In July 2020, Aluf Benn, the editor of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, interviewed a 92-year-old retired Hebrew University professor named Yehezkel Dror. Benn described him as the “doyen of public policy experts in Israel.” For his part, Dror fashioned himself after Herman Kahn, the American defense intellectual who made his name by “thinking the unthinkable” — how to fight a thermonuclear war. In 2005, Dror’s work on policy planning and strategic thinking won him the coveted Israel Prize.

Dror responded to Benn’s questions as a futurologist with knowledge of what is to come, gained by thinking rationally and ruthlessly about a world too complex for all but an elite class of geniuses. Complimenting Israeli leaders for expelling as many Palestinians from the country as they did in 1948, Dror insisted on the correctness of his plan for an Israeli attack on Iran and praised President Donald Trump’s 2020 Israeli-Palestinian peace plan — the so-called Deal of the Century. He also called for a world government run by modern philosopher kings, and in his 2020 book, “Steering Human Evolution,” he advocated settling a thousand fertile couples on Mars to ensure the human race would not become extinct.

Dror explained the tension in his thinking between rationalist universalism and a tribalist commitment to his own group, the Jews. Citing Zionism as the “core meaning of his life,” Dror emphasized the contribution he had made to “a total revolution in the history of the Jewish people, on the path from Holocaust to resurgence.” The primacy of this latter commitment is clearly apparent in his book “Crazy States: A Counterconventional Strategic Problem,” published in 1971.

The topic of “craziness” as a descriptor of states was a familiar one in the 1960s when discussing nuclear deterrence. Academics Thomas Schelling and Herman Kahn both explored how a state with a reputation for craziness could increase the credibility of otherwise unconvincing threats.

The thrust of Dror’s book was different. Dror imagined how states with powerful modern weapons might act in ways radically contrary to accepted norms or expected calculations. Normal states would need to act differently toward adversaries deemed “crazy” by shifting strategies from deterrence and self-defense to destruction and preemptive attack. The not-so-hidden subtext of the argument was to brand all of Israel’s adversaries as “crazy,” thereby establishing justification for using any and all means, including subversion, preventive war, and even annihilation, against them.

Dror went on to lay out the criterion for labeling states — Israel’s enemies — as “crazy.” Fifty years later, however, Dror’s account of craziness and the warning signs he suggested looking for apply more readily to Israel than to its Arab enemies.

“Crazy” Characteristics

Dror never defined precisely what he meant by “crazy,” preferring to list behaviors, practices, and beliefs associated with his image of craziness. His prototypical case, used repeatedly for illustration of his argument, was Nazi Germany. Dror began his book by offering the Third Reich to skeptical readers “as a striking and radical demonstration of the possibility of crazy states and their implications for the international order and the security of various countries.” The case study also made the point that nonstate movements or organizations, such as Hitler’s National Socialist Party, could be treated as crazy as well as states. This justified Dror’s inclusion of various Palestinian movements and groups affiliated with the Palestine Liberation Organization as “crazy” even though they weren’t states.

At the end of 1973, an Israeli military publishing house issued a Hebrew edition of Dror’s book with a new chapter, “The Question of ‘Crazy’ States and the State of Israel.” Written against the backdrop of the October 1973 Arab-Israeli War, known in Israel as the Yom Kippur War, Dror described virtually all Arab states and movements, whether Muslim or Palestinian, as either crazy, partially crazy, or liable to become crazy. According to Dror, the purpose of this chapter — which never appeared in English — was to shape Israeli military doctrine and strategies to deal with the craziness and potential for “extreme craziness” of Israel’s adversaries.

Dror emphasized that the kind of craziness he had in mind — so dangerous to the world community that no measures to disrupt or destroy it should be ruled out — requires an ability to think clearly, plan systematically, and act effectively. In doing so, he was carefully distinguishing irrationality from craziness. To be classified as crazy, a state or movement must not only have the means to project its power with devastating effect; it must also demonstrate a capacity for calculated action so that it can learn from mistakes and devise better and more successful techniques for achieving its (crazy) purposes.

A useful list of the features Dror set forth to identify a crazy state appeared in a positive review of his book: aggressive pursuit of far-reaching goals harmful to others; radical and intense commitments to achieve those goals; and adoption of a morally superior posture even while grossly contradicting international norms, both ethical and legal.

Using these measures — goals, means, and public posture — we can ask whether Israel itself is crazy. If it is, then for Israel’s Lobby to be successful, U.S. policies toward Israel and the Middle East must themselves be crazy and therefore dangerous to American interests and to the world.

Hard-Right Turn

Israeli politics revolve around its party system. That system has undergone two fundamental transformations: from one-party dominance to an even rivalry between two parties and then a return to dominance by the former opposition party. For almost three decades, the social democratic Labor Party dominated Israeli elections, with the right-wing parties in opposition. While never securing a majority of seats, in the 1960s and 1970s, Labor’s parliamentary dominance was enough to relegate Menachem Begin’s right-wing Herut (Freedom) Party to the political wilderness.

As David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first and until Netanyahu longest-serving prime minister, frequently declared, Labor would accept any party as a coalition partner except those occupying the extremes of the political spectrum: the communists and Herut. Begin, he once wrote, was “a Hitlerist type: a racist, willing to destroy all the Arabs for the sake of Greater Israel.”

After the June 1967 Arab-Israeli war, known as the Six Day War, the Labor Party favored withdrawal from occupied Palestinian territories in return for peace, though it avoided specifying what territories could be relinquished or under what circumstances. The party that Begin led in 1967 was Gahal, a combination of Herut and the Liberal Party. In 1973, it became the cornerstone of the Likud. Like Herut, Gahal and then Likud opposed territorial withdrawal from any part of the West Bank and Gaza. The right wingers rejected the principle of trading land for peace, favored settlement of Jews throughout the territories, and looked forward to their permanent absorption into the State of Israel.

The “earthquake,” Likud’s victory in the 1977 elections, temporarily ended single-party dominance in Israel. Subsequently, two rival blocs — one led by the Likud and the other by one or another version of the Labor Party — battled each other in seesaw fashion. But since the 2013 elections, the right-wing bloc, with the Likud forming the core of governing coalitions, has dominated Israeli politics.

The sharpness of Israel’s shift to the right is evident in the changing ideological complexion of members of its 120-seat parliament, the Knesset. Israeli parties have always differed on a variety of social and economic questions. But by far the two most important markers of a party’s location on the spectrum of Israeli politics are its position on Israel’s borders and the intensity of its commitment to an exclusivist Jewish mission for the state.

Border Wars

Before the 1967 war, the issue of the country’s borders was not particularly salient in Israeli politics. Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip reopened the question of expanding the state’s boundaries, polarizing the political system, and triggering a sharp rise in both hawkish and dovish positions on these questions. After the Six-Day War, average left-wing representation in the Knesset increased by approximately two-thirds compared to what it was before 1967. Right-wing representation in the Knesset, however, tripled.

In the 2000s, the right-wing bloc’s representation has grown rapidly, while the left-wing bloc has shrunk drastically. Since the 2003 election, the first following the second Palestinian uprising, or Intifada, average representation of right-wing views has been twice that associated with the left. In the most recent elections, actual majorities of Knesset members have been affiliated with political programs advanced before 1967 only by a small and extreme minority. Meanwhile, the number of Knesset members espousing concessions capable of attracting even minimal Palestinian interest has dwindled.

Following the 2022 election, 63 members of the Knesset identified with what were originally seen as extreme far-right views on the nation’s borders, while only 14 supported a two-state solution. Of the latter, 10 were Arabs and only four were Jews.

Israeli public opinion has also shifted strongly toward the extreme right. Intensive polling done between 2022 and 2024 showed that four to five times as many Jewish Israelis identified themselves as “right-wing” than as “left-wing.” The rightward shift is more extreme than it seems from this data because what it means to be yemini, or right wing, has itself changed. Much more than in the past, it is associated with commitments to overt discrimination against Palestinian citizens, annexation measures that would exclude Palestinians from citizenship, use of extrajudicial punishment against Arabs, and preference for military action over negotiation for advancing Israeli interests in the region.

Along with the rightward extremization of the Jewish public has been an escalating propensity for Israeli leaders to aggressively pursue expansive goals. This hawkishness manifested as military actions, assassinations, and spectacular acts of sabotage — from the West Bank and Gaza to Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Qatar, and Iran — that have stunned the world.

Rise of a Madman

In the 1990s, Benjamin Netanyahu began his rise to power, not as a right-wing firebrand but as a silver-tongued defender of Israel against international criticism. He coupled strong right-wing views with opportunism and an aversion to making risky decisions. Having climbed the greasy pole to take control of the Likud Party in 1996, Netanyahu went on to become Israel’s longest-serving prime minister.

Following Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, however, Netanyahu’s modus operandi changed. Two of his most crucial judgments — that the Gaza Strip could be kept indefinitely in a state of economic immiseration and that Hamas would not mount a large-scale attack — pushed Israelis into one of the most severe shocks they ever experienced.

Fearing investigation of his failure to protect the country, Netanyahu transformed himself into the epitome of Israeli craziness.

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The levels of violence he authorized against Palestinians in Gaza shocked the world. Netanyahu’s endorsement of transferring the entire population of Gaza out of Palestine; the bloody attacks he unleashed against Hezbollah and civilian neighborhoods in Lebanon; the wars he launched against Iran; and his attempt to assassinate Hamas negotiators in Qatar all reflect much more far-reaching goals for Israel than those of recognition, peace, and security, as one nation among others in a stable Middle East.

In this way, Netanyahu is not just following in the footsteps of predecessors, who were prepared to take risks for ambitious gains; instead, he has made the craziness that has occasionally marked Israeli policies into a dominant trait.

A 21st Century Sparta

Efraim Inbar is among Israel’s most influential national security analysts. The founder and director of the Jerusalem Institute for Strategic Studies, Inbar has reliably indexed the policy preferences of Likud governments, in general, and those led by Netanyahu in particular.

From year to year, problem to problem, threat to threat, Inbar’s recommendation has almost always been the same: reject available compromises, accept international isolation, and use preemptive war to inflict more pain and damage on adversaries than they are willing to tolerate.

“Fortunately,” he wrote in response to questions about Israel’s long-term goals, “Jewish history presents the Zionist movement another alternative: the Davidic option of building a Jewish commonwealth in the midst of an idolatrous world. The House of David ruled the Land of Israel for over four hundred years, playing a balance of power politics in our region.”

As if channeling Inbar’s thinking, Netanyahu gave a speech in September 2025 calling for Israel to expect and accept international isolation, adapt its economy toward autarchy, and see itself as a 21st century Sparta.

Israelis are familiar with the Jerusalem syndrome, a tendency for susceptible people visiting the country to experience delusional psychoses with religious or apocalyptic themes. It is also true that spectacular visions — of an unfolding, divinely guided, and Israel-centric redemption process; of the settlement in the West Bank as a crucial step in the bringing of the Messiah; and of Jewish rule over virtually the entire Fertile Crescent — have long animated the private thinking of the architects behind the vast settlement project in the occupied territories.

The Israeli Mainstream

What is striking is that such thinking has moved from the private worlds of dedicated activists, from the margins of respectable political discourse toward the center of Israeli politics. Ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich both advocate for the rebuilding of the ancient Jewish Temple in the Old City of Jerusalem. Daniella Weiss, Ben-Gvir, and many others have called for the entire Gaza Strip to be emptied of Palestinians and resettled by Jews. What were, in the 1960s and 1970s, the outlandish ambitions of some marginal intellectuals, extreme rabbis, and retired generals are now the goals pursued by leading government ministers, senior security service officials, and settlement leaders.

Such grandiose ideas provide no guidelines for practical strategic thinking about Israel’s future or rationales for creative diplomacy. The result is that Israeli leaders focus on imminent security threats and diplomatic challenges, but neither entertain nor pursue longterm goals. That is to say: Those who govern Israel imagine no stable future that is both satisfying and possible enough to shape policy decisions and actions. The goal of Israel’s foreign and security policies therefore becomes simple if outlandish: to establish itself as the regional hegemon, possessing the only nuclear arsenal in the Middle East, equipped with sufficient conventional military power to operate throughout the region at minimal risk, and poised to crush any combination of opponents.

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This region-shaping ambition was evident in Israel’s June 2025 attack on Iran. An Israeli military poster, in Farsi, of what Israel dubbed “Operation Rising Lion” featured a majestic lion on his hind legs next to a brightly shining sun, symbols of ancient Persia.

The idea of transforming the Islamic Republic of Iran, a Muslim-majority country of 93 million, into an ally and returning it to a non-Islamic imperial past was advanced in an Instagram post two weeks into the war by Sara Netanyahu, the prime minister’s influential wife. It depicted two lions leaning against each other and gazing into the future, one wrapped in the flag of Israel, the other in the flag of the Pahlavis, the last shahs of Iran.

Amid Israel’s bombardment of Iran in July 2025, before the U.S. joined the war, the grand scale of such ambitions — consistent with the unattainability of the goals crazy states set for themselves — became apparent during remarks Netanyahu made to an Israeli interviewer. “We are changing — and I said this on the second day of the [Gaza] war — I said that we’re changing the face of the Middle East,” Netanyahu said calmly. “And now I say to you and also to our viewers: We’re changing the face of the world. I have determined that we will achieve all our goals.”

Adapted from “Israel’s Lobby: America in the Grip of a Foreign Power” by Eli Clifton and Ian Lustick. Copyright 2026 by Eli Clifton and Ian Lustick. Reprinted by permission of One Signal Publishers, a division of Simon & Schuster, LLC.

The post Israel Justified Its Wars by Calling Enemies “Crazy.” Now, the Warning Signs All Apply to Israel. appeared first on The Intercept.

Over 50,000 people last week risked their lives to cross the border between Morocco and Ceuta, the tiny Spanish enclave in north Africa, in the hope of making it to mainland Europe.

The vast majority have already been returned to Morocco; fewer than 2,000 refugees remain on Ceuta and are, according to on-the-ground reports, in urgent need of food and shelter. Over 80 people reportedly died during the crossings, most from drowning.

The crisis for those seeking to enter Europe through Ceuta last week, including those who have been sent back, has already been framed according to a putrid, far-right political fulcrum. As a wide array of responses to the situation on Ceuta make clear, a commitment to harsh border regimes is not the sole preserve of the far right.

Once again, liberals and centrists who claim to decry the right’s anti-immigrant stances are themselves treating immigrants as a threat to be secured against.

For the international far right, images of thousands of desperate young African men entering European Union territory — little matter that Ceuta is, in fact, not on mainland Europe — has been fodder for predictable racist fearmongering and calls for extremist border rule. Far-right leaders blamed the crossings of the left-wing Spanish government’s extremely reasonable plans to regularize over 1 million undocumented immigrants who have already been living and working in Spain for at least five months.

“It’s terrible. Remember that picture. That’s going to be us in three years if the wrong side gets in,” President Donald Trump told Fox News, in a groundless attempt to use the suffering on Ceuta to his advantage. A spokesperson for the White House decried Spain’s new immigration regularization proposal as “far-left, globalist policies.”

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Meanwhile, conservative and right-wing leaders across Europe and the U.K. echoed similar sentiments, conjuring the old lie of an “invasion” confronting the West. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni proposed Spain be suspended from the Schengen Area. A total of 22 EU leaders, including Meloni and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, wrote a joint letter to the European Commission expressing “serious concerns” about how Spain’s decision to grant legal status to immigrants served as a “pull factor.”

In response to these attacks and criticisms, several liberal and centrist politicians, institutions, and media organs have pushed back. Analyses in the New York Times and The Atlantic have stressed, for example, that not one of the people who crossed into Ceuta managed to make it to mainland Europe. These responses are framed as a counterpoint to Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s right-wing critics.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen also defended Sánchez against right-wing attacks, by praising the Spanish authorities’ “swift handling” in “successfully preventing illegal movement onwards to mainland Spain and Europe.”

Sanchez himself took a similar line.

“In less than 48 hours, my government has succeeded in fully restoring control over the border,” he wrote on Saturday in a response to criticism from other European leaders.

The mainstream defense against far-right fearmongering, then, was merely a regurgitation of the right’s anti-immigrant premise. Stopping immigrants who have been forced to take irregular routes, according to this logic, is a good thing. What the far right got wrong, by the lights of these centrists and liberals, was not their virulent racism, but rather that the claims of an “invasion” of Europe are not factually accurate.

“Spain and Germany’s centrist responses have been to ‘assure’ the E.U. that borders are fortified,” wrote migrant justice organizer and scholar Harsha Walia on Instagram. “This rebuttal simply buttresses the premise of border securitization.”

The reasons for the surge in crossings are not yet fully known; speculation abounds about the role of Moroccan and other state forces. A few things are, however, clear: Misinformation had spread in the preceding days on social media suggesting, falsely, that a recent Supreme Court ruling in Spain would prevent the Spanish authorities returning immigrants.

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In a world of increasing and inevitable mass migration, it is a moral failure to treat the swift removal of immigrants as a victory. Such a framing is also a gift to the far right, who will continue to benefit within a political consensus that treats immigration as a bad thing.

Only a few voices on the European left have placed focus where it belongs: with supporting immigrants who remain on Ceuta.

“What is happening in Ceuta is not a natural disaster, but the result of political decisions,” said Clara Bünger, a member of Germany’s The Left Party. “Germany and the EU have a duty to help with providing for refugees and to take in those seeking protection.”

“People are fleeing war, poverty, and the climate crisis,” she noted. “Higher walls won’t stop them; they will only make the escape more deadly. The most important thing now is that no one else dies.”

The post Liberals Are Ceding Ground to the Far Right on Ceuta Border Crossings appeared first on The Intercept.

The frontman of British punk rap band Bob Vylan was denied entry to Germany, detained at the Berlin airport, and ultimately deported to the United Kingdom last month due to his pro-Palestine statements.

German federal police justified deporting the band’s vocalist on June 15, referencing a performance at the Glastonbury Festival in England in 2025 where Bob Vylan led a chant of “Death, death to the IDF,” or the Israel Defense Forces.

Authorities later revoked the entry ban against the singer, whose legal name is Pascal Robinson-Foster, in a letter in late July, but refused to explain why it had been rescinded — or how the decision to impose it had been made in the first place.

A police file on Robinson-Foster obtained by The Intercept alleges that he disseminated antisemitic narratives and Hamas propaganda that could “radicalise certain segments of the [German] population” and serve as “ideological justification” for terrorist groups or individuals. It also says that Robinson-Foster poses a threat to Germany’s public security and public order. Allowing him into the country would cause “considerable reputational damage” by creating the impression that Germany was making “no effort to prevent the spread of the propagated antisemitism and the associated calls to violence.”

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The German Federal Police declined to answer detailed questions about the now-revoked entry ban, citing public security interests and data protection. In response to a list of questions about the decision-making process behind the ban, its legal basis, and why it was lifted, Bundespolizei spokesperson Nikolai Jaletzke told The Intercept the agency does not comment on individual cases, internal threat assessments, or inter-agency coordination.

“It’s frankly absurd to suggest that I’m a threat to German national security,” Robinson-Foster told The Intercept. “It’s equally absurd to claim that we spread propaganda on behalf of any proscribed organization.”

Bob Vylan’s Glastonbury performance last year drew widespread international attention at a moment when an increasing number of artists were speaking out against Israel’s destruction of Gaza. The performance — and the chant of “Death, death to the IDF” — also drew condemnation from politicians, including then-U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer, and several pro-Israel Jewish organizations. Germany’s antisemitism commissioner, Felix Klein, described the performance as “hate speech and incitement” and called on concert organizers in Germany to cancel Bob Vylan shows.

Following that performance, Robinson-Foster and his bandmate Wade Laurence George had their U.S. visas revoked. However, Germany is the first country to deny entry and deport a member of the band.

The documents reviewed by The Intercept concern only the implementation of the ban — not the decision-making process behind it. “Our position is simple,” said Alexander Gorski, the German lawyer representing Robinson-Foster. “There is a constitutional right to know the file on which such a decision is based.”

Following Robinson-Foster’s deportation, Gorski submitted a request with the Federal Police headquarters in Potsdam seeking both the deletion of the entry ban from Germany’s national register and access to the files underlying the decision. Soon after, federal police rescinded the entry ban without explaining why it had been lifted. The two-page response, reviewed by The Intercept, states that no additional information could be disclosed.

“It is, of course, good that the ban is now lifted,” Gorski told The Intercept. “But from a rule-of-law perspective, it is deeply problematic that someone can be barred from entering the country over a political statement that is not a criminal offence — and then be denied access to the files.”

Gorski filed a formal objection seeking access to the internal files that led to the decision. He argues that Robinson-Foster has a right to know the factual and legal basis on which he was barred from entering Germany — not only to challenge the lawfulness of the measure, but also to understand what conduct German authorities consider grounds for refusing entry in the future.

“If an artist wants to comply with the law, they have to know what the rules are,” Gorski said.

It’s unclear how a British musician who hasn’t been charged with an offense in either the U.K. or Germany came to be classified by German authorities as a threat to public security. British police previously closed an investigation into Bob Vylan’s Glastonbury performance, concluding there was “insufficient evidence to support a realistic prospect of conviction.”

“There is a lack of crime, not a lack of evidence,” Robinson-Foster told The Intercept in response. “It’s on the BBC. They can just go and watch it.”

According to Gorski, the case is yet another example of a broader shift in the use of German migration law against pro-Palestine figures. Last year, Berlin authorities moved to deport four foreign residents over their participation in protests against Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza.

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Gorski argues that German authorities are increasingly using immigration law “to silence unwanted voices” by preventing critics of Israel from entering Germany or removing them from the country. Similar concerns have been raised by others, including Thomas Oberhäuser, chair of the German Bar Association’s executive committee on migration law, who argues that immigration law is increasingly used for political ends.

Gorski pointed to previous cases involving the British Palestinian surgeon Ghassan Abu Sitta and former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, both of whom he has represented in similar proceedings. German authorities sought to prevent them from entering the country to participate in Palestine-related events.

Robinson-Foster told The Intercept that he traveled to Germany in June in a private capacity to visit friends and music collaborators ahead of the release of the band’s new album. Bob Vylan has toured Germany in recent years, and Robinson-Foster hopes to return soon. Even though authorities rescinded the entry ban, Robinson-Foster said the incident continues to shape his travel plans, saying it “opened a Pandora’s box.”

“It would seem as though the refusal of entry into Germany has now sparked this continued border confusion whenever we try to enter countries,” he said.

Since his deportation, Robinson-Foster said both he and his bandmate have been stopped for questioning at European borders. In one instance, Belgian border officials questioned the band’s drummer about the incident in Germany despite not having traveled there himself, Robinson-Foster said.

“We have shows that we are wanting to put on in Germany,” he said. “It’s a place that we’ve toured for the last five years. For us not to be able to connect with the people that support us there would be a shame.”

The post Free Speech Crackdown: Germany Deports Bob Vylan Frontman for Anti-Israel Chants appeared first on The Intercept.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Saturday night, a man drove a van into a crowd near Berlin’s Pride Festival, before getting out and stabbing several people, leaving one woman dead and dozens injured.

The suspect, identified as 21-year-old Abdul Ballout, a German national and reported supporter of the Islamic State group, was shot dead by police on Sunday following a daylong manhunt.

“We do not want this deed to be used for political ends,” said the organizers of the festival, also known as Christopher Street Day, in a statement on Sunday before the attacker had even been located. “We don’t want any groups to be placed under suspicion for this. People are trying to divide our society and set some people against others. We will not allow this.”

Amid the shock and grief, the organizers saw the immediate need to stop malign political forces using the horrific attack and the queer community’s suffering to fuel Germany’s already fervent anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, and anti-immigrant sentiment.

They had reason for concern. The far-right Alternative for Germany Party, or AfD — which decries trans people as a “cult,” opposes marriage equality and gay adoption, defines a family as only “father, mother and children,” and condemns so-called “gender ideology” — had moved to weaponize the attack within hours.

“The AfD has been warning for years: Islamism is and remains the greatest security threat to our country,” said AfD member of parliament Martin Hess in a statement. He remarked that “we also urgently need a genuine shift in migration policy” — despite the fact that Saturday’s suspect was born and raised in Germany.

The AfD, which is currently the most popular German party according to recent polls, boasts numerous state-level branches classified as extremist organizations by Germany’s intelligence agencies.

Alliance for Bigotry

The party is using a familiar playbook. In 2016, the day after the deadly Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida, then-presidential candidate Donald Trump called for a total ban on immigration from Muslim countries. His two presidencies have since been dedicated to destroying both trans lives and Muslim lives with vigor.

Trump has sought to leverage attacks abroad, including in Germany, to galvanize his anti-Muslim base. The president was quick to condemn the 2016 massacre at a Berlin Christmas market to double down, once again, on his Muslim ban plan.

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So far, Trump hasn’t said anything about the Berlin Pride attack — perhaps his demonization of Muslims has been so thorough that he no longer needs to feign concern about queer lives to gin up Islamophobia — but the alliances that inform these bigotries nonetheless remain a powerful political force.

Trump and his allies have long boosted the very German politics that is cynically leveraging the Berlin attack for political gains.

Last year, anti-trans zealot Elon Musk threw his support and his social media platform behind the far-right party.

“Only the AfD can save Germany,” he wrote on X.

The Right’s Own Attacks

Day in and day out, meanwhile, it is the likes of the AfD and other conservative German parties, and the Republicans at home, who are assaulting the LGBTQ+ rights.

A spike in anti-LGBTQ+ hate crimes in Germany in recent years has been directly linked to a rise in far-right extremism, including more than two dozen attacks at Pride events.

The attacks themselves, however, are only part of the story.

“Politicians are now shamelessly exploiting the suffering of the queer community for their own agenda, while cutting funding for queer organizations, aid projects, and cultural initiatives,” wrote Mohamed Amjahid, a columnist for German newspaper, Taz.

It’s true. Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s Christian Democratic Party, in its role in the coalition leading Berlin’s municipal government, has cut funding for queer community programs in the city and banned drag story hour readings in public libraries.

Of the perpetrators of Saturday’s brutality, Merz said: “They want to take away the most important things we have: our openness, our freedom.”

This purported shared “openness” and “freedom” had not been on display when Merz opposed plans to fly a rainbow flag atop the Reichstag Building to honor Pride last year.

“The Bundestag is not a circus tent,” the conservative chancellor said.

Just hours before Ballout rammed a truck into Pride attendees, Berlin riot police had focused their energies on making arrests and aggressing attendees at the explicitly anti-colonial, anti-capitalist Internationalist Queer Pride march elsewhere in Berlin.

Part-Time Solidarity

As Berlin-based journalist James Jackson noted, Merz’s statement on the attack, along with statements by three other senior conservative politicians, wholly failed to explicitly mention gay or queer people.

The statements defended “tolerance” and “freedom,” but when queer and trans people are attacked and killed, it is not “freedom” that is threatened in the abstract, it is specific forms of life — the very ways of being in the world that have been under assault by far-right politics and centrist complicity, across Europe and the United States.

On Sunday, thousands gathered for a vigil in front of the Brandenburg Gate, which was lit up in rainbow colors by night.

“Last year they refused to let us fly the rainbow flag in front of the Bundestag, because it’s not a circus tent, after all,” said one vigil speaker who identified as Muslim and gay. “Today the flags are flying at half-mast. But solidarity shouldn’t be a knee-jerk reaction after a tragedy.”

It’s a lesson that self-identifying allies in the U.S., above all Democrats who continue to fail trans people, would do well to learn, too.

The post The Right Seeks to Capitalize on Berlin Pride Attack — Even as It Poses Its Own Existential Threat to Queer Lives appeared first on The Intercept.

Despite Cuba being severely hobbled by in the throes of a humanitarian crisis engineered by U.S. sanctions and fuel blockades, the new report paints the country as a major threat.

The report appears to be the brainchild of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a first-generation Cuban American who has made the overthrow of the Cuban government a top priority under the second Trump administration.

Published Monday without a listed author, the report says Cuba is the “capital of 21st century communism,” ideologically immovable, and a permanent enemy committed to the destruction not just of the U.S. but also of “Western civilization” through the spread of “Third Worldism.”

If that sounds like a throwback to the long-settled Cold War, that’s because it is — something critics of the report in Congress seized upon.

Whatever truths the report contains, they’re largely overshadowed by a feverish paranoia about the alleged reach of Cuban intelligence into American civil society, according to Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Wis., days after returning from a fact-finding trip to Cuba.

“It may be the stupidest, most fantastical, most biased thing I’ve ever read from a governmental agency,” Pocan said in a statement Tuesday. “This report focuses on the 1960s & 70s with no clear connection to today. Yet somehow, the State Department uses this report to say that this impoverished nation is responsible for everything from Black Lives Matter to Antifa, the anti-ICE protests and more.”

Rep. Delia Ramirez, D-Ill., who went on the fact-finding mission with Pocan, said the report was aimed at manufacturing consent for an invasion of the island — and to crack down on dissent at home.

“This report was intentionally designed to instill fear of the Cuban people and to justify a military attack on Cuba,” Ramirez told The Intercept. “It’s hypocrisy at its finest, because while criticizing the regime in Cuba, it instead attacks Americans’ constitutional rights to free speech and free assembly.”

In sketching a broad, anti-American conspiracy in nearly dozens of left-wing social movements, organizations, and educational institutions, the report also functions as a broadside on civil society in the U.S — and hardly for the first time.

“Cuba is not a new cudgel,” said Miriam Pensack, a historian at Princeton University specializing in Latin America and the Caribbean. “The Cuban revolution was a galvanizing event for the way that the United States thought about its national security, really until the end of the Cold War. And it still has an ideological utility, even as the country is limping along.”

Center of Global Conspiracy

Running 100 pages, the report lays out what its authors describe as a decadeslong effort by Cuba to foment revolutionary movements throughout the world and to build a latter-day “axis of evil” by allying with other governments opposed to U.S. interests, including the current-day governments of Iran, Russia, China, and North Korea.

“Even as it expands and revitalizes its network within the next generation of American left-wing activists, it has also forged new partnerships — or deepened and repurposed old ones — with other foreign governments and movements around the world,” the report warns. “The regime continues to act as a force multiplier for a much broader anti-American coalition, positioning itself as a staging ground for a wide range of foreign adversaries to conduct operations against the United States.”

Cuba, the authors allege, is “less a nation-state than an all-encompassing intelligence and subversion operation, focused around its existential revolution against the United States.”

The report goes on to list a slew of left-wing groups and individuals as accomplices, both witting and unwitting, of this intelligence operation, including the Democratic Socialists of America, Code Pink, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, and left-wing streamer Hasan Piker.

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In a section stretching nearly five full pages on the National Lawyers Guild, a long-standing right-wing bugaboo, the report’s authors describe the venerable progressive law association as “one of the most persistently relevant — and insidious — organizations in Cuba’s U.S. network.”

Posting to X for the first time since March, the organization quipped, “We have been called much worse, by much better.”

Academic Freedom at Home

The report took aim at universities in the U.S. for maintaining exchange programs and partnerships with Cuban universities, implying that such programs functioned as a feeding ground for Cuban agents looking to recruit spies and fellow travelers.

The report singled out Harvard University, pointing to trips by faculty to Cuba as recently as 2017.

If anything, however, the Cuban government has been wary of exchange programs with American schools, according to Alejandro de la Fuente, a professor of Latin American history and economics at Harvard who chairs the university’s Cuba Studies Program and took part in a trip to Cuba in 2017 that is mentioned in the report.

“They did their best to delimit those exchanges as much as possible because they understood that knowledge production requires freedom and a plurality of viewpoints — precisely what they do not allow,” de la Fuente told The Intercept in an email Wednesday. “Indeed, they would probably argue that it was U.S. universities that were trying to penetrate Cuban institutions and to foment subversion there!”

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Born in Cuba, De la Fuente is hardly an apologist for the Cuban government, at whose feet he laid the blame for the country’s collapse. He acknowledged that Cuban intelligence may have targeted American students and academics in the past, but scoffed at the underlying thesis of the report that Cuba continues to pose a grave threat to the U.S.

“The ineptitude and corruption of the regime have destroyed the country’s economy and society, to the point that the very existence of the nation is in danger,” de la Fuente said. “Can a country like this pose a threat to the national security of the United States today? The answer, any reasonable observer would agree, is emphatically no.”

“War on the Cuban People”

Cuba has made no secret of its support for revolutionary movements throughout the 20th century. And it was a vital partner to left-wing governments in Latin America in the 21st century.

With Cuba today crippled by sanctions and fuel shortages, however, Ramirez, the member of Congress, said the report’s notion of the country as a central node in some threatening conspiracy was a “fiction.”

Accusations about Cuba’s extensive reach into protests against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, antifascist organizing, and Black Lives Matter don’t square with the reality of the severe crisis that has gripped Cuba. In early January, the Trump administration tightened its embargo of the country into a virtual blockade on all fuel arriving in Cuba.

Already weakened by internal tensions and by decades of economic sanctions imposed by the U.S., the island nation has in recent months been plunged into repeated, extended blackouts; its tourism-dependent economy has effectively collapsed; and its citizens face a daily question of where to find their next meal.

Her voice on the verge of tears as she described the humanitarian crisis she witnessed on the island, Ramirez forcefully rejected the notion that the U.S. has anything to fear from Cuba.

“Under no circumstances, at any moment during my trip, did I see anything to make me believe that Cuba poses an existential threat to the United States,” Ramirez said. “On the contrary, what I witnessed was a war on the Cuban people by the United States, and specifically by Donald Trump and Marco Rubio.”

The post Rubio’s Paranoid Cuba Report Designed to “Justify a Military Attack on Cuba,” Says Democratic Rep. appeared first on The Intercept.

“It started with this hilltop,” he said, referring to the current settlement push that has crept ever closer to al-Mughayyir. “We ended up putting the area in Jewish hands. There are no Arabs here.”

Netanel was speaking on a tour aimed at English-speaking Jews, some of whom expressed interest in moving to the settlements. He described his “mission” to support his fellow settlers and shepherds in their return to “Judea and Samaria,” the biblical name Israeli settlers and the Israeli government use for the West Bank.

The settlement movement is accelerating, recruiting outsiders to join and bringing in reinforcements from the military’s Hagmar battalions, regional defense units staffed largely with settlement residents that have exploded in size since October 7, 2023. The government has issued thousands of rifles to civilian security squads, at times distributed personally by Israel’s far-right national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir. Israeli watchdog groups describe the push as an unprecedented state-backed land grab, one that settlers are carrying out with an odd combination of tools: government-supplied rifles alongside herds of sheep and goats.

Reservist settler-soldiers like the Hagmar battalions “are not simply self-organized militia groups,” said Marko Milanovic, a professor of public international law at the University of Reading. “In essence, they should be treated in the same way as IDF soldiers as a legal matter.”

Established in 2025, the Metzudat David is illegal, even under Israeli law. It is one of 10 Israeli outposts that now surround al-Mughayyir as settlements expand at a rapid clip in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. At one stop on the tour, a group of Israeli youths could be seen building a new housing unit for a family slated to move into the settlement.

“The ultimate goal is for people to leave their homes and villages. But the settlers aren’t acting alone, they’re backed by the Israeli government, which uses them as instruments to get what it wants,” Amin Abu Alia, the council head of al-Mughayyir, told The Intercept.

Settlers have taken over more than 38,000 dunams of al-Mughayyir’s grazing and farmland, the equivalent of nearly 9,400 acres. Across the West Bank, settlers living in farm outposts now effectively control roughly 1 million dunams — nearly a fifth of the entire territory — according to a report published this month by the Israeli watchdog groups Peace Now and Kerem Navot. The report found that roughly 750,000 of those dunams were seized since the current Israeli government took office in late 2022.

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Of al-Mughayyir’s roughly 41,000 dunams, Palestinians today have practical access to only 1,200 to 1,500, Abu Alia said. The village’s eastern gate, which opens onto the Alon Road, has been closed by the Israeli military since 2023.

In response to questions from The Intercept, COGAT, the Israeli defense body that administers the West Bank, said the outposts “are known to the Civil Administration and are unauthorized.” The COGAT spokesperson added that the body had already demolished other unauthorized settlement structures. “Additional enforcement measures will be taken in accordance with enforcement priorities, the operational situation assessment, and the approval of the political echelon,” the spokesperson said.

“Once [the Metzudat David] outpost went in, it effectively closed off the village’s access to land to the east, displacing the community from that land,” Dror Etkes, the head of the Israeli settlement watchdog Kerem Navot, told The Intercept. Residents describe a growing sense of foreboding, a feeling that their time is running short before life in al-Mughayyir becomes untenable. And that fear has only grown. On Saturday, a 17-year-old resident, Fadi Naasan, died of wounds he sustained when he was shot during a raid on the village earlier that month, according to the al-Mughayyir village council.

Only a handful of settlers like Netanel oversee the Metzudat David outpost. Otherwise, dozens of animals fan out across the land to claim as much space as possible, requiring very little manpower.

On the tour in June, Netanel showed off the more than 100 sheep and goats that do the settlers’ work for them. The herds graze out Palestinian crops, and their steady, intimidating presence — backed by the threat of settler violence — pushes farmers off land they can no longer safely use, clearing the way for the outpost to absorb it.      

These outposts now control at least 786,000 dunams, roughly 14 percent of all land in the West Bank. Some 70 percent of the land seized by grazing outposts was taken in the past few years, according to Kerem Navot and Peace Now.

For now, the settlers don’t make any money from the livestock, Netanel said. The milk and meat aren’t profitable, but “the other work they do,” he said, “is invaluable.”

Palestinians living in al-Mughayyir are unable to enter the Alon Road, the main artery connecting the eastern half of the West Bank, and must exit through the western side of the village, via Khirbet Abu Falah. Residents say this adds at least an hour to any trip.

Even the fallback route is under threat. One of the new outposts, built inside Area B on al-Mughayyir’s northwestern lands, also encroaches on the very villages the detour runs through, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

“If you go through the IDF checkpoint, it’s a gamble. They can arrest you, beat you, steal your money, steal your belongings,” Omar Mohammed, who lives in al-Mughayyir, told The Intercept. “They can do whatever they want. You can’t do anything about it.” The Israeli military did not respond to questions about mistreatment of residents at checkpoints.

Hodaya, who led the tour and knew a reporter was present, gave only her first name, like Netanel. “On the other side of two hills, there are also another settlement,” she said. “So now, you know, the [farms] are surrounded by Jews, and that helps to make the place more safe.”

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During the tour, an Israeli military armored personnel carrier was stationed at the village’s yellow gate — the kind that has become a distinct marker of movement restrictions across the West Bank since October 7, 2023 — was shut.

When one of the participants on the tour asked whether Palestinians resisted attempts to confiscate their land, Hodaya answered, “They don’t accept it and say, ‘Oh, very nice, we’re going away.’ Of course they’ll fight. They’re on the land, and they were permanent … but they understand that there’s a change.”

There was a sense of excitement on the tour about a Jewish return to what participants called Judea and Samaria, and an explicit recognition that doing so would require displacing Palestinians from their land.     “The assumption is that ‘We cannot get rid of [the roughly 3 million] Palestinians right now in the West Bank,’” Etkes, of the watchdog group Kerem Navot, said, describing the settler thinking. “‘So what we have to do is isolate them and take from them their means of livelihood.’”

Al-Mughayyir was the village most affected by settler violence in the West Bank in 2025, when there were more than 70 recorded settler-related incidents, according to Nasser Khoudr, Middle East assistant research manager at the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data, known as ACLED. It is on track to earn the same distinction in 2026.

“One of the main reasons behind this is the expansion of nearby settlements and farming outposts, especially since 7 October,” Khoudr said. “This expansion has gone together with Israeli government policies that gave more power to settler security structures.”

In April, a settler shot and killed Aws al-Naasan, a 14-year-old student, and Jihad Abu Naim, a 32-year-old parent, at the boys’ school in al-Mughayyir, according to the United Nations and village officials.    

Video of the attack, verified by multiple news outlets, shows a man in military fatigues advancing on the village and firing repeatedly toward the school.

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The Israeli military said the shooter was a reservist traveling in a car with other Israeli civilians who exited the vehicle and opened fire at “suspects in the area,” alleging that they had thrown stones at the car. The military said the reservist was dismissed from reserve duty and his weapon confiscated, and that military police are reviewing the killings. No one has been arrested for the shooting.

Mohammed was one of the first to reach his friend’s body after the settler-reservist shot Aws in the head. “They come in half uniform, wearing the green pants, but not the shirt,” Mohammed said. “We can’t tell if they are a settler, a soldier, or, well, both.”

The distinction has dissolved. Even in regular army units, settler ideology has taken root. In March, reservists detained CNN correspondent Jeremy Diamond and his crew in the village of Tayasir while guarding an illegal outpost, telling the journalists on camera that the entire West Bank belongs to Jews and that they were avenging a settler’s death.

According to the U.N., no Israeli soldier has served prison time for killing a Palestinian in the West Bank since at least 2017, and the Israeli rights group Yesh Din found that 93.6 percent of investigations into settler violence between 2005 and 2025 were closed without indictments.

Last August, after a Palestinian gunman allegedly opened fire on a settler grazing his sheep on al-Mughayyir’s land, the Israeli military declared a closed military zone and uprooted olive trees across roughly 74 acres of the village’s land — at least 3,100 trees by the military’s own count, and far more according to village officials who spoke with The Intercept.

The military said that the clearing was necessary because vegetation near the road obstructed “the identification of enemy movement.” But the head of the army’s Central Command, Maj. Gen. Avi Bluth, told troops the village would “pay a heavy price,” prompting two Israeli human rights groups to demand a criminal investigation into him, suspecting he was ordering collective punishment. None ever occurred.

Netanel described participating in the uprooting. He said it was sad to see the olive trees die, but “it is for security, security of this outpost. We need a clear line of sight into the land.” As Netanel spoke, the roots of the trees still pointed up into the air.

“It’s a process, a process that we are progressing,” Netanel said. “That’s what’s happening here.”

Update: July 23, 2026, 12:16 p.m. ET
This story has been updated with a comment from COGAT, the Israeli defense body that administers the West Bank.

The post On a West Bank Eviction Tour, Israeli Settlers Advertise “No Arabs Here” appeared first on The Intercept.

William Lawrence is running a very different campaign.

In a purple congressional district in Michigan, Lawrence, a co-founder of the progressive Sunrise Movement, is calling for a moratorium on new data centers and labeling Israel’s war in Gaza a genocide.

The approach mirrors that of Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, who has endorsed Lawrence.

Both men are making strong showings in the polls, and now the centrists are fighting back. A shadowy group is running misleading ads that question Lawrence’s progressive bona fides.

The line of attack is telling, Lawrence told The Intercept.

“People are sick of the status quo,” he said. “We have seen this in many cases in other elections this cycle — that corporate centrists are attacking progressives for not being progressive enough. And it shows you what voters are hungry for is change.”

An unabashed progressive, Lawrence breaks the mold of the typical candidate to run for a seat like Michigan’s 7th Congressional District, which is centered around the state capital of Lansing and the college town of East Lansing.

The district was previously represented by centrist Democrat Elissa Slotkin, who now serves in the Senate, and is currently held by Republican first-term Rep. Tom Barrett.

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The other two candidates running in Michigan’s August 4 primary hew closer to Slotkin’s mold. Bridget Brink is a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine who quit in protest of President Donald Trump’s policies on the war with Russia, and Matt Maasdam is a former Navy SEAL who served as a military aide to President Barack Obama.

Unlike Lawrence, both declined to call Israel’s war on Gaza genocide at a debate.

Lawrence also comes from a starkly different background: While Brink and Maasdam traveled the corridors of power in Washington, Lawrence focused on building grassroots power, first through his role co-founding the youth-led Sunrise Movement, which backed the Green New Deal, and more recently helping found the Michigan Rent Is Too Damn High coalition.

Mutual Endorsements

On July 7, Lawrence and El-Sayed announced that they were endorsing each other. Like Lawrence, El-Sayed is running in the progressive lane in his primary while arguing that it will not hurt his electability in the general.

“We have a lot of people who want to back both of us,” Lawrence said. “Given that the two of us both prioritize having a very robust, grassroots campaign rather than just relying on tens of millions of dollars in dark money like our respective opponents, it is especially beneficial for us to be able to integrate our grassroots operations.”

Although no independent polls of the race have been released, Lawrence’s campaign commissioned one showing him leading the pack. Another commissioned by Brink’s campaign showed her ahead.

Now that Lawrence has demonstrated that he has a shot at winning, the attacks have begun.

The Congressional Black Caucus is targeting him over a podcast episode in which Lawrence remarked to a Black anti-war activist during a conversation on organizing that he was frustrated with the position of some older Black political leaders backing “capitalist, imperialist American power.”

Lawrence says his comments have been misrepresented while apologizing for his choice of words.

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Meanwhile, a super PAC called the Crush MAGA PAC is targeting Lawrence, rather than the Republican holding the seat. The group has plowed more than $500,000 into a highly misleading ad that accuses Lawrence of investing in “Wall Street, big oil, and data centers” and campaigning against Democrats for supporting the 2024 Uncommitted movement, which sought to pressure party candidates over Israel’s war on Gaza.

The investments highlighted in the anti-Lawrence ad make up a small portion of the $11,000 Lawrence has invested in a mutual fund; the mutual fund, not Lawrence himself, chose them. And, for his part, Lawrence eventually supported Kamala Harris in the 2024 election.

The source of the ad campaign against Lawrence is unclear, but he has speculated that it may be powered by pro-Israel donors.

Crush MAGA PAC is affiliated with another group called the Save Democracy PAC, which has received money from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s super PAC, United Democracy Project. United Democracy Project, however, denied getting involved in the Michigan congressional race. (Neither Crush MAGA PAC nor Save Democracy PAC responded to requests for comment.)

If Lawrence succeeds in the primary, he will have to win in a general election in a purple district. He believes he can show that progressive candidates can win in split districts, pointing to the election and reelection of Congressional Progressive Caucus member Rep. Chris Deluzio in a swing district in Pennsylvania.

“He’s not throwing people under the bus, and he has joined the progressive caucus, and he has now turned that into a more comfortable district. He has been winning with healthy margins,” Lawrence said. “That is what I hope to be able to do as well.”

The post William Lawrence Is Running in a Purple Michigan District — on His Pro-Palestine Credentials appeared first on The Intercept.

The lawsuit, filed in a New York federal court by Democracy for the Arab World Now, or DAWN, and Taxpayer Alliance Against Genocide, seeks to reverse sanctions brought under Executive Order 14203.

The order, which President Donald Trump made in February 2025, grants the administration power to issue penalties against any person or group seeking to bring a case against the U.S. or its allies — namely Israel — before the International Criminal Court.

The plaintiffs, both of whom coordinate with international NGOs in an effort to hold the U.S. and Israel accountable for war crimes, are seeking a declaration that the ICC sanctions are in violation of their First Amendment rights because they create obstacles to free association. The lawsuit also asks for an injunction barring the Trump administration from using sanctions to stymie free speech.

Trump’s assault on the ICC — most recently including a vow to “dismantle” the court — has focused mostly on efforts to hold Israel accountable for war crimes. In November 2024, the court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, another Israeli official, and an official with the armed Palestinian group Hamas for activities during the time period of Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

The White House executive order came down shortly after the arrest warrants were issued.

The rights groups’ lawsuit specifically highlights sanctions against Francesca Albanese, the U.N. official tasked with probing human rights violations in the occupied Palestinian territories, and three Palestinian nongovernmental organizations. According to the plaintiffs, the sanctions impinge on their First Amendment rights by preventing them from engaging in protected speech activities with Albanese and the NGOs.

“The Trump administration is using the blunt instrument of economic sanctions not only to punish human rights defenders but to police the political expression of millions of Americans,” said Omar Shakir, the executive director of DAWN, which was founded by journalist Jamal Khashoggi before his assassination by the Saudi government. “The government is violating the constitutional rights of American citizens in order to shield officials of a foreign government who have committed a genocide.”

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The defendants named in the suit are Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, and Brad Smith, the director of the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control. (None of the American government officials immediately responded to requests for comment.)

Trump and his allies’ war on the international human rights community goes back years: In 2020, Trump issued sanctions against an ICC prosecutor after she called for an investigation into U.S. human rights abuses in Afghanistan.

Shortly after retaking the White House, Trump lifted Biden-era sanctions on Israeli settlers involved in violence against Palestinians and destruction of their property. Trump then issued Executive Order 14203, “Imposing Sanctions on the International Criminal Court,” which placed visa restrictions and financial penalties on individuals and groups seeking to help the ICC in any potential case against the U.S., Israel, or other allies.

Months later, the administration issued sanctions against Albanese, the U.N. special rapporteur. Albanese was briefly removed from the sanctions list in May after a federal judge ruled that the sanctions violated her rights, but the Office of Foreign Assets Control, which administers U.S. sanctions, added her to the list again days later, according to Al Jazeera.

The Albanese sanctions were followed in September 2025 with an edict sanctioning three NGOs: Al Haq, Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, and the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights.

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In addition to penalizing Albanese and the NGOs, the sanctions bar any U.S. people or groups from engaging with them and make it a federal offense to receive or provide any “service” related to designated groups and people — an action the plaintiffs argue is in violation of their First Amendment rights.

The lawsuit comes at a moment of heightened attention to the sanctions against the ICC. Days before the lawsuit was filed, Rubio launched a broadside against the ICC in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece laying out a case for “dismantling” the court. Rubio specifically cited calls by DAWN for an investigation into potential war crimes in the U.S. bombing campaign against Iran.

“The ICC is backed and run by a powerful network of leftist nongovernment organizations, smug globalists, and hostile Third World governments united by their enmity toward the U.S.,” Rubio wrote. “Using all the tools at our government’s disposal, working beside every ally with whom we can make common cause, we will dismantle the ICC—brick by brick, if necessary.”

The timing of Rubio’s renewed attack on the ICC alongside the lawsuit appears to be a coincidence, but only serves to further underscore the stakes, according to Michael Schaeffer Omer-Man, a spokesperson for DAWN.

“The fact that he mentioned DAWN in his Wall Street Journal op-ed shows that the risk [of prosecution] to Americans is real,” Schaeffer Omer-Man told The Intercept. “But our primary goal is to get legal clarity that we can continue to have a working relationship with Francesca Albanese, and, equally if not more importantly, that we can resume working shoulder to shoulder with Palestinian civil society and human rights groups.”

The post Trump’s Sanctions Against the ICC Are Unconstitutional, Rights Groups Say appeared first on The Intercept.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ceasefire Collapse

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

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

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

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

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

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

U.S. Death Toll

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wounded U.S. Personnel

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

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

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

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

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

In 2023, Israeli settlers took firearms and bulldozers to the village, destroying the school and other buildings and displacing dozens of Bedouin Palestinian residents from their homes. 

While standing amid the rubble, one of Khanna’s staffers spotted an Israeli settler wearing a large smile on his face with an assault rifle draped around his shoulder, peering at the group through a broken window.

Khanna and his small delegation of his staffer Cameron Kasky, their driver, and a security guard hurried back into their van, Khanna and Kasky, a Parkland school shooting survivor and former congressional candidate, said in interviews with The Intercept.   

Settlers had parked their car directly in front of them, blocking their exit along a narrow dirt road that juts from Highway 60 with rocky slopes and dry grass on both sides.

Over the next 75 to 90 minutes, Israeli settlers, who carried what appeared to be M4 assault rifles, intimidated and harassed Khanna and his group, who felt their fear rising from inside the van. The settlers proceeded to menace the Americans: They prevented the group from leaving the village, brandished their rifles, laughed and yelled taunts at the group, kicked the van’s tires, and wiped down the windows with their hands to gawk inside, recording the group and snapping photos. Khanna and Kasky said their security aide identified the men as members of the Hilltop Youth, an extremist settler group with a history of violent raids, which prompted more concern among the delegation. 

“It’s the most powerless I have felt,” Khanna told The Intercept. “They paraded around the van, laughing, smiling, brandishing the M4s. I have not been treated that way in any other country I’ve traveled to, including China. In any place that I have traveled, it’s the most arrogant and humiliating treatment of American citizens I have endured — I was quite shocked.”  

Two white pickup trucks later pulled up and out stepped more armed settlers, according to video and footage reviewed by The Intercept. Later, another vehicle arrived carrying a group of four men and women dressed in green military uniforms, which their security aide identified as Israeli military, Khanna and Kasky recalled. Rather than attempting to resolve the situation, the soldiers joined the group, laughing and talking with the settlers, and at one point, smoking cigarettes together, they said. 

Even after the security aide identified the group as an American delegation with a member of Congress, the settlers and soldiers did not budge. “The security person said this is the most concerned he’s ever been, and he’s done tours for decades,” Khanna recalled.

In response to a request for comment by The Intercept, the Israeli military acknowledged that “a report was received regarding Israeli civilians who were unlawfully blocking the vehicles of foreign nationals and members of the media.” The statement directly contradicted Khanna’s and Kasky’s account, with the military claiming soldiers had helped clear the group of settlers.

“Upon receiving the report, IDF troops were dispatched to the scene, quickly dispersed the Israeli civilians, and reopened the blocked road. The IDF soldiers operating in the area did not take part in blocking the road,” the military said, adding, “The identity of the armed individual is currently under review.”

Kasky, who joined Khanna’s office in January following his own visit to the West Bank and has been working with Khanna on his Israel and Palestine policy, said he was afraid the incident would turn more violent, recalling accounts of settler attacks.

“I was sitting there like, ‘Are the Hilltop Youth about to blow a bunch of holes in our vehicle?’” Kasky remembered saying to himself. “I’m a Jewish school shooting survivor, and I’m sitting here looking at Jewish kids who have the eyes of a school shooter. So it was a very surreal experience for me.” 

Harassment from Israeli settlers and military has long been a regular occurrence for Palestinians in the West Bank, who face severe restrictions on daily movement throughout the territory. Palestinians are subject to a military court system where the accused lack due process rights and thousands are imprisoned indefinitely, oftentimes without charge. Israeli forces and settlers have killed more than 1,100 Palestinians in the West Bank since October 7, 2023. That figure includes a growing number of Palestinian Americans and other American citizens.

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Harassment of foreign delegations in the West Bank is more rare. In September 2023, European Union diplomats reported harassment by Israeli settlers during a visit. In May 2025, Israeli soldiers fired warning shots toward a delegation of diplomats visiting Jenin, which included officials from the United Kingdom, France, Canada, and Ireland. The last reported instance of harassment toward an American delegation was in 2015, when settlers hurled rocks at diplomats investigating reports of settler attacks in the area.

Members of Congress have visited the West Bank in the past, but Khanna’s run-in with settlers is the first known instance of direct harassment by Israeli settlers toward a sitting U.S. lawmaker. 

During the incident, Khanna said he phoned an official in the U.S. Embassy, which urged the group not to escalate the situation. After more than an hour, the group of settlers and soldiers suddenly drove off. Shortly after, Israeli police arrived and instructed the group not to return under threat of arrest. 

“I thought to myself, if they can do this to an American member of Congress and to American citizens, imagine what life is like for ordinary Palestinians who do not have a national platform, who can’t just pick up the phone and call the American embassy,” Khanna said.

The recent trip wasn’t Khanna’s first visit to the West Bank. In 2022, Khanna joined a delegation of lawmakers, led by Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and visited with leaders in Israel and Palestinian leaders in Ramallah. Khanna’s remarks praising Israel’s tech industry drew criticism from pro-Palestine advocates, who at the time accused the lawmaker of using the visit as a “photo op” to “whitewash Israeli apartheid.”    

Khanna had long branded himself as an anti-war figure. In 2004, he ran an unsuccessful bid for Congress centered around his opposition to the Iraq War. And after being elected to Congress in 2016, Khanna would help spearhead an effort to halt U.S. military support to Saudi-led military intervention in Yemen’s civil war. 

Israel, however, remained a blindspot. But since the October 7 Hamas attacks and the start of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, Khanna has evolved from a pro-Israel Democrat who regularly voted to send military aid to Israel into one of its staunchest opponents, especially as he gears up for a potential 2028 presidential run. 

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Khanna is a co-sponsor to the Block the Bombs bill and in April said he opposes the transfer of all U.S. arms — both offensive and so-called defensive weapons — to Israel. Last month, he attempted to strike a portion of the National Defense Authorization Act that seeks to codify Israel’s joint development of weapons with the U.S. and said he would also urge senators to oppose the pro-Israel proposal. Khanna is also a co-sponsor on the West Bank Violence Prevention Act, which seeks to codify sanctions on Israeli settlers, and in January, introduced a resolution opposing the expansion of settlements. In his war powers resolution against the Iran war, he said in June 2025, “U.S. involvement in Israel’s war with Iran is a red line.”

After the run-in with Israeli settlers, the congressman put a finer point on the need to stop arming Israel.

“We’re supplying them the M4s that they’re using to detain American citizens,” he said. “We’re supplying them the weapons that they’re using to kill Palestinian Americans. We’re supplying them the weapons that they’re using to commit terror on the Palestinian population in the West Bank.
It is simply inhumane, and the United States needs to not just sanction these extremist settlers — we need to demand that the IDF start to demolish the outposts in the West Bank.”

Khanna said he still differentiates between settler outposts and larger, long-standing Israeli settlement communities that function as suburban neighborhoods. While he believes outposts should be dismantled, he said the larger settlements should be subject to a land swap with Palestinians as part of a broader political deal to grant Palestinians sovereignty. Yet he still opposed the expansion of the larger settlements and said U.S. funds should not be used to construct such developments.

As Congress took its summer recess, Khanna took the three-day visit to the West Bank this week at Kasky’s urging. The American journalist Jasper Nathaniel, who extensively covers the West Bank and facilitated Kasky’s previous visit, had invited Khanna to visit and connected the group with local Palestinian residents, businesses, activists, and leaders. 

When Khanna and Kasky landed in Tel Aviv on Tuesday, Kasky said Israeli airport security took him to a back office where officers questioned him for 40 minutes while showing him a printed screenshot of his Twitter profile where he had previously written in his bio “Stop funding genocide” and a separate printout of a tweet by a pro-Israel user who had spotted Kasky at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport in December 2025. The officials continued to hold Kasky despite Khanna identifying him as a part of his office.

After his release, Kasky said he received notification that the Israeli government had revoked his travel visa.

“I’m probably never going to get into the country again,” he said.

During the wide-ranging trip, the delegation spoke with Palestinian shopkeepers in Hebron, who reported harassment from neighboring Israelis who from the upper floors hurled rotten vegetables and acid, and urinated on their stores below. Mayors of Bethlehem, Beit Sahour, and Beit Jala told Khanna of water shortages and the Israeli military-imposed restrictions on Palestinians from drilling new wells, while Israeli settlers enjoy unfettered access to water. Khanna met with the relatives of Amer Mohammad Saada Rabee, the 14-year-old Palestinian American from New Jersey who was shot and killed by Israeli soldiers in April. Other Palestinian residents, including American citizens, spoke of settlers destroying their cars and raiding their homes. The brother of Awdah Hathaleen, who was shot dead by the Israeli settler Yinon Levi in July 2025, told Khanna how he still sees Levi roam free as Israeli prosecutors mull whether to charge him. 

On Wednesday, the same day of the incident with Israeli settlers, Khanna’s group had been held up for more than an hour by Israeli officials in Masafer Yatta, where the Israeli government constructed a large metal gate on the only road in and out of the area. Khanna, who is Hindu and of Indian descent, said he has never been more acutely aware of his identity as when he was in Palestine, with Israeli guards constantly asking about his race and religion. 

Khanna — who is a ranking member of the House Armed Services subcommittee on Cybersecurity, Innovation Technology, and Information Systems — urged other members of Congress, especially other ranking members in foreign policy committees, to also visit the West Bank in Palestinian-led visits. 

He said he would raise the issue of the settler incident with the State Department and his colleagues in Congress.    

“I am convinced that the most pro-Israel candidate — who may dispute my characterization of genocide by legal means, who may disagree with me in my belief of a Palestinian state, who may argue with me about Israel taking preventive measures, in their view, to minimize civilian casualties — even such a person, if they spent one day in the West Bank,” Khanna said, “if they visited the Palestinians side of Hebron, if they visited Um al-Khair, if they visited Palestinian towns and villages in Areas A and B, if they saw the settler’s outpost, they would conclude that it is apartheid, that it is unjust, that it is a perversion of Judaism in any form of civilized human existence.” 

The post Armed Israeli Settlers Detained Ro Khanna. He Wants Their Illegal Outposts Demolished. appeared first on The Intercept.

Maybe.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In a highly unusual move this weekend, the international soccer federation reversed a suspension of a top U.S. player after a personal intervention by Trump, undermining the integrity of the game, according to experts.

Trump personally called FIFA President Gianni Infantino, following a win by the U.S. men’s soccer team in the FIFA World Cup last week, and asked him to review the one-game suspension of striker Folarin Balogun, the team’s top goal scorer. On Sunday, FIFA reversed course, announcing Balogun would be eligible to play in the upcoming U.S. match against Belgium. It was the first time that FIFA has nullified a suspension for a red card received during the World Cup in 64 years.

“Thank you to FIFA for doing what was right, and reversing a great injustice!” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Sunday. 

The Union of European Football Associations expressed “disbelief at such an unprecedented, incomprehensible and unjustifiable decision” that it said undermined not just the tournament but soccer itself.

“Football, like any other sports, relies on rules, which are the basis for fair, honest and transparent competition,” UEFA said in a statement. “When the certainty of rules is no longer guaranteed by its guardians, the integrity of the game is at stake and the credibility of a competition is undermined.”

On Monday, Trump described FIFA referee Raphael Claus, who gave Balogun the red card after a review suggested by the video assistant referee, as “very suspect” — an apparent reference to past accusations of match fixing.

Asked if his intervention with Infantino created a troubling precedent which would lead other world leaders to attempt to exert influence over soccer, Trump dismissed concerns. “I had nothing to do with the decision,” he said on Monday. “What I did have to do is, I said, I think this should be reviewed.”

The red card reversal is not FIFA’s first concession to Trump. After years of lobbying and begging by Trump failed to win him a Nobel Peace Prize, FIFA created its own peace prize last year and presented it to Trump.

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FIFA signed a partnership agreement with Trump’s so-called Board of Peace to “foster investment into football for the purpose of helping the recovery process in post conflict areas,” Infantino announced earlier this year. Trump controls the Board of Peace’s finances as its chair, creating what looks to be a massive slush fund. For the past year, FIFA has also leased office space at Trump Tower in New York City.

For more than six months, FIFA has ducked questions from The Intercept about the Peace Prize and the organization’s fealty to Trump. FIFA spokesperson Jhamie Chin did not reply to repeated questions about the federation’s recent capitulation over Balogun’s suspension.

Trump undercutting the credibility of the single largest and most-watched sporting event in the world mirrors his long-running efforts to weaken the electoral process in the United States and undermine the integrity of elections. Trump is currently attempting to force Congress to pass legislation — the SAVE America Act — which threatens to increase the difficulty or block the ability to vote for millions of eligible American citizens, justifying the legislation with false claims of voter fraud. According to research by the Brennan Center for Justice, more than 21 million citizens do not have ready access to a birth certificate, a passport, or naturalization papers that would be needed to comply with a so-called “show your papers” provision.

For years, Trump has regularly peddled fictions about “rigged” elections, including his 2020 presidential election loss to Joe Biden. After the 2020 election, the results were certified, and 61 of 62 lawsuits challenging the results of the election failed. Trump refused, however, to accept the facts and continues to peddle the lie that he won the 2020 race. Since then, Trump has regularly claimed, without offering evidence, that Democratic electoral victories are the result of fraud. Most recently, he claimed, without any proof, that the Los Angeles mayoral race was “rigged” against former reality star Spencer Pratt.

Trump said on Monday that he would view a victory by Belgium in the same light. “If they beat us, I say it was rigged, just like the election was rigged in 2020,” he announced.

In awarding him its inaugural peace prize, FIFA said that Trump was “recognised for his tireless efforts to promote peace.” In the five-plus years Trump has been in the White House, alone, the U.S. has been embroiled in more than 20 military interventions, armed conflicts, and wars, according to an analysis by The Intercept.

Chin deflected when asked in February how FIFA could ignore Trump’s constant war-making. The spokesperson failed to respond to repeated follow-up questions on Monday.

The post FIFA Gives Trump Exactly What He Wants appeared first on The Intercept.

The Other Lobby

Regime change in Venezuela; a punishing siege of Cuba; election meddling in Honduras, Argentina, and Colombia; economic sabotage and terrorist designations in Brazil; boots-on-the-ground militarism, knife-to-the-throat death squads, and torture in Ecuador; lawfare, psy-ops, and CIA kill teams in Mexico; mass deportations and support for a gulag state in El Salvador; a deadly crackdown on protesters in Bolivia; and outright murder in the Caribbean and Pacific — a year and a half into his second term, President Donald Trump has deployed, with significant success, the full range of U.S. hard power on Latin America.

Even as the White House has proved reckless and self-defeating in Iran, it has maintained a menacing, disciplined focus on Latin America. The siege of Cuba and informal annexation of Venezuela are the centerpieces of this program, but there’s not one country, except perhaps Uruguay, where Washington isn’t in deep. The State Department was even micromanaging the recent Colombian elections, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio personally approving the deportation of Beto Coral, a Colombian national who lives in Texas, because he has been critical of Trump’s preferred candidate.

The extent of this power projection is impressive, even if the power asymmetries make operations in Latin America easy compared to the Middle East. You can pressure Ecuador with a gang designation and $20 million in security aid and get results. You can’t do that with Iran.

But asymmetry alone doesn’t explain the Trump administration’s overwhelming focus on Latin America. Florida, to a large degree, does. A narrow, wealthy Latin American diaspora geographically concentrated in the greater Miami area has captured U.S. hemispheric policy — not through persuasion or broad public support, but through the state’s electoral math and alliance with the Republican Party. This informal lobby represents a Latin American propertied class who fancy themselves dispossessed, who imagine their interests threatened by the mildest of democratic reforms. The members of this class see Trump and Rubio as their personal repo men. 

The Cause

Florida’s outsized role in U.S. politics begins with the backlash to Cuba’s 1959 revolution. Those who fled Fidel Castro’s socialist government in its early days overwhelmingly came from the middle and upper classes. They turned the peninsula into a sanctuary state. After the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion — the CIA’s 1961 bid to use exiles as an expeditionary force to invade Cuba and dislodge Castro — the more ideological of these agency-trained exiles continued to populate the counterinsurgent gothic. These Cuban emigres allied with rogue elements in the CIA and FBI, Colombian drug traffickers, and mafiosi to advance “The Cause,” as the novelist James Ellroy calls efforts to liberate Cuba through the violent overthrow of Castro’s government.

Cuban exiles, drawn into covert operations and the ranks of the then-fringe U.S. New Right, would go on to participate in many of the storied black-bag operations that defined the middle to late Cold War: the conspiracies surrounding JFK’s assassination (as the House Select Committee on Assassinations put it in 1979: “anti-Castro Cuban groups, as groups, were not involved in the assassination, but the available evidence does not preclude the possibility that individual members may have been involved in the assassination) and the execution of revolutionary Che Guevara in Bolivia, led by Bay of Pigs veteran and CIA operative Félix Rodríguez, who then went to Vietnam to train the death squads of the Phoenix Program. Other Bay of Pigs alumni flew CIA combat missions over the Congo strafing Simba rebels and carried out the Nixon White House’s Watergate break-in and the Iran–Contra affair, in which Reagan administration officials secretly sold weapons to embargoed Iran and diverted the illegal profits to right-wing Contra rebels in Nicaragua, directly violating a congressional ban.

The Cold War ended but the Cause continued. In 2000, the notorious Republican operative Roger Stone recruited Cuban American protesters for the infamous Brooks Brothers riot — the mob action that shut down the Miami-Dade recount of presidential ballots and handed George W. Bush the White House — by instrumentalizing exile grievance through Cuban radio broadcasts. “The idea we were putting out there,” Stone later said, “was that this was a left-wing power grab by Gore, the same way Fidel Castro did it in Cuba.”

Drug profits financed many of these operations. “Every major area of operation in which the CIA has worked has left behind a major functioning drug cartel,” as CIA operative-turned-whistleblower John Stockwell put it. So too the Western Hemisphere with the Cubans. The beginning of the modern cocaine trade “had developed largely under the control of exile Cuban criminal organizations based in Miami,” Bruce Bagley, an expert on Latin American drug trafficking, observed in Foreign Affairs.

By the late 1970s, Miami prospered, even as the rest of the country was suffering from a prolonged economic downturn, high unemployment, and urban decay. Laundered cocaine money in effect provided Miami a covert Keynesian stimulus, a massive injection of cash into construction, retail, banking, and services at the exact moment the U.S. government was abandoning such policies as inflationary. While nearly every other Federal Reserve district was running a deficit, the vault of Miami’s Fed was stuffed with a $5 billion surplus made up of manicured bundles of $50 and $100 bills, evidence of large cash transactions conducted outside normal financial channels. Real estate boomed. Employment boomed. Car dealerships, paid in cash, boomed. Buildings went up, the city’s traditional pastel stucco and red tiles giving way to glass, glitz, and gleam.

Cuban Americans came to dominate Miami’s independent banking sector. Continental National Bank, the first Cuban American-owned bank in the United States, was founded in 1974 by exile Carlos Dascal in Miami’s Little Havana neighborhood. Typical of the small Latin American-owned banks that proliferated in this period, Continental went from $12 million in annual deposits in the mid-1970s to over $600 million by 1980 — a dramatic illustration of the narco-dollars flooding Miami’s banking system.

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It was a wild time in Miami’s exile community. Cocaine and covert ops were a dangerous mix. No two figures better embodied the era than Luis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch — both CIA-trained Bay of Pigs veterans, both connected to the New Orleans mob and the drug trade. Together, they founded the Coordinación de Organizaciones Revolucionarias Unidas, or CORU, which the FBI described as “an anti-Castro terrorist umbrella organization” that served as a subcontractor for Operation Condor, Chilean military dictator Augusto Pinochet’s hemisphere-wide assassination program. In 1976, Cuban CORU operatives planted the car bomb that killed former Chilean ambassador Orlando Letelier and his U.S. colleague Ronni Moffitt in Sheridan Circle in Washington — the first case of state-sponsored international terrorism in the nation’s capital. Posada and Bosch also carried out the bombing of Cubana de Aviación Flight 455 off the coast of Barbados, killing all 73 people aboard, including the Cuban national fencing team, soon after.

Democracy Promotion in Hialeah

Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential election victory changed the calculus. His advisors were hard-line: the New Right had moved from the fringe to the halls of power. Cocaine continued to finance Miami, but the off-the-books exiles had become a liability. The historian Alan McPherson writes that by the mid-1970s, Cuban exile militants had carried out, in addition to the attacks described above, more than 100 bombings on U.S. soil and in 1974 accounted for 45 percent of all terrorist bombings in the world. The Reagan White House didn’t want to dim exile passion, but it also didn’t want planes being shot down over the Caribbean and bombs exploding in Sheridan Circle. And so mercenaries were out, and lobbyists were in.

Reagan’s national security adviser Richard Allen worked with Jorge Mas Canosa, who had left Cuba in 1960, to create the Cuban American National Foundation, or CANF. Allen explicitly modeled CANF on the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, better known as AIPAC — telling fellow Cubans to study the Israeli lobby and replicate its methods, as documented by political scientists Patrick Haney and Walt Vanderbush. The goal was not just to sideline terrorists like Posada and Bosch but to marginalize more moderate perspectives within the Cuban American community who wanted some accommodation with the Cuban government. Reagan needed a respectable political vehicle for hard-line Cuba policy that could operate in the open. That was CANF.

Note the self-reinforcing loop: The Reagan White House organized the creation of a lobbying group to lobby itself for policies it already wanted to pursue, generating the appearance of popular democratic pressure for what was in fact long-standing government hostility toward the Cuban Revolution.

Mas Canosa put his own personalistic imprint on the AIPAC model. He combined, as Saul Landau put it, the style of an “old-style political ward boss” — getting himself and his allies appointed to local utility, road, and electoral commissions; awarding contracts; doing incoming immigrants favors; finding them jobs and housing — “with the pragmatic lobbying techniques” of AIPAC, cultivating congressional allies to enforce and strengthen the Cuba sanctions. His anti-Castro ideology was both genuine and lucrative: a Cuba opened to U.S. capital would be an enormous prize, and he and his inner circle would be best positioned to seize it.

In 1989, CANF won its first congressional seat, when Cuban-born Ileana Ros-Lehtinen defeated her Democratic opponent to succeed Claude Pepper, the New Deal lion who had championed labor, Medicare, and Social Security from the same Miami district for more than two decades. The symbolism was stark: “Red” Pepper’s left-liberal tradition eclipsed by Cuban exile politics.

Ros-Lehtinen would serve for 30 years, becoming the powerful chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and what the South Florida journalist Juan David Rojas called a founding figure of the “Miami neocons.” She was simultaneously the exile community’s most aggressive Cuba hard-liner, a champion of Israel in its Lebanon and Gaza wars, the author of Iran sanctions legislation, and a vocal defender of the accused Flight 455 bomber Orlando Bosch. Her former intern was Marco Rubio, now Trump’s national security adviser and secretary of state.

Over in Broward County, Florida’s 25th Congressional District, with its large Jewish, Colombian, and Venezuelan population, Debbie Wasserman Schultz is another Miami neocon, a Democratic one, advocating for hard-line policies in both Israel and Latin America. An AIPAC favorite, Wasserman Schultz shortly after first being elected in 2004 worked closely with Trump’s current Venezuela viceroy, Mauricio Claver-Carone, to squash five initiatives that would have diluted Cuba sanctions. 

At the time, Claver-Carone, born in Miami, was running both the U.S.–Cuba Democracy PAC and the Cuba Democracy Advocates. Since 1996, the National Endowment for Democracy, a nongovernmental organization, and the U.S government have channeled more than $100 million into similar “democracy” programs, many of them headquartered in Hialeah and Coral Gables. Democratization in Cuba was the stated objective, but the work of the NGOs and their subcontractors are often protected from disclosure as “trade secrets” under FOIA exemptions.

Mas Canosa died in 1997, and the conventional wisdom at the time was that the Cuban American lobby had peaked. The old guard was dying off, and poll after poll showed that younger Cuban Americans — U.S.-born, English-dominant, less connected to the island — were open to normalization and an end to the embargo. President Barack Obama’s surprise announcement in December 2014 that the United States and Cuba would restore diplomatic relations — the most significant shift in Cuba policy in more than half a century, negotiated secretly with the help of Pope Francis — seemed to confirm the lobby’s decline.

And yet the U.S. government, in the last two years of Obama’s presidency, continued to flood Miami with “democracy promotion” grants, a direct federal stimulus to activists who would become some of Donald Trump’s staunchest supporters. With Trump’s election, what looked like the lobby’s last gasp turned out to be its renaissance.

Trump ended the normalization of relations with Havana and, listening to Florida’s then-Sen. Marco Rubio, imposed harsh sanctions on the island. After Ron DeSantis’s 2018 gubernatorial victory turned the state hard right, Florida (home to a good number of the nation’s billionaires, including Jeff Bezos and Google co-founder Larry Page) became the command center of MAGA power.

A Febrile Complex

Beyond Trump, something was transforming Miami that would change the lobby’s nature entirely. Through the 2000s and into the 2020s, the city was absorbing a new wave of Latin American capital flight on a scale that dwarfed anything produced by the original Cuban exodus.

Across Latin America, economic liberalization, a policy pushed by Washington since the 1980s, failed to generate prosperity and stability, leading many nations to elect left-leaning governments. Venezuelans had been arriving in Florida since Hugo Chávez’s first election in 1998. Now they were joined by wealthy Brazilians, Bolivians, Argentines, Nicaraguans, and Mexicans. Colombians had been coming for decades, fleeing the violence of their country’s civil war.

Even the mildest of leftists could spark a flight of capital northward. When it looked like Gabriel Boric would win Chile’s 2021 presidential election, two Chilean law firms opened offices in Miami to help wealthy Chileans move their assets to South Florida. Boric did win, and investors pulled money out of Chile at a record pace, leaving behind what Bloomberg estimated as a $50 billion hole. Chileans ranked eighth among foreign buyers of real estate in South Florida in 2021.

“When governments in Latin America go left,” as one prominent Miami realtor put it, “buyers go north.” Latin Americans bought nearly half of all new luxury units in South Florida through mid-2025, most of them in cash.

The city of Doral, just west of Miami, became so heavily Venezuelan it is informally known as Doralzuela. Miami’s Brickell neighborhood is filled with Colombian and Brazilian private banking offices. The Biscayne corridor attracted Mexican, Argentine, and Peruvian capital. These were not the huddled poor who arrived in the 1980 Mariel boatlift, an exodus of Cubans, or the desperate Haitians who came after the 1991 coup. These were the propertied business classes — and they were looking for ideological allies in Washington to beat back the social democrats at home.

The Cuban exile network absorbed and nurtured the grievances of these new arrivals. Following the 2009 military coup in Honduras — which ousted the elected center-left president Manuel Zelaya and replaced him with a right-wing government — a delegation of Miami Cubans, working with Sen. John McCain, the Republican Party’s most prominent neoconservative, served as a bridge between AIPAC and the greater Latin American lobby and hosted Honduras’s coup leaders in Washington to validate their takeover. For a brief moment, President Obama opposed the coup government, but when Cuban Americans and other conservatives began associating him with Castro and Chávez, he backed down and recognized the regime as legitimate.

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The new Latin American arrivals found a common language in a single word: “castro-chavismo.” The term had been popularized in Álvaro Uribe, Colombia’s former president and leader of its far right. Uribe himself imported the term into the U.S. as part of a campaign to derail the Colombian government’s Cuban-brokered peace agreement with the FARC guerrillas. Flanked by then-Sen. Marco Rubio and Rep. Mario Díaz-Balart, Uribe gave a rallying speech at a Doral restaurant, Mondongo’s, in October 2016. He warned the crowd of Colombian and Venezuelan expats that castrochavismo would come to Colombia if the peace deal were ratified. Uribe used this trip to deepen his ties with Trump’s people: Policy analyst Adam Isacson and historian Christy Thornton, separately, note Uribe’s influence on Trump’s first reelection campaign, when he ran ads in Florida linking President Joe Biden to the Latin American left. “Joe Biden is a PUPPET of CASTRO-CHAVISTAS,” he tweeted in 2020.

The Cuban lobby had long been motivated by the specific wounds of the Castro revolution: the confiscations, the executions, the broken families, what Joan Didion called in her 1987 book “Miami” the “febrile complex of resentments and revenges and idealizations and taboos” that united the exiles. The newcomers from across Latin America were equally febrile, but their cause was not just a free Cuba — it was a continent liberated from the likes of left-leaning presidents like Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum, Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and Colombia’s Gustavo Petro.

Unlike the Cuban lobby, which had operated under the tight discipline of Mas Canosa and CANF, the newer Latin American exile community had no single institutional home. The Trump transition team after the 2024 election moved quickly to capture these new constituencies, reaching out to figures like Félix Maradiaga, a Miami-based Nicaraguan opposition leader whom former guerrilla fighter and strongman president Daniel Ortega had stripped of his citizenship. Maradiaga says that Trump’s envoys were urging the opponents of Nicaragua, Cuba, and Venezuela to “unite our points of view so that the actions that come from the United States have a joint impact in the quest for democracy.”

Mar-a-Lago became the diaspora’s clubhouse, a palace-in-exile for Latin America’s displaced elites — where Brazil’s Bolsonaro family bends Trump’s ear, Venezuelan opposition figures convene with White House officials, and Colombian magnates attend fundraisers alongside Cuban American politicians and businessmen to discuss business opportunities and coordinate the hemisphere’s restoration.

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The scale of what was being plotted there has been partially revealed: a cache of forensically authenticated voice notes leaked from former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández. Convicted of drug trafficking, Hernández had been serving a 45-year sentence in a West Virginia federal penitentiary until Trump pardoned him in December 2025. The leaked memos reveal that Hernández was being financed by both Israel and Argentina (he spent his first night of freedom in the five-star Waldorf Astoria hotel) and that his political proxy, current Honduran President Nasry Asfura, was meeting with investors at Mar-a-Lago to discuss sketchy deals with U.S. officials and to plan a broader destabilization program targeting Mexico, Colombia, and Brazil.

Miami Rules

The new, greater Latin American lobby operates differently from the old CANF model, trading a single-issue ethnic lobby focused on one country for a class-based hemispheric operation united by a common enemy: reformism of even the blandest sort. CANF itself continues to exist but has fallen into irrelevance. Its PAC went dormant and its lobbying function was absorbed into a broader, more decentralized Latin America lobby. Florida’s Republican Party has largely absorbed CANF’s electoral machinery.

Class divisions had long existed in the Cuban diaspora, especially after the Mariel boatlift. But a singular focus on liberating Cuba had muted the cleavages. Now, though, as the diaspora became hemispheric in scope, the gap between the haves and have-nots has become more visible. Doral’s gated communities sport lovely names — Doral Isles Riviera, Doral Isles Venetia — and wealthy Venezuelans play golf at Trump National. Tens of thousands of poorer Venezuelans — many of whom risked their lives trekking the Darién Gap to get to the U.S., many of whom work at that same golf resort — live in constant fear: Trump has revoked their Temporary Protected Status, leading to more than 15,000 deportations. Some have been sent back to Venezuela, others to El Salvador’s infamous maximum-security CECOT prison.

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The cruelty is not limited to Venezuelans. The Trump administration has targeted other poor immigrants, including Hondurans, Nicaraguans, and Haitians. Even poor Cubans — who in the past could expect automatic residency — are now being shipped to Mexico, where many, elderly and sick, find themselves sleeping on the streets of random cities, such as Villahermosa, the humid capital of Mexico’s southern state of Tabasco. “They’re casting us aside to die,” said Harold A, a 58-year-old Cuban national who was deported to Mexico earlier this year. “They don’t give us anything, nothing. … How are we supposed to eat?”

The wealthy members of the diaspora tend to see these deportations as harsh but necessary to protect their reputation as “exceptional migrants.” Poor Venezuelans are referred to by some of their better-off compatriots as orcos — orcs, subhumans — a class contempt that Oxford scholar Erick Moreno Superlano has documented in detail. The lobby that presents itself as the agent of Latin American freedom is, in fact, a staunch defender of the hemisphere’s status and class hierarchy.

These new well-to-do exile groups vote in their national elections as a bloc, and often decisively so for their country’s most Trump-like candidate. Last month in Peru, the daughter of former President Alberto Fujimori — who spent 16 years in prison for human rights violations committed during his presidency, including death squad killings — would have lost the presidential election if only votes cast in Peru were counted, but ultimately beat her center-left opponent thanks to the votes of the Peruvian diaspora. The roughly 9,000 Miami-Dade votes helped her win by less than 1 percent.

More recently, Colombians living in Miami turned out in unprecedented numbers to vote for the hard-right Trump mimic Abelardo De la Espriella, helping him win a presidential election that was as close as Peru’s. De la Espriella is a U.S. citizen and was a long-time resident of a multimillion-dollar mansion in Miami, where he worked as a defense lawyer for Colombian clients, among them paramilitaries, right-wing politicians, and money launderers.

Be it by the bullet or the ballot, Miami rules.

The Dogs That Caught the Car

Both AIPAC and the greater Latin American lobby had, in the second Trump term, achieved close to their maximal ambitions simultaneously: a war on Iran and a full-court press on Latin American leftists of all stripes, with the deployment of U.S. Special Operations forces, CIA assassination teams, naval blockades, and sanctions. War powers resolutions to stop Trump’s actions — in Iran, Cuba, and Venezuela — are routinely blocked by a Republican caucus dependent on AIPAC money and Florida’s electoral votes, often with an assist from a handful of AIPAC Democrats.

Yet both lobbies now find themselves something like the dog that caught the car, and then was run over.

Trump’s war in Iran was a tactical and strategic disaster, leading the White House to lash out at Israel in ways that, just a month ago, would have been unimaginable. Vice President JD Vance just lectured Israel that it “can’t just kill your way out of solving every single national security problem.” And Trump warned Benjamin Netanyahu “you will be on your own very soon.” AIPAC’s maximalist project — permanent war, permanent leverage, permanent intertwining with U.S. power — is in tatters.

Whether the same reversal comes for the Latin American lobby remains to be seen. Trump is still pressing Cuba hard, demanding a “deal.” But the deal Trump is pushing looks less like regime change than an investment prospectus. It’s less the Monroe than the Capone Doctrine: Sanctions destroy foreign competitors, Helms–Burton lawsuits punish anyone who stays, and Trump-connected U.S. investors move in to pick up assets at distressed prices. Recently, a business connected to a former Trump official Ray Washburne muscled out a Canadian mining and cobalt corporation.

Trump’s sanctions worked too well. They broke Cuba’s economy so completely that Havana was forced, recently, to enact sweeping economic liberalization — reforms that serve investors, not exiles.

In Florida, Cuban Americans who have never set foot in Cuba, like Nicolás J. Gutiérrez — a Miami-born lawyer whose “young millionaire” father lost his sugar fields to Castro — founded organizations such as the “National Sugar Mill Owners of Cuba,” hoping that Trump would make a country they have never seen theirs again. 

For many, that hope is dissipating quickly as they face their nightmare scenario: a repeat of what happened recently in Venezuela, where Trump entered into a partnership with the existing government, letting demands for root-and-branch regime change take a back seat to oil industry dealmaking. ExxonMobil, which has a large role in setting Trump’s Venezuela policy, just won a Supreme Court Case that allows it to sue Cuban state-owned companies in U.S. federal courts to win compensation for property confiscated more than 65 years ago. This ruling will give the company enormous leverage in what comes next for Cuba. At the same time, Trump, in his second term, has deported nearly 8,000 Cuban nationals, many of the low-income asylum-seekers but also a considerable number of middle-class business and property owners.

The sugar fields, it seems, will not be returned to the children of their former owners any time soon, though they might be put out to bid. But those hoping for restoration will always have Mar-a-Lago.

The post How Florida’s Cuban Diaspora and the Israeli Lobby Came Together — and Are Coming Apart appeared first on The Intercept.

Editor’s note: This article contains graphic descriptions of sexual violence.

The months after the October 7, 2023, attacks saw a wave of questionable mainstream news stories about alleged sexual assault in Hamas’s attacks that day on Israel.

It would be years before the American press began to deal with sex crimes against Palestinians imprisoned by Israel as part of its brutal occupation.

It’s a reckoning that is long overdue.

Sexual violence by Israeli forces against Palestinians in detention is both a systematic and a decades-old practice — a well understood dynamic that is being put in the spotlight this week in a new report from the Palestinian Feminist Collective, a group of Palestinian and Arab feminist researchers and organizers.

The extensive 188-page report, parts of which were shared with The Intercept in advance of publication, situates recent, high-profile news stories detailing the rape and sexual assault of Palestinians in Israeli detention as part of “a wider system of sexualized and gendered violence spanning detention, warfare, surveillance, reproductive destruction, family separation, domicide, and the desecration of Palestinian bodies” over decades.

The report, “A Predatory State: Israeli Systemic Sexualized and Gendered Violence Against Palestinians,” brings together witness and survivor testimonies; news coverage; academic research; United Nations reports; and findings from human rights groups, like the Gaza-based Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, Geneva-based Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor, and Israel-based B’Tselem; along with declassified Israeli archival material.

A spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces denied allegations of mistreatment of Palestinians in detention and said the military could not comment on specific cases without more information about the detainees.

“The IDF rejects allegations concerning the systematic abuse of detainees, including allegations of stripping detainees of their clothes and sexually assaulting detainees during interrogations in detention facilities under its responsibility,” the spokesperson said in a statement to The Intercept. “Allegations of misconduct by IDF soldiers are examined and handled accordingly. In appropriate cases, criminal investigations are opened by the Military Police.”

The United Nations added Israel in May to a blacklist of countries found to be committing sexual violence in war zones, citing 31 cases of sexual violence perpetrated in the last two years by Israeli forces against Palestinians from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. The new Palestinian Feminist Collective report underlines that the U.N.’s findings are merely the tip of the iceberg.

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The compilation of harrowing details from a multiplicity of sources offers a chilling rebuke to those who have sought to discredit Palestinian victims’ claims or dismiss cases of sexual assault and rape perpetrated by Israeli forces as rare aberrations.

Crushed testicles, genital beatings, rapes of detainees including children and the elderly — the report, like a number of the previous human rights reports it draws from, shows that such abuse is, according to the authors, “institutional practice rather than individual misconduct.”

Rape by Trained Dogs

A section of the report shared with The Intercept includes the detailed testimonies of multiple released Palestinian prisoners. A 42-year-old woman arrested in Gaza while going through an Israeli military checkpoint in November 2024, for example, described being stripped, blindfolded, and handcuffed to a metal table and raped vaginally and anally by Israeli soldiers.

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“I felt a penis penetrating my anus and a man raping me,” the woman said, in testimony originally collected by the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights. “I started screaming, and they beat me on my back and head while I was blindfolded. I felt the man who was raping me ejaculate inside my anus.”

She then recounted subsequent vaginal rapes.

A 41-year-old Palestinian father arrested at Kamal Adwan Hospital in December 2023 and held for 22 months in Israeli prison reported, “One of the soldiers raped me by violently inserting a wooden stick into my anus. After about a minute he removed it and then inserted it again more forcefully.”

Other accounts from boys and men detail anal rape by soldiers and prison guards using carrots, bottles, batons, and other sharp objects.

The report also includes multiple accounts claiming the use of trained dogs as sexual threats and tools of direct sexual violence.

When the New York Times’s Nicholas Kristof last month reported on widespread and extreme sexual torture of Palestinians in Israeli detention, including the use of trained dogs to rape detainees, the backlash from Israeli authorities and pro-Israel mouthpieces was as swift as it was predictable.

The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs slammed the article as “one of the worst blood libels ever to appear in the modern press” — a typical retort that deems any criticism of Israeli brutality to be antisemitic. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu threatened to sue the Times for defamation. No such lawsuit has materialized, bound as it would be to fail and risk a court process revealing further horrors perpetrated by Israeli forces.

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Meanwhile, for Palestinians and advocates of Palestinian liberation, Kristof’s report was perhaps only surprising for its presence in the New York Times. Reports of rape, sexual violence, and sexual humiliation in Israeli custody have been widespread well established for years.

Pro-Israel media outlets like Bari Weiss’s The Free Press attempted to discredit and debunk the testimonies in Kristof’s article, particularly those from formerly detained Palestinians who alleged that trained dogs were used to rape prisoners. Such abuse was impossible, the critics claimed — despite the fact that, according to survivors, Augusto Pinochet’s regime in Chile, as well as Nazi prison commander Klaus Barbie, reportedly used dogs to rape and sexually torture prisoners.

The “Predatory State” report lists 10 specific incidents of rape or severe sexual assault involving trained dogs, as reported to human rights groups by victims themselves or firsthand witnesses.

“The shock came when they forced me to lie down, and a dog climbed on top of me and tried to insert its penis into me,” one detainee testified, in a report first compiled by Euro-Med and cited by the Palestinian Feminist Collective. “At first, I did not understand what was happening, but then I realised that I was being raped.”

“They unleashed police dogs on us again, allowing them to tear into our flesh,” a 48-year-old man arrested at Al Shifa Hospital in Gaza told the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights in further testimony cited by the Palestinian Feminist Collective. He reported that one dog attacked a fellow detainee and “started mauling his genitals (penis). He bled to death in my arms.”

“Violence Across Decades”

The report authors note that “sexual torture has often preceded the deaths of detainees and prisoners and therefore must be considered part and parcel of the crime of genocide waged against the Palestinian people.”

This statement covers more than just Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza: The Palestinian Feminist Collective report is explicit in including accounts of sexual violence reportedly carried out by soldiers as well as settlers in the West Bank.

“They zip-tied my penis, tightened it and then dragged me all around the village,” a Palestinian man, Qusai Abu-al Kebash, told B’Tselem of a reported assault at the hands of settlers in his West Bank village earlier this year.

In response to credible claims of sexual assault, particularly in Israel’s Sde Teiman military prison, Israel’s defenders have attempted to downplay incidents as aberrations or outliers in the fog of war.

“This is a story about how Israel was institutionally overwhelmed by events after October 7,” Jonathan Conricus, a former Israeli military spokesperson, now fellow at the neoconservative think tank Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington, told The Free Press.

He was responding to an incident caught on video of Israeli soldiers appearing to beat and brutally sodomize a Palestinian prisoner with a knife. Conricus blamed “reservists without the right training” who “were called up to be prison guards” — but rejected any claims of systematic abuse.

All charges were dropped against the soldiers accused of sexually assaulting the detainee. Numerous Israeli lawmakers, including far-right Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, condemned the military for even attempting to charge the soldiers.

Reports like the Palestinian Feminist Collective’s further give the lie to excuses like Conricus’s.

“The Sde Teiman footage should have shattered the fiction that Palestinian testimony is unproven until Israeli perpetrators record themselves,” legal scholar and human rights attorney Noura Erakat told The Intercept. “Still the debate focuses on whether individual soldiers received direct orders, rather than how a state has sanctioned, protected, and repeated this violence across decades.”

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In a statement shared with The Intercept, Loubna Qutami, a member of the Palestinian Feminist Collective, said, “This report names what Palestinians have long known and what the world has too often refused to hear: Israel’s sexualized and gendered violence against Palestinians is systemic, historical, and constitutive of Israeli colonial rule.”

According to Igal Dotan, an Israeli attorney cited in the Palestinian Feminist Collective’s report, “The situation before the war was very bad, but it is not comparable to what happened in Israeli prisons after October 7.”

Dotan’s clients include a “severely disabled” 14-year-old Palestinian boy, diagnosed with autism, who was, the report notes, “reportedly sexually, physically, and psychologically assaulted while in detention.”

Before October 7

The Palestinian Feminist Collective refuses to begin its history of sexual and gendered violence on October 7. The report includes testimonies of sexualized violence gathered from oral histories, declassified archives and historical documents, dating back to the Nakba in 1948, the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from what are today’s Israel’s internationally recognized borders.

The long history of systematic displacement and dehumanization of Palestinians is run through with sexualized violence — as is common in situations of oppressive, militarized violence and population control.

“‘A Predatory State’ documents how sexual torture is a technology of Israeli rule: a means of terrorizing Palestinians and advancing a project of destruction,” Erakat told The Intercept. “Accountability must go beyond a handful of soldiers to reach and tear down the legal, military and political structures that command and then protect these crimes.”

With the genocide in Gaza ongoing and Israeli expansionist violence continuing in the West Bank, Lebanon, and Syria, such accountability seems beyond our current horizons of expectation.

More evidence of the sort compiled by the Palestinian Feminist Collective is unlikely to change that; it is not for lack of evidence that Israeli forces continue to carry out war crimes with impunity.

The urgency is to act on the ample evidence we have.

“The report is a call upon all responsible citizens to stay united,” said Francesca Albanese, U.N. special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, in a statement on the Palestinian Feminist Collective report, “not just to end genocide, but to fight once and for all this testosteronic model of power that roots and grows through subjugation and repression.”

Update: July 2, 2026
This story has been updated to include a statement from the Israeli military received after publication.

The post How to Show That Israel’s Sexual Violence Against Palestinians Is Systemic — and Has Gone on for Decades appeared first on The Intercept.

Keir Starmer, the U.K.’s sixth prime minister in a decade, has resigned. Even allowing for the weariness of repetition, this should theoretically be a big deal.

Within that benighted kingdom, it will be for some — the John Fetterman-esque cartoon Andy Burnham, now widely considered Starmer’s all-but-inevitable successor, looks set to grip the poisoned chalice that is leadership of the British Labour Party, for all the good it will do him. The ascendant far-right outfit Reform U.K. will likely regard Starmer’s downfall as another stepping stone to turning Oswald Mosley’s deferred dreams of Anglified fascism into reality.

The Greens, who have enjoyed some recent success with their novel proposal that left-wing people might actually want a left-wing party to vote for, may see this as further proof of the once-verboten idea that — whisper it — maybe the Labour Party doesn’t need to exist. And those constituent nations of the U.K. which are not England but are nevertheless forced to abide by its whims will be reminded that the British state they are bound to has not enjoyed stable government for quite a while.

The question of whether the wider world should take heed of the U.K. and its travails remains open, and for good reason. The centuries long legacy of Britain’s various eccentric neuroses being imposed outside of its island isolation is horrifically grim, and I would not blame anyone for wishing to see it quarantined like patient zero in a zombie outbreak. Yet there are lessons to be learned from Starmer’s short, sad tenure, especially as the international left will continue to face manifestations of the worldview he represented — not least the U.S. Democratic establishment, as New York primary voters will need no reminding this week, who seem stubbornly resistant to learning them.

It shouldn’t be controversial to say that Starmer’s rise was not achieved on his own merits. As Labour leader, Starmer’s role was essentially pest control: He was installed as head of a party that has historically, if intermittently, pretended to belong to a species of socialism, and was tasked with disinfecting Labour of any threat it might genuinely embody that ideology. In this mission, he was nominally successful, purging the party of anything associated with his leftist predecessor Jeremy Corbyn (whose specter continues to haunt Britain’s commentariat, despite achieving precisely zilch). Starmer, the best that central casting could produce, was then delivered to Downing Street with a ridiculous majority by an electorate exhausted by more than a decade of Conservative government.

In power, the Tories had alternated between brutality and incompetence, and Starmer did not buck that trend, reaffirming Gore Vidal’s contention that trying to find much difference between Labour and the Tories was like bringing “a measuring rod to Lilliput.” At every turn, Starmer pursued the credo of centrism by meeting his government’s increasingly psychotic right flank where they were, and was somehow shocked and dismayed to find this only made him more despised, while also emboldening and empowering reactionary forces.

Under Starmer’s health secretary and supposed human being Wes Streeting, trans youth in the U.K. were stripped of gender-affirming healthcare, and Britain’s frothingly transphobic “gender-critical” lobby — from which their equally exterminationist American sympathizers have taken much inspiration — fumed that young trans people still existed.

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Starmer’s government saw Palestine solidarity activists criminalized under a dubious interpretation of anti-terrorism law, yet British right-wing media continued to grumble that pro-Palestinian protests were still possible at all. Within a year of Starmer vowing his government would curb legal immigration and “take back control” of the U.K.’s borders, immigrants in Britain were subjected to pogroms and firebombing.

It should not need to be spelled out, but Starmer and his backers have shown time and again that it still does — if the mythic Overton window shifts to the right, and you obligingly follow suit, it will simply move further toward that extreme, and reward only the tip of the spear. Those in the U.S. who saw Kamala Harris struck mute on trans rights and blind in the face of genocide in Gaza know too well the stakes of “moderating” to the right in the interest of “consensus.”

Since his resignation, a small and desperate coterie of British pundits have urged their dwindling readership to focus on the positives of Starmer’s reign by emphasizing those instances in which he stood firm on the rock of not-quite-fascism, particularly in foreign affairs. After all, they point out, he recognized a Palestinian state (while simultaneously offering precious little resistance to killing the people who would otherwise live there). But whether in the United States’ kidding-but-not-really bid to colonize Greenland, its pursuit of regime change in Venezuela via the enactment of a lousy ’80s action movie, or a war with Iran — the sheer sloppy-drunk incompetence of which stunned even its most vociferous critics — the Starmer administration never achieved any greater fortitude than weakly suggesting, “I say, steady on …”

There was never any realistic hope that this erstwhile human rights lawyer was going to seriously confront a sclerotic superpower ruled by a meat-headed fascism which treats human rights as a laughable suggestion. It is appropriate that in his resignation speech, Starmer expressed pride in supposedly protecting Britain’s youth from social media; this feat of Herculean self-aggrandizement was, in its own way, telling of Starmer’s entire premiership. Given the choice between taking on the entrenched power of social media platforms (to which the U.K.’s political class remains unashamedly addicted) or restricting the liberties of a constituency not particularly useful to him, Starmer inevitably chose the latter.

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Less than a decade ago, the idea that the American progressive left might be in a healthier state than its British equivalent would have drawn hoots of derision from those smugly confident in Corbyn’s brief ascendance. Yet the left in the United States — from the days of Occupy Wall Street through Black Lives Matter, the Palestinian solidarity movement, and on-the-ground anti-ICE resistance — has wised up to the idea that it must move in an independent and extra-parliamentary manner. They may take heart in developments such as the rise of figures like Zohran Mamdani, but they seem to understand that real political change requires mass organizing beyond party structures and a willingness to break with the accepted norms and niceties of the political process.

This understanding passed entirely by all those on the British left who invested in Labour, along with those centrists and liberals who warned against the insidious influence of identity politics and “culture wars” that would require giving a shit about the rights, liberation, and lives of embattled and persecuted minorities. Starmer’s premiership, and its ignominious end, are the consequence.

The lesson of Keir Starmer’s undistinguished spell as prime minister is that — in the U.K. or anywhere else — if you throw red meat to a bloodthirsty right, it is only a matter of time before they are devouring your own flesh. You will not defeat fascism, or even delay it — you will simply make sure that when it arrives, much of its work has already been done.

The post Keir Starmer’s Downfall Is the Only Reward for Simpering Centrism appeared first on The Intercept.

Yet after back-to-back earthquakes rocked multiple Venezuelan cities on Wednesday, toppling scores of buildings and killing at least 188 people and injuring at least 1,520, Trump merely offered assistance.

“The U.S.A. stands ready, willing, and able to help! I have instructed all agencies of our government to get ready to move quickly,” he wrote in a Truth Social post. “We will be there for our new and great friends.”

One U.S. government official told The Intercept that Trump’s offer doesn’t go far enough since Venezuela is now a U.S. “vassal state.” “Don’t we run that country?” the official asked, speaking on background and referencing Trump’s comments. “That’s an obligation that exceeds friendship.”

At the same time, Venezuelan American organizations and progressive foreign policy groups are about to circulate a letter calling on the Trump administration to provide massive, unconditional humanitarian aid to Venezuela in the wake of the 7.2 foreshock and 7.5-magnitude quake, as well as long-term economic damage from U.S. sanctions, according to details of the letter shared exclusively with The Intercept by Just Foreign Policy, one of the groups that drafted the letter. The organizations argue that the United States bears a unique obligation to Venezuela and that U.S. aid “must match the scale of the harm the United States has played a role in creating.”

This all comes after Trump seemed to suggest earlier this week that the U.S. has reaped billions of dollars of Venezuelan oil wealth in the last six months.

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After ousting Maduro, Trump’s installed a puppet government run by former Maduro ally Delcy Rodriguez. She has carried out day-to-day governance under the threat of a looming U.S. criminal indictment alleging corruption and money laundering charges. Trump also warned that the U.S. might attack again if Rodriguez did not comply with his demands.

The costs of Absolute Resolve — the military operation and abduction of Maduro — topped $206 million, according to an analysis by Brown University’s Costs of War Project. Since then, the Trump administration has seized control of Venezuela’s oil industry and claims to be exploiting it for massive returns. This week, Trump said that the U.S. has recovered its war costs 28 times over through oil extraction; this equates to roughly $5.7 billion.

“The people are happy in the country. They have smiles,” Trump said of Venezuelans on Tuesday, prior to the earthquakes. He claimed Venezuela has shared in the economic rewards.

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But the letter being drafted by the Venezuelan American and progressive groups cites a recent economic analysis by Venezuelan economist Francisco Rodríguez showing that U.S. policy has failed to produce the economic recovery Trump has claimed. The letter notes that sanctions have left Venezuela operating at a “diminished capacity,” that “the buildings that collapsed were not maintained,” and “the hospitals that must now treat nearly a thousand injured were not adequately supplied” as a direct result.

In the port city of La Guaira, for example, more than 100 buildings were destroyed in the twin earthquakes. “Should the U.S. be responsible for rebuilding?” the U.S. government official mused. “Any word from Trump on that?”

The White House did not respond to a request for comment on whether the U.S. would ease sanctions or help to rebuild Venezuela.

U.S. Southern Command, which spearheaded the war on Venezuela earlier this year said on Thursday that it was “working with the Department of State to support U.S. government relief operations in Venezuela.” The command added that it “has established an operational planning team that includes experienced subject matter experts from the Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance, who are advising staff and leadership responsible for disaster relief planning and mission-related decisions.”

But disaster aid is inadequate, according to Just Foreign Policy and the other groups. “Emergency relief alone will not be enough. Venezuela’s recovery will require access to its own financial resources and the ability to import the equipment, construction materials, medicine, fuel, spare parts and other goods needed to rebuild homes, hospitals, schools, roads, ports and critical infrastructure,” they wrote.

Even before the earthquakes, almost 8 million people in Venezuela were in need of humanitarian aid, according to the United Nations. The letter from Just Foreign Policy and others calls on the Trump administration to “provide immediate, massive humanitarian assistance with no political conditions attached,” to release Venezuelan oil revenues currently held in U.S.-controlled accounts, and to suspend remaining sanctions impeding disaster response and reconstruction.

The post Trump Claimed to Run Venezuela. After Earthquakes, He’s Walking That Back. appeared first on The Intercept.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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