Challenge Airlines, a cargo hauler based in Israel, made three flights this spring carrying the bomb casings for BLU-109s — a 2,000-pound munition that has been tied to numerous mass-casualty attacks on civilian neighborhoods in the Gaza Strip, Lebanon, and Iran in recent years — according to open-source data obtained by the Movement Research Unit and reviewed by The Intercept.

The airline also made more than 100 shipments of guidance kits known as joint direct attack munitions, or JDAMs — which are used to convert so-called “dumb bombs” into GPS-guided munitions capable of striking a specific target — according to data shared with The Intercept. Many of the guidance kits were marked for use on the MK-84, another 2,000-pound bomb Israel used in its campaign to level Gaza, where fragments of JDAMs have repeatedly been found at the site of airstrikes.

The 2,000-pound bombs present a serious risk of civilian casualties, according to Josh Paul, a former State Department official who resigned at the outset of the war in Gaza to protest the Biden administration’s sale of weapons to Israel.

“If you look at historic U.S. use of 2,000-pound bombs, in the entire counter-ISIS campaign, there were just two that were dropped in the vicinity of the city of Mosul precisely because there is no way to use a 2,000-pound bomb discriminately in an urban environment,” Paul said, referring to an American air war during the final years of the Obama administration to end the Islamic State’s control of the Iraqi city of Mosul.

Israel hasn’t shared the United States’s reservations. The country made extensive use of the weapons to attack targets in Gaza and Lebanon, including a deadly strike on Gaza’s Jabaliya refugee camp that killed dozens of civilians, according to an analysis by the New York Times.

“If you look at a picture of Gaza right now, I would say Israel’s use of these weapons is functionally indistinguishable from indiscriminate bombing,” Paul said.

Challenge Airlines, and the Israeli military did not respond to request for comment.

“We work closely with all airport partners to ensure the safety of public, neighboring communities, and airport personnel,” said a spokesperson for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates JFK Airport. “The federal government and commercial airlines have primary responsibility as to what is allowed to be shipped on aircraft. We are pre-empted under federal law from interfering with these activities.”

While the shipments of JDAMs and bomb bodies for BLU-109s did not include active munitions, previous shipments of weapons through JFK have included explosives, including 14 tons of nitrocellulose bound for Israel in May 2025.

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The Intercept verified the data showing all three shipments of bunker-buster bomb bodies, and verified a portion of the data showing shipments of JDAM kits. Movement Research Unit, an investigative outlet whose prior work has uncovered shipments of drone tech to Israel and the transport of fighter jet parts by United Airlines onboard civilian passenger flights, shared the data on the condition that some specifics of its methods be withheld to prevent a crackdown on the availability of such data.

In response to the flow of weapons and materiel through JFK, the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America has been organizing a campaign to stop the flow of weapons to Israel through the airport.

“This is another example of a growing body of reporting that shows how civilian infrastructure is used for the genocide in Gaza,” said a DSA member named Henry, who asked to be identified without his last name in order prevent retaliation from his employer. “Civilian air travel should prioritize passengers, travelers, and the international community — not weapons — and no worker should be forced to serve the militarized supply chain.”

Tons of Pressure

Challenge Airlines shipped the bunker-buster bomb bodies on flights leaving JFK for Tel Aviv on March 12, April 30, and May 6, according to the data shared with The Intercept.

They shipped the guidance kits far more frequently, with 109 shipments leaving JFK for Tel Aviv between December 22, 2024, and June 7, 2026. Cargo documents indicate that most of the shipments were of JDAM kits designed for 2,000-pound MK-84 bombs but also included at least one shipment of kits for bunker-buster bombs.

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In total, the airline shipped 175,884 pounds of BLU-109 casings and more than 5 million pounds of JDAM kits between December 22, 2024, and June 7, 2026, according to the data obtained by Movement Research Unit.

JFK Airport is the main export hub for such munitions flying by air to Israel, according to federal data: More than half of all Israel-bound air shipments of weapons that fit the government export category for bombs and missiles was sent abroad from JFK.

It was not immediately clear where the bunker buster and JDAM shipments originated, but sales of military hardware to Israel typically either come from deals between the Israeli and U.S. governments or direct commercial purchases under a special export license made by the Israeli military from private companies.

In the first two years of Israel’s war on Gaza, the U.S. spent $21.7 billion on military aid to Israel, according to a study by analyst William Hartung. That has included multiple shipments of 2,000-pound bombs like the BLU-109 and the MK-84, as well as JDAM kits to equip the weapons with GPS guidance.

The Biden administration in May 2024 halted the shipment of MK-84 2,000-pound bombs to Israel, citing the potential harm to civilians, but President Donald Trump resumed shipments of the heavy munitions within weeks of retaking the White House.

News of the shipments comes just over a month after the Associated Press revealed plans in the works for the U.S. to ink a vast $2.8 billion arms sale to Israel that would include thousands of 2,000-pound bombs.

The ongoing sale of such heavy weapons to Israel underscores the need for a federal solution, according to Rep. Delia Ramirez, D-Ill., who sponsored last year legislation dubbed the “Block the Bombs Act,” that would bar the U.S. from selling BLU-109s, JDAMs, and other munitions central to Israel’s war effort.

“It’s the only bill that prohibits these weapons transfers from happening, and the only bill that creates a comprehensive process of oversight,” Ramirez told The Intercept. “There’s been a big push, particularly in New York and around JFK, to block these transfers and it’s good that people are putting pressure locally, but ultimately it is Congress’s responsibility to make that happen.”

First introduced in May 2025, the bill has gathered more than 80 co-sponsors but has thus far languished in legislative limbo. With the House of Representatives soon to be under Democratic control, Ramirez said she plans to bring the bill to the floor next session.

The post Tons of “Bunker-Buster” Bomb Parts for Israel Go Through JFK Airport appeared first on The Intercept.

The 58-year-old had lived with kidney failure for two years, and his doctor had prescribed dialysis twice a week.

Since the siege, however, the fighting stood between al-Eissi and the dialysis center in Taiz city that kept him alive. Al-Eissi wouldn’t let his family risk their lives to take him to the center.

“My father’s condition deteriorated badly,” said his son, Muadh, 38. “We couldn’t move him to Taiz because the fighting had intensified.”

About a week ago, al-Eissi died at home in his bed.

“When I saw my mother weeping for her husband, I felt helpless,” Muadh said. “It might have been avoided if my father had reached his dialysis sessions on time.”

Abdullah is one of at least 10 dialysis patients who have died since the siege on Taiz began because they could not reach treatment, according to Dr. Issam Mahyoub, director of the kidney dialysis center at al-Jumhuri Hospital in Taiz. Doctors warn that many more could follow.

“About 60 percent of kidney failure patients in Taiz face the risk of death because they cannot reach the dialysis center,” said Dr. Fouad al-Haddad, the hospital’s director. “Behind every number is a human being and a family living in anxiety, waiting for a chance to continue treatment that may never come.”

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The kidney-failure deaths are part of the toll of a wider regional war set off by an unprovoked February attack against Iran by Israel and the United States. Estimates hold that 10,000 or more people have died during the war, including both military and civilian deaths across the region. Since the regional war reignited in Yemen this summer, according to the World Health Organization, at least 800 people have been killed, with thousands wounded and tens of thousands displaced.

“The plight of dialysis patients in Taiz illustrates how geopolitical struggles over deterrence, energy security, and regional leverage translate into blocked transit, disrupted medical care, and preventable deaths,” said Sina Toossi, a senior non-resident fellow at the Center for International Policy. “Yemen’s population has already endured more than a decade of devastating war, and the tragedy is that this wider regional conflict is now threatening to plunge it back into another humanitarian catastrophe.”

Yemen in the Iran War

Yemen entered the war in March, when the Iran-aligned Ansarallah armed group, more commonly known as the Houthis, began firing missiles into Israel in retaliation for its attacks on Iran. The Houthis, who gained control of various portions of Yemen during a two-decade-long insurgency, including the capital of Sana’a, saw their prominence in the Iran war grow with attacks against shipping channels surrounding the Arabian Peninsula.

The Yemeni civil war itself had been a long-simmering conflict when the Iran war broke out, straining a 2022 truce signed by the Houthis and their rivals, including Saudi Arabia, which was broken this July when the Houthis attacked a regional Saudi airport. Throughout August, the Houthis launched missile, drone, and ground attacks across the front lines against the internationally recognized, Saudi-backed Yemeni government.

In September, the Houthis seized strategic areas on Yemen’s coast and imposed a naval blockade that cut off the Bab al-Mandeb Strait, while firing missiles deeper into Saudi Arabia.

In early October, Yemeni government forces backed by the Saudi-led coalition launched an operation aimed at retaking the coast and pushing into Sana’a.

As they moved inland to consolidate their coastal gains, Houthi forces pushed into the highlands around Taiz, a strategically located city controlled by the government. In short order, the insurgents severed the main mountain road linking Taiz to Aden, another city also controlled by the government.

The blockade trapped more than 600,000 residents and sent food and fuel prices soaring. The U.N. World Food Program warned that Taiz’s wheat and flour stocks are close to running out.

“We have confirmed cases of death and cases of severe impact,” said Tawfiq al-Humaidi, head of the SAM Organization for Rights and Liberties, a Geneva-based international body monitoring violence in Yemen, who said fighting on roads near Taiz has cut off medical supplies from the city. “Those who are dying and suffering are among the victims of the Iranian war, which drove the Houthis to expand toward Taiz and Bab al-Mandeb.”

On October 14, the Yemeni government formally petitioned the U.N. Security Council for immediate, practical intervention to lift the “suffocating siege.”

Any action would be too late for families like the al-Eissis.

Cut Off From Care

Taiz is Yemen’s cultural capital and its third-largest city. Healthcare facilities there serve a huge geographical area. Al-Haddad, the head of the al-Jumhuri Hospital, said patients hail from across the governorate.

“They come from the West Coast, al-Mawasit, Jabal Habashi, al-Shamayatayn, Sama, al-Silw, al-Misrakh, and al-Maafer areas,” he said, “where distances are long and the hardship of travel is multiplied by rough roads and security conditions.”

The kidney dialysis center has 270 registered patients.

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“That doesn’t count the patients from outside the city who haven’t been able to reach us,” said Mahyoub, the head of the dialysis center. “Patients from al-Misrakh, al-Aqroud, al-Shamayatayn, al-Hujariya, al-Turba, and Jabal Habashi localities used to come to us. Now getting here has become extremely difficult, with the fighting and the restrictions on movement into the city.”

Ahlam Ali Abdo, 33, walks about 30 kilometers from her village in Jabal Habashi to reach the center, crossing rough roads and areas where gunfire and shelling ring out. The walk, extremely risky for a kidney failure patient, takes between 5 to 9 hours. After treatment, she faces the same distance back, uphill, to her three children. Some days the road is too dangerous, and Abdo waits for hours in the city.

“I cry constantly of pain and exhaustion and worry that I wouldn’t be able to see my children again. My condition is miserable,” she said.

Her husband stays home with the children. Bringing any of them with her, she said, would put the whole family in danger.

Mahyoub’s center tried and failed to find her housing in the city. Yesterday, on Friday, another dialysis patient took her in, for fear she would be killed on the road.

Reaching the center doesn’t guarantee treatment.

“The shortage of diesel needed to run the generators forced us to cut dialysis sessions from 4 hours to 2,” said Mahyoub. Supplies from the Ministry of Health in Aden “no longer arrive regularly, and the remaining stock is nearly gone.”

“Dialysis is a lifeline for these patients,” he said.

Haddad, the hospital director, said of the dialysis center doctors: “They are expected to save patients, but the means available are not always enough.”

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The Office of Public Health and Population in Aden has warned of an imminent health and humanitarian catastrophe in Taiz caused by the continuing siege and the obstruction of supplies.

In a statement, it said “medicines, solutions, medical supplies and fuel in the city’s health facilities were close to running out. That threatens emergency services, surgery, intensive care, dialysis and neonatal incubators.”

No Road to Aden

For patients who can no longer reach Taiz’s center, Aden is the fallback, whether for treatment or for its airport to travel abroad. The Taiz–Aden road, however, is unusable, according to patients and Mahyoub. The detours wind through mountain bends and rough terrain, add hours and transport costs, and in places run through active clashes.

The crisis extends beyond Taiz.

Dr. Anis al-Asbahi, spokesperson for the Health Ministry in Sana’a, said that “more than 8,000 kidney failure patients in Houthi-controlled governorates are suffering because hemodialysis machines and dialysis medicines can’t get in.”

He blamed the blockade and the closure of Sana’a airport.

“Kidney failure knows no political barriers,” Mahyoub said. “Patients cannot wait for disputes to be settled or for circumstances to change before they get treatment.”

For Muadh al-Eissi, whose father died from kidney failure, the question is simpler.

“How can the parties using heavy weapons in populated areas ignore what the fighting does to patients,” he asked, “to the children, women and elderly people who need medicine and treatment? People, like my father, are losing their lives for what?”

The post Yemenis Unable to Reach Hospital Are Part of the Iran War Death Toll appeared first on The Intercept.

Democratic leaders like House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York have been cagey about their strategy on Iran for the lame-duck period before the next Congress is sworn in on January 3. So far, months of Capitol Hill maneuvering have produced few concrete results. And one path to potential progress for ending the war is laden with risk: threatening a government shutdown.

Opponents of the war say that, with Democrats pushing for support based on their efforts to end to the war, they owe it to voters to put government spending on the line.

“It will certainly demonstrate whether Democrats are willing to stretch themselves and put up a fight and get uncomfortable,” said Hannah Morris, the vice president of government affairs for the liberal, pro-Israel group J Street, which opposes the conflict. “So much of the rhetoric has been about the Iran war.”

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In the months since the conflict began on February 28, Democrats and the handful of Republicans opposed to the war have poured most of their energy into votes based on the 1973 War Powers Resolution, which limits the president’s power to wage war without congressional approval. In June, they succeeded in securing House and Senate passage of a war powers resolution, but the Trump administration has ignored the vote, arguing the law is unconstitutional.

Advocates still believe the Trump administration should be bound by the June resolution, but they concede that other paths may have more teeth.

If they really want to stop the war, Democrats will have to confront questions of timing, divisions within their own caucus, and the risk of a government shutdown.

One prime opportunity could be the December 11 expiration of a spending bill called the continuing resolution that has been funding the government since the last shutdown. Democrats could attempt to attach a rider to the bill prohibiting the use of any of its funds for the Iran war. If that bill does not pass both chambers, the government shuts down.

The process will provide Democrats with rare leverage before the next Congress is sworn in.

Congressional Democratic leaders have not said whether they are willing to risk a shutdown, however. Jeffries did not tip his hand when he was asked during a recent interview with CNN.

“Listen, we’ll deal with the appropriations process when we deal with the appropriations process,” he said. “Right now, the mechanism that is in front of us will be to aggressively move war powers resolutions until we end this war in the best interest of the American people.”

Some Democratic candidates in hotly contested races have gone much further than Jeffries, zeroing in on the appropriations issue. Rep. Tom Barrett, of Michigan’s 7th Congressional District, was one of the few Republicans to vote for an Iran war powers resolution. But environmental activist Will Lawrence still attacked him at a recent debate on the issue of war funding.

Morris, who is part of a coalition of groups that have called on Congress to cut off funding for the war, said she is not sure how aggressively Democrats will be willing to pursue the issue during the lame-duck period.

“Will they be willing to shut down the government over this? I don’t have real answers. I think there are a lot of variables here,” she said.

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Another option supported by many advocates is the pending debate over the National Defense Authorization Act, the annual Pentagon budget and policy bill. Critics of the war argue that Congress could attempt to insert a provision into the law cutting off authorization for the conflict.

Democrats should be willing to block the bill if it does not include “meaningful restrictions” on the administration’s ability to wage the war, said Hassan El-Tayyab, legislative director for Middle East Policy at the Friends Committee on National Legislation.

“That’s the mandate we’re seeing from the American people,” he said. “They shouldn’t pass a massive defense bill while leaving the administration free to pursue yet another open-ended war in the Middle East.”

The defense bill is generally considered “must-pass” legislation on Capitol Hill, providing leverage for Senate Democrats who could block it with a filibuster. The office of Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., who plays a key role in the process as the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, did not respond to a request for comment.

Falling short of either of those paths, Democrats could continue to try to pass more war powers resolutions. With their party poised for a dramatic shift in its favor in the midterm elections, Democrats could even try to exert pressure on Republican legislators to vote in favor of the resolutions, some opponents of the war believe.

Democrats could also wait until January, when they are widely predicted to retake control of one or both chambers of Congress. Holding the gavel in the House or Senate will give them vastly expanded powers to set military spending and launch investigations into the conduct of the war.

One key Democrat, Rep. Adam Smith of Washington, told The Intercept in a statement he was willing to pursue multiple paths to stopping the war, but all of them face obstacles until the next Congress.

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“I am open to exploring options for using the NDAA or appropriations bills as a way to end the war,” said Smith, the ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee. “That effort would most likely require bipartisan support. Unfortunately, I am not confident that there is sufficient Republican will or support for such legislative efforts or to override an inevitable veto.”

Whether in this Congress or the next, cutting off spending for the war appears to be the best way for Democrats to force the Trump administration to negotiate with Iran, according to Brian Finucane, a former State Department official who serves as a senior adviser at the nonprofit International Crisis Group.

“If they are serious,” he said, “they should be willing to play hardball, and that would require using the power of the purse.”

The post Dems Have an Opportunity to Force an End to the Iran War. Will They Take It? appeared first on The Intercept.

After a string of damaging attacks on bases throughout the Middle East, U.S. long-range bombers stationed in the United Kingdom fled back to their American home bases on Sunday amid fears of an impending Iranian strike.

A U.S. official described the threat as a “sophisticated plot to attack” Royal Air Force Fairford air base with “multiple drones” that could have turned into a military and public relations nightmare. The U.S. official suggested that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps may have recruited U.K. nationals to play roles in the plot, which so unnerved the Pentagon that they took the extraordinary step of removing 12 B-1 Bombers from the base that has played a key role in the U.S. war. A second official called it a “complex plan” and part of a “hybrid strategy” of asymmetric warfare by Iran that forced the Pentagon to take drastic measures.

“There were some threats,” President Donald Trump admitted on Monday when asked about the bombers, adding that leaving the aircraft would only tempt an attack.

The inability to safeguard U.S. aircraft at a base northwest of London comes at a time of mounting attacks on U.S. outposts around the world.

Complex Iranian drone and ballistic missile strikes have killed and injured U.S. troops, placed many more in harm’s way, and damaged or destroyed numerous outposts across the Middle East. Some crucial bases have sustained so much damage that U.S. operations have been radically disrupted and, according to the second official, “base posture in the region may never recover.”

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The strikes have also targeted joint facilities operated by U.S. allies. In March, Iran launched a drone attack on a British air base in Akrotiri, Cyprus, causing damage to a facility the U.S. military has long relied on. Iran also targeted a joint U.K.–U.S. base on the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia that has become increasingly central to the U.S. war effort.

What Trump called a “little excursion” has become a festering wound for the U.S. military. Despite months of claims by Trump and Hegseth that Iran’s military was annihilated, Iran has attacked more than 15 bases across the Middle East. The official U.S. casualty toll stands at 19 dead and close to 900 wounded, most of the dead occurring since July, after the Trump administration claimed the war had ended. The real casualty toll is higher and has been consistently obscured and manipulated through what one defense official called a “cover-up.” 

The first U.S. official said Iran is engaged in a “go for broke” strategy, banking that it can absorb economic ruin longer than the U.S. can sustain a failing war and an expensive and difficult Naval blockade and escort program in the Strait of Hormuz, while dealing with global economic upheaval from stubbornly high fuel prices that have not shrunk to pre-war levels despite the oil flow from other Gulf Nations returning to normal.

The withdrawal of the bombers from Fairford came just days after the British government arrested six suspects in connection with a suspected attack on that same base. U.K. Prime Minister Andy Burnham said there were “strong indications” that Iran played a role in the incident. The men were later released on bail, prompting criticism by Trump.

The IRGC warned in July that “any base used to launch attacks on Iranian territory is a legitimate target for our forces.” On Monday, the commander-in-chief of Iran’s army, Maj. Gen. Amir Hatami, “stressed the need for any creative act capable of disrupting the enemy’s calculations,” according to a report by Iran’s Islamic Republic News Agency. The U.S. officials referenced additional threats against other bases in Europe, including Ramstein Air Base in Germany.

This isn’t the first time the U.S. has scrambled to protect its assets from a supposed Iranian threat. In July, Trump himself snuck into a catering truck and fled Turkey on a military aircraft due to U.S. fears of a possible Iranian attack on Air Force One. Trump had earlier said he was Iran’s “No. 1 target” during the NATO summit in Ankara.

Unlike their commander-in-chief, U.S. troops have been unable to flee their bases and ships when Iran has overwhelmed U.S. air defenses during attacks in the Middle East. A recent Pentagon inspector general report revealed Iranian strikes “damaged and destroyed hundreds of buildings and structures at U.S. bases in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Oman, and Jordan during the conflict.” Air Force personnel, alone, endured more than 1,200 “alarm reds” — the official code for imminent attack by missiles, aircraft, or ground forces — during just 38 days earlier this year, according to Air Force chief of staff Gen. Ken Wilsbach. 

A March 1 drone attack on the Port of Shuaiba in Kuwait killed six U.S. troops, the deadliest known Iranian strike on U.S. personnel during the war; dozens more were wounded. In July, an Iranian attack on Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan killed three soldiers from air defense units although they were “not actively engaged in anti-aircraft activity” during the attacks, according to a “defense official” who spoke on background because they were not authorized to disclose the information. Multiple U.S. military aircraft were also damaged in the attack, including an A-10 Thunderbolt and eight F-15 fighters. These were among dozens of U.S. aircraft so far destroyed or damaged in the war, including four F-15 fighter aircraft, 12 KC-135 refueling aircraft, and as many as 30 MQ-9 Reaper drones, according to the inspector general report.

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. About 65 percent of Patriot interceptors were expended between February and July, leaving fewer than 830 remaining from a pre-war total of 2,330, according to an analysis by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The number of THAAD interceptors dropped from more than 450 to less than 270.

Adm. Brad Cooper, the chief of U.S. Central Command, downplayed the risks of depleted stockpiles of such missiles last month, telling CBS’s “60 Minutes” that he wasn’t worried for the safety of U.S. troops. “I’m not concerned at all,” he replied when asked about defending against Iranian attacks. CENTCOM did not reply when asked if Cooper would resign if U.S. troops were killed or wounded in future attacks.

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An Iranian missile and drone attack at the start of the war destroyed Navy facilities in Manama, Bahrain, the most critical U.S. logistics hub in the region. The Pentagon claimed for months that the strikes did not significantly impact military operations but acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao admitted last month that “they blew the hell out of Bahrain.” A Wall Street Journal investigation previously found that rebuilding the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet headquarters, barracks, and communication towers at Naval Support Activity Bahrain may cost more than $400 million, which the first U.S. official told The Intercept could be an underestimate if it’s ever attempted. Naval Forces Central Command referred questions about the cost estimate to CENTCOM, which did not respond.

With the home of the Fifth Fleet knocked out and other ports in the region within range of Iranian missiles and drones, the Navy found itself facing the daunting challenge of maintaining a flotilla of more than 24 ships — including two massive aircraft carriers and numerous guided-missile destroyers and cruisers, attack submarines, or supply ships deployed at any one time. This means Navy ships need to haul food and fuel more than 2,000 miles from the base on Diego Garcia. The inspector general report noted that the shift in “naval bases and support ports posed significant challenges,” pointing specifically to the “issue with shifting logistics support and infrastructure to Diego Garcia” and the challenges of “extended sea transit requiring 14- to 18-day logistics cycles.”

Sailors and Marines have been subjected to constant danger as a result. The USS Gerald R. Ford Carrier Strike Group completed a record-breaking 11-month deployment that also included the invasion of Venezuela. (Under normal conditions, a carrier would visit port about once a month to allow its crew to rest.) The ship was, according to a Presidential Unit Citation, under “persistent threat from enemy missiles and one-way attack drones” during its deployment to the Middle East.

More recently, the IRGC targeted another aircraft carrier and guided-missile destroyer with ballistic missiles, according to Central Command. And Marines were injured in an Iranian attack on a commercial vessel in the Strait of Hormuz last month; the two U.S. officials said those Marines potentially suffered brain trauma, among other injuries.

Amid the floundering war with Iran, U.S. forces withdrew from neighboring Iraq last week, ending two-plus decades of U.S. military occupation and operations that unleashed waves of bloodshed and civilian suffering. “The expulsion of America from Iraq was the result of … the country’s steadfastness in its independence,” the IRGC announced, in a missive touting the power of national resistance. Politicians in Baghdad also celebrated the withdrawal, with Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi officially declaring October 1 a “Day of Sovereignty and Independence.”

Despite the Trump administration’s claims, the Iran war continues to expand. Last month, Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi forces seized virtually all of Yemen’s Red Sea coast, including the shoreline along the crucial shipping lanes of the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, which is the southern entrance to the Red Sea. On Tuesday, the Houthis claimed to have killed or wounded more than 200 Saudi-backed fighters seeking to retake territory.

The post The U.S. Military Struggles to Protect Its Bases Amid Failing Iran War appeared first on The Intercept.

But in the 12 weeks since, more U.S. military personnel have been injured and killed than in the 18 weeks of Epic Fury. Of the 880 U.S. troops left wounded or dead, 444 have occurred since July 7, according to the official Pentagon count.

President Donald Trump’s war of choice has left nearly 100 U.S. troops wounded or dead this month alone, according to the Pentagon. This includes 29 Navy sailors and eight Marines added last week to the official tally of those injured, following claims by a top Iranian official that an attack with a new “anti-ship missile” had “created hell for the Americans.”

The Marines were injured in a cruise missile attack on September 14, according to two U.S. officials who spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity. The Marines were aboard an unidentified vessel in the Strait of Hormuz, they said, and potentially suffered brain trauma among other injuries. The attack was first reported by NBC News.

A cargo ship was hit that same day by a projectile in the Strait of Hormuz, according to the United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations organization. The officials would not say if Marines have been stationed on commercial vessels transiting the Strait.

The Navy did not answer The Intercept’s questions about when and where the sailors were wounded. A Navy official said that casualties had been “fully validated” but would not name the affected “units.”

This latest in a series of casualty spikes comes as additional details of the toll of Iranian attacks on U.S. troops become more apparent. Air Force personnel, alone, endured more than 1,200 “alarm reds” — the official code for imminent attack by missiles, aircraft, or ground forces — during just 38 days earlier this year, according to Air Force chief of staff Gen. Ken Wilsbach. He noted that these Iranian strikes also led to more than 420 “long lonely walks” by explosive ordnance disposal technicians. Dealing with such munitions can be lethal: Army Sgt. Michael Emmanuel Swinton, 30, of Fayetteville, North Carolina, was killed and another soldier was wounded “during a controlled detonation” of an Iranian attack drone at Iraq’s Erbil Air Base in July.

President Donald Trump recently said the conflict with Iran is “small potatoes,” Vice President JD Vance asserted it is not a “war,” and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick announced: “There haven’t been American deaths, it’s really just an economic choke-out.” 

At least 19 personnel have died according to the official Pentagon count of war dead, including 11 killed by hostile fire. The actual number of troop deaths in the region since the war began is higher. The latest known fatality is Capt. Bianca Wilkerson, 37, of Norfolk, Virginia, who died on September 18 from a “coronary issue,” according to her brother. He said she returned from Saudi Arabia on September 10 and was headed back but died on the return flight, according to reporting by the Virginian-Pilot.

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For almost six months, The Intercept has reported on anomalies in official counts offered on the website of the Defense Casualty Analysis System, or DCAS, which tracks “deceased, wounded, ill or injured” service members for Congress and the White House. 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.

Prior reporting by The Intercept also 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.” When the Washington Post also recently suggested that the Pentagon had suppressed the casualty numbers, self-styled War Secretary Pete Hegseth called the report “DISGUSTING and FAKE.”

The Pentagon’s list of the names of the dead is still, for example, 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 died while on duty in Camp Buehring, Kuwait, on March 6.

The military has claimed that Davius was part of another mission but a recent National Guard news release noted that when “Trump made the decision to attack Iran and launched Operation Epic Fury on Feb. 28, the division headquarters began conducting combat operations.” The 42nd served as the primary headquarters leading what became, according to Maj. Gen. Jack James, the division commander, the “largest and first long-range precision fires campaign in the history of the United States Army.” James specifically saluted Davius whom the Guard admitted was “conducting operations” when he died.

The eight Marines added to DCAS last week appeared in the tally almost 10 days after the September 14 attack. 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. “We got it very quickly. We could report the number of casualties very fast,” Joan Crenshaw, who worked on DCAS during the war on terror, previously told The Intercept, noting that data was refreshed daily. A current U.S. official also previously told The Intercept that the recent reporting lags are a blend of incompetence and deliberate slow-walking of casualty data to manage public fallout.

Iran’s ability to overwhelm U.S. air defenses in the Middle East using attack drones and advanced ballistic missiles, as previously reported by The Intercept, has left the U.S. military in a precarious situation. Despite months of claims by Trump and Hegseth that Iran’s military was annihilated, Iran has attacked more than 15 bases across the Middle East, according to information from U.S. officials and Iranian reports. These strikes damaged or destroyed hundreds of facilities at U.S. bases in Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, according to Central Command. Air Force personnel alone conducted 48 airfield repairs in a little more than a month, according to Wilsbach.

An Iranian missile and drone attack on February 28 destroyed Navy facilities in Manama, Bahrain, the region’s most critical U.S. military logistics hub. The Pentagon claimed for months that the strikes did not significantly impact military operations, but acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao recently admitted that Iran “blew the hell out of Bahrain.”

The post U.S. Has Suffered More Casualties in Iran Since the Conclusion of Operation Epic Fury appeared first on The Intercept.

National Iranian American Council Action on Thursday filed its suit in a Washington federal court asking a judge to declare the war on Iran illegal on the basis that it violates the Declare War Clause of the Constitution.

“No President should have the power to take this country into an indefinite war by himself,” NIAC President Jamal Abdi said in a statement. “Congress never authorized this war. Yet Iranian families are being bombed, American service members have been killed, and communities on both sides are being forced to bear the consequences. This lawsuit asks a fundamental question: Can one person decide, on his own, to keep an entire nation at war?”

The lawsuit was filed as the Senate prepared to vote on a resolution seeking to stop the war. A floor vote on the resolution, which already passed the House of Representatives, failed in the upper chamber Thursday afternoon after senators shot it down in a 49–50 split.

“We’ve unfortunately seen this Congress fail its job of standing up for their constitutional role as the sole body empowered to declare war,” Abdi told The Intercept. “That’s why we are pursuing every option at our disposal, including taking the challenge against this unconstitutional war to the courts.”

Both the Senate vote and NIAC Action’s lawsuit took on new urgency after Trump used his United Nations General Assembly speech on Tuesday to threaten to “annihilate” Iran, a country of 90 million people.

“When Trump is threatening annihilation of another country in a war of aggression,” Abdi said, “it is all hands on deck to stop this full-blown constitutional crisis before it gets worse.”

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Seven Months of War

Trump, in partnership with the Israeli military, launched the war against Iran on February 28 with a sudden barrage of airstrikes and missile attacks that left numerous top Iranian leaders dead and killed hundreds of civilians. The early days of the attack saw a missile strike on a school in the town of Minab that killed more than 100 children, which the United Nations declared to be a possible war crime.

It was days later, on March 2, that Trump notified Congress of the initiation of hostilities. In the ensuing months, the war has turned into a regional conflagration. Israel invaded Lebanon, leaving thousands of people killed and tens of thousands more displaced.

Meanwhile, retaliatory missile and drone strikes by Iran against the U.S., Israel, and their allies in the Persian Gulf have severely impacted the region and led to a shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz that has hobbled global fuel markets. And missile fire from the Houthis, the militant group that controls much of Yemen, shut down shipping through the Red Sea’s Bab al-Mandab Strait, further straining the global economy and spurring a Saudi military response. 

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The initial attacks, thousands of deaths, and cascading economic fallout of the war all took place without the consent of the American people, a fact that NIAC Action’s attorneys cast in the lawsuit as a clear violation of Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution, which grants Congress the exclusive power to declare war.

“The Constitution does not permit a President to wage war indefinitely and ask Congress for permission later,” said attorney Alan Morrison. “Congress never authorized this war, yet months later the bombing and blockade continued. We are asking the Court to enforce the constitutional line between the President’s authority as Commander in Chief and Congress’s exclusive authority to take the country to war.”

Though Trump has sought to bypass Congress in pursuing the war through the use of semantics, he has repeatedly undermined that effort with public statements declaring that his military action is a war, NIAC Action’s complaint noted.

“Calling a war a ‘military operation’ or an ‘excursion’ does not erase the Declare War Clause,” said attorney Bruce Fein in a statement. “The question before the Court is whether the President can continue these hostilities without the authorization the Constitution requires.”

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The lawsuit was filed on behalf of several NIAC Action members who have been personally impacted by the war. Several of their family members have been killed, wounded, or otherwise terrorized by the monthslong campaign of airstrikes carried out by the U.S. and its allies. One member joining the suit, Nilma Dilmaghani, described the horror of learning that a cousin had been badly wounded in an airstrike that destroyed a family apartment.

“When I learned that my cousin had been trapped under the rubble, that they had lost their home and suffered such serious injuries, I felt completely helpless,” said Dilmaghani. “It is unbearable to watch your family live through this from thousands of miles away and know there is nothing you can do to keep them safe.”

The post Congress Failed Again to Stop Trump’s Iran War. This Group Is Trying Through the Courts. appeared first on The Intercept.

Another U.S. soldier died this month, according to newly released Pentagon statistics that classify the death as “non-hostile.” A female soldier was on a military flight headed to Saudi Arabia when she suffered an undisclosed “medical incident,” a defense official told The Intercept. Another 66 U.S. personnel have also been wounded in action just this month, according to that official. This has pushed the official count of war casualties above 850. Almost half the total — 419 wounded or dead — have occurred since Iran stepped up attacks in early July.

The Pentagon’s official total of dead and wounded personnel, as documented over almost six months of reporting by The Intercept, has been a gross undercount, stemming from what one U.S. official previously called a “casualty cover-up.”

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Since the beginning of the Trump administration’s war with Iran, the War Department has posted the official count of military 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 White House. Casualties were initially tallied under Operation Epic Fury. Since July 7, they are now counted separately on a webpage with a generic title: “Overseas Operations.” 

Prior reporting by The Intercept found DCAS is missing hundreds of wounded or dead personnel from the Iran war. The Pentagon’s list of the names of the dead is, for example, 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 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. Gen. Dan Caine, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for example, recognized Davius while “honoring our fallen.” 

Three U.S. contractors based in the region have also died during the conflict, according to an official who spoke with the Washington Post. 

For months, The Intercept has 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.

A U.S. government official previously told The Intercept that scores of casualties added to DCAS last month was “an accounting trick” designed to dampen depressing statistics. That official accused the Pentagon of “slow-walking” the total for weeks. “They wanted the heat on them to slow down after the really devastating attacks,” that source told The Intercept, referencing attacks on U.S. bases in July that exposed the vulnerability of U.S. troops to Iranian attacks. Official statistics now show that the Pentagon admits that 352 personnel were wounded or killed in July and none died or were injured in August.

DCAS counts 11 hostile deaths in 2026, all resulting from the Iran war. This is the highest total of military personnel killed in action since 2021. Including non-hostile deaths, DCAS counts 19 dead due to the Iran war, but fails to count Davius. Also missing is Sgt. Devin Seibel who died in Irbil, Iraq, on May 31 in a training accident, according to a military press release.

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More than 580 military personnel have died this year, across the world, according to Pentagon statistics. The War Department lists 114 as accidental and 14 as homicides. As of September 21, there are also eight personnel whose deaths are listed as “undetermined.”

The female soldier who died this month has yet to be identified but was over 35 years old, according to DCAS information.

Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary Joel Valdez did not reply to repeated requests for comment or clarification for this article.

The post Another U.S. Soldier Is Dead as Iran War Casualties Rise appeared first on The Intercept.

Mohammadjamal Azizi and Hannaneh Alikaram requested asylum after arriving in the United States in late 2024, for fear of the persecution they would likely face as Christian converts in Iran, where they had twice been arrested due to their faith.

Since arriving in the U.S., they have faced sharply different versions of American justice, the result of a process advocates refer to bitterly as “immigration roulette”: Azizi — who goes by the name Liam — has been free for more than a year, after his asylum claim was granted, while Alikaram has suffered 21 months in detention, more than a year of that coming after her claim was rejected. 

Until recently, it is likely that Alikaram would not have spent nearly as much time in detention as she has. But amid the twin agendas of mass detention and mass deportation, the Trump administration has swept aside years of precedent by locking up people who would previously have been allowed to fight their cases from outside detention, while going after communities formerly protected from deportation due to the likelihood of persecution back home.

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Iranians have found themselves the crosshairs. Last year, amid the so-called 12-Day War between the U.S.–Israel and Iran, senior officials with Immigration and Customs Enforcement launched a scheme to begin deportations to Iran, a plan that resulted in three planes full of Iranian deportees being sent back to Iran on charter flights.

Those flights were suspended earlier this year after the U.S. and Israel launched the ongoing war on Iran, but multiple Iranians with final orders of removal have been deported to countries where they have no ties, including Panama and the Central African Republic. With so-called third-country flights leaving every month or so, Azizi and his wife live in constant fear that Alikaram might be put on a plane to a country where she knows no one and from which she has little hope of escaping.

Leaving detention after seven months, Azizi headed to the Iranian American hub of Los Angeles, where he has spent the past year working any job he can find to raise money for legal bills and fighting for his wife’s release. By the logic of the U.S. immigration system, that should be a simple prospect: As the spouse of an asylee, Alikaram is eligible for a status known as derivative asylum, a process intended to ensure family unification and act as a backstop against situations like the one in which Azizi and Alikaram find themselves, according to Carmen Maria Rey Caldas, a former immigration judge fired by the Trump administration last year.

“The person gets to have derivative asylum because family unity is a central tenet of our immigration system,” said Rey Caldas. “This is your money and my money that are being wasted in detaining this woman who is unquestionably eligible for asylum as the spouse of an individual that has been granted asylum.”

The couple currently has a petition for derivative asylum before U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and have filed a petition for habeas corpus seeking to secure Alikaram’s release on the basis of prolonged detention. Amid the uncertainty, with no end in sight to his wife’s detention, Azizi said their separation — and his feeling of helplessness in the face of bureaucratic cruelty — weighs on him daily.

“Being separated from Hananneh is unbearable,” Azizi wrote in a statement to the court filed earlier this year. “Every night I go to sleep wondering if she is safe in detention. Every day I wake up with anxiety that she might be taken away from me and sent back to a country where she could be imprisoned, tortured, or even killed just because she sought freedom.”

Azizi and Alikaram married in 2018 and lived together in Isfahan, Iran, where both had gone to university. Azizi worked as a software engineer, while Alikaram ran a greenhouse business, cultivating plants and posting playful videos to YouTube in which she coached plant lovers on topics ranging from prepping plants for autumn to guarding against pests. In the videos, which include jokey, spliced-in clips from “Lord of the Rings” and Miyazaki films, Alikaram comes across as a happy young woman enamored with the natural world.

The couple found their way to Christianity first through friends, members of Isfahan’s sizable minority of Armenian Christians. Christians have lived in Iran for more than a millennium, and Iran’s constitution affords protections allowing ethnoreligious communities, most notably Armenians and Assyrians, to practice their faith and organize their families and communities accordingly.

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But the situation is very different for converts like Azizi and Alikaram, who are considered by Iran’s theocratic government to be apostates, and are subject to harsh punishments — up to and including execution. As a result, converts must worship in secret, in an underground network of so-called home churches.

It was in these home churches that the couple began exploring Christianity and where, in January 2024, they were baptized into the Anglican church. But it was also in a home church where the two met with their first experience of state terror, Azizi and Alikaram told The Intercept in telephone interviews and related in court documents. On March 5, 2024, they were worshipping with a handful of others in a home church in Isfahan when members of the pro-government Basij militia burst in, having been informed of the gathering by neighbors. Alikaram and Azizi, along with others, were taken into custody. Alikaram was beaten so badly she passed out and had to be hospitalized.

On June 9, 2024, after relocating for their own safety to the capital of Tehran, Alikaram and Azizi were arrested again on charges of practicing a foreign religion and inviting others to practice Christianity. She was held for two days, and he for four. After that ordeal, they decided it was time to leave. They secured a visa to enter Brazil, and left Iran on November 3, 2024. Five days later, a court in Tehran issued warrants for their arrest, according to court documents.

Azizi and Alikaram entered the United States on December 26, 2024, after an arduous trip overland from Brazil that took them through more than half a dozen countries. En route, they traveled through the infamous Darién Gap and spent two days as captives of a criminal group in Tapachula, Mexico, an ordeal that ended only after paying thousands of dollars for their release. 

In Mexico, they registered for CBP One, the mobile app designed by the Biden administration as the only method by which potential asylees could file a claim. Due to the danger in Mexico, including threats from a smuggler, Alikaram and Azizi said smugglers forced them to join a group of migrants from India, Iran, and a number of African countries in crossing the border wall separating Tijuana and San Diego.

“They told us, ‘You have to cross the border, you cannot stay in Mexico,’” Azizi recalled the smugglers saying. “It was out of our hands.”

On the other side, they soon found themselves in the custody of the U.S. Border Patrol, who searched the migrants and separated the men from the women. 

“We told them we are married, we showed them our marriage certificate,” Azizi told The Intercept. “But they didn’t care. They separated us.”

In early January 2025, Alikaram was sent to Richwood Correctional Center in Monroe, Louisiana, while Azizi was sent to another facility in Louisiana before ending up at a detention center in Houston, Texas. 

They have been apart ever since.

Alikaram went before Judge Jennifer A. May for her asylum hearing on July 2, 2025. May, who was appointed in 2018 under the first Trump administration, appears to be in line with the policy objectives of the current administration. Between 2021 and the end of 2025, she denied asylum in 91.8 percent of the cases she heard, according to data from Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, which collects data on immigration judges.

The hearing took place at a time in which judges were under ever greater pressure to deny claims, according to Rey Caldas, the former immigration judge, who was fired last year amid a purge of the immigration court system by the Trump administration.

“It was evident to me when I was on the bench, and it’s certainly evident to me now that they are exerting massive pressure so that judges deny all applications,” Rey Caldas said. 

In the hearing, which was conducted over Webex, May drilled into Alikaram’s claim, asking for details about her baptism, whether or not she had owned a Bible, and her reasons for converting to Christianity. Alikaram, clearly nervous, stumbled over her words at times, and at others gave answers that clashed with evidence provided to court. Some details also appeared to get lost in translation. At one point, a reference by Alikaram to the Basij, the paramilitary arm of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, was transcribed as “a siege.” 

May did not find Alikaram to be credible. In her decision denying Alikaram’s asylum case, May focused mostly on what she described as inconsistencies in Alikaram’s testimony, including how long she’d been attending home churches and details of her arrest — inconsistencies that Alikaram and Azizi later blamed on her nerves while testifying. But May also tried to downplay the likelihood that Alikaram would face persecution if she returned to Iran.

“I find there is no independent evidence to show that the respondent would likely be tortured in Iran,” May wrote. “[T]his court is aware that Christians have been arrested and sent to jail for some period of time. But looking at the amount of people in Iran, the amount of people who are converts to Christianity, I cannot find that that percentage would be more than likely or not torture or persecution [sic] for this respondent.”

Six days later, Azizi who at the time was being held at a detention facility in Texas, went before Judge Nimmo Bhagat, fully expecting that his claim would be denied as well. To his shock, however, the judge approved his claim for asylum, and just two weeks later he was a free man.

“I was shocked,” Azizi said. “I thought if my wife couldn’t get asylum that I’d have no chance. But they gave me asylum.”

A spokesperson for the Executive Office of Immigration Review, the branch of the Justice Department that oversees immigration courts, declined to comment. Neither ICE nor USCIS responded to requests for comment.

In light of his wife’s asylum denial, Azizi’s successful claim was a godsend for them both. Despite May’s decision, Alikaram should now be eligible for derivative asylum, upon which her own claim and its denial has no bearing.

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“Warehousing Human Beings”

The couple filed for derivative asylum in December, after the Board of Immigration Appeals denied Alikaram’s appeal of May’s decision. USCIS issued a notice of receipt, and even scheduled an appointment in Jackson, Mississippi, for a biometrics appointment. But ICE failed to produce Alikaram for the appointment, and the derivative asylum process now appears to be languishing in limbo.

In April, Alikaram’s attorney, Emily Trostle, filed a petition for habeas corpus in an attempt to secure Alikaram’s release from detention. That case, too, has stalled, forcing Trostle to file a petition last week to expedite the process.

In detention, meanwhile, Alikaram is suffering from poor nutrition, failing eyesight, and severe anxiety and depression. 

“I can’t bear it anymore,” she told The Intercept in a telephone interview. “I know God has a plan for me, but sometimes now I say, ‘Just kill me so my husband and my family can move on with their lives.’”

The post Immigration Roulette: Husband Granted Asylum, Wife Locked Up Awaiting Deportation appeared first on The Intercept.

As the conflict has engulfed the region, the military has grappled with a growing list of challenges: Iranian attacks on U.S. bases and warships in the Middle East, depleted stockpiles of defensive munitions, increasing casualties, maintenance issues on ships, lengthy troop deployments, complicated logistics, flagging morale and a host of other issues that have taken a heavy toll on troops, damaged military readiness, and a strained Pentagon budget — contradicting months of rosy pronouncements by the Trump administration.

Both officials said that Iran is facing extreme economic pressure, according to intelligence reports. The first official characterized recent Iranian attacks on warships with ballistic missiles as a “go for broke” strategy to increase economic pressures on America ahead of the U.S. midterms. That official said it was unclear which country would “blink first.”

Trump suggested on Sunday that the U.S. could “stay and keep the oil” in Iran, like the neo-colonial resource grab the administration is carrying out in Venezuela. The second official said that a U.S. occupation of Iran would be “almost impossible” and that the idea was “nonsensical obviously.”

Iran’s ability to overwhelm U.S. air defenses in the Middle East using attack drones and advanced ballistic missiles, as previously reported by The Intercept, has left the U.S. military in a precarious state. The Trump administration failed to appreciate Iran’s military prowess, said the first official. The other pointed to a “complete lack of planning” for the war. Since July 7 alone, there have been hundreds of U.S. casualties caused by Iranian attacks, according to official Pentagon statistics.

The officials said the military’s ability to function at peak capacity was crippled in the opening hours of the conflict when an Iranian missile and drone attack on February 28 destroyed Navy facilities in Manama, Bahrain, the region’s most critical logistics hub. The Pentagon claimed for months that the strikes did not significantly impact military operations, but last week acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao admitted “they blew the hell out of Bahrain.” More than six months after the attack, Naval Support Activity Bahrain remains a shambles. “We’re not getting back in there anytime soon,” said Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Daryl Caudle, the Navy’s highest-ranking officer, during a recent town hall.

A Wall Street Journal investigation previously found that rebuilding the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet headquarters, barracks, and communication towers at NSA Bahrain may cost more than $400 million, which the second official said could be an underestimate if it’s ever attempted. Naval Forces Central Command referred questions about the cost estimate to Central Command, which did not respond.

Trump has touted the destruction of Iran’s navy as one of his signature accomplishments of the war, but the officials pointed to the severe strain placed on U.S. naval forces in the region. With the home of the Fifth Fleet knocked out and other ports in the region within range of Iranian missiles and drones, the Navy found itself facing the daunting challenge of maintaining a flotilla of more than 24 ships — including two massive aircraft carriers and numerous guided-missile destroyers and cruisers, attack submarines, or supply ships deployed at any one time.

While aircraft carriers are nuclear-powered, the planes and helicopters on them, as well as the other ships, require millions of gallons of fuel each week. And the sailors aboard the ships require hundreds of thousands of meals. This means Navy ships need to haul supplies more than 2,000 miles from a longtime U.S. base on the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia. A War Department inspector general report released on Monday noted that the shift in “naval bases and support ports posed significant challenges,” pointing specifically to the “issue with shifting logistics support and infrastructure to Diego Garcia” and the challenges of “extended sea transit requiring 14- to 18-day logistics cycles.”

“It’s difficult and ultimately unsustainable,” said the second official, who told The Intercept that White House assumptions that Iran would “crack” before the Navy have yet to be borne out.

The Navy has just 11 aircraft carrier strike groups, and amid the ongoing strain of extended deployments, its oldest carrier, the USS Nimitz, has seen its service life extended. So far, four of the 11 carrier strike groups have already been deployed to the Middle East during the war. Some of the remaining carriers are undergoing substantial repairs and will not be ready to deploy again for years.

The USS Gerald R. Ford Carrier Strike Group completed a record-breaking, 11-month deployment that also included the invasion of Venezuela. (Under normal conditions, a carrier would visit port about once a month to allow its crew to rest.) The ship was, according to a Presidential Unit Citation, under “persistent threat from enemy missiles and one-way attack drones” during its deployment to the Middle East.

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Early in the Iran war, the Ford suffered extensive damage from a laundry fire and a malfunctioning fire-suppression system that forced crew members to manually fight the blaze for around 30 hours. The fire halted sorties for two days, and around 600 sailors lost access to their bunks due to the damage. The Navy claimed few casualties from the blaze, but reports soon emerged that the more than 200 sailors were treated for smoke inhalation or lacerations.

The Ford has also been plagued by plumbing issues for years. During just a four-day span in 2025, there were 205 breakdowns. Before the Ford left the Caribbean, it was facing constant issues with the nearly 650 toilets aboard. And then in the Middle East, the carrier again suffered from clogged, excrement-filled toilets, according to video obtained by CNN. 

Another carrier, the USS Abraham Lincoln, spent most of its nine months at sea with no port calls, leading to reports of rampant morale problems, supply shortages, and suicide attempts, with at least one crew member going overboard. At an August 11 town hall in San Diego, families expressed deep concerns about their loved ones to Cao, the acting Navy secretary. But Trump dismissed worries about the sailors, saying the Lincoln’s deployment was “not nearly long enough.” Last month, the Lincoln was relieved by the USS George Washington, allowing the heavily rusted Lincoln to pull into Thailand for a port call. 

Those ships have left the region but sailors remain under persistent threat. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps targeted a U.S. aircraft carrier and guided-missile destroyer with ballistic missiles this month, according to Central Command. CENTCOM did not reply to a request for additional information about the strikes.

Despite months of claims by Trump and self-styled War Secretary Pete Hegseth that Iran’s military was annihilated, Iran has attacked more than 15 bases across the Middle East, according to information from U.S. officials and Iranian reports.

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, according to U.S. officials who spoke to The Intercept as well as numerous press reports.

Trump and Hegseth have pushed back on these claims. Trump posted on Monday that the U.S. is “producing more Exquisite and Elite Weapons than at any time in our History,” but the aforementioned inspector general report immediately contradicted the president, revealing that the conflict has resulted in “strategic inventory shortfalls and revealed industrial base bottlenecks for munitions resupply.”

“I have all the munitions necessary to both defend our forces as well as conduct a broad range of contingencies,” Adm. Brad Cooper, the CENTCOM chief, told Congress in May. But even the Pentagon admits that 410 U.S. troops have been killed or wounded since July 7 alone. Three U.S. soldiers were killed during Iranian ballistic missile and drone attacks on Jordan’s Muwaffaq Salti Air Base on July 17 and 18, for example. And an Iranian drone attack on Erbil Air Base, Iraq, on July 18 killed one soldier and left another injured during what CENTCOM called a “controlled detonation” of the downed aircraft.

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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. About 65 percent of Patriot interceptors were expended between February and July, leaving fewer than 830 remaining from a pre-war total of 2,330, according to an analysis by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The number of THAADs dropped from more than 450 to less than 270.

On Sunday, Cooper, the CENTCOM commander, continued to downplay the risks of depleted stockpiles and told CBS’s “60 Minutes” that he wasn’t worried for the safety of U.S. troops. “I’m not concerned at all,” he replied when asked about defending against Iranian attacks. CENTCOM did not reply when asked if Cooper would resign if U.S. troops were killed or wounded in future attacks.

In addition to the destruction of NSA Bahrain, the Combined Air Operations Center at Al Udeid Air Base, Qatar, was severely damaged by Iranian missiles early in the war, rendering it inoperable. Both were recently attacked again, raising questions about whether either will ever be rebuilt. Iran also struck Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan last week, damaging multiple U.S. military aircraft, according to the second U.S. official. In response, U.S. forces fired a “significant” number of Patriot interceptors to protect U.S. forces, the second official said.

U.S. officials confirmed that Iran has also 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 has also attacked U.S. military facilities at Jordan’s Prince Hassan Air Base and King Faisal Air Base; and Kuwait’s Al-Adiri base, Ahmed Al-Jaber Air Base, Camp Doha, Ali Al Salem Air Base, and Camp Arifjan. Last week, the IRGC announced its forces had “simultaneously attack[ed] the American bases in Jordan, Bahrain, and Erbil,” including “a combined missile-drone attack on the headquarters and residence of the American commander of the Ali al-Salem base.”

CENTCOM failed to respond to a request for comment about attacks on its outposts or provide its own official count of the number struck. But the Pentagon inspector general report revealed Iranian strikes “damaged and destroyed hundreds of buildings and structures at U.S. bases in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Oman, and Jordan during the conflict.” It also disclosed that “dozens of U.S. aircraft were destroyed or damaged,” including four F-15 fighter aircraft, 12 KC-135 refueling aircraft, and as many as 30 MQ-9 Reaper drones.

The post Iran War Has the U.S. Military on the Brink of a “Breakdown” appeared first on The Intercept.

The Toxic Inheritance of America’s Wars

Esmaeil Baqaei, the spokesperson for Iran’s Foreign Ministry, recently warned of the increasing environmental damage caused by the U.S. war, drawing attention to oil contamination in the Persian Gulf that has begun washing up on Iranian shores. “This incident is only one visible example of the extensive pollution — both overt and concealed — that has degraded the waters of the Persian Gulf and the Sea of Oman,” he wrote on X. “Who bears responsibility for compensating these damages? Is it the nations that consume the inexpensive energy exported from our region, the shipping insurers, or the aggressors and their partners who have transformed the Persian Gulf and the Sea of Oman into a theater for military operations and the testing of highly destructive weaponry?”

Alongside death and destruction that has killed or wounded tens of thousands of Iranians, the U.S.–Israeli war has caused massive environmental devastation. By March, attacks had already resulted in more than 300 incidents of potential environmental harm, documented across 12 countries in the region, according to a report by the Conflict and Environment Observatory. These toxic exposures threaten not only today’s war victims, but also future generations who will grapple with the knock-on effects.

Major commercial satellite companies have restricted or delayed the publication of their Middle East data at the behest of the U.S. government. Likely intended to obscure the true extent of damage inflicted on U.S. military facilities across the region, the ongoing satellite blackout has also hindered the work of those tracking the environmental devastation that has accompanied the conflict since it began in February. Even with the limited data, the Conflict and Environment Observatory has concluded that “[a]ll parties to the conflict” have appeared to target “environmentally risky facilities,” including oil infrastructure and water desalination plants.

According to research by the Climate and Community Institute, U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran in the first 14 days of the war emitted roughly 5 million metric cubic tons of greenhouse gases. Put another way: In two weeks, coalition strikes produced roughly the same amount of carbon emissions as the country of Iceland does over the course of a year. And as the war dragged on, missile facilities, weapons depots, oil infrastructure, nuclear facilities, dual-use and civilian infrastructure including power stations and desalination plants were also increasingly struck.

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The environmental threats these targets pose is enormous. Damaged desalination plants jeopardize the civilian water supply and flood nearby land and marine environments with harmful chemicals like sulfuric acid. Bombed infrastructure fills urban streets with asbestos-contaminated rubble and dust, heightening the risk of respiratory illness and cancer among exposed populations. Damaged weapons facilities pollute surrounding areas with explosives, highly toxic liquid propellants, and heavy metals. And the targeting of nuclear facilities risks radiation exposure or worse, an uncontrolled nuclear disaster, like a meltdown.

Fossil fuel infrastructure has also remained a key military objective for all belligerents. Israeli strikes on more than two dozen Iranian oil depots in early March engulfed the capital city of Tehran in a cloud of toxic smoke that rained black carbon and sulfuric acid on the city’s 9 million residents. Attacks on oil tankers and other commercial vessels have leached oil and spilled fuel into myriad waterways from the Egyptian port of Damietta, where Iran struck two liquefied natural gas vessels, to the coast of Sri Lanka, where the U.S. sank an Iranian frigate. And such environmental damage is likely to increase as the conflict continues to sporadically flare up.

The U.S. has a long history of starting wars that leave deep environmental scars. And for decades, U.S. troops have paid for it with exposures to toxic substances, including defoliants like Agent Orange, an herbicide the U.S. sprayed across Southeast Asia in the 1960s and 1970s; smoke from oil depot fires that dotted the landscape in and around Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War; and the military base burn pits of the post-9/11 forever wars. The PACT Act of 2022 extended healthcare access to millions of veterans who served from the last half of the 20th century to today and now suffer from a wide range of conditions related to such wartime exposures, including cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and reproductive issues likely caused or exacerbated by their military service.

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Health problems among U.S. veterans often mirror those of local communities in war zones as they are exposed to the same toxic substances. Just as American troops returned home from Iraq with higher rates of diseases like urinary and blood cancers, doctors in the Iraqi city of Fallujah, for example, reported higher birth abnormalities and miscarriages among the local population.

Fallujah offers a glimpse of the environmental fallout that the people of neighboring Iran may face in the years to come. More than half of Fallujah was leveled in a U.S. Marine-led siege of the city in 2004. Hospitals, water systems and electrical grids were destroyed. A similar wave of destruction accompanied the ISIS takeover of the city in 2014. Fallujah was then besieged and heavily bombed in 2016 during the U.S.–Iraqi military operation that retook the city. Iraqis in Fallujah fled en masse in both 2004 and 2014. Those who returned were greeted by demolished homes, bomb craters, chemical spills, and houses with ash covered walls littered with bullet holes.

Since 2004, Fallujah has seen a 12-fold increase in childhood cancer rates and similar spikes in early onset cancer and respiratory diseases, according to a study co-authored by local physicians. Elevated rates of miscarriages and lethal birth defects that followed the initial U.S. invasion have never diminished. Reports on these poor health outcomes by doctors at Fallujah Women and Children’s Hospital led to the creation of a multidisciplinary study steered by researchers from Purdue University in the U.S. and Britain’s Newcastle University which tracked the intergenerational health effects of heavy metal exposure.

Depleted uranium munitions — which shatter and ignite on impact, allowing them to penetrate heavy armor plating — have been used by the U.S. in combat since the Gulf War. Spent rounds then release particles of radioactive uranium and other heavy metals, like titanium, into the surrounding earth, water, and air. Heavily bombarded areas in Fallujah were left with a greater percentage of heavy metals in their soil as a result.

Those who returned to the city after the battles, rebuilt their homes, reseeded contaminated farmlands, and drank and bathed in local waters now carry higher levels of radiation and heavy metals in their bodies. Indeed, uranium was found in the bones of one-third of study participants, all of whom were children during the 2004 siege — at levels roughly 300 times higher than their generational peers in America.

While highly toxic on its own, uranium levels are also often a marker for exposure to heavy metals including lead, arsenic, and mercury, which have been known to harm virtually every organ in the human body. Today, elevated rates of miscarriages and lethal congenital anomalies plague families in Fallujah.

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“War itself is always about combustion,” explained Kali Rubaii, a cultural anthropologist and Purdue University assistant professor who led the study on Fallujah. “The combustion of generally toxic materials redistributes these toxicants into people’s air, water and food. Every time someone breathes in everything in the air, they are inheriting the pollutants of war.”

Post-war surges in birth defects, respiratory diseases, and cancers in Fallujah have now been directly linked with exposure to the weapons of war. As the pollutants of war are largely universal, the study’s implications lie far beyond Fallujah. Recommendations for those returning to bombarded areas are included in the study’s appendix in both Ukrainian and Arabic. When I spoke to Rubaii in March — two days after Tehran was drenched in black rain — she hoped the study’s finding, and its recommendations for returnees, could be of help to those living near the Persian Gulf.

The U.S–Israeli war on Iran has only exacerbated ongoing environmental crises in the Middle East, including a five-year-long drought, brought on by years of insufficient rainfall linked to human-induced climate change, that poses a severe threat to Tehran’s water supply. The Persian Gulf’s fragile coral reefs and mangrove forests have also, for years, suffered under rising water temperatures, intensive vessel activity, and growing industrial pollution.

The Persian Gulf’s ecosystems still bear the scars of oil spills from the U.S. battles with Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War. Now, according to a recent study from the University of South Florida’s College of Marine Science, oil spills in the Gulf have increased dramatically since the beginning of the war to cover roughly four times the area in March 2026 as they did one year earlier. Though it is still too soon to calculate the full extent of the environmental harm imposed by the ongoing conflict, the toxic airborne pollutants, land contaminated with heavy metals, and oil-soaked waterways will pose a threat to life for decades to come.

As Rubaii’s study concludes, “the most effective way to limit heavy metal toxicity from war is by not bombing cities.” While we live in an age where threats to civilian infrastructure are espoused and ordered by prime ministers and presidents alike, the illegality of these attacks — and their grave ecological consequences — cannot be ignored. The targeting of a country’s energy infrastructure, waterways, bridges, and homes makes it more likely that the attacked nation will respond with attacks on similar targets, placing civilians at risk in the present and, due to environmental contamination, for following generations.

The International Committee of the Red Cross — which works to uphold the laws of war — has repeatedly affirmed that the environment itself is a civilian object and must be protected. Under the 1998 Rome Statute, which established the International Criminal Court, to inflict disproportionate widespread and severe environmental damage is a war crime.

The Iran war has already sparked a global fuel crisis, threatened future harvests, and placed tens of millions of people at risk of hunger, imperiling this generation and the next. It has also subjected civilians to toxic smoke, black carbon rain, and other public health hazards. People can’t be healthy if they live on sick lands. Even after the final bomb of the Iran war has dropped, the ecological devastation and health hazards will haunt U.S. service members and local residents alike. Fallujah has shown that even long after the guns fall silent, war victims continue to suffer with the fallout of conflicts that have, quite literally, seeped into their bones.

The post Ecocide in Iran appeared first on The Intercept.

The increase of 60 wounded last week was called “an accounting trick,” by one U.S. government official who accused the Pentagon of “slow-walking” the total for weeks. “They wanted the heat on them to slow down after the really devastating attacks,” that source told The Intercept, referencing airstrikes on U.S. bases last month that exposed the vulnerability of U.S. troops to Iranian attacks.

The office of self-styled War Secretary Pete Hegseth did not respond to multiple requests for comment, including when and where the injuries occurred.

Since the beginning of the Trump administration’s war with Iran, Hegseth’s department 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 White House. Casualties since July 7 are now counted separately on a webpage with a generic title: “Overseas Operations.” Combined with totals for Operation Epic Fury — the military’s official designation for the initial months of the Iran war — 18 service members have died and 758 have been wounded since the U.S. launched the war against Iran on February 28, according to DCAS. 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.”

In the face of the increasing number of dead and wounded troops, the military has been seeking a range of services related to personnel who are killed or wounded, according to new contracting documents analyzed by The Intercept. While the military regularly awards such contracts, the commands involved have not replied to questions concerning the possible relationship to the current conflict.

On Friday, for example, the Air Force announced it awarded a new contract for a full range of mortuary services at Robins Air Force Base in Georgia. This includes transportation and refrigeration of remains, embalming, dressing, casketing or cremation, as well as funeral services. Last week, the Air Force also began looking into local firms that could fulfill a wide-ranging contract — including “mortuary services” — at Italy’s Aviano Air Base, a key hub for the war with Iran.

The public affairs offices at Robins Air Base and Aviano Air Base did not return requests for comment prior to publication.

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Last week, the Army also announced it “desires to procure” casualty administrative support, including casualty case management services, at Fort Knox, Kentucky, for the Army’s Casualty and Mortuary Affairs Operations Division. Over 90 percent of the latest casualties are Army soldiers, and its storied Fort Knox base has been intimately involved in the conflict with Iran. The body of 26-year-old Sgt. Benjamin Pennington — who died of injuries resulting from an Iranian strike on a U.S. base in Saudi Arabia in March and was the first Kentuckian to die in the war — was sent home via Godman Army Airfield at Fort Knox. Six soldiers killed in an Iranian strike in Kuwait that same month were operating under the 1st Theater Sustainment Command which is headquartered at the base. 

Fort Knox did not respond to a request for comment and further information about the contract and the losses from the war prior to publication.

The recent casualty spike resulted from Iranian attacks on around 10 U.S. outposts across the Middle East since July 9, according to a second U.S. official who previously spoke to The Intercept. 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 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 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 wounded or dead personnel from the Iran war. The Pentagon’s 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 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. Gen. Dan Caine, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for example, 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.

CNN was the first to report a significant increase in wounded troops last week.

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 by U.S.-Israeli air strikes. Last week, The Intercept reported on a family of eight, including five children, killed in one of those attacks.

The post Sixty More U.S. Soldiers Reported Injured in Iran War appeared first on The Intercept.

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.