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