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The American University of Beirut shifted to fully remote operations on Sunday after Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps declared American universities across the Middle East "legitimate targets" for retaliation, issuing an extraordinary threat over what Tehran says were US-Israeli strikes on Iranian academic institutions.
The IRGC said in a statement that the United States and Israel had bombed the Tehran University of Science and Technology and targeted other Iranian universities on multiple occasions during the ongoing conflict.
The Guard warned that all universities belonging to "the occupying regime" and American universities in the West Asia region would remain legitimate targets until two universities are struck in retaliation for the destruction of Iranian academic institutions.
The statement set a specific deadline: if the US government wants its universities in the region to be spared beyond those two retaliatory strikes, "it must officially condemn the bombing of universities" in Iran by noon Tehran time on Tuesday. The IRGC urged all staff, professors, students, and nearby residents to keep a distance of one kilometer from the listed campuses to protect their safety.
IRGC-affiliated media later circulated a graphic explicitly naming institutions it considers targets, including the American Universities of Sulaimani and Baghdad in Iraq, alongside a renewed evacuation warning.
Separately on Sunday, the Isfahan University of Technology said it had been struck by what it described as "Zionist-American aggressors," marking the second time the institution has been hit since the conflict began.
Iranian foreign ministry spokesperson Esmail Baghaei said on Saturday that US-Israeli strikes had deliberately targeted "many universities and research centers" during the war, framing the attacks as a systematic assault on Iran's academic infrastructure.
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AUB President Fadlo Khouri acknowledged in a statement that the campus community had woken to alarming news, but stressed there was no evidence of a direct threat against the university specifically. "Out of an abundance of caution, we will operate fully online on Monday and Tuesday, with the exception of essential personnel," Khouri said.
The university and its affiliated hospital sit in the heart of Beirut, a city already drawn deeper into the wider regional conflict after Tehran-backed Hezbollah fired rockets at Israel on March 2 in retaliation for the killing of Iran's supreme leader.
Several other American universities maintain campuses across the Middle East, including Texas A&M University in Qatar and New York University in the United Arab Emirates. While only the institutions in Iraq and Lebanon have been publicly named or have issued responses so far, the IRGC's blanket language leaves the status of other campuses uncertain.
There are several American universities across Iraq, though only the Sulaimani and Baghdad campuses were directly cited in the IRGC-affiliated outlet's Sunday evening warning.
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