“I do hope that his tweet was a matter of a wrong choice of words,” the Iranian minister wrote in a tweet in reaction to Trump’s threats on Sunday that he would order strikes on Iran’s cultural sites, in case Iran carried out its promised revenge over the US assassination of Lt. Gen. Qasem Soleimani.
Mounesan went on to add, “Attacking cultural centers is completely against international law. Threatening cultural sites is not acceptable to any nation and under any pretext, and under UN Security Council resolution 2347, any such move would be filed as a war crime."
Trump’s defense of his earlier remarks about striking Iran’s cultural sites on Sunday, showed that those words had not been, in fact, a wrong choice of words.
"They're allowed to use roadside bombs and blow up our people and we're not allowed to touch their cultural sites? It doesn't work that way," he said.
Iranian Foreign Minister Zarif had also reacted to the threats, saying that targeting cultural sites with military action is considered a war crime under international law.
Meanwhile, a number of Iranians active in the tourism industry launched a protest campaign addressed to the UN secretary-general and signed a statement declaring that Trump’s threat to attack Iranian cultural and historical sites had nothing to do with political disputes and goals. They stressed that the historical and cultural heritage of Iranian civilization belongs to the whole human civilization and all human beings of the world’s past, present and future. Any harm done to human heritage anywhere in the world and by any person is equal to a crime against human culture and civilization, the statement highlighted.
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