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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related

Meta’s Israel Policy Chief Tried to Suppress Pro-Palestinian Instagram Posts

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

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

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

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

Related

Facebook Tells Moderators to Allow Graphic Images of Russian Airstrikes but Censors Israeli Attacks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related

Trump Celebrates Achieving Absolutely Nothing in Iran

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related

How the War Strengthened Iran’s Hand Against the U.S. and Israel

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related

Putting Fuel on a Ceasefire: Israel Tries to Kill U.S.–Iran Talks

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Promise of World Peace

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

Related

When Anti-War Candidates Become War-Monger Presidents

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

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

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

Months later, these objectives remain unmet.

Eliminating Missiles

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

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

Annihilating the Navy

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

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

Ending the Nuclear Program

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

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

Halting Funding of Militias

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

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

Unconditional Surrender

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

Related

How the War Strengthened Iran’s Hand Against the U.S. and Israel

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

Reopening the Strait

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

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

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

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

Related

Putting Fuel on a Ceasefire: Israel Tries to Kill U.S.–Iran Talks

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

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

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

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

A Peace Deal

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

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

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

Just Give Him Two Weeks

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

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

Related

Stop Calling It a Ceasefire

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

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

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

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

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

Related

Putting Fuel on a Ceasefire: Israel Tries to Kill U.S.–Iran Talks

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related

Amy Goodman on the Media’s “Access of Evil”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related

“Casualty Cover-Up”: The Pentagon Is Hiding U.S. Losses Under Trump in the Middle East

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related

Trump Wanted to Replicate His Venezuela “Success” in Iran. What Has It Even Looked Like?

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

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

Good for Israel

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

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

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

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

Related

These Middle Eastern News Sites Are Actually U.S. Government Propaganda Operations

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

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

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

Don’t Listen to Israel

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

Related

Putting Fuel on a Ceasefire: Israel Tries to Kill U.S.–Iran Talks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Experts also expressed skepticism at this revised count.

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

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

Related

After Afghanistan Disaster, the Pentagon Is on Track to Get Even More Money

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related

Trump’s War on Iran Could Cost Trillions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related

Putting Fuel on a Ceasefire: Israel Tries to Kill U.S.–Iran Talks

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

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

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

On the day the ceasefire between the Trump administration and Iran took effect, the tally of U.S. dead and wounded was 385. Despite a pause in hostilities, the number had slowly risen to 428 on Monday, according to Pentagon statistics. Yet on Tuesday, the number of wounded-in-action troops declined by 15 troops without public comment from the War Department, dropping the total to 413. The count held steady on Wednesday, except for one public War Department tally that put the “grand total” of wounded and dead at 411.

The casualty conundrum came as President Donald Trump extended the truce with Iran on Tuesday just hours before it was set to expire.

Two Pentagon spokespersons said they were unable to field questions on the 15 casualties disappeared by the War Department on Tuesday, claiming only the “duty officer” could answer the question but that person was not at their desk. “As soon as the duty officer comes back to their desk, I can get this to them,” said one of them.

A day, and multiple follow-ups, later, The Intercept has yet to receive an explanation of why 15 wounded personnel were scrubbed from the War Department’s casualty rolls.

Related

“Casualty Cover-Up”: The Pentagon Is Hiding U.S. Losses Under Trump in the Middle East

Whatever the actual number, the Pentagon’s official tally of dead and wounded military personnel is a gross undercount, stemming from what one U.S. government official has 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.

“These numbers, it is obvious, are important. That they don’t want the public to have them says something,” the official said. “That’s the definition of a cover-up.”

The Intercept spoke with two people who used to work on DCAS who said that there was historically very little lag between a casualty occurring in the field and its inclusion in the system. “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, told The Intercept, noting that data was refreshed daily. 

The Office of the Secretary of War did not reply to questions about the slow accumulation of casualties over two weeks or the reason the number of those wounded-in-action has increased by 43, or 28, or 26 since the cessation of hostilities on April 8.

Since The Intercept began asking hard questions about undercounts of dead and wounded personnel, the slow-walking of statistics, faulty accounting measures, and arcane casualty-counting procedures, both U.S. Central Command and the Office of the Secretary of War have clammed up, failing to answer questions or grant interviews with experts. It follows long-running efforts by Trump to mislead the American people about U.S. military casualties.

Setting aside the question of disappearing wounded, the Pentagon’s official casualty statistics offer a distorted image of the conflict. 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 at least 63 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 which had been conducting round-the-clock flight operations, said Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine, to “project combat power.” The numbers also don’t include a sailor who suffered a non-combat-related injury aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln as it was involved in “strike missions in support of Operation Epic Fury” on March 25.

Crenshaw said that DCAS data during the 2000s and early 2010s included the numbers of wounded, injured, and ill. She questioned why the smoke inhalation injuries from the USS Ford were missing from the publicly reported data. “That should have been entered into DCAS,” she said. “My concern is why that piece is now missing.”

A second person who also worked on DCAS during the war on terror, who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to their employment, expressed similar concerns and questioned what the Pentagon “had to hide.”

For weeks, the Pentagon has failed to reply to repeated requests for comment on why DCAS provides counts of non-hostile war zone deaths but not non-hostile injuries or illnesses.

It’s well known that when operations’ tempo increases, such as during a war, troops’ mental and physical health suffers. And the military’s own studies have shown — as a 2025 article in Military Review, the U.S. Army’s professional journal, put it — the “profound impact of disease and nonbattle injury (DNBI) on lost duty days and overall lethality.

Related

Trump’s War on Iran Could Cost Trillions

During the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, DNBI accounted for 80 to 85 percent of evacuations, significantly outpacing battle injury evacuations, even during spikes in combat. Another military study found that more than one-third of the casualties and almost 12 percent of all deaths of service members in Iraq and Afghanistan from 2003 through 2014 were caused by DNBI. And as a 2024 meta-analysis in Military Medicine observed, “disease and non-battle injury (DNBI) has historically been the leading casualty type among service members in warfare and a leading health problem confronting military personnel.”

In addition to ignoring untold numbers of sick and wounded personnel, the Pentagon has undercounted the dead during the Iran war.

“We will always honor the fallen,” Adm. Brad Cooper, the CENTCOM commander, announced at a Pentagon press conference last week. “And the 13 who lost their lives really helped steel the resolve and congeal the motivation of the forces.”

DCAS similarly lists 13 hostile and non-hostile U.S. deaths during the war and provides their names. But missing from Cooper’s count and the Pentagon tally is 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, 2026.

“He passed away while deployed to Kuwait in support of Operation Epic Fury,” said Rep. Mike Lawler, R-N.Y., during a memorial service for Davius late last month. Caine, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, also recognized Davius while “honoring our fallen” from the war.

For weeks, the Pentagon has ignored requests for comment on why Davius is missing from its casualty rolls.

During a Tuesday interview, Trump repeatedly said that 13 male service members had died during Operation Epic Fury. “We lost 13 men,” he said on CNBC. “But if somebody would have said, ‘We’ve done this and obliterated that country — obliterated it — and we lost 13 men,’ people would’ve said, ‘That’s not possible.’” According to DCAS, three of the dead are actually women: Maj. Ariana Gabriella Savino, Technical Sgt. Ashley Brooke Pruitt, and Master Sgt. Nicole Marie Amor.

Almost a decade ago, the Trump administration began taking steps to undermine transparency surrounding U.S. military casualties. Not long after Trump first took office, in 2017, the Pentagon stopped releasing immediate information about American combat deaths in Afghanistan — an unannounced shift in traditional policy that delayed casualty announcements for days. It followed an uptick of violence in the conflict.

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. “We suffered no casualties.”

Soon, the Pentagon would acknowledge there were, indeed, casualties and proceeded to adjust the figure upward at least five times, with CENTCOM ultimately admitting that 110 troops suffered traumatic brain injuries. An inspector general report released in November 2021 indicated that the number of brain injuries may have been even higher, because “DoD cannot determine whether all Service members are being properly diagnosed and treated for TBIs in deployed settings.”

Alyssa Farah, a former Pentagon spokesperson, later revealed on a podcast that the Trump White House pressured the military to downplay those troops’ injuries. “We did get pushback from the White House of ‘Can you guys report this differently? Can it be every 10 days or two weeks, or we do a wrap-up after the fact?’” said Farah. “The White House would prefer if we did not give regular updates on it.” She added, “And I think that it ended up glossing over what ended up being very significant injuries on U.S. troops after the fact.”

On the campaign trail in 2022, Trump also peddled casualty disinformation, claiming that for 18 months of his presidency, the U.S. suffered no deaths in the Afghanistan 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. The AP determined that there were, however, 45 combat deaths among U.S. service members reported in Afghanistan, as well as 18 “non-hostile” deaths during Trump’s first term.

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 attacks, breakdowns by country, and the total number injured. The Pentagon had offered even more granular data, providing individual synopses of more than 150 attacks, including information on deaths and injuries not only to U.S. troops, but even civilian contractors working on U.S. bases.

The post Pentagon Erases Wounded U.S. Troops From Iran War Casualty List: “Definition of a Cover-up” appeared first on The Intercept.

These overlooked stories share the same ideological slant and editorial voice: that of the White House. Al-Fassel’s YouTube account, for instance, has racked up millions of views on Arabic-language videos praising the Trump administration’s Gaza policy and exhorting Hamas to cease “taking orders from the Iranian regime” and release Israeli prisoners. On Pishtaz News, a poll on the homepage recently asked: “[H]ow would you describe your belief about the Supreme Leader’s current health status and whereabouts?” Possible answers range from “In good health but hiding” to “Disfigured” or “Dead.” The excellence of Saudi and Emirati leadership, both close military partners of the U.S., is a recurring theme.

There’s a reason this coverage echoes American foreign policy talking points. Al-Fassel and Pishtaz News are, in fact, part of network of websites and social media accounts purporting to be legitimate Middle Eastern news outlets that are in fact propaganda mills funded by the United States government, The Intercept has found.

Disclosed only at the bottom of both sites behind an “About” link that is easily missed by casual readers, the outlets note that they are “a product of an international media organization publicly funded from the budget of the United States Government.” The government affiliation remains undisclosed on social media platforms including Instagram, despite a platform policy requiring the labeling of state-backed media outlet to prevent the unwitting consumption of government propaganda.

The sites’ recent fixation on crushing Iran is unlikely to be a coincidence: Both publications share numerous connections with a portfolio of fake newsrooms that originated as a military psychological operations campaign against foreign internet users.

Al-Fassel and Pishtaz News did not respond to requests for comment, nor did CENTCOM or the Department of Defense.

In 2008, U.S. Special Operations Command put out a call for contractors to help operate what it called the Trans-Regional Web Initiative, a project that would provide “rapid, on-order global dissemination of web-based influence products and tools in support of strategic and long-term U.S. Government goals and objectives.” In other words, state propaganda pushed by Pentagon.

Masquerading as independent online newsrooms, the TRWI sites hired “indigenous content stringers” to produce articles “which Combatant Commands (COCOMs) can use as necessary in support of the Global War on Terror.” The contract, awarded to General Dynamics Information Technology, spawned 10 websites that funneled U.S. foreign policy talking points to audiences across the Middle East and South Asia, running everything from banal essays about inter-faith coexistence to, as reported by Foreign Policy in 2011, articles intended to “whitewash the image of Central Asian dictatorships.” By 2014, the sites were deemed a failure by Congress and de-funded.

Eight years later, a team of researchers published an unusual report. Following the 2016 election, the bulk of the Western media’s interest in online propagandizing had focused on influence campaigns attributed to Russia, China, and other American geopolitical rivals. But the 2022 report from the Stanford Internet Observatory and Graphika, a commercial internet analysis firm and Pentagon information warfare contractor, uncovered a network of phony “pro-Western” Twitter and Facebook accounts that pushed articles from pseudo-news websites. The report stopped short of formally attributing the campaign to the U.S., but noted that both Meta and Twitter had done so. The researchers concluded that the accounts in question attempted the coordinated spread of articles from a network of sham news websites established by U.S. Special Operations Command.

Related

Twitter Aided the Pentagon in Its Covert Online Propaganda Campaign

The report found that just a few years after TRWI’s ostensible death, many of the sites had simply rebranded, now carrying hard-to-find disclosures mentioning they were run by U.S. Central Command. Following Stanford and Graphika’s findings, some of the sites shut down; others continued. Subsequent reporting by the Washington Post found that the embarrassing revelations spurred the Pentagon to conduct “a sweeping audit of how it conducts clandestine information warfare.”

A review of the Internet Archive shows that in the aftermath of the Stanford report, TRWI sites that remained in operation changed their disclosure language. Rather than citing CENTCOM sponsorship, these sites shifted to state that they are “publicly funded from the budget of the United States Government.” The disclosure language used by the remaining network of CENTCOM propaganda sites is a word-for-word copy of the phrasing The Intercept found tucked away on the About pages of Pishtaz News and Al-Fassel.

That’s not the only evidence suggesting a link to this network of military propaganda sites.

Since they began publishing in 2023, Al-Fassel and Pishtaz News have regularly quoted or summarized CENTCOM press releases touting regional operations and battlefield successes, as did the outlets mentioned in the Stanford/Graphika report. The reliance on combatant command press releases in particular is an editorial strategy that dates back to the original SOCOM-run TRWI network.

On X, Pishtaz News follows only three other users; two are the official CENTCOM accounts for Farsi and Arabic audiences. The Pishtaz News Instagram account, which carries no disclosure of the account’s governmental nature, follows only one other user: “US CENTCOM FARSI.”

Intentionally or otherwise, Al-Fassel’s posts to X are often geotagged as having been sent from Lutz, Florida, a stone’s throw from the headquarters of CENTCOM and SOCOM in Tampa, as well as myriad military contractors that service both.

Both sites also share common design elements with the TRWI-associated publications that suggest they were created or operated by the same contractor: All posts conclude with a poll asking “Do you like this article?” using the same thumbs-up and thumbs-down icons. URLs are structured identically for Al-Fassel, Pishtaz News, and Salaam Times — an Afghanistan-focused site launched under the TRWI that continues today under a different name — suggesting they were coded using the same tools. The three sites use an identical 404 error graphic to alert users when they’ve clicked on a broken link, as well.

The web design of Al-Fassel and Pishtaz News — including page layout, URL structure, 404 error graphic, and much of the legal verbiage in the About sections — closely mirrors that of CENTCOMcitadel.com, a publication with similar content that carries an overt disclosure of Pentagon sponsorship at the bottom of its homepage.

“These sites are similar in style to the overt messaging efforts we saw from the Department of Defense previously,” Renée DiResta, a former Stanford researcher and co-author of the 2022 report, told The Intercept. “We previously saw this pattern of clearer U.S. affiliation language in the About page of the domain, then minimal to no acknowledgement on the social media profiles.”

There are other subtle nods to the sites’ true purpose: URLs for the English language versions of each site are denoted “en_GB,” for Great Britain. In a comprehensive 2015 analysis of the TRWI network, University of Bath doctoral student Roy Revie observed that the network of American military propaganda sites explicitly marked their English versions as British because “SOCOM seeks to avoid any suggestion its sites are aimed at US audiences.”

In the parlance of information warfare, these propaganda shops are considered “overt” rather than “covert,” because their state ownership is technically disclosed. But in his 2015 paper, Revie argued that these psyop sites still engage in deception. They use online journalism as a form of camouflage, he wrote, because most readers won’t seek out a publication’s About page to learn about its funding. The design of these sites “allows the DOD to credibly claim full transparency and maintain legitimacy, putting the onus onto the user to inform themselves about the source,” Revie wrote.

The output of both sites consistently lionizes the U.S. and Israel, along with America’s Gulf allies. They regularly demean the Iranian state, presenting a wholly lopsided and misleading account in a time of war. “The US says it does not seek open conflict with Tehran,” reads a March 2 article in Al-Fassel. Both sites have repeatedly cited reporting by Iran International — a Saudi-funded, pro-Israel, Iranian monarchist publication with a long record of journalistic misrepresentation. A March 31 Pishtaz News article, for instance, based on an entirely anonymously sourced Iran International post, alleged that Iranian security forces gang-raped nurses in Tehran.

Recent coverage depicts Iran as up against the ropes. A March 22 article in Pishtaz News exclaimed, “The Islamic Republic’s regular army, known as the Artesh, is increasingly described by informed observers as a force under severe strain and institutional neglect.” Another anonymously authored piece from March 25, headlined “Artesh would be better off without its main rival,” seems intended to stoke tensions between Iran’s regular army and its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. “Without the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), resources could flow directly to the regular army, known as the Artesh, enabling meaningful modernization,” the story claimed, a talking point ripped straight from the mouths of right-wing Iran hawks in the U.S. In a March 18 Fox News segment, for example, retired Gen. Jack Keane suggested that an Artesh–IRGC rivalry could be exploited to accomplish regime change.

It’s unclear who exactly writes what appears on these sites. Most articles run without any byline, while other stories are published under names that are difficult to find any mention of anywhere else on the internet. Some of the personnel may not be real at all. A January Al-Fassel YouTube overview of recent regional headlines was narrated by an Arabic-speaking man in a sharp blue blazer. Experts told The Intercept the newscaster was likely a product of generative AI and not genuine footage. “The strongest indicator is an almost complete absence of eye blinks,” Georgetown University professor and deepfake researcher Sejin Paik told The Intercept. Zuzanna Wojciak, a synthetic media researcher with the human rights organization Witness, reached the same conclusion, citing strange anomalies with his skin, hands, and teeth.

Related

Pentagon Document: U.S. Wants to “Suppress Dissenting Arguments” Using AI Propaganda

Some articles deeply misstate or misrepresent the facts. An April 15 Al-Fassel article about Iran’s “war crime threats” against the American University of Beirut omitted the fact that these threats came in response to repeated U.S.–Israel airstrikes against Iranian schools. The day after an Al-Fassel article described the Houthis as “crippled” and “largely disintegrated,” capable of offering only “verbal support” for Iran, the Yemeni militant group launched cruise missiles at Israel.

The outlets also illustrate the extent of deceptive messaging radiating from the Pentagon and White House: A March 5 post to the Pishtaz News Instagram account boasted, “The Iranian regime’s ability to strike US forces and regional partners is rapidly eroding, while US combat power continues to grow.” Four weeks later, Iran was continuing to lob missiles at U.S. bases as well as its regional partners, and succeeded in downing an American F-15 and A-10 Warthog. An April 4 Al-Fassel Instagram post claimed, citing Secretary of State Marco Rubio, that “Iran is not satisfied with a peaceful nuclear program, but seeking to enhance its military capabilities,” even though a 2025 assessment from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence concluded the opposite.

Other articles dispense with masquerading as journalism, reading more as warnings straight from Washington: “United States is fully prepared to protect its forces in Middle East,” read a June 2025 headline on Pishtaz News. “With advanced technological capabilities and highly-trained personnel, the United States maintains one of the world’s most capable military forces, continuously adapting to evolving security challenges to maintain order and stability.” A March 27 Pishtaz News tweet was more straightforward. “You will be systematically annihilated,” it threatens in Farsi. “Your commanders are hiding in bunkers. They have sent their families and wealth abroad—why are you still fighting for them?”

Some articles purport to include comments from genuine expert sources. In at least one case, this happened without the knowledge of the source. A July 2025 article in Al-Fassel predicted that a future closure of the Strait of Hormuz “would harm China and Russia more than other nations.” The article quoted Umud Shokri, an energy analyst affiliated with George Mason University, the State Department, and the Middle East Institute. “I would like to clarify that I was not aware of any affiliation between alfasselnews.com and the U.S. government,” Shokri told The Intercept. “I also did not have any direct interview with the platform, nor was I contacted by them directly. To the best of my knowledge, any quotation attributed to me appears to have been drawn from prior public commentary or other media appearances.”

Prior to the war on Iran, a top priority on both sites was marketing the U.S.–Israeli plans for the future of Gaza. The message is essentially a distillation of the U.S.–Israel–Gulf State consensus: That all Palestinian suffering is brought on by Hamas rather than the past three years of Israeli bombardment, and that the Trump-sponsored “Board of Peace” augurs an unprecedented era of prosperity for Palestinians.

Related

Plans Call for “New Rafah” Built in Israel’s Image — Without Palestinians

“The incoming Board of Peace,” a December 2025 Al-Fassel piece claimed, “is expected to foster conditions for democratic representation and meaningful civic participation.” A December 12 Al-Fassel YouTube video similarly blamed Hamas and Iran, rather than Israel, for the blockade of humanitarian aid into Gaza, followed by an AI-generated image of a science fiction city overlaid with Arabic captions promising billions in foreign investment and economic revitalization for Gaza. The video currently has nearly 1.7 million views.

Other items around Gaza further invert reality. Since October 2025, Gaza has been bifurcated by the so-called “Yellow Line,” an arbitrary boundary behind which Israeli forces nominally withdrew last year. Palestinians on the Israeli side of the line face harsh occupying military governance, while those on the other side risk being killed.

Despite claims by Al-Fassel’s video team that Trump’s Gaza policy will herald the ability for countless Palestinians to return home, Israeli forces routinely fire at civilians approaching this buffer zone.

“Incidents of gunfire, shelling, and limited incursions have continued near the ‘Yellow Line,’ the separation zone near the border with Israel, keeping any return highly dangerous,” according to a United Nations video report. “With the amount of available space shrinking, thousands of families have been forced to return to the edges of their destroyed neighborhoods near the ‘Yellow Line,’ despite what residents say is the continued risk of injury or death from intermittent fire.”

Not so, says Al-Fassel: “The Yellow Line is more than a boundary; it is a lifeline designed to keep Gaza’s families safe and informed during the ceasefire,” claimed a November article. “The Yellow Line is not a symbol of division — it is a lifeline.”

Following the 2016 election and the panic surrounding Russian covert propaganda efforts, major American social media platforms began adding labels to the accounts of government-controlled media properties. Videos from Al Jazeera English’s YouTube account, for instance, come with a disclaimer that “Al Jazeera is funded in whole or in part by the Qatari government.” Although X abandoned this policy in 2023, it is still nominally on the books for both Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, and YouTube.

Related

A Journalist Reported From Palestine. YouTube Deleted His Account Claiming He’s an Iranian Agent.

There is no disclosure, however, in the Instagram posts or accounts of Al-Fassel or Pishtaz News. YouTube videos from both accounts do not include a disclaimer about U.S. funding; however, a brief disclosure can be found on their main account pages, tucked into an About section that must be expanded to be read.

Neither site appears to have a particularly large audience on social media. Both have paltry followings on X — about 2,400 for Al-Fassel, and only 132 following Pishtaz News — with many appearing to be spam-based accounts with names followed by a long string of numbers that engage in posting behavior common to spam networks. Al-Fassel has found modest engagement on Instagram, where it has over 7,700 followers. Though Pishtaz News has only 475 followers on Instagram, its posts sometimes break through; a March 18 post of CENTCOM footage from the deck of an aircraft carrier, for example, racked up more than 1,100 likes.

At times, the content published by the propaganda sites may have reached American audiences. A March 27 Al-Fassel story alleging the total collapse of the Iranian-led “Axis of Resistance” was shared that same day to FreeRepublic, the conservative American message board, by user MeanWestTexan. Federal law forbids Pentagon propaganda aimed at Americans, though a similar prohibition aimed at the State Department was overturned in 2013.

Sometimes their stories reach other Western readers. An Al-Fassel article on the Houthis made its way into the citations of a 2024 article in the academic journal Survival: Global Politics and Strategy by University of Ottawa professor Thomas Juneau. (Juneau did not respond to a request for comment.) A submission to the U.N.’s Committee on Enforced Disappearances from Justice for All International, a Swiss-based nonprofit, similarly cited an Al-Fassel post on the IRGC, while an annual report by the state-operated Swedish Defence Research Agency relied in part on an Al-Fassel article on ISIS. The Intercept reviewed multiple entries on Grokipedia, X’s Wikipedia clone, citing Al-Fassel articles as well.

Emerson Brooking, a fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab and former Pentagon cyber policy adviser, believes CENTCOM is most likely behind the sites and considers their overall reach lackluster. When it comes to online propaganda, he said, the U.S. “could learn some lessons from Iran.” Iranian propaganda efforts — mostly quickly produced AI slop — have captured the attention of the internet in a way that the U.S. ersatz newsrooms have not.

But the sites’ limited reach is unlikely to bring them to a halt anytime soon. Even as the Trump administration has gutted Voice of America and other long-standing tools of U.S. soft power, these sites have continued publishing. If their similarities to the long-running American military psyops are more than coincidental, that says more about a culture of inertia at the Pentagon than its success in winning hearts and minds. Brooking told The Intercept that because operating blogs amounts to a “rounding error” within the broader defense budget, such projects can continue with little scrutiny.

A seldom-read network of propaganda sites might seem to have little purpose. But it’s the kind of thing authorities can gesture toward, Brooking said, when pressed about their efforts to combat Iran in the “information space.” “Successive SOCOM or CENTCOM or other senior leaders could point to the fact that they’re maintaining this network of websites,” he said.

The post These Middle Eastern News Sites Are Actually U.S. Government Propaganda Operations appeared first on The Intercept.

“The hospital has become my home,” Annan said, exhausted.

Last week, an Israeli strike leveled the building where Annan’s family lived in Kayfoun, a town in the Mount Lebanon governorate, west of the Lebanese capital.

“I buried my father,” he said, “but my mother is still missing.”

Since then, his days have become a single-minded search for any sign of his mother, Fatima, who is 56. Like several others searching for missing family members, Annan gave a sample of his blood to the hospital, hoping he can get some closure with a DNA match to unidentified remains.

“I walk through hospitals in the Mount Lebanon region. I stare at injured faces. I go to the morgues. I look for a mole, a mark,” Annan said. “Then I come back here. Waiting for the sample results.”

The cold-storage units at the Hariri hospital have been fashioned into ad hoc laboratories to identify a relentless influx of dead bodies.

The unprecedented scales of DNA identification of corpses is born of a macabre need. Last week, after Iran and the U.S. agreed to a ceasefire, Israel pressed on in its Lebanese front with a ferocious blitz of airstrikes. The toll was staggering, leaving demolished buildings and infrastructure, along with the attendant skyrocketing casualties — the violence rending people into unrecognizable forms.

“The bodies arrive completely disfigured,” said Hisham Fawwaz, director of the hospitals and dispensaries department at the Lebanese Ministry of Health, which operates the hospital. “The remains are scattered and the features obliterated. We are often not dealing with whole bodies. We are dealing with human fragments that the force of the explosions has turned into medical puzzles.”

After the Iran–U.S. truce, Israel launched more than 100 strikes on Lebanon in just 10 minutes, with the Israeli government taking to social media to brag about its assault. The latest round of hostilities between with Israel had already brought weeks of ravages to Lebanon, but last week’s onslaught, dubbed “Black Wednesday” by the Lebanese, razed densely populated neighborhoods in the capital. At least 357 were killed and more than 1,000 were injured, according to the health ministry.

A week later, dozens of people are still missing. The ceasefire in Lebanon announced by President Donald Trump on Thursday will hopefully lead to fewer bombings, but it won’t slow families’ attempts to find their loved ones and, if worse comes to worst, identify their remains.

The families remain on a desperate quest to track them down, whether they’re pinned under the wreckage or hidden among the dismembered bodies at the morgues like the one at Hariri Hospital.

Related

Israel Will Keep Occupying Lebanon Despite Ceasefire

At one point, more than 90 unidentified bodies were held there, some stretching back to the initial days of Israeli bombardment. Each body has been assigned a temporary number, waiting for someone to claim it.

The Health Ministry established a central triage center to absorb the uninterrupted flow of bodies, along with a protocol: document tattoos, distinguishing marks, and remnants of burned clothing that a family member might remember. Hospital workers also cross-reference physical descriptions from families with what is recorded of unidentified remains.

If that proves too difficult, doctors draw blood from living relatives to match the DNA against the unclaimed fragments of victims.

“Suspended Loss”

Zahraa Aboud had just recently fled her hometown of Anqoun in southern Lebanon. Israeli ground troops had invaded the town in March, razing entire villages and displacing hundreds of thousands as they set up a buffer zone intended to stop Hezbollah from lobbing rockets into northern Israel.

When the Israeli airstrikes grew relentless, Aboud, 29, and her sister traveled to Beirut, to their aunts’ apartment in the Ain Al-Mrayseh neighborhood. In the capital, she thought, they would be out of reach of the violence.

Israel’s missiles would soon come down on her.

According to Aboud’s father, Qassem, when an airstrike hit the upper floors of the aunts’ building, everyone in the apartment upstairs — including six children — was instantly killed. A floor below, Aboud’s aunts were killed in the same strike, and her sister was taken to Clemenceau Medical Center with serious wounds.

Zahraa Aboud, though, hasn’t been seen since.

“We are not looking for rubble,” said Qassem, 56. “We are looking for life. Or at least for the certainty that will put out the fire in our hearts.”

Related

Gaza’s Civil Defense Forces Keep Digging for 10,000 Missing Bodies

Rescue teams gave up after a few days of searching, but families of those missing in the rubble refused to leave the scene and pressured them to keep going.

Qassem Aboud, meanwhile, hasn’t stopped circling Beirut for traces of his daughter. Back and forth, he checks private hospitals, government hospitals, and lists of unidentified patients. In ICU wards across the city, he peers at any face behind an oxygen mask that might be hers.

The Aboud family calls the tragic situation “suspended loss”: They can’t find a sign of life to suggest they may get Zahraa back, but they’ve also been denied a final farewell and the chance to see their daughter off.

Like the others, Qassem submitted a blood sample to the hospital in hopes of later finding a DNA match — and closure.

After days of searching, Qassem came to suspect that the force of the explosion may have thrown his daughter’s body into a neighboring building. When he checked, he found the apartments were either locked or abandoned by departed residents. So far, he can’t find anyone to let him in.

“I feel very helpless every day, but will keep searching until I bury her,” he said.

The rubble itself has become a legal obstacle.

Buildings destroyed by Israeli strikes are classified, under Lebanese law, as private property. Civil defense teams and relief organizations cannot fully clear or demolish them without prior judicial authorization. The red tape is meant to protect property rights, to preserve the legal record, and to avoid tampering with what the law considers a crime scene, according to a source at the public prosecutor’s office who asked to stay anonymous as he’s not authorized to talk to the media.

Some of the legal restrictions have slowed rescues. Families that want to utilize specialized search dogs, which can move through the wreckage faster than people, must file formal requests at the public prosecutor’s office.

“We submitted the requests. We begged the relevant authorities to expedite the judicial procedures,” said a relative of a missing woman who asked not to be identified. “But the Lebanese judiciary has not moved. Every minute that passes is a nail in the coffin of our loved ones, while the judiciary is still reviewing paperwork.”

When families sought exceptional permissions to allow rescue teams to remove the rubble, judicial authorities did not respond to their requests, families of missing people said. (Judicial authorities did not respond to a request for comment.)

Back at Hariri Hospital, families continued filing into a makeshift office opened by the Health Ministry designed to help families identify their lost loved ones. Inside, they recalled the tiniest details of their missing relative, from birthmarks to unique articles of clothing — anything that may lead to closing a case. Then they give their blood. And they wait.

“The goal is not accounting,” said Fawwaz, the Lebanese Ministry of Health official. “It is to return to each victim their name, and to give their families the right to a farewell that ends the spiral of doubt.”

This article is published in collaboration with Egab.

The post Israel’s “Black Wednesday” Massacre Leaves Lebanese Families Giving DNA to ID Loved Ones’ Remains appeared first on The Intercept.

Vice President JD Vance is set to lead renewed negotiations with Iran this weekend to bring an end to the U.S.–Israel war on the country that stretched into a second month. The talks come after a roller coaster of a week, which began with President Donald Trump threatening genocidal war crimes against Iran. 

“A whole civilization will die tonight,” he wrote on social media, “never to be brought back again.” 

Trump urged Iran to make a deal with the U.S. and fully open the Strait of Hormuz by Tuesday at 8 p.m. ET. Then, shortly before the deadline, Trump took to social media again to say Iran and the U.S. had reached a two-week ceasefire agreement brokered by Pakistan. Trump said the U.S. received a workable 10-point plan from Iran to begin negotiations on a durable ending to the war. In the meantime, Iran said it would allow for safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz. Israel, however, immediately intensified its attacks on Lebanon, jeopardizing the already tenuous ceasefire. More than 300 people were killed in Lebanon by Israeli airstrikes the day after the ceasefire was announced. 

The terms of the plan are not yet clear but there are some key factors for Iran, says Narges Bajoghli, a professor of Middle East Studies at Johns Hopkins University. 

“One is that Iran is asking for non-aggression from the United States into the future. It won’t take the United States’s word for it. It’s already been burned by the U.S. multiple times,” Bajoghil tells The Intercept Briefing. “Then the other big thing is sanctions relief.” But “Iran’s biggest red line is its sovereignty and independence.”

This week on the podcast, Bajoghil speaks to senior Intercept editor Ali Gharib about the path that led the U.S. back to the negotiating table with Iran. This war has proven, Bajoghil says, “both to the decision-makers in Iran, to the Iranian population, and then more importantly to the international world, is that Iran’s real deterrence actually doesn’t come from a potential nuclear bomb, but it comes from the ability to be able to stop or regulate traffic through the Strait of Hormuz.” 

She notes, “In many ways, what actually has potentially led to this ceasefire is the fact that Iran is able to create a chokehold over 20 percent of the world’s oil and gas trade. That is an extremely powerful weapon that they have in their hands and in many ways can force shifts to happen geopolitically in a much faster way than a nuclear bomb can.”

Listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen.

Transcript

Ali Gharib: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing. I’m Ali Gharib, a senior editor at The Intercept.

Akela Lacy: And I am Akela Lacy, senior politics reporter at the Intercept and co-host of the Intercept Briefing.

AG: Akela, how are you doing? It’s been a pretty wild week. We’ve had genocidal threats. We’ve had ceasefire agreements. Now we have a shaky ceasefire agreement. Traffic opened up in the Strait of Hormuz. It closed back down. How are you viewing all this?

AL: I am struggling to keep up with the fast-changing developments, but my overall takeaway this week has been thinking about what, if any, recourse our institutional democracy provides for this kind of thing, or is supposed to provide? We have a lot of Democrats coming out and talking about invoking the 25th Amendment and instituting articles of impeachment. It feels like we’ve seen all of this before.

So it’s kind of like, yeah, we have a crazy genocidal maniac running the country. People keep telling me the checks and balances are working. I’m not convinced that the checks and balances are working.

AG: Well, tell it to the people in Tehran and all over Iran and in central Beirut that these checks and balances aren’t working, and the madman theory of conducting foreign policy seems like a much bigger gamble when it’s an actual madman.

Related

With Trump Threatening Genocide in Iran, Military Must Disobey His Orders, Former Pentagon Officials Say

OK, well, let’s talk a little bit about that. Obviously, we had this last-minute ceasefire agreement on Tuesday night between Iran and the U.S. through Pakistani mediation that came just on the precipice of the deadline expiring for Trump’s threat to, let’s call it what it is, commit genocide against Iran.

Almost immediately, the ceasefire came under strain by a few residual tit-for-tat attacks. The Iranians said that they faced a couple Israeli attacks on energy infrastructure, and the Emirates said that the Iranians were still hitting them with drones and missiles. And in short order, however, those attacks slowed down, and by all accounts, the Americans have stopped bombing Iran.

What seems to be the biggest strain on the ceasefire at this point is an incredible, almost mind-numbing level of assault that the Israelis launched against Lebanon. Can you talk a little bit about what happened there and how this has played out in public bickering between Iran and the U.S.?

AL: Something that I think has been not lost in the coverage, but under-appreciated about this war is that while the U.S. and Israel have been bombing Iran, Israel has been waging war around the world basically since October 7, pretty unchecked. Multiple acts of aggression that we covered on this podcast — obviously the latest of which is razing Southern Lebanon.

On Wednesday, there were more than 200 people killed in just one day. That’s a small fraction of the total number of people who have been killed in all of these strikes that we’re talking about.

Related

The Forever Spoiler: Netanyahu Has Been Blowing Up Diplomacy With Iran for Decades

But my reaction to this is that it feels like Israel is able to get away with this aggression, particularly against Lebanon, because we write it off because of Hezbollah, or we don’t consider the retaliation against regional countries as part of the war, even though people are being killed every single day with the implicit approval of the U.S.

AG: Yeah, with U.S. bombs as part of the U.S. war. That has been the key sticking point. When the Pakistani prime minister announced the ceasefire, or rather made the request of the Trump administration for a ceasefire — with a tweet that the New York Times later reported had been approved in advance by the Trump administration — we saw that he included Lebanon in the ceasefire. Of course, the Israelis quickly came out and said Lebanon was not involved in the ceasefire and kept going.

JD Vance immediately sided with the Israelis, and now he’s going to be the guy who’s going to be going to Pakistan along with our two favorite real estate agent Trump aides: Steve Witkoff, who was involved in the original Iran talks that were interrupted by this war, and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who has no official role in the administration, but is extremely close to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and could very easily allow Netanyahu and Israeli aggression to play spoiler in these talks.

AL: The other thing that I found maddening was that this week, I mean the day that Trump sent this tweet calling for genocide in Iran, where was JD Vance? In Hungary trying to help Viktor Orbán not lose his election this upcoming weekend.

Then there was this huge puff piece in the Times centering JD Vance as the person who really tried to stop the president from dragging us into war with Iran. Now he’s being put forth as the negotiator in these ongoing talks. I mean, when you have a Cabinet full of evil villainous characters, these are the people who are running the world.

I don’t even know the word to describe it — the fact that he’s being upheld as this person who was trying to keep Trump from going to war with Iran, while he’s halfway across the world trying to save another far-right authoritarian figure from losing because he is so unpopular, and yet we’re praising him at home in the paper of record. The framing of this was that he did something huge and valorous, when really it was showing modest opposition and, at the end of everything, agreeing to go along with it. So what are we celebrating here?

AG: Yeah, there’s a tiny bit of room to be optimistic in a world where every option is like a complete pile of crap. It’s like, maybe this is our one shining pile of crap that we can look to. It might be that he was the only guy that said something. But yeah, it doesn’t inspire much confidence that he has been like every other official who’s gotten anywhere near Trump’s circle of power: a complete sycophant of the president, has gone along and agreed with what the president says, and in the end, we still have this complete madman calling the shots. 

So I spoke this week with Narges Bajoghli about the ceasefire, about the 10-point plan, and what this looks like for regional dynamics going forward. Narges is an associate professor of anthropology and Middle East studies at Johns Hopkins University. She’s written several books including “Iran Reframed” and “How Sanctions Work in Iran.” Her upcoming book is called “Weapons Against Humanity.” It’s about how the Middle East became the physical, political, and moral workshop for the global weapons industry.

AL: That sounds fascinating. Let’s hear that conversation.

AG: Narges, welcome to the Intercept Briefing.

Narges Bajoghli: It’s lovely to be with you.

AG: The pleasure is all ours. 

So before we get started, I just wanted to note that we’re speaking on Wednesday morning. This is the day after Iran and the U.S. reached a temporary ceasefire agreement following Trump’s threats to annihilate the whole civilization of Iran. So let’s jump right in from there.

OK, just to quickly recap the week. On Tuesday morning, Trump threatened this genocidal war against Iran. Basically said he wanted to do war crimes and wipe out the whole civilization of Iran. He said, “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” The warning came hours before a deadline that Trump had put on Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

That deadline was set for Tuesday at 8:00 p.m. About an hour and a half before that Trump announced this ceasefire. The terms of it aren’t exactly clear, but it does seem that it was brokered by Pakistan. Iran had introduced this 10-point plan. The ceasefire is to last for two weeks. The straits are to be reopened. Those are some basic things we know. 

So in this 10-point plan, as far as we can tell, and in the ceasefire agreement, what’s Iran asking for and how likely is it that they can get there from the Trump administration? What does the Trump administration want from them?

NB: Two key things. One is that Iran is asking for non-aggression from the United States into the future. It won’t take the United States’ word for it. It’s already been burned by the U.S. multiple times. This is potentially where China’s involvement in this Pakistan-mediated ceasefire might play a big role. And it’s been reported that it has.

Then the other big thing is sanctions relief. If Iran ends this and goes back to its sanctions pre-war status quo, that’s going to be unacceptable to Iran. So a big component of this is going to be lifting of at least a very large number of sanctions against Iran.

AG: We should just say that this is a sanctions program that’s been on since the Islamic Revolution of 1979, but really kicked into high gear about 15 years ago. Then when Trump came into his first term, started this program of “maximum pressure” that totally crippled Iran — impoverished it.

Related

Ghosts of Mossadegh: The Iran Cables, U.S. Empire, and the Arc of History

The sanctions have been over Iran’s nuclear program. That’s also part of what the Trump administration says that it’s getting from Iran as part of this plan, though that didn’t appear in Iran’s readout of the 10-point plan. I saw in the FT on Wednesday morning that a diplomat had told the paper that the version of the 10-point plan that they were getting wasn’t exactly the version that Iran had put out publicly.

How likely is it that Iran would be willing to compromise on its nuclear program? For example, remove it entirely, which has been a red line for them this entire time — especially given as you said, that they’re not likely to trust a U.S. non-aggression guarantee.

NB: Iran’s biggest red line is its sovereignty and independence. Within that, the nuclear program is part and parcel of it. Will it concede to certain kinds of negotiations on the nuclear program? Yes, of course. This was also part of the negotiations that were ongoing prior to the start of this war. But will it give up its high-enriched uranium completely and give it up to the United States? I find that to be a very difficult thing to be happening after this war.

It’s important to note that from the Iranian perspective, in many ways its infrastructure has been really battered. Its residential buildings, its economic hubs have been really battered throughout all of this bombing of the past 40 days.

But from Iran’s perspective and many Iranians themselves, they see that they are coming out of this victorious simply because no real regime change has taken place, Iran’s territory has not been shifted, and Iran’s state has not collapsed, nor has Iran fractured. These are all of the things that at different points in time, the Israelis or the Americans were saying were a part of this war effort.

Related

How the War Strengthened Iran’s Hand Against the U.S. and Israel

In the face of that, Iranians and the Islamic Republic understands that they can continue to withstand extreme amounts of pain in order to sustain Iran’s sovereignty and independence. They will not give up things, whether it is complete control over the Strait of Hormuz or the nuclear program in order to please Trump at this stage.

AG: This obviously has been one of the hairiest issues here. I want to talk about the government’s resilience in a moment, but just to get back to this nuclear issue.

When we’re talking about the nuclear issue, of course, the U.S. and Israel have maintained for decades that Iran is building nuclear programs. Iran says that this is an energy program, but that terrain seems to be shifting throughout the course of this war with the death of Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, who is the cleric in charge of the government, who had issued a fatwa — a religious declaration — saying that nuclear bombs were not permitted. But Iranian officials have seemed to be reconsidering that, according to some news reports.

When we talk about the nuclear program and what Iran’s willing to give up — can you just give us a little brief primer on how that became such a point of tension, and where you think things might be likely to go from this point as far as what Iran might have its eyes on? Is there something to the fact that they think that they might need a nuclear weapon to defend their sovereignty, which as you said is the top priority? Is that going to become a non-starter because of whatever negotiations happen from here forward?

NB: First of all, Iran began developing the infrastructure for nuclear energy prior to even the revolution, during the shah’s time. Then after the revolution, especially after the Iran–Iraq War, it began to invest again in the development of Iran’s nuclear facilities.

As you stated, the main purpose of it was for internal scientific and energy reasons. As I think many people now realize, even though Iran has been under all of these severe sanctions for upwards to close to five decades, investment in science in Iran, investment in medical advancement, in engineering — all of this has been very important for not just the Islamic Republic, but I think the Iranian nation as a whole.

Related

The Forever Spoiler: Netanyahu Has Been Blowing Up Diplomacy With Iran for Decades

The way that they have talked about the nuclear program and the way that even it has been verified over and over by U.N. agencies and others is that there has not been evidence of it moving toward a weaponization of this. Netanyahu himself has been, obviously, for close to 30 years now, keeps saying that Iran is weaponizing and is just a little while away from the bomb. But all of the inspectors seem to disagree with this.

Now, in this war, as you said, and also during the 12-Day War last June, there has been increased conversations within both Iranian decision-making circles as well as the general population that maybe Iran needs to go for a bomb in order to establish real deterrence against Israel and the United States. That is very much a debate that is alive right now. 

However, I think one thing that this war — that currently we are under potentially a ceasefire on — has proven both to the decision-makers in Iran, to the Iranian population, and then more importantly to the international world, is that Iran’s real deterrence actually doesn’t come from a potential nuclear bomb, but it comes from the ability to be able to stop or regulate traffic through the Strait of Hormuz.

So in many ways, what actually has potentially led to this ceasefire is the fact that Iran is able to create a chokehold over 20 percent of the world’s oil and gas trade. That is an extremely powerful weapon that they have in their hands and in many ways can force shifts to happen geopolitically in a much faster way than a nuclear bomb can.

Iran’s decision makers have also studied very, very closely what happened in Iraq and Libya and other countries, Syria, around the region that attempted to go toward building of potential nuclear energy. So Iran, especially from 2003 onward, has utilized the nuclear program as a lever that they could bring onto the international stage, especially with the United States, to negotiate.

So the nuclear program for Iranian decision-makers — yes, it has importance for development of scientific knowledge within the country and energy infrastructure. But more importantly, it was really used as a thing that could bring the United States to the negotiation table. 

Today, what is becoming apparent is that, in many ways, the nuclear program before this war hit was a dead end. It actually became a bigger liability for Iran then the ability to be able to bring the United States to the table. Today, what they’re faced with is the fact that actually the Strait of Hormuz and Iran’s control over it is what is not only bringing the United States to the table, but has the ability actually to bypass U.S. sanctions and be able to force other countries to deal directly with Iran economically than to even have to worry about the U.S. sanctions.

So I think in many ways the calculation here about the utility of the nuclear program for international diplomacy is beginning to lessen, as Iran is beginning to realize that the biggest card they have in their hands is the Strait of Hormuz.

AG: Fascinating. That also would seem to open the door exactly to a compromise on the nuclear issue in order to get the relief that they’ve been pushing for from this sanctions regime.

Now I want to talk about the idea of the Strait of Hormuz and the regional picture, because you wrote a great piece in Foreign Affairs called “Iran’s Long Game,” about the history of the Islamic Republic over about the past half decade or so, has proven to the country that it’s on its own and that they won’t be able to compete on conventional grounds with foreign militaries.

That’s especially true of course, in this war, we see Israel and the U.S. have this overwhelming firepower. And Iran, after years of sanctions, has been hobbled, both its economy, but also to some extent its ability to large-scale industrial mass production — but that hasn’t affected so much the weapons program. Of course, we’ve seen that one of the goals of this war for Israel and the U.S. has been to degrade Iran’s missile program, and while the amounts of missiles being fired has certainly been reduced, Iran clearly has some material left in its arsenal that have still been hitting Israel, Gulf countries, U.S. installations, and some of that has begun to slip through more and more missile defense systems.

Can you just talk about what the after-effect of this war and whatever has happened to Iran’s industrial capacity might mean for that long game going forward? Is this going to become a thing that becomes more focused on the strait? Or is this going to continue to be the broad-based regional program for Iran that is going to be small missile drone attacks on regional installations to heighten the cost for its neighbors of their alliance with the U.S.?

NB: The lessons Iran took from the Iran-Iraq War was that the way that it was viewed in Iran was that this was a war by the United States and the West using Iraq in order to weaken the new revolutionary state at that time.

AG: We should say this was a nearly a decade[long] war between a young Islamic Republic and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, where Iran was fighting on its own, and Saddam Hussein was backed by the West, basically, had the conventional edge, and Iran, very improbably, with great sacrifices, held on and preserved the Islamic Republic.

NB: Exactly, and that’s really important background to have. So how did Iran fight that war was that it was forced in many ways to fight it asymmetrically. And Iran then made the decision that it could not invest and create an air force that would be equal to Israel or the United States.

That in many ways how Iran could move forward in its defense posture was to create asymmetric warfare as central to their defense posture and central to their strategy militarily. That then became tested again once the global war on terror started after September 11, when the United States invaded Iraq. Very famously, they said that next on the book would be Iran.

In order to prevent that attack from happening, Iran’s Quds Forces or the IRGC — the Revolutionary Guards’ extraterritorial forces — which at the time were later led by Qassim Suleimani, they developed also then asymmetric warfare to deal with the Americans in Iraq, later in Syria, later also, and obviously throughout all this time with Lebanon and Israel.

Related

Data Centers Are Military Targets Now

So asymmetric warfare is really cemented within how the IRGC has developed its weapons program, as well as its strategy moving forward. It has realized that these missiles and these drones are an effective way of, yes, Iran will sustain a lot of damage — as it has this past month and moving forward — but it is also able to inflict damage whether to its neighbors or to Israel or, importantly, to America’s military bases.

What it has also done is taken that idea of asymmetrical defense of the country, as we see in like this mosaic defense that they have created throughout the country where they have decentralized decision-making. The way in which, for example, Iran’s electricity — even though Trump was threatening to hit these power plants — the reality is, even if Trump had hit the largest power plants in Iran, that only supplies a little bit above 2.3 percent of the population because they have decentralized how electricity is run in the country. Because they understand that an Iran that demands sovereignty and independence is a threat to the United States and the U.S. posture in the Middle East.

So it has decentralized and taken that asymmetric warfare across all kinds of planning. That also includes the manufacturing of its drones and its missiles, which are deep underground in Iran’s mountains. So in essence, no foreign intel agency really knows how many missiles and drones Iran has. It doesn’t know where all of the different manufacturing sites of these are in these mountains.

This, again, is something that Iran has developed in order to be able to have a long fight of attrition against the United States and Israel. Because the way that Iran will fight any of these wars going into the future, if it continues, is that it knows that time is on its hands. Time is in its favor. And that by being able to do all of these things in an underground fashion, it has a particular kind of power, in a conventional sense, it would not have.

[Break] 

AG: On Tuesday, we had this threat to annihilate Iranian civilization, and leading up to that the threat had been all about these broad-based attacks on power, on bridges, on infrastructure. And as we’ve seen from a decade and a half of these extremely stringent sanctions, and also in the aftermath of last June’s war and the continued Israeli and American pressure put on Iran, that the ones who’ve always seemed to suffer from this were Iranian people before any of the Revolutionary Guard, the government suffered.

Then you had this big [New York] Times story the other day and which had come out in bits and pieces before that about how Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu really pitched this war to Trump as, I don’t want to say a cakewalk, but that it would be a relatively assured effort to take out Iran’s nuclear program, its missile program, and especially to foment some revolution that would overthrow the Islamic order. That has not played out.

So if I can ask you with apologies for the two-sided question in two parts, how the government has survived and how they remain so strong despite what Israel and the U.S. had hoped to do? And what that might mean for Iranian people going forward in terms of repression, and what it means to have a government that has now survived this assault?

NB: So one thing to understand is that Iran’s infrastructure, and importantly its governmental systems, have been on the books for a little bit over a century. It predates the Islamic Republic.

You are dealing with an infrastructure and a bureaucracy and systems of power that regenerate and have been regenerating for close to a century now. Many of that has nothing to do with just the political establishment. You are also dealing with a civilizational state here that has a very clear understanding of itself and its history, and that despite the threats that Trump may make of obliterating this civilization, the fact of the reality is it’s millennia long. Iranians know that. They take huge amounts of pride in that. 

Now, the Islamic Republic also has been institutionalized very deeply within Iranian society. It has also fought these wars across the Middle East for over four decades now. It knows that one of the biggest ways in which, especially Israel, but also increasingly the United States, fight these wars across the region, is through assassination of leaders at the top. It has watched this happen. It has happened to its own commanders as well. So Iran has established four to five successors for each major role within both its military and political establishment. That’s one part. 

The other thing that I think is really important for people to understand is that Iranians have been struggling for over a century now for the independence and sovereignty of the country vis-a-vis both the West and, at the time that the Soviet Union existed, the East. For Iranians writ large, across political and social lines, to have Iran remain sovereign and independent — that is not a demand of the Islamic Republic, that’s a demand of the Iranian population. It has been a demand of the Iranian population for many decades now.

So when we saw this war begin, and also in the June war, many Iranians are extremely angry at their governing establishment for a whole slew of very valid reasons. But they also have seen the way that the United States and Israel have acted these past three years in particular, but also over the past many decades on Iraq, which is their neighbor on Afghanistan, which is their other neighbor, and they do not want to be succumbed to that.

So rallying around the flag is not rallying around the flag of the Islamic Republic. It is rallying around this idea that Iran as a territory and as a nation stays sovereign and independent. That means that in essence, and the Islamic Republic also repeats this often, is that their biggest deterrence is its population.

The fact that the population is resilient and will not give in to saying, “OK, we don’t like our governing establishment, so therefore let’s welcome what comes from the outside” — that is just incongruent with any understanding of modern Iranian history. This is why Bibi Netanyahu’s strategy has failed.

This is also why, actually, before we even got Trump and [Pete] Hegseth, much of the top brass of the American military understood this. Both understood any real war with Iran is almost impossible because of Iran’s size and because of its topography; it’s surrounded by mountains. But then the other fact is that you’re dealing with a civilizational state. And that is a very different war to fight than a war that America has been used to fighting in the Middle East, which is with states that have been carved out by colonial powers over just the past century. So that makes it very different. 

Then what do we see in the aftermath of all of this moving forward? The Islamic Republic has proved now in three wars — from the 1980s to the 12-day War to today’s war — that it is able to defend Iran’s territory. That means that coming out of this war, it is coming out in a position of victory and in a position of strength. That does not bode well for a lot of civil society actors inside of the country. Because you now have an emboldened military and IRGC, you also have a new generation of them, which has come to power because many of their fathers have now been assassinated throughout this war.

Related

Children Are Dying Because Companies Are Too Scared to Sell Medicine to Iran

This is one of the reasons why Iranian civil society actors have been so against both sanctions and war because they understand that those only create further internal repression. But at the same time, the same way that I’ve been saying that Iranians have been demanding sovereignty and independence, they’ve also been demanding dignity from their governing establishment for over 150 years. Those demands will continue, but they will shift in how they make these demands now because they are now dealing with, in many ways, a younger and more entrenched and victorious Revolutionary Guard and governing establishment that has come out of this war.

AG: Part of Netanyahu’s plan was to foment this regime change, and it seems that there were some efforts to instigate more street protests and even to arm protesters, and that would seem to, as you said, even give more reason to the security establishment to clamp down on protesters, more propaganda justifications for its internal population, and justifications for the regime to itself for doing this.

I also want to talk about this related issue of Iran’s regional push. Part of Netanyahu’s pitch to the Trump administration was to degrade Iran’s ability to project its power. This has been both through its weapons program, obviously its relationships. It seems to me that this has really backfired. What Iran’s war strategy has done is really shake the Arab Gulf states’ relationship with the world economy and especially with the U.S. It’s created fissures in the NATO alliance that even we saw that Israel’s war in Gaza wasn’t able to create.

It’s really broken things up and I don’t know how much we can say it has a direct bearing on it, but a part of that certainly has been this intense online propaganda campaign, which you just wrote about for New York Magazine, fascinating article about these videos that Revolutionary Guard-linked production houses have been putting out that are AI-generated videos.

They often use Lego characters for the main players. There’s been a couple that used AI to project the faces of popular Western actors on American politicians that was like a political suspense movie trailer. And it’s been really fascinating to watch Iran bring out these contradictions — the hypocrisies. One of the themes that they kept hitting was [Jeffrey] Epstein. Certainly they’ve hit a lot on the idea of Israel controlling the U.S., of dragging the U.S. into war. That’s been a narrative that’s really caught on with good reason in U.S. political discourse.

Part of what you wrote about was exactly the concept of, as the more stodgy, older old guard of Islamic Republic figures, especially the IRGC, that had this very reserved demeanor and took everything extremely seriously, has started to pass away, it’s the younger generation that’s come through and recognized that the old propaganda was sort of a flop, and they needed to really be able to speak to the world on the world’s terms. If you could talk about how that happened and the effect that you think it’s had, and what that might mean going forward for how Western populations especially but also in the region view Iran and their own relationships with the U.S.?

NB: Those of us who have studied Iran in the United States very closely, I had hoped this war would never come, but I assumed it would one day come, just because of the trajectory of everything.

But I thought that when this war would happen, the regularly scheduled program was something that was created from 1979 onwards with the Iran hostage crisis and Ted Koppel and “Nightline.” This idea that Iran is this really irrational theocratic state run by these old school mullahs who want to take Iran back to the seventh century. Iran actually broke through that and really went viral across the internet. 

For anyone who spends any time on any platform on the internet these past 40 days, they have been seeing Iran’s Lego videos or any other AI content and short-form videos that they’re putting out. It has shifted the way that people are thinking about Iran, and it has also shifted what they think Iran now stands for. 

Wars are fought, yes, on the battlefield. Another big part of the way that wars are fought is in the communication sphere and the narrative war. And in the narrative war, Iran has really come out on top.

Why and how did this happen? The IRGC has created, for 40 years now, a really robust media sphere. It contains different kinds of production studios, university programs. It’s humongous. But one of the biggest things that I always saw doing field work in these sites was that there was a huge generational clash between older generations of the IRGC and pro-regime media makers, who, as you said, wanted very serious films about what Iran stands for and what martyrdom means, but they didn’t even work within the Iranian population. They definitely did not work internationally. 

These younger media makers really wanted to use humor in what they were doing. They wanted to do faster cuts. They wanted to do away with forefronting martyrdom, and their elder generations kept saying no. What we saw happen in this war is, again, because of these decapitation strikes, you had many of that older generation be assassinated. So in that space — in that vacuum — these younger people came in and they began to really fill in what their fathers would not let them do.

Now here’s what the important thing is. These younger folks, they’re millennials, and they’re Gen Z. They have lived their lives online just like many of us who are their generational cohorts around the world. So why has Iran’s stuff gone viral in this moment? It’s because they’re not inventing anything new. 

Related

Netanyahu and Trump Are Trying to Have It All

Anyone who spends any time online knows that in order to make your content go viral, you don’t say something new. You add things into the conversation that is already being had, that is already being had online. So when this war started, much of the conversation across the political spectrum and across the world was about the Epstein files. Iran tapped into that; this is not a conversation Iran created. Iran tapped into that by essentially tapping into this idea that Trump is starting this war in order to prevent further Epstein files from coming out. That resonated with the MAGA world very quickly.

It also then began to say, and this again, it picked up from the MAGA world because it’s paying attention — just like anyone else who’s online all the time is paying attention to different discourses. It picked up on the fact that there’s a big contingency within that world that is saying that these are not America’s wars. These are Israel’s wars, and that this is not an America-first presidency, it’s an Israel first presidency. Again, Iran didn’t create this narrative, but it began to play into that narrative and show how this is playing out in this war. 

Then most importantly, instead of using real-life people — which Iranians have been depicted and Muslims in general have been depicted in a particular way for about 50 years in America’s political imagination and popular imagination — instead, they chose to use cartoons. They chose to use Lego videos. The Lego movie franchise is all about the creation of a resistance movement against tyrants and oligarchs. So it tapped also into that. These are Gen Z filmmakers in Iran who grew up on these Legos movies just like they did across the world.

So they are now utilizing all of these in order to further their message. Then importantly, their message is not about the importance of Shia martyrdom, which was what their fathers were creating. Their message is about imperialism, it’s about the Epstein class, it’s about the raping of women and children, it’s about a genocidal state — meaning Israel —going forward with settler colonialism, not just across Palestine, but attempting to do so across the Middle East. So it is tapping into a 21st-century language that anyone who has been paying any attention, especially since the genocide in Gaza over the past three years — that is the language of the internet.

Related

States Can’t Control the Narrative on Israel-Palestine Anymore

Then the way that I really think about this is that the United States and Israel have failed in their communications. Throughout this war, mainly because for the most part, the U.S. and Israel’s legitimacy came through — for many years — traditional media outlets. But traditional media outlets failed Gaza. They failed to be able to really explain what was happening in those past three years, and there was a huge disconnect over mainstream media’s coverage and then what everyone was seeing on their phones through a livestreamed genocide. 

Gaza shattered the way in which we understand what is going on in the world and the type of trust that we put into media institutions. Into those cracks is where Iran’s younger media makers came, and then they are now up against, in essence, older forms of media makers from Israel and the United States where that generational shift has not yet taken place. So in my understanding, it’s like 20th-century leaders trying to compete with these young millennials and Gen Z leaders in Iran at this moment in the media war living in 2026. Twentieth-century media just doesn’t work anymore.

Ali Gharib: Yeah, it’s funny when you watch the Trump administration’s AI-generated, jingoistic movies. It’s still AI-generated, but it’s a totally different language, and they do seem like they’re all made to get the retweet from one guy, which is Donald Trump. In sharp contrast, like the Islamic Republic, these Lego videos are clearly not made for Iran’s ayatollah leadership. 

I want to ask about, and this is something that you’ve written about — that is, as an Iranian has been certainly one of my hobby horses — which is the Iranian opposition politics. It’s funny that one of the few audiences with which Netanyahu’s message and his plan have really resonated, which he seems to have vastly overestimated, was that royalist faction in exile and its support inside Iran.

To be fair, the frustrations of living under the Islamic Republic for many Iranians and young Iranians — who, like their IRGC-oriented young counterparts, don’t remember the early days of the Islamic Republic. They don’t remember certainly pre-revolutionary Iran and have this nostalgia for the mini-dresses and cocktails at the Key Club that I know my parents grew up with in Tehran, and really latched on to Reza Pahlavi, who’s the exiled former crown prince of Iran. His father was the last shah. He really is a product of the U.S. He grew up there and has lived there for many years. And only in the past few years when he began meeting with the Israelis was propped up as this potential opposition leader. We have to say that he did gain some support.

I think the Israelis were absolutely way off base when they posited him as a potential leader for a new regime in Iran. Obviously, none of that has anywhere close to come to fruition yet. But one thing you’ve written about a lot was the sentiments of people more so inside Iran, but also I would add that in the diaspora as well, who have also latched onto this royalist fever dream of reinstalling the shah.

We’ve seen reports in the Western media about these views shifting. The New York Times did an article the other day, the FT had a pretty good one a couple weeks ago. So I just wondered how much you’ve been picking up inside Iran on disillusionment with this program? Have people changed their minds now that the war has continued and this gambit has failed? What does this mean for opposition politics inside Iran and in exile going forward?

NB: The first maybe 10 days of the war, there was still hope among those who were supporters of Pahlavi that the Americans and Israelis would hit just military installments or things belonging to the Islamic Republic. They even went so far — similar to what happened early on in Gaza — to say that the strike on the Iranian school in Minab that killed over 170 children at school was IRGC’s doing, which later proved out to not be true. But it began to really shift when Israel hit multiple oil depots surrounding Tehran and it created this really toxic air. It was this mass chemical campaign in many ways because of all the petrochemicals that went up into the air and then there was acid rain the next day. At around that same time, Trump then began to say that Iran’s territory and its map might shift during this war. 

Related

U.S. Military Refuses to Endorse Trump Claim That Iran Bombed Girls’ School

Then as the war continued, then Americans and Israelis were hitting critical infrastructure, and really importantly, Iran’s universities. That began to shift folks’ feelings because that then started to become a war against the Iranian nation and not just the Islamic Republic. 

It began to brew a certain “We want to change, but this is destroying the country and this is destroying the future of the country.” Then the other fact of the matter is that Reza Pahlavi and all the bets that they were making actually did not turn out to be true. The Islamic Republic turned out to be much more resilient than they thought that it would be. And with now the ceasefire — and we’ll see if it holds — but the fact of the matter is, it seems like the Trump administration wants to have negotiations with the Islamic Republic. You also have the younger son of Khamenei now in charge, and that the Islamic Republic feels that it is coming out of this victorious. So in many ways, in all the ways, I would say the Pahlavi gambit failed. 

Then there’s also a bigger story to this. Other forms of Iran’s opposition movements in the 1980s, namely the Mojahedin, which was a big organization at the time, and had a lot of support within Iran in the revolutionary period. Their leadership also sided with Saddam Hussein during the Iran–Iraq War, and that became their death knell within [the] Iranian population. They were seen as being traitors to the country during a time of war.

The same thing is happening right now, which is that the more that Iranians were getting killed, the more that Iran’s universities and critical infrastructure was being targeted, Pahlavi was not out there condemning this. In many ways, he kept asking for more help from the Israelis and the Americans.

Again, Iran is a civilizational state, and Iranians have a lot of sense of patriotism across the political spectrum. This has nothing to do even with the governing establishment. So now increasingly, Pahlavi is being seen as being a traitor to the nation. No other Iranian leader, especially ones connected to past rule, have ever called for foreign powers to invade Iran. This is a new thing in Iranian history. That stigma is going to stick with him.

What does that mean moving forward? It means that I think any opposition tied to bringing back the former monarchy in essence is done. But I think he has also really done a huge disservice to opposition movements in Iran because now they will be targeted and stamped with this idea that you are playing with or playing good with foreign powers in order to bring change in Iran.

This is something that I think various forms of civil society actors and opposition movements in Iran are going to have to contend with and are going to have to work past. This episode in many ways has pushed back opposition movements in Iran. It’s going to be an uphill battle, unfortunately.

AG: Narges, thanks so much for speaking with us today. I’ve been a fan of your work for a long time. I can’t recommend enough that everybody follow your writings. They’re always fascinating, and you cover so many different topics, and it’s just such an interesting picture of what’s going on in both international relations and the geopolitics of Iran as well as inside the country itself.

Thanks again for joining us on The Intercept Briefing.

NB: Thanks so much for having me, and I love the work that you guys do, so thank you.

AG: We’re going to leave it there. 

But before we go, we’d love it if you helped The Intercept Briefing win its first Webby Award for best news and politics podcast. So please vote for us. 

We’ll add a link to vote in our show notes. Thanks so much! 

And that does it for this episode. 

This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief and Maia Hibbett is the managing editor of The Intercept. Chelsey B. Coombs is our social and video producer, and Fei Liu is our product and design manager. Nara Shin is our copy editor. Will Stanton mixed our show. And the legal review was done by the illustrious David Bralow. 

Slipstream provided our theme music. 

This show and our reporting at The Intercept doesn’t exist without you. Your donation, no matter the amount makes a real difference. Keep our investigations free and fearless at theintercept.com/join. 

And if you haven’t already, please subscribe to The Intercept Briefing, wherever you listen to your podcasts, and please leave us a rating or review. It really helps other listeners find us. Let us know what you think of this episode, or leave a general comment. You can email us at podcast@theintercept.com.

Until next time, I’m Ali Gharib.

The post Putting Fuel on a Ceasefire: Israel Tries to Kill U.S.–Iran Talks appeared first on The Intercept.

The ceasefire announced Tuesday night by President Donald Trump and confirmed by Iranian officials is on life support. If Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu gets his way, it may soon be dead. 

Over the first 36 hours of the supposed ceasefire, hundreds have been killed and thousands injured in Israeli strikes on Lebanon. The attacks extended beyond Israeli’s traditional targets in southern Lebanon and Beirut’s outskirts into the central parts of the capital — and may mark the heaviest bombardment of the country since Israel’s 1982 invasion.

Trump suggested the ceasefire remains intact because Israel’s attacks are “a separate skirmish,” but the official announcement of the agreement described “an immediate ceasefire everywhere including Lebanon.” The language was put forward by Pakistan’s prime minister, who had brokered the deal and, according to the New York Times, the U.S. had seen the text before it was publicly released.

The words “including Lebanon,” however, lasted no longer than it took for Netanyahu to talk to Trump immediately before the ceasefire announcement. Trump confirmed Thursday that he told Netanyahu to “low-key it,” appearing to give Israel a green light to immediately violate the ceasefire and put it at risk of collapse.

In response, Iran says it will not open the Strait of Hormuz so long as Israel is violating the ceasefire. And planned talks in Islamabad for the U.S. and Iran to hammer out a longer-term agreement during the two-week ceasefire window have been thrown into doubt.

For his part, Netanyahu sought to dispel any notion that the Iran war was ending, emphasizing that the ceasefire is temporary and “a way station on the way to achieving all of our goals.”

When it comes exerting Israeli influence on the U.S., Netanyahu once infamously said, “America is a thing you can move very easily.” Indeed, according to reports, it was Netanyahu who convinced Trump to launch this war in the first place.

Now, potentially upending U.S. efforts to disentangle itself from conflict with Iran, the Israeli prime minister finds himself on familiar footing: playing the role of spoiler against any form of U.S.–Iran détente.

Decades of Détente-Busting

America’s supposed junior partner has worked ceaselessly to prevent any off-ramp from confrontation between the U.S. and Iran. In 1995, when Iran and the U.S. flirted with economic rapprochement by opening the Iran oil industry to American investment and development, Israel and AIPAC lobbied Congress and President Bill Clinton to block it.

In 2002, as Iran worked directly with the U.S. on Afghanistan in the aftermath of September 11, seeking a grand bargain, Israel interdicted a weapons shipment it said was bound for Palestinian forces, making questionable claims about the shipment’s Iranian provenance. The seizure helped tank the exploratory talks on Afghanistan and convinced President George W. Bush instead to infamously cast Iran as part of the “axis of evil.”

Related

For Netanyahu and the Saudis, Opposing Diplomacy With Iran Was Never About Enrichment

Over the course of President Barack Obama’s Iran nuclear talks from 2013 to 2015, Israel worked to block a deal — with Netanyahu engaging in unprecedented efforts to sabotage diplomacy. He even addressed a joint session of Congress against a nuclear deal over the White House’s objections. Ultimately, Netanyahu succeeded with Trump’s ascension: Under intense lobbying, Trump tore up the deal and nearly brought the countries to war before his first term ended.

Joe Biden campaigned on reentering the deal, but that aim was prematurely dispatched during Biden’s transition when Israel assassinated Iran’s top nuclear scientist in 2020, prompting Iranian hard-liners to pass legislation that blew up talks. When negotiations finally began in earnest in 2021, Israel launched an attack on Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility. Iran responded by announcing it would, for the first time, enrich uranium to nearly weapons-grade. The talks, predictably, failed.

Trump’s Second Term

Though Trump has proved to be a willing partner in Netanyahu’s push to increase tensions with Iran, Israel nonetheless now found ways to play the spoiler — much in the same manner it did with Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Biden.

The Israelis successfully turned two round of nuclear talks during Trump’s second term into cover for surprise attacks. Both the war on Iran in June 2025 and the current one were initiated not amid great diplomatic impasses, but when Iran put forward workable proposals. In both cases, U.S. officials said Israel was going to act regardless of the American position — and so the U.S. had to join the wars.

These were not wars to defeat Iran, but rather wars to defeat U.S. diplomatic efforts. They are the kinetic manifestation of Israel’s long efforts to keep the U.S. in a permanent state of war with Iran, sometimes cold, sometimes hot.

If U.S.–Iran talks do move forward and there actually is progress toward hammering out a sustainable cessation of hostilities, Israel will remain a wildcard. Any long-term ceasefire will require Israel’s acquiescence.

If Netanyahu tanks the ceasefire and the U.S. and global economy continues to suffer, Israel’s already plunging support among Americans is likely to falter even further. At this point, however, Netanyahu seems more concerned with his domestic political welfare than his credibility with American voters.

Related

Fool Me Twice: The Case for War With Iran Is Even Thinner Than It Was for Iraq

Netanyahu is widely thought to benefit from wars — from Gaza to Iran and now, most critically, in Lebanon — to shore up his political fortunes. He faces an election in October and losing could lead to the revival of corruption charges that might land him in prison.

The question now may unfortunately not be whether Iran and the U.S. can find a compromise. Instead, the fate of the global economy and, not least, Iranians themselves, could rest between Netanyahu and Trump, who faces his own political challenges in midterm elections this year.

It may once again be a question of whether it is America or Israel who blinks first.

The post The Forever Spoiler: Netanyahu Has Been Blowing Up Diplomacy With Iran for Decades appeared first on The Intercept.

Pressed for a more accurate count of U.S. personnel killed or injured during Operation Epic Fury, the Office of the Secretary of War provided a new tally that still undercounts American dead or wounded. This comes after U.S. Central Command ghosted The Intercept after sending lowball and outdated figures last week.

The continued undercount comes amid a fragile ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran in which both sides have claimed victory. Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine noted during a Wednesday press conference that the halt in fighting was only “a pause” in the conflict, and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth said U.S. forces were “prepared to restart at a moment’s notice.”

When questioned about stale numbers initially sent by CENTCOM, a Secretary of War spokesperson referred The Intercept to the new Operation Epic Fury webpage of the Defense Casualty Analysis System, which generates casualty counts for Congress and the president.

DCAS counts 13 hostile and non-hostile U.S. deaths during the war, listing out their names. Missing from the Pentagon tally is 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, 2026.

“He passed away while deployed to Kuwait in support of Operation Epic Fury,” said Rep. Mike Lawler, R-N.Y., during a memorial service for Davius late last month. Caine also recognized him while “honoring our fallen” from the war.

The Pentagon did not reply prior to publication to a request for comment on why Davius was missing from its casualty rolls.

The military’s count of those injured and wounded is even more flawed. Last week, multiple military personnel were injured when a U.S. F-15 was shot down over Iran and an A-10 Warthog crashed near the Straight of Hormuz. One of the Air Force officers from the F-15 who was rescued by U.S. Special Operations forces during a Saturday night mission, for example, was “bleeding rather profusely” and “injured quite badly,” according to President Donald Trump. But CENTCOM has failed to provide The Intercept with updated casualty figures reflecting these and other wounded personnel. (The Pentagon’s DCAS may reflect these wounded, but it’s impossible to know for certain due to the system’s lack of detail.)

CENTCOM has not replied to more than a dozen requests for clarification over the last week since claiming to The Intercept in a March 30 email that “since the start of Operation Epic Fury, approximately 303 U.S. service members have been wounded.”

On its website, the DCAS states that its goal “is to provide as accurate reporting of military casualties as possible.” Yet it posts conflicting counts of troops injured in Operation Epic Fury. On one page titled “Casualty Summary by Casualty Category,” DCAS lists 372 troops wounded in action — a count 23 percent higher than CENTCOM’s claims to The Intercept. On another page titled “Casualty Summary by Month and Service,” DCAS lists an even lower “grand total” of wounded in action: 357. Both counts were updated on April 8.

Putting aside its internal data discrepancies, the way the system defines casualties offers a skewed image of the conflict. Though the DCAS tracks “non-hostile” deaths — meaning individuals killed in accidents or by illness — it doesn’t include “non-hostile” injuries. For example, the DCAS figures show that at least 63 Navy personnel have been wounded in action. What it doesn’t show — and what the CENTCOM casualty figures also exclude — are more than 200 sailors treated for smoke inhalation or lacerations due to a March 12 fire that raged aboard the USS Gerald R. Ford before it limped out of the war zone for repairs. The numbers also don’t include a sailor who suffered a non-combat-related injury aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, as it was involved in “strike missions in support of Operation Epic Fury” on March 25.

The Department of War did not reply to a request for comment on why DCAS tracks non-hostile war zone deaths but not non-hostile injuries or illnesses.

It’s impossible to know how many other casualties have been kept under wraps. After an Iranian missile attack on Al-Asad Air Base in Iraq on January 8, 2020, during Trump’s first term, the administration peddled a complete fiction to the public. “No Americans were harmed in last night’s attack by the Iranian regime,” Trump said at the time. “We suffered no casualties.”

Soon, the Pentagon would acknowledge there were, indeed, casualties and proceeded to adjust the figure upward at least five times, with CENTCOM ultimately admitting that 110 troops suffered traumatic brain injuries. An inspector general report released in November 2021 indicated that the number of brain injuries may have been even higher, because “DoD cannot determine whether all Service members are being properly diagnosed and treated for TBIs in deployed settings.”

Related

The Media Just Can’t Help Turning Iran Fighter Jet Rescue Into “Black Hawk Down”

Trump claimed that “nobody was even injured” in the Saturday rescue mission that involved hundreds of Special Operations troops and other military personnel. During a Wednesday press conference, Hegseth echoed this, claiming there were “zero American casualties.” But blast symptoms — like traumatic brain injuries — can take time to manifest, if the military even bothers to assess them.

“Not a single thing we’ve done has put an American troop in more of a harm’s way,” Hegseth said on Wednesday. But current and former Pentagon officials say the War Department failed to adequately protect U.S. personnel on bases across the Middle East, forcing troops to retreat to hotels and office buildings during Epic Fury.

U.S. bases in Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and the United Arab Emirates have also been targeted by Iranian drones and missiles. Retired Gen. Joseph Votel, a former head of Central Command, recalled that U.S. troops in the region have faced drone attacks for at least a decade. “At that time we identified a need to protect against this threat, and it has taken far too long for the DoD to respond and provide adequate protection for our deployed troops,” he told The Intercept, referencing drone attacks during the campaign against ISIS in the spring of 2016. “It was a known expectation that, if attacked, Iran would retaliate against our bases, installations, and forces, and I agree that we should have anticipated and been prepared for this inevitability.”

While much of the focus on U.S. forces has centered on air and naval power, it is the Army — whose soldiers man the interceptor missile systems on those bases — that has suffered the most casualties: 251, according to DCAS statistics. The Army is only now seeking sensors designed to assess “blast overpressure,” the sudden onset of a pressure wave from explosions from enemy munitions and the blasts from weapon systems employed by soldiers themselves. It can lead to cognitive impairment and adverse effects on brain health, including traumatic brain injuries. Trump has long dismissed brain injuries as “headaches” and “not serious.” CENTCOM claims that the “vast majority” of injuries of the current war have been “minor.”

Of the 13 deaths counted in DCAS, six were killed in a drone strike on Port Shuaiba, Kuwait. A soldier also died due to an “enemy attack on March 1, 2026, at Prince Sultan Air Base, Saudi Arabia.” If the USS Ford injuries were added to the Navy count, that service would take over the top spot with more than 264 wounded. DCAS also counts 39 Air Force personnel wounded in action and 19 Marines.

More injuries are on the horizon. It’s well known that when operations’ tempo increases, such as during a war, troops’ mental and physical health suffers. Last year, even before the war, an article in a professional journal published by Army University Press warned that the “relentless demands from training, overseas rotations, and deployments significantly affect servicemembers’ physical and mental health, leading to wellness issues and influencing military readiness. Continuous operations without adequate recovery intervals worsen stress-related illnesses, causing a hazardous balance between duty and health.”

The Pentagon wants $200 billion in supplemental funds to pay for its war on Iran but money for long-term health care for veterans of the Iran war will likely push the ultimate price tag into the trillions of dollars.

Around 50,000 U.S. troops are deployed around the Middle East where the United States and Israel, as well as Iran and its proxies, have struck fuel depots, oil facilities, and military sites — all of which release noxious substances shown to negatively affect human health. If they file disability claims at the rate of the extremely short 1990 Gulf War — 37 percent of whom receive compensation today — this alone would add around $600 billion in costs over their lifetimes, according to Linda Bilmes, the co-author of “The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict.”

The post We Called Out the Pentagon for Undercounting U.S. Casualties in Iran. They Keep Doing It. appeared first on The Intercept.

The war in Iran has entered its first ceasefire — a two-week break from hostilities brokered largely by Pakistan that all sides have agreed to, with negotiations on a permanent end to the war to follow starting in a few days.

It’s hard to say who has emerged a “winner” in the war so far, but certainly when one examines what has been accomplished and what has not, the U.S. cannot claim a resounding victory, even as it demonstrated formidable military prowess.

Iran may, in fact, be the country that can claim the victory. It’s not just that the Islamic Republic of Iran survived, it’s also that the country demonstrated its control over the Strait of Hormuz — an outcome that establishes Iran’s position as both an influential regional force and a player able to exert sway over the entire world economy.

After the ceasefire announcement, Iran’s first vice president posted on social media: “Today, a page of history has been turned; the world has welcomed a new pole of power, and the era of Iran has begun.”

It sounds like Trumpian hubris, but it can’t immediately be dismissed as a far-fetched fantasy.

Survival — and More

First, the regime had to survive. And it did: Despite President Donald Trump’s self-serving claim, the regime in Iran hasn’t changed. In fact, the Iranian government may have become even more hard-line and less accommodating than before.

Iran took a beating. Despite the depletion of some of its strategic assets, however, the country has maintained many of its strategic capabilities.

Related

Lesson From Ukraine: Breaking Promises to Small Countries Means They’ll Never Give Up Nukes

The war hasn’t, for instance, eliminated the uranium stockpile Iran still possesses, though it is buried deep underground — leaving unmet another of the demands that the Trump administration. It is unclear if any of Iran’s thousands of advanced centrifuges survived the bombings in June of last year, but Iran’s ability to manufacture new ones has not been eradicated, despite the loss of some of its nuclear scientists over the past year.

Neither have Israel and the U.S. eliminated all of Iran’s missile launchers or its production lines, as evidenced by the ongoing attacks against Israel and neighboring Persian Gulf states with direct hits up to the ceasefire taking effect. Iran’s drone supply and production line also don’t appear to have been eliminated.

The war, in other words, hasn’t prevented Iran from being a threat to U.S. allies in the region — a threat that has shaken the Arab Persian Gulf states’ faith in U.S. security guarantees, to say nothing of investors’ confidence in the Emirates as a financial capital.

The Gulf is not the only region where the U.S. will suffer international consequences. The war also stoked tensions between Iran and Western nations — some of which assailed the U.S., while even staunch allies in Europe refused to cave to Trump’s admonishments to join the war.

Iran may remain one of the most geopolitically isolated states in the world, but U.S. isolation is rapidly on the rise as well.

The Clincher

Scoring the war and the previous attack on Iran’s nuclear sites like a boxing match, one might argue that Iran has “won” the second round, despite being bruised and bloodied in the fight.

Surviving intact after more than five weeks of intensive day and night bombing by two nuclear powers, the assassination of its supreme leader and some of its top leadership, and the destruction of infrastructure will itself be viewed by the regime and its supporters as victory.

Related

With Trump Threatening Genocide in Iran, Military Must Disobey His Orders, Former Pentagon Officials Say

The regime’s ability to keep fighting against arguably the greatest military power the world has ever seen will be viewed in Tehran and abroad as a remarkable show of strength, potentially establishing a deterrent against future rounds of fighting.

Ultimately, though, it is Iran’s demonstration of its ability to control the flow of oil, gas, and goods through the Strait of Hormuz that would clinch the match. It became evident that Iran’s sway over the strait, creating a toll booth of sorts, was virtually impossible to undo, short of a major ground invasion — something Trump and even his most reckless advisers were loath to authorize.

Leaving aside the bonus Iran received from the jump in prices as it continued to sell oil during the conflict, the toll it began charging — which amounts to about $2 million per ship — will fill its almost empty coffers in short order.

In his remarks to the press, Trump did not seem to be especially concerned with the toll, even suggesting that he, like any mafia boss, would like a piece of it. Iran may, in the event a permanent peace deal is achieved, even agree to pay the protection money if it guarantees the safety of the regime.

Stronger Position in Talks

From the perspective of many in the West and certainly in Iran, the claim that Iran “won” the second round of the match rings truer than the U.S. claim of having accomplished its goals.

Related

The Regime Survives, Trump Has to Deal, and Iranians Are the Biggest Losers

The U.S. and Israel’s assassinations and destruction of military and civilian infrastructure were never contestable; Iran was never a match for the two countries’ conventional forces. To what end, though, was the question.

Whether there is a final peace deal or not, the ends of the war can hardly justify the U.S. and Israel’s means. It may be enough to dissuade military action even absent a deal.

And looking forward, in terms of a longer peace deal and nuclear agreement, Iran is arguably in a stronger position than the days before the war.

At the announcement of the ceasefire, Trump said the Iranian 10-point plan was a workable start to negotiations. Though there are some disputes about whether the proposal Iran presented publicly matched what was transmitted privately, many of the new plan’s pillars matched those presented and what Omani mediators had described as a workable proposal for a diplomatic solution.

By surviving a war and inflicting real pain — physical and financial — on both the aggressors and their enablers, Iran can probably extract more concessions from Trump than it could before.

With his eye on the markets, the price of gasoline, the unpopularity of the war, and the realization in the wake of his apocalyptic threats that there is universal opposition to actually taking Iran back to the Stone Age, it should be obvious by now that Trump wants to put the Iran issue behind him as soon as possible.

In this way, too, the Iranians have shown that they have the upper hand. While Trump and Israel have demonstrated that they don’t understand the Iranian political system, the Iranians have a solid grasp of U.S. politics. They know about the upcoming midterm elections. Perhaps now they think the survival of the Trump regime is actually what’s at stake.

The post How the War Strengthened Iran’s Hand Against the U.S. and Israel appeared first on The Intercept.

“We believe democracy cannot be delivered through missiles, and freedom cannot emerge from destruction and more death of innocent lives,” they said in the previously unreported letter.

The signers included Rep. Yassamin Ansari of Arizona, the first Iranian American Democrat elected to Congress.

Women have been at the forefront of demonstrations against the Iranian government in recent years, including the “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests of 2022 that were met with a deadly crackdown. The international protest movement was set off by the Iranian government’s killing of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini for allegedly failing to wear the mandatory headscarf properly.

Related

“Liberate Their Bodies From Their Souls”: The Lies That Sell the Iran War

The Iranian government’s suppression of that protest and another anti-government protest wave earlier this year have been cited as justification for the war that Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu launched in February.

“Remember the great women march,” Trump said at an April 6 press conference at the Pentagon, going on to describe government snipers suppressing protests by shooting demonstrators. In a speech justifying last June’s Israeli-led war against Iran, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu invoked the Women, Life, Freedom movement by name in Farsi.

The Iranian American women who signed the letter, however, said that the war is only encouraging further crackdowns.

“The Iranian people must not become casualties of geopolitical rivalry or instruments of foreign agendas,” the signatories wrote. “We refuse the false choice between repression at home and devastation from abroad. Both deny Iranians the right to determine their own future.”

Trump has given mixed signals as to whether he hopes to pursue regime change in the conflict.

The Iranian diaspora is deeply divided over the war, but a recent poll suggests Iranian Americans may be turning against it.

Related

With Trump Threatening Genocide in Iran, Military Must Disobey His Orders, Former Pentagon Officials Say

Despite the polarized exile politics, many groups responded with horror to Trump’s threat that a “whole civilization will die tonight” if Iran does not reopen the Strait of Hormuz. He has also threatened to destroy civilian infrastructure such as bridges and power plants, which would be a war crime; the U.S. and Israel have already launched scores of attacks targeting civilian sites across the country.

Ansari, the letter’s most prominent signer, said Monday that she plans to file articles of impeachment against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth for “repeated war crimes,” including the bombing of a school that killed scores of young girls.

“As the daughter of Iranian immigrants who fled the brutal Islamic Republic, and the first Iranian-American Democrat elected to Congress, I stand in strong opposition to this illegal war,” Ansari said in a statement. “Iranians deserve freedom and democracy. That cannot be delivered through bombs and destruction of civilian infrastructure. Iran’s future must be determined by Iranians alone — free from war and authoritarian rule.”

The 14 signers of the letter included women serving as city councilmembers, state legislators, and Democratic Party delegates.

The post Iranian Women Elected to Office in U.S. Reject Trump’s Iran War appeared first on The Intercept.

“President Trump has repeatedly threatened war crimes in Iran and now he is expressing genocidal intent,” said Sarah Harrison, an associate general counsel at the Pentagon’s Office of General Counsel, International Affairs during Trump’s first term. “Every single lawmaker and national security leader needs to stand against this and make clear to the U.S. military that these are unlawful orders and if carried out they will someday face criminal prosecution.”

This interpretation was echoed by Rebecca Ingber, a former State Department lawyer and now a law professor at Cardozo Law School. “The U.S. understanding of the definition of genocide in the Genocide Convention requires a ‘specific intent’ to destroy a group — such as a national or ethnic group as relevant here,” she told The Intercept. “That is an intentionally high bar, and one that explicitly would not cover unintended consequences of armed conflict. If acted upon, the President’s statement would be evidence of that required specific intent.”

Trump has repeatedly threatened to obliterate Iran’s civilian infrastructure should the nation’s leaders not heed his demands. “We have a plan because of the power of our military where every bridge in Iran will be decimated by 12:00 tomorrow night,” he said on Monday. “Where every power plant in Iran will be out of business, burning, exploding, and never to be used again.” This echoed an Easter morning missive. “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!!” Trump ranted on Truth Social. “Open the Fuckin’ Strait [of Hormuz], you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell.”

Asked on Monday if he was concerned that his threat to bomb power plants or bridges amounts to war crimes, Trump replied “No, not at all,” and said in another interview, “I’m not worried about it.”

“What President Trump is describing as the destruction of ‘a whole civilization’ would be a war crime, plain and simple,” said Sarah Yager, the Washington director at Human Rights Watch and a former senior adviser on human rights to the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff. “There is no gray area on this under international law.”

Civilian infrastructure has been a frequent target since the U.S.–Israeli war on Iran began on February 28. “Strikes on critical infrastructure and industrial sites have disrupted basic services including electricity, water and telecommunications, also leading to increasing immediate and longer term environmental and health risks,” wrote the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, or OCHA, in a brief report issued last week. Airports, cultural heritage locations, hospitals, industrial sites markets, residential areas, and schools have also been struck, including the civilian international airport in Tehran, a power plant in Khorramshahr, and water reservoirs in Fars and Khuzestan. Last week, the U.S. attacked the newly constructed B1 highway bridge, which killed 8 people, who were, according to the deputy governor of Alborz province, not military targets but nearby villagers celebrating Nowruz, the Persian new year.

Related

“Casualty Cover-Up”: The Pentagon Is Hiding U.S. Losses Under Trump in the Middle East

The International Atomic Energy Agency has confirmed strikes affected multiple nuclear sites, including Iran’s Bushehr nuclear power plant. Rafael Grossi, head of the nuclear watchdog, warned on Monday that “continued military activity near the BNPP — an operating plant with large amounts of nuclear fuel — could cause a severe radiological accident with harmful consequences for people and the environment in Iran and beyond.”

Trump claimed that the Iranian people actually want the United States to attack their civilian infrastructure, citing “numerous intercepts” of communications. “‘Please keep bombing,’” Trump said on Monday of these supposed pleas. “And these are people that are living where the bombs are exploding. And when we leave, and we’re not hitting those areas, they’re saying, ‘Please come back.’”

In actuality, Iranians have been fleeing from Tehran and other major urban areas under attack. Almost a month ago, UNHCR — the U.N. refugee agency — reported that as many as 3.2 million people were already displaced inside Iran due to the conflict. While casualty counts are fragmentary, more than 2,100 civilians had been killed in the war by the end of last month and around 28,000 injured, according to Iranian Ministry of Health and Medical Education. This included 216 children killed and 1,881 injured, as of April 3.

Related

“Liberate Their Bodies From Their Souls”: The Lies That Sell the Iran War

Yager noted that Iranians who have already suffered severe government repression, including the mass killings of protesters earlier this year, now face obliteration by America. “They’re being told their entire society could be destroyed by the president of United States, with the power of the U.S. military at his fingertips. His previous threats to bomb their power plants and bridges are threats to the systems that keep people alive, their electricity, water, and health care,” she told The Intercept. “Even before anything happens, that kind of rhetoric creates deep anxiety and fear for millions of civilians who have no control over these decisions but who will bear the consequences.”

Almost 115,200 civilian homes, commercial properties, and other civilian sites have been damaged in the war, according to the Iranian Red Crescent Society. This includes 763 schools. The highest profile of these strikes was the U.S. attack on the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school. The attack killed around 175 civilians, most of them children. A preliminary Pentagon report concluded the strike was conducted by U.S. forces, directly contradicting assertions by Trump that Iran struck the school.

The Iranian Red Crescent also reported that more than 334 medical, health, pharmaceutical, and emergency centers have been damaged, including 18 of its own centers. Twenty-four health workers have been killed and 116 injured, according to Iran’s Ministry of Health and Medical Education.

Around 400,000 people are also facing food insecurity in Tehran alone, according to local authorities. Inflation for groceries is at almost 113 percent, severely curtailing people’s purchasing power, according to OCHA.

The post With Trump Threatening Genocide in Iran, Military Must Disobey His Orders, Former Pentagon Officials Say appeared first on The Intercept.

Neither Josh Hartnett nor Ewan McGregor was there, but the way the mainstream media is telling it, they might as well have been. The Sunday morning rescue of a U.S. airman shot down over Iran launched a thousand breathless tick-tock retellings from the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, CBS News, and many, many more — helpful water-carrying for an administration prosecuting a deeply unpopular war without a clear end in sight.

“The rescue had unfolded with near‑perfect precision. Under cover of darkness, U.S. commandos slipped deep into Iran, undetected, scaled a 7,000‑foot ridge and pulled a ​stranded American weapons specialist to safety, moving him toward a secret rendezvous point before dawn on Sunday,” Reuters’ report on the rescue opens. “Then everything stopped.”

The operation was a “harrowing race against time,” according to the Times. As Politico put it, citing an anonymous senior administration official, it was “the ultimate ‘needle in a haystack’” mission, made possible by a CIA “deception campaign” in the country disseminating the misinformation that the airman had already been located and was being extracted by ground to confuse the Iranians’ search.

The White House frequently hosts widely attended “background briefing” calls for large groups of reporters. Maybe that’s how Axios chimed in with the same evocative “needle in a haystack” line, which it also attributed to a senior administration official.

“This was the ultimate needle in a haystack but in this case it was a brave American soul inside a mountain crevice, invisible but for CIA’s capabilities,” the unnamed source told Axios.

Related

Far-Right Religious Leaders Advising Trump See Iran as an End Times Holy War

CBS News called locating and extracting the service member, who was aboard a craft known by the call sign “Dude 44,” “a herculean U.S. government effort.” Even The Associated Press characterized the mission as “a daring rescue,” and multiple publications reported that when the airman was able, they radioed the line “God is good” just ahead of Easter Sunday — a plot point that would make even devotees of the show “24” groan.

As government sources are telling the tale to eager reporters at national publications, the F-15E Strike Eagle was the first jet shot down Friday over enemy territory in this war on Iran. After coming under Iranian fire, the two-man crew ejected themselves, and the aircraft’s weapons systems officer was separated from the pilot, who was “quickly” rescued, according to the Journal.

While the initially missing service member’s identity has not been revealed, Trump said he is a colonel who was injured but managed to hide out in a mountain crevice to await rescue. Two Black Hawk helicopters involved in the search were also hit by incoming fire; in another incident, an A-10 Warthog was hit and crashed in a neighboring allied country, where the pilot was rescued.

“When airmen go down, you can’t get them in very tough countries, like in Vietnam,” Trump told the Journal, in a revealing comparison.

“He was able to climb, climb up as wounded as he was, he was able to climb up into a crevice,” Trump went on. “A lot of great things happened.”

To say it would be naive to take the Trump administration at face value is an understatement. Yet the complete lack of any skepticism of this Hollywood story from mainstream news would make even Breitbart writers blush.

Even the timing of the premiere was perfect for the Trump administration, which is acutely aware of how unpopular this war is at home. Is America winning this war? Don’t worry about that, check out this action sequence.

One of the ironies of all this is that it exposes exactly why the Trump administration can’t be trusted. Just two days before the fighter jet was shot down, Trump was blustering about how U.S. strikes had left Iran with “no anti-aircraft” capabilities. The daring rescue, however, is predicated on the very clear fact that Iran absolutely still has the ability to shoot down American planes.

The U.S. can certainly bomb Iran “back to the Stone Age” — a line both Trump and Hegseth deployed — but all that hellfire rained down on civilian targets won’t yield the political dividends they so desperately desire.

Related

The Architects of the Iraq War: Where Are They Now?

It’s all eerily reminiscent of the way the media covered the lead-up to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, when papers of record like the Times and The Atlantic and respected broadcast outlets like “Meet the Press” were more than happy to launder the Bush administration’s quarter-baked intelligence to make the case for war to the American public.

Even voices from the emergent, supposedly left-wing media — like the wonks making their name through a new format called “blogs” — were overjoyed to fall in line with the war effort. After all, the logic seemed to go, how could you be taken seriously if you were reflexively anti-war — the province of far-left nuts who are cast into the political wilderness? It was far safer and, in the long term, professionally beneficial to sell out any principles you had to enlist as junior partners in the pro-war coalition.

Even if, in this moment, the media is vaguely more skeptical of the war with Iran, national reporters simply couldn’t resist retelling the story of a Great American Rescue Mission, consequences, or the broader truth, be damned. Americans’ memories, especially for failing wars, are short.

As the fog clears and a fuller picture emerges, maybe we’ll see whether it shakes out the same way these serial liars sold it to huge swaths of the media.

The post The Media Just Can’t Help Turning Iran Fighter Jet Rescue Into “Black Hawk Down” appeared first on The Intercept.

Both aircraft had two-person crews, U.S. officials told The Intercept, and in both cases, one crew member was rescued and one remains missing.

The downing of the U.S. plane undermined an assertion of strength President Donald Trump made in a nationally televised speech earlier this week.

“They have no anti-aircraft equipment. Their radar is 100 percent annihilated,” Trump said Wednesday. “We are unstoppable as a military force.”

A month ago, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Iranian leaders were “looking up and seeing only U.S. and Israeli air power every minute of every day until we decide it’s over.” He continued: “Iran will be able to do nothing about it. B-2s, B-52s, B-1s, Predator drones, fighters controlling the skies, picking targets, death and destruction from the sky all day long.” 

Neither the White House nor the Pentagon responded to requests for comment on how Iran could down an advanced U.S. aircraft when the country supposedly no longer possesses anti-aircraft weaponry.

The loss of the F-15 is the first known instance of an American combat aircraft shot down in Iran since the war began in late February. It comes after Trump repeatedly threatened critical infrastructure in Iran and the U.S. struck the B1 bridge outside of Tehran, which killed eight people and wounded 95, according to Iranian news media.

Last week, at least 15 U.S. troops were wounded in an Iranian attack on a Saudi air base that hosts American troops.

The U.S. military has previously provided misleading and stale casualty statistics, in what a defense official who spoke with The Intercept called a “casualty cover-up.”

Related

“Casualty Cover-Up”: The Pentagon Is Hiding U.S. Losses Under Trump in the Middle East

At least 15 U.S. troops in the Middle East have died since the beginning of the Iran war, including six personnel who were killed in a drone strike on Port Shuaiba, Kuwait, and a soldier who died due to an “enemy attack on March 1, 2026, at Prince Sultan Air Base, Saudi Arabia.” More than 520 U.S. personnel have also been injured, according to an Intercept analysis.

On Friday, Iranian state media published pictures and videos that they claimed show parts of the downed plane and one of the ejection seats.

Update: April 3, 2026, 12:45 p.m. ET
The article has been updated with additional information about the surviving crew member who was located.

Update: April 3, 2026, 2:58 p.m. ET
This article has been updated with news of a second U.S. military plane that crashed near the Strait of Hormuz.

The post Iran Shoots Down F-15 Fighter Jet After Trump Bragged They Had No Capability appeared first on The Intercept.