molecular microbiology, and immunology, many of which had received international recognition, were abruptly terminated.
One US military source reportedly told journalists that American forces had no targets in the vicinity of the institute, attributing the attack to the Israeli regime.
Such semantic evasions, however, cannot obscure the reality of joint responsibility, as experts note.
Baghaei, in a post on his social media handle, stated that the attack was “heartbreaking, cruel, despicable, and utterly outrageous”, a “barbaric assault on basic human core values” and “another war crime committed as part of an illegal war.”
Pattern of healthcare targeting
The strike on the Pasteur Institute did not occur in isolation. It is part of a systematic terror campaign against Iran’s healthcare infrastructure that has intensified as the aggression has progressed in the past five weeks.
According to the World Health Organization, more than 20 attacks on Iranian healthcare facilities have been verified since March 1, 2026, resulting in many deaths, including that of an infectious diseases health worker and a member of the Iranian Red Crescent Society.
The list of targeted facilities is chilling in its scope.
On March 31, Israeli-American strikes hit the Tofigh Daru Research and Engineering Company in Tehran, one of Iran’s largest pharmaceutical companies, which develops and produces active pharmaceutical ingredients for anticancer, cardiovascular, and immunomodulatory medications.
On March 29, the newly constructed Delaram Sina Psychiatric Hospital in Tehran was significantly damaged during an air strike, with approximately thirty patients inside at the time.
On March 21, the Ali Hospital in Andimeshk in Khuzestan province sustained damage from an explosion, forcing the facility to evacuate and cease services.
On March 2, the Gandhi Hospital in Tehran was damaged during attacks on a nearby television communications tower.
On the morning of April 3, the day after the Pasteur Institute strike, a drone attack hit a Red Crescent relief warehouse in Bushehr province, destroying two relief containers, two buses, and emergency vehicles.
On the afternoon of April 3, plasma center at Beheshti University was targeted.
And the Iranian Red Crescent has reported that a total of 307 health, medical, and emergency care facilities have been damaged since the aggression began on February 28.
This pattern of targeting is not random. It reflects a deliberate strategy to dismantle Iran’s public health infrastructure, to deprive its population of essential medicines and vaccines, and to create a humanitarian catastrophe that would pressure the Iranian government into submission.
As Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, himself a heart surgeon by profession, wrote on X, “What message does attacking hospitals, pharmaceutical companies and the Pasteur Institute as a medical research center in Iran convey?”
As a physician, he urged the WHO, the Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders, and physicians worldwide to “respond to this crime against humanity.”
International law and the crime of targeting healthcare
Under the Geneva Conventions and customary international humanitarian law, medical facilities, research centers engaged in public health, and civilian objects are protected from attack unless they are being used for military purposes and the harm to civilians is not excessive in relation to the concrete military advantage anticipated.
The principles of distinction, proportionality, and precaution are foundational to the laws of armed conflict.
No credible public evidence has been presented by the United States or the Israeli regime suggesting that the Pasteur Institute housed military assets.
The institute operated transparently for over a century as a civilian biomedical institution affiliated with the global Pasteur network. It had no military function, no strategic value in the context of the aggression, and no justification for being targeted.
Destroying a vaccine-producing research center during an armed confllict risks widespread civilian harm by undermining disease control and pharmaceutical supply chains, precisely the kind of foreseeable consequence that international humanitarian law seeks to prevent.
On April 2, 2026, the same day as the Pasteur Institute strike, more than one hundred prominent US-based international law experts, including professors from Yale, Harvard, and Stanford, former State Department legal advisers, and retired military Judge Advocates General, published an open letter warning that US and allied strikes on Iran raise “serious concerns about violations of international humanitarian law, including war crimes.”
The letter highlighted attacks on civilian infrastructure such as health facilities, schools, and energy sites, as breaching the duty to distinguish between military and civilian targets.
It also argued that the initial resort to force violated the UN Charter’s prohibition on the use of force absent self-defense against an imminent armed attack or Security Council authorization.
Human rights organizations and UN officials have echoed these concerns, noting that deliberate or reckless targeting of medical infrastructure can constitute a war crime under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.
The strike on the Pasteur Institute, they argue, exemplifies a broader erosion of protections for civilian scientific and health assets in modern warfare, an erosion for which the United States and the Israeli regime bear direct responsibility.
Culturicide: Destruction of a national heritage site
The dastardly attack on the Pasteur Institute also constitutes what legal scholars term “culturicide”, the deliberate destruction of national cultural heritage.
The institute’s building was listed in the Iranian National Heritage Register in June 2020, recognizing its architectural and historical significance as a landmark of Iran’s scientific modernization.
Its destruction is not merely an attack on a physical structure but an assault on the collective memory and identity of the Iranian people, according to observers.
The institute represented a unique chapter in the history of Iranian-French scientific cooperation, a testament to the power of knowledge to transcend political boundaries.
Its laboratories had trained generations of Iranian physicians and researchers, many of whom went on to lead public health initiatives across the country.
Its archives contained irreplaceable records of epidemiological research spanning a century, from the plague outbreaks of the 1940s to the COVID-19 pandemic of the 2020s.
All of this has now been lost, buried under the rubble of a deliberate military strike.
The targeting of cultural heritage is prohibited under the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, to which both the United States and the Israeli regime are signatories.
The destruction of the Pasteur Institute building, a recognized heritage site, therefore constitutes an additional violation of international law, compounding the already grave legal liability of the aggressors.
Global response and Iran’s determination
The international response to the attack has been one of dismay and condemnation.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus wrote on X that two departments of the Pasteur Institute had been working closely with the WHO and that the war “is impacting the delivery of health services and the safety of health workers, patients, and civilians present at health facilities.”
The Iranian Red Crescent has called for the protection of humanitarian workers, ambulances, relief supplies, and humanitarian facilities.
Yet words of concern have not translated into action. No Western government has suspended military cooperation with the United States or the Israeli regime in response to these attacks on healthcare.
No international tribunal has been convened to investigate the bombing of the Pasteur Institute.
The same international community that condemned attacks on hospitals in other conflicts has remained largely silent when the victims are Iranian.
Iran, however, has demonstrated remarkable resilience.
Despite the destruction of its premier research institute, Iranian officials have confirmed that vaccine and serum production will continue through alternative facilities.
As local news agencies reported, “the services of the Pasteur Institute of Iran have not been interrupted by these attacks.”
This determination to persevere in the face of aggression reflects the same spirit that sustained the institute through a century of challenges—from the influenza pandemic of 1918 to the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, from the turbulence of the 1979 revolution to the crushing burden of sanctions.
Crime against science and humanity
The bombing of the Pasteur Institute of Iran on April 2, 2026, will be remembered as one of the most egregious attacks on civilian scientific infrastructure in the 21st century.
It is a crime not only against the Iranian nation and its rich heritage but against the universal values of science, public health, and human dignity.
For 105 years, the institute served humanity, producing vaccines that saved countless lives, training researchers who advanced the frontiers of knowledge, and standing as a beacon of international cooperation in the fight against infectious diseases.
In a matter of minutes, American and Israeli bombs erased much of that legacy.
The greusome attack on the Pasteur Institute is not an isolated aberration but part of a systematic campaign against Iran’s healthcare infrastructure, a campaign that has targeted hospitals, pharmaceutical factories, psychiatric facilities, and Red Crescent warehouses.
It is a strategy of collective punishment, designed to inflict maximum suffering on the Iranian population in the hope of breaking their will to resist.
It is a violation of every principle of international humanitarian law, from the distinction between civilian and military targets to the protection of cultural heritage.
As the rubble of the Pasteur Institute is cleared and the work of rebuilding begins, the Iranian people will not forget what was done to them.
And the international community will have to answer a difficult question: how many hospitals, how many research centers, how many centuries of scientific achievement must be destroyed before the bombing of civilian infrastructure is recognized a war crime.
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