Earlier this month, Roman Gofman, the new director of the Mossad, Israel’s shadowy national intelligence agency, dismissed the heads of its intelligence directorate and Iran division, known only by their heavily anonymized names “K” and “Y,” respectively. The Mossad prides itself on secrecy, and while terminations following the appointment of a new Mossad director aren’t unprecedented, such public oustings, which were reported by Israel’s mainstream news organizations, are almost unheard of.

The last known dismissals for incompetence came in 1997, when a botched attempt to assassinate Khaled Mashal, then chair of Hamas’s political bureau, resulted in the detention of several Mossad agents inside Jordan and a public relations disaster. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government found itself forced to supply the antidote for the poison its Mossad agents had administered, bringing down both the agency’s director and the director of operations. 

Israel is now dealing with the aftermath of the largest mistake in its history, one of its own doing: its failed war on Iran. Sold to the United States as an easy war that would quickly bring down the Islamic Republic and its alleged nuclear weapons program, almost nothing Israel desired came to pass.

The promise of assassinating Ali Khamenei was that it would bring about governmental chaos and spur a spontaneous national uprising. Instead, it only led to the selection of his younger son as the new supreme leader, a leadership that may prove to be even more antagonistic to the United States and Israel than the previous one.

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Israel also promised that any potential closure of the Strait of Hormuz would be militarily ineffective. Now, Iran’s ability to hold the world economy hostage — despite relentless claims by the U.S. that the waterway is “open” — is its most valuable weapon. 

The Mossad’s particular role in this war involved weakening the Islamic Republic’s security structure in hopes of then funneling guns to Kurdish armed groups who would invade the country from Iraq, and then fuel mass demonstrations to topple the state. All of these lofty ambitions completely detonated on impact with reality, with Iran’s security structure remaining intact despite assassinations and airstrikes, Kurdish factions instead suffering constant Iranian military attacks, and no major protests occurring in any Iranian city, despite the massive anti-government protests in January that swept through the country.

For those who witnessed the Mossad’s public campaigns to encourage protests and defections — which it deployed in the open through Farsi-language social media accounts on X and Telegram bearing their name and seal — signs of the inevitable failure of this campaign were becoming evident. While images from June 2025’s Twelve-Day War of Mossad agents operating inside Iran and sabotaging Iranian military operations shocked many inside the country — that sabotage hampering Iran’s initial military response — its ability to change fundamental facts on the ground, and to move an entire country’s population against the sitting government, sputtered.

The Mossad chose to shift its image as that war began, capitalizing on its perception as an all-powerful and omniscient force to offer its supposedly unlimited power to help the Iranian populace. This shift manifested through cryptic social media posts, sarcastic quote-tweets of Iranian officials, and offering gifts to those who answered questions by direct message. The Mossad offered remote medical services through WhatsApp, and former radio host Menashe Amir, who notably hosted an Israeli radio show in Farsi aimed at anti-Islamic Republic Iranians, made videos on the Mossad’s behalf encouraging Iranians to listen to what the intelligence agency had to say.

The effort produced little. Iranian officials openly mocked the campaign online from the start, and it became increasingly desperate as mass protests failed to materialize. AI-generated videos of Iranian prisons having their walls blown open, and of happy Iranians following their defections to Israel, did next to nothing. The Mossad has continued to post AI-generated videos using Grok to encourage collaboration following the ceasefire.

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While accusations were levied (and arrests made) of supposed Mossad agents inside the Iranian protests in January, their infiltration, alleged or otherwise, did not end up toppling or even shattering the Islamic Republic. Instead, more than 7,000 protesters were killed that month, in addition to hundreds of police officers.

After the plan to arm Kurdish groups, in collaboration with the CIA, apparently fell apart — either by Trump’s veto or, as Trump claimed, because the Kurds simply kept the weapons themselves — the Mossad apparently came up with a quick Plan B. The new bright idea: Overthrow the government via an airstrike campaign against Iranian police stations and checkpoints manned by the Basij, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ paramilitary militia component. Despite extensive strikes in broad daylight, with some Iranians tipping off locations to opposition media outlets to help facilitate this campaign, the mass uprising, once again, did not arrive.

The war did not continue long enough for a comprehensive Plan C to come to fruition on the ground, with the Israeli military beginning to strike railways and manufacturing infrastructure, and Trump taking the lead on calling for the destruction of Iran’s energy infrastructure and bridges. Both are unified in their hope to strangle the country economically in hopes of pushing Iranian society into oblivion, but this outcome is only truly possible through American military means.

But even the U.S. has seen itself overextended, unable to resupply its missile interceptors for its own bases in the Middle East, and potentially unable to protect Israel as effectively as it had in the past should open conflict break out over its skies again.

News of the dismissal of the Mossad officials was met with disbelief in the Israeli media and by veterans of the intelligence service, who accused Gofman of suppressing the agency’s ability to function. By firing two deputies, security analysts accused him of foisting the agency’s failure onto underlings to shield the decisions made at the top levels of government from scrutiny.

While overthrowing the Iranian government has remained a popular idea among Israeli officials and other elected politicians, Netanyahu chief among them, other politicians have acknowledged its difficulty. Gadi Eisenkot, the former Israel Defense Forces chief of the general staff, has spoken of the unlikelihood of being able to overthrow the entire Iranian system, instead stating that operations should have continued “in the shadows.”

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Reporting from Israel Hayom in May revealed that many in the Mossad were opposed to the idea of focusing resources on overthrowing the Iranian government, seeing it as a massive gamble. The Mossad’s former chief of influence operations, known as O., told the newspaper that he felt he had to sell the operation to many in the agency, despite the fact that “no one actually knows how to overthrow a regime or what the chances are that it will succeed.”

In March, just days before he would be killed in an Israeli assassination strike, Ali Larijani, then-secretary of the Iranian Supreme National Security Council, told the Iranian news outlet ISNA that Netanyahu “seemed to believe that these attacks had set a movement in motion inside Iran and that, by portraying the system as being in disarray, he could incite the public.” But Larijani pointed out that in less than a day, the regime had appointed “replacements for the commanders who had been killed, addressed the public, changed the atmosphere, and, by issuing specific orders, authorized the launch of missiles.”

Netanyahu, having pushed for the military overthrow of the Iranian government across multiple American administrations, finally got the war he wanted. But neither raw force, nor covert operations executed on his orders, were enough to carry out his will.

While Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has remarked upon how the current situation is very much working for Israel — one in which southern Iran is constantly bombarded with no end, and America is doing all of the fighting and dying — Netanyahu has continued his rhetoric about the need to create the conditions for the fall of the Islamic Republic. But in a moment of rare humility, he admitted this may “not happen in a single day.”

Recent reporting from Ynet found Netanyahu’s government instructed both the Israeli military and the Mossad to prepare for a much larger campaign against the Iranian state, with eyes on a potential return to open war in autumn. As has been the case over and over again, in Yemen, Lebanon, Gaza, and now Iran, Israel hopes that what was not solved with bombs can still be won — this time with even more bombs.

The post The Mossad Suffers a Crushing Defeat Entirely of Its Own Making appeared first on The Intercept.

That day, the U.S. attacked the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab, killing more than 150 people, most of them children. In the weeks that followed, tens of thousands more would be killed or wounded in U.S.–Israeli strikes, according to World Health Organization estimates. Since a June ceasefire collapsed and the U.S. resumed attacks, Iran’s Health Ministry says U.S. strikes have killed or wounded more than 650 people.

Mohammad’s parents — Fatemeh Rostami, known to her family as Hannaneh, and Ali, her husband — brought him home to their apartment in eastern Tehran’s Pirouzi neighborhood. Despite the danger, Hannaneh’s mother, Tahereh Sarbaz, traveled almost 100 miles from the city of Qazvin to meet her newborn grandson, as Trump lobbed threats and missiles at Tehran. “Today Iran will be hit very hard! Under serious consideration for complete destruction and certain death, because of Iran’s bad behavior, are areas and groups of people that were not considered for targeting up until this moment in time,” he wrote on Truth Social on March 7. Sarbaz witnessed the destruction that week and felt a blast wave firsthand while driving through the capital. “I was in Tehran. I saw what happened there,” she recalled. “People were being bombed every night. Families everywhere were losing their children.”

Pirouzi, a crowded working- to middle-class residential area, with a major shopping mall, hospital, sports complex, and several transit hubs, is home to around 600,000 people. When the war erupted, it was hit hard. As U.S. and Israeli munitions laid waste to buildings there, people flooded into the streets — Hannaneh’s family among them — seeking safety. Ali was still going to work each day but suggested that Hannaneh and the children decamp for the relative safety of Qazvin, which was not attacked nearly as much as the capital. “My daughter refused,” Sarbaz recalled. “She told him, ‘I will not leave you here alone.’” 

Sarbaz eventually headed across town, to northern Tehran, where her son, Mehdi Rostami, lived with his wife and their three children, thinking it would be safer. After a short visit, she returned, alone, to Qazvin.

On March 17, Sarbaz checked in with Hannaneh by phone. “I called her and asked how she and the baby were doing,” Sarbaz said. “I asked whether the fighter jets were still coming. Whether she was afraid. Whether there was a lot of noise. And I told her to be careful.”

The next day, Rostami’s whole family traveled across Tehran to visit Hannaneh and her children. Not long after, Sarbaz received a call from another daughter-in-law. “She sounded extremely distressed. She was trying to prepare me for something,” Sarbaz recalled. “Finally, I asked her, ‘What happened? Why are you so worried?’” The daughter-in-law said: “Mother, the thing you were afraid of has happened.”

Sarbaz was initially so stunned that she couldn’t process the news. It wasn’t until other family members broke down in tears that she could comprehend the enormity of her loss. An airstrike hit Hannaneh’s apartment building while her brother’s family was visiting. The attack killed Rostami; his wife, Manzar al-Sadat Zarrabadi; and their three children: Ali, 13; Fatemeh, 9; and Zeynab, 7. Also slain were Hannaneh and her two children: Mohammad Hassan Kialha, 7, and Mohammad Ali Kialha, who was just 20 days old. Ali, Hannaneh’s husband, survived; he was out at the time of the attack.

“They told me that my family in Tehran had been killed,” Sarbaz said. “Inside, I was heartbroken.”

Dr. Nader Azadeh, a high-ranking official with the Tehran Fire Department, was coordinating emergency response and rescue operations in the capital following airstrikes and deployed to the Pirouzi neighborhood just after the attack on the family’s apartment building. Amid all the carnage he witnessed over weeks of war in Tehran, the toll on the Rostami family — eight dead — had a lasting impact on him. He said he could not forget the scale of their loss.

A rescue worker who participated in the response said that the entire building was demolished by the strike. He estimated that 30 people, in total, died. It took hours to unearth what was left of the family and other victims from the rubble. Most of the dead had been exhumed when neighbors explained that an infant was still somewhere under the debris, prompting the search to begin anew. Hours later, they finally located the tiny body, he recalled.

No one knows how many survivors in Iran are grieving over loved ones killed in Trump’s war. Global attention has focused on Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school — almost to the exclusion of the other schools, homes, hospitals, apartment buildings, and other civilian sites damaged or destroyed in other U.S.–Israeli strikes. The U.S. military has used this tunnel vision to its advantage, advancing the farcical claim that the elementary school strike is the only incident of civilian harm during the entire conflict. “There is one active civilian casualty investigation from the 13,629 munitions,” Adm. Brad Cooper, the chief of U.S. Central Command, told members of the Senate Armed Services Committee in May.

CENTCOM has continued these claims in response to queries from The Intercept. “We have no new updates at this time pertaining to current investigations or munitions that were expended during Operation Epic Fury,” a spokesperson said.

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Asked if CENTCOM was aware of any allegations of civilian harm in Iran on or about March 18, the command dodged the question. “The U.S. military takes all reports of civilian harm seriously,” a defense official told The Intercept. “All allegations of civilian harm reported to CENTCOM have been reviewed.”

While CENTCOM was tight-lipped, Sarbaz refused to stay silent. “I want people around the world to know that civilians died in this conflict. I want people around the world to know that the president of the United States, a man mired in corruption and scandal, came and took my children from me,” she told The Intercept. “What crime had my 20-day-old grandchild committed?”

It’s unclear if Hannaneh and Ali’s apartment building was the intended object of a U.S. or Israeli strike, a targeting error, or so-called collateral damage. The family says it knows of no regime officials who resided in the building or military uses of the site.

The Israel Defense Forces announced it killed “Mehdi Rostami Shamastam, one of the key commanders in Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence” in Tehran on the same day that Mehdi Rostami and his family lost their lives in Hannaneh’s apartment. Sarbaz said her son was an academic, not an intelligence official. “I deny this,” she said of the assertion. “My son was a university professor. But if what Israel claims were true, I would be very glad.”

Sarbaz said that if her son was, in fact, a top intelligence chief, killing him alongside his family, including a baby, would make it an even graver atrocity. “The presence of a 20-day-old infant among the victims, and the killing of eight members of one family, is such an enormous crime,” she said. “Why didn’t they target him in the street?”

Following the attack, the Iranian regime did not treat Mehdi Rostami as it often does senior commanders or influential figures killed in enemy strikes, making no public acknowledgment of his service to the state. Mehdi and Rostami are also common names. The Israeli military did not respond to multiple requests for clarification if the Mehdi Rostami Shamastam it referenced and Mehdi Rostami were the same person. CENTCOM did not respond to multiple requests for comment on whether it or Israeli forces had conducted airstrikes in Tehran’s Pirouzi neighborhood on March 18.

The strike that killed the Rostami family was part of an unrelenting blitz. The U.S. and Israel struck more than 17,000 separate targets in 40 days — a rate of strikes near unprecedented in modern conflict, according to the civilian harm monitoring group Airwars. In the first 24 hours of the war alone, the U.S. said it had struck more than 1,000 targets, and Israel 500. A May 18 report by Human Rights Activists in Iran counted 12,798 “unique attacks” by the U.S. or Israel, 77 percent of them involving civilian harm or damage to civilian infrastructure.

The U.S. bears some responsibility for all attacks as the chief of the coalition attacking Iran. “Only the United States of America could lead this,” self-styled War Secretary Pete Hegseth said on March 4. “But when you add the Israeli Defense Forces, a devastatingly capable force, the combination is sheer destruction for our radical Islamist Iranian adversaries. … Fighting shoulder to shoulder with such a capable ally is a true force multiplier and a breath of fresh air.”

After initially striking Iranian military assets in the opening rounds of the war, the U.S. shifted to targeting civilian infrastructure, Sina Toossi, a senior nonresident fellow at the Center for International Policy specializing in U.S.–Iran relations, told The Intercept. Targets included oil facilities; steel and pharmaceutical plants; universities; and even the headquarters of Iran’s space program. He noted that bridges were targeted, killing civilians as well as first responders.

This summer, as a second ceasefire imploded and Iran stepped up attacks on U.S. bases causing large numbers of casualties, Trump has increasingly unleashed unhinged rants, including threats to attack civilian infrastructure such as bridges and power plants, that would “affect 91 million people.”

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In July, Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., cajoled chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine into what seemed like a half-hearted pledge to “not target, even in retaliatory sense, infrastructure that is generally considered to be primarily for civilian survival.” The very next day, Trump announced that “any time the Islamic Republic of Iran shoots at a ship in the Strait of Hormuz … the United States will bomb and destroy ONE BRIDGE OR POWER PLANT, including those located next to, or in, the Capital City of Tehran.”

Harrison Mann, a former U.S. Army officer and intelligence official and now the associate director for campaigns and policy at Win Without War, drew specific attention to the attacks on the bridges and water reservoirs. It is “quite dangerous to be conditioning the U.S. military to carry out orders that are clearly war crimes,” he warned.

The World Health Organization puts the Iranian casualty toll at an estimated 37,181, including 3,375 deaths. Iranian state and semi-official media reported similar figures, just under 3,500 killed. Mansoureh Mills, a regional researcher with Amnesty International, noted that earlier government figures put the civilian toll at roughly 45 percent of the total, including 383 children. 

The total number of U.S.–Israeli strikes on apartment buildings is unknown, but certainly significant. Reports of civilian harm were recorded every day from the beginning of the war on February 28 to the first ceasefire on April 8, according to Airwars. This includes six strikes on March 18, the day that the Rostami family was killed. Airwars found that civilians were frequently slain in attacks on residential areas, with such strikes accounting for 147 out of the 297 — almost 50 percent — of the civilian harm incidents it tracked. Eighty-seven of these took place in Tehran province. A Washington Post investigation, relying on data from the Institute for the Study of War, counted 285 attacks across Tehran with strikes “blanket[ing] almost a third of all neighborhoods, some with upward of 11 strikes.”

Azadeh, the fire department official, recalled chaotic and emotionally overwhelming nights of bombardment that killed untold numbers of civilians. In one attack on an apartment building in central Tehran, on the first day of the war, he recalled the death of a mother, her daughter, and the child’s grandmother. In another strike on a 10-unit apartment building in the Pirouzi neighborhood, he recounted the slaying of most of its residents, including seven children and teenagers. “When our rescue teams arrived, the force of the explosion had thrown many of the bodies into the street,” Azadeh said.

Azadeh drew specific attention to the death of Saeed Shamghadri, an academic killed with his son and daughter in an attack on their home in northern Tehran in March. “To kill one person, they bombed a 14-story residential building and killed somewhere between 50 and 200 people living there,” Azadeh said. “To eliminate one person, many civilians were attacked.”

When asked how many civilians have been killed in U.S. strikes and, if the military did not know the answer, to explain why, CENTCOM told The Intercept: “The U.S. military does not deliberately target civilians.” After being told that response didn’t address the question, Maj. Emma Thompson, the command’s media operations chief, said CENTCOM had “nothing additional to add.”

The WHO estimates that 229 healthcare centers, 49 hospitals, and 78 pharmaceutical facilities, laboratories, and warehouses were damaged in U.S.–Israeli strikes. “While I was on my way to my son’s house, Gandhi Hospital came under attack,” said Sarbaz of the medical facility in northern Tehran that saw its entire front facing torn off in a March 1 strike. Sarbaz said that the massive shockwave from the explosion rocked the car she was in. “The media are lying when they say ordinary people were not targeted. Gandhi Hospital, where pregnant women were present, was also attacked.” Videos of the private hospital, known for fertility treatments, show it sustained significant damage, and government sources noted it had to evacuate patients, including babies in incubators.

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These attacks came after Hegseth’s Pentagon spent a year slashing measures to prevent civilian casualties, including firing the military’s top lawyers, who advise leaders on international laws of armed conflict. “U.S. strikes on civilian infrastructure in Iran, including the elementary school in Minab, have been absolutely devastating and completely inexcusable,” Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., told The Intercept. “I continue to have deep concerns about how the school in particular was targeted, especially as the strike was deliberately planned for the first day of the conflict and did not occur amid the fog of war. Secretary Hegseth’s catastrophic cuts to civilian harm mitigation efforts at the Department of Defense and his disdain for the rules of engagement will only continue to put innocent men, women, and children in danger.”

A group of Democratic lawmakers told Hegseth in a July letter that his “gutting civilian harm mitigation and response (CHMR) efforts” has left the Pentagon unable to “comply with the law and its congressionally-mandated CHMR responsibilities.” They added: “The Trump administration — potentially in violation of federal law — has defunded and impeded civilian protection efforts.”

That letter, sent by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., Gillibrand, and eight other lawmakers, echoed concerns raised by a War Department inspector general report that described civilian protection efforts as largely “inactive.” The May report by the Pentagon’s top watchdog says cuts to civilian harm mitigation and response efforts have been so severe under Hegseth that the United States cannot adequately protect civilians in conflict zones or track harm when it occurs.

These criticisms were echoed in an as-yet-unreleased official report revealed by The Intercept that found Hegseth’s Pentagon gutted its premier center devoted to preventing civilian casualties in war zones. The War Department’s Civilian Protection Center of Excellence reduced its staff from 40 personnel in January 2025 to just nine by the end of the year, according to the report. And cuts have been even more catastrophic at the tip of the spear.

When questioned by lawmakers about U.S. attacks on civilian targets in Iran, Caine dismissed the concerns. “We have a robust process which considers a target. It goes through a system that looks at a variety of considerations, to include what you’re alluding to around both purely civilian or dual-use targets,” the Joint Chiefs of Staff chair said. “I have trust and confidence in CENTCOM that they’re looking at the range of those things on a daily basis.”

There are good reasons not to trust that system. The 10-person civilian harm mitigation team at CENTCOM has been reduced to just one individual, according to Cooper, the CENTCOM commander. Another recent yet-to-be-released Pentagon report on civilian casualties noted that 15 attacks in Yemen from early 2025 are still under review by CENTCOM. “How will they get through hundreds of cases for Iran if their one civilian harm person still hasn’t finished Yemen?” a U.S. official lamented to The Intercept. Both current and former government officials told The Intercept that the massive cuts have left the Pentagon unable to protect civilians in war zones like Iran.

Asked if anyone would be held accountable for the February strike on the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school, Trump replied in June: “No. If it was a fault — and as you know that’s under investigation. It’s such a strange question to be asked at this date. You’re talking about a long time ago.”

The Rostami family was large and close-knit. Sarbaz said that 16 children and grandchildren made a pilgrimage from Tehran to Qazvin every Friday. “We would spread a large tablecloth and eat together,” she said. After the bodies of her children and grandchildren were pulled from the rubble, the eight deceased made a last trip to their ancestral home for a funeral procession and burial.

A large crowd gathered outside Sarbaz’s home on March 23. “They were crying,” she recalled. “People came from everywhere. They were chanting ‘Death to America’ and mourning my children.” Azadeh, who accompanied the bodies back to Qazvin, recalls being deeply affected as Sarbaz received the corpses. “When we returned the bodies, I saw the mother arrive carrying an Iranian flag. She was the only surviving immediate family member there,” he said of Sarbaz. “She said the reason she was crying was because she herself had not been martyred alongside them.” 

Footage from Iranian state television of the martyrs’ procession shows a huge crowd with women pushing children in strollers, men waving Iranian flags, and others carrying poster-sized photos of the dead, behind decorated funeral trucks bearing the bodies of the victims. Photos from the Iranian Students’ News Agency show crowds carrying coffins wrapped in the green, red, and white of the Iranian flag and a cleric clad in a black robe and turban holding the body of a white-shrouded baby aloft.

The funeral was attended by thousands of people, Sarbaz remembered.

In June, just after agreeing to a ceasefire that quickly collapsed, Trump returned to threatening to kill Iranians. “If they ​don’t behave,” he said, “we’ll go right back to dropping bombs ​right smack in the middle of their head.” Attacks followed. “We can knock down their bridges in one hour. We can knock out their energy supply,” he said in July. “We can knock out their electricity and power generating plants. … Every plant will be gone.” Later that month, Trump posted: “Every time Iran kills an American Soldier, they will pay for that killing many times over!”

Sarbaz now lives with the fallout of Trump’s war of choice and his disregard for civilian lives. “After three sons, God gave me this daughter, and she was all my hope. We had named her Fatemeh, but because her father loved the name Hannaneh, we used to call her that,” she explained. “But today, I no longer say Hannaneh or Fatemeh.”

As his war in Iran has imploded, Trump has increasingly lashed out, calling for cataclysm, slaughter, and even genocide. “We’re knocking the hell out of it,” he said of Iran earlier this month. “I do not want to kill people. But at some point we’re gonna.” But Trump has already killed many thousands of Iranians — including school children, hospital patients, the elderly, and, in Tehran’s Pirouzi neighborhood on March 18, most of a family, including its youngest member. “Knocking the hell out of them,” said Trump as he continued to rant about his attacks on Iranians last week. Mohammad Ali Kialha was one of those people; perhaps the youngest killed by Trump’s war.

And Sarbaz wants an answer from Trump about why he had to die: “What sin had my 20-day-old grandchild committed that he had to be martyred?”

This article is published in collaboration with Egab.

The post The Short Life of a Newborn During the Iran War appeared first on The Intercept.

In the process, immigration officials indicate they complied with an Iranian request to repatriate three specific people who were living in the United States.

Hundreds of emails spanning from May to November of last year show ICE officials, operating under the orders of then-Acting Director Todd Lyons, scrambling to put together plans for three controversial charter flights to Iran in the clearest picture yet of the Trump administration’s behind-the-scenes planning for the trips.

The flights delivered more than 100 people to an uncertain fate in Tehran just months or weeks before the U.S. and Israel launched their current devastating war, which has to date killed thousands of Iranians. While Israel and the United States bombed Iran during the Twelve-Day War last year, the flight planning remained ongoing. The coordination marked a reversal in decades of immigration policy toward Iranians, who were typically allowed to remain in the United States, even with a final removal order, due to fear of persecution from a regime U.S. leaders have accused of wantonly murdering its own citizens. 

The emails, which were released in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from the National Iranian American Council, or NIAC, and provided exclusively to The Intercept, show heavy pressure from high-ranking Trump administration officials to make the flights happen; discussion of coordination between ICE and Iranian officials, often through Qatari intermediaries but at times directly; and even an apparent mix-up in which ICE officials accidentally put the wrong person on a deportation flight bound for Iran.

Iranians were already under increased targeting by ICE, according to data obtained by NIAC. The timing of the about-face from long-standing policy was particularly cruel, said Jamal Abdi, the group’s president.

“It seemed clear that Iranians were under the microscope all of a sudden,” Abdi told The Intercept. “And we now know that it was actually in the middle of the [Twelve-Day] war where the White House was directing ICE to start removing Iranians.”

Each flight arrived in Tehran carrying at least a dozen deportees, including political activists and ethnic and religious minorities who had good reason to fear persecution upon arrival. Many of the people flown to Tehran were transported against their will, including one man who later told the New York Times that he attempted suicide before the flight and ICE agents physically forced him onto the plane.

The bulk of the emails released to NIAC illustrate the planning and execution of the first mass deportation to Iran on September 29, 2025.

Most of the correspondents have their identities and contact information redacted, with the exception of officials such as then-acting director Lyons, head of removal operations Marcos Charles, then-deputy director Madison Sheahan, and Joshua Coster, whose email signature identifies him as the ERO — Enforcement and Removal Operations — attaché at the agency’s U.S. Embassy branch office in Tel Aviv. In the run-up to the flight, Coster appears to have acted as the primary liaison with the Qatari government in back-and-forths over landing permits, passenger manifests, and details of the transfer in Doha to the final leg of the journey on a Qatar Airways charter. His level of involvement, Abdi said, “reveals how integral the ICE office in Tel Aviv has been to this transnational network of ICE officers removing people from America.”

In one of the most confounding episodes that took place during the first flight, Coster informed his colleagues that an Iranian national not included on the final list of deportees somehow wound up on the plane to Doha.

“An Iranian national not included on the final manifest we sent to Qatari MOI was boarded on the flight,” Coster wrote to colleagues on September 30, 2025. “This is unfortunate.”

“I have no idea how the case/person got through to the plane,” one of Coster’s colleagues responded. 

After the stopover in Doha, the accidental passenger was sent to Iran anyway.

A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, the parent agency of ICE, declined to comment on the apparent mix-up.

Formal diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Iran have been severed since 1979, and communications between the two nations have typically taken place either through intermediaries or through Iranian representatives operating out of the Pakistani Embassy in Washington, D.C. That made the issuance of travel documents necessary for deportation nearly impossible, and Iranians were often allowed to remain in the country indefinitely.

Yet the move to begin deporting Iranians took place at a time in which relations between the U.S. and Iran were at a particularly low point.

The so-called Twelve-Day War was in full swing when, on June 19, 2025, the orders came down to ICE officers to begin putting plans into motion.

In an email sent from his BlackBerry to Charles and Sheahan that day, Lyons directed his underlings to “launch target cases as a priority.” Less than an hour later, Charles forwarded Lyons’s missive to several ICE officials and included marching orders of his own.

“Please begin working on a plan to remove all removable FO [final order] Iranians in custody,” Charles wrote. “We need a plan forward ASAP.”

In a series of emails among ICE officials, all of whose names were redacted, the pressure to develop a plan was clear. One staffer, whose email signature listed them as an assistant director of the ERO’s removal division, appeared pessimistic about the timing.

“Unfortunately I do not have great news,” wrote the staffer. “I’ve learned from the team that Iran is currently uncooperative and does not issue [travel documents] in a timely manner.”

As a result, the staffer told Charles, “removal will prove difficult.” To make matters worse, “due to the current conflict, the airspace in Iran is closed to all ( not just U.S.) until further notice,” wrote the official. “Neighboring land borders are also a challenge.”

Still, in other emails, the assistant director urged colleagues to press ahead with the orders.

“Please initiate conversations with [the Department of] State first this [sic] tomorrow,” the official wrote in an email forwarding the commands to his colleagues. “They need to help us identify a solution for this WH [White House] priority.”

Just 24 hours later, however, an ICE official wrote with good news.

“The team has come together and developed a few viable options for removals to Iran,” the official wrote. All of the plans were redacted.

Lyons, Charles, and Sheahan did not respond to requests for comment. When The Intercept contacted Coster at his official ICE email address, the reporter received an automatic out-of-office reply indicating that Coster’s area of focus had shifted to North Africa. 

For years, Iranians facing deportation from the U.S. have been protected by two realities: the lack of diplomatic relations between the two nations and the threat of retribution at home.

But the Trump administration has dispensed with both roadblocks in its quest for mass deportations, in which Trump has dismantled the asylum system for refugees from almost any country — with the notable exception of white Afrikaners. 

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“It seems that this administration will stop at nothing to make sure that these physical deportations actually happen, no matter what the cost, and they’ll just turn people over to despotic regimes,” said Hassan Ahmad, an immigration attorney who has represented a number of high-profile people targeted for deportation in recent years. “I’ve been an immigration lawyer a long time, but with this administration, every day it’s a new low.”

It has become virtually impossible for ethnic minorities and political dissidents fleeing persecution in Iran to find safety in the United States, despite Trump’s strident criticism of the Iranian government’s human-rights record.

“Iran commits grievous human rights abuses and arbitrarily detains foreigners, including United States citizens, on spurious charges without due process of law, subjecting them to abuse,” Trump wrote in a February 2025 national security policy memo announcing his administration’s “maximum pressure” campaign. The following January, during a deadly crackdown on protests against the Iranian government, Trump issued messages of support for the people of Iran opposed to the regime — even as ICE agents were set to deport a dozen more people to Tehran later that month.

Amid all its bluster against Iran, his administration was doing everything it could to send Iranians back to that government. In June 2025, according to figures tallied up in an email from Charles, there were 522 Iranian nationals in ICE detention, including 244 who were under a final order of removal, and another 278 who were in removal proceedings. Charles wrote that the agency’s internal portal showed more than 5,000 other cases of Iranians in deportation proceedings who were not in ICE custody.

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Around that time, ICE embarked on a dramatic scaling up of detentions of Iranian nationals not already in custody, arresting between 290 and 300 people between June and July of that year, according to NIAC’s data. 

“At the same time the U.S. and Israel were plotting a new phase of war with Iran, ICE’s attaché in Israel was coordinating to send asylees back to a government that threatens their lives,” Abdi said. “The people of Iran are wronged at every turn: by their authoritarian government and by the U.S. that speaks as if it is their ally, only to pursue policies that block them from the American dream, impoverish them, and drop thousands of bombs on their country.”

The first war with Iran under the second Trump administration ended on June 24, 2025, and efforts to organize the first flight to Tehran continued apace. Throughout August, ICE agents at field offices around the country made repeated mention of a charter flight scheduled for later that month. But by August 22, that charter appears to have fallen apart.

“It looks like there is some finger pointing going on,” wrote Coster, the ERO attaché then based in Tel Aviv, “because the Qataris, [Ministry of the Interior] and [Ministry of Foreign Affairs], are saying the Iranians did not approve in time.”

A few days later, his colleague was passing on an ask from Iranian officials. “Iran has requested that I amend the previous manifest an expedite the removal process,” an ERO officer wrote on August 29, with further specifics redacted. Within a month, the plan was a go.

On September 29, a plane operated by the private contractor Omni Air and brokered by CSI Aviation, neither of which responded to The Intercept’s requests for comment, took off from the Alexandria Staging Facility in Louisiana and flew to Puerto Rico for a brief refuel before traveling on to Cairo, according email records and to data provided to The Intercept by ICE Flight Monitor at Human Rights First.

After a stop in Cairo, the plane continued on to Qatar, with 54 Iranians onboard, who were transferred to a charter flight operated by the state-owned Qatar Airways. On October 1, at about 11:00 a.m. local time, the Qatar Airways flight arrived at its final destination, at Imam Khomeini International Airport in Tehran. 

For reasons that are not made clear in the emails, the Iranian deportees numbered fewer than half the 120 Iranian nationals that Qatar and Iran were expecting. The Qataris were not happy. 

“We would like clarification on why the number of passengers has been reduced from 120 to 54, as this directly affects our internal operations,” wrote a representative of the Qatari Ministry of the Interior in an email to ICE officials. “Last-minute changes are not welcome, especially since we are an intermediary with the Iranians.”

If U.S. officials gave an explanation to Qatar, it does not appear in the correspondence. The emails do reveal the inclusion of an Iranian not slated for the flight — as well as further specific requests from Iran, in which officials appear to ask that certain individuals be sent back to the country.

“The lran Embassy just issued passports or travel documents for the three listed below. They requested they be added to the flight leaving out on the 29th,” an official wrote on September 26, 2025.

The description of coordination between representatives of the two hostile nations, and the requests from Iran that individuals be included in the flight appears to bolster claims made in a lawsuit filed last month in federal court by the Iranian American Legal Defense Fund, which accused ICE of handing over sensitive information to the Iranian government. In court filings, ICE has dismissed those claims as “hearsay.”

In response to a detailed list of questions, a spokesperson for DHS again denied sharing sensitive information with the Iranian government.

“These allegations that ICE shared asylum application records with the Iranian government are FALSE,” the spokesperson wrote. “ICE is committed to ensuring that illegal aliens are informed of their right to communicate with their consular representatives. Consistent with established protocols, ICE provides illegal aliens the opportunity to contact their consular post and facilitates consular access to detained individuals, in accordance with applicable laws, regulations, and agency policy.”

The emails end on November 25, when the U.S. was planning a second flight that transited deportees to Iran through Kuwait on December 7. A third flight took place on January 25, again through Kuwait, and a fourth one was scheduled for late March.

According to filings in the lawsuit, it was derailed when, in late February, the U.S. and Israel again began bombing Iran.

The post ICE Worked With Iranian Regime to Set Up Deportation Flights as Trump Laid Plans for War appeared first on The Intercept.

On Saturday, two Defense Department accounts on X posted images overlaid with the words “SEND ME.” The agency’s Rapid Response account published the phrase on a picture of a service member watching a helicopter above an aircraft carrier. Chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell quoted Isaiah 6:8 in a post and included the all-caps phrase on an image of a soldier silhouetted in the dark. The Department of War’s official account amplified both posts.

Isaiah 6:8 is a verse that appears in the Hebrew Bible and Old Testament in which the prophet Isaiah answers a divine call. When God asks, “Whom shall I send?” Isaiah replies, “Here am I. Send me.” The passage is widely used in many Christian traditions as an expression of accepting God’s call to a divine mission. The verses that follow describe God sending Isaiah to proclaim a message of judgment that culminates in cities “without inhabitant,” houses emptied of people, and the land left “utterly desolate” before eventual restoration.

Jemar Tisby, a historian of religion, said Isaiah 6:8 functions in American evangelical culture “almost entirely as a standalone missions text,” commonly invoked at missions conferences, ordinations, and altar calls as a declaration of willingness to serve. “The most important context of Isaiah 6, the part most people miss, is that the devastation falls on God’s covenant people,” Tisby said. “The nation doing the sending, not a foreign enemy, is in view here.”

It’s unclear what, exactly, the biblical quotation was intended to convey. The Pentagon declined to answer The Intercept’s questions about whether the posts reflected an expression of faith or proselytizing, a message about the war with Iran, or a coordinated communications strategy. “Nothing to offer you on this,” a Pentagon spokesperson said.

The posts followed months of controversy over the role of religion in the Defense Department under Secretary Pete Hegseth.

In March, The Intercept reported that the appointment of Christian activist Erika Kirk, wife of Charlie Kirk, to the Air Force Academy’s Board of Visitors alarmed former military leaders and constitutional advocates, who warned it could push the academy toward an overtly ideological vision of military leadership.

That same month, reporting later entered into the congressional record detailed complaints from more than 100 service members who alleged commanders described the war with Iran as “part of God’s divine plan” and encouraged troops to view the conflict through a biblical lens. Saturday’s posts placed similar biblical language on the Defense Department’s own official social media accounts.

Tisby said he viewed the Pentagon’s recent messaging as part of a broader pattern.

“Given Hegseth’s religious influences, tied to Douglas Wilson, and taken with the fact that Hegseth instituted worship services at the Pentagon, this reads as part of a larger effort to incorporate a narrow vision of Christianity into the military and the federal government writ large,” Tisby said.

Tisby compared the Pentagon’s recent messaging to a controversy during the George W. Bush administration, when the Pentagon used the exact same biblical passage, Isaiah 6:8, on intelligence briefings prepared for then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld during the Iraq War. The use of the verse became public in 2009 and prompted criticism from religious scholars, who argued it had been removed from its broader biblical context. “In the Rumsfeld era, there was a public outcry about the misattribution of Bible verses in military contexts, and the administration pulled back,” he said. “Now, this administration is leaning into the framing.”

The messages marked a notable institutional shift. Previous controversies centered on statements by individual commanders or political appointees. This time, multiple official Defense Department accounts amplified the same biblical passage, and the Pentagon declined to explain why.

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That does not necessarily mean the Pentagon’s post violated the Constitution. The First Amendment generally prohibits the government from promoting or favoring a religion through its official actions. At the same time, courts have long allowed some traditional references to religion, including the national motto, “In God We Trust.”

Nelson Tebbe, the Jane M.G. Foster Professor of Law at Cornell Law School, whose scholarship focuses on constitutional law and religion, said the Pentagon’s post was different from those long-standing examples because it relied on a specific biblical passage rather than a general religious phrase and therefore could have a more direct impact on members of the military.

“Minor endorsements of religion by the government are common,” Tebbe said, pointing to phrases such as “God save this honorable Court,” commonly invoked in the Supreme Court. “This particular example involving the Pentagon spokesperson is less minor or incidental.”

Even so, Tebbe said recent Supreme Court decisions have made it unlikely that a court would strike down the Pentagon’s post.

“Recently, the Supreme Court has weakened the Establishment Clause, particularly the doctrine that used to prohibit government endorsements of religion in its own speech,” he said. “I would say that the chance of the Supreme Court invalidating this kind of practice is vanishingly small.”

Legal scholars say that constitutional question is separate from the practical consequences of the Pentagon’s messaging during an active conflict.

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“More problematic, if also predictable, to me is the conflation of divine and military calling and service,” said Jonathan Ebel, a professor of religion at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who studies religion and the American military.

“Besides delegitimizing the U.S. military through such overtly Christian rhetoric and alienating non-Christian service members, such blatant Bible thumping in this context implies a religious war against Iran, foolishly confirming Iranian propaganda that the ‘Great Satan’ wants to wage war on Islam,” said Rachel VanLandingham, a former Air Force judge advocate and military law professor.

Since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Iran’s leaders have referred to the United States as the “Great Satan,” portraying Washington as both a geopolitical rival and a religious enemy. Iranian officials have repeatedly framed conflicts with the United States and Israel as part of a struggle against Islam, making official biblical messaging from the Pentagon particularly vulnerable to exploitation as propaganda, VanLandingham said.

VanLandingham said the Pentagon’s messaging risked replacing military professionalism with religious symbolism at a moment when the armed forces should remain grounded in constitutional principles, rather than religious conviction.

“Religious war is a slippery slope to total war,” she said. “The U.S. military fights based on honor and fidelity to the law, not to Old Testament biblical passages.”

Update: August 6, 2026, 10:18 a.m. ET
This article was updated to include comment from Jemar Tisby, a historian of religion, and Jonathan Ebel, a professor of religion.

The post The Pentagon Is Posting Cryptic Biblical Messages on Social Media appeared first on The Intercept.

Channeling His Inner-Martian

As his war in Iran has imploded, his poll numbers have plummeted, the U.S. economy has cratered, and he finds himself in the grip of a steep cognitive decline, President Donald Trump has increasingly lashed out, calling for cataclysm, slaughter, and even genocide. As he tries desperately, if ham-handedly, to extricate himself from a losing war, the commander-in-chief of the world’s most destructive military offers up deranged rants, baying for blood and issuing orders that throw the concept of proportionality in warfare out the window.

Trump’s bloodthirsty rhetoric has been borne out in asymmetrical slaughter, with Iranian fatalities exceeding American deaths by multiple orders of magnitude. And this follows similarly lopsided casualty tolls in Trump’s conflicts in Somalia, Venezuela, Yemen, and on the high seas. This low-risk butchery masquerading as warfare harkens back to 19th-century extermination campaigns in which so-called inferior races were massacred in spectacles of slaughter — colonial violence that wiped out ethnic groups and set the stage for 20th-century genocide.

“Every time Iran kills an American Soldier, they will pay for that killing many times over!” Trump recently announced on Truth Social. “This directive has been passed on to Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Daniel Caine, and every Leader in the Military.”

This unhinged command for disproportionate retaliation — which may amount to a violation of international humanitarian law — was featured, mostly without further remark, in news reports with bland headlines, like “Trump pays respects to 4 US service members killed in the Middle East.” It was also, for example, tucked deep inside and presented without further comment in a New York Times article about impending testimony before the Senate Appropriations Committee by Hegseth and Caine.

Trump’s order, and the matter-of-fact coverage from the Times, reminded me of a report by a different Times, almost exactly 199 years earlier: an article from Van Diemen’s Land, the Ireland-sized island to the southeast of Australia that we now know as Tasmania.

White settlers poured onto the island in the early 1800s, wiping out the kangaroos and replacing them with sheep. They treated the Indigenous people no differently. “Thousands were hunted down like wild beasts,” according to the local press. When one of the white people were killed by locals, the Colonial Times reported that other settlers exacted revenge on the Indigenous people that left “sixty of them killed and wounded.” The next year, when members of settler police and military forces were pelted with stones, they responded with gunfire and a bayonet charge that “killed seventy of them, dragging the women and children from the crevices of the rocks, and dashing out their brains.”

The slaughter in Tasmania was the inspiration for author H.G. Wells’s late 19th-century sci-fi classic “War of the Worlds,” in which Martians with superior technology, advanced firepower, and no compunction about annihilating humanity invade England, laying waste to London and driving out its population. “And before we judge of them too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought,” the narrator says in the book’s open. “The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?”

When lawyer Raphael Lemkin formulated the idea of “genocide” after World War II, almost 50 years after Wells wrote “War of the Worlds,” he considered Tasmania a historical case study of his concept. It’s unclear if Trump ever read “War of the Worlds,” though he attended the New York City premiere of the 2005 Steven Spielberg film adaptation; I doubt he understood Wells’s allegory, presuming he knows what an allegory is.

The Tasmanian carnage was part of an age of slaughter and genocide carried out across the globe by European powers and the United States. Trump has long been in the thrall of the precepts of this era of colonial conquest: Might makes right; territorial acquisition through armed intervention; and colonial relationships with, and resource extraction from, conquered foes and weaker nations.

Trump often invokes and praises Andrew Jackson, his 19th-century predecessor in the White House, who owned slaves and implemented a policy of “Indian removal” that culminated in the Trail of Tears, the military’s forced displacement of Native Americans, during which thousands died. Trump advocated “furthering President Jackson’s legacy, expanding his vision, [and] honoring his memory” earlier this year, pronouncing that Old Hickory embodied the “best of the American Spirit.” Trump has even employed America’s contribution to the eradication of indigenous peoples as a punch line. He has made light, on social media, not only of the Trail of Tears but also the Army’s massacre of hundreds of Native Americans at Wounded Knee in South Dakota.

Even the Army’s official history portrays Wounded Knee as a Tasmanian-scale slaughter in which an effort to disarm a group of Lakota religious revivalists resulted in an errant shot, possibly an accidental discharge, that “led immediately to heavy and indiscriminate firing from soldiers,” including the use of artillery, “despite the presence of numerous noncombatants.” In the end, up to 300 Lakota, including women and children, lay dead while “Army casualties totaled 25 killed and 39 wounded, some of whom likely were hit by friendly fire.”

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Such disproportionate mass killings and exterminations were a hallmark of the 19th century. This “destruction of the ‘inferior races’ of four continents prepared the ground for the destruction of six million Jews in Europe,” as the author Sven Lindqvist observed, in his classic text “Exterminate All the Brutes.” We look back on these Holocaust-precipitating slaughters as beyond abhorrent. Or at least we did.

The death toll disparity at Wounded Knee doesn’t compare to the carnage of Trump’s war on Iran. The estimated 3,375 to 6,000 Iranian deaths dwarf the 19 U.S. deaths by 180 to 320 times, or more than two orders of magnitude. (The official U.S. Iran war death toll stands at 18, with the Pentagon omitting one widely reported loss.) The 60-to-1 Tasmanian toll of dead and wounded is a similar ratio as the estimated 39,806 total Iranian casualties compared to the official U.S. count of more than 700 troops who have been killed or wounded.

Trump has also repeatedly touted the lopsided nature of his punitive expedition in Venezuela, a short war in which the U.S. deposed and kidnapped President Nicolás Maduro, creating a de facto U.S. colony run by a quisling. “To have a few injuries, but no death on our side, is really amazing,” Trump bragged after the invasion, later comparing the lack of U.S. fatalities to the substantial death tolls of the (much longer) Korean and Vietnam wars. The 100 or more Venezuelan and Cuban military personnel and civilians killed compared with a handful of U.S. injuries shares a lineage of battlefield massacres like the 1863 U.S. slaughter of 250 to 500 Shoshone — including at least 90 women, children and infants — at Bear River at a cost of 24 U.S. troops, and the up to 6,000 Zulus armed with shields and spears cut down by Gatling guns and artillery compared with 10 British troops killed at Ulundi in southern Africa in 1879.

Trump’s 2025 war against the Houthi government in Yemen — Operation Rough Rider — was similarly lopsided. The airstrike monitoring group Airwars tracked reports of at least 224 civilians in Yemen killed by U.S. airstrikes. This nearly doubled the civilian casualty toll in Yemen from U.S. attacks since 2002, meaning that almost as many civilians were reportedly killed in 52 days as the previous 23 years of airstrikes and commando raids combined. The Yemen Data Project put the death toll at 238 civilians, at a minimum, and another 467 civilians injured. The U.S. also killed hundreds of Houthi fighters and numerous Houthi leaders, according to CENTCOM spokesperson Dave Eastburn, who referred to “credible open sources” citing 650 Houthi casualties. The U.S. did not suffer a single reported fatality during the campaign. And Trump’s relentless strikes in nearby Somalia have amounted to up to 420 deaths at a cost of zero American lives.

The Trump administration’s boat strike campaign in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean, which has killed at least 221 people without the loss of even one U.S. life, is a still more egregious slaughter. In this case, only unarmed civilians are targeted, victims akin to the fleeing Tasmanian women and children who had their skulls bashed in.

There are, of course, myriad differences between Trump’s ongoing war on the world and 19th-century colonial extermination campaigns in Africa, America, Australia, and elsewhere. Trump doesn’t, for example, explicitly assert racial superiority as a reason for his military interventions even if he often lapses into racist rants and is making war in Somalia while deriding Somalis as “garbage.”

But Trump’s more than 20 military interventions, armed conflicts, and outright wars have heightened the increasing trend toward “riskless warfare,” a term coined more than a quarter century ago by Paul Kahn, the director of Yale Law School’s Schell Center for International Human Rights. “It is an image of warfare without the possibility of chivalry,” the prescient Kahn later observed. “At the heart is a violation of the fundamental principle that establishes the internal morality of warfare: self-defense within conditions of reciprocal imposition of risk. Without the imposition of mutual risk, warfare is not war at all.” 

Earlier this decade, in a study of drone warfare, Neil Renic, a scholar of military ethics, refined the concept as “radical asymmetry,” in which “one side has, in a practical sense, overcome the type and degree of physical vulnerability that has long been regarded as an expected and unavoidable feature of war.” Renic sees the drift toward unilateral violence leading to the increasing “perception of the weaker party … from an opponent to be fought and overcome, to one that must be hunted and done away with,” contributing to “dehumanization” of the enemy which, “in some cases … has led to a more severe decline in the targeting practices of the United States, from the morally questionable to the morally indefensible.” This feature of modern warfare harkens back to the age of extermination, when Tasmanians and others were also hunted and done away with.

As Trump has reveled in asymmetrical body counts and called for more disproportionate deaths, he has increasingly fancied himself an alien destroyer like Wells’s Martians; even if he himself doesn’t quite realize it. In one bizarre AI-slop image he posted on Truth Social as the Iran war went south, Trump appears to be striding from a spaceship — on some platform high above Earth — as legions of weapons-toting alien warriors flank him. In another, a gigantic Trump is seated at a command console in a space station floating high above the world. On screens above him, we see huge explosions apparently going off simultaneously back on Earth. On still another, an indistinct country is seemingly being ravaged by lasers.

“Then in a moment the Heat Ray was brought to bear, and the town became a heap of fiery ruins,” wrote Wells in “War of the Worlds,” describing the Martians’ weapon of mass destruction. “The houses caved in as they dissolved at its touch and darted out flames; the trees changed to fire with a roar.” Wells referenced the “massacre of mankind” and “the rout of civilization.” As Trump has made disproportionate slaughter his signature accomplishment from Latin America to the Middle East to Africa, he has channeled his inner Martian. “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” he wrote of Iran on Truth Social, promising the “entire country could be taken out” and warning he might bomb Iran “back to the Stone Ages.”

Trump’s unhinged rhetoric is further driven home by the remaining imagery in the command-console post: a mushroom cloud from a monstrous nuclear blast with text on a screen announcing “target destroyed,” while a glowering Trump is poised to push a glowing red button that suggests he is about to incinerate the planet. Trump’s annihilationist fantasies are especially disturbing since he controls a nuclear arsenal that can destroy the world many times over. (“We have enough nuclear weapons to blow up the world 150 times,” was how Trump put it.) 

Iranians, Latin Americans, Somalis, and Yemenis have all been in the crosshairs of America’s lopsided killing campaigns during his second term, but in this new age of slaughter, all of us are potentially targets in Trump’s war on the world.

The post When a President Promises a Massacre appeared first on The Intercept.

Since the start of the conflict, the Department of War has posted the official count of casualties on the website of the Defense Casualty Analysis System, or DCAS, which tracks “deceased, wounded, ill or injured” service members for Congress and the president. This official total of dead and wounded personnel, as documented over months of reporting by The Intercept, has been a gross undercount, stemming from what that same official previously called a “casualty cover-up.”

But after a series of Iranian strikes on U.S. facilities in the Middle East in July, the Pentagon last week rolled out a new approach. Casualties since July 7 are now counted separately on a new webpage with a generic designation: “Overseas Operations.”

Two hundred and seventy-three U.S. troops were killed or wounded since July 7, according to the Monday total on the new Overseas Operations page.

When combined with the existing DCAS page for the Iran war, the official count stands at 704, an 83 percent increase in casualties since April 8, the day the first ceasefire deal was struck between the Trump administration and Iran. When counting known casualties overlooked by the DCAS page, the total exceeds 900 personnel.

For months, the Pentagon has failed to comment on DCAS anomalies reported by The Intercept nor the reason for the change in the way it now counts casualties, which was first reported by the New York Times. Last week, the Pentagon told the newspaper that “since Operation Epic Fury has concluded, the department classifies casualties as overseas operations in the CENTCOM area of responsibility.” Central Command oversees U.S. military operations in the Middle East.

“This is certainly designed to conceal the count of the wounded,” the official said, while noting that “incompetence” has also caused confusion in the casualty count.

The change comes after a July 20 rant by Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell who claimed reports of a Pentagon effort to withhold news of dozens of U.S. casualties were “baseless and malicious” and a U.S. official’s disclosure to The Intercept that same day that recent attacks on U.S. bases by Iran had wounded “far more” personnel than the Pentagon had acknowledged.

The casualty spike resulted from Iranian attacks on at least nine U.S. outposts across the Middle East since July 9, according to a second U.S. official who spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak with the press.

Iran’s military managed to overwhelm U.S. air defense systems using a mix of attack drones and advanced ballistic missiles, despite months of claims by President Donald Trump and self-styled War Secretary Pete Hegseth that Iran’s military was annihilated.

Last month, the tally of wounded personnel fluctuated by the day in the wake of increased Iranian attacks. On July 21, the casualty count on DCAS for Operation Epic Fury, the military’s official designation for the Iran war, stood at 500. Now, it has shrunk to 431.

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For months, The Intercept found anomalies with the counts offered on the DCAS website. On April 21, for example, the number of wounded-in-action troops declined by 15 without public acknowledgment by the War Department. Despite repeated questions for months, the Pentagon has not commented on the disparities in its casualty count.

Prior reporting by The Intercept also found DCAS is missing hundreds of dead and wounded personnel from Epic Fury. The Pentagon list of the names of the dead is still missing Maj. Sorffly Davius, a signals and communication officer with the New York Army National Guard who was assigned to the headquarters of the 42nd Infantry Division and reportedly died of sudden illness while on duty in Camp Buehring, Kuwait, on March 6. Davius’s death was widely acknowledged even as it was excluded from the the official count: Rep. Mike Lawler, R-N.Y., spoke about him during a memorial service that month, and Gen. Dan Caine, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recognized Davius while “honoring our fallen.”

While DCAS provides a running tally of “non-hostile” deaths — meaning those who died from accidents or by illness — it doesn’t include “non-hostile” injuries. The DCAS figures for Epic Fury show that 65 Navy personnel were wounded in action. Missing, however, are the more than 200 sailors treated for smoke inhalation or lacerations due to a March 12 fire that raged aboard the USS Gerald R. Ford. The aircraft carrier had been conducting round-the-clock flight operations to, Caine said, “project combat power” in the Middle East.

Recent reporting by the War Horse, using Pentagon records obtained via the Freedom of Information Act, found more than 400 casualties were recorded between February 28 and April 8. Seventy occurred on March 18 alone, but this huge single-day toll was never reported by the Pentagon.

The records provide more granular detail than DCAS, revealing that at least 17 troops sustained life-threatening injuries. They show that U.S. troops suffered shrapnel wounds, broken bones, smoke inhalation, and other injuries. The most common injury recorded, however, was head trauma — which affected at least 170 troops, according to the data.

President Donald Trump has long dismissed brain injuries as “headaches” and “not serious.” 

The post The Pentagon Found a New Way to Undercount U.S. Casualties in Iran appeared first on The Intercept.

The military personnel, clad in a mix of combat fatigues and gym attire, piled into a bunker, huddling in the darkness. “Guys, off the walls if we can,” a woman, likely a medic, advised, warning about the danger of traumatic brain injuries.

The footage, reportedly from Jordan’s Muwaffaq Salti Air Base, where three U.S. troops were killed during Iranian ballistic missile and drone attacks on July 17 and 18, offers a glimpse of the dangers faced by U.S. forces across the Middle East.

The attacks are continued demonstrations of Iran’s ability to target U.S. bases across the Middle East and kill U.S. troops, despite months of claims by President Donald Trump and self-styled War Secretary Pete Hegseth that Iran’s military was annihilated. As this fiction has collapsed, U.S. Central Command has refused to discuss the number and scale of the strikes. “I have nothing for you on that,” Maj. Emma Thompson, the command’s media operations chief, told The Intercept.

Iran has attacked at least nine U.S. outposts across the Middle East since July 9, according to a U.S. official who spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak with the press. Several of these bases suffered “significant” damage in the attacks, the source said.

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Iran’s military managed to overwhelm U.S. air defense systems using a mix of attack drones and advanced ballistic missiles, according to the official. Numerous factors make the missiles difficult to defeat, the source said: They travel at hypersonic speeds, have complex navigational capabilities including methods to circumvent jamming, and some can be guided or steered.

Stocks of advanced air-defense missiles, like Patriot and THAAD interceptors, are so depleted that U.S. forces are not shooting down all Iranian missiles and drones aimed at U.S. and allied targets across the Middle East, the official said, referencing a Friday report by NBC News that revealed the tactic. The official told The Intercept that the U.S. allows missiles through its defenses only in cases where a strike is judged not to imperil U.S. lives.

The U.S. and its allies burned through more than 11,000 munitions, including large amounts of defensive missiles, in the first 16 days of the war alone, according to a March analysis by the Royal United Services Institute. The report predicted then that U.S. forces were about a month away from running out of THAAD interceptors. An April report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies noted that “diminished munitions stockpiles have created a near-term risk.” A follow-up report the next month warned that it would “take three or more years from today to return to prewar inventory levels” of Patriot and THAAD missiles.

Brig. Gen. Hossein Mohebbi, an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps spokesperson, said that “Patriot systems have been weakened to such an extent that Iranian missiles and drones are reaching their targets without being intercepted.” He said that during a flurry of attacks from July 8 to July 22, Iran struck numerous air defense and radar installations, including six “Patriot air-defense radars.”

CENTCOM did not reply to a request for comment on the claims by the U.S. official or Mohebbi.

The official confirmed that Iran also recently attacked Tower 22, a U.S. military outpost on the northern Jordanian border with Syria. Satellite images as well as photos and videos circulating online indicate the base suffered extensive damage. (In 2024, a drone attack on Tower 22 by an Iran-backed militia killed three U.S. troops.) 

Iran says it also attacked U.S. military facilities at Jordan’s Prince Hassan Air Base, King Faisal Air Base, and Al-Azraq Air Base; Kuwait’s Al-Adiri base, Ahmed Al-Jaber Air Base, Camp Doha, Ali Al Salem Air Base, and Camp Arifjan; Naval Support Activity Sheikh Isa in Bahrain; and Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar.

Thompson refused to confirm Iranian attacks on various U.S. bases across the Middle East. “We don’t comment on battle damage assessments,” she said.

Iran has fired between 8,000 and 9,000 drones and missiles at targets across the Middle East since the U.S.–Israeli war began in February, according to the official. Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guard Corps recently warned residents of countries that host American forces to keep at least 1,650 feet away from any buildings housing U.S. personnel. The group is also fielding crowdsourced information on “new locations of the American occupying forces” from people in these countries.

The IRGC specifically mentioned “covert and secret” facilities in a statement posted on their website. CIA sites in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere in the region were reportedly struck, possibly with Russian assistance, according to Reuters. A former Pentagon consultant with ties to the defense industry told The Intercept that Russia has certainly provided “targeting support” to Iran during the conflict but did not comment directly on attacks on CIA facilities.

Despite Trump’s insistence that Russia and China are “not participating” in the Iran war, Hegseth recently said both are “enabling some of the things Iran is doing.” In March, CIA Director John Ratcliffe told senators that the “Iranians are requesting intelligence assistance from Russia, from China and from other adversaries of the United States,” but said he would only talk about what they might have provided in a classified setting.

The lethal strike on Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan killed Pvt. Isabella Gonzales, 19, of Carrollton, Texas; Lt. Tyler James Feehan, 25, of Ewa Beach, Hawaii; and Sgt. Angel S. Rampersad, 28, of Ozone Park, New York. All three soldiers were from air defense units. They were “not actively engaged in anti-aircraft activity” during the attacks, according to a different “defense official” who spoke on background because they were not authorized to disclose the information.

An Iranian drone attack on Erbil Air Base, Iraq, on July 18 led to the death of Army Sgt. Michael Emmanuel Swinton, 30, of Fayetteville, North Carolina, and left another soldier injured during what CENTCOM called a “controlled detonation” of the downed aircraft.

In April, Hegseth told the Senate Armed Services Committee that “CENTCOM had every possible measure they could to ensure that our troops are protected.” The U.S. official would not address possible failures of force protection measures that led to the most recent deaths, due to operational security. But the official said that Hegseth’s claims “obviously were not true.” They noted that it was no secret that earlier casualties were caused by a lack of sufficient overhead protection, referencing a March 1 drone attack on the U.S. base at Port Shuaiba, Kuwait, that killed six troops.

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Hundreds of U.S. personnel have been killed or wounded in the war. Months of reporting by The Intercept found the Pentagon’s official casualty tally is a gross undercount, which another U.S. government official called a “casualty cover-up.”

Israel, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq, and Qatar said they intercepted attack drones on Monday, two days after the United States abruptly suspended a two-week campaign of airstrikes against Iran amid concern over the dwindling stocks of air defense missiles and a reported dearth of Iranian targets. Trump insisted on Tuesday that there had been some “very good talks” with Iran but failed to offer evidence when confronted with Iranian denials.

Saudi Arabia said on Monday that the drone attacks it suffered were “carried out by Iran-backed militias operating in Iraq.” On Tuesday, Jordanian authorities said they downed a drone in the east of the country, near its border with Iraq and Saudi Arabia.

The post Iran Has Figured Out How to Overwhelm U.S. Air Defenses appeared first on The Intercept.

A crushing wave of attacks in Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, and Kuwait left U.S. forces in “disarray,” causing significant damage to facilities, dozens of injuries, and the first troops killed in action since a June ceasefire collapsed, according to a U.S. official. Three Army soldiers were killed in “devastating” ballistic missile attacks on Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan, said the official whom The Intercept is not naming because they are not authorized to speak publicly.

Pvt. Isabella Gonzales, 19, of Carrollton, Texas, was killed in action on Friday. Lt. Tyler James Feehan, 25, of Ewa Beach, Hawaii, was killed on Saturday. The third soldier is provisionally listed as missing, but the official said that “unidentified remains” found after the attack were “certainly” those of the missing soldier. A second official confirmed this assessment. At least four and as many as 10 troops were also injured in the attacks in Jordan, according to the first official.

In northern Iraq, a U.S. service member was killed and another wounded on Saturday when ordnance from a downed Iranian drone exploded. CENTCOM claimed that the injuries occurred during a “controlled detonation” of the downed aircraft. 

The surge in deaths and injuries raise the official U.S. casualty count to at least 446. U.S. casualties have increased by more than 15 percent since the first ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran was struck on April 8. The first official told The Intercept that recent attacks had wounded “far more” personnel than are reflected in the Pentagon’s current casualty count. They did not provide numbers but said “dozens” had received medical attention.

Neither CENTCOM nor the Pentagon replied to numerous requests by The Intercept for information on the casualties, nor would either address the effort to cover up U.S. losses.

Reporting by The Intercept previously found that the Pentagon’s official tally of dead and wounded personnel is a gross undercount, stemming from what one U.S. government official called a “casualty cover-up.” The Defense Casualty Analysis System, or DCAS, which tracks “deceased, wounded, ill or injured” service members for Congress and the president, is missing hundreds of dead and wounded personnel. The official tally was also previously adjusted downward by 15 casualties without explanation. For months, the Pentagon has ignored requests by The Intercept for comment or clarification.

On Monday, the New York Times reported that the Pentagon withheld information on “dozens of U.S. military injuries in Iran War.” Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell called the article “baseless and malicious.”

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U.S. bases across the Middle East suffered “significant” damage over the last week, according to the official speaking on the condition of anonymity. That source said Iran had learned how to defeat U.S. air defense systems by overwhelming them using a mix of ballistic missiles and attack drones. They said multiple U.S. aircraft had also been damaged in the attacks. Videos circulating on social media showed the impact and aftermath of Friday’s missile strikes on Muwaffaq Salti Air Base.

“They’ve got some missiles. They’ve got some drones,” Trump said on Sunday of an Iranian military he has insisted, for months, had been annihilated. “We hit them very hard, again, tonight and we did that in honor of the probably three, probably three as opposed to two, great patriots.” 

U.S. Central Command announced later on Sunday night that it had “successfully completed the ninth consecutive evening of strikes,” claiming that the “U.S. military is holding Iran accountable at the Commander in Chief’s direction.”

The office of self-styled War Secretary Pete Hegseth attempted to keep information about the new casualties under wraps. “We have nothing to provide beyond what is listed on the website,” a representative of Hegseth’s office told The Intercept late Friday night, without specifying which website, when questioned about U.S. casualties. Hours later, U.S. Central Command acknowledged “two U.S. service members in Jordan were killed in action” on Friday amid “Iranian ballistic missile and drone attacks.” The command also disclosed that four other troops “were medically evacuated to Jordanian hospitals,” an unspecified number of other troops were evaluated for injuries, and “one service member is currently missing in action.” CENTCOM later stripped “in action” from the announcement of the missing soldier but would not explain the reason to The Intercept.

“Godspeed, heroes,” Hegseth wrote on X. “Their sacrifice only stiffens our resolve.”

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The spike in U.S. casualties over the last week followed the Pentagon quietly adding another fatality to its rolls earlier Monday. After Iran claimed to have killed three U.S. personnel in Kuwait last weekend, U.S. Central Command said last Sunday that there were “zero reports of U.S. service member deaths or injuries in the region.” But last Monday, the Pentagon’s official toll of injuries and deaths in the war quietly climbed upward.

After ignoring numerous requests for clarification, an official from Office of the Assistant to the Secretary of War for Public Affairs intimated the fatality added last week was Cmdr. Gabriel Edwards, the commanding officer of Helicopter Sea Combat Squadron (HSC) 5 who went missing almost two weeks prior, following his “helicopter’s emergency landing in the Arabian Sea.” But that official refused to confirm it.

Historically, there was little lag between a casualty occurring in the field and its inclusion in the DCAS system, according to two people who used to work on the official casualty tally.

Asked why it took a week after the search for Edwards ended to add him to the casualty rolls, the second official said a blend of incompetence and deliberate slow-walking of casualty data has slowed down the process of updating publicly available statistics. 

For months, the Pentagon list of the names of the dead has also been missing Maj. Sorffly Davius, a signals and communication officer with the New York Army National Guard who was assigned to the headquarters of the 42nd Infantry Division and reportedly died of sudden illness while on duty in Camp Buehring, Kuwait, on March 6. Davius’s death was widely acknowledged even as it was excluded from the official count: Rep. Mike Lawler, R-N.Y., spoke about him during a memorial service that month, and Gen. Dan Caine, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recognized Davius while “honoring our fallen.”

Counting Davius and the “missing” soldier in Jordan, the U.S. has suffered 19 deaths during the Iran war. Parnell said on Monday that “casualty information is publicly available and regularly updated online on the Defense Casualty Analysis System for everyone, including the media, to review.” DCAS was, uncharacteristically, not updated as of Monday afternoon and instead offered outdated figures posted Friday morning.

While DCAS provides a running tally of “non-hostile” deaths — meaning those who died from accidents or by illness — it doesn’t include “non-hostile” injuries. The DCAS figures show that 68 Navy personnel have been wounded in action. Missing, however, are the more than 200 sailors treated for smoke inhalation or lacerations due to a March 12 fire that raged aboard the USS Gerald R. Ford. The aircraft carrier had been conducting round-the-clock flight operations to, in Caine’s words, “project combat power” in the Middle East.

The casualty numbers also don’t include a sailor who suffered a non-combat-related injury aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln as it was involved in “strike missions in support of Operation Epic Fury” on March 25.

On April 21, the number of wounded-in-action troops declined by 15 without public comment from the War Department. Despite repeated questions over three months, the Pentagon has not explained the disparity in its casualty count.

The Trump administration began undermining transparency surrounding U.S. military casualties almost a decade ago. Not long after Trump first took office in 2017, and following an uptick of violence in the conflict, the Pentagon stopped releasing immediate information about American combat deaths in Afghanistan.

After an Iranian missile attack on Al-Asad Air Base in Iraq on January 8, 2020, Trump peddled a complete fiction to the public. “No Americans were harmed in last night’s attack by the Iranian regime,” he said at the time. CENTCOM ultimately admitted that 110 troops suffered traumatic brain injuries. An inspector general report indicated that the number of wounded may have been even higher, because “DoD cannot determine whether all Service members are being properly diagnosed and treated for TBIs in deployed settings.”

On the campaign trail in 2022, Trump claimed that for a year and a half of his first presidency, the U.S. suffered no deaths in the Afghan war. “In 18 months in Afghanistan, we lost nobody,” he said. But an Associated Press investigation found that there was no year-and-half span during Trump’s first term when there were no combat deaths.

Last spring, The Intercept reported on an effort by CENTCOM, the Pentagon, and the White House to keep casualties of the U.S. war against Yemen’s Houthis under wraps. It represented a departure from the Biden administration, when the Office of the Secretary of Defense and CENTCOM provided detailed data on attacks on military bases across the Middle East — including to this reporter. CENTCOM had provided the total number of strikes, breakdowns by country, and the total number injured, and even individual synopses of more than 150 attacks.

The post U.S. Official: Iran Attacks Injured “Far More” Troops Than Pentagon Admits appeared first on The Intercept.

The increase followed the collapse last week of the ceasefire with Iran amid tit-for-tat attacks between the countries.

As hostilities escalated, Iran called for revenge on the U.S. for killing Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei at the outset of the war in February.

The numbers for both wounded and dead U.S. service members in the war increased on Monday, according to the Defense Department.

Iran claimed Sunday that it “demolished the U.S. Army’s surface-to-surface missile base” in Kuwait, killing three American military personnel.

U.S. Central Command responded: “There are zero reports of U.S. service member deaths or injuries in the region.”

On Monday, however, the Pentagon’s Iran war death toll, which was last updated Friday, went up by one.

Pentagon statistics show a sailor died in what was provisionally deemed a “non-hostile” fatality with a “pending” caveat, meaning it could later be revised to a hostile death.

It marks the first U.S. fatality on the Pentagon rolls since March. It was not immediately clear whether the new death listed occurred in Kuwait.

The U.S. Office of the Secretary of Defense, CENTCOM, and the Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Ceasefire Collapse

Iran’s military said on Monday that it launched strikes aimed at American military targets in Jordan, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Oman. Hours before, U.S. forces attacked Iran in response to strikes on commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz.

President Donald Trump renewed his past protection-racket threats to seize the Strait and begin charging a 20 percent toll on all goods passing through it.

“We’re gonna keep the strait, and we’ll probably run it,” he said on Monday. “We’re gonna get paid for guarding it, a lot of money.”

Following a week of public funeral ceremonies for Khamenei, his son and successor Mojtaba Khamenei called for retribution for the late supreme leader’s assassination.

“We pledge that we will avenge your pure blood and the blood of all those martyred in these two wars from the criminal and disgraced killers,” he said. “This revenge is the demand of our nation, and it must certainly be carried out.”

In addition to killing Khamenei, Trump’s war on Iran has killed thousands of Iranian civilians, including more than 150 — most of them children — in an attack on an elementary school.

U.S. Death Toll

The official number of dead and wounded U.S. personnel stands at 428, a more than 11 percent increase since the first ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran was struck on April 8.

Reporting by The Intercept previously found that the Pentagon’s official count of dead and wounded personnel is a gross undercount, stemming from what one U.S. government official called a “casualty cover-up.” The Defense Casualty Analysis System, or DCAS, which tracks “deceased, wounded, ill or injured” service members for Congress and the president, is missing hundreds of known casualties.

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The number of casualties in the DCAS system fluctuates from time to time. On Monday, the number of U.S. deaths during Operation Epic Fury, the military’s name for the campaign in Iran, increased by one, to 14 total.

For a short time in May, however, the count was already at 14 before dropping back to 13, without explanation. Following the drop, DCAS listed 13 hostile and non-hostile U.S. deaths.

The Pentagon list of the dead is missing Maj. Sorffly Davius, a signals and communication officer with the New York Army National Guard who reportedly died of a sudden illness in Kuwait on March 6.

Davius’s death was widely acknowledged even as it was excluded from the official count. Rep. Mike Lawler, R-N.Y., spoke about him during a memorial service and Gen. Dan Caine, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, publicly recognized Davius as a fallen service member.

Wounded U.S. Personnel

On Monday, the number of U.S. wounded from the Iran war rose by one, to 414.

Like the official U.S. death toll, it has fluctuated, rising from 385 to 428 during a pause in hostilities in April. Later that month, the number suddenly declined by 15 without public comment from the Defense Department, leading to questions about manipulation of the figures or incompetence at the Pentagon.

While DCAS provides a running tally of “non-hostile” deaths — meaning those who died from accidents or by illness — it doesn’t include “non-hostile” injuries.

The DCAS figures show that 65 Navy personnel have been wounded in action. More than 200 sailors injured during a fire aboard the USS Gerald R. Ford in March are, however, missing from the tally.

The post Iran Claims to Kill 3 U.S. Service Members in Kuwait appeared first on The Intercept.

Maybe.

“To me, I think it’s over,” President Donald Trump said on Wednesday, referring to a preliminary truce inked in Islamabad, Pakistan, in June. That ceasefire, an American capitulation intended to reopen the Strait of Hormuz — a key oil and gas shipping route whose closure by Iran was wreaking havoc on the global economy — never quite took effect. The price of oil spiked to its highest level in weeks following Trump’s Wednesday remarks.

“I don’t want to deal with them anymore. They’re scum,” said Trump, referring to Iran’s leaders, as he wrapped up his trip to the NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey. “They’re cuckoo.” At one point in his remarks, the 80-year-old president claimed that a U.S. warship was attacked by the “the Islamic Republic of Japan.”

The June agreement between the United States and Iran, designed to usher in further negotiations toward permanently ending the war that Trump began on February 28, echoed another faux ceasefire, signed in April, which was also largely a fiction.

Trump’s statement that he “thinks” the ceasefire has concluded surprised one U.S. official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “Shouldn’t he know?” the source said.

That official said the Trump administration had mismanaged the conflict and been repeatedly outmaneuvered by Iran, leading to a “twilight state” between war and peace, which has allowed Tehran to fortify its defenses and reconsolidate power. “He must be trying for the record of how many times you can lose the same war.”

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An Intercept analysis found that, despite celebrating the June agreement as a victory, the Trump administration failed to achieve any of its war aims. For weeks, the White House has failed to respond to repeated requests for confirmation that the June ceasefire had collapsed and no goals of the war were reached. The White House did not reply to a question on Wednesday concerning the collapse of the ceasefire nor Trump’s claim of an attack by “the Islamic Republic of Japan.”

The United States attacked Iran on Tuesday, after reimposing sanctions on Iranian oil sales. U.S. Central Command said that it had struck “over 80 targets with precision munitions as an immediate response to Iran’s latest attacks on commercial vessels transiting the Strait of Hormuz.” Iran did not claim responsibility for Tuesday’s attacks on commercial ships, including a Saudi oil tanker and a Qatari ship carrying liquefied natural gas in waters off Oman’s coast.

CENTCOM also claimed to have attacked “more than 60 Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps small boats in and near the strait.” U.S. officials have previously claimed to have completely annihilated Iran’s naval forces. “Their Navy is gone,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on April 11, just after the first ceasefire was announced and fell apart.

Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Iran’s top negotiator and Parliament speaker, accused the United States of multiple violations of the June ceasefire agreement, in a Tuesday post. “The era of bullying and extortion is over. It leads nowhere. We don’t fold,” he wrote. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps said in a statement published on state media on Wednesday, that in response to U.S. violations of the ceasefire, it had attacked 85 U.S. military sites in Bahrain and Kuwait and also shot down an American MQ-9 Reaper drone.

“They’re vicious, violent people,” Trump said during his remarks in Ankara.

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During the president’s war of choice on Iran, the U.S. and Israel struck more than 17,000 separate targets in 40 days — a rate of strikes almost unprecedented in modern conflict, according to the civilian harm-monitoring group Airwars. On the first day of the war, the U.S. attacked the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab, killing more than 150 people, most of them children. In the weeks that followed, tens of thousands more civilians would be killed or wounded in U.S.–Israeli strikes, according to World Health Organization estimates. 

The official number of dead and wounded U.S. personnel stands at 426, an almost 11 percent increase since the first ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran was struck on April 8. For months, The Intercept has reported that the Pentagon’s official tally of dead and wounded military personnel from the Iran war is a gross undercount, stemming from what another U.S. government official called a “casualty cover-up.” The Defense Casualty Analysis System, which tracks “deceased, wounded, ill or injured” service members for Congress and the president, is missing hundreds of known American casualties. The true number exceeds 625.

Trump vowed more attacks on Iran at the NATO summit. “I’ll give them a little warning we’re going to hit them hard tonight,” he said. On Monday, Trump threatened attacks on Iran’s civilian infrastructure that would “affect 91 million people,” almost all of them civilians.

“The child-killing and terrorist U.S. military in the early hours of this morning openly violated the ceasefire and violated the Islamabad understanding by launching an airstrike on a number of coastal bases and civilian stations,” the IRGC said in its statement.

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CENTCOM claimed to have struck Iranian air defense systems, “command and control networks,” coastal radar sites, and other targets and threatened further attacks. “CENTCOM forces remain postured and prepared to hold Iran accountable when the agreement is not adhered to or obeyed,” the command posted on X.

After previously failing to make good on his pledge to ensure Iran “can never obtain a nuclear weapon,” since Tehran still maintains its stockpile of enriched uranium, Trump said on Wednesday that the U.S. would “de-nuke it.”

The U.S. official laughed when appraised of Trump’s pledge. “What is that supposed to mean?” he asked of Trump’s denuclearization statement. The official said Trump had painted himself into a corner. “There is one word that describes this man and this war: a trainwreck.”

The post Another Trump Ceasefire With Iran Crumbles appeared first on The Intercept.

The White House has been desperate to find a way out of the quagmire of its own making in Iran, leading to the remote signing on June 15 of a memorandum of understanding that promises extraordinary concessions to the Islamic Republic. Stipulations once deemed a “nightmare for Israel” by American politicians and dismissed by President Donald Trump as “not acceptable” — such as total sanctions relief and the unfreezing of billions of dollars of funds held abroad — are now reality. Despite attempts by the Trump administration to spin this as an achievement of all of America’s goals and an “unconditional surrender” by Iran, the deal has been met with skepticism, derision, anger, and mockery by Democrats and even some Republicans, pushing close Trump allies such as Fox News host Mark Levin and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz to admonish the president for doing the “unthinkable” by capitulating to Iran.

In Israel, the deal has been seen far more uniformly across the political spectrum as an immense and almost incomprehensible betrayal by the United States, an unforeseen cruelty by Trump, and an incalculable failure by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Only 11 percent of Israelis say that their country won the war against Iran, and a whopping 71 percent do not expect Trump to look out for Israeli interests in future negotiations. One Likud member of the Knesset expressed his frustration by filming himself taking off his “Make America Great Again” hat and instead putting on a “Total Victory” hat, a phrase invoked by Netanyahu to justify the wholesale destruction of the Gaza Strip.

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In Iran, the atmosphere is still not entirely jubilant. Much of Iran’s media and many officials have indeed taken a triumphant attitude: The front page of Javan, an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-aligned newspaper, depicted a crowd of Iranians breaking through a wall of threats made by the Trump administration, and Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Iran’s chief negotiator, claimed that “everything we wanted to achieve through military action, we achieved many times over through negotiation.” But past betrayals are, after all, far too recent to forget.

It was only in April, for instance, when Israel unilaterally insisted it wasn’t party to the ceasefire in Lebanon and continued its war there. Previous negotiations with America only served as a cover for war preparations in June 2025 and February 2026. This has resulted in a national mood that is much more cautious than the elation that many felt after the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the Iran nuclear deal negotiated under Barack Obama and agreed to by the Rouhani administration, was adopted in 2015.

While an overwhelming majority of the country has backed the diplomatic track, criticism of the efforts of the team lead by Ghalibaf and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi has burned subtly in the background since early April. Supporters of the coalition known as the Front of Islamic Revolution Stability, representing the largest faction of the conservatives in the Iranian Parliament, have begun making their objections known, countering previous attempts by those in power to present a united front and to dispense with hardliner-versus-reformist politicking amid the war.

Criticism of current diplomatic efforts on the Iranian state television program “Soraya” in late May led to the suspension of the program days later. In response, its host, Mohsen Maqsoodi, held live conversations in Tehran’s Valiasr Square, where political commentator Ali Abdi criticized the state for not striking Israel as its army continues to bulldoze Lebanon, which led to that series’ cancellation as well. Rumors swirled online that the cancellation was owed to an intervention by an adviser to Ghalibaf.

After Araghchi gave an interview on state TV on June 12 saying that Iran would have to make concessions in its dealings, angry demonstrators who were attending nightly state-sponsored rallies demanded the diplomatic corps remember the “blood of the Leader [Khamenei],” with one speaker in Tehran’s Enghelab Square leading marchers in chants of “Death to the compromiser,” against those who think “America has something to offer [Iran].”

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In Parliament, conservatives affiliated or allied with the Front have made their criticism vocal, with members calling for Araghchi to be barred from contacting Trump administration negotiator Steve Witkoff and demanding Parliament see the deal before it is signed. One representative called the agreement worse than “the JCPOA and [the Treaty of] Turkmenchay,” referring to the 1828 treaty that ceded swathes of Iranian territory to the Russian Empire. 

Tehran representative Mahmoud Nabavian has been arguably the most prominent member of Parliament criticizing the government’s diplomats, castigating Araghchi for leaving gaps in the memorandum of understanding that America could exploit, namely the immediate reopening of the Strait of Hormuz erasing Iran’s economic leverage, and the lack of clarity in the document about timelines for the lifting of sanctions and the exit of American forces from the region.

The public criticism has less so outlined how exactly Iran could extract more concessions. But it appears such sentiment is now being expressed at the highest level of government: Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei. In a statement announcing his approval of the deal, Mojtaba raised the eyebrows of some analysts by saying that he “had a different view” than what was agreed to by his negotiators, but nevertheless acceded to the wishes of President Masoud Pezeshkian on the condition that Iran rejects “excessive demands” made by the United States, remarking that the nation “await[s] the realization of the aforementioned conditions.”

This kind of public and immediate skepticism of a deal agreed to by the elected government was not the type of messaging made by Mojtaba’s father, Ali Khamenei, who reserved public criticism of the red lines crossed in JCPOA negotiations until the deal had been torn up years later by the Trump administration. Coverage in Axios from an Israeli analyst speculated that Mojtaba means to place any failure of the deal firmly on the shoulders of the Iranian president.

While the deal has yielded extraordinary concessions for Iran, there are already dark clouds looming. Concerns are emerging among other members of Parliament about the agreement requiring cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency, which was suspended last year by the elected legislature. More importantly, the first clause of the agreement — which requires an immediate and permanent end to the war in Lebanon — is already being shattered. 

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Israel, as it did when the ceasefire was initially achieved in early April, has again argued that it must remain in southern Lebanon for as long as Israel’s national security demands it. A ceasefire apparently brokered between Hezbollah and Israel on Friday was broken within minutes as Israel continued to bombard the Lebanese south. An order has apparently come down on Saturday from Netanyahu and Defense Minister Israel Katz for the Israeli military to cease firing in Lebanon, but not withdraw from any of its positions and respond to any Hezbollah attack on its occupying forces. This leaves open the question of how Israeli military doctrine in southern Lebanon is actually supposed to change.

The United States has also taken active steps to secure more concessions from Iran outside of the explicit directives of the deal, with Vice President JD Vance saying that the $300 billion in reconstruction funds would not be released to Iran unless the nation stopped funding “terrorist organization[s]” like Hezbollah. The memorandum of understanding includes no mention of Iran’s support for allied organizations abroad, nor its ballistic missile program, both of which were primary targets of the Israeli–American war.

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Iran, for its part, closed the Strait of Hormuz on Saturday in response to Israel’s refusal to stop the war. While it is still sending negotiators to Switzerland to speak with Vance, Iran is apparently not going there to negotiate a final deal just yet but instead demand U.S. compliance with the terms of the agreement. There is, as of now, still little indication at this time that the U.S. will agree to the demand for a total withdrawal of Israeli forces from Lebanon, despite surprising recent criticism from Trump and Vance of Israel’s scorched-earth tactics in the country. 

For the moment, Israeli officials continue to dig in their heels, demanding further and further action, and stirring tension on other fronts like the West Bank, in an attempt to divert attention and lessen the blow that the majority of Israeli society agrees the country has suffered. For National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, there is no possibility of acceptance of the diplomatic track, remarking on Friday: “For every tear of an Israeli mother, a thousand Lebanese mothers must weep. All of Lebanon must burn!”

The post The Surprising Reaction Inside Iran to Its War Victory appeared first on The Intercept.

Company records show that Israel petitioned Meta to take down Facebook and Instagram posts expressing support for Iran, opposition to Israel, and even depictions of Iranian missile impacts.

The government flagged a variety of materials related to the war, including posts mourning the death of Ayatollah Khamenei following his assassination by the U.S. and Israel on the opening day of the conflict, content supportive of Iran’s retaliatory attacks, and Iranian accounts that shared military analysis and propaganda sympathetic to the Iranian regime’s perspective.

In some cases, Meta complied with the censorship requests, the records show, though it is unclear on what grounds. Meta maintains that it only removes content as required by law or materials that violate its speech policies.

When asked how many Iran-related takedown requests had been granted to date since the war began, the company did not answer. The Israeli Ministry of Justice, which submits takedown requests to social media platforms, did not respond to a request for comment.

Israel’s social media lobbying is not new; for years the nation has leaned on its close relationship with Meta to push for targeted enforcement of the company’s content moderation rulebook.

Israel’s Office of the State Attorney routinely lodges complaints to social media platforms on behalf of state security agencies about content deemed illegal or said to promote “terrorism,” according to its website. In the documents reviewed by The Intercept, the office in some cases made no claim that the social media content violated Israeli law. Instead, the office asked that posts or accounts should be removed because they were in violation of Meta’s content moderation rulebook.

Meta, for instance, designates Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps a “Dangerous Organization,” and prohibits users from engaging in many forms of positive speech about its actions. This means posts supportive of retaliatory missile launches by the IRGC, for instance, could run afoul of the company’s rules. No such prohibition exists for users who post favorably about the U.S. or Israeli militaries.

Meta did not respond to questions about the Iran war requests, but spokesperson Daniel Roberts provided a statement to The Intercept. “Anyone is able to report content they think violates our rules. Regardless of who or how a piece of content is flagged, we assess it based on our policies, which govern what is and isn’t allowed on our platform. It is wrong and irresponsible to imply that these requests are in any way unusual or improper.”

Meta has faced scrutiny, specifically in the Middle East, for removing content that doesn’t violate the company’s rules. A 2022 audit commissioned by the company itself found discrepancies in its content moderation practices between Arabic and Hebrew content. “Arabic content had greater over-enforcement (e.g., erroneously removing Palestinian voice) on a per user basis.” the company found. A 2023 report by the company’s inhouse Oversight Board described the “over-enforcement” of the company’s Dangerous Organizations and Individuals blacklist, disproportionately composed of Muslim and Middle Eastern entities.

Meta has long claimed that as an American company, it is legally required to sometimes remove content pertaining to certain entities sanctioned by the U.S., such as the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. But legal scholars say that has little to no precedent or basis in existing sanctions law, which focus on matters of material support rather than political speech. It’s a policy that has created an immense ideological slant: A company headquartered in California can determine what is or is not permissible speech for billions of users across the world, only a fraction of whom are American.

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Further adding to the imbalance when it comes to Middle East crises is the fact that Meta has granted Israel privileged access to its content moderation policy teams. In 2024, The Intercept reported how Meta employee Jordana Cutler, a former aide to Benjamin Netanyahu, served as a dedicated liaison to the Israeli government, advocating for the country’s interests and helping facilitate the removal of unwanted speech. Few other countries in the world have a dedicated representative within Meta — in 2020, a similar policy head for India market resigned after revelations she had lobbied for rule enforcement that favored India’s ruling Hindu nationalist party. Asked if Cutler has had a role in facilitating Israeli takedown requests of content relating to the war, Meta did not respond.

“Meta’s close relationship with the Israeli government for takedown requests has been a long-standing issue,” Evelyn Douek, a Stanford Law School professor and scholar of digital speech policies, told The Intercept. “Meta’s acquiescence in lots of takedown requests has been a long-standing practice.”

These asymmetries of censorship power are particularly sensitive during times of war, said Douek.

“Governments wanting to suppress speech that is critical of their war efforts is as old as time,” she said. “Allowing governments to claim national security reasons to suppress speech willy-nilly would obliterate the value of speech protections.”

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According to a source familiar with the matter, Israel lobbied Meta to implement a blanket rule restricting imagery of war damage within its territory, mirroring an Israeli news media censorship policy that bars journalists from documenting weapon impacts without military approval. Meta has so far declined to implement such a policy for its billions of global users, the source said. Meta did not respond to questions about the status of this request.

The U.S. and Iran signed on Friday a ceasefire agreement, though Israel has suggested it would not abide by the terms of a deal. While many of the censorship requests directly addressed the war, others were tangential to the conflict itself. The records show Israel has pushed to remove content expressing outrage over last month’s storming of Al-Aqsa Mosque by far-right government minister Itamar Ben-Gvir. It also sought to stifle posts critical of rhetoric by Israel that linked Israel’s recent closure of Al-Aqsa with the ongoing war.

In general, Meta grants the vast majority of Israeli governmental takedown requests. The State Attorney’s Office boasted a 92 percent compliance rate in 2023, and a 2025 report by Drop Site News said the overall rate has climbed to 94 percent since the October 7 attack by Hamas.

Records reviewed by The Intercept show Israel asked for Iran war takedowns using the exact same language evoking Hamas’s October 7 attack that it submitted when requesting the censorship of pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli speech across the globe during Israel’s war on Gaza.

“It suggests that they don’t expect their requests are being reviewed very carefully,” Douek said.

Douek argued that the wartime censorship requests underscore the danger of policing speech entirely out of public view through “opaque processes” like governmental backchannels.

“These platforms have always maintained that they are neutral, or that they are just a platform for people to express their views, but it has long been true that these companies have always presented a particular view of the world and have been responsive to their own geopolitical and commercial interests, and have always been more responsive to powerful governments,” Douek said.

This creates a deeply lopsided dynamic when it comes to the Iran war: The two arguably best-represented governments in the world within Meta — the U.S. and Israel — are allied belligerents in a conflict against a state deeply sanctioned by the company’s speech rules. “You’re going to end up with a skewed debate,” Douek said.

The post Israel Asked Facebook to Censor Iran War Content, Internal Documents Show appeared first on The Intercept.

The U.S. and Iran have agreed to a second ceasefire and the eventual reopening the Strait of Hormuz under a preliminary deal scheduled to take effect on Friday. “Iran has taken a major step toward final victory,” Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of the Iranian Parliament, said on Monday, one of several Iranian leaders taking a victory lap after outlasting the Trump administration.

Trump’s war has already killed thousands of Iranian civilians — including more than 150, most of them children –  in a strike on an elementary school. The official number of dead and wounded U.S. personnel stands at 426, an almost 11 percent increase since the first ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran was struck on April 8. This tally, however, is missing hundreds of casualties, including two soldiers wounded in action earlier this month.

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For months, The Intercept has reported that the Pentagon’s official tally of dead and wounded military personnel from the Iran War is a gross undercount, stemming from what another U.S. government official called a “casualty cover-up.” The Defense Casualty Analysis System, or DCAS, which tracks “deceased, wounded, ill or injured” service members for Congress and the president, is missing hundreds of known casualties. The true number exceeds 625.

When the first ceasefire was struck between the Trump administration and Iran, the tally of U.S. casualties was 385. Despite a pause in hostilities, the number slowly rose to 428, according to Pentagon statistics.

On April 21, however, the number of wounded-in-action troops declined by 15 without public comment from the War Department, dropping the casualty total to 413. Despite repeated questions over almost two months, the Pentagon has not explained the disparity in its casualty count. A defense official told The Intercept that it was impossible to tell whether Pentagon casualty analysts were “grossly incompetent” or had been ordered to manipulate the figures.    

Since the 15 wounded vanished in April, the DCAS casualty count has steadily crept upward to top out at 413, where it stood on Tuesday morning. This includes one sailor wounded in action this month. Central Command did not reply to a request for further information about the injury.

The official figures appear to be missing two soldiers who were recently wounded in action. CENTCOM spokesperson Capt. Tim Hawkins told NBC News last week that two crew members from a U.S. Army AH-64 Apache helicopter downed by an Iranian drone on June 8 were receiving medical care. And a CENTCOM social media post said they were in “stable condition.” But DCAS lists no Army personnel wounded in action this month.

The official tally of war dead also appears to be an undercount. For weeks, DCAS listed 13 hostile and non-hostile U.S. deaths during the war. DCAS briefly raised the total to 14 last month before dropping it back to 13, without any explanation on the fluctuation.

The Pentagon list of the names of the dead is still missing Maj. Sorffly Davius, a signals and communication officer with the New York Army National Guard who was assigned to the headquarters of the 42nd Infantry Division and reportedly died of sudden illness while on duty in Camp Buehring, Kuwait, on March 6. Davius’s death was widely acknowledged even as it was excluded from the official count: Rep. Mike Lawler, R-N.Y., spoke about him during a memorial service that month, and Gen. Dan Caine, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recognized Davius while “honoring our fallen.”

While DCAS provides a running tally of “non-hostile” deaths — meaning those who died from accidents or by illness — it doesn’t include “non-hostile” injuries. The DCAS figures show that 65 Navy personnel have been wounded in action. Missing, however, are the more than 200 sailors treated for smoke inhalation or lacerations due to a March 12 fire that raged aboard the USS Gerald R. Ford. The aircraft carrier had been conducting round-the-clock flight operations to, in Caine’s words, “project combat power” in the Middle East. The ship returned to its home port in Norfolk, Virginia, last month after 326 days at sea, the longest deployment of any U.S. aircraft carrier since the Vietnam War.

The casualty numbers also don’t include a sailor who suffered a non-combat-related injury aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln as it was involved in “strike missions in support of Operation Epic Fury” on March 25.

On April 21, two Pentagon spokespersons said they were unable to field questions about why more than a dozen casualties had been disappeared by the War Department, claiming only the “duty officer” could answer the question but that person was not at their desk. “As soon as the duty officer comes back to their desk, I can get this to them,” said one of them. After almost two months, The Intercept has yet to receive a response from the duty officer.

The Pentagon did not reply to a request for clarification on Monday about whether the duty officer ever returned to their desk.

The post U.S. Casualties in Iran Are Still Rising appeared first on The Intercept.

With a commitment to a ceasefire and the scheduled signing of a “framework” later this week, Iran is expected to agree to reopen the Strait of Hormuz within 30 days. Negotiations over an agreement regarding Iran’s nuclear program are expected to take place in the 60 days following Friday’s signing ceremony.

If the deal is signed on this week, it will mark a return to the status quo antebellum when the Strait of Hormuz was open and no nuclear deal with Iran was in place. Aside from killing top regime leaders, thousands of civilians — including more than 150, most of them children, on a strike on an elementary school — and damaging almost 149,000 civilian infrastructures, the United States has functionally achieved nothing. The same regime is in power and it maintains missile capabilities, still has a navy, and still supports regional proxies.

Trump also teased the prospect of a U.S. protection racket under which Middle Eastern nations would be forced to pay monetary tribute to America if the U.S. and Iran do not finalize a nuclear accord.

On Monday, Iran’s government declared victory and appeared to vow revenge on the U.S. for the war.

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“The Deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran is now complete,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Sunday, his 80th birthday. “I hereby fully authorize the toll free opening of the Strait of Hormuz.” An hour later, Trump offered a caveat, stating the strait would only be opened “upon the signing of the Deal on Friday.”

“This victory was achieved through absolute national cohesion, under the wise guidance of the Supreme National Security Council and all state pillars,” Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmail Baghaei announced on Monday, claiming that the conflict “cost the aggressors heavily.”

“Moving toward diplomacy does not mean we will ever forgive or forget the crimes against the Iranian nation; the pursuit of justice for our martyrs is permanent,” said Baghaei.

The White House did not reply to a request by The Intercept for comment on Iran’s declaration of victory and apparent vow of revenge for its dead.

The new “deal” is a complete capitulation for Trump who claimed, on March 6: “There will be no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!” No such surrender occurred.

Nor is it the first ceasefire Trump has claimed would result in a reopening of the Strait of Hormuz.

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“Iran has now agreed to a ceasefire and reopening the Strait of Hormuz,” the White House announced on April 8, essentially the same agreement publicized on Sunday.  That original ceasefire collapsed months ago, but the fiction was observed by the administration and mainstream news media outlets alike, until the new agreement was rolled out.

Pakistan says it will oversee a formal signing of a memorandum of understanding on Friday in Geneva, Switzerland. Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif told the National Assembly session in Islamabad “the immediate and permanent cessation of military operations has been announced across all fronts, including Iran, America, and Lebanon.”  

Self-styled War Secretary Pete Hegseth claimed on Sunday that the agreement guarantees “Iran will never have a nuclear weapon, won’t seek one, won’t buy one, won’t have one.” Iran previously agreed to those terms when it first ratified the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in 1970, and reaffirmed that agreement on the first page of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, negotiated by former President Barack Obama’s administration. Trump unilaterally withdrew from that pact during his first term.

Trump indicated Hegseth was lying or uniformed in an interview with the New York Times on Sunday. The president said the U.S. was still negotiating whether Iran would suspend its enrichment for 20 years but hinted that he might settle for a 15-year suspension.

Trump has consistently criticized the JCPOA. “Barack Hussein Obama gave them 1.7 Billion Dollars in ‘Green” Cash,’” he wrote during a social media rant in April. Iran’s Mehr news agency reported that the U.S. would release $12 billion in frozen assets to Iran before the start of nuclear negotiations. “The accord secures the unfreezing of all Iranian assets and addresses compensation for wartime damages,” said Baghaei.

Trump said that if the U.S. does not sign a final nuclear agreement with Iran, the United States might assume the role of “the guardian of the Middle East” in return for 20 percent of the region’s revenues. The proposed extortion scheme appears akin to the 19th-century Barbary States, which practiced state-supported piracy to exact tribute from other nations. The United States fought two separate wars against two of these North African states: Tripoli from 1801 to 1805, and Algiers from 1815 to 1816.

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A Point-by-Point Breakdown of Trump’s Failed Iran War Objectives

A recent Intercept analysis of Trump’s claims about the Iran war, his stated objectives, and supposed American achievements found the U.S. has fallen short or flamed out on all counts. The public record shows an administration that has consistently scaled back its goals and downgraded its claimed successes, without nearing anything resembling the victory Trump has touted.

On the first day of the conflict, Trump laid out his most ambitious objectives. “The heavy and pinpoint bombing … will continue, uninterrupted … as long as necessary to achieve our objective of PEACE THROUGHOUT THE MIDDLE EAST AND, INDEED, THE WORLD!” Trump wrote on Truth Social on February 28.

Since April, the White House has not replied to requests for further information about Trump’s inability to achieve world peace. Trump has also failed to accomplish even his more modest goal, as the region remains mired in conflict. Israel continued its war on Lebanon on Sunday and said it was not involved in the new pact. “Trump’s agreement does not bind us. … We are not party to this agreement,” Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir wrote on Telegram on Sunday.

“He’s a very difficult guy,” Trump said of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday. “He should be very thankful to us for doing this,” he said of the war, lapsing into typical hyperbole. “Because if Iran had a nuclear weapon, Israel wouldn’t be around for two hours.”

The post Trump Celebrates Achieving Absolutely Nothing in Iran appeared first on The Intercept.

This week, U.S. forces bombarded Iran after the downing of an American Apache helicopter near the Strait of Hormuz. Iran responded with strikes on targets across the Middle East and threats to “turn the entire region into hell.” Trump told Fox News’s Trey Yingst on Wednesday night that the U.S. fired 49 Tomahawk missiles at targets inside Iran, in addition to bombing raids by fighter jets. Yingst reported that Trump also said, “We’ll bomb the S out of them tomorrow night'” if Iran did not sign a peace agreement. Trump followed this on Thursday by declaring the U.S. would be “hitting Iran … VERY HARD TONIGHT.”

The burgeoning forever war contradicts months of reassurances by Trump that a peace deal with Iran is imminent.

An Intercept analysis of Trump’s claims about the Iran war, stated objectives, and supposed achievements finds the U.S. has fallen short or flamed out on all counts. The public record shows an administration that has consistently scaled back its goals and downgraded its claimed successes, without nearing anything resembling the victory Trump has touted. 

A Promise of World Peace

On the first day of the conflict, Trump laid out, with complete clarity, his most ambitious objectives. Claiming Iran was already “very much destroyed and, even, obliterated,” Trump said his war would bring peace to the region and, somehow, the globe. “The heavy and pinpoint bombing … will continue, uninterrupted … as long as necessary to achieve our objective of PEACE THROUGHOUT THE MIDDLE EAST AND, INDEED, THE WORLD!” Trump wrote on Truth Social on February 28.

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The bombing campaign was, indeed, “heavy.” The “pinpoint” attacks included a strike on an elementary school that killed between 150 and 175 civilians, most of them children. And thousands more civilians died in other strikes. Almost 149,000 civilian infrastructures, including homes, hospitals, and schools, have been damaged in the U.S.–Israel war, according to an April report from the Iranian Red Crescent Society. An estimated 400,000 people have been affected by damage to houses and apartments. But Iran was not “very much destroyed,” much less “obliterated.”

Peace in the Middle East, it goes without saying, never came to pass. The U.S.–Israeli strikes actually kicked off a regional war that grew to include more than a dozen countries, including Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. Beyond this, the inability of the self-proclaimed “peace president,” head of the world’s newly created Board of Peace, and recipient of the first FIFA Peace Prize to achieve “peace throughout … the world” may stand as Trump’s grandest failure.

Just two days after setting out his topline goals, Trump began publicly vacillating and dramatically scaling back U.S. aims. “Our objectives are clear. First, we’re destroying Iran’s missile capabilities,” he said during a March 2 White House ceremony. “Second, we’re annihilating their navy. … Third, we’re ensuring that the world’s number one sponsor of terror can never obtain a nuclear weapon. … And finally, we’re ensuring that the Iranian regime cannot continue to arm, fund and direct terrorist armies outside of their borders.”

Months later, these objectives remain unmet.

Eliminating Missiles

While the United States claims to have struck more than 13,000 targets in Iran, leaked U.S. intelligence assessments found evidence that Iran restored 30 of the 33 missile sites along the Strait of Hormuz to operational status, and retained 70 percent of its prewar missile stockpile and 70 percent of its mobile launchers. Reports emerged that in April and May, Iran began efforts to repair its Yazd Missile Base. In just one day last week, Kuwait says it was targeted by an Iranian barrage of “13 hostile ballistic missiles.” On Sunday, Iran launched ballistic missiles at Israel. And on Thursday, Iran attacked multiple countries in the region, including Jordan which said it shot down 20 Iranian missiles.

During an aborted interview with NBC News that aired on Sunday, even Trump admitted he had failed. “They have some missiles left,” he said. “I would say, percentage-wise, maybe 21, 22 percent of their missiles. It’s a lot of missiles.” 

Annihilating the Navy

While the U.S. sunk many Iranian ships, the Iranian Navy has not been annihilated. In fact, U.S. Central Command, which is overseeing the war effort, has repeatedly referred to actions by Iran’s Navy and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy in the months since Trump laid out his aims, demonstrating that both still exist, upending Trump’s frequent boasts to the contrary.

Just last week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that “there is no Iranian Navy,” and in the next breath admitted there was, referencing Iran’s “Boston Whalers with machine guns on them.”

Ending the Nuclear Program

Iran also still maintains its stockpile of enriched uranium. And there is no evidence that nuclear sites that were not attacked during Trump’s 2025 Iran war, such as Pickaxe Mountain, were ever damaged. Last week, in fact, Rubio confirmed that Iran’s “nuclear program” still exists. And during his recent NBC interview, Trump acknowledged that Iran still possessed its stockpile of highly enriched uranium and “they can get it, I guess, with years of work.”

Last week, Rubio even suggested Iran might be allowed to continue enrichment at some later date, noting it would need to accept “severe and long-term limitations, and/or cancellation, of enrichment.”

Halting Funding of Militias

The Trump administration has also failed to ensure “that the Iranian regime cannot continue to arm, fund and direct terrorist armies outside of their borders.” Days after Trump declared this war aim, House Republicans introduced legislation stating that “Iran remains the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism and provides substantial financial and military support to groups including Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis.” In the months since, even the Trump administration says the president’s goals haven’t been achieved.

In mid-April, the State Department said that Iran still “funnels the wealth of the Iranian people to Hizballah and other terrorists in the Middle East.” That same month, the Treasury Department took action against a “constellation of Iran-backed terrorist militias,” specifically “seven Iraqi militia commanders responsible for planning, directing, and executing attacks against U.S. personnel, facilities, and interests in Iraq,” including leaders of Kata’ib Hizballah, Kata’ib Sayyid Al-Shuhada, Harakat Al-Nujaba, and Asa’ib Ahl Al-Haqq. In May, the Treasury Department again targeted “Iran and its proxy militias in Iraq,” sanctioning “leaders of Iran-aligned terrorist militias Kata’ib Sayyid Al-Shuhada and Asa’ib Ahl Al-Haq” and referencing still “other Iran-aligned terrorist militias in Iraq.”

Unconditional Surrender

This assemblage of failures has been compounded by other unmet war aims. On March 6, Trump set the terms for an agreement with Iran. “There will be no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!” he wrote on Truth Social. In the months since, that hard-line stance has turned to mush.

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“There is the prospect before us — which could happen today,” Rubio said last week of a potential peace deal, in a weak-kneed explanation to lawmakers. “We’re hopeful that something like that could happen in which the straits would reopen, we would enter into a period of negotiations on very specific topics — delineated negotiations in the hope of reaching an outcome that’s acceptable to us, and something they would be able to do as well.”

Reopening the Strait

The “straits” in question have become another sticking point and catastrophe. After failing to achieve all his initial war aims, Trump added another that was nothing more than a return to the status quo antebellum in the Strait of Hormuz: opening the waterway to traffic after Iran imposed a wartime blockade.

Before the war, the average number of vessels crossing the strait — a critical artery for the world’s oil, fertilizer, helium, critical materials for microchips, and numerous other goods — was more than 120 per day. It has never been close to that level again.

“I gave Iran ten days to MAKE A DEAL or OPEN UP THE HORMUZ STRAIT. Time is running out,” Trump declared on April 4. When the U.S. and Iran agreed to a ceasefire on April 7, Trump wrote on social media that he would “suspend the bombing and attack of Iran” on the condition that Tehran agree to the “COMPLETE, IMMEDIATE, and SAFE OPENING of the Strait of Hormuz.”

The next day, the White House declared: “Iran has now agreed to a ceasefire and reopening the Strait of Hormuz as the Trump Administration negotiates a broader peace agreement — once more proving Peace Through Strength victorious.” But that same day, Iran closed the strait, following continued Israeli attacks on Hezbollah targets in Lebanon. 

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In response to Iran’s blockade, the U.S. imposed its own blockade of the strait on April 13, barring commercial vessels from entering or leaving Iranian ports. Then on April 15, Trump posted: “I am permanently opening the Strait of Hormuz.” Two days later, Trump claimed, “Iran has agreed to never close the Strait of Hormuz again.” On April 19, Trump said Iran had launched attacks in the strait and noted Iran had announced a blockade. On April 23, Trump ordered the Navy to attack Iranian ships laying mines in the strait. On May 6, Trump teased that the war might be “at an end, and the highly effective Blockade will allow the Hormuz Strait to be OPEN TO ALL, including Iran.” A day later, Trump said U.S. warships came under Iranian fire in the strait. The situation was still dragging on when Trump wrote, on May 29: “The Hormuz Strait must be immediately open, no tolls, for unrestricted shipping traffic, in both directions.” On Monday, a U.S. Army Apache helicopter gunship patrolling the strait was downed by Iran. 

The Strait of Hormuz remains functionally closed, except for a tiny trickle of traffic. “Last month, I directed our Great U.S. Military to execute a secret mission to support Oil Tankers and other Commercial Ships through the Strait of Hormuz,” Trump posted on Wednesday. “More than 200 Commercial Ships have safely traveled through the Strait.” (About 3,000 ships normally traverse it every month.) On Thursday, Iran announced that it, again, closed the strait to oil tankers and commercial ships.

Oil industry analysts say that global oil reserves are dwindling and that if the war doesn’t wrap up in the near term, petroleum prices could skyrocket to $150 a barrel. “The oil will go down,” Trump said on NBC, but acknowledged the war had driven up prices. “We’re going to have higher gasoline. We’re going to have a little higher fertilizer,” he admitted, before equivocating further when asked if gasoline prices had peaked. “Well, it depends. I mean, it depends where the war goes. It could be,” he waffled. “If we sign an agreement, it’ll go down now. Otherwise, it’ll go down after we’re finished.”

Oil prices rose to about $95 a barrel on Thursday as the U.S. and Iran continued to launch attacks. Trump said on Wednesday that the price of oil would have been at $250 a barrel had the U.S. government not been siphoning off “millions of barrels” of Iran’s oil over the course of the war. On Thursday, Trump posted that the U.S. would also soon seize Iran’s “oil infrastructure points, and assume total control of their Oil and Gas Markets.” Despite the rampant oil theft and threats of more to come, U.S. inflation accelerated for a third straight month in May, driven by energy prices which rose 3.9 percent over the month.

A Peace Deal

The “agreement” in question is still another failed aim. On March 23, Trump told reporters about supposed peace talks and cited “major points of agreement, I would ​say — almost all points of agreement.” Iran denied negotiations had taken place. Two days later, Trump claimed Iran wanted to “make a deal so badly.” On March 26, he said Iran was “begging to make a deal.” On April 15, he said the war was “very close to over.” On April 17, Trump claimed that Iran had “agreed to everything” and that “we will get a deal in the next day or two.” 

“An Agreement has been largely negotiated, subject to finalization,” Trump announced on May 23. On June 2, Trump wrote: “as I told Iran, ‘It’s time, one way or another, for you to make a Deal.’” Then Trump told NBC late last week: “We’re very close to having a deal.” But on Monday, Trump said a “Final Deal” has yet to be “reached.”

What such a “deal” will end shines a bright light on another flip-flop failure by the president. Trump went from claiming, in early March, that the U.S. won the war with Iran, to attempting to convince Americans that he never even went to war in the first place. “We don’t call it a war,” he said before the end of that month. “We call it a military operation.” By early May, Trump was calling it a “mini war” or “a little detour.”

Just Give Him Two Weeks

The deadline for when this “mini-war” will finally end may be the most telling of Trump’s failed aims and achievements. It’s well known that Trump’s lying and laziness coalesce around one simple phrase: two weeks. “We’ll have something in two weeks,” Trump said in January of an agreement with Europe to extend U.S. control over Greenland, to take one example.

Trump has long used this two-week delaying tactic when faced with vexing questions about anyone and everything, from Russian President Vladimir Putin and the war on ISIS to international trade and the Covid-19 pandemic. Two weeks really means later. Except when it means never.

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The ceasefire with Iran, announced on April 7, was initially supposed to last “two weeks” while the two countries inked a deal to end the war, according to Trump. He claimed at the time that they were already “very far along with a definitive Agreement concerning Longterm PEACE with Iran, and PEACE in the Middle East.”

On Monday evening, Trump held a tele-rally for South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham where he addressed his failed war with Iran. “We’re negotiating now, and they want to make a very good deal. They’re willing to give us everything,” Trump claimed, noting, “It’ll happen very soon.” The president then added in his favorite faux time frame: “I think we are winning that battle, but you’re really going to win it over the next two weeks when we declare total victory.”

The post A Point-by-Point Breakdown of Trump’s Failed Iran War Objectives appeared first on The Intercept.

To any reasonable person, a ceasefire is exactly what it sounds like: It is the total cessation of military attacks to end a war. But to the mainstream American media outlets covering the U.S.–Israel war with Iran, what constitutes a “ceasefire” is a rhetorical exercise.

Today, Iran launched missiles at the international airport in Kuwait. As the New York Times reported: “The barrage was one of the biggest attacks on a Gulf nation since the U.S.-Iran cease-fire took effect in April.” ABC News’s live update coverage ran with the breaking news headline “Iran targets US forces, Kuwait airport amid ceasefire.” Over at CNN, the headline was “Kuwait’s airport attacked as fresh Iran-US strikes strain ceasefire.”

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Of course, Iran’s latest campaign didn’t come out of nowhere: It comes two days after the U.S. announced that it had bombed radar and drone sites in the country, and one day after Israel bombarded south Lebanon with airstrikes and artillery yet again, reportedly killing at least four people across two towns.

All that bombing, and all of its attendant death and suffering, sure doesn’t feel like a “ceasefire” in any real sense. Still, the Times, along with other national news outlets, continues to spin the fantasy that the ceasefire is intact — only now it’s increasingly “fragile” or “tested.” The paper of record has gone so far as to say that it “hangs in balance.” 

In a piece of news analysis in the Times last week — on the heels of the U.S. bombing Iran for the second time in three days — the paper made the case that “a truce isn’t necessarily doomed if the missiles are still flying.” It also argued that while a ceasefire might sound like an end to the bombing, the geopolitical definition hinges on whether both sides agree that a “ceasefire” remains in effect.

If government officials call it a ceasefire, who is the New York Times to question it?

For many months, another ceasefire in name only has been touted in Gaza. What that’s looked like in practice is Israel relentlessly bombing the Palestinians on a near-daily basis. Al Jazeera reported that since the “ceasefire” in Gaza was announced in October 2025, Israel has killed at least 922 people and injured 2,786.

To the people of Gaza and of south Lebanon, there is no ceasefire. Continuing to carry water for the idea that we’re no longer at war, or that there’s been any meaningful progress made to end this war, is to provide cover for the U.S. and Israel, the countries that launched this war of aggression and continue to execute it. It also provides President Donald Trump with the political cover he so desperately desires as he realizes that he’s powerless to end the deeply unpopular war he started with Israel, and that no number of testy phone calls will move the needle if our ally won’t agree to a true ceasefire.

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The mainstream media is perfectly comfortable spinning the fiction that we’re currently in a gray zone somewhere between war and peace because the stakes are an abstraction. To them, blindly supporting American imperialism and Israeli aggression are baked-in ideological assumptions, not matters of life or death. It’s no coincidence that the New York Times has done more than any other media organization to massage the language around Israel, Gaza, and Iran to an extreme degree.

But words like “ceasefire” matter a great deal, which is why it’s critically important for the media to call out acts of war for exactly what they are. In this way, the brutal fact of war is black and white: Your country is either killing people with the bombs it’s dropping, or it’s not. Failing to acknowledge that reality is worse than dishonest — it is to irrevocably deprive those paying the highest price of their humanity.

The post Stop Calling It a Ceasefire appeared first on The Intercept.

The increase in casualties came as Iranian Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei said in a written statement that the war had exposed the vulnerability of U.S. military bases across the Middle East and as Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps threatened to respond to any U.S. strikes.

“The hands of time do not turn backward, and the nations and lands of the region will no longer serve as shields for American bases,” Khamenei said in his statement. “America, in addition to no longer having a safe place for aggression and military bases in the region, is moving further away from its former status day by day.”

The U.S. has been clinging to a rickety ceasefire with Iran for more than a month, as President Donald Trump — who previously threatened to commit genocide in that country — has oscillated between claims that a peace agreement is imminent and talk of renewed hostilities.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Tuesday that talks to end the war were continuing but that a peace agreement could take “a few days.” 

Reporting by The Intercept found that the Pentagon’s official tally of dead and wounded military personnel from the Iran War is a gross undercount, stemming from what one U.S. government official called a “casualty cover-up.” The Defense Casualty Analysis System, or DCAS, which tracks “deceased, wounded, ill or injured” service members for Congress and the president, is missing hundreds of known casualties.

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On April 8, the day the ceasefire deal was struck between the Trump administration and Iran, the tally of U.S. dead and wounded was 385. Despite a pause in hostilities, the number slowly rose to 428, according to Pentagon statistics.

On April 21, however, the number of wounded-in-action troops declined by 15 without public comment from the War Department, dropping the casualty total to 413. Despite repeated questions over the last month, the Pentagon has not commented on the disparity in its casualty count.

Since then, the casualty count has crept upward, with the number of dead increasing by one and the number of wounded topping out at 409 on Tuesday, yielding a combined total of 423 dead and wounded U.S. personnel.

On Thursday, CENTCOM told The Intercept, “13 service members were killed in action and one service member passed due to a non-combat related medical emergency during Operation Epic Fury” — the military’s name for the campaign.

For weeks, DCAS listed 13 hostile and non-hostile U.S. deaths during the war. Most DCAS webpages still claim 13 U.S. deaths but one put the tally at 14 as of Tuesday.

The Pentagon list of the names of the dead is still missing Maj. Sorffly Davius, a signals and communication officer with the New York Army National Guard who was assigned to the headquarters of the 42nd Infantry Division and reportedly died of sudden illness while on duty in Camp Buehring, Kuwait, on March 6. Davius’s death was widely acknowledged even as it was excluded from the the official count: Rep. Mike Lawler, R-N.Y., spoke about him during a memorial service that month, and Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recognized Davius while “honoring our fallen.”

CENTCOM did not reply to a request for comment on whether Davius was the recently referenced non-combat fatality.

While DCAS provides a running tally of “non-hostile” deaths — meaning those who died from accidents or by illness — it doesn’t include “non-hostile” injuries. The DCAS figures show that 64 Navy personnel have been wounded in action.

Missing, however, are the more than 200 sailors treated for smoke inhalation or lacerations due to a March 12 fire that raged aboard the USS Gerald R. Ford. The aircraft carrier had been conducting round-the-clock flight operations to, Caine said, “project combat power” in the Middle East. The ship returned to its home port in Norfolk, Va., this month after 326 days at sea, the longest deployment of any U.S. aircraft carrier since the Vietnam War.

The numbers also don’t include a sailor who suffered a non-combat-related injury aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln as it was involved in “strike missions in support of Operation Epic Fury” on March 25.

For weeks, the Pentagon has failed to reply to repeated requests for comment on why DCAS provides counts of non-hostile war zone deaths but not non-hostile injuries or illnesses. CENTCOM did not immediately respond on Tuesday to requests for clarification concerning the casualty figures.

The post U.S. Casualties in Iran War Rise as Military Strikes Begin Again appeared first on The Intercept.

The bombshell New York Times report that the U.S. and Israel hoped to install former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the leader of Iran puts the lie to so much of what hawks in the West have been trying to sell their publics about the Iran war.

Despite claims by President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Iran war was never about freedom for the Iranian people.

That much is obvious thanks to Ahmadinejad’s role in recent Iranian history: In 2009, Iranians rose up against a stolen election in what was known as the Green Movement, which was violently crushed by Iran’s security forces to keep Ahmadinejad in power.

Though a populist, Ahmadinejad at the time dismissed the protests as nothing more than the result of “emotions after a soccer match” or, in another instance, “dirt and dust.” These are not the bona fides of a leader who will lead Iran into democracy.

Instead of a campaign for Iranian freedom, this war — like much of the U.S. and Israel’s last 20 years of going after Iran — has been about catastrophically weakening Iran. Here, reading between the lines of history, Ahmadinejad’s position as an Israeli–U.S.-backed coup leader starts to make sense.

Ahmadinejad had been largely quiet until he suddenly reemerged into headlines on Tuesday with the Times report. After killing Iran’s supreme leader in the opening hour of the war, according to the Times, Israel targeted a building on Ahmadinejad’s street, ostensibly to “free” him from what was effectively either house arrest or the strict monitoring of his movements. According to some reports, the guards keeping watch on Ahmadinejad were indeed killed, but Ahmadinejad himself was injured, too.

How, if the plot had been successful, was Ahmadinejad supposed to take over? Was the assumption that by assassinating the top leadership, including Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps generals, Ahmadinejad would be able to gain the support of the rest of the top echelon of the security forces? That would be a far-fetched notion.

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While he retained his populist credentials over the years, Ahmadinejad’s clashes with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and with the “nezam,” or regime, over social and political issues lost him whatever support he still had among the military wings and the Basij militia. Those forces — though they had helped crush the 2009 protests on Ahmadinejad’s behalf — remained fiercely loyal to Khamenei and the political system of “Guardianship of the Jurist.”

For now, Ahmadinejad is nowhere to be found, raising suspicions that he is in the custody of the IRGC or dead.

Good for Israel

It’s hard to imagine the Iranian president who declared in his first few months in office that “Israel must vanish from the pages of time” and subsequently questioned the Holocaust being a good choice for Israel. History shows, though, how Ahmadinejad’s eclectic positioning has previously coincided with Israeli interests.

Coming to power after President Mohammad Khatami’s reform movement and his call for “dialog among civilizations,” Ahmadinejad’s stances damaged Iran’s reputation almost beyond repair.

And this was, somewhat ironically, a boon to Israel, whose leaders could point to the malevolent nature of the Islamic Republic. Ahmadinejad was the perfect figurehead for a bogeyman Iran that needed to be taken down a notch.

Israel and its allies in Washington made hay of Ahmadinejad’s every word — for instance, his sponsorship of a Holocaust denial cartoon contest — and succeeded in turning his remarks into the justifications for an unprecedented and devastating sanctions program. Ahmadinejad’s rule was, in so many ways, bad for Iran.

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Which is why, even at the time and certainly later, there were suspicions privately aired in Tehran that he could actually be a Mossad asset — with the caveat, of course, that no hard proof ever emerged. Still, at a time when gaining the trust of the west in nuclear negotiations was paramount, Ahmadinejad was building Israeli hard-liners’ case against talks for them.

Now, of course, the allegation that Ahmadinejad was primed as a coup leader — the first report from an even remotely reliable outlet of a real link to Israel — has only added to the rumors, as have his most recent trips abroad, to Viktor Orbán’s Hungary and to Guatemala, both allies and supporters of Israel.

Trump himself admitted before this latest revelation that Israel bombed some of the people who were candidates to be an Iranian Delcy Rodríguez — the Venezuelan figure who seamlessly took control from kidnapped President Nicolás Maduro and reportedly is cooperating with the U.S. The most solid hint Trump gave was that he had someone “inside” Iran in mind, dashing the hopes of Iranian royalists.

Don’t Listen to Israel

Whether or not it is true that Ahmadinejad was an Israeli asset — whenever he may have been recruited or even just unwittingly manipulated — he would have fit Trump’s bill. What he never would have been was a beacon of freedom for the Iranian people. Insofar as the broad contours of the Times report are accurate, we can now be assured that the well-being of the Iranian people has not really ever been at the top of either Trump or Netanyahu’s minds.

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The U.S. and Israel may have some commonality in what they’d like to see with Iran, but not entirely. Israel’s interests lie mostly in defanging Iran, even seeing it descend into a failed state that can neither threaten Israel nor challenge its hegemony in the region. The U.S., on the other hand, has consistently focused on Iran’s nuclear potential.

Both Democratic and Republican administrations have indicated that if the nuclear issue was resolved to the satisfaction of the U.S., Iran could potentially be rehabilitated and rejoin the international community. That would have left Iran with the potential to grow into a regional powerhouse and global force — something Israel has long opposed, which is why it tried so hard to derail the 2015 nuclear agreement.

Whatever happens, Ahmadinejad will never be a factor in Iranian politics, even if in the unlikely event that he one day resurfaces alive and free. The Venezuela option for Iran now seems silly, a chimera that should have never been considered.

If the White House had listened to a handful of Iranians or those who know Iran well, rather than Netanyahu and war hawks in Congress, perhaps 175 school children and their teachers would be alive today. The Strait of Hormuz might be open and free. And a nuclear deal could have already been signed.

Instead, there has been war and destruction, wasted lives and wasted treasure, chaos in the region, and the global economy wobbling. Ahmadinejad has once again been bad for Iranians — and now everyone else, too.

The post Ahmadinejad Is Still Bad for Iranians — and Still Great for Israel appeared first on The Intercept.

Two weeks ago, the Pentagon claimed the war had cost $25 billion, a figure that analysts said was likely a gross undercount. In testimony before the House Appropriations defense subcommittee, the Department of War’s comptroller, Jay Hurst, said the cost of the war has risen “closer” to $29 billion because of the “repair and replacement of equipment” and “general operational costs” of keeping troops in the Middle East.

Experts also expressed skepticism at this revised count.

“The costs of this war are still growing, and the Pentagon is still not being straight with taxpayers or lawmakers about the numbers. If the numbers being thrown around in committee hearings were complete, why would the Pentagon continue withholding a comprehensive, itemized cost assessment from Congress?” said Gabe Murphy, a policy analyst at Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan budget watchdog advocating for an end to wasteful spending. “Taxpayers deserve answers, and lawmakers need them in order to craft a responsible budget.”

Hurst, War Secretary Pete Hegseth, and Gen. Dan Caine, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff are on Capitol Hill to discuss the Pentagon’s $1.5 trillion budget request for 2027 before House and Senate appropriations subcommittees on Tuesday. Hegseth said the massive sum — the largest request in history — “reflects the urgency of the moment” and would address both the “deferment of long-standing problems as well as position our forces for the current and future fight.”

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Murphy called the dramatic 45 percent increase a negotiating tactic. “They’re seeking $350 billion through reconciliation and $1.15 trillion in the base budget, but they know reconciliation is a long shot. It’s all about trying to make a $1.15 trillion Pentagon budget seem reasonable in comparison,” said Murphy. “But there’s nothing reasonable about it. It’s a roughly $150 billion increase over last year.”

Americans, Murphy said, deserve an explanation for the runaway military budget. “If they can’t defend the nation with a trillion dollars, they’re doing it wrong.”

President Donald Trump said Monday that the ceasefire with Iran — which went into effect on April 8 — is “on life support” after Iran’s response to the latest U.S. peace proposal. Reuters, citing Iranian state media, reported that Iran’s proposal included war reparations from the United States, lifting sanctions on Tehran, and recognition of its sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz. Trump rejected Iran’s reply as “totally unacceptable” and called it a “piece of garbage.”

Hegseth said the Pentagon was prepared to reignite hostilities with Iran. “We have a plan to escalate, if necessary; we have a plan to retrograde if necessary. We have a plan to shift assets,” the secretary testified, declining to say more in the public hearing.

An analysis by The Intercept found that Trump has embroiled the U.S. in more than 20 military interventions, armed conflicts, and wars during his five-plus years in the White House. The expenses of this wide-ranging war on the world are rising across the globe.

The Intercept was, for example, the first outlet to reveal that the U.S. military’s intervention in Venezuela and attacks on boats in the Caribbean and the Eastern Pacific — Operations Absolute Resolve and Operation Southern Spear, respectively — have already cost taxpayers at least $4.7 billion, according to an exceptionally cautious estimate from Brown University’s Costs of War Project.

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The ultimate price tag of Americas wars in Latin America will further balloon in the decades ahead, saddling future Americans with soaring costs, according to the report. “War is financed by debt, adding interest costs to the public budget,” wrote authors Hanna Homestead, a research analyst with the National Priorities Project, and Jennifer Kavanagh, the director of military analysis at Defense Priorities, a nonpartisan research group. “Furthermore, the federal government undertakes an obligation to pay veterans benefits for decades into the future.”

Recently, Linda Bilmes, a former assistant secretary and chief financial officer of the U.S. Department of Commerce and currently a public policy professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, told The Intercept that the already-excessive expense of the Iran war would likely be pushed into the trillions of dollars by such long-term costs like veterans benefits and interest on the debt to pay for the war.

The post Hegseth Asks for More Money as Iran War Costs Skyrocket appeared first on The Intercept.

On Monday, President Donald Trump said Iran would be “blown off the face of the earth” if it attacked U.S. ships guiding vessels through the Strait of Hormuz as part of Trump’s ill-defined “Project Freedom.”

The following day, Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine said Iran had launched numerous attacks. “Since the ceasefire was announced, Iran has fired at commercial vessels nine times and seized two container ships. They’ve attacked U.S. forces more than 10 times,” he told reporters on Tuesday. He explained that despite attacking U.S. troops, the strikes were “below the threshold of restarting major combat operations at this point.”

Trump suggested to reporters on Tuesday that Iran knew what actions constituted red lines that would violate the ceasefire, but refused to go on record on what they were. “Well, you’ll find out, because I’ll let you know,” he said, without letting anyone know.

“One of Trump’s standard plays with respect to Iran is resorting to belligerent threats of potentially illegal violence in the hopes of coercing Tehran,” Brian Finucane, a senior adviser for the U.S. Program at the International Crisis Group, told The Intercept. “Notwithstanding Trump’s threat, attacks on U.S. ships are a real possibility and a potential vector for the breakdown of the ceasefire.”

At the press conference alongside Caine, War Secretary Pete Hegseth was asked if the truce ended, since the U.S. and Iran had fired at each other in the last 24 hours. “No, the ceasefire is not over,” he replied. “Ultimately, this is a separate and distinct project.” Both he and Trump have also repeatedly claimed victory in the war, that they simultaneously claim is paused.

Hegseth suggested last week in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee that the ceasefire undercut a 60-day legal deadline mandated by the 1973 War Powers Resolution for the U.S. to exit the war. (The deadline expired on Friday, though the White House can also extend the timeline for another 30 days to assist with the withdrawal of forces.)

“We are in a ceasefire right now, which our understanding means the 60-day clock pauses or stops in a ceasefire,” said Hegseth. He reiterated this erroneous contention on Tuesday.

“I do not believe the statute would support that,” Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., replied, adding that he has “serious constitutional concerns and we don’t want to layer those with additional statutory concerns.”

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Only two ships were known to have passed through the Strait of Hormuz on Monday, and none did so on Tuesday. “As a direct gift from the United States to the world, we have established a powerful red, white, and blue dome over the strait,” said Hegseth on Tuesday. Iran’s state broadcaster dismissed Project Freedom as a failure and said Iranian control over the waterway had tightened.

“There’s this ongoing denial of reality by the administration about the global and domestic consequences of this conflict,” said Finucane. “This war is very unpopular. The president’s own popularity has fallen, and it doesn’t look like it’s going to get any better as the economic consequences worsen. The current status quo is untenable, but it’s unclear how the president is going to find his way out of this mess of his own making.”

The post Hegseth Clings to Phony Ceasefire to Help Trump Evade War Powers Pressure appeared first on The Intercept.