The Israeli government this week stripped Nile crocodiles of their protected status in order to advance a proposal that National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir said was inspired by the Trump administration’s now-shuttered Alligator Alcatraz to build a prison for Palestinians surrounded by a moat full of the ravenous reptiles.
“You read that right,” the liberal US Jewish group J Street said in response to the news. “When cruelty becomes a governing principle instead of an aberration within the Israeli government, something has gone deeply wrong.”
Israeli Environmental Minister Idit Silman signed a directive Wednesday reclassifying Nile crocodiles as “specially managed wild animals,” a novel legal category enabling the government to keep them for security purposes.
Ben-Gvir, who heads the Israel Prison Service (IPS), said he was inspired by the Trump administration’s recently closed Alligator Alcatraz immigrant detention center in Florida. He is seeking to first introduce crocodiles into a moat around Ketziot Prison in southern Israel.
While it is not certain that the plan will come to fruition, Ben-Gvir celebrated Silman’s decree in a social media post showing him petting a crocodile, with the caption: “Cursed terrorist, thinking of trying to escape? Think again.”
Palestinians have occasionally escaped from Israeli lockups, such as in September 2021, when six men used improvised tools, including spoons, to tunnel out of the high-security Gilboa Prison. All six escapees were caught within weeks.
(Photo by Itamar Ben-Gvir/Facebook)
The move by Silman—who gained international notoriety by calling for the ethnic cleansing of all Palestinians from the Gaza Strip—came despite objections from her own ministry’s legal adviser and the Nature and Parks Authority.
IPS, which sent a fact-finding mission to the Hamat Gader crocodile farm in January, argued that its employees could handle the animals, citing the agency’s experience working with the attack dogs that Palestinian prisoners and human rights groups have claimed were used to maul and even sexually abuse detainees.
Silman’s approval is contingent upon IPS meeting animal welfare requirements and appropriate holding conditions.
Meanwhile, Ben-Gvir has openly boasted about the dramatic deterioration in conditions endured by Palestinian prisoners since the Hamas-led attack of October 7, 2023 and Israel’s retaliatory obliteration of Gaza, which United Nations and other experts describe as a genocide.
“We go into the prisons, and they wet themselves,” Ben-Gvir said of Palestinian prisoners during a speech on Friday. “I’m not joking. They’re afraid. Fear rules them, and that’s how it should be.”
The US military destroys the Vessel Traffic Service tower at Shahid Kalantari Port in Chabahar, Iran. The approximately 60-meter structure was used to monitor and coordinate maritime traffic at the commercial port. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gloated over the attack on social media.
The United States military bombed bridges, a railway station, an airport and the control tower of Iran’s only deep-water ocean port on Friday, the seventh consecutive day of strikes, extending its assault from military targets to the infrastructure of civilian life.
Iranian state media reported strikes on at least five bridges in the southern province of Hormozgan, killing seven people in the port city of Bandar Khamir and hitting its railway station. Explosions were reported in Sirik, Ahvaz and Yazd after a new wave of strikes began at 3 p.m. Eastern time.
Iran’s energy ministry asked citizens Friday to use less electricity and air conditioning, as American strikes on the power system strained the grid in extreme heat. Since the fighting resumed, the strikes have killed at least 38 people and wounded more than 400, Iran’s Health Ministry said Friday.
Attacks on civilian infrastructure are war crimes. The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court defines “intentionally directing attacks against civilian objects, that is, objects which are not military objectives” as a war crime, and customary international law—binding on Washington and Tehran alike, though neither ratified the treaties—specifically protects “drinking water installations and supplies.”
A spokesman for UN Secretary-General António Guterres said Friday that Guterres is “particularly concerned about attacks on civilian infrastructure in Iran and across the region,” adding, “Such attacks are unacceptable.”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth celebrated the destruction on social media. He posted a photograph Friday of the maritime surveillance tower at Chabahar collapsing in smoke, above the caption, “Iran does not control the SoH”—the Strait of Hormuz, 350 miles away.
Iranian officials said the tower, which fell after a third strike, guided merchant shipping and rescues of fishermen at sea. Ryan Costello, policy director of the National Iranian American Council, called the post “disgusting online revelry in the bombardment of Iran and its infrastructure.”
The memorandum of understanding signed June 17 stopped the American attacks, reopened Iran’s ports and paused oil sanctions in return for 60 days of free passage through the strait.
US President Donald Trump pronounced the agreement dead on July 8, notified Congress on July 10 that “military action” had resumed, and the first of seven consecutive nights of bombing followed on July 11. By Tuesday afternoon the naval blockade was back in force.
The Trump administration is actively discussing a ground invasion. The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that Trump is leaning toward expanded operations, including sending troops to seize Kharg Island, Iran’s main oil export terminal, and other territory along the strait, after a White House Situation Room meeting Tuesday. Reuters reported the same day that officials describe the current strikes as “shaping operations.”
On Friday, the Journal reported that the US was shifting jet fighters back from Europe and that the 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit, more than 2,000 strong, is operating in the region.
Trump has refused to rule out a ground assault. “Sometimes you need a ground campaign, but we have other people that will do the ground campaign for us,” he said on Fox News Tuesday, calling a seizure of Kharg Island unlikely, but adding, “If we degrade them far enough and deep enough back, I would do that.”
The bridge campaign itself executes a threat he made days earlier: “We’re going to knock out all their power plants. We’re going to knock out all their bridges unless they get to the table and negotiate.”
Iran answered with missile and drone attacks on US bases and other targets across Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Jordan and Oman. On Friday, it damaged a Kuwaiti power and desalination plant—the country draws about 90 percent of its drinking water from desalination—forcing Kuwait to ration electricity in the July heat.
When Trump signed the agreement with Iran in June, the party’s leaders denounced it as a capitulation. “This is not the art of the deal. This is the art of surrender,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said on June 19, declaring that Trump “gave away the store” and that “the Iranians took him to the cleaners.”
Democratic Representative Seth Moulton of Massachusetts called the deal “basically a surrender document from Donald Trump to the supreme leader of Iran.” Their criticism was, in effect, a demand that the war be fought through to victory.
The war is overwhelmingly unpopular. In an Economist/YouGov poll conducted July 10-13, 57 percent called the decision to go to war wrong and 65 percent said Washington should strike a deal to end it as soon as possible. A Washington Post-Ipsos poll released Thursday put Trump’s approval rating at 37 percent, with 61 percent disapproving.
The economic toll is mounting. Brent crude settled Friday at $88.10 a barrel, up 4.6 percent on the day and more than 10 percent across the week, its sharpest five-day rise since April.
Gasoline has reached $3.94 a gallon nationally, up from $3.79 on July 7, according to AAA, and war-risk insurance for ships in the region has climbed from 0.25 percent of a vessel’s value before the war to as much as 10 percent.
The bombing of Iran is part of a broader war. In Gaza, the Health Ministry counted 73,250 dead as of this week, and Israel has sharply escalated its strikes—more than 40 in June, the most of any month since the ceasefire that took effect in October 2025.
On Friday a drone strike on a funeral procession outside a mosque in the Nuseirat refugee camp killed eight people, Al Jazeera reported. The Times of Israel wrote Thursday that the Israeli military “ramped up its strikes” in Gaza after the first round of the war against Iran wound down in April.
The White House has held meetings this week to discuss sending ground troops to Iran, according to a report published Wednesday in the Wall Street Journal. President Donald Trump “is leaning toward expanding U.S. military operations in Iran after days of briefings from top aides,” the Journal wrote, citing US officials, with the options including “sending ground forces to seize Iranian islands near the Strait of Hormuz.”
A ground invasion of Iran would mark the war’s most dangerous escalation to date. Four and a half months of war, beginning February 28, have left the Iranian government in place, Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium sealed underground and shipping through the strait nearly halted. Washington is turning toward ground forces because bombing has failed.
Trump convened a meeting in the White House Situation Room Tuesday evening “to discuss the potential seizure of Kharg Island and other territory along the Strait of Hormuz using U.S. troops, as well as the potential bombing of a tunnel complex at Pickaxe Mountain,” the Journal reported. The discussion “was one of multiple formal and informal conversations Trump has held in recent days” with senior officials about an escalation of the war.
Trump told Fox News Tuesday: “Sometimes you need a ground campaign, but we have other people that will do the ground campaign for us.” In the same interview, he said it was unlikely that US forces would seize Kharg Island, Iran’s main oil export terminal, but would not rule it out: “If we degrade them far enough and deep enough back, I would do that.”
On June 14, Washington announced a “memorandum of understanding” to suspend direct attacks. Under the agreement, signed June 17, the United States lifted its naval blockade and paused oil sanctions in exchange for a 60-day guarantee of safe passage through the strait.
The “ceasefire” was condemned by all factions of the political establishment. Former Vice President Mike Pence, writing in the Journal on June 22, said the agreement “smacks of the kind of appeasement” Trump once rejected and urged him to “let the armed forces finish the job.” Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called it the “art of surrender,” and Democratic Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut described it as “essentially surrender to Iran.”
Trump declared the “ceasefire” over on July 8, and in a July 10 letter informed Congress that the United States had resumed “military action” against Iran—a notification the White House claims reset the 60-day clock set by the War Powers Act for the president to seek congressional approval of military operations. The bombing resumed the following night, and on Monday Trump announced the reimposition of the naval blockade, which took effect Tuesday afternoon.
Reuters reported Wednesday, citing US officials, that the strikes aimed at forcing open the Strait of Hormuz are “also targeting Iranian military capabilities the U.S. would want to destroy before executing more complex operations against Iran.” One of the officials called the strikes “shaping operations” and said: “This is helping set the stage, if needed.” Reuters wrote that another official said Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth “has been an advocate of escalating the military operation against Iran.”
Three boys play in the shallow waters of the Strait of Hormuz, as a plume of smoke rises from an explosion in the background, off Bandar Abbas, Iran, Monday, July 13, 2026. [AP Photo/Razieh Poudat]
Retired Marine General Frank McKenzie, who ran US military operations across the Middle East from 2019 to 2022, advocated a ground invasion of Kharg Island on CBS’s Face the Nation program Sunday: “That’s something we should think about doing because possession of Iranian soil would be a significant factor in future negotiations with Iran.”
The International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) estimates that Iran fields some 570,000 active-duty troops and 350,000 reserves, backed by coastal missile batteries, naval mines and swarms of fast attack boats. The US military said its strikes overnight July 7-8 hit more than 80 targets, including over 60 of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ small attack boats, but Reuters reported Wednesday that Iran is still fielding missiles and drones despite heavy losses. Retired General Philip Breedlove told Fox News this week that the 2003 invasion of Iraq required more than 300,000 US troops staged in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia; the American force now in the region number 50,000, but few are ground troops.
The bombing has now run six consecutive nights. The wave that ended Wednesday night reached the Parchin military complex and the city of Pakdasht, near Tehran—the first strikes close to the capital in this round of the war—and hit a civilian airport in Semnan province, where Iran builds its ballistic missiles and runs its space program. A sixth wave began at 2:00 p.m. Eastern Time Thursday “to further degrade Iranian military capabilities,” the US military announced; Iranian state media said a bridge between Bandar Abbas and Lar and an airport in Iranshahr, in the country’s southeast, had been struck.
On Wednesday, US missiles struck Greater Tunb Island, one of three islands commanding the approaches to the Strait of Hormuz, and a barracks of the army’s 388th Mechanized Infantry Brigade, where Iranian state television said at least 13 missiles killed seven soldiers. At least 35 people have been killed and more than 300 wounded this month, according to Iran’s Health Ministry.
Iranian officials said a US strike Wednesday night hit near Shahid Baqaei Hospital, a children’s cancer center in Ahvaz, forcing the evacuation of 211 chemotherapy patients. Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei called it “a cowardly war crime against the most innocent of human beings—children who are bravely fighting for their lives.”
Iran struck back Thursday at air bases housing US forces in Jordan, Kuwait and Bahrain, with the Guard citing the strike near the Ahvaz hospital as justification. Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Iran’s chief negotiator, declared Wednesday: “We are in an essential and existential war with America.” Iranian army spokesman Brigadier General Mohammad Akraminia warned Thursday that if Trump carries out his threats against Iranian infrastructure, “All the infrastructure in the region will be crushed under the steel blows of the powerful armed forces of the Islamic Republic of Iran.”
The US military is now enforcing the naval blockade by attacking civilian ships. Within 17 hours of its taking effect, the military said it had “redirected” two commercial ships, and on Wednesday a US aircraft fired Hellfire missiles into the smokestack of the Belma, a Curaçao-flagged tanker sailing for Kharg Island, disabling it. “The ship is no longer transiting to Iran,” the military announced.
The human rights groups’ suit came as the Trump administration vowed to destroy the International Criminal Court entirely.
Noah Hurowitz, The Intercept, July 15 2026, 6:00 a.m. ET
Human rights groups sued the Trump administration and cited U.S. sanctions against U.N. special rapporteur Francesca Albanese, seen speaking at a summit in Brussels on April 22, 2026. Photo: Dursun Aydemir/Anadolu via Getty Images
Two pro-Palestine groups filed a lawsuit Wednesday that takes aim at U.S. sanctions against international human rights groups linked to efforts to hold Israel accountable for war crimes.
The lawsuit, filed in a New York federal court by Democracy for the Arab World Now, or DAWN, and Taxpayer Alliance Against Genocide, seeks to reverse sanctions brought under Executive Order 14203.
The order, which President Donald Trump made in February 2025, grants the administration power to issue penalties against any person or group seeking to bring a case against the U.S. or its allies — namely Israel — before the International Criminal Court.
The plaintiffs, both of whom coordinate with international NGOs in an effort to hold the U.S. and Israel accountable for war crimes, are seeking a declaration that the ICC sanctions are in violation of their First Amendment rights because they create obstacles to free association. The lawsuit also asks for an injunction barring the Trump administration from using sanctions to stymie free speech.
Trump’s assault on the ICC — most recently including a vow to “dismantle” the court — has focused mostly on efforts to hold Israel accountable for war crimes. In November 2024, the court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, another Israeli official, and an official with the armed Palestinian group Hamas for activities during the time period of Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
The White House executive order came down shortly after the arrest warrants were issued.
The rights groups’ lawsuit specifically highlights sanctions against Francesca Albanese, the U.N. official tasked with probing human rights violations in the occupied Palestinian territories, and three Palestinian nongovernmental organizations. According to the plaintiffs, the sanctions impinge on their First Amendment rights by preventing them from engaging in protected speech activities with Albanese and the NGOs.
“The Trump administration is using the blunt instrument of economic sanctions not only to punish human rights defenders but to police the political expression of millions of Americans,” said Omar Shakir, the executive director of DAWN, which was founded by journalist Jamal Khashoggi before his assassination by the Saudi government. “The government is violating the constitutional rights of American citizens in order to shield officials of a foreign government who have committed a genocide.”
The defendants named in the suit are Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, and Brad Smith, the director of the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control. (None of the American government officials immediately responded to requests for comment.)
Trump and his allies’ war on the international human rights community goes back years: In 2020, Trump issued sanctions against an ICC prosecutor after she called for an investigation into U.S. human rights abuses in Afghanistan.
Shortly after retaking the White House, Trump lifted Biden-era sanctions on Israeli settlers involved in violence against Palestinians and destruction of their property. Trump then issued Executive Order 14203, “Imposing Sanctions on the International Criminal Court,” which placed visa restrictions and financial penalties on individuals and groups seeking to help the ICC in any potential case against the U.S., Israel, or other allies.
Months later, the administration issued sanctions against Albanese, the U.N. special rapporteur. Albanese was briefly removed from the sanctions list in May after a federal judge ruled that the sanctions violated her rights, but the Office of Foreign Assets Control, which administers U.S. sanctions, added her to the list again days later, according to Al Jazeera.
The Albanese sanctions were followed in September 2025 with an edict sanctioning three NGOs: Al Haq, Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, and the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights.
In addition to penalizing Albanese and the NGOs, the sanctions bar any U.S. people or groups from engaging with them and make it a federal offense to receive or provide any “service” related to designated groups and people — an action the plaintiffs argue is in violation of their First Amendment rights.
The lawsuit comes at a moment of heightened attention to the sanctions against the ICC. Days before the lawsuit was filed, Rubio launched a broadside against the ICC in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece laying out a case for “dismantling” the court. Rubio specifically cited calls by DAWN for an investigation into potential war crimes in the U.S. bombing campaign against Iran.
“The ICC is backed and run by a powerful network of leftist nongovernment organizations, smug globalists, and hostile Third World governments united by their enmity toward the U.S.,” Rubio wrote. “Using all the tools at our government’s disposal, working beside every ally with whom we can make common cause, we will dismantle the ICC—brick by brick, if necessary.”
The timing of Rubio’s renewed attack on the ICC alongside the lawsuit appears to be a coincidence, but only serves to further underscore the stakes, according to Michael Schaeffer Omer-Man, a spokesperson for DAWN.
“The fact that he mentioned DAWN in his Wall Street Journal op-ed shows that the risk [of prosecution] to Americans is real,” Schaeffer Omer-Man told The Intercept. “But our primary goal is to get legal clarity that we can continue to have a working relationship with Francesca Albanese, and, equally if not more importantly, that we can resume working shoulder to shoulder with Palestinian civil society and human rights groups.”
The leader of Yemen’s Houthi rebels has threatened Saudi Arabia after days of fighting between the two countries, Al Jazeera reports.
In a televised address, Sayyed Abdul-Malik Al Houthi has blamed the Saudi leadership for advancing US and Israeli objectives in the region.
“The United States and Israel are the source of evil and instability in the world,” al-Houthi says.
He adds that the US, Israel and their allies “fuel instability through warmongering and the plundering of the wealth of nations, from Palestine to other regions”.
Al Houthi also says that Israel’s aim of changing the map of the Middle East to create a “Greater Israel” is the “driving force behind all the wars in the region”.
“This axis has no respect for international agreements and United Nations resolutions, but also boasts of genocide against nations and the destruction of civilisations,” Al Houthi adds.
He alleges that Saudi Arabia’s attacks on Yemen have been ongoing for years, have no legal justification, and are “carried out within the framework of alignment and loyalty to the United States and Israel”.
A small motorboat passes anchored vessels in the Strait of Hormuz off Bandar Abbas, Iran, Thursday, June 11, 2026. [AP Photo/Amirhosein Khorgooi]
US President Donald Trump threatened Tuesday to destroy Iran’s power plants and bridges, as the United States reimposed its naval blockade of Iranian ports and bombed the country for a fourth day.
“We’re going to hit them very hard tomorrow night. We’re going to hit them very hard the night after, and then next week it gets really bad for them, because next week comes the power plants. Next week comes the bridges,” Trump told Fox News. “We’re going to knock out all their power plants. We’re going to knock out all their bridges unless they get to the table and negotiate.”
The deliberate destruction of civilian infrastructure is a war crime under international law. In April, Trump threatened to bomb Iran “back to the Stone Ages.” In June he posted that the United States might be “forced to militarily complete the job,” and that if that happened, “the Islamic Republic of Iran will no longer exist!”
Trump’s genocidal threats to destroy Iranian civilization, and his renewed attacks, are a testament to the deepening crisis of the war. Trump has achieved none of the war’s objectives, from overthrowing the Iranian government to controlling the Strait of Hormuz.
Underscoring the degree of the crisis, Trump backed off Tuesday from the 20 percent toll on the Strait of Hormuz that he had proclaimed only a day earlier. On Monday he had declared the United States “THE GUARDIAN OF THE HORMUZ STRAIT,” to be “reimbursed, at the rate of 20 percent on all cargo shipped” through the waterway.
On Tuesday, citing “highly productive conversations with Middle East leadership,” he announced that he would “replace the 20 percent United States Reimbursement Fee with Trade and Investment Deals that the various Gulf States will be making into the United States.”
The renewed blockade took effect at 4 p.m. Eastern time, one hour after US forces opened a new round of airstrikes across southern Iran.
Ship traffic through the strait, which normally carries about one-fifth of the world’s oil, has nearly stopped. The maritime data firm Kpler counted 10 transits Monday, against more than 130 a day before the war.
US forces began Tuesday’s strikes at 3 p.m., the military said. Iranian officials and news agencies reported strikes on the city of Bushehr, home of Iran’s only operating nuclear power plant, on the Abadan oil refinery, Mahshahr, the islands of Qeshm and Kish, Sirik and Bandar Abbas.
Over three nights beginning Saturday, US warplanes and warships had already hit more than 300 sites, by the military’s own count.
Iran has declared the strait “closed until further notice” and is enforcing the closure with missiles.
Early Tuesday, Iranian cruise missiles struck two tankers of the Emirati state oil company, the Mombasa and the Al Bahiyah, in Omani waters, killing an Indian crew member and wounding eight others, according to the UAE’s defense ministry.
Iran struck back across the Gulf on Tuesday, firing missiles and drones at bases housing US forces. Kuwait’s army said it intercepted a ballistic missile, five cruise missiles and 33 drones, and that four of its sailors were wounded; Jordan said it shot down four missiles. Sirens sounded across Bahrain.
The bombing continued into the night. Iranian state media reported new American strikes late Tuesday along the southern coast and said a “US projectile” killed three civilians in a town in Hormozgan province.
Tehran has ruled out talks under fire. “If the US thinks its military attacks and blockade will force us to request negotiations, it’s making a mistake,” Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi told Iranian state media Tuesday.
Iran’s parliament, meeting Monday night in its first open session in more than four months, took up a bill to require Iranian permits and fees for every ship in the strait, with American and Israeli ships barred outright, under a draft reported by Al Jazeera.
The Trump administration claims that it can wage war again because it had a pause. The White House maintains that the June “ceasefire” ended the earlier hostilities and that its July 10 letter to Congress restarted the 60-day clock of the War Powers Resolution.
The response in major pro-war publications demonstrates the degree of the crisis gripping the Trump administration.
“The Trump administration wasn’t bargaining for an open-ended conflict when it rolled the dice in late February and joined Israel’s military campaign to eliminate Iran’s leadership and cripple its arsenal of ballistic missiles and launchers,” the Wall Street Journal’s national security correspondent, Michael Gordon, wrote Tuesday in an analysis titled “The Battle for Hormuz.”
“This is going to be a long-term effort,” Joseph Votel, the retired Army general who commanded US forces in the Middle East from 2016 to 2019, told the Journal. In the Washington Post, columnist David Ignatius raised the prospect of a war lasting years, citing an American negotiator’s forecast that peace “will come in two weeks, or two months, or two years.”
“In retrospect, this was clearly a war based on fatally flawed assumptions,” John Hannah, a former national security adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney and now a senior fellow at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America, said in a New York Times analysis published Tuesday, “none more damaging than the president’s apparent conviction that Iran’s revolutionary regime was a flimsy house of cards ready to collapse in a hail of American airstrikes and bellicose Truth Social posts.”
The Financial Times’ editorial board wrote Tuesday: “The quagmire underlines once again the foolishness of the war launched by Trump against the advice of many of his allies and without much understanding of his enemy. A crisis of Trump’s own making has left Tehran with newfound leverage in the strait, which Iran had never before closed in the past.”
In a Reuters/Ipsos poll completed Sunday, 79 percent of Americans said they expect US involvement in Iran to “go on for an extended period of time.” Only 37 percent approved of the renewed strikes.
Establishing US control over the Strait of Hormuz would require a massive escalation. Holding the strait would take a ground war, military analysts told the Associated Press Tuesday. “It’s very difficult to envision any scenario where you could satisfactorily secure the Strait of Hormuz absent ground forces,” said Jason Campbell of the Middle East Institute, a former Pentagon official—an operation, he said, that would require tens of thousands of troops, months of preparation and “very high costs.”
The forces such an operation would draw on are in place. The Abraham Lincoln and George H.W. Bush carrier groups, the assault ships Tripoli and Boxer with thousands of Marines aboard, and more than 20 warships in all are on station, with more than 50,000 US troops in the Middle East—by the military’s own account its largest force in the region since the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz has said that the Israeli military won’t withdraw from Gaza even if Hamas disarms and that he plans to establish three settlements in the area of northern Gaza that the IDF has destroyed.
“We are not retreating from the Yellow Line,” Katz said on Monday during a visit to northern Gaza with reporters from Israel’s Channel 14. “Unequivocally, as long as Hamas does not truly disarm, and even after that, we remain inside of Gaza to bring up three Nahal outposts (military settlements).”
Nahal settlements are a type of Jewish settlement in Israeli-occupied territory that are established by Israeli soldiers with the goal of transitioning them to permanent civilian communities. Katz first vowed in December 2025 that Israel would “never leave” Gaza and would establish Nahala settlements, though he has remained quiet about the plan since then, likely due to international backlash.
Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz said in a report aired on Monday that the destruction in Gaza, which he described as “the result of a deliberate policy”, “feels good”. pic.twitter.com/4bfytEmzYN— Middle East Eye (@MiddleEastEye) July 14, 2026
In his remarks on Monday, Katz said that a permanent Israeli presence was needed in Gaza to “improve the hold and defense of the communities,” referring to Israeli towns near the Gaza border.
Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has also recently said that plans have been drawn up for the establishment of three Jewish settlements inside Gaza and that he is just waiting on approval from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Katz also boasted of the destruction of Gaza cities during his visit to the northern part of the Strip. When asked how the view of the destruction made him feel, the Israeli minister said, “I feel good. Thank God. This is all the result of a deliberate policy aimed at removing threats. Instead of the raid method—going in and out—the IDF is inside, the terrorists are outside, and the houses are destroyed.”
Katz’s plans for Gaza go against the US-backed outline for a peace plan for Gaza that was approved by the UN Security Council, and the US has remained silent as Israel continues to constantly violate the ceasefire deal signed in October 2025, which was meant to lead to the implementation of the full peace plan.
Now that Hamas has released all Israeli captives and recovered the bodies of the deceased, Israeli officials try to justify the continued occupation and attacks in Gaza by demanding that Hamas disarm, but the comments from Katz and other Israeli officials reveal that the real goal is permanent occupation.
The former congressman tells Robert Scheer that a provision buried in the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act could integrate the United States and Israel at the highest levels of military technology—without meaningful public debate or congressional scrutiny.
Former Congressman Dennis Kucinich has spent decades warning about the machinery of permanent war. But in a new conversation with Robert Scheer, he argues that Congress is now on the verge of crossing a line without precedent in American military history.
At the center of Kucinich’s warning is Section 219 of the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act, a provision he says would formally integrate key areas of U.S. and Israeli military development, including artificial intelligence, autonomous weapons, quantum sensing, cyber and electronic warfare, biotechnology, missile defense, drones and directed-energy systems.
“They call it integration, but I call it a merger,” Kucinich tells Scheer.
The implications, he argues, go far beyond traditional military aid or weapons sales. Kucinich warns that the provision could create new counterintelligence risks, deepen U.S. dependence on Israel’s military infrastructure and technology, blur questions of war powers and further entangle Washington in Israel’s expanding regional conflicts.
Even more alarming, Kucinich says, is how little debate the proposal has received. Rather than being considered through a separate treaty or subjected to extensive congressional hearings, the provision has been folded into a massive defense authorization bill that lawmakers will face enormous political pressure to support.
“This provision has been smuggled into the bill,” Kucinich argues. “There’s never been any debate.”
For Scheer, the contradiction is impossible to ignore. At the moment the United States marks 250 years since declaring its independence, Washington may be moving toward an unprecedented military dependence on another state—one whose conduct in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon has placed it at the center of international accusations of genocide and grave violations of international law.
In this urgent edition of Scheer Intelligence, Scheer and Kucinich examine what Section 219 could mean for American sovereignty, constitutional government and the future of war—and why a provision of such consequence has received so little attention from Congress, the Democratic opposition and the mainstream press.
The Strait of Hormuz will never be opened by “war, evil, and American aggression”, the Iranian army’s spokesperson, Brigadier General Mohammad Akraminia, was cited as saying by the Tasnim news agency.
The country’s armed forces will not relent over the key waterway, Akraminia added. Respecting the rights of the Iranian people is the only way to open the Strait of Hormuz, he added.
“We are obligated to avenge the blood of the martyrs, especially the martyred leader of the Islamic Revolution,” Akraminia said.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Monday announced what he characterized as a “campaign to dismantle” the International Criminal Court, the Hague-based tribunal tasked with investigating and charging individuals with war crimes and other violations.
In a video posted to social media, Rubio accused the international court of “waging a war against our country—not with bullets or missiles, but with statutes, compacts, and the force of so-called international law.” The top American diplomat threatened that the US “will teach the ICC the full meaning of American resolve.”
The US State Department said in a statement that Rubio’s new campaign against the ICC would “feature a whole-of-government response to systematically disable” the court’s “ability to operate, target American servicemen or officials, or otherwise threaten American sovereignty.” The US is not party to the Rome Statute, the 1998 treaty that established the ICC.
US President Donald Trump and his subordinates, who have been accused of myriad violations of international law, have adopted an increasingly aggressive posture toward the ICC since taking power last January.
In a February 6, 2025 executive order, Trump declared “a national emergency to address” the purported “threat” posed by the ICC and announced sanctions against court officials, including its judges. The president’s order cited the ICC’s “investigations concerning personnel of the United States and certain of its allies, including Israel,” which is also not party to the Rome Statute.
Rubio warned in an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal on Monday that US officials accused of international crimes could be next to face ICC action.
“Border Patrol agents working to remove violent criminals from our country, US Marines risking their lives to restore order in the Western Hemisphere, federal prosecutors working to dismantle terror networks plotting attacks on the American homeland—all would face the constant risk of persecution for the ‘crime’ of defending our country,” Rubio wrote. “Using all the tools at our government’s disposal, working beside every ally with whom we can make common cause, we will dismantle the ICC—brick by brick, if necessary.”
Raed Jarrar, advocacy director of the human rights group Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN), said in response to Rubio’s op-ed that “when the world’s most powerful country aims to dismantle the world’s only permanent international court, it sends the message that the powerful are above the law.”
“It is not the ICC that Rubio is dismantling brick by brick, but the rules-based international order that grew out of the ashes of World War II,” said Jarrar. “Rubio’s attack doesn’t just underscore US hypocrisy, but undermines access to justice across the globe, from Ukraine to Sudan and could amount to obstruction of justice, a crime under the Rome Statute in and of itself.”
In his op-ed, Rubio pointed to DAWN’s call earlier this year for Iran and other Middle East nations to grant the ICC jurisdiction to investigate apparent war crimes committed during the conflict launched in late February by Trump and Netanyahu.
Omar Shakir, DAWN’s executive director, said Monday that Rubio mischaracterized the group’s call as focusing solely on actions by US personnel. That move, said Shakir, “begs the question: Is the secretary of state worried because he knows US personnel committed war crimes in Iran?”
Under Rubio’s plan, the State Department is threatening to impose “increased sanctions against the ICC and affiliated organizations,” hit court personnel with “visa revocations and travel bans,” and pressure other nations that aren’t party to the Rome Statute to “leverage their diplomatic networks to take similar actions alongside” the Trump administration.
Kenneth Roth, the former executive director of Human Rights Watch who has demanded international accountability for the Trump administration over its illegal assault on Iran, wrote Monday that Rubio “can’t even make an honest case for attacking the International Criminal Court.”
“He makes it sound like the ICC acts out of the blue anywhere it wants when in fact it acts only against crimes committed on the territory of states that have invited it,” Roth wrote. “He never explains why the United States should be able to commit crimes on the territory of those states with impunity, contrary to the desire of their sovereign governments for an international backstop to reinforce justice for such crimes.”
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