Published date: 10 April 2026 13:35 BST | Last update:39 mins 32 secs ago
Pakistan’s defence minister, Khawaja Asif, called Israel “evil” and a “curse for humanity” in an X post on Thursday, just hours before US and Iranian delegations were due to arrive in Islamabad for peace talks mediated by Pakistan.
In the post, which has since been deleted, Asif wrote: “While peace talks are underway in Islamabad, genocide is being committed in Lebanon. Innocent citizens are being killed by Israel, first Gaza, then Iran and now Lebanon, bloodletting continues unabated. I hope and pray people who created this cancerous state on Palestinians land to get rid of European jews burn in hell.”
The statement followed a wave of Israeli strikes on Lebanon on Wednesday that killed over 200 people and wounded over 1,000 in the heaviest day of bombing on the Lebanese capital in decades.
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The Israeli Prime Minister’s Office called Asif’s comments “outrageous” in a post on X.
“This is not a statement that can be tolerated from any government, especially not from one that claims to be a neutral arbiter for peace,” it said.
Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar said in a post on X that Israel “views very gravely these blatant antisemitic blood libels from a government claiming to mediate peace”.
“Calling the Jewish state ‘cancerous’ is effectively calling for its annihilation,” he added.
A screenshot of the deleted tweet on 9 April by Pakistani Defence Minister Khawaja Asif describing Israel as ‘cancerous’ and ‘evil’
Islamabad is set to host delegations from the US and Iran from Friday, with talks scheduled to begin on Saturday. They are aimed at ending the US-Israeli war on Iran, which reached a tentative ceasefire agreement on Wednesday.
Iran’s foreign ministry spokesperson, Esmaeil Baghaei, said on Friday that Iranian delegates would not attend peace talks unless the ceasefire agreement is extended to Lebanon.
One Pakistani official involved in the mediation talks told The Guardian on Friday: “Our priority is that the talks go smoothly.”
“We don’t want to be seen as a spoiler. Our role is as a facilitator and mediator. We will leave it to both parties, Iran and the US, to share any developments with the media if they want.”
Pakistan, which has positioned itself at the centre of global conflict mediation during the war, has also been mired in its own conflict with Afghanistan since declaring “open war” on 27 February.
Hundreds have been killed and nearly 100,000 displaced by cross-border shelling and air strikes during the conflict, which China is simultaneously mediating.
Asif, a veteran member of the conservative Pakistan Muslim League party that has governed Pakistan since 2024 and during several previous administrations, has long been vocal in his criticism of Israel.
On 3 March, he described Zionism as “a threat to humanity” in a post on X.
“From the establishment of Israel on the land of Palestine until today, every catastrophe that has befallen the Islamic world, every war imposed upon it, will show the direct or indirect hand of Zionist ideology and the state,” he wrote.
US officials were aware that a statement from Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif on the US-Iran ceasefire that was issued on Tuesday included a truce in Lebanon as part of the deal, according to media reports.
The New York Times reported that the US had already seen and signed off on Sharif’s statement before he posted it. The initial post included a header that said “Draft – Pakistan’s PM Message on X,” causing speculation that the statement was actually written by the US, though a White House official denied that President Trump drafted it.
A diplomatic source familiar with the negotiations leading up to the ceasefire announcement told ITV News that Iranian and Pakistani officials ended the talks with the understanding that the US was aware that the truce also applied to Lebanon, contradicting claims from Trump and Vice President JD Vance that it did not.
Vance claimed it was a “misunderstanding” on the part of the Iranians that the ceasefire included Lebanon and said it would be “dumb” for Tehran to allow the negotiations to collapse over the issue, though he also insisted the deal includes a halt to Iranian attacks on Israel and the US’s Gulf allies in the region.
Israel not only continued its attacks on Lebanon, but it also dramatically escalated the bombardment, launching a new military operation dubbed “Operation Eternal Darkness” and killing hundreds of people across the country. According to NBC News, Trump asked Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to scale down the attack, but heavy Israeli strikes continued on Thursday.
Netanyahu’s office said in a statement on Thursday that he instructed his government to open negotiations with the Lebanese government, though there’s no sign he plans to halt the bombing campaign.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi affirmed in a statement on Wednesday that the ceasefire must include Lebanon or the deal will be off. “The Iran-US Ceasefire terms are clear and explicit: the US must choose—ceasefire or continued war via Israel. It cannot have both,” Araghchi wrote on X. “The world sees the massacres in Lebanon. The ball is in the US court, and the world is watching whether it will act on its commitments.”
US threats against Iran and ongoing Israeli attacks in Lebanon cast doubt on fragile ceasefire efforts.
By Al Jazeera Staff, AFP and AP
Published On 9 Apr 2026
United States President Donald Trump has warned that US forces will remain deployed around Iran and threatened overwhelming military action if Tehran fails to meet Washington’s demands, casting doubt over a fragile ceasefire.
Writing on social media late on Wednesday, Trump said US troops, aircraft and naval forces would stay in position until what he described as the “REAL AGREEMENT” is fully implemented.
“All US ships, aircraft, and military personnel … will remain in place in, and around, Iran, until such time as the REAL AGREEMENT reached is fully complied with,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
“If for any reason it is not … the ‘Shootin’ Starts,′ bigger, and better, and stronger than anyone has ever seen before.”
The remarks came just a day after a two-week ceasefire between Washington and Tehran, brokered by Pakistan, paused six weeks of fighting and briefly calmed global markets worried about disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz.
Yet Trump’s language underscored how quickly the truce could unravel. He reiterated US demands that Iran abandon any nuclear weapons ambitions and ensure safe passage through the vital shipping lane, while boasting that US forces were “Loading Up and Resting, looking forward, actually, to its next Conquest”.
Meanwhile, in Iran on Thursday, the semiofficial ISNA and Tasnim news agencies published a chart suggesting the country’s paramilitary Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) had put sea mines into the Strait of Hormuz during the war.
The chart showed a large circle marked “danger zone” in Farsi over the Traffic Separation Scheme, which was the route ships take through the strait. The chart suggested ships travel further north through waters closer to Iran’s mainland near Larak Island, a route that some ships were observed taking during the war. It was dated from February 28 until April 9, and it was unclear if the IRGC had cleared any mining on the route since then.
A vendor displays morning newspapers at his roadside stall in Islamabad on April 8, 2026.
(Photo by Aamir Qureshi/AFP via Getty Images)
A foreign policy expert told Common Dreams that Israel’s unprecedented attack on Lebanon, backed by the US, “appeared to be a direct attempt to blow up the ceasefire, and it worked.”
A Pakistani official said Wednesday that despite Israel’s unprecedented attack on Lebanon, it is still part of the ceasefire agreement that Pakistan’s prime minister helped to mediate the previous day, even as Israel and the US insist otherwise.
Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, who played a key role in brokering the deal announced on Tuesday, said that “Iran and the United States of America, along with their allies, have agreed to an immediate ceasefire everywhere, including Lebanon and elsewhere, EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY.”
But within hours of the agreement, Israel launched what it said was its largest military operation against Lebanon yet, which killed at least 254 people and wounded 1,165 others, according to the Lebanese Health Ministry. The Israel Defense Forces acknowledged that the assault included attacks on many civilian areas.
Contrary to the mediators, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahudeclared that the ceasefire “does not include Lebanon.” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt followed suit, confirming that the US’s position was also that “Lebanon is not part of the ceasefire,” adding that “that has been relayed to all parties involved.”
But Pakistan’s ambassador to the US, Rizwan Saeed Sheikh, said on Wednesday afternoon that this was not the agreement the parties reached on Tuesday.
He told CNN anchor Becky Anderson that the deal announced by his prime minister, which included Lebanon, “could not have been more authentic” to what the two parties agreed to, and that it was still the prime minister’s understanding that Lebanon was included.
He added that this was another instance in which a ceasefire “could be disrupted” by Israel’s actions. He also noted that “there have been instances in the past where ceasefires have been disrupted,” a possible reference to Israel’s routine violations of its previous ceasefire with Lebanon and the current one with Gaza, and its repeated assassinations of Iranian negotiators as they’ve sat down for talks with the US.
The US-Iran ceasefire is less than 24 hours old, but Israel’s attack on Wednesday has already thrown it into peril. Iran responded to the attacks on Wednesday by once again closing the Strait of Hormuz after briefly reopening the critical waterway in accordance with the deal. Iran is also reportedly considering withdrawing from the ceasefire altogether and resuming strikes against Israel.
President Donald Trump has appeared eager to declare victory and move on from the war, which has further tanked his already plummeting support at home and sparked a global economic crisis.
But Janet Abou-Elias, a researcher with the Democratizing Foreign Policy program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, told Common Dreams that Israel’s goals are very different.
She explained that Israel was largely sidelined from the talks that culminated in Tuesday’s ceasefire and that within Israel’s internal politics, the agreement is being portrayed as “catastrophic.”
She noted that Yair Lapid, the leader of the opposition to Netanyahu’s government, has portrayed it as “the worst political failure in our history,” and accused the prime minister of failing to achieve his goals.
“What we’ve seen since looks like Israel acting to undermine a diplomatic process over which it had lost influence,” Abou-Elias said.
She said that Israel’s attack on Lebanon on Wednesday, which it has referred to as Operation Eternal Darkness, “appeared to be a direct attempt to blow up the ceasefire, and it worked.”
According to the Human Rights Activists News Agency, a US-based human rights monitor for Iran, at least 1,701 civilians have been killed in US-Israeli attacks against Iran since the war was launched on February 28.
After Wednesday’s bombardment, Lebanon’s Health Ministry reported that the death toll in the country was now up to at least 1,739 since the war began on March 2.
“At this point, any durable end to this conflict, even a temporary one, requires Washington to rein in Israel,” Abou-Elias said. “Trump has the leverage to do it. What’s unclear is whether he has the political will to use it.”
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Iranian media reported on Wednesday that Iran has halted traffic through the Strait of Hormuz in response to Israel’s escalations and its continued bombing campaign in Lebanon.
“The passage of oil tankers through the Strait of Hormuz has been halted following Israel’s attacks on Lebanon,” Iran’s Fars news agency has reported.
Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, who mediated the US-Iran ceasefire deal, said in his initial announcement of the agreement that it would also include a ceasefire in Lebanon, a point reaffirmed by Iranian officials. But it has since been denied by both the US and Israel that Lebanon was part of the deal.
“The two-week ceasefire does not include Lebanon,” the office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wrote on X. On Wednesday morning, Israel launched a massive bombardment across Lebanon, killing and injuring hundreds of people, as part of a new escalation it dubbed “Operation Eternal Darkness.”
President Trump was asked if the ceasefire included Lebanon and called it a “separate skirmish” that was “not included” in the deal. “Yeah, they were not included in the deal,” he said. “Because of Hezbollah. They were not included in the deal. That’ll get taken care of, too. It’s alright.”
According to Israeli media, Trump didn’t express opposition to Israel continuing its war in Lebanon when he spoke with Netanyahu to inform him of the ceasefire in Iran.
The US and Iran may hold talks in Islamabad this Friday, but according toIran’s Tasnim news agency, Iran may withdraw from the process if the Israeli war in Lebanon continues.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has also said it would respond if Israel didn’t halt its attacks on Lebanon. “If the aggressions against our beloved Lebanon are not stopped immediately, we will give a regretful response to the evil aggressors in the region,” the IRGC said.
Missile and drone attacks were also reported across the Gulf Arab states after Trump’s ceasefire announcement, and Iran said that one of its oil facilities was targeted hours after the declaration.
Published date: 8 April 2026 03:03 BST | Last update:37 mins 32 secs ago
Iran‘s Supreme National Security Council said on Wednesday that the country had achieved a “historic” victory and forced the United States to accept the framework of a 10-point proposal ahead of planned negotiations.
In a statement, the council said the proposal includes guarantees of non-aggression, continued Iranian control over the Strait of Hormuz, sanctions relief, the withdrawal of US forces from the region, and reparations.
It added that negotiations, set to begin on Friday in Pakistani capital Islamabad, will focus on finalising details but “do not mean the end of the war”.
The statement came hours after US President Donald Trump said Washington would suspend attacks on Iran for two weeks to allow diplomacy to proceed.
He described the pause as a “double-sided ceasefire” tied to the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz and said a 10-point Iranian proposal provided “a workable basis” for talks.
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According to Iran’s state broadcaster, the proposal includes the “complete cessation” of the wars in Iran, Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen, the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz with guarantees for safe and secure navigation, compensation for reconstruction, a commitment to lifting sanctions, the release of Iranian funds and frozen assets held by the US, and a full commitment by Iran not to pursue nuclear weapons.
Full text of Iran’s National Security Council statement on ceasefire
Iran’s top security body said Tehran had submitted its plan to the US via Pakistan, and that Washington had accepted its principles as the basis for negotiations.
It said the talks could last up to 15 days and may be extended, adding that any agreement would need to be formally endorsed, including through international mechanisms.
“This does not mean the end of the war,” the statement said, adding that Iran would continue military operations if its demands are not fully met.
It also said Iranian forces and allied groups had inflicted significant losses on their adversaries across the region, forcing them to seek a ceasefire.
Iran’s objectives, it added, include establishing new regional security arrangements based on what it described as its “power and supremacy”, while maintaining pressure until gains are consolidated.
The council called for national unity during the negotiation period and warned that any misstep by its adversaries would be met with force. It said Iran would only accept a formal end to the war once the terms of its proposal are fully agreed.
‘Double-sided ceasefire’
Early on Wednesday, Trump said he had agreed “to suspend the bombing” of Iran for two weeks, calling it a “double-sided ceasefire” linked to the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz.
Trump said the decision followed talks with Pakistani leaders and cited a 10-point Iranian proposal as “a workable basis” for negotiations, adding that the pause would allow time to finalise an agreement.
“Based on conversations with Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Field Marshal Asim Munir, of Pakistan, and wherein they requested that I hold off the destructive force being sent tonight to Iran, and subject to the Islamic Republic of Iran agreeing to the COMPLETE, IMMEDIATE, and SAFE OPENING of the Strait of Hormuz, I agree to suspend the bombing and attack of Iran for a period of two weeks. This will be a double-sided CEASEFIRE!” Trump said on Truth Social.
Trump said that almost all of the points of contention between the United States and Iran have been agreed to.
“The reason for doing so is that we have already met and exceeded all Military objectives, and are very far along with a definitive Agreement concerning Longterm PEACE with Iran, and PEACE in the Middle East. We received a 10 point proposal from Iran, and believe it is a workable basis on which to negotiate,” Trump added.
On Tuesday, Pakistan had issued a last-minute plea for a two-week extension for negotiations to end the US-Israeli war on Iran, ahead of President Donald Trump’s 8pm EST deadline to destroy the country’s “whole civilization”.
“To allow diplomacy to run its course, I earnestly request President Trump to extend the deadline for two weeks,” Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said on X, as he requested that Iran allow the Strait of Hormuz to reopen to all traffic during that time.
Sharif had called for a two-week ceasefire as negotiations progressed.
“We also urge all warring parties to observe a ceasefire everywhere for two weeks to allow diplomacy to achieve conclusive termination of war, in the interest of long-term peace and stability in the region,” Sharif wrote.
President Trump on Tuesday issued another threat against Iran, saying a “whole civilization will die tonight,” raising fears that he’s threatening to use nuclear weapons.
“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will,” the president wrote on Truth Social. He went on to reference his deadline that he previously set for Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz or agree to some sort of diplomatic deal by 8 pm EST tonight, but there’s no sign that real negotiations are taking place.
“However, now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS? We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World. 47 years of extortion, corruption, and death, will finally end. God Bless the Great People of Iran!” Trump added.
Trump has previously threatened that if a deal isn’t reached by tonight, he will order strikes to destroy all of Iran’s power plants and bridges, and he has also suggested he may bomb desalination plants. While visiting Hungary on Tuesday, Vice President JD Vance backed Trump’s threats.
“We’re going to get a response from the Iranians by 8 o’clock tonight. I hope they make the right response … They’ve got to know, we’ve got tools in our toolkit that we so far haven’t decided to use. The president of the United States can decide to use them, and he will decide to use them if the Iranians don’t change their course of conduct,” Vance said.
The US-Israeli war against Iran and Trump’s rhetoric have led to calls for the 25th Amendment to be invoked to remove him from power, including from former allies. But such a step would require Vance and the majority of Trump’s cabinet to declare that Trump is unfit to serve, and there doesn’t appear to be any dissent at that level.
“25TH AMENDMENT!!!” former House Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene wrote on X on Tuesday in response to Trump’s latest threat. “Not a single bomb has dropped on America. We cannot kill an entire civilization. This is evil and madness.”
Some sitting members of Congress are also calling for Trump’s removal. “We need to invoke the 25th Amendment and remove Trump,” Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) said in a video posted on Tuesday morning. “Threatening war crimes is a blatant violation of our constitution and the Geneva Conventions.”
The president’s post on Tuesday marked the second day in a row that he issued a warning that could be taken as a threat to use nuclear weapons. “The entire country could be taken out in one night, and that night might be tomorrow night,” he said at a press conference on Tuesday.
On Sunday, US President Donald Trump issued a profanity-laced rant on Truth Social vowing to destroy Iran’s civilian infrastructure in a series of war crimes.
“Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the F****n’ Strait, you crazy b******s, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.”
A day earlier, Trump wrote: “Time is running out — 48 hours before all Hell will reign down on them. Glory be to GOD!” Trump told Fox News Sunday morning: “If they don’t make a deal and fast, I’m considering blowing everything up and taking over the oil.”
The invocation of Allah—the name for God used by Muslims—in a message on Easter Sunday threatening to send the population of a predominantly Muslim country to “Hell” is an overtly Christian fascist statement, giving the war the coloration of a crusade.
The president of the United States is threatening to destroy the power grid and bridges of Iran, eliminating the basis of civilized life for 90 million people. These are statements of total criminality, within the framework of an illegal war of aggression.
Trump operates completely outside the framework of international law, of democratic conventions and basic legality. His statements and actions are a testament to the total breakdown of American democracy under the pressure of extreme inequality, endless war and spiraling social, economic and political crisis.
The overwhelming majority of the American population is disgusted by and opposes Trump’s illegal war against the people of Iran. They rightly see him as a criminal and a gangster.
But this raises the question: How, amid overwhelming popular opposition, after millions marched against the government on March 28, can this gangster regime remain in power?
The answer lies in the character of the nominal political opposition. The Democratic Party’s response to Trump’s statements has focused on the president’s personality and mental state. “These are the ravings of a dangerous and mentally unbalanced individual,” Senator Bernie Sanders wrote Sunday. Senator Chris Murphy called Trump’s remarks “completely, utterly unhinged.” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said Trump is “ranting like an unhinged madman on social media” and threatening “war crimes.”
Trump’s statements are indeed both criminal and insane. But the Democrats’ response is characterized by political impotence. Five weeks into the war, no congressional committee has held a public hearing. No resolution condemning the war has been brought to a vote. No investigation has been opened.
Despite admitting that Trump is both a criminal and mentally unfit, the Democrats have categorically ruled out impeachment. House Democratic Caucus Chairman Pete Aguilar told Punchbowl News on March 26: “Literally no Democrats are talking about [impeachment]. This is not something that comes up in our discussions at all.” Representative Susie Lee said, “We have bigger priorities to focus on.”
Representative Maxine Waters said on March 4, “I think when we take control of the House we will consider” impeaching Trump.
The Democrats have not only effectively ruled out impeaching Trump, they have enabled him. They voted for the $839 billion defense budget that funds the war. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez echoed the Trump administration’s claims that the Iranian government had killed tens of thousands of protesters, backing a regime change operation that, as Trump admitted on Fox News Sunday, was armed by the US government. “We sent guns to the protesters, a lot of them,” Trump said.
The Democrats’ response is determined by (1) the fact that whatever their tactical differences with Trump, they are a party of Wall Street and the CIA and support the strategic aim of US imperialist domination of the Middle East, and (2) they are terrified by the growth of popular opposition from below.
A genuine popular mobilization would not stop at the war. It would raise the distribution of wealth, the power of the financial oligarchy, and the entire social order both parties exist to defend. This is why, during the “No Kings” protests against Trump, the Democrats and their political affiliates deliberately downplayed the war against Iran, though this was in fact the central issue.
The rise of Trump to the heights of American politics is a reflection of the historical bankruptcy of the entire social and political order. Trump is, as World Socialist Web Site International Editorial Board Chairman David North wrote April 2, an embodiment of a criminal underworld that has come to power. His language expresses “the essential character of a social layer that has become habituated to criminality and no longer feels compelled to apologize for it.”
This oligarchy has amassed its wealth not through productive labor, but through fraud, speculation and theft. Its social physiognomy is epitomized by the Epstein scandal, which exposed—if only in part—the integration of high finance, state power and sexual blackmail in the operations of the American ruling class. The same networks of privilege, corruption and impunity that surrounded Epstein uphold a political system in which criminality is not an aberration, but a method of rule.
Trump did not arise out of nowhere. He articulates, in unvarnished form, a broader ruling class policy. His genocidal threats mark a new stage in a decades-long escalation of US imperialist criminality: Bush’s invasion of Iraq on fabricated pretexts; Obama’s global drone assassination program conducted outside democratic or legal restraint; Biden’s arming and funding of Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
The same ruling class is waging all-out war on the working class at home. On Wednesday, Trump told a White House Easter lunch audience that the government could not afford daycare, Medicaid, Medicare or Social Security because it needed the money to wage war. He called these vital programs on which tens of millions depend “little scams,” and said the federal government had one job: “military protection.” His proposed budget requests $1.5 trillion for the Pentagon—a 44 percent increase—paid for by gutting domestic spending.
Again, the Democrats oppose any popular mobilization because a movement from below would immediately raise these broader issues. Trump’s profanity-laced threats to obliterate Iran’s civilian infrastructure expose more than his personal depravity. They reveal the breakdown of democratic institutions themselves. There is no mechanism within the existing political institutions to seriously oppose him, and the regime has declared it will not accept any constraints on its actions.
Opposition cannot be entrusted to the Democratic Party. It must be developed as a class movement. Workers and young people must organize independently—in workplaces, across industries and across borders—against the war, against the destruction of social programs, and against the capitalist system that produces war, dictatorship and social inequality.
A memorial for the victims of the Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school bombing is on display on March 28, 2026, in Tehran, Iran.
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The first casualty of war is the truth.
This truism — understandably repeated at the outset of each new U.S. war — is proving itself once again.
With all evidence pointing toward U.S. responsibility for the February 28 bombing of Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school, President Trump claimed that the attack “was done by Iran.” In spreading this blatant misinformation, Trump was not in fact shattering presidential norms — rather, he was continuing a White House tradition.
Back in 1945, in a public statement announcing the U.S.’s atomic bomb strike on Japan, President Harry Truman falsely described the city of Hiroshima as “an important Japanese Army base.” In fact, the overwhelming majority of those killed were civilians. The bomb targeted thousands of schoolchildren, including nearly 6,000 who died as part of a service patrol near the center of Hiroshima. In Nagasaki, more than 1,400 students and teachers at Shiroyama Elementary School were killed.
But like most students attending U.S. schools after World War II, I was taught that dropping the atomic bombs saved lives.
Radical economist Costas Lapavitsas discusses the crumbling of the dollar-backed world system and what could be next. By C.J. Polychroniou , Truthout
March 25, 2026
Long before George W. Bush asserted that Saddam Hussein had WMDs, dubious claims and outright lies served as pretexts for the U.S. to launch major wars. A jingoistic fervor following an explosion on the battleship USS Maine prompted the Spanish-American War in 1898. In 1964, LBJ cited a “phantom battle” to push the Tonkin Gulf Resolution authorizing military intervention in Vietnam.
Trump stands out mostly because he made little effort to sell his lies before going to war. In his prime-time address on April 1, 2026, he retroactively offered his first attempt to justify the war, claiming without evidence that Obama’s nuclear deal made Iran a greater threat and that Iran was on the cusp of aiming missiles at “the American homeland.”
Long before George W. Bush asserted that Saddam Hussein had WMDs, dubious claims and outright lies served as pretexts for the U.S. to launch major wars.
Calling truth a casualty of war may imply, however, that truth survives between wars. But the reality is that militarism and the warfare state are sustained by lies which stretch over decades. The ideology of American exceptionalism is driven by the myth that U.S. intervention plays a unique role in spreading freedom and democracy around the globe. Keeping the public uninformed and miseducated has been a key tactic to tamp down dissent.
The most common and continuous form these lies take is omission, erasing the pattern of U.S. war crimes from military records, history textbooks, and public memory. This record of erasure has proven so effective that many of those speaking out against war crimes do not seem to understand the degree to which they, too, have been miseducated. Chastising the Trump administration’s response to the school bombing, The New York Times’s David Wallace-Wells recoiled at the notion of a mass civilian massacre being “treated by U.S. officials as the normal cost of waging war.”
That civilian massacres have been a regular feature of warfare under Democratic and Republican administrations throughout U.S. history has apparently been lost on Wallace-Wells and countless others. Racism and xenophobia play a crucial role in this erasure, as they are used to rally support for war while devaluing the millions of nonwhite lives lost in pursuit of U.S. interests. As General William Westmoreland said bluntly during the Vietnam War, “The Oriental doesn’t put the same high price on life as does a Westerner.”
In this way, war-related lies have been integral to the formation of our national identity.
Trump stands out mostly because he made little effort to sell his lies before going to war.
This is particularly true for the series of wars stretching across East, Central, and West Asia since the late 19th century that I researched for my book, American Peril: The Violent History of Anti-Asian Racism. Rudyard Kipling’s invocation of “the white man’s burden” in his 1899 call for the U.S. to colonize the Philippines was unmistakably racist. But in its time, it was meant to be instructive: Waging the “savage wars of peace” required Americans to shed their “childish” innocence and embrace the brutish nature of imperial power.
The message was sadly taken to heart by U.S. troops in the Philippines, where lynching, torture, concentration camps, and mass murder became all too common. Some atrocities continued long after the U.S. declared an end to combat. In 1906, American troops on Jolo Island in the southern Philippines killed 1,000 Moro people in what the U.S. recorded as a great military victory over Muslim fanatics in the “Battle of Bud Dajo.” Recounted by historian Kim A. Wagner, it was a horrific massacre, whose victims included women and children, as well as outgunned or unarmed men attempting to surrender.
Regarding the firebombing of Tokyo during World War II, Robert McNamara admitted, “In that single night, we burned to death 100,000 Japanese civilians in Tokyo: men, women, and children.” After WWII, McNamara served as secretary of defense, overseeing the escalation of the Vietnam War that resulted in over 3 million deaths. The My Lai massacre, which was marked by wanton slaughter and sexual assault — was initially recorded as a successful defeat of “enemy” combatants in March 1968, but more accurate news about it finally broke through decades of silence on U.S. war crimes. Most Americans quickly bracketed it off, a horrific exception rather than the culmination of a pattern.
But My Lai was a near replay of tragedies from the Korean War that the U.S. military systematically covered up. South Koreans had long memorialized the hundreds of unarmed and defenseless civilians, from babies to elders, massacred by U.S. soldiers at No Gun Ri. It was only brought to the attention of the U.S. public, however, by a Pulitzer Prize-winning team of Associated Press reporters nearly a half-century later. Even today, mainstream histories largely ignore U.S. military involvement in the brutal partition and occupation of Korea.
And My Lai was far from the only civilian massacre in Vietnam. Indeed, on the same day, dozens of Vietnamese civilians in My Khe were killed by U.S. troops. American soldiers commonly used the most vile, racist epithets and dehumanizing stereotypes to characterize Vietnamese people — both combatants and civilians, friends and foes alike. “Murder, torture, rape, abuse, forced displacement, home burnings, specious arrests, [and] imprisonment without due process,” as author Nick Turse documented in Kill Anything That Moves, “were virtually a daily fact of life” for Vietnamese people.
The most common and continuous form these lies take is omission, erasing the pattern of U.S. war crimes from military records, history textbooks, and public memory.
Although the U.S. defeat in Vietnam caused veterans like Colin Powell to adopt a more protective approach to the deployment of U.S. troops, the pattern of civilian massacres continued. On February 13, 1991, over 400 Iraqi civilians taking refuge in a shelter were killed in Amiriyah by two laser-guided “smart bombs” in the U.S.-led war on Iraq. Though in this case U.S. officials did acknowledge the civilian deaths, they were largely dismissed as “collateral damage” from a strike on a military target.
Amnesty International investigated 10 incidents involving at least 140 civilians, including at least 50 children, killed in the U.S.-led war on Afghanistan, for which there were no war crimes prosecutions of any kind. Retired Lieutenant General Douglas Lute, the former deputy national security advisor, acknowledged, “We virtually never held anyone accountable for civilian casualties.”
Whether actively or passively, our culture — just as it fails to value all American lives equally — has internalized the lies that elevate the value of American lives far above those who look like the enemy.
None of this is meant to imply that the U.S. always targets civilians deliberately or to deny that America’s enemies have committed atrocious crimes against humanity. Lies and dehumanization are a common tactic that all parties use in war. But with America’s unrivaled post-WWII military and economic superpower has come the concordant privilege to act with impunity, to disregard what the rest of the world thinks of us, and to dismiss the suffering of others.
Civilian massacres have been a regular feature of warfare under Democratic and Republican administrations throughout U.S. history.
When the Tokyo Trials were set up after World War II to prosecute Japanese war crimes, the U.S. ensured that the conduct of its military was barred from review, setting in motion a chain of disregard for equitable governance under international law. Since 2002, the U.S. has failed to endorse the International Criminal Court. The Trump administration has gone much further, attacking and placing sanctions on its judges, while waging war on Iran with Israel as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is wanted for arrest by the ICC for war crimes in Gaza.
The incremental steps our own government has taken have been rapidly reversed, as well. Pete Hegseth, the Fox News host turned self-proclaimed “Secretary of War,” bombastically declared that “We negotiate with bombs,” while expressing disdain for “stupid rules of engagement.” Signaling this intent last year, he dismantled Pentagon programs intended to mitigate civilian harm. Such actions complement the misinformation campaign to eliminate “controversial” and “unpatriotic” topics from our public schools and national monuments.
But as the latest wrongheaded war reveals another layer of the United States’s limitations and declining power, those imperial privileges are waning. Trump’s threat to obliterate Iran’s civilian infrastructure should be opposed because it is a war crime in the making against innocent people and because such attacks could boomerang into a global economic meltdown, intensifying suffering at home and abroad.
Holding the individuals responsible for these decisions accountable — at the ballot box and under international law — is just the first step that people in the U.S. can take to become responsible citizens of a global community and stop the next atrocities before they occur. But we cannot wait for change to come from those at the top.
Historian Judy Tzu-Chun Wu has chronicled the diverse U.S. activists who built transnational and multiracial solidarity through travels to Vietnam while it was under siege from the U.S. Since the 1990s, the International Women’s Network Against Militarism has brought U.S. educators, artists, and activists together with women in many of the places most impacted by war and the negative effects of permanent overseas U.S bases. Their multifaceted efforts to overcome militarism advance a decolonial model of solidarity crossing Asia, the Pacific Islands, and the Caribbean.
More recently, the humanitarian aid flotillas acting to alleviate starvation and death in Gaza and Cuba owing to Israel’s and the U.S.’s respective illegal blockades serve as important examples of the people-to-people relations necessary to break the chain of the lies that have torn us apart for too long. Reckoning with the legacy of empire ultimately requires a level of awareness that can best be achieved through these forms of solidarity from below.
As the Trump administration deepens U.S. military involvement in Iran alongside Israel, a new The Intercept briefing examines a dimension of the conflict often overlooked in mainstream war coverage: the growing influence of Christian nationalist ideology inside American foreign policy. In this episode, investigative journalist Sarah Posner joins host Jessica Washington to unpack how apocalyptic theology, evangelical political networks, and religious-right power structures are shaping decisions from the Pentagon to the campaign trail.
At the center of the discussion is Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, whose public prayers for “overwhelming violence” and rhetoric about divine mission reveal how sections of the modern Christian right increasingly frame military conflict not simply as geopolitics, but as spiritual warfare. Posner argues that this worldview goes beyond symbolic religious language: it reflects a deeper ideological belief that biblical authority supersedes international law, civilian protections, and traditional diplomatic constraints.
The conversation also traces the role of influential evangelical figures such as John Hagee, whose decades-long advocacy for confrontation with Iran ties directly into end-times prophecy and Christian Zionist doctrine. Far from fringe theology, these ideas continue to shape large sections of Trump’s political base, reinforcing a foreign policy culture where war, prophecy, and domestic nationalism increasingly intersect.
Beyond Iran, the episode links these religious currents to broader domestic agendas—from anti-LGBTQ legislation to voting restrictions and immigration policy—showing how the same ideological infrastructure behind foreign intervention is also driving a wider effort to redefine American law, citizenship, and family life. The result is a portrait of a political movement that sees no separation between spiritual destiny, military power, and state authority.
What began as another presidential justification for war has rapidly opened a broader debate about the forces driving American power abroad. In its latest briefing, The Intercept turns attention away from battlefield headlines and toward a political current that has long operated beneath the surface of U.S. foreign policy: the growing fusion of Christian nationalist ideology, apocalyptic belief, and state power inside the second Donald Trump administration.
The episode arrives as Washington’s military partnership with Israel in its confrontation with Iran enters a more dangerous phase, with rising oil instability, domestic political backlash, and widening fractures inside both major parties. Yet the discussion presented by host Jessica Washington and investigative journalist Sarah Posner argues that strategic calculations alone do not explain the intensity of current rhetoric coming from senior U.S. officials. Instead, they suggest that parts of the administration increasingly frame war through a theological lens—one in which military action is not only justified politically, but sanctified spiritually.
That argument becomes most visible in the conduct of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, whose recent public prayer at the Pentagon asking for “overwhelming violence” against enemies drew renewed scrutiny. For Posner, the significance lies not merely in religious language but in the specific worldview behind it. Hegseth’s association with the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches reflects a current of Christian Reconstructionism that views biblical authority as the supreme legal framework governing both personal and public life. Under that framework, war can become more than a strategic instrument—it becomes part of a divine obligation to defend and expand what adherents see as a Christian nation.
The discussion carefully distinguishes this ideological current from more familiar evangelical support for Israel. Figures such as John Hagee, founder of Christians United for Israel, have spent decades promoting confrontation with Iran through a different theological narrative: one rooted in end-times prophecy, biblical signs, and the expectation that conflict in the Middle East may accelerate events leading to the return of Jesus. While Hegseth’s rhetoric reflects dominionist ideas about establishing God’s authority through state power, Hagee’s message speaks to a broader evangelical audience that sees Israel’s wars through prophetic fulfillment.
What makes the moment politically significant is that these belief systems are no longer confined to pulpits, television ministries, or religious conferences. According to Posner, they now intersect directly with executive power, military messaging, and legislative agendas. Trump’s long alliance with white evangelical leadership has often been described by mainstream media as transactional—religious conservatives deliver votes, and Trump delivers judges. But the interview argues that the relationship has matured into something far deeper: an ideological partnership in which both sides reinforce one another’s vision of national restoration, civilizational conflict, and cultural authority.
That framework also helps explain why debates over Iran cannot be separated from domestic policy. The same religious infrastructure influencing foreign policy is also deeply involved in campaigns against abortion rights, transgender rights, immigration protections, and secular legal norms. Posner points to new policy blueprints emerging from The Heritage Foundation, where “natural family” doctrine and anti-LGBTQ language form part of a broader project to reorder public life according to conservative Christian definitions of family, gender, and citizenship.
The conversation also highlights an important tension emerging inside Trump’s own coalition. While evangelical support for Israel remains strong, some Catholic and nationalist figures on the populist right have begun openly questioning Israeli influence in American politics and criticizing the war with Iran. Yet even this fracture is unstable. Posner notes that some of the loudest anti-war voices on the far right often blend legitimate foreign policy criticism with conspiratorial or openly antisemitic narratives, creating a volatile ideological split rather than a coherent anti-interventionist bloc.
Underlying all of this is a warning about infrastructure. The Christian right’s political power, Posner argues, was not built overnight and does not operate election to election. Over decades, it developed legal institutions, media ecosystems, activist training networks, educational pipelines, and political organizations capable of shaping courts, legislation, and public discourse across generations. From judicial appointments to school boards to foreign policy framing, the movement works through a layered system designed for permanence rather than short-term victory.
In that sense, the Iran war becomes more than a foreign crisis. It becomes another window into how religious nationalism increasingly shapes the language of American power—where military force, prophecy, electoral politics, and cultural conflict are no longer separate debates but parts of a single ideological project.
For more from the Intercept Trump’s Holy War Abroad and at Home
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