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.

Aerial imagery from Bint Jbeil, the seat of a municipality by the same name, shows what residents describe as burn marks at sites where official records were kept: civil registration files, land deeds, the paper infrastructure of a city’s legal existence.

With the notary gone, civil administration buildings bulldozed, and widespread destruction of homes that contained important personal documents, residents of the 36 villages of the Bint Jbeil district fear Israel’s total war has meant the destruction of all their records could permanently untether them from the homes they left behind when they fled under Israel’s evacuation orders.

That could make reconstruction after the war a nightmare. Bint Jbeil is Lebanon’s most southwestern district and the site of an Israeli campaign to evacuate entire populations before flattening their villages.

Some Lebanese even see it as an intentional tactic, part of Israel’s plan to empty out southern Lebanon and establish a buffer zone south of the Litani River Israeli leaders hope will put northern Israel out of the reach of Hezbollah’s rockets.

A mukhtar, or local official, confirmed to The Intercept that civil registry records had been digitized up to 2020 only, which offers limited reassurance. Much, however, remains unaccounted for. There are the last six years of records along with countless others that were not officially registered thanks to Lebanon’s notoriously chaotic bureaucracies and lax enforcement of registration rules, which are at times flouted to avoid paying taxes.

At the center of the crisis is Bint Jbeil’s Grand Serail, the old administrative building that houses land deeds for thousands of families across more than 20 villages in the district. Since Israeli forces moved in, Lebanese authorities have not been able to reach it, despite making efforts through the International Committee of the Red Cross with requests to the so-called Mechanism Committee that administers the Israeli-Lebanese ceasefire agreement.

“The Ministry of Interior has not yet been able to obtain the civil registry records for Bint Jbeil district, because the ICRC (International Committee of the Red Cross) has not received approval from the Mechanism Committee, which includes Israel, to enter the area, despite submitting a request to do so, in order to retrieve the records and transfer them to the Interior Ministry in Beirut,” a ministry spokesperson told The Intercept.

In a statement to an Intercept journalist in New York, a spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces declined to comment on the ICRC request and said the Lebanese group Hezbollah installs military assets in civilian areas.

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“IDF directives permit the execution of clearing operations of structures used for military purposes, or when there is an essential operational necessity that justifies the full or partial demolition of a structure, in accordance with international law,” the statement said.

Destruction of civilian infrastructure in war is permissible by the laws of armed conflict only under narrow conditions, including that there be a military purpose and that the destruction be incidental to that military purpose.

Israel has flattened entire border towns in Lebanon. Experts have said the actions could constitute war crimes. Israel’s defense minister has previously said, “All houses in villages near the Lebanese border will be destroyed.”

The Grand Serail

Lebanese Finance Minister Yassine Jaber has been monitoring the Grand Serail by satellite.

“The walls are still standing mostly,” he told The Intercept, “but satellites don’t have keys to doors. We don’t know what happened inside. Were the records destroyed? Were they confiscated? The truth is still behind the front lines.”

For four weeks, Jaber ran what amounted to a crisis operations room: calls to Lebanese army command, coordination with military intelligence, repeated attempts to reach the Mechanism Committee — the multilateral body, including Israel, that monitors the its mid-April ceasefire agreement with Hezbollah — and appeals to UNIFIL, a United Nations force in Lebanon.

Their goal was to establish a corridor for a single journey to Bint Jbeil to recover the records.

“We tried everything,” Jaber said. “But Bint Jbeil today is a forbidden zone.”

Even the International Committee of the Red Cross has been unable to reach the records.

“The ICRC supported the Ministry of Interior in the evacuation of some civil registries in southern Lebanon at the beginning of the escalation,” said Sally Aoun, a spokesperson for ICRC Lebanon. “It was not possible to support the evacuation in Bint Jbeil because of ongoing hostilities.”

Jaber has had some successes in other areas where recovering records proved a challenge. When fighting reached Marjayoun, in Lebanon’s south, a team of civil servants went in under bombardment to get the civil records. The same thing happened in the Hasbaya distrcit.

Records from the southern city of Tyre are now held further up the coast in Sidon. The ministry also managed to evacuate files from Meiss El Jabal, Tibnine, Jbaa, Jouaya, and Nabatieh to Beirut. The Ministry of Interior in Beirut designated one day each week for each of the district registries to process civil documentation requests from displaced southerners.

Bint Jbeil remains the missing piece.

A Legal Trap

Lebanon does have a partial digital backup. The Finance Ministry holds electronic records for most registered properties in the south — a safety net for deeds that were formally logged. Thousands of transactions, however, were never registered.

Take the case of Ali Khreizat, known by the honorific Abu Hassan, who was displaced from his home in the village of Aitaroun in Bint Jbeil district. When the village faced Israeli bombardment, Abu Hassan left — but he left behind, in a drawer in the corner, a worn leather bag holding the bill of sale for the land he had lived on for five years.

Abu Hassan has made peace with the destruction of his house, but his far more profound worry is that he will never be able to prove he ever owned the property.

“The house I built stone by stone is dust now,” he said. “And the paper that says it was mine has gone to God.”

Even five years after moving in, his bill of sale never reached the land registry. Like many in Lebanon, Abu Hassan felt no particular rush to make bureaucratic deadlines — with the legendary inefficiencies of the Lebanese state offering little encouragement to do so. Now, he has heard from locals still in the area that even the notary’s office was destroyed, leaving diminishing hopes that a copy of his bill of sale exists anywhere.

With little enforcement of registration rules — whether the failure to do so is born of a lackadaisical ethos around bureaucratic paperwork or another reason, like wanting to dodge taxes — the problem of unregistered homes could leave people with no way to show they ever bought properties.

“This will create a major legal problem in proving ownership,” Jaber said. “Who owns what? Who protects the buyer’s right if the paper contract has disappeared?”

When Jaber took office in February 2025, he said, he found a registry system unfit for our modern, online era. He is now overseeing a full overhaul to digitize documents, a project he estimates will take six months to complete.

“A digital vault,” he said, “that no shell can reach and no fire can erase.”

Erasing the Map

The damage to land records in Bint Jbeil may run deeper than any individual document.

A key concern is the fate of Bint Jbeil’s land survey division. The technical unit holds the measurement records tying property lines to fixed geographic reference points, some dating to the French Mandate. Those points are connected, through a chain of historic surveys, to a reference coordinate in Homs, Syria, which has served as an anchor for Lebanon’s national cadastral map since the 1920s.

If those physical survey markers have been destroyed, said Riyad Al-Asaad, a civil engineer from the south, the question becomes: Who holds the GPS data that defines the boundaries? Lebanon or Israel?

The risk, Al-Asaad said, is that properties could be redrawn using Israeli measurements, a new geographic reality imposed on top of the old one.

Retired Lebanese Gen. Yaarab Sakhir sees this as part of a deliberate pattern — pointing to the Dahiya Doctrine, an Israeli military strategy named for the Beirut suburb where it was first implemented. The strategy calls for disproportionate attacks and targeting civilian infrastructure to create a high cost for Israel’s enemies, thereby creating a strong deterrent.

“Israel, when it applies the Dahiya Doctrine, as it did in Gaza, dividing it into a 55/45 split between an Israeli corridor and a Palestinian zone — it is doing the same thing now south of the Litani,” he said. “First, displacement and depopulation. Second, repeated strikes. Third, when areas fall militarily — Bint Jbeil first — they mine, demolish, bulldoze, and erase every feature to make these areas uninhabitable and prevent residents from returning.”

Official buildings, Sakhir said, become specific Israeli targets under this program.

“Israel focuses on civil registry offices and government serails,” he said. “The archive in Bint Jbeil’s serail covers not just the city but all the villages in the district.”

In its statement to an Intercept journalist in New York, the Israeli military denied targeting civilian infrastructure as such.

“The IDF,” the spokesperson said, “does not operate against the institutions of the State of Lebanon, the Lebanese Armed Forces, or Lebanese civilians, and rejects allegations of intentional harm to population registries, civil documents, land registry records, or administrative institutions, or any intent to disconnect residents from their land or harm their property rights.”

Ghosts in Their Own Country

The Interior Ministry’s internal figures name 190,000 people registered on the 2025 voter rolls for Bint Jbeil district. Add the generation of young people and children not yet on those rolls, and the number approaches a quarter million — all of them, in varying degrees, affected by the disappearance of their district’s official records.

Mohamed Sarhan, the mukhtar, or local leader, of Kfarkela, a village north of Bint Jbeil district, told The Intercept that residents and civil servants from the area reported that Israeli forces confiscated land registry records belonging to Bint Jbeil district. The fate of the civil registration records remains unclear. No one can say with certainty whether they were burned in the bombardment, taken, or simply lost in the chaos.

Dalia Boussi left Bint Jbeil under the sound of shelling. Like everyone else who fled last fall, she grabbed what she could. Boussi, a local video producer, is not in a panic; she brought her documents with her. She worries, however, about those who left without papers and about what the state must do when people return.

“There is complete destruction in the city center, as we can see in satellite images. When we return, we’ll have to redraw the borders of properties from scratch and determine what public land is and what’s private before reconstruction can begin,” Boussi said. “It’s important that the state and the relevant ministries show flexibility to ease things for citizens. Within each town and city, a crisis cell should be established specifically to follow up on property files and civil registration records, and to ensure every person has their official papers.”

She paused, then added: “Whatever happens, no one is going to lose their identity and no one is going to shave years off their age.” It was a lighthearted joke that belies an underlying reality: The people of Bint Jbeil still exist. The records may be gone, but the local residents know who they are and know what was theirs.

As Abu Hassan, the Aitaroun resident whose bill of sale was likely destroyed with his home, said, “Tomorrow’s battle won’t only be reconstruction. It will be a battle to prove we exist, with an archive that has been looted or set on fire.”

The post Civil Records for Hundreds of Thousands of Lebanese Could Be Wiped Out By Israel’s Total War appeared first on The Intercept.

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

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

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

A Promise of World Peace

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

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

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

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

Months later, these objectives remain unmet.

Eliminating Missiles

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

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

Annihilating the Navy

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

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

Ending the Nuclear Program

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

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

Halting Funding of Militias

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

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

Unconditional Surrender

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

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

Reopening the Strait

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Peace Deal

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

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

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

Just Give Him Two Weeks

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

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

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Stop Calling It a Ceasefire

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

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

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

In addition to passionate debates about the Olympics themselves — the geopolitics of the Games and their effect on local hosts — Wasserman has come in for criticism over his ties to the late pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, his support for Israel, and the potential that the Games might bring him profits through his role as a talent manager for entertainment stars.

The controversies, especially revelations about his relationship with a member of Epstein’s inner circle, nearly led to Wasserman’s ouster from his role atop LA28, the Los Angeles Olympics organizing committee.

Now, another personal wrinkle is coming to light: Wasserman’s daughter, Stella, is training to compete for the Israeli equestrian team at the 2028 Games.

Stella Wasserman, 21, is training to compete with the Israeli team in the show jumping competition, according to a recent profile in World of Show Jumping, a trade publication covering the sport. Instagram accounts for Stella Wasserman and her mother, Laura Ziffren Wasserman, posted in the wake of the article to celebrate Stella’s plans to compete with the Israeli team.

There’s a very real possibility that the man responsible for orchestrating an American Olympic games will have a child competing for another country that has become an international pariah due to its genocide in Gaza and wars with Lebanon and Iran — a team that is likely to face protests in LA. (Casey Wasserman, Stella Wasserman, LA28, and the Israeli Olympic committee did not respond to requests for comment.)

Casey Wasserman is himself an outspoken supporter of Israel. In December, he took a trip to Israel during which he met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and pledged that the safety of athletes, and particularly Israeli athletes, was his “number one concern,” according to Algemeiner, a right-wing, New York-based newspaper covering Jewish issues.

“If you’re claiming that this thing that you’re promoting so heavily is going to bring all these benefits to Los Angeles, but you’re also promoting the interests of a foreign genocidal state — and on top of that your daughter is representing that state in the Games — that’s a conflict,” said Miguel Camnitzer, an organizer with Jewish Voice for Peace Los Angeles. “Somebody else, without those very personal connections to Israel, might be able to make a different call, but he’s unable to.”

Wasserman, a longtime local powerbroker and grandson of Hollywood Golden Age tycoon Lew Wasserman, has been central to bringing the Games to Los Angeles, a role that has come under increased scrutiny due to his ties to Epstein and the late pedophile’s former companion, convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell.

While his connections to the Epstein world were known to some degree for years  — he rode with Bill Clinton on Epstein’s private jet for a humanitarian mission to Africa — the release of the so-called Epstein files earlier this year revealed graphic sexual emails between Wasserman and Maxwell. The revelations sparked a backlash from some of the artists represented by his eponymous talent agency, which in March changed its name to The Team; Wasserman also announced he would be selling the company.

This week, Wasserman reaffirmed that he has no plans to step down as the chair of LA28.

Olympian Hypocrisies

Despite her young age, Stella Wasserman is an accomplished show jumper and owns at least four competition horses, according to a report in the Chronicle of the Horse.

It is common for athletes from one country to compete for a country in which they hold dual citizenship; the International Olympic Committee requires that competitors be nationals of the countries on whose behalf they are competing.

Amid the genocide in Gaza, the Israel connection underscores arguments from critics of the Olympics who say that the Games whitewash human rights abuses by nations taking part — and that international approaches to the Games foster a global double standard that penalizes some nations while allowing others to compete. In the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Russian teams were barred from competing in the 2026 Winter Olympics; Israel has faced no such sanction.

The yearslong campaign by Wasserman and others — including former Mayor Eric Garcetti — to host the Olympics in Los Angeles has met with stiff opposition from local activists. Forming a coalition, dubbed NOlympics, the activists sought to call attention to the ways in which they say the Games would exacerbate issues of affordability, surveillance, and anti-immigrant policing by federal law enforcement.

“When we started organizing against the Olympics 10 years ago, LA was already reeling from homelessness, housing shortages, brutal policing, and ICE. And 10 years later these issues are all worse,” said Jonny Coleman, an organizer with NOlympics LA. “Mega-events like the Olympics or the World Cup don’t necessarily create problems from whole cloth, but they accelerate them.”

In December, LA28 announced it had raised more than $2 billion in sponsorship revenue, according to Reuters. If the costs of the Games exceed what the Olympic committee is able to fundraise, however, Los Angeles would be on the hook for the first $270 million of over-cost expenses, with the next $270 million to be covered by the state of California.

The Games, activists said, could be a boon for Wasserman. Wasserman chaired a host committee to bring the Super Bowl to LA in 2022; his client Kendrick Lamar was featured in the halftime show — a coveted slot not least for the millions the exposure can bring.

For Coleman, Casey Wasserman’s relationship to Ghislaine Maxwell and Stella Wasserman’s potential competition on behalf of Israel only further highlights the corrupt nature of the Olympics.

“We know these mega-events are a way to legitimize awful regimes,” said Coleman. “It’s disgusting, but I don’t really care about the supposed integrity of the sports, personally. So yeah, let her play — why not?”

The post Daughter of 2028 Olympics Chair Dreams of Competing in LA — for Israel appeared first on The Intercept.

In a recently published policy paper arguing a full-throated embrace of data center nationalism, Anthropic said that “it’s essential that the US and its allies stay ahead of authoritarian governments like the Chinese Communist Party,” lest the world fall into the grips of tech-powered tyranny. Anthropic and its peers, the company claims, will form a bulwark of democratic values, protecting societies at home and abroad from repression.

Left unmentioned in the document — and seldom publicly acknowledged — is the fact a slice of Anthropic is owned by the Emirati dictatorship of Abu Dhabi, a repressive and authoritarian monarchy.

Anthropic’s policy paper, published in May, tours the same Sinophobic territory heavily trod by its chief competitor OpenAI and a wide swath of the tech industry, who know a “race” with China — the finish line never quite defined — is a weighty cudgel against regulation.

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Anthropic is aware of which way the wind blows from Washington to Silicon Valley, and it shrewdly casts the development of machine learning models not just as a matter of hardware and software, but of ideology and geopolitics. “Democracies, not authoritarian regimes, must lead in AI development and deployment,” the company says, or else an era of “authoritarian AI” will begin.

“Already, the CCP is using AI to censor speech, repress dissidents, hack governments and corporations across the world, and strengthen the People’s Liberation Army,” Anthropic writes, and to “enforce draconian policies on ethnic minorities” using machine learning-powered methods like biometric collection and facial recognition.

The policy paper isn’t a condemnation of any of these AI uses per se; the United States is already eagerly using these technologies for intelligence, military, and ethnic minority-repression purposes today. Residents of Tehran, which Anthropic has helped bomb since the start of the joint U.S.–Israeli war against Iran, might question the company’s argument that American AI supremacy is a matter of global “safety.”

Though the policy paper focuses on China, the company has long stated it opposes authoritarianism broadly: “AI-powered authoritarianism seems too terrible to contemplate, so democracies need to be able to set the terms by which powerful AI is brought into the world, both to avoid being overpowered by authoritarians and to prevent human rights abuses within authoritarian countries,” CEO Dario Amodei wrote in a 2024 blog post.

This is not merely a battle between the U.S. and China, Anthropic says in the May paper, but a war between democracy and “authoritarian governments” broadly construed.

But Anthropic’s anti-authoritarian fervor seemingly does not extend beyond China to the Middle East, where Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund invested in Anthropic twice this year. In February, Anthropic announced it had raised $30 billion in capital from a group of investors that included MGX, the AI-focused investment vehicle of a Emirati government capital controlled by Abu Dhabi’s royal family. Anthropic’s most recent May 28 $65 billion capital round, bringing its valuation to $965 billion, also included MGX.

Like China, the United Arab Emirates outlaws almost everything associated with democratic society: Political parties, a free press, freedoms to associate and assemble, open elections, due process, and free speech are nonexistent. Political dissidents face torture, and any speech, online or offline, that causes “damage to national unity” risks life imprisonment or the death penalty.

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Emirati authoritarianism isn’t contested by the U.S., Anthropic’s primary governmental customer. The State Department’s 2024 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices assessed the UAE faces “credible reports of: disappearances; arbitrary arrest or detention; transnational repression against individuals in another country; serious restrictions on freedom of expression and media freedom, including censorship; and prohibiting independent trade unions or significant or systematic restrictions on workers’ freedom of association.” Freedom House, a State Department-backed think tank, gives the UAE a score of 18 out of 100 on its “Global Freedom” index.

Anthropic declined to comment. MGX did not respond to a request for comment.

Given that MGX bought into Anthropic at its Series G and H investment rounds, relatively late in the venture capital game, it’s likely that the UAE’s stake in the company is relatively small and its influence limited. But Anthropic’s willingness to sell part of itself to an authoritarian monarchy suggests at least that its mission of “ensuring democracies lead” comes with asterisks.

“Like China, the UAE is at the forefront of AI-based authoritarian surveillance,” said Matthew Tokson, a law professor at the University of Utah who focuses on the security implications of artificial intelligence.

Tokson added that while he generally agrees with Anthropic’s calls to restrict processor exports to China and other measures to bolster American AI firms, he doesn’t buy the nationalist rhetoric, which he attributes to the company’s anti-regulatory agenda rather than patriotism. The more Anthropic and its competitors can convince the public that their bottom line is a matter of national security, the more likely Washington is to take a light touch.

“The fact that Anthropic is partly owned by the government of Abu Dhabi, which is similar to China in its extensive use of AI surveillance to support an authoritarian government, suggests that its anti-authoritarian arguments are more based on a cynical policy position than a sincere passion for democracy or antipathy toward authoritarian governments.”

Many of the emirate’s long record of repressive acts and rights violations are connected to MGX via its chair, Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed Al Nahyan. Through his position as the emirate’s national security and intelligence chief and his business portfolio, including chairmanship of the AI firm G42 (itself a founding partner in MGX), Tahnoun has been linked to a bevy of campaigns to surveil and hack into the phones of Emirati dissidents, human rights advocates, and others the monarchy deems an adversary, according to news media reports and scholarly research. A 2020 investigation by Bill Marczak, a senior researcher at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab placed “Spy Sheikh” Tahnoun at the center of myriad hacking, espionage, and surveillance operations. A 2025 Wired profile of Tahnoun similarly described him as Abu Dhabi’s “spymaster sheikh,” noting G42’s “special areas of strength in state-sponsored hacking and surveillance tech.”

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In 2019, the New York Times reported a covert Emirati government campaign to conduct surveillance through an instant messaging app called ToTok, an app itself Marczak tied to Tahnoon and through G42 in his 2020 analysis. The Wired profile described Tahnoun’s ambitions to “dominate AI” noted that “an engineer who worked at G42 at the time told me that all of the [ToTok] voice, video, and text chats were analyzed by AI for what the government considered suspicious activity.”

G42 declined to comment, and neither it nor MGX responded to interview requests for Tahnoun.

There is reason to believe G42 and MGX have already deployed Anthropic’s powerful large language models. A review of DNS data — internet records that connect website names to numerical addresses understandable by computers — show both G42 and MGX have both configured their servers to allow personnel to access Anthropic tools like Claude, the company’s flagship large language model.

Anthropic has been more candid in internal communications about its stance on authoritarianism.

“Unfortunately, I think ‘No bad person should ever benefit from our success’ is a pretty difficult principle to run a business on,” Amodei wrote in a 2025 memo on Gulf State venture capital obtained by Wired. He wrote that such investment would boost “dictators” and conceded that it would give an authoritarian government “some soft power” to wield against the company. Nonetheless, Amodei dismissed the risk of hypocrisy as a “Comms Headache” — a function of “very stupid” commentators “having a poor understanding of substantive issues.”

Principles aside, Amodei explained in plain terms why he was interested in doing business with a repressive Gulf State. “We gain a very large benefit,” he wrote, “from having access to this capital.”

The post Anthropic Says We Must Stop Authoritarian AI. But What About Its Authoritarian Investors? appeared first on The Intercept.

In the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, local health workers have been battling the devastating virus without adequate supplies, testing materials, or international support. The outbreak is further complicated by the rare strain of the disease, known as Bundibugyo, that standard field tests often miss and for which there are no vaccines or therapeutics. At least 62 people in Congo and one in Uganda have died according to WHO, but experts say this is likely a significant undercount due to the outbreak emerging in a remote, war-torn region.

“The outbreak had a big head start, and we’re still behind, but under the leadership of the Government of DRC, we are catching up,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, told journalists on Wednesday, after a visit to the epicenter of the outbreak. African health officials say that it might take nine months or more to get a handle on the outbreak.

Experts say Trump administration policies — like dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development and withdrawing from WHO — have undermined global health security and negatively impacted the response to the outbreak. The U.S. had been the largest provider of humanitarian assistance and health sector support to the Democratic Republic of Congo, funding more than 70 percent of humanitarian work there, according to a 2025 report from Physicians for Human Rights which noted the aid cuts have “severely harmed” public health and humanitarian efforts, including infectious disease control. The Trump administration has reportedly even barred some U.S. health officials from communicating with counterparts at WHO.

In the face of criticism of a U.S. failure to quickly respond to the Ebola outbreak, State Department spokesperson Tommy Pigott lashed out at WHO and heaped praise on his boss. “The security concerns in the area – which President Trump has taken unprecedented steps to address – and the WHO’s delay in informing the world of concerns until May 15 has had an impact,” he told The Intercept.

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Public health experts say Piggot’s response exposes a fundamental confusion about how authorities combat infectious disease. “It reveals a lack of understanding about how international health regulations work and what a ‘public health emergency of international concern’ actually is,” Margaret Harris, a former senior WHO official and a medical doctor who responded to Ebola outbreaks in West Africa in the mid-2010s and Congo in the late 2010s, told The Intercept.

On May 5, WHO issued an alert of a high-mortality outbreak in Congo’s Ituri Province, which included deaths among healthcare workers. On May 14, blood samples were finally analyzed across the country, in the capital, Kinshasa. A day later, the analysis confirmed Bundibugyo virus disease, a strain of Ebola.

Dr. Mohamed Yakub Janabi, the WHO Regional Director for Africa, explained that affected nations are the lead actors. “WHO does not declare. It’s the member states who declare,” he told The Intercept on Thursday. “On the 15th, Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda declared. On the 16th, we declared the presence of Ebola, and on the 17th, Director-General Tedros declared this as a ‘public health emergency of international concern.’”

Dr. Marie Roseline Belizaire, WHO Africa’s Director of Emergency Preparedness and Response, further explained that under the well-defined protocols, states have the obligation to declare an outbreak after which the WHO informs the rest of the world and begins providing support. “There is a clear, well-defined methodology and it is clearly outlined in the international health regulations,” she told The Intercept.

The response is markedly quicker than in some previous outbreaks. During the 2014–16 Ebola crisis in West Africa — when more than 28,000 people were infected and more than 11,000 died in the largest ever outbreak of the disease — WHO became aware that Ebola was spreading in Guinea in March 2014 but did not declare a “Public Health Emergency of International Concern” until almost five months later.

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Blame for any lag in response is not the fault of WHO, argued Harris, noting that USAID previously supported NGOs and healthcare workers in rural communities on the front lines of such outbreaks. “Dr. Tedros declared it without even calling the emergency committee together, so he wasted no time once they had information about the extent of the outbreak and the fact that clearly it had been running silently for a long time,” said Harris. “But the silence of the outbreak is not something you could lay at the feet of WHO. You lay that at the feet of a very fragile health system in the middle of a conflict that the rest of the world should be doing something to stop.”

The number of suspected Ebola cases in Congo has been reduced from over 1,000 last week to 116 as teams work through a backlog of tests. Experts say many suspected cases turned out to be malaria. This large number of people with untreated malaria demonstrates, they note, the chronic healthcare deficiencies in the region and a need for a comprehensive focus on public health there.

“We also need to remember that Ebola is only one health threat among many that these communities face,” said Tedros. “One of the things I heard from the community leaders is that they worry that the response to Ebola may take resources away from the health and humanitarian services they rely on for their many other needs.”

The Trump administration has faced scrutiny for pouring money into an Ebola quarantine and treatment center for infected Americans being built in Kenya, as a group of distinguished physicians, nurses, public health professionals, and humanitarian workers, including former top officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, called for Americans exposed to Ebola to be brought home for treatment. “We are deeply concerned by reports that the United States government is pursuing a policy under which American citizens with Ebola exposures requiring quarantine, isolation, or medical care would be transferred to a facility in Kenya,” they wrote in a letter to Congress, noting the “profound legal, ethical, and human rights concerns associated with preventing American citizens from returning home for care or diverting them to third-country facilities.”

On Wednesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio doubled down on plans to bar Americans with Ebola from being treated in the U.S. “We cannot and will not allow any ‌cases of Ebola to enter the United States,” he said.

“It really sends the wrong message — that it’s a terrifying thing that you can’t possibly allow to arrive at your borders,” said Harris. Kenya has never experienced an Ebola outbreak, making it a perplexing choice of location for a treatment facility.

The U.S. could have set up a facility in Congo, Harris said, which has the most experience and expertise, having stopped 16 previous outbreaks. Or it could bring its citizens home for treatment and quarantine.

“If you’re going to not treat U.S. citizens on-site in DRC, bring them back to the U.S.” said Harris. “You’ve got one of the best health systems in the world, and you’ve got some of the brightest and best in the world in your country. So why aren’t you mobilizing them and showing that America is truly great?”

The post Trump Administration Tries to Shift Blame for Ebola Response appeared first on The Intercept.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kareem, whose name has been changed to protect his safety, had lived in the close-knit West Bank city for years, but he’d long known he would one day need to leave. It was March 2024, and the Tel Aviv Court for Administrative Affairs had recently ruled that LGBTQ+ Palestinians can petition for asylum in Israel — upending years of precedent that considered them ineligible. The following month, Kareem crossed into Israel, a country that has occupied the West Bank for more than twice as long as he’d been alive.

Supporters of Israel have long pointed to the “only democracy in the Middle East” as a purported safe haven for the LGBTQ+ community. While detractors say the argument amounts to “pinkwashing,” the use of LGBTQ+ inclusion to distract from moral and legal violations in other spheres, the Israeli government has doubled down on the concept, invoking it often to distract from violations of international law. In a speech before the United States Congress on July 24, 2024, for example, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu mocked protesters holding “Gays for Gaza” signs, saying they “might as well hold up signs saying ‘Chickens for KFC.’”

As Netanyahu spoke, Kareem was living legally in Israel, believing his status secure while an administrative storm was brewing behind the scenes. Palestinians like Kareem might be safer by virtue of the distance from their families, but the bureaucratic process of seeking asylum imposes its own dangers. In interviews with The Intercept, Kareem and multiple advocates and lawyers for Palestinian asylum-seekers described how Israeli authorities put asylum-seekers through permit revocations, instability, and, in many cases, coerce them into sharing information with Israel’s internal intelligence agency.

Kareem felt this pressure, he told The Intercept.

At a processing facility at Sha’ar Ephraim, a crossing point in the separation wall west of Tulkarm in the northern West Bank, Kareem recalled, Israeli authorities repeatedly pressed him for information on friends and family still living in the West Bank, anything that might be of use. The implication was a quid pro quo: intelligence in exchange for an easier permit approval process.

“When you are in such a fragile situation, you cannot be in the territories [the West Bank], and you don’t have status in Israel, the security bodies like the police … use this weakness and they try to get information or get someone’s cooperation from those people,” Kareem’s attorney, Tamir Blank, told The Intercept. “They promise them that they will not deport them or put them in jail.”

Kareem didn’t have the kind of information necessary to secure such a process. He found himself, like so many Palestinian asylum-seekers in Israel, in a series of cascading double binds. After they flee, they find themselves trapped: Leaving the West Bank for Israel carries with it the stigma, true or not, of having collaborated with Israeli authorities, making it even more difficult to return, and leaving nowhere else to go.

Home to about 30,000 Palestinians, Ramallah is small and insular, but it contains a space for queer Palestinians to hold conversations that aren’t always possible elsewhere in the West Bank. A loose network of activists hosts weekly community meetings that range from knitting circles to conversations dissecting the Eurocentricity of LGBTQ+ identity terminology in Arabic. During Ramadan this year, as rockets flew overhead during the Israel–U.S. war on Iran, they hosted a queer iftar in the city.

Kareem was active with the group for a year before rumors made their way to his parents. They had long suspected “there was something off with me,” Kareem recalled.

It also did not help that the family, as is typical of Ramallah’s upper class, is conservative and politically involved.

His father works for the Palestinian Authority, just as his father before him, who was involved with the Palestine Liberation Organization before the 1993 Oslo Accords. The family home in Al-Bireh is an old stone building, “colder inside in the winter than it is outside,” according to Kareem, and adorned with a classic Palestinian metal gate.

Aside from occasional Israeli military raids, Al-Bireh feels like the only true bubble inside of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. There are upscale cafes, flower shops, and a concerted effort by all who live there to pretend they enjoy more freedom than they do. Despite the idyllic atmosphere, there are only a handful of checkpoints by which to exit the city, all manned by Israeli soldiers.

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Kareem worked in his cousin’s welding shop in the Jalazone refugee camp, where, as he would later recount to Israeli authorities, he faced years of abuse — both sexual and physical — from his cousins, who taunted him for his feminine presentation. After Kareem’s father confronted him, he recalled, “My father was sending my cousins after me to stalk my friends and me.”

At first, Kareem thought he should flee to a different city in the West Bank, possibly Bethlehem. Israel had stopped issuing permits for most West Bank Palestinians after October 7, citing “security concerns,” and Kareem worried that his family’s associations with the Palestinian Authority would count against him. But the West Bank is small, so small that without checkpoints blocking the way, one could drive from Jenin at the top of the West Bank to Hebron at the bottom in about an hour and a half. As the crow flies, it is only 22 kilometers from Ramallah to Bethlehem. Families know each other, and word spreads fast.

So Kareem tried to fashion a life for himself in Israel. Not only would his family follow him to Israel after he fled, but so too would Israel’s occupation. His life would turn into a series of military court hearings and attempts to solicit intelligence from him by Shin Bet, Israeli domestic intelligence, with the specter of returning home meaning likely death.

Kareem secured a welfare permit by April 2024 with the help of pro bono lawyers from HIAS, a Jewish humanitarian organization that provides legal support to asylum-seekers in Israel, including a small number of Palestinians fleeing persecution. He spent months sleeping on benches and couch surfing before finally moving into an emergency LGBTQ+ youth shelter in Tel Aviv called HaGag HaVarod (“The Pink Roof” in Hebrew), where he went from never having met an Israeli who wasn’t holding a rifle to living together in shared housing. 

In October 2024, just six months after leaving the West Bank, Kareem woke up to an alert on his phone that his permit to stay in Israel had been invalidated. His lawyers advised him to leave the shelter immediately. It was operated under the Israeli Ministry of Welfare, putting him at risk of deportation without a permit.

“I was so confused. They had just given me the permit, so why would they take it away?” Kareem recounted.

His family appeared to have worked to sabotage his legal status through multiple channels. In June, they had filed a report with Israeli social services claiming Kareem was a Hamas member planning to attack civilians. When a security flag appeared in his file, triggering the revocation of his welfare permit, his lawyers raised the possibility in court that it too had been planted by his family to engineer his deportation. The Intercept attempted to reach Kareem’s father for comment but was unable to get in touch.

“I had a security block on my application,” Kareem said. “There was no way to get it back without petitioning the military commander for reconsideration.”

Nimrod Avigal, deputy director of HIAS Israel, has been tracking LGBTQ+ Palestinian asylum claims for more than a decade. He worked on Kareem’s case at the outset. “Everything became much more difficult after October 7,” he said. “Many more people were refused because of security issues, mostly related to a family member.”

Back in his hometown, rumors were circulating that Kareem was collaborating with Israeli authorities, according to testimony submitted to the Jerusalem District Court, a justification not only for his family to track him down, but also for others to help them.

His family began posting notices in Facebook groups offering a cash reward for any information leading to his whereabouts, declaring him a “missing person.” One such post appeared in a public Jerusalem Facebook group with more than 450,000 members.

His phone was flooded with calls, 60 to 80 a day, mostly from unknown numbers. Eventually, as Kareem recounted to The Intercept, he threw his phone into the Mediterranean Sea in the hopes it would solve the problem.

It did not. The family hired men in Ramallah to track Kareem down on the other side of the separation wall. “They said that they were hired by my family to look for me and bring me back ‘after I tarnished the family’s reputation,’” Kareem recalled, “and that they need to ‘wash their honor as soon as possible.’”

A childhood friend now living in Spain sent Kareem a voice memo with a warning: “Your family has placed a bounty of 35,000 shekels on your head. It is absolutely clear that this will not end well and that your family is truly determined to catch you.”

The only thing standing between Kareem and deportation back to the West Bank was his welfare permit, and now it was gone.

In a court filing, Kareem’s attorney wrote that his family members wished “to obtain information about his whereabouts and bring him to the territories, dead or alive, in order to settle accounts with him, that is, to ensure he does not remain alive.”

Israel contended in court that Palestinians in Kareem’s position were motivated not by genuine fear but by a desire to “enjoy the more liberal lifestyle in Israel, rather than facing an actual threat,” language drawn from a 2013 Israeli Inter-Ministerial Committee report on Palestinians claiming persecution based on sexual orientation.

In response to a request for comment from The Intercept, COGAT, the Israeli military body that oversees civilian affairs in the occupied territories, said that permits of this kind are granted “first and foremost for the purpose of saving lives, and allow the applicant to remain in Israel until a permanent solution is found in a receiving country.”

As Kareem’s lawyers and other human rights organizations in Israel have long argued, rather than being welcomed, gay Palestinians are frequently subject to blackmail by Israeli authorities, who pressure them to provide intelligence in exchange for protection, turning their vulnerability into a tool of coercion.

In the 10 Years Tamir Blank has been working with Palestinians from the West Bank filing asylum claims in Israel, he has accepted that many of his clients will either willingly choose to collaborate with Israeli intelligence or be coerced into it.

Many asylum-seekers feel pressured to offer intelligence to Israeli authorities in the hope that it might help them obtain a humanitarian stay permit, which entitles them to the right to work. (Even that is a relatively recent development: The permits only began allowing legal employment in 2022, after extensive litigation, before which Palestinians were often forced into grey industries like the sex trade.) In one case, a transgender Palestinian woman named Zehava who fled the West Bank in 2021 died by suicide after Israeli authorities revoked her permit.

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“The Israeli policy is to minimize the presence of Palestinians within its borders, in the West Bank and within the 48 borders,” referring to Israel’s pre-1967 territory, said Anat Matar, an Israeli academic and head of the Israeli Committee for Palestinian Prisoners. Israeli authorities deter Palestinians from fleeing to Israel with bureaucratic hurdles, she told The Intercept, as they seek to maintain a Jewish demographic majority.

Blank’s clients are often so desperate to hold onto their status, feeling pressured to offer intelligence is “not something that is unique,” he said. The authorities “use every weakness they can.”

Kareem, however, was out of luck. He had no such intelligence to offer, as is often the case with LGBTQ+ Palestinians forced to flee. According to Blank, the very fact of their social exclusion means they are rarely privy to intelligence of value to Israeli authorities, regardless of who their family members might be.

Because he was born in the West Bank and holds a Palestinian Authority-issued ID, Kareem is unable to ever obtain residency or citizenship in Israel. Doing so, Israeli authorities fear, would set a precedent for a broader right of return for Palestinians displaced in the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. The original welfare permit Israel issued required Kareem to pursue resettlement in a third country; there was no path for him to remain in Israel.

Reut Ahdut, of the Aguda Israel, which until 2025 ran a program offering assistance to LGBTQ+ Palestinians fleeing the West Bank, said permits that used to be relatively stable are now often granted for only one to three months, with applicants required to regularly provide evidence that they are at risk across all Palestinian Authority territories, including the West Bank.

Despite the 2024 ruling, Israel’s Population and Immigration Authority maintains that Palestinians are not subject to the United Nations Refugee Convention and therefore that it is not obligated to provide them asylum on the grounds that UNRWA, the U.N. agency mandated to provide assistance to Palestinian refugees, bears that responsibility instead. After banning UNRWA from operating on its territory in 2025, Israel demolished UNRWA’s East Jerusalem headquarters in January. 

After a court battle at the Jerusalem District Court, Kareem’s permit was reinstated in December 2024, and he has since been able to renew it with the permission of the military commander. In its ruling, the court acknowledged that the security intelligence used to revoke his permit may have been “based on false allegations that his family has made against him, in order to bring about his deportation.”

For now, Kareem has no path out of Israel — his life suspended, renewed six months at a time.

At one point, Kareem hoped he could be resettled to Canada through the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees resettlement program, but amid rising anti-immigrant sentiment even in Canada, that option has vanished.

His time living in the shelter is over. With the help of the Tel Aviv Municipality, Kareem has moved into transitional housing in the Tel Aviv area.

He keeps his lightheartedness, switching seamlessly from referencing TikToks he found hilarious, to drama at work, to decrying how life as a Palestinian in Israel has become all but impossible since October 7th.

With the Port of Jaffa to the left and the Tel Aviv skyline looming off to the right, Kareem stared out at the Mediterranean, reflecting on the past year.

“I hate the sea, I really do, and I am supposed to say at least I got to see it because of my permit. But really what I miss is my home, the West Bank,” Kareem said. “That is where I am from, but for now, the sea will do.”

The post A Gay Palestinian Fled to Israel’s “Safe Haven.” Israel Tried to Exploit Him for Intelligence. appeared first on The Intercept.

Parscale was hired in part to influence major right-wing Christian media company Salem Media Group, where he is also an executive. His firm spent hundreds of thousands on ads with a Salem subsidiary. As part of the contract, Parscale’s firm also sent millions to other firms run by some of his closest political allies.

The new filing sheds light on a more detailed web of interconnected companies and political operatives capitalizing on Parscale’s contract with the Israeli government. Many of the companies getting work as part of Parscale’s Israel contract are being reported here for the first time.

Among those that received millions of dollars’ worth of payments related to the contract are ventures like SparkFire, an AI chatbot company leading a mass texting campaign, and a shadowy firm run by longtime mainstream Republican strategist Mike Shields. (None of the figures or firms in this story responded to requests for comment.)

Israel initially directly hired Parscale’s firm, Clock Tower X, last September with a contract worth $6 million. The new filing reveals that his firm has received over $15 million from Havas Media Network, an international media company, on behalf of the Israeli state.

The document shows that Parscale directed over $500,000 for ads to Salem Media Representatives, a subsidiary of Salem Media. Although Parscale was hired to integrate pro-Israel messaging into Salem Media shows — which feature conservative commentators such as Hugh Hewitt, Larry Elder, and Scott Jennings — these payments to the conservative media conglomerate on behalf of Israel were not previously known.

Parscale, who is the chief strategy officer for Salem Media, is not the only registered representative of Israel working for the media company. 

One of Parscale’s team members working on the Israel contract, Ashley Evdokimo, is Salem’s vice president for communications. According to her LinkedIn profile, Evdokimo, who works with Parscale at his digital strategy company Campaign Nucleus, took a position at Salem Media in September 2025, the same month that Parscale was hired to work for the Israeli government. A month later, Evdokimo registered as a foreign agent for Israel.

A Parscale Partnership

One of the largest recipients of the Israeli funds coming in through Parscale’s contract is a firm called Portman Road Strategies, which is run by longtime GOP strategist Mike Shields, according to Virginia state records. Shields’s firm received just under $5 million from Parscale as part of the contract in exchange for media placement, consulting, polling, and advertising work. 

Shields, a longtime Parscale ally, is also largely responsible for staffing the contract with the Israeli government. Of Parscale’s 18 team members at Clock Tower X, 14 are staffers at Convergence Media, a “campaign strategy, digital, public affairs & media firm” led by Shields.

During the first Trump administration, Shields and Parscale operated as a package deal, consistently recommending each other’s services as both became power brokers in Trump world. Parscale frequently convinced GOP campaigns — including that of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis — to hire Shields’s Convergence Media. The duo are now applying their digital influence campaign playbook to Israel. According to his bio, Shields was also a CNN commentator, a former chief of staff for the Republican National Committee, and a strategist for former Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif.

Parscale directed another $6 million of the Israeli funds to SparkFire Technologies, an AI chatbot company. SparkFire’s role was previously unknown, but it was related to a campaign of text messages that was first reported by Responsible Statecraft. Under the contract, Parscale’s firm reaches out to Americans under the auspices of supposed “peace” organizations. 

SparkFire’s main service, called the flywheel, uses AI to reach out to people with personalized messages. The AI then performs an analysis on the conversation, with SparkFire storing the data and using it to target messages to the recipient.

Bot texts sent by SparkFire can appear compassionate, understanding, and referential, based on screenshots shared with the Intercept and Responsible Statecraft.

SparkFire claims these types of conversations are highly effective. The company boasts its messaging had a 45 percent conversion rate, suggesting almost half of the recipients were persuaded by the AI-powered conversation. While the scale of its text campaigns is unknown, SparkFire says it can reach millions of people.

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In text conversations with Americans about Israel, SparkFire’s bots frequently push links to pro-Israel websites and videos created by Parscale. One video, posted by a YouTube channel called Allies for Peace, claims that the narrative of suffering in Gaza was manufactured.

The pro-Israel websites and videos created for the initiative are also intended to influence artificial intelligence platforms like ChatGPT and Claude that scrape the internet for content.

Parscale’s websites include a legal disclaimer that they were created on behalf of the Israeli government. To identify the connection to paid pro-Israel advocacy, users of ChatGPT and Claude would have to ask the chatbot for sources, click the links to Parscale’s websites, and then scroll to the bottom of the pages to see that they are receiving information from a contractor for Israel.

Israel-Loving Oil Tycoon

Another company that appears to be involved with Parscale’s Israel contract is Jackson Parker, whose Florida chapter was founded by Parscale and billionaire oil tycoon Tim Dunn in early 2025. The company shares an Ohio office with several other Parscale companies working on the Israel project.

A recent job listing from Jackson Parker for a director of strategic communications says, “We are a mission-driven organization focused on combating anti-Semitism and strengthening public understanding of Israel as America’s closest ally in the Middle East.” One of the position’s requirements, the listing says, is to maintain compliance with the Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA.

Dunn, a major Trump donor, is an evangelical preacher and billionaire who has spent tens of millions of dollars to push Texas towards a Christian governance model. He’s staunchly pro-Israel and chairs the Christian Advisory Board of the Israel Allies Foundation. Dunn once told a Jewish Republican Texas House speaker, however, that only Christians should hold leadership positions in the statehouse. 

Dunn is also heavily involved in the recently announced purchase of Salem Media. Earlier this month, WaterStone, a Colorado-based nonprofit that already controlled a 49.5 percent voting interest in Salem Media, said it would acquire the remaining shares of the company at a 250 percent premium of its recent share price, taking the company private. Hexagon Foundation, a nonprofit led by Dunn, is the largest institutional donor to WaterStone. Dunn’s organization, which says its mission is to support WaterStone, gave $70 million to Salem’s new owners in 2025.

On LinkedIn, an employee of another company called Three Tech, which received close to half a million dollars from the Israel contract, wrote “come work with us” and then shared job listings from Jackson Parker. 

Three Tech, a software development company founded in 2024, is connected to a constellation of interwoven firms run by Parscale in Ohio and Texas that have been paid with Israeli government money. Three Tech is listed as a “certified partner” of a marketing firm that shares Clock Tower X’s Medina, Ohio, address (along with another Parscale company receiving Israeli money as part of this deal, AI company Eyesover). According to the CEO’s LinkedIn, Three Tech uses a team of “80 Serbian engineers.”

Parscale’s work, with the help of subcontractors, is part of a broader strategy by the Israeli government to win back support from young conservatives and evangelicals. Fifty-seven percent of Republicans aged 18 to 49 have an unfavorable opinion of Israel, according to a Pew poll from March.

Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s government has ramped up spending on influence operations. Earlier this year, Israel more than quadrupled its public diplomacy budget from $150 million in 2025 to $730 million in 2026.

The post Ex-Trump Campaign Chief Funneled Millions of Israeli Government Money to His Longtime Allies’ Companies appeared first on The Intercept.

It was eight days after Donald Trump took office for a second time, and Gorka, the senior counterterrorism director on President Trump’s National Security Council, walked into the Oval Office accompanied by a member of his own counterterrorism team and his boss, then-national security adviser Mike Waltz. The group approached the Resolute desk and laid an intelligence “place mat” with information about a man in Somalia in front of the president.

“Sir, ISIS leader, killed Americans, planning to kill more Americans,” is how Gorka recalled the summary they provided to the president. “We informed him that the Biden administration had been watching him for about a year and a half.” According to Gorka, Trump replied: “What do you mean, we’ve been watching him? Kill him!’”

Gorka said Trump ticked off the “go box” on the operation orders with one of his signature presidential Sharpie markers. Moments later, outside the Oval Office, Gorka recalled, a call was made to Fort Bragg and “elsewhere” to arrange the attack. Less than 30 hours later, Gorka and his colleague were in the White House Situation Room watching the target on massive television screens. “It was Tom Clancy, but it was real,” Gorka recalled recently. “Go time was 8:45 in the morning.” Two minutes before the scheduled attack, there was still no sign of Waltz. A minute later, he walked in, and 60 seconds after, Gorka’s quest was complete.

“Eight forty-five the platform launches what it launches and this individual just disappears from the earth,” Gorka recalled recently in a version of the account told during a softball interview with Dean Cain, a MAGA influencer best known for his role in the 1990s TV series “Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman.” Gorka told the story again and again on Breitbart’s Alex Marlow Show, and to other pro-administration outlets.

In the aftermath of that first strike, Trump took to social media to boast about the attack. “This morning I ordered precision Military air strikes on the Senior ISIS Attack Planner and other terrorists he recruited and led in Somalia,” he wrote. “The message to ISIS and all others who would attack Americans is that ‘WE WILL FIND YOU, AND WE WILL KILL YOU!’” In honor of this line — which he said has become the motto of his directorate and is arguably the mantra of the second Trump administration — Gorka and his team wear custom lanyards that say: WWFY & WWKY. Gorka calls it the “most coveted lanyard in the U.S. government.”

Since that strike, the Trump administration has taken the murderous motto to heart, proclaiming versions of it in avenues from Pentagon social media posts to Trump’s foreword to Gorka’s recently released “Counterterrorism Strategy” — and conducting a global killing spree. “Since our first operation on day 11 of this administration, a scant 15 months ago, we have killed 860 jihadis across the globe,” Gorka told Newsmax, noting elsewhere that this figure does not include those killed in the wars in Iran, Venezuela, or Yemen. (Gorka also claimed, two days later, that the number killed in lethal strikes was actually 815. The White House did not reply to a request for clarification.)

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While the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, the war with Iran, and even the so-called boat strikes in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean have been front page news, Trump has supercharged America’s longest ongoing forever war — the conflict in Somalia — with very little notice. But as Trump’s attacks in Somalia have skyrocketed, so has terrorist violence there, according to the Pentagon. War Department statistics show that attacks and fatalities in Somalia have reached epic proportions, even though the War Department seemed to claim that ISIS-Somalia has been annihilated and Trump claims ISIS was wiped out years ago.

“Somalia saw the biggest surge in reported fatalities across all regions,” according to an April report by the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a Pentagon research institution. “The 8,813 deaths linked to al Shabaab and the Islamic State (ISIS) over the past year represent a 93-percent increase from the previous year.” This record throws into broad relief the failure of Gorka’s and the president’s primary counterterrorism strategy and the inability of the administration to kill its way to victory.

Loosened rules of engagement during Trump’s first term had a profound effect in Somalia, where strikes tripled after Trump relaxed targeting principles. The U.S. conducted 219 declared attacks in Somalia during Trump’s first four years in the White House, a more than 350 percent increase over the eight years of the Obama presidency.

A review of Trump-era rules by the Biden administration found that for attacks in some countries, a requirement for “near certainty” that civilians would “not be injured or killed in the course of operations” was reportedly enforced only if the civilians were women and children. A lower standard was applied to adult men. All military-age males were considered legitimate targets if they were observed with suspected al-Shabab members in the group’s territory, retired Brig. Gen. Donald Bolduc, who led Special Operations Command Africa at the time, told The Intercept. 

A 2023 investigation by The Intercept found that Trump’s directive contributed to a particularly disastrous attack in Somalia that killed at least three — and possibly five — civilians, including 22-year-old Luul Dahir Mohamed and her 4-year-old daughter, Mariam Shilow Muse. The mother and child survived the initial strike but were killed by a double-tap attack as they fled for their lives. “They know innocent people were killed, but they’ve never told us a reason or apologized,” said Abdi Dahir Mohamed, one of Luul’s brothers. “No one has been held accountable.”

Under President Joe Biden, the U.S. military conducted 51 strikes in Somalia over four years, according to D.C.-based think tank New America. Last year alone, Trump oversaw 126 attacks, exceeding the previous one-year record of 66 under Trump in 2019. He has already conducted 64 attacks in Somalia this year, and a total of at least 190 there so far in his second term — including an attack that one top U.S. commander called the “largest airstrike in the history of the world.” Trump and Gorka are on pace to eclipse the 219 strikes of his first term in just a year and a half in office.

Gorka frames the Biden administration’s failure to conduct wholesale strikes on supposed “jihadis” as a soul-crushing experience for national security professionals from the Intelligence Community and special operations forces. “The morale was so bad,” he recently told Cain. “I’ve got a targeter on my team, an amazing lady, who are in the bowels of an intelligence agency and their job is … for 10 hours a day with headphones watching a screen tracking jihadis.… And for four years, they’re basically not allowed to kill people.” He added: “You say, ‘Hey, we’ve got the coordinates. Can we do something?’ And the White House says, ‘No.’”

Wes Bryant, who called in thousands of strikes against ISIS as a special operations joint terminal attack controller, scoffed at Gorka’s assessment that the Biden administration was negligent in its war on ISIS and capriciously allowing terrorists to operate freely.

“Often, we gain more by watching senior operatives for extended periods because we can then piece together more of an entirety of an operation or organization. Otherwise, all it becomes is whack-a-mole,” Bryant told The Intercept. “Targeting and intelligence collections operations can be likened to an undercover operation against a criminal organization in law enforcement — where we are watching and monitoring and gathering evidence and characterizing every single associate and activity in order to build the big picture of the organization and take every piece of it down versus just one guy that we found.”

Bryant was skeptical of Gorka and his motives. “I’m not sure if he doesn’t know better and just wants to deliver the superfluous talking point to his uneducated far right audience that ‘Trump kills more bad guys’ and is therefore keeping America safer.”

The Intercept sought to interview Gorka through Anna Kelly, the special assistant to the president and White House principal deputy press secretary. She did not reply to that request or to questions about Gorka’s claims.

Trump, who campaigned on ending foreign wars during his 2024 presidential run and pledged to measure success “by the wars that we end — and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into,” has conducted military interventions in Ecuador, Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela, and Yemen, as well as attacks on civilians in boats in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean and CIA operations in Mexico.

While claiming to be “the peace president,” Trump — with Gorka as his point man — has actually been attempting to kill his way to victory. “We are bringing down the hammers of hell on our enemies,” Gorka told Newsmax. But official pronouncements from the Pentagon, the intelligence community, and even the White House demonstrate that Trump’s lethal strikes have failed. 

ISIS was, for example, one of the top threats in Trump’s 2018 counterterrorism strategy. He battled the group during his first term and eventually declared victory. “We defeated ISIS in record time,” Trump said in his 2024 election-night speech. Despite this, the first lethal strike of Trump’s second term — in February 2025 — was on “the Senior ISIS Attack Planner … in Somalia,” according to Trump himself. Three months later, at his commencement speech at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, Trump was back to claiming ISIS had been wiped out. “I defeated ISIS in three weeks,” he said.

This claim has, however, been undermined by the nation’s Africa Command on a regular basis in the year since, amid scores of pronouncements of attacks “targeting ISIS-Somalia.” This month, AFRICOM commander Gen. Dagvin R.M. Anderson even admitted to the Senate Armed Services Committee that the “Islamic State of Iraq and Syria remain a threat to the homeland today” and that “ISIS-West Africa and ISIS-Sahel [are] becoming increasingly more collaborative.” The next day, Trump undercut his own claims by announcing on Truth Social that U.S. forces had “eliminate[d] the most active terrorist in the world … Abu-Bilal al-Minuki,” a top figure within ISIS–West Africa whom Trump claimed was “second in command of ISIS globally.”

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Despite Gorka’s consistent fawning praise of Trump — he told Cain his boss is the “most incredible commander-in-chief we’ve had of the modern age” — even Gorka’s recently unveiled “2026 Counterterrorism Strategy” rebutted Trump’s assertions. That document lists ISIS as one of the “top five Islamist terror groups that have the intent and capabilities to execute External Operations against the United States,” and it spotlighted yet another branch of the group, ISIS-Khorasan, which is active in South Asia. The National Counterterrorism Center also lists a host of additional Islamic State threats: ISIS’s network in Bangladesh, ISIS–Central Africa, ISIS–East Asia, ISIS–Libya, ISIS–Mozambique, and ISIS–Sinai among them.

Trump’s ongoing campaign against the supposedly defeated ISIS and spiking violence in Somalia offers clear evidence of the administration’s failures, even as Gorka touts success to outlets that fail to push back on his claims.

“The find, fix, finish model is peerless,” Gorka said of lethal strikes on the New York Post podcast “Pod Force One.” He boasted that the U.S. is “crushing it when it comes to jihadis.” 

The post Trump’s War on ISIS Is Failing, No Matter How Gorka Spins It appeared first on The Intercept.