By the most cautious estimate, 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.

The Costs of War analysis is the most comprehensive accounting of the U.S. air, naval, and Special Operations expenses — including some troop deployments and munitions — used in the two campaigns between August 1, 2025, and March 31, 2026. The need for such an estimate stems from the refusal of the Department of War to provide a tally of costs to lawmakers or The Intercept.

The researchers behind the Costs of War estimate say it’s almost assuredly an undercount.

“Operations do not have a clear end date and are actively expanding. They carry significant human, financial, and strategic costs and risk,” 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.

“American taxpayers, who are increasingly unable to afford basic needs, have a right to know how their tax dollars are spent,” they noted.

Homestead and Kavanagh observe that the largest costs might still be on the horizon.

“We expect that if comprehensive information were available, our cost estimate would likely increase significantly,” they wrote.

Kavanagh told The Intercept that the expenses were “enough to fund Medicaid for 500,000 people for an entire year.”

“Though the Trump administration is right to focus more on the Western Hemisphere, most needs in the region are economic or require investment in regional law enforcement. The United States is not clearly safer or more prosperous as a result of Operation Southern Spear or Operation Absolute Resolve,” she said.

The Naval deployment — which comprised the largest concentration of U.S. ships in the region since the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 — constituted the single largest expense, an estimated $3.8 billion. This includes the ever-growing cost of the Iwo Jima Amphibious Ready Group which consists of the USS Iwo Jima, USS Fort Lauderdale, and USS San Antonio, which remain deployed in the Caribbean with the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit and the USS Lake Erie guided-missile cruiser. Costs of War puts the daily operating costs of these ships at around $9 million per day.

The steep Naval expenditures are followed by at least $616 million spent on the deployment of aircraft, including P-8 Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft, F-35A Lightning II fighters, and MQ-9 Reaper drones used in both operations. The continuing daily cost of operating the at least 20 aircraft that are assumed to remain deployed in the region is $2.6 million.

Under Operation Southern Spear, the U.S. military has conducted 53 attacks on so-called drug boats since September 2025, killing more than 180 civilians. The latest strike, on April 19 in the Caribbean, killed three people. The Trump administration claims its victims are members of at least one of 24 or more cartels and criminal gangs with whom it claims to be at war but refuses to name.

Experts in the laws of war and members of Congress, from both parties, say the strikes are illegal extrajudicial killings because the military is not permitted to deliberately target civilians — even suspected criminals — who do not pose an imminent threat of violence. The summary executions are a significant departure from standard practice in the long-running U.S. war on drugs, in which law enforcement agencies arrested suspected drug smugglers.

The Costs of War analysis puts the price tag of the munitions employed in these attacks on boats at between $12.5 million and $50 million, the range owing to the lack of transparency surrounding the strikes. The report notes that the individual cost of armaments used in each strike may top $1 million and could actually be far higher if multiple munitions or aircraft are used.

Beyond expenses captured under Southern Spear, ancillary costs of Absolute Resolve, a large-scale air campaign and the abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, top $206 million. This includes the deployment of at least 150 aircraft — fighter jets, bombers, and Special Operations aircraft, and more — along with precision munitions such as Tomahawk cruise missiles and JASSM-ER missiles.

The approximately 200 Special Operations forces who played a key role in Maduro’s kidnapping cost about $16 million, to include the costs of daily operations and combat. As yet unknown are the costs of deployments of U.S. commandos in Ecuador, another front in America’s Western hemispheric war.

The boat strikes recently moved to land as what Joseph Humire, the acting assistant secretary of war for homeland defense and Americas security affairs, called “bilateral kinetic actions against cartel targets along the Colombia-Ecuador border” on unnamed designated terrorist organizations. “The joint effort, named ‘Operation Total Extermination,’ is the start of a military offensive by Ecuador against transnational criminal organizations with the support of the U.S.,” Humire announced last month. That U.S.–Ecuadorian campaign has already strayed into Colombia after a farm was bombed or hit by “ricochet effect” on March 3. In a war powers report announcing the introduction of U.S. armed forces into “hostilities” in Ecuador, the White House also informed Congress of “military action taken on March 6, 2026, against the facilities of narco-terrorists affiliated with a designated terrorist organization.”

America’s wars in the Western Hemisphere are part of what President Donald Trump and others have termed the “Donroe Doctrine,” a bastardization of the 1823 Monroe Doctrine. While President James Monroe’s policy aimed to prevent Europe from meddling in the Western Hemisphere, Trump has employed his version as a license for America to do exactly that.

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The National Security Strategy, released late last year, decrees the “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine a “potent restoration of American power and priorities,” rooted in the “readjustment of our global military presence to address urgent threats in our Hemisphere.” Last month, Humire told members of the House Armed Services Committee that “America’s immediate security perimeter” extended from “Alaska to Greenland in the Arctic to the Gulf of America and the Panama Canal and surrounding countries.” The Trump administration has, in fact, bullied Panama and threatened Canada, Colombia, Cuba, Greenland, and perhaps also Iceland, while conducting counter-cartel CIA operations in Mexico.

The Pentagon refuses to provide insights into its expenditures for conflicts in Latin America.

“For any information regarding budgetary costs for Operations Southern Spear and Operation Absolute Resolve, I’ll have to refer you to OSW,” U.S. Southern Command spokesperson Steven McLoud told The Intercept. When asked about the costs, the Office of the Secretary of War said it does “not have anything to provide currently.” 

Homestead and Kavanagh admit that the $4.7 billion price tag placed on Operations Absolute Resolve and Southern Spear is likely a low-ball figure. “This is a conservative estimate based on the limited information about the operation that is available,” they wrote. “Full data for several cost categories are not publicly available, and certain operations — such as the details of a CIA operation in Venezuela referenced by President Trump — remain classified or incompletely reported in the public domain.”

Costs are mounting by the day and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Trump has said he expects the U.S. will be running Venezuela for years. (He recently teased the possibility of making Venezuela the 51st U.S. state, before saying he could run for president of that country.) The Intercept previously reported that Pentagon procurement documents indicate the U.S. plans to maintain a massive military presence in the Caribbean until late 2028.

“Much of the military forward presence involved in these operations appears to now have become the ‘steady state,’ that is, it is likely to remain in the region for the foreseeable future,” said Kavanagh. “This means that the costs will continue to accumulate.”

The ultimate price tag of Americas wars in Latin America will further balloon in the decades ahead, saddling future Americans with soaring costs. “War is financed by debt, adding interest costs to the public budget,” write Homestead and Kavanagh. “Furthermore, the federal government undertakes an obligation to pay veterans benefits for decades into the future.”

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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.

“Across the country people are going bankrupt and dying prematurely because of lack of health care, but the U.S. government has billions to spend on imperialist violence to enrich corporations — from Venezuela to Iran — without any regard for human rights, life or rule of law,” Homestead told The Intercept. “This situation illustrates why greater restraint on Pentagon spending — which primarily benefits private contractors — is so necessary.”

The post Trump Has Already Spent at Least $4.7 Billion Attacking Latin America 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.

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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.

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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.

The American personnel died in a vehicular crash in the mountains of the Sierra de Chihuahua following a drug raid, alongside two Mexican officials, including Román Oseguera Cervantes, the director of the Chihuahua State Investigation Agency.

U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Ronald Johnson announced the deaths of the Americans on Sunday, referring to them in a post on X as “two members of staff from the United States Embassy.”

The State Department refused requests for additional information on the Americans’ activities or the agencies that employed them. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said during a Monday press conference that she was unaware of “any direct work between Chihuahua state and personnel from the U.S. embassy.”

Two U.S. government officials who spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity said the CIA has been running covert operations in Mexico, working alongside vetted Mexican state-level police forces and other government agencies. The sources said the Americans died after a raid on a synthetic drug lab.

“You may note that CIA declined to comment,” a CIA spokesperson told The Intercept by email in response to questions about the deaths.

Mexican authorities told the press that the Americans were not involved in the raid, after earlier stating they died following the operation against the labs.

Western Hemisphere Front

Trump has turned the Western Hemisphere into a war zone, as part of what he and others have called the “Donroe Doctrine.” This bastardization of the 1823 Monroe Doctrine — which Trump has turned into a unilateral license to militarily meddle in the U.S.’s backyard — has led to strikes on civilian boats in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean; an attack on Venezuela and the abduction of its president; and increased military operations elsewhere in Latin America.

Adm. Frank M. Bradley, the chief of U.S. Special Operations Command, recently referenced the “perceived increase of U.S. support to counter-cartel operations in Mexico” in testimony before the House Subcommittee on Intelligence and Special Operations. He said his elite troops “remain postured to provide … support to Mexican military and security forces to dismantle narco-terrorist organizations.”  

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In a little-noticed move in January, U.S. Northern Command, on Trump’s order, established Joint Interagency Task Force-Counter Cartel, or JIATF-CC, to coordinate U.S. government intelligence “to identify, disrupt, and dismantle cartel networks.” Among other things, the task force was established for “developing cartel targets for action by USNORTHCOM’s partners and providing direct support to law enforcement.” 

Gen. Gregory Guillot, NORTHCOM’s commander, said then that the task force would be operating “via traditional and non-traditional means to deliver accurate, timely, and relevant intelligence to execution elements.” Last week, he told lawmakers that the force would “provide actionable intelligence to the Government of Mexico and federal law enforcement counterparts acting domestically based on leads developed from foreign intelligence operations.”

“Trump has reportedly been pushing for U.S. direct action against drug labs and traffickers in Mexico since his first term,” Brian Finucane, a senior adviser for the U.S. Program at the International Crisis Group, told The Intercept. “In his second term, he now has some officials in his administration eager to do a ‘Sicario’ — making Mexico a battlefield in the new GWOT,” or global war on terror, “against the narcos.”

Acting Assistant Secretary of War for Homeland Defense and Americas Security Affairs Joseph Humire was unable to tell members of the House Armed Services Committee how many land strikes were being conducted across almost 20 Latin American and Caribbean nations. “I don’t have an exact number,” he replied to a question last month. But when asked by Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., the ranking member of the committee, if the War Department would “be moving to a lot more terrestrial strikes,” Humire replied, “Yes, ranking member.”

Trump mused last year that he might send U.S. commandos into Mexico to battle cartels.

“Could happen,” he said. “Stranger things have happened.”

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth also threatened military action on Mexican soil.

Over the Precipice

The Americans died at around 2 a.m. on Sunday morning in the town of Morelos after their multi-vehicle convoy departed from the site of the drug raid. The vehicle reportedly drove off the road and over the side of a ravine, exploding upon impact. 

The Americans killed in the wreck in Mexico are some of the first known casualties since Trump ramped up military and CIA operations in and around Latin America last year. A number of U.S. military personnel were injured in the U.S. attack on Venezuela in January. In February, Lance Cpl. Chukwuemeka E. Oforah, 21, fell off the USS Iwo Jima while it was conducting operations in the Caribbean and was declared deceased on February 10.

The Chihuahua Attorney General’s Office claimed that the Americans in Mexico were only conducting training on drone operations, according to Mexican press reports. Sheinbaum said at a news conference Monday that she would ask Johnson, Washington’s ambassador, to meet with Foreign Minister Roberto Velasco Álvarez to discuss the incident. Sheinbaum has repeatedly said that Mexico will not accept U.S. boots on the ground.

“It’s outrageous that U.S. operatives were working to blow up drug labs in Mexico and President Sheinbaum’s security cabinet wasn’t informed of their activities,” said Sanho Tree, the director of the Drug Policy Project at the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies.

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Last year, the State Department declared six Mexican drug cartels — the Sinaloa Cartel, Cártel de Jalisco Nueva Generación, the Northeast Cartel, the Michoacán family, the United Cartels, and the Gulf Cartel — to be foreign terrorist organizations. The Salvadoran MS-13 and the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gangs were also named. The designation activates U.S. sanctions, including restrictions on financial transactions and bans on U.S. citizens from providing support to the groups.

The drug war deaths in Mexico follow the announcement of new joint counter-cartel operations in Ecuador last month. Humire said that the Defense Department supported “bilateral kinetic actions against cartel targets along the Colombia-Ecuador border” — Pentagon-speak for March 3 strikes on unnamed “Designated Terrorist Organizations” previously reported by The Intercept.

“The joint effort, named ‘Operation Total Extermination,’ is the start of a military offensive by Ecuador against transnational criminal organizations with the support of the U.S.,” he said.

The attacks in Ecuador are also part of, and an expansion of, Operation Southern Spear: the U.S. military’s illegal campaign of strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea and Eastern Pacific Ocean. The U.S. has conducted 53 attacks on so-called drug boats since September 2025, killing more than 180 civilians. The latest strike, on April 19 in the Caribbean, killed three people.

Gen. Francis Donovan, the chief of U.S. Southern Command, told lawmakers last month that “boat strikes are not the answer,” but teased an even broader campaign.

“What we’re moving for right now might be an extension of Southern Spear, but really a counter-cartel campaign process that puts total systemic friction across this network,” he told members of the Senate Armed Services Committee. “I believe these kinetic [boat] strikes are just one small part of that.”

Correction: April 21, 2026, 3:10 p.m. ET
An earlier version of this article misstated how many Mexican cartels the State Department designated as foreign terrorist organizations; it was six, not eight.

The post U.S. Personnel Who Died in Mexico Were Working for the CIA, Sources Say appeared first on The Intercept.

For the first time in history, the Lebanese ambassador to the United States, Nada Moawad, and Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Yechiel Leiter, sat in the same room at the State Department in Washington, D.C., facing one another as two states ostensibly on equal ground, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio and other officials presiding over the talks. Lebanese and Israeli officials had been in the same room before, having held indirect negotiations in 2022 and direct talks last in 1993, but this was the first time that Israel and Lebanon’s flags were hung next to one another — a high-level public meeting of a kind never before attempted.

A 10-day ceasefire inside Lebanon was finally implemented on Friday, one previously agreed to during the Iran ceasefire talks in Pakistan and then almost instantaneously undermined by Israel. The United States, and the Israeli state to a certain extent, have portrayed this ceasefire as the result of this breakthrough, a direct negotiation with an enemy nation that, as Netanyahu said on Thursday, could lead to the “opportunity to forge a historic peace agreement” with Lebanon. 

Many Lebanese have been able to return to their home villages under the ceasefire, but this was also the case in 2024, which then was followed by the implementation of an Israeli military buffer zone that left much of the south even more in ruins than from the war itself. The danger of these negotiations lies not in the immediate short term, as the residents of Beirut’s southern suburbs and the south experience a reprieve from intensive bombardment, but in the long term, beyond the 10 days.

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Israel has now reaped the fruits of unilaterally declaring Lebanon outside of the Iranian ceasefire, against its previous agreements, and has now made permanently ending the war, as Iran has desired, a much more difficult prospect. Such a long-term cessation is now reliant on the ability of the Lebanese government to do what America and Israel demands, dismantling Hezbollah by any means necessary even if it means speeding headfirst into a civil war.

While Lebanese President Joseph Aoun hailed the ceasefire as evidence Lebanon is “no longer a card in anyone’s pocket,” Hezbollah members of Parliament, as well as Iranian officials, have told a different story. Even if Hezbollah “will cautiously adhere to the ceasefire,” the deal did not come about from these talks but instead from Iranian pressure to reach a ceasefire as a precondition to another round of negotiations between Tehran and Washington, now set for Monday, albeit looking increasingly fraught. Iranian parliamentary speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf announced after the ceasefire that it was the result of the “resistance and steadfast struggle of the great Hezbollah and the unity of the Axis of Resistance.” Hezbollah MP Ibrahim Moussawi was more blunt, telling Drop Site News that this was the “same ceasefire agreement” reached in Islamabad days ago, only now stamped with Israel’s belated co-sign.

While Hezbollah had significant leverage to force a ceasefire on its behalf — with Iran’s threats to return to war with missiles already reportedly on the launchpad if Lebanon was not included in the deal — it is unclear what leverage the Lebanese government had to negotiate a ceasefire on its own. Throughout the previous ceasefire and into this war, Israel argued Lebanon’s government was incapable of disarming Hezbollah, with Israeli government-aligned newspapers deriding the state’s inability to even expel the Iranian ambassador after Lebanon’s foreign minister ordered him out in March. Israel’s Foreign Ministry routinely criticized the Lebanese government for being “all talk and no action” on disarming Hezbollah, and Israel’s Defense Minister Israel Katz threatened that the Lebanese state itself would pay a “very heavy price” by way of Israel destroying “Lebanese national infrastructure” and the “loss of territory” to Israeli occupation.

After Israel’s military launched “Operation Eternal Darkness” on April 8, killing more than 300 Lebanese civilians and bringing war to places in Beirut that had not been attacked since the 1980s, Lebanon’s Prime Minister Nawaf Salam came out and insisted that “no one but the Lebanese state can negotiate on behalf of Lebanon.” Aoun further said Lebanon could not accept negotiations on its behalf by anyone else, and that this was a “sovereign matter” above all else, even amid ongoing Iranian military pressure to bring Lebanon into the ceasefire. Israel, whose diplomats refused to speak with the Lebanese government in early March on the basis that Lebanon was not “credible,” and whose U.N. ambassador said “dialogue with the Lebanese government cannot stop the fire from Lebanese territory,” suddenly decided to focus all its efforts on arranging unprecedented negotiations.

Lebanon’s ambassador claimed after talks concluded that she had raised the ceasefire with the other representatives (Axios confirmed the prospect was brought up “informally”), but neither the Israeli nor the American officials stated the talks were to achieve a ceasefire. The prospect was in fact “peace,” a long-term settlement between the two nations, or as Leiter, Israel’s ambassador, put it, to affirm “we are on the same side, we and the Lebanese” and that Lebanon would “no longer be occupied by Hezbollah.”

Leiter has made the issue of peace with Lebanon one of his top priorities since being appointed in early 2025, saying in an interview with PragerU last May that he was “upbeat” about Lebanon, as well as Syria, potentially joining the Abraham Accords, perhaps even before Saudi Arabia. He also told reporters this week that he had spoken with Lebanese officials about a future in which one could cross the border in a “swimsuit to vacation on the beaches of both countries.” Beyond these liberal platitudes, Leiter himself has had a significant past — one deeply intertwined with Israeli expansionist politics that he now strenuously denies applies to Lebanon.

The first West Bank settler to be selected as ambassador to the United States, Leiter was an early member of the Jewish Defense League, an organization the FBI later described as a right-wing terrorist group and led by Rabbi Meir Kahane, whose members committed mass shootings of Palestinians, plotted to bomb American mosques, and attempted assassinations of U.S. politicians. Leiter was then a member of Kach, Kahane’s political party, which was later banned as a terrorist organization inside Israel itself. During this period, Kahane advocated for a wide-scale deportation of Arabs from Israeli-occupied areas as well as from Israel itself, and labeled southern Lebanon as part of Israel’s “minimal” borders. Leiter left the party in the 1980s, claiming Kahanism came from “a weakness of character,” but made these criticisms in his capacity as a leader of the Hebron settlement movement in the occupied West Bank, attempting to paint those who advocated peace with the Palestinians as just as misguided. 

As ambassador to the United States, Leiter told the Lebanese news outlet This is Beirut in late 2025 that Israel and Lebanon “have a history,” recalled the disastrous economic conditions in Israeli-occupation southern Lebanon with a smile, and said southern Lebanese used to line up in early in the morning at the border every day to seek economic opportunities in northern Israel. “We’d be more than happy to see that again,” Leiter said.

While the Israeli government has constantly demanded the Lebanese Army do more to disarm Hezbollah and impose Lebanese sovereignty over the country’s south, Leiter has made no indications that Israel would accept any military build-up, even by Lebanon, at the border with Israel, saying in a visit to occupied Syrian territory last November alongside Netanyahu and Katz that Israel could no longer tolerate “foreign armies” on its border. Leiter has also warned certain other Lebanese allies, such as France, should stay “far away” from these negotiations, and said, “they are not a positive influence, particularly not in Lebanon.” France had previously advocated for direct talks between the Lebanese government and Israel but had also condemned Operation Eternal Darkness and called for the Iranian ceasefire to apply to Lebanon as well.

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While the Israeli negotiating team has been explicit that the talks were intended to get the Lebanese government to ally with their country against Hezbollah, there was another goal at work, one not reflected by the photo ops: to legitimize the indefinite occupation and depopulation of southern Lebanon. 

In an interview on Israeli TV about Israel engaging in negotiations with Lebanon, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich asserted that “no one will disarm Hezbollah for us” and said a peace agreement between the two countries would serve to “greatly legitimize” Israel’s position. He also said he would push for the Israel Defense Forces to remain up until the Litani River, which Smotrich last month described as the location where Israel’s “new border” must be. 

Israel’s Channel 14, which is considered close to the right-wing Israeli government, has also reported that Israeli diplomats had been promoting a “Yellow Line” plan of their own for Lebanon modeled on Gaza’s as part of a long-term settlement. Under such a plan, Israel would dismantle “Hezbollah infrastructure” up to the Litani, only giving the Lebanese Army control after they had completed destroying it in one particular area, and with no timetable to hand back control to the Lebanese Army the area behind the Yellow Line, 7–8 kilometers from the area. Israel’s Defense Ministry has justified the complete razing of villages in southern Lebanon by saying that the homes themselves count as Hezbollah infrastructure.

Netanyahu has since affirmed the existence of a “Yellow Line” in Lebanon post-ceasefire, and in the ceasefire text, there is also no mention of any withdrawal for Israeli troops — only that the ceasefire’s extension relies on “Lebanon effectively demonstrat[ing] its ability to assert its sovereignty.” Israel, for its part, “shall preserve its right to take all necessary measures in self-defense, at any time, against planned, imminent, or ongoing attacks” and that such actions would not violate the agreement.

The groundwork is being rapidly laid for further and further demands on the Lebanese state — more disagreements, more violations — and potentially binding the future of the Lebanese state with an Israeli one that seeks to impose the depopulation of wide swathes of its territory, and considers its Shia population as its enemy. In response to criticism that he was being deceived by the Lebanese government, Smotrich replied that amid peace negotiations, Israel was still acting to annihilate towns and cities where tens of thousands lived: “We are erasing Khiam, and we are erasing Bint Jbeil.” Amid all of this outpouring of peace, those supposedly advocating for it are in the same government as those advocating Lebanon’s destruction.

The post How the Lebanon Ceasefire Could Make It Harder to End the War on Iran 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.

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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.

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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.

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“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.

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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.

In a historic Senate vote on Wednesday, all but seven members of the Democratic caucus voted for at least one of two resolutions to block the sale of bombs and bulldozers to Israel’s military. Other prominent Democrats and potential 2028 presidential candidates, including Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y.; Ro Khanna, D-Calif.; and former Obama aide Rahm Emanuel have recently said the U.S. should halt all military aid to Israel for offensive and so-called defensive weapons. 

The idea of steering public funding to those responsible for the genocide in Gaza has plummeted in popularity, with polls consistently show a majority of Americans now oppose sending weapons to Israel. As Americans struggle with affordability amid the joint U.S.–Israel war on Iran, skepticism about military aid for Israel has only grown.

Yet amid this shift, a quieter debate is stirring in the American left over how far Democrats should go in blocking weapons to Israel. 

For anti-Zionist organizers, the goal has long been a total arms embargo. That wouldn’t just bring to an end U.S. public spending to support Israel’s military, but would also halt the commercial sale of weapons from U.S. companies to Israel’s government. Advocates for the embargo, which includes Reps. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich.; Summer Lee, D-Pa.; and Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., view the policy as the most effective means in halting Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and its human rights abuses in the West Bank, Lebanon, and Iran. Doing so, they say, would bring the U.S. into compliance with its own laws governing weapons transfers and human rights.

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Meanwhile, pro-Israel Democrats are beginning to speak out about holding Israel accountable for its abuses, but seek narrower arms restrictions that would still allow commercial weapons sales as a means to maintain Israel’s friendly relationship with the U.S. 

On Monday, J Street, an influential liberal Zionist lobbying group, released a memo outlining a significant shift in policy. Echoing growing demands to end Israel’s “blank check support from the United States,” J Street is urging legislators to instead make the Israeli government pay for U.S. weapons using its own funds. 

It’s a major departure for the self-described “pro-Israel, pro-peace” group, which had previously opposed a ceasefire in Gaza and backed Israel’s aggression in Gaza in the early months of the genocide. Since November 2024, J Street has supported a series of Senate resolutions introduced by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. meant to block weapons transfers, including Wednesday’s joint resolutions of disapproval. But those measures focused on halting only the transfer of offensive weapons to Israel, such as bombs and firearms. J Street’s new policy memo calls for an end to government spending on both offensive and so-called defensive weapons, or missile interceptor systems, which power Israel’s Iron Dome. It’s a position that until recent months even Ocasio-Cortez and Khanna had not embraced.

Citing existing U.S. law, J Street’s memo calls for an end to providing Israel $3.3 billion in State Department funds to purchase U.S. weapons, along with $500 million earmarked within the Department of Defense for anti-missile systems.

“What we want to be doing is laying the groundwork for the next president to have the political backing to do the right thing to implement the right policies when they come into office in 2029,” Hannah Morris, vice president of government affairs for J Street, told The Intercept.

J Street’s position runs short of a complete arms embargo in that it would still allow Israel to purchase interceptor weaponry from U.S. companies. The group said the exception for anti-missile systems is meant to protect civilians in Israel. Critics say Israel’s defense systems enable the country to carry out its expanding wars in the Middle East without consequence. In addition, the new J Street memo calls for the U.S. to maintain “a strong security partnership with Israel,” including the sharing of intelligence and collaborating on researching and developing new military equipment when mutually beneficial to American interests. “They cannot become a backdoor for continued US subsidies to Israeli defense,” J Street wrote in its memo. 

J Street acknowledged its new position is partly intended to address the growing antipathy toward Israel among Americans. A Pew Research Center poll from earlier this month showed that a record high 60 percent of American adults have an unfavorable view of Israel, including 80 percent of all Democrats aged 18 and older and more than half of all younger Republicans. 

“Part of having this policy is to remove some of the discomfort that some of the American population has with the exceptionality of the relationship” between the U.S. and Israel, Morris said. “And that can lower the temperature or lack of sympathy for the Israelis versus Palestinians.” 

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Advocates for a total arms embargo view J Street’s evolution as a sign of mounting pressure amid the swing in American public opinion. “That did not just happen out of the blue,” said Beth Miller, policy director for Jewish Voice for Peace Action.“It’s the result of movement organizing for years and years.”

Some arms embargo supporters questioned the timing of J Street’s new position and whether it will hinder efforts to halt Israel’s expansionist wars. Yousef Munayyer, a longtime advocate of a total arms embargo on Israel, wondered whether the J Street memo could offer political cover for certain Democrats seeking to thread the needle by taking a stance against Israel’s abuses without suffering blowback from pro-Israel constituents.

Instead, Munayyer, who heads the Palestine/Israel Program at Arab Center Washington D.C., said now is not the moment to give up ground. “There has never been a more defensible moment for Democrats to take such a position on an arms embargo, and it seems completely unnecessary for this hyper-calibrated messaging,” he said, referring to J Street’s policy position. “Maybe in a couple of districts and a couple of states, it may be useful, but in the broader sense the public has moved on, especially in the Democratic base.”

Disagreement between J Street and Palestinian rights organizers is not new in Washington. Some advocates for Palestine continue to condemn the group for opposing a ceasefire resolution in 2023, which opponents say helped pave the way for Israel’s genocide. Even before Israel’s war on Gaza, the group has been criticized for not taking strong enough positions on blocking weapons to Israel, including a bill in 2021 that sought to prohibit Israel from using U.S. aid to demolish Palestinian homes and annex Palestinian land in the West Bank. While J Street endorsed the bill, the group drew criticism from Palestinian rights groups who claim it didn’t do enough to drum up support with rank-and-file Democratic members. 

Morris said arms embargo advocates who are critical of J Street’s new policy memo “want to go from zero to one hundred in a way that I think is not only unrealistic but untenable.” She also questioned whether most Americans knew the definition of an arms embargo and suggested that, if given the full picture, fewer would support the premise.

Under the Foreign Assistance Act, the U.S. government is barred from sending weapons to any country that engages in “a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights” or a country that blocks or restricts humanitarian aid. Another provision of the Foreign Assistance Act known as the Leahy law, along with provisions within the separate Arms Export Control Act, prevents military aid to specific units of any foreign security force that is found to violate human rights law. The U.S is also a signatory to the Geneva Conventions, international law meant to prohibit war crimes, crimes against humanity, including genocide. The conventions also have legal bearing on the transfer of weapons. 

Such laws make no distinction between weapons sales made with U.S. government support or sales through the commercial market. If Israel were to buy weapons directly from U.S. companies, Congress would still receive a notification and could vote to disapprove a sale.

When introducing his series of resolutions to block some arms sales to Israel, Sanders evoked both the Foreign Assistance and the Arms Export Control acts. The laws are also the legal basis for the Block the Bombs Act in the House, which has drawn support from a range of elected members — including ones backed by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee — and has become a litmus test for candidates taking a position on Israel and Palestine in the midterm elections. 

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At any point, either the president, through an executive order, or Congress, via legislation, can use these laws to enact some form of conditions on Israeli aid, whether halting all military support or a total arms embargo. 

Both a total arms embargo and the J Street model would bring to an end State Department spending ($3.3 billion annually), known as Foreign Military Financing, as well as the phasing out of Pentagon spending for Israel. Funds earmarked for Israel in the Pentagon’s budget are not classified under the Foreign Assistance and Arms Export Control laws. Instead, Congress must draft and pass a defense budget that excludes carveouts for Israel, or draft legislation that specifically targets Pentagon spending on Israel, most of which currently funds things like Israel’s Iron Dome.

Then-Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green, R-Ga., attempted to pass an amendment to a Pentagon spending bill in July 2025 that would have nixed the $500 million set aside for Israel defense spending, but it drew only six votes. Ocasio-Cortez was absent from the vote, which she said was to maintain Iron Dome funding.

While such cuts would be a blow to Israel’s ability to wage war, Israel still boasts its own major annual military budget of more than $45 billion. Israel also is home to a domestic weapons industry that sells to the Israeli government. Earlier this year, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he would want to “taper off the military” from the U.S. within the next decade. “We’ve come of age and we’ve developed incredible capacities,” he said. But both J Street and advocates for an arms embargo agree that banning subsidized weapons deals with Israel would still have a tremendous impact.

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Stephen Semler, who worked on Brown University’s Cost of War project that tracked U.S. military spending on Israel during its genocide, said halting access to American munitions stockpiles and U.S. weaponry would greatly diminish Israel’s ability to wage war at the rate it has in recent months in Iran and southern Lebanon. “If they’re forced to buy their own arms, then they’re going to have problems sustaining what they’re doing,” Semler said. 

In the first month of the U.S.–Israel war on Iran, the Israeli military said it carried out more than 10,000 separate strikes. Before the recent ceasefire, joint U.S. and Israeli strikes killed more than 2,000 people in Iran. Since early March, Israel has killed at least 2,100 people in Lebanon, including women, children, paramedics and journalists. The military has also leveled entire villages in the country’s south, similar to destruction seen in Gaza. Evidence of Israel’s human rights abuses are continuing to pile in both wars. 

“If you can make perpetual war and not have to pay for it, that becomes a much more attractive option,” Munayyer said. “But suddenly when you have to directly carry the costs, now you have to start thinking, ‘Do I want to be at war with all of my neighbors all the time, forever?’”

The post Democrats Are Split Over What It Means to Block Israel Weapons Deals 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.

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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.”

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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.

President Donald Trump announced on Thursday that a temporary ceasefire agreement had been reached between Israel and Lebanon. The 10-day ceasefire, set to begin at 5 p.m. ET, will reportedly see a pause to Israel’s relentless assault on southern Lebanon, which has displaced over 1.2 million people and killed at least 2,000 since early March.

Any news of reduced annihilation by Israeli and U.S. forces in the region is, of course, to be welcomed. Just a week ago, Trump was threatening to wipe out the whole civilization of Iran. In Lebanon, Israel has targeted civilian infrastructure like hospitals and demolished villages and homes with ferocity.

In the Israeli context, however, the very meaning of “ceasefire” has been irreparably degraded. This is the lesson of Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. Under the conditions of an alleged ceasefire in Gaza since October, Israel has killed over 765 Palestinians in the Strip and injured over 2,000 — while maintaining a ground occupation of at least half the territory.

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Those concerned about Israeli occupation and ethnic cleansing in Lebanon, too, have little reason to believe a ceasefire will see an end to Israel’s expansionist violence.

None of this is a secret. “Israel has no plans to withdraw its military from southern Lebanon during the announced 10 day ceasefire,” an Israeli security official confirmed to Reuters.

Israeli officials frame unambiguous expansion into Lebanon’s territory as the creation of a security “buffer zone.” The plan to maintain control of southern Lebanon is an open one, with a long history, imbued with renewed fervor by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s extremist government.

Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz has said that, even after the current war ends, Israel intends to maintain control over the territory up to the Litani River in southern Lebanon, and that all villages near Israel’s ever-moving border would be destroyed.

“[T]he policy of occupying and annexing south Lebanon up to the Litani River has long held influence among parts of the Israeli government,” wrote Mireille Rebeiz, chair of Middle East Studies at Dickinson College.  She noted that it “dates back to influential Zionist leaders — secular and religious alike — before Israeli independence in 1948.”

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Israel has invaded Lebanon seven times in the last half century. Between 1978 and 2000, Israel maintained an 18-year occupation of southern Lebanon — the occupation Hezbollah was formed to fight.

It’s worth stressing, too, that while Israel and the U.S. describe the war as one against Hezbollah, it is being waged against the Lebanese people. Much like it is an unacceptable euphemism to describe Israel’s genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians as a war with Hamas.

Lebanese journalist Lylla Younes told “Democracy Now!” that in southern Lebanon, as in Gaza, Israel is carrying out a “scorched-earth campaign,” destroying whole villages, mosques, and cultural sites. Her family’s village in the southern border region was bombed earlier this week.

“What the world should know is that we will return to these villages, and when we do, we’ll return to rubble, and it will be an immense process of rebuilding,” she said. That is, if return is possible at all.

Hezbollah, for its part, will not be fighting through the ceasefire, the group’s representatives had said.

“We will be respecting the ceasefire and we will deal with it cautiously,” said Ibrahim Moussawi, a member of the Lebanese Parliament and a Hezbollah spokesperson. He added that “it should hopefully be a beginning of a course of the Israeli withdrawal from our occupied territories.”

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Lebanon’s Prime Minister Nawaf Salam wrote on X on Thursday that he has “full hope” that the Lebanese civilians displaced from the south will be able to return to their homes.

It is an optimism at direct odds with Israel’s open commitment to annexation — and it is a hollow hope in the face of what we’re seeing in Gaza.

“Israeli forces continue their violent attacks and expand their military control of the Strip,” noted Médecins Sans Frontières in a report last week. “Living conditions of Palestinians remain dire, while Israel continues to deliberately obstruct aid, which is translating into entirely preventable deaths.” The humanitarian medical aid group put it plainly: “This is not a ceasefire.”

This cannot be what “ceasefire” gets to mean.

The post Israel Will Keep Occupying Lebanon Despite Ceasefire appeared first on The Intercept.

On April 11, the U.S. conducted attacks on two boats in the Pacific Ocean, killing two people in the first strike and leaving one shipwrecked. The search for that survivor has been abandoned and that person is presumed dead. Three people were killed in the second strike that day. These attacks were followed by another strike in the Eastern Pacific on April 13 that killed two more people.

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As part of Operation Southern Spear, the U.S. military has now destroyed 51 vessels and killed 171 civilians. The Trump administration claims its victims are members of at least one of 24 or more cartels and criminal gangs with whom it claims to be at war but refuses to name.

The boat strikes recently moved to land as so-called “bilateral kinetic actions” along the Colombia–Ecuador border. “The joint effort, named ‘Operation Total Extermination,’ is the start of a military offensive by Ecuador against transnational criminal organizations with the support of the U.S.,” Joseph Humire, the acting assistant secretary of war for homeland defense and Americas security affairs, announced last month.

“There’s a danger that these lawless killings just become background noise,” Brian Finucane, a former State Department lawyer who is a specialist in counterterrorism issues and the laws of war, told The Intercept in the wake of the 50th boat strike. “The U.S. Congress remains the institution best situated to bring these to halt — if not now, then at least after the midterms. And members of Congress and 2028 hopefuls should be vowing accountability for those who participated in unlawful killings.”

Finucane and other experts in the laws of war, as well as members of Congress, from both parties, say the strikes are illegal, extrajudicial killings because the military is not permitted to deliberately target civilians — even suspected criminals — who do not pose an imminent threat of violence. The summary executions are a significant departure from standard practice in the long-running U.S. war on drugs, in which law enforcement agencies detained suspected drug smugglers and brought them to trial on criminal charges.

After blowing up one of the boats on Saturday, U.S. Southern Command sent a message to the Coast Guard alerting them to “a person in distress in the Pacific Ocean,” Coast Guard spokesperson Kenneth Wiese told The Intercept.

The Coast Guard “immediately commenced search efforts,” calling on ships in the area to divert to search for the survivor of the U.S. attack. The next day, a French-flagged cargo ship, MV Marius, diverted to the scene but “completed its search with negative results and departed the area due to operational and fuel constraints,” according to the Coast Guard. On Monday, a U.S.-flagged research vessel, RV Sikuliaq, “completed two search patterns provided by the Coast Guard with negative results.” The same day, at 10:43 Pacific time, the Coast Guard suspended its efforts after having found “no signs of survivors or debris.”

Most boat strike survivors have been purposefully killed or left to drown by the United States. Two survivors, for example, clung to the wreckage of a vessel attacked on September 2, 2025, for roughly 45 minutes. Adm. Frank Bradley — then the head of Joint Special Operations Command — sought guidance from his top legal adviser, Col. Cara Hamaguchi, the staff judge advocate at the secretive JSOC. He then ordered a follow-up attack, first reported by The Intercept in September, that killed the shipwrecked men.

Search efforts for survivors have seldom resulted in rescues. After a U.S boat strike on December 30, a Coast Guard plane did not head toward the site of the attack for almost two days, reporting from Airwars and The Intercept revealed. A total of 11 civilians died following that attack— including eight who jumped overboard.

The Coast Guard atypically rescued the survivor of a March 19 attack that killed two civilians. The Costa Rican press recently identified the deceased as Ecuadoran citizens Pedro Ramón Holguín, 40, and Carlos Manuel Rodríguez Solórzano, 34. The injured man was identified as José David Torres Hurtado, 21, a Colombian national. He reportedly remains hospitalized in the burn unit at San Juan de Dios Hospital, “where, according to medical reports, his condition is critical but stable,” said Costa Rican authorities.

The Intercept reported on Monday that the U.S. is waging a pressure campaign against the leading pan-American human rights watchdog to squash a potential investigation into the illegal boat strike campaign. After a recent meeting of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the State Department pushed the organization to shift its focus to other issues instead of the U.S. campaign of extrajudicial killings.

The post The U.S. Is Still Routinely Killing Civilians in Boats appeared first on The Intercept.

That’s because the Trump administration fired hundreds of key State Department personnel with the skills needed to safeguard U.S. citizens abroad and usher them from harm’s way, lawmakers say. These foreign service officers — who lost their jobs amid Elon Musk’s purge of the federal workforce — contacted members of Congress last month with dire warnings about the department’s inability to manage the ongoing crisis.

“The Department is actively preventing experienced, cleared, available officers from helping American citizens in crisis,” a group of nearly 250 mostly mid-career and senior State Department foreign service officers wrote in a letter sent to lawmakers that was shared exclusively with The Intercept. “The crisis now unfolding in the Middle East is, in part, a foreseeable consequence of this and other short-sighted decisions taken by this administration to undermine the federal bureaucracy by eliminating expertise and politicizing our apolitical workforce.”

They added: “The expertise required to manage the current crisis has been systematically removed.”

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The situation in the Middle East remains dire, even as a fragile ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran has taken hold following a genocidal threat by President Donald Trump. After Trump teased that he was willing to wipe out Iran’s “whole civilization” earlier this week, the State Department advised American citizens to reconsider travel across the Middle East due to serious risks to safety and security. Days earlier, the department had urged “citizens to depart Lebanon while commercial flight options remain available” and to flee Iraq via “overland routes” due to fears of “widespread attacks against U.S. citizens.” 

The FSOs responsible for the letter to lawmakers are among more than 1,300 State Department personnel fired by the Trump administration as part of a purge by Musk’s now-disgraced Department of Government Efficiency last July. Under the rules governing federal employment, they were not immediately terminated but issued reduction-in-force, or RIF, notices, which is the legally prescribed federal procedure for laying off career civil servants.

The Bureau of Consular Affairs, whose top priority is to “protect the lives and serve the interests of American citizens” around the world, was especially hard hit, losing 102 personnel — including the entire rapid-response consular officer team. These FSOs, all with Top Secret clearances and who are still being paid, have indicated their willingness to return to service, and include many with experience in the Middle East, crisis management, evacuation operations, or so-called “active conflict/ordered departure environments,” according to the letter.

President Donald Trump began his war of choice with Iran on February 28, stating its “objective is to defend the American people.” But it wasn’t until March 2 that the State Department put out an alert for U.S. citizens to “DEPART NOW” from Bahrain, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen “due to serious safety risks.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced on March 3 that stranded Americans should call a State Department hotline for assistance. Those that did were told they were on their own. “Please do not rely on the U.S. government for assisted departure or evacuation. At this time, there are currently no United States evacuation points,” an automated message stated.

The entire Massachusetts congressional delegation, led by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., called out the “failures of the Trump administration and State Department to adequately prepare for the threats to American citizens living in the Middle East” in a March 5 letter and asked Rubio to provide answers to detailed questions about the evacuation failures. A month later, the State Department has yet to reply.

“Secretary Rubio has no answers for the failures on his watch, but these brave public servants paint the clearest picture yet of the damage the Trump administration has wreaked,” Warren told The Intercept. “Rubio recklessly purging hundreds of State Department experts has threatened our national security and put U.S. citizens in danger in the Middle East.”

The State Department did not provide answers to detailed questions from The Intercept about the fired FSOs. Instead, a spokesperson passed along anodyne talking points. “The RIFs did not have any negative impact on our ability to respond to the developments in the Middle East, our ability to plan, or our ability to execute in service to Americans,” she wrote in an email. “There were no RIFs that affected our overseas operations that are working in the field to assist Americans.”

As U.S. citizens scrambled to flee the Middle East last month, nearly 20,000 flights to and from the region were canceled and major travel hubs, including the world’s busiest international airport in Dubai, were shut down for days. Americans found themselves stranded in countries that were quickly engulfed in America’s war, like a family from North Carolina left cowering in a bomb shelter in Jerusalem as missiles exploded outside, and a Philadelphia native living in the United Arab Emirates who described the State Department’s evacuation notices as “absolutely cavalier.”

“I saw in the air missiles and lights and all that and everyone got on their knees and started praying,” Evelyn Mushi, who was transiting through the airport in Abu Dhabi with her 82-year-old mother, told NPR. “I’m just very shocked and upset that I see other nations getting their citizens out and we’re just stranded here.” Stuck in a hotel in Doha, Qatar, Odies Turner, a private chef from South Carolina, told ABC News: “I really don’t know what to do. I’ve reached out to the embassy, consulate and airlines. There’s no information on when I will get back home. It’s a mess.”

The Trump administration claims that it “has no higher priority than the safety and security of Americans worldwide.” But while Gen. Dan Caine, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that Operation Epic Fury was the “culmination of months, and in some cases, years, of deliberate planning,” Trump said the administration had no evacuation plans for Americans abroad because “it all happened very quickly.”

With Americans stranded and endangered, the State Department sat on its hands, the FSOs allege. On March 5, a former member of the Bureau of Consular Affairs’ Rapid Response team with significant crisis management experience volunteered their services but say they were rebuffed. “At this time, there are no opportunities for officers who were subject to the July 2025 RIF to volunteer for the Middle East Consular Task Force,” the FSO was told by the State Department, according to the letter.

The State Department did not reply to repeated questions about why the FSO’s offer was rejected.

Last month, Foreign Policy reported on a letter from John Dinkelman, president of the American Foreign Service Association, to Michael Rigas, State Department deputy secretary for management and resources, in which he noted that many of those fired in July 2025 had offered to assist in the Middle East evacuation effort.

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Among the fired FSOs are officers who managed emergency evacuations from Ukraine in 2022; evacuation from Afghanistan — including an officer who led operations responsible for relocating 52,000 Afghans across multiple countries in 2025 and another who processed 8,000 evacuees in under 30 days at a remote site; evacuations from the Middle East during the Arab Spring; the tumult of the Covid-19 pandemic, including an officer who adjudicated tens of thousands of visas from a single overseas post; the 2006 Lebanon evacuation, which was the largest U.S. noncombatant evacuation operation since World War II; and those that managed posts during ordered departures from Bahrain, Ethiopia, and Iraq, among other relevant experience, according to the letter.

One officer who shared their story on the condition of anonymity noted they joined the Foreign Service in the late 2000s, serving in South Asia and the Middle East, among other posts. A speaker of Urdu, Pashto, and Arabic, this FSO was one of those who played a major role in the Afghanistan evacuation, helping to process more than 34,000 Afghans, including 900 American citizens, whose identities and case statuses, such as those who worked with the U.S. military and had special immigrant visas, needed to be verified. “I loved my work and gave it my all,” said the officer. “I was on sick leave when I received an email that I was laid off. Shock can’t describe how I felt.” Others offered similar resumes and disbelief at the dismantling of the Foreign Service by the Trump administration.

“Collectively, members of our group are prepared to staff multiple crisis task force shifts. We have a deep bench of Middle East experts, consular experience, crisis expertise, crisis communications background, and relevant language skills to immediately deploy to help,” wrote the fired FSOs. “The U.S. Government is not trimming fat. It amputated capability, and Americans are now paying the price.”

The July 11, 2025 reduction in force terminated 1,346 State Department employees, including 276 Foreign Service Officers — some of whom were later reinstated to correct purported firing “errors” — as well as 1,070 civil service employees. The Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations alone lost 62 personnel, including a senior stabilization adviser embedded with the military who supported evacuation planning.

The department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs also lost close to 80 employees between August and December 2025, and the position of the assistant secretary in charge of Near Eastern Affairs remains vacant. The administration’s most recent budget proposed a 40 percent cut to the bureau, although Congress eventually settled on a less dramatic reduction.

The cuts are symptomatic of the hollowing out of the State Department, especially in the Middle East. As of March, the United States had no confirmed ambassadors in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Egypt, Kuwait, Algeria, Libya, or Iraq. Career ambassadors to Qatar, Kuwait, Egypt, and Algeria were also dismissed without replacement. The State Department did not respond to a request to confirm that all those positions remain open, nor did the press office address how the lack of leadership in so many key countries has affected diplomatic efforts in the Middle East.

The post DOGE Cuts Left U.S. Unable to Help Americans Stranded in Iran War Zone appeared first on The Intercept.

“I want to occupy,” he told The Intercept. “Yes, occupy, the word nobody likes. I want to occupy southern Lebanon. Move all the Arabs from there, up to the Litani River.”

We’re sitting in the command and control center in Moshav Netu’a, a village so close to the U.N.-brokered “Blue Line” separating Israel and Lebanon that one can see the physical barrier from the windows of many homes. Here, amid a temporary pause in fighting between the U.S.–Israeli alliance and Iran, there’s no sense of peace.

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Under muddied terms for the two-week ceasefire with Iran, Israel has kept fighting Hezbollah in Lebanon, launching an all-out war on the country’s armed elements and civilians alike. The Israeli military bombed villages and ordered more than 1 million Lebanese civilians to evacuate from the south, territory that is often viewed as Hezbollah’s stronghold due to its significant Shia Muslim population and weapons caches. Israel blew up bridges linking the north and the south of Lebanon. In defiance of previous ceasefire conditions set in November 2024, Hezbollah forces that were supposed to retreat north have remained in the south, and Israeli forces continued to hold five “strategic” hilltops in the north, accumulating more than 10,000 total ceasefire violations.

For the residents of Netu’a, Hezbollah is a problem to be solved, and one to fix with military power.

“The Arabs’ only motivation to stop fighting is if you take their land,” Adom said. “You kill them, it doesn’t matter. You hurt them, it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. Only taking territories. This is the only thing that matters to them.”

At least seven Netu’a residents told The Intercept that they see the eviction of Lebanese civilians as the only sure way to prevent their own displacement. After October 7, 2023, fearing a follow-on attack by Hezbollah, the Israeli government evacuated kibbutzim and other settlements near its border with Lebanon, including Netu’a, scattering families in hotels across the country.

The evacuation was “like a piece of gum being pulled apart,” said Oranit Manasseh, a mother of four who lives in Shtula, another kibbutz on Israel’s border with Lebanon. “That is what happened to our community, day after day that we were living in hotels away from the kibbutz.”

Manasseh and her children have since been able to return to their home, which was not damaged during the evacuation. When she spoke to The Intercept, the family was staying at a villa in Shtula that would normally host tourists for holidays like Passover but has been sitting largely empty since October 8, 2023, with few Israelis wishing to visit the north for a vacation with incoming missile fire.

Manasseh’s hope, she told The Intercept, is that the Israeli military “depopulate the south, get rid of Hezbollah, and keep the terrorists out.”

Israel’s actions suggest it’s headed in that direction. On Wednesday, in the span of 10 minutes, Israel struck Lebanon more than 100 times, killing at least 300 people. This was the deadliest single incident since the end of Lebanon’s civil war in 1990. According to reporting from the Financial Times and confirmed by the Lebanese Ministry of Public Health, more than 100 women, children, and elderly were killed in the strikes, including two journalists and four Lebanese army soldiers.

Part of the justification for Israel’s war on Hezbollah is the view that it is the only way to establish a security buffer to protect communities in the north situated on Israel’s border with Lebanon.

Much like October 7th catalyzed Israeli society’s calls for the war on Gaza — in which Israel killed, according to conservative estimates, 70,000 Palestinians and over 700 more since the oft-violated ceasefire went into effect last year — there are calls to reduce southern Lebanon to rubble.

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They either “crush Hezbollah so that the Lebanese government can disarm, and keep the south free of terrorists,” said another member of Netu’a’s security patrol, or they will have to evacuate again in the future, and it will rip their communities apart.

Israel’s border communities are often referred to as the “periphery.” Looking out from Netu’a, one can see a string of Israeli military outposts situated on the Blue Line, which the U.N. established in 2000, erecting a border wall like the one that cordons off the West Bank. Far from the metropolitan centers of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, these communities occupy a particular place in Israeli politics, and according to residents who spoke with The Intercept in these communities, there is a consensus that they feel forgotten in the wake of October 7.

“I think the government doesn’t do enough for this area. Israel is like a golden cage,” Manasseh said. “You love it, but we are not safe here anymore.”

These “periphery” residents are working to leverage their political influence to end the “Hezbollah problem,” partly by staying in their communities during this war instead of evacuating, forcing the Israeli military to either protect them or admit they can’t.

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This is also part of what is driving the Israeli military to establish a “security zone” south of the Litani, in the words of National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, to “protect” the communities in the north and spare them from another round of evacuation. Israel’s Home Front Command, which is responsible for setting civilian protection guidelines during wartime, announced that because of its strikes on Lebanon, the government would extend the time for Israeli civilians to enter shelters after an alert from zero seconds to 15, due to a partial withdrawal of Hezbollah forces north.

“We all understand that if they reach our borders, it won’t stop there,” said Hila Kronos, who just finished a round of reserve duty in the Israeli military and has been living in Adamit, another Israeli border community, for 20 years. “Maybe not now, but in five or ten years, they could decide everything is calm and use that opportunity to attack Israel.”

Do it now and once and for all is the consensus in these kibbutzim, whose residents insist that they will be staying. “There will be no more evacuations,” another resident told The Intercept.

The desire to establish a security buffer is driving not only Israel’s aerial bombardment campaign, which has claimed the lives of at least 1,800 Lebanese people since the start of the war, but also what used to be a fringe movement that has grown more mainstream in the past two years: the push, as in Gaza, to settle the south of Lebanon.

To do so would require a military commitment that even the most hawkish of Israeli military figures acknowledge Israel does not have. They are facing a manpower crisis and are short more than 15,000 soldiers.

The fringe Uri Tzafon movement, Hebrew for “North Awaken,” which advocates for the Jewish settlement of southern Lebanon up to the Litani River, has put their words into action. In February, members of Uri Tzafon launched drones into southern Lebanon, urging residents to evacuate, and breached the security barrier as a demonstration in favor of settlement.

Adom, the Netu’a security official, said that his family does not belong to the Uri Tzafon movement. Still, he told The Intercept, “my middle son wants to establish a movement that would push the government to take control of the area, build settlements, and pass a law declaring it Israeli territory — like the Golan Heights — and formally annex it.”

But Israelis like Kronos are not so sure of this strategy. “They’re trying, but I think we’re losing too many young people,” he said. “There’s too much death for something I don’t believe can actually be achieved.”

Kronos has grown disillusioned living in Adamit, watching war after war claim civilian lives in the south and destroy her home community.

“We were young, without children when we first came here. We would sit on rooftops and watch the rockets, almost like a game, trying to guess where they would land,” Kronos said. “I remember sitting next to a woman. Today she must be around 18. She told me her story: Twenty years earlier, in 2006, she had been sitting in a shelter holding her baby son. She had been told that by the time he grew up, there would be no need for an army in Israel, no war in Lebanon, that things would be better. And now, 20 years later, she was sitting there again, and her son was in Lebanon, fighting.”

The post “I Want to Occupy”: Inside the Israeli Movement Pushing to Raze and Settle Southern Lebanon 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.”

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

“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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Goat meat goes down like big shards of glass when the symptoms set in. The local livestock, the main source of available nutrients, becomes nearly impossible to swallow. It feels, the sufferers say, like deep wounds have been sliced into their throats.

In Kargi, a remote desert village in the far north of Kenya, cancers of the digestive tract plague the population at unusually high rates. The disease most often attacks the esophagus, though stomach cancer is also common. Some patients think it’s a punishment from God.

The evidence on the ground suggests it’s more likely from a multinational oil company. In the 1980s, foreign work crews dressed like astronauts descended on the village of Kargi and the surrounding Chalbi Desert to drill for oil. They spent five unsuccessful years boring nearly a dozen wells thousands of feet into the ground. The men were from Amoco, an American oil company now owned by BP.

The crews then drove off their bulldozers, packed up their protective equipment, and vanished. One of the only traces to mark their presence was a dry white substance scattered on the ground, close to the water wells used by residents and their livestock.

An Intercept investigation drawn from on-the-ground interviews with dozens of Kargi residents, government and corporate reports spanning decades, court filings, and public hearings traces Amoco’s failure to clean up its waste to the ongoing pollution of Kargi. The substance the company left behind contained heavy metals and known carcinogens, but because of a lack of testing and thorough scientific study, it isn’t clear if the waste directly caused cancer in the community.

What is clear is that residents ate it.

Kargi has one of the highest poverty and malnutrition rates in Kenya, and when locals discovered the flaky substance around the wells, many believed it was natural salt and started using it to cook their food.

The water was contaminated. High levels of carcinogenic toxic chemicals, namely nitrates, had seeped into surrounding boreholes and wells — the only water supply in the desert. Animals began dying in the thousands. And people started getting cancer.

By the early 2000s, the cancer rate in the community was three times the national average. The area’s state representative asked the government to investigate the correlation between the disease plaguing his constituents and the drilling waste that had been left behind.

Now, across the manyattas — communities of traditional homes constructed from sticks and patchworks of old clothing — in Kargi and surrounding villages, everybody claims to know someone afflicted by the disease. The “salt” still remains scattered where Amoco, now part of British Petroleum, once searched for oil.

What’s clear now, from court records and environmental tests, is that the white clayey substance collected adjacent to Amoco’s wells was a tool the company used to help drill for oil, that it contained a variety of heavy metals, and that the wells were not properly sealed.

The pollution and disease inspired the first-ever lawsuit filed on the basis of Kenya’s constitutional right to a safe and healthy environment in 2020, when residents of Kargi and other communities in the Chalbi Desert sued the Kenyan national and county governments. They demanded a supply of clean water for people and animals, and they blamed Kenya for failing to police Amoco’s damage to the environment. Six years later, it’s still crawling through the court system.

The Amoco case was the start of a pattern of identifying environmental destruction across the East African country. In the last few years, similar cases have been popping up nationwide, accusing the local and national governments of failing to clean up the waste that other multinational oil companies have left behind, subjecting residents to drink contaminated water. 

A lack of adequate testing and general neglect of Kargi and its surrounding areas makes it difficult to directly correlate cancer to the waste Amoco left behind. But high levels of carcinogenic toxins, including nitrates and arsenic — both commonly used in drilling wells — have been found in the area’s drinking water over the years, in sporadic tests conducted by the Kenyan government and nonprofit organizations.

No official cleanup has ever been done. Neither BP nor the Kenyan government responded to repeated requests for comment.

In Kargi, residents told The Intercept that Amoco’s footprint has left them in a state of constant despair. 

Gumathi Galnahgalle, a village elder in his mid-40s, said the community began to notice people falling ill in the years after Amoco left. When his mother stopped being able to swallow food, he took her to the hospital multiple times.

“There was no treatment; we were just told to take her back home and wait for her time,” he said, standing in front of her grave. “There is no manyatta that has not been affected by this disease.”

Amoco’s African Expansion

Amoco’s arrival in the 1980s was met with intrigue and excitement. As helicopters flew over Kargi, foreign crews came into the community to join traditional dances at night.

The company employed locals to cook for their crews. In such a remote area, with few educational opportunities and literacy rates around 25 percent, the work was well-received. Lebeku Mirgichan, now in his early 70s, worked as a cook for Amoco for three years — earning 3,000 Kenyan shillings a month (equivalent to roughly $23 today). “At the time, that was a lot of money,” he told The Intercept.

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Oil exploration was a “welcome development for many communities because it came with a lot of promise and opportunity for development,” said Omolade Adunbi, director of the African Studies Center at the University of Michigan. And it wasn’t just Amoco — Chevron and Total had also explored for oil in other parts of Marsabit, the more than 40,000-square-mile county that contains Kargi.

Then-Kenyan President Daniel arap Moi, who commissioned the Amoco project, reportedly visited Kargi to watch the drilling. Amoco’s managing director told Moi that “the rock formation made the prospects for striking oil very encouraging and exciting.” Moi said “he had hope that economically viable oil deposits would be found.”

Amoco, then a Midwest-based company, felt that it was on the cusp of becoming one of the world’s leading explorers and developers of oil — acquiring drilling rights in Mozambique, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, and Burundi. Alfred O. Munk, Amoco’s manager of foreign affairs, told The Chicago Tribune, “Heads of state and competitors alike are coming to the sudden, belated conclusion that Amoco is a major international player.”

With Moi’s blessing, Amoco drilled at least 10 oil wells that reached 10,000 feet deep. But in 1990, after five years and no real sign of oil, the project in Kargi was decommissioned. Amoco’s vehicles, guards, and land rovers abruptly left.

In court records and interviews with the community, dozens said they were never officially informed of the project’s end. And no one came to clean it up.

Mass Extinction

The failure didn’t seem to affect Amoco’s business. In 1998, British Petroleum bought it in a $48 billion deal, the largest takeover of an American company by a foreign firm at the time. It changed its name to BP Amoco, then just BP in 2001. Most Amoco stations in the U.S. were converted to BP’s brand.

But in Kargi and its surrounding villages, animals were dying. Across the Chalbi Desert — where over 90 percent of the population of 30,000 is considered impoverished — most people survive off their livestock, eating only the meat and milk of goats, sheep, and camels. Due to the area’s aridity, there is no piped water, and communities rely on groundwater from boreholes and shallow wells.

In the 1990s, after drinking water from a borehole next to an abandoned well that Amoco had drilled, a flock of sheep and goats died in the neighboring village of Balesa, court records allege.

Then, in the early 2000s, 7,000 sheep and goats died under similar circumstances, residents told The Intercept. According to court records, a water quality report conducted by the government immediately after the mass death confirmed that over 600 animals died within two hours of taking the water. The water was found to contain high levels of nitrates, a type of salt and chemical compound that gets dissolved into drilling material for a variety of purposes: as powerful explosives to locate oil, to stop bacteria from growing in wells, and as an additive to drilling mud to strengthen the walls of a well.

When consumed in high amounts, nitrates can be extremely toxic and stop mammals’ blood from carrying oxygen.

A government team was sent to the area on a fact-finding mission in 2003, according to court documents. They recommended that the community should not give the water to infants and that the veterinary department should carry out toxicology tests in Kargi. It also found that the wells had not been properly sealed. A 2004 government report concluded that “the claims of the presence of esophagus cancer in the region were everywhere the team visited and concern is overwhelmingly evident as reported by medical personnel and local community.”

Subsequent tests commissioned by a local nonprofit organization found that levels of nitrates and arsenic were high in Kargi waters.

Five years later, a prospective report by a Swedish oil company, Lundin, which was planning to look for oil and other mining materials, confirmed that a “white clayey substance used to cool drill bits by Amoco while drilling was collected adjacent to the well.” Lundin tested it and found extremely high alkaline levels — which can cause chemicals to be corrosive and destroy skin when spilled.

The former Amoco cook, Mirgichan, alongside two other community members who also worked for Amoco, told The Intercept that they remember watching workers’ skin start to peel off when they worked with drilling materials.

In its report, Lundin found the substance to be “extremely saline and sodic” and that it was related to “abundant” claims about related health issues by the local communities, including dying livestock and cancer cases.

Between 2007 and 2009, multiple tests on the water found that it was not meeting the World Health Organization recommended standards, according to court records. The Kenyan water resources authority declared that it was not safe for human consumption. A local nonprofit found that high levels of nitrates and arsenic were in the water, and they were the probable cause of the livestock deaths.

By then, people were dying.

In Search of Nutrients

In Kargi, where food is scarce, community members kept finding the white substance that Amoco left behind and decided to put it to use, packing it up and using it to cook. The area, littered with salt-like mounds, became so popular with residents that it was named kwa chuvmi, loosely translated to “where there is salt.”

There are conflicting reports over what exactly the “salt” was. According to Kenyan court documents, the salt-like substance was actually two heavy drilling chemicals: barite and bentonite. Barite is a mineral used in large quantities to increase the density of drilling fluids, and bentonite, a clay-like substance often referred to as drilling mud, helps in carrying cuttings to the surface and stabilizing boreholes. The chemicals can have “catastrophic effects,” on the environment and people, said James Njuguna, an engineering professor at Robert Gordon University.

According to tests undertaken by Lundin, Amoco used “a white material that could pass for salt like substance,” but was “essentially a special clay material used to cool the drill bits.” It contained high levels of calcium, magnesium, sodium, and electrical conductivity.

Between 2006 and 2009, records from the only health center in Kargi, a village area with only 10,000 residents, registered 65 cancer-related deaths — which health workers said was largely throat cancer — or a rate nearly three times higher than the national average, according to government reports.

In 2008, Safi Mirkalkona’s sister died from stomach cancer just after giving birth, leaving behind the baby and four other small children. There was no medicine or treatment available, and she was advised to stay at home. “There are many orphans here,” Mirkalkona told The Intercept. “And yet, we still do not understand this disease.”

The same year, Joseph Lemasolai Lekuton, who represented Kargi and the surrounding area in Kenya’s national assembly, brought the issue to the Parliament.

“Strange diseases started occurring in the specific areas where oil was drilled,” he said. “I do not know how we can possibly explain the sudden emergence of cancer cases.”

“It is really embarrassing that we sit here and … years later people are still dying,” Lekuton continued in his speech. “We have a survey that has revealed shocking statistics of men and women who are ailing from throat cancer and many have died.” 

But leaders, including in the energy ministry, were dismissive and said no connection had been found between oil exploration and cancer cases.

By 2009, a community member was dying of cancer every month, according to a local news report. The symptoms and deterioration of residents were similar. The first was an inability to swallow meat. The patients were then referred for a biopsy, “but the majority prefer to go back home and wait to die,” the report said. Some tested positive for esophageal cancer.

Desert of Death

Years went by with no answers. In 2013, a documentary titled “Desert of Death” aired on Kenyan national television on throat and stomach cancer patients in the county, suggesting that waste left behind after failed oil prospecting had a connection to the disease. The youngest cancer patient featured was 3 years old. The documentary drew countrywide attention, prompting further discussions in the government.

“I come from Kargi Village, and I have about 150 names of those who have died as a result of that disease,” Godana Hargura, senator of Marsabit, said in a government hearing in 2015. “The situation is so desperate.”

In Kargi, there is only one health center serving the 10,000 residents. There is no doctor — just a clinical officer, a nurse, and a nutritionist.

“People normally come too late. Most of the people are sick, but they don’t even know that they are sick,” said Abraham Situma, the clinical officer. “We really need more human resources.”

Situma often refers the cases to Marsabit county hospital, a two-hour drive from Kargi. Following that, many patients are then referred to a hospital in Meru, over 300 miles away. But, Situma said, most prefer to just stay in Kargi and pass away at home. So many people have died in their homes that they became labeled the “manyattas of death.”

In July 2024, separate from the court case, the community petitioned Kenya’s National Assembly to order a comprehensive and independent probe into cancer cases in the region. The community said they had documented close to 1,000 cancer-related fatalities in the last decade, all attributed to the consumption of contaminated water. The fatalities were reported in Kargi and other surrounding areas, but only 100 families had the victims’ health records, because their culture dictated that the dead be buried with documents.

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“I call it the social death of the environment,” said Adunbi, the University of Michigan professor. “The practice of extraction in many communities is literally sentencing people to a form of death, and there is no oversight on how many of these corporations have conducted their activities in these spaces.”

Meanwhile, the case filed in 2020 by the Kargi residents remains ongoing and continuously delayed.

The petition detailed accusations against nine Kenyan and county governments — including the attorney general; ministries of environment, water, and sanitation; as well as the National Oil Corporation of Kenya — of being accountable for failing to ensure that Amoco caused little damage to the environment; disposed of waste oil, salt water, and refuse; and did not cause fluids or substance to escape to the environment.

“The untold pain, suffering and hopelessness is exemplified by the rampant deaths that take place in the manyattas without the residents of Marsabit County having access to medical care, the long distance the resident have to travel seeking medical care and lack of financial capacity to carry the burden of the cancer scourge,” the petition reads.

There were also plans to sue BP, but it has proved to be too legally complex, according to John Mwariri, acting executive director of Kituo Cha Sheria, the Kenyan legal aid group leading the case. The company had also long diverted its interest away from the Marsabit region into more fruitful areas in countries like Angola, Egypt, and Algeria.

In Kargi, the community has lost hope in getting answers. In his manyatta, Galnahgalle, the village elder, awaits the same fate as his mother.

“I keep being told to go home as there is no treatment,” he said. “Amoco should come and explain what they did here.”

The post An American Company Drilled for Oil in Kenya — and Left Behind Soaring Cancer Rates 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.”

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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.

Nearly two-thirds of Iranian Americans now oppose the war after opinions were near evenly divided at the start of the conflict, according to a Zogby Analytics survey.

The nearly 17 percentage point leap comes as the prospects that the Iranian regime will collapse seem to have dimmed, the conflict’s endgame becomes increasingly murky, and steady bombings have swelled the number of civilians killed.

Jamal Abdi, president of the nonprofit group that commissioned the poll, the National Iranian American Council, said the survey results show that the diaspora’s feelings on the war are more complicated — and more negative — than pundits have suggested.

“This is a war that is supposedly being fought in our name,” Abdi said. “There’s a lot of wish-casting and projection and voices from the diaspora claiming that there is this mandate from our community, and it’s not based on data or facts or reality. It’s based on a campaign for regime change no matter what the cost is. It’s dangerous for our community to be used like this.”

NIAC has long been one of the major voices in the diaspora expressing skepticism about war with Iran. In days leading up to the February 28 strikes that started the war, however, figures such as Reza Pahlavi, the son of the country’s former shah, were given prominent platforms to argue for regime change.

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NIAC’s March 24 to 27 poll, which has a margin of error of plus or minus 4.4 percentage points, is the second that the group has commissioned from Zogby Analytics. An earlier survey was conducted from February 27 to March 5, a period that coincided with the final hours of U.S.–Iranian negotiations and the beginning of the conflict.

The survey results suggest that Iranian Americans are now more opposed to the war than Americans as a whole, after being more supportive at its start.

Iranian Americans are a sliver of the U.S. population, about 0.2 percent, making polling of the group more difficult than the general population. Abdi said that Zogby drew from a “significant list of contacts” in the Iranian American community to conduct the survey.

One prominent Iranian American, Ahmad Batebi — an exiled dissident who thanked President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu after the war began but has spoken out against targeting civilian infrastructure — questioned the poll results.

“My view is that the reported decline in support should be interpreted cautiously,” Batebi said in an email, “not only because opinion may indeed be shifting in real time, but because the more basic question is whether this polling instrument can credibly be treated as representative of the broader Iranian-American community in the first place.”

In the earlier survey, Iranian Americans showed nearly a 50-50 split in their position on going to war with Iran.

Iranian Americans now believe by a wide margin that President Donald Trump should end the conflict, according to the more recent numbers. 70 percent of respondents said that it was time to end the war. Only a quarter believed it should continue.

Trump is scheduled to give an address on the war Wednesday night, with officials giving mixed signals as to whether he will wrap up the conflict or expand it with a ground invasion.

The recent Zogby poll also captured an increasingly pessimistic view of the war’s likely outcome. Many Iranian Americans celebrated on social media when Khamanei’s death in an Israeli airstrike was confirmed on March 1.

Hard-liners have held onto power in Iran since then, however, leading to a dimming view of the future among the diaspora. Nearly 60 percent of Iranian Americans believe ordinary Iranians will be worse off a year from now and more than half believe the Islamic Republic will remain in power.

“There was probably some initial exuberance in that first week,” Abdi said, “and that has trailed off as we have seen civilian casualties and a shuffling of chairs in the regime but not any signal that the regime itself was going anywhere.”

The post Iranian Americans Have Turned Against the War, New Poll Finds appeared first on The Intercept.

The White House and Pentagon won’t tell the American people where the U.S. is at war, and Trump has never gone to Congress for war authorization. But an analysis by The Intercept reveals 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. Due to a lack of government transparency, obscure security cooperation, and carveouts baked into the U.S. Code — like the 127e authority enacted in the wake of the September 11 attacks, and the covert action statute that enables the CIA to conduct secret wars — the actual number could be markedly higher.

During his two terms in office, Trump has overseen armed interventions and military operations — including drone strikes, ground raids, proxy wars, 127e programs, and full-scale conflicts — in Afghanistan, Central African Republic, Cameroon, Ecuador, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Kenya, Lebanon, Libya, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, North Korea, Pakistan, the Philippines, Somalia, Syria, Tunisia, Venezuela, Yemen, and an unspecified country in the Indo-Pacific region, as well as attacks on civilians in boats in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean. More than 6,500 U.S. Special Operations forces’ “operators and enablers” are currently deployed in more than 80 countries around the world. And during its second term, the Trump administration has also bullied Panama and threatened Canada, Colombia, Cuba, Greenland (perhaps also Iceland), and Mexico.

Under the U.S. Constitution, it’s Congress that has the authority to declare war, not the president, pointed out Katherine Yon Ebright, counsel in the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program.

“Congress has not authorized conflicts in this wide array of contexts, and indeed many lawmakers — to say nothing of members of the public — would be surprised to learn that hostilities have taken place in many of these countries,” Ebright said. “Congressional authorization isn’t just a box-checking exercise: It’s a means of ensuring that the solemn decision to go to war is made democratically and accountably, with a clear purpose and goal that the American people can support.”

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Despite the fact that the U.S. has not declared war since 1941, its military has fought near-constant wars from Korea to Vietnam from the 1950s through the 1970s to Afghanistan and Iraq in the 21st century, as the executive branch has come to dominate the government and Congress has abdicated its constitutional duty to declare war.

For years, the Pentagon has even attempted to define war out of existence, claiming that it does not treat 127e and similar authorities as authorizations for the use of military force. In practice, however, Special Operations forces have used these authorities to create and control proxy forces and sometimes engage in combat alongside them. Recent presidents have also consistently claimed broad rights to act in self-defense, not only of U.S. forces but also for partner forces.

The Trump administration has even claimed the full-scale conflict in Iran is something other than what it is. Earlier this month, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby refused to call it a war. “I think we’re in a military action at this point,” he told lawmakers.

Trump routinely refers to the conflict with Iran as a war, but he has also cast it as an “excursion.” Trump has also erroneously claimed that if he doesn’t call the conflict with Iran a “war,” it circumvents Congress’s constitutional authority.

“We have a thing called a war, or as they would rather say, a military operation. It’s for legal reasons,” he said on Friday. “I don’t need any approvals. As a war you’re supposed to get approval from Congress. Something like that.”

EArlier This month, Special Operations Command chief Adm. Frank M. Bradley told the House Armed Services Committee’s Subcommittee on Intelligence and Special Operations that secret-war capabilities were key for the United States.

“This environment places a premium on forces capable of operating persistently inside contested spaces, below the threshold of armed conflict,” he said. “Small footprints are necessary to enable denial strategies, strengthen allied resilience, and contribute to deterrence without triggering escalation, and to counter illicit and malign activity without large-scale military presence.”

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Bradley claimed America’s enemies “blur the lines between competition and conflict,” but this is precisely what America has done for decades, including numerous secret wars during both Trump terms. The United States has waged unconstitutional and clandestine conflicts through a variety of mechanisms. The covert action statute, for example, provides the authority for secret, unattributed, and primarily CIA-led operations that can involve the use of force. It has been used during the forever wars, including under Trump, to conduct drone strikes outside areas of active hostilities. It was apparently employed in the first U.S. strike on Venezuela in late 2025 — a prelude to a war, days later, that led to the kidnapping of that country’s president, Nicolás Maduro, by U.S. Special Operations forces.

The 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, which was enacted in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and has been stretched by successive administrations to cover a broad assortment of terrorist groups — most of which did not exist on September 11 — has been used to justify counterterrorism operations, including ground combat, airstrikes, and support of partner militaries, in at least 22 countries, according to a 2021 report by Brown University’s Costs of War Project.

Under Trump, even this signature post-9/11 workaround for war has been eschewed for something more clandestine. Top Pentagon leadership wanted to keep so-called “advise, assist and accompany” or “AAA” missions — which can be indistinguishable from combat — under wraps during Trump’s first term. This led then-Defense Secretary James Mattis to order U.S. operations in Africa to be kept “off the front page,” a former senior U.S. official told the International Crisis Group.

But the bid to keep Trump’s other African wars secret imploded during a May 2017 AAA mission when Navy SEAL Kyle Milliken was killed and two other Americans were wounded in a raid on an al-Shabab camp in Somalia. The Pentagon initially claimed that Somali forces were out ahead of Milliken — U.S. troops are supposed to remain at the last position of cover and concealment where they remain out of sight and protected — but that fiction fell apart, and the truth emerged that he was, in fact, alongside them.

This was followed by an October 2017 debacle in Tongo Tongo, Niger, where ISIS fighters ambushed American troops, killing four U.S. soldiers and wounding two others. The U.S. initially claimed troops were providing “advice and assistance” to local counterparts. In truth, until bad weather prevented it, the ambushed team was slated to support another group of American and Nigerien commandos attempting to kill or capture an ISIS leader as part of Obsidian Nomad II, another 127e program.

Under 127e, U.S. commandoes — including Army Green Berets, Navy SEALs, and Marine Raiders — arm, train, and provide intelligence to foreign forces. Unlike traditional foreign assistance programs, which are primarily intended to build local capacity, 127e partners are then dispatched on U.S.-directed missions, targeting U.S. enemies to achieve U.S. aims.

During Trump’s first term, U.S. Special Operations forces conducted at least 23 separate 127e programs across the world. Previous reporting by The Intercept has documented many 127e efforts in Africa and the Middle East, including a partnership with a notoriously abusive unit of the Cameroonian military, also during Trump’s first term, that continued long after its members were connected to mass atrocities. In addition to Cameroon, Niger, and Somalia, the U.S. has conducted 127e programs in Afghanistan, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Mali, Syria, Tunisia, Yemen, and an undisclosed country in the Indo-Pacific region.

“During the global war on terror, the Department of Defense built out its capacity, and secured legal authorities, to operate ‘by, with, and through’ foreign militaries and paramilitaries,” Ebright said, noting that these authorities had been designed for countering al-Qaeda but had led to led to combat against groups that had not been debated and approved by Congress. “These smaller-scale, unauthorized hostilities through or alongside foreign partners may seem quaint compared to the Iran War and other recent public and persistent hostilities, but for years they deepened the perception that the president may use force whenever and wherever he pleases, even without specific congressional authorization.”

For almost one year, the White House has failed to respond to repeated requests from The Intercept for information about past and current 127e programs.

“While Trump claims to be the president of peace, he is actually the conflict-in-chief, waging many pointless and deadly wars, ensuring generational animosity towards a rogue U.S.,” said Sarah Harrison, an associate general counsel at the Pentagon’s Office of General Counsel, International Affairs during Trump’s first term. “His actions are not just unconstitutional and in violation of international law, they make Americans less safe and their wallets less full.”

During his second term, Trump has made overt war across the African continent, conducting airstrikes from Nigeria to Somalia. In the Middle East, Trump has left a trail of civilians dead, from a migrant detention facility in Yemen to an elementary school in Iran.

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America’s punishing war on Iran has ground on for over a month without a clear definition of victory, a plan for the aftermath, or coherent strategy behind bellicose rhetoric and shifting claims, most recently that the U.S. is fighting a regime change war and will possibly seize Iran’s oil.

“We’ve had regime change if you look already because the one regime was decimated, destroyed, they’re all dead,” Trump said on Sunday, referring to top ranking officials killed in the war including the late Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. “The next regime is mostly dead.”

Additional U.S. forces are now being sped to the Middle East to augment more than 40,000 troops already stationed in the region. This included dozens of fighter jets, bombers, and other aircraft, as well as two carrier strike groups. (The USS Gerald R. Ford had to since abandon the fight and travel to port, following a fire on the ship.)

More than 2,000 additional Marines arrived in the region over the weekend, and 2,000 more are on their way by ship. A similar number of paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division are expected to arrive soon. The influx of troops comes as Trump has threatened to seize Iran’s oilfields.

“To be honest with you, my favorite thing is to take the oil in Iran but some stupid people back in the U.S. say: ‘why are you doing that?’ But they’re stupid people,” he told the Financial Times on Sunday. In a Monday Truth Social post, Trump threatened to commit war crimes by “blowing up and completely obliterating all of [Iran’s] Electric Generating Plants, Oil Wells and Kharg Island (and possibly all desalinization plants!)”

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The Pentagon has already requested $200 billion in supplemental funds to pay for the Iran war, and the ultimate cost is expected to run into the trillions of dollars.

The U.S. is also ramping up conflicts in the Western hemisphere. Since attacking Venezuela and abducting its president in January, the U.S. has reportedly undertaken a regime-change operation in Cuba, attempting to push out President Miguel Díaz-Canel. Trump has also repeatedly spoken of “taking” Cuba. He has also threatened to annex Greenland (and possibly Iceland), turn Canada into a U.S. state, and carry out military strikes in Mexico.

The chief of U.S. Special Operations Command recently referenced the “perceived increase of U.S. support to counter-cartel operations in Mexico” and said his elite troops “remain postured to provide… support to Mexican military and security forces to dismantle narco-terrorist organizations.”  The U.S. claims to be currently at war with at least 24 cartels and criminal gangs it will not name.

Under Operation Southern Spear, the U.S. has conducted an illegal campaign of strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea and Eastern Pacific Ocean, destroying 49 vessels and killing more than 160 civilians. The latest strike, on March 25 in the Caribbean, killed four people.

“Trump wants to call DoD’s summary executions on the high seas a war because he thinks that will allow him to kill civilians. And he wants to call the war in Iran a military operation so he doesn’t have to go to Congress for approval,” explained Harrison, who also previously served in the White House Office of Legislative Affairs. “It doesn’t matter what imaginary legal constructs Trump comes up with, it won’t protect him or his officials from accountability for these undeniably illegal uses of force.”

The boat strikes recently moved to land as so-called “bilateral kinetic actions against cartel targets along the Colombia-Ecuador border” on unnamed “designated terrorist organizations.” “The joint effort, named ‘Operation Total Extermination,’ is the start of a military offensive by Ecuador against transnational criminal organizations with the support of the U.S.,” Joseph Humire, the acting assistant secretary of war for homeland defense and Americas security affairs, announced earlier this month. That U.S.–Ecuadorian campaign has already strayed into Colombia after a farm was bombed or hit by “ricochet effect” on March 3, leaving an unexploded 500-pound bomb lying in Colombia’s border region.

Harrison drew attention to the human costs of the raft of conflicts being waged by the Trump administration, remarking on “all the people who are needlessly dying because of one man’s ego and how it makes the U.S. much less safe.”

Successive White Houses and the Pentagon have also kept secret the full list of groups with which the U.S. is in conflict. In 2015, The Intercept asked the Pentagon for “a complete and exhaustive list of the groups and individuals, including affiliates and/or associated forces, against which the U.S. military is authorized to take direct action” — a Pentagon euphemism for attacks. Eleven years later, we’re still waiting for an answer. Asked more recently for a simple count — just the number — of wars, conflicts, interventions, and kinetic operations, the Office of the Secretary of Defense offered no answers. “Your queries have been received and sent to the appropriate department,” a spokesperson told The Intercept weeks ago before ghosting this reporter.

“The proliferation of unauthorized, presidentially initiated conflicts raises profound challenges for our rule of law, democracy, and accountability around matters of war and peace,” said Ebright. “This is true, too, of secret wars that government officials may refer to as ‘light-footprint warfare’ or ‘low-intensity conflict,’ not the least because we’ve repeatedly seen intermittent strikes or raids give way to protracted military engagements and larger-scale operations.”

Bradley — perhaps best known for ordering the double-tap strike that killed two shipwrecked men last fall — recently offered a murky catalogue of “state adversaries, terrorists, and transnational criminal networks” aligned against the United States, including China, Russia, “Iran, its proxy forces, and terrorist organizations,” and other unnamed “state adversaries”; transnational criminal organizations that “continue to attempt to exploit the southern approaches to the United States”; ISIS and Al Qaeda affiliates; as well as “terrorists” and “extremist groups” in Africa. The State Department currently counts 94 foreign terrorist organizations around the world, including 13 that were designated back in 1997. Thirty-seven groups, about 40 percent of the list, were added under Trump — 27 during his second term. The most recent addition, the Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood, was designated earlier this month. The administration also maintains a secret list of domestic terrorist organizations which it will not disclose.

For weeks, The Intercept has asked if the White House even knows how many wars, conflicts, kinetic operations, and military interventions the U.S. is currently involved in. We have never received a response.

The post Trump’s Secret Wars on the World Keep Expanding appeared first on The Intercept.