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 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.”
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.
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.”
USS Boxer (LHD 4) and USS Portland (LPD 27) transiting the Indian Ocean, June 30, 2026. . The Boxer Amphibious Ready Group (ARG) and embarked 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit are currently operating in the Middle East. [Photo: US Central Command]
The US military bombed Iran throughout the weekend, striking about 140 targets Saturday night—the largest single barrage of the week—and launching at least two more rounds on Sunday. In all, the Sunday New York Times reported, US forces have struck some 310 targets in Iran over the past week.
Late Friday, US President Donald Trump once again threatened to destroy the entire country in a post on Truth Social. “1000 Missiles are Locked and Loaded and aimed at the Islamic Republic of Iran,” he wrote, declaring that the US military stood ready “for a one year period of time, subject to extension, to completely decimate and destroy all areas of Iran—PRAISE BE TO ALLAH!”
The weekend attacks completed the abrogation of the “ceasefire” Washington and Tehran signed on June 17. “The United States has stated to them, in no uncertain terms, that the Cease Fire is OVER!” Trump wrote Friday.
The “ceasefire” itself marked the failure of the American campaign to overthrow the Iranian government and dominate the Strait of Hormuz. The Washington Post’s editorial board wrote Wednesday that of the four objectives Trump named in March—destroying Iran’s missile capabilities, destroying its navy, denying it a nuclear weapon and cutting off its proxies—“None of these objectives is fully complete.”
Even as Trump sought a temporary negotiated settlement, both factions of the US political establishment condemned it for conceding too much to Iran.
Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina—who died Saturday at age 71—told CBS’s Face the Nation on June 21: “If this deal fails, President Trump is going to take the Strait of Hormuz over by force,” adding, “If Iran contests control of the Strait of Hormuz by the United States, we will obliterate them.”
Senator Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, said June 17 that Trump had “offered concession after concession to the Iranian regime for next to nothing in return.”
The attacks continued over the weekend, with Democrats excoriating Trump’s failure to achieve the aims of US imperialism in the Middle East.
Representative Jim Himes of Connecticut, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, told CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday that “all of the nuclear materials are still there. They’re just buried behind a bunch of rubble.
“The more concerning question, Jake, is the regime survived what the president promised us would be a regime-ending attack on them,” Himes told host Jake Tapper. “By the way, it’s not dust. The president keeps talking about nuclear dust. It’s not dust. This stuff is down there and recoverable.
“So my concern is that, on the backside of this war, Iran is going to be more motivated than they were a year ago to actually produce the weapon that they know will forever take off the table an attack on their country,” he said.
Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Yechiel Leiter, told CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday that Iran had “forced the US to go back into kinetic activity,” and pledged: “We’re a partner, we’re an ally. If the United States calls on us to rejoin kinetic activity against Iran, we’re going to be there for the United States.”
Under the June 17 memorandum, Washington ended the blockade it had thrown around Iran’s ports in April and licensed Iranian oil sales, while Tehran pledged safe passage for commercial ships through the Strait of Hormuz, toll-free for 60 days.
US warplanes hit some 80 sites on July 7 and roughly 90 the next day, and the U.S. Treasury canceled the waiver that had let Iran sell its oil. On July 9, US strikes severed the rail line to Mashhad during the burial of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader the United States and Israel assassinated, along with members of his family, in the war’s opening attack.
On Sunday, six ships transited the strait, against more than 130 a day before the war. CNN reported Sunday that the United States has expended half its THAAD interceptors, nearly half its Patriot interceptors and about 30 percent of its Tomahawk cruise missiles—stocks earmarked for a future war with China. Gasoline, at $3.88 a gallon, costs 30 percent more than before the war, and the White House has asked Congress for another $87.6 billion in emergency war spending.
Launched by the United States and Israel on February 28, the war is now in its 135th day. Iranian authorities counted more than 3,400 dead by mid-June, before the past weeks of bombing, and Amnesty International has documented at least 39 political executions and more than 6,000 arrests inside Iran since the war began. The World Bank called the choking of the Strait of Hormuz “the largest oil supply shock on record,” and the International Monetary Fund cited the war’s energy shock this month in cutting its forecast for world growth this year to 3 percent.
The assault on Iran unfolds alongside Israel’s continuing onslaught against Gaza and Lebanon. Gaza’s Health Ministry put the death toll there at more than 73,000 as of July 6. In Lebanon, where a truce nominally took effect June 21, an Israeli drone strike on July 6 murdered a school principal, her mother and two others, and Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz declared on July 9 that Israeli troops would remain in Gaza, Lebanon and Syria.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi speaks at a press conference in Baghdad, Iraq, on June 28, 2026.
(Photo by Murtadha AL-Sudani/Anadolu via Getty Images)
Iran’s Foreign Ministry accused the Trump administration of “rendering futile all efforts made over the past several months to reduce tensions and restore stability.”
The Iranian Foreign Ministry on Sunday condemned the United States’ latest round of airstrikes as a “flagrant violation” of international law that threatens to permanently derail efforts to achieve a peaceful resolution to the war, which US President Donald Trump launched earlier this year in coordination with the Israeli government.
This past weekend, said Iran’s Foreign Ministry, the US carried out “brutal attacks” and “acts of aggression” that pose “a serious threat to international peace and security, rendering futile all efforts made over the past several months to reduce tensions and restore stability in the West Asia region.”
On Saturday and Sunday, the US military bombed dozens of targets across Iran, which retaliated with strikes on American military installations in Kuwait, Bahrain, and other Middle East nations. Iran’s Foreign Ministry accused those nations of illegally serving as launch pads for US strikes.
In response to the new wave of bombings, Iran announced the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, blaming the US for causing “insecurity” in the critical waterway. Trump claimed in an interview on Sunday morning that the strait is “open” after the US “bombed the hell out of” Iran the previous night.
“The US ruling establishment continues its campaign of disinformation and the dissemination of fake news in an attempt to distort the facts and justify its unlawful actions,” said the Iranian Foreign Ministry, accusing the Trump administration of undermining talks between Iran and Oman regarding commercial traffic through the Strait of Hormuz.
The Iranian statement also voiced “regret” over what it described as the head of the United Nations’ “unconstructive approach” to the Trump administration’s “blatant lawlessness and bullying.”
“The Ministry of Foreign Affairs underscores the responsibility of the UN secretary-general and the Security Council to address violations of international peace and security,” the statement reads. “It calls for the aggressor parties to be held accountable and for those who ordered and carried out the crimes committed against the Iranian nation to be brought to justice and punished.”
Earlier Sunday, Stéphane Dujarric, a spokesperson for UN Secretary-General António Guterres, voiced concern over the “serious escalation and renewed military confrontations in the Gulf, including the Iranian attacks on ships in the Strait of Hormuz, the attacks by the United States on Iran, and the attacks by Iran on targets in the neighboring countries.”
“These attacks must all stop,” said Dujarric. “The secretary-general reiterates that a return to full-scale hostilities would have catastrophic consequences—for the peoples of the region, for international peace and security, and for the global economy. He further reaffirms the need for the restoration of full freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz.”
The military exchanges came less than a month after the US and Iran signed a memorandum of understanding aimed at facilitating a permanent end to the war. Last week, Trump declared the agreement “over” and said negotiations were “a waste of time,” even as the US and Iran agreed to continue talks.
The National Iranian American Council (NIAC) noted Sunday that “Iran and the United States have once again entered a cycle of direct military confrontation,” adding that “what was presented as an end to the war now appears to have been little more than a temporary pause.”
“The continued evisceration of diplomatic agreements will make any attempt to restore peace extremely difficult,” NIAC argued. “Iran, fresh off new US attacks amid the late supreme leader’s funeral ceremonies, will view any US pivot back to diplomacy with even deeper distrust. US hawks will likewise paint Iran’s actions as the predictable irrationality of radicals, even if US actions have helped trigger Iranian retaliation every step of the way.”
A group of extremist Jewish settlers equipped with US-made M4 rifles detained US lawmaker Ro Khanna and his group during their visit this week to the southern occupied West Bank, the Democratic representative disclosed on 9 July.
“We were at a village that Israeli settlers had destroyed; they had destroyed the school, they had destroyed that village, and we were just looking at it,” Khanna told Reuters on Thursday.
“And these hoodlums come in with machine guns – M4, an American-made machine gun – and they detain us. They block off the road.” Khanna said, adding, “And then they call the IDF and the IDF is on their side, not on the side of the Americans.”
Khanna’s aide, Cameron Kasky, said the delegation was held for over an hour near Khirbet Zanuta, a Palestinian hamlet ethnically cleansed by Israeli settlers in 2023, before appealing to the US Embassy in Jerusalem to free them.
Khanna’s visit to the occupied West Bank comes as support for Israel splits Democrats ahead of the US midterm elections in November, with the issue contributing to primary defeats for incumbent lawmakers financed by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).
Israel’s favorability rating among Democratic voters has fallen from 59 percent in 2018 to 22 percent in May 2026, according to recent polls.
The US lawmaker’s confrontation with extremist settler groups occurs amid a broader campaign of state-supported settler violence that, by mid-2026, has escalated into systematic ethnic cleansing and land theft in the occupied West Bank.
As of July 2026, illegal settler outposts effectively control 18 percent of the occupied West Bank, following an “unprecedented” expansion directly backed by the Israeli government.
Former Israeli officials have characterized the current escalation as a “systematic campaign” of “Jewish terrorism” intended to facilitate de facto annexation of the Palestinian territories.
An Oxfam analysis based on UN data revealed that since 2023, Israeli forces and settlers have killed at least 1,244 Palestinians, exceeding the total from the previous 17 years combined, and forcibly displaced nearly 46,000 people.
Over 540 settler attacks were reported in the first quarter of 2026 alone, alongside a record 925 movement obstacles that restrict Palestinian life.
Amnesty International concluded, based on independent investigations, that the Israeli government is implementing a policy of ethnic cleansing, supported by digital evidence, satellite imagery, and field investigations.
A massive crowd gathers for funeral prayers for the late Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and members of his family at the Holy Jamkaran Mosque in Qom, Iran, Tuesday, July 7, 2026. [AP Photo/Ahmadreza Taheri]
The Trump administration continued its bombing of Iran for a third day on Thursday, striking the rail lines to Mashhad, as mourners buried Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader assassinated by US and Israeli forces on the first day of the war.
The strikes delayed the burial by eight hours, the Telegraph reported Thursday. Khamenei was laid to rest at the shrine of Imam Reza in the city of his birth, at the end of six days of funeral processions through Iran and Iraq that Iranian state media said drew up to 43 million people. Mourners carried red flags symbolizing revenge and banners reading, “We Will Kill Trump.”
The turnout demonstrated the failure of the American effort to overthrow the Iranian government and subjugate the country by force.
Khamenei, who had served as supreme leader since 1989, was assassinated at the age of 86 on February 28, in a US-Israeli strike on his compound in Tehran. The US and Israel also murdered his daughter, daughter-in-law, son-in-law and 14-month-old granddaughter.
The strike that murdered Khamenei came in the middle of negotiations, two days after US and Iranian diplomats held nuclear talks in Geneva. To assassinate an adversary under the cover of negotiations is an act of perfidy, illegal under the laws of war.
The Iranian government said US strikes hit a bridge 55 kilometers from Mashhad on Thursday, blocking passenger trains from Tehran, and that cruise missiles struck a second bridge near Aqqala, in Golestan province, on a line that carries the country’s overland trade with Russia and China. The Financial Times reported Thursday that these were “the first attacks on Iranian infrastructure in months.”
On Monday, at the White House, US President Donald Trump said: “We can knock down their bridges in one hour, we can knock out their energy supply.”
The rail strikes followed two nights of heavy bombing. The fighting began Monday, when projectiles struck three commercial ships near the Strait of Hormuz—a Qatari gas carrier, a Saudi oil tanker and a third vessel. The US military blamed Iranian forces; Tehran did not claim responsibility.
US warplanes struck more than 80 targets Tuesday night and about 90 more on Wednesday, hitting the ports of Bandar Abbas, Chabahar, Konarak and Sirik and, the Iranian government said, the perimeter of the Russian-built nuclear power plant at Bushehr. More strikes took place Thursday night.
The US military said the targets included air defenses, coastal radar, missile and drone depots and more than 60 Revolutionary Guards boats. Iran’s health ministry said the bombing killed 14 people and wounded 78 across five provinces, including three dead at the port of Sirik.
Iranian forces fired missiles and drones at US bases in Kuwait, Bahrain and Qatar and, the Revolutionary Guards said, 10 ballistic missiles at the Azraq air base in Jordan, of which the Jordanian military said it intercepted eight. The price of Brent crude jumped more than 5 percent Wednesday to $78 a barrel, and the United Nations shipping agency urged shipowners to keep their vessels out of the strait, citing the danger to nearly 6,000 sailors in the region.
At a news conference at the NATO summit in Ankara on Wednesday, Trump declared the ceasefire over. “To me, I think it’s over,” he said. “I don’t want to deal with them anymore.” He called Iran’s leaders “scum,” “sick people” and “evil people,” said “let’s just finish the job.” He threatened to seize Kharg Island, the center of Iran’s oil exports, and to bomb power stations and desalination plants: “We’ll take them out if we have to.”Available from Mehring BooksThe struggle against imperialism and for workers’ power in IranA pamphlet by Keith Jones
The ceasefire Trump broke had taken effect June 17. Under it, the United States lifted the naval blockade it had imposed on Iran’s ports in April, and the Iranian government agreed to open the Strait of Hormuz toll-free for 60 days. On Tuesday the U.S. Treasury revoked the waiver permitting Iranian oil exports, the agreement’s central benefit for Tehran.
Congress had twice voted to end the war—the House on June 3, the Senate on June 23—the first war-powers resolution ever to pass both chambers. But the votes were non-binding, and Trump resumed the bombing without the authorization they demanded. Asked what the war had taught him about the limits of his power, he answered, “There are no limits.”
The war on Iran is only one front in a global eruption of imperialist violence. Trump oversaw the attacks from the NATO summit in Ankara, which was given over to expanding wars, above all, against Russia.
At the summit’s arms forum on July 7, NATO advertised more than $50 billion in weapons deals, though the Associated Press reported that no prices were disclosed and that several of the contracts predated the summit. Buyers lined up for Saab’s GlobalEye surveillance planes, Northrop Grumman drones and Airbus tankers, and Britain led a dozen European states and Canada, without the United States, in a $50 billion program to build missiles that can reach Moscow. NATO said financial institutions had “already mobilised $217 billion” for the buildup.
NATO’s leaders cheered the widening war on Russia. They praised Ukraine’s drone strikes deep inside the country, among them the attack on Russia’s largest oil refinery, at Omsk, 2,500 kilometers from Ukraine, which the Financial Times reported this week had cut Russian refining by a fifth to two-fifths. The US bombing of the Iranian rail line belonged to the same offensive. In a single week Washington struck the infrastructure binding together Iran, Russia and China.
At the same time, Israel is continuing its onslaught on Gaza and Lebanon. An Israeli drone murdered at least four people in Lebanon on July 6, among them a school principal and her mother. In Gaza, Israeli forces have killed more than 73,000 Palestinians, and Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said Thursday Israeli forces would not leave Gaza, Lebanon or Syria.
(Photo credit: Ammar Awad /Reuters)
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