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Thursday, June 11, 2026
Trump Bombs Iran for Second Night After Complaining Talks Have ‘Taken Too Long’
US President Donald Trump bombed Iran for the second consecutive night on Wednesday after complaining on social media that Tehran has taken too long on peace negotiations and vowing to respond to the downing of an American military helicopter.
US Central Command said Tuesday that CENTCOM “forces began launching self-defense strikes against Iran at 5:00 pm ET today at the commander in chief’s direction, in response to yesterday’s downing of a US Army Apache helicopter. The mission is a proportional response to unjustified Iranian aggression.”
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Trump took to his Truth Social platform just after 7:00 am ET Wednesday, writing that “Iran’s Military is a complete and total mess. Much of it, like their Navy and Air Force, doesn’t even exist anymore—They have been completely defeated. Iran is all talk and no action. The Bully of the Middle East is DEAD!!! They’ve taken too long to negotiate a deal that would have been great for them, now they will have to pay the price!!!”
Ken Roth, a visiting professor at Princeton University and the former longtime executive director of Human Rights Watch, noted that Trump’s complaint about the drawn-out talks with Iran came “even though he is the one who ripped up an entirely effective deal... and in February ended negotiations to start bombing.”
Trump unilaterally ended the Iran nuclear deal negotiated by the Obama administration, formally called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, during his first term. There has been no agreement in place since.
After Trump’s strikes on Tuesday night, Iran fired at Bahrain, Kuwait, and Jordan, which all host US troops. The recent exchanges cast further doubt on the ceasefire deal negotiated in April, after the American president’s genocidal threat against Iran.
Later Wednesday, CENTCOM announced that US “forces began launching additional self-defense strikes today at 5:15 pm ET against multiple targets in Iran at the commander in chief’s direction. The strikes are in response to Iran’s unwarranted and continued aggression.”
Drop Site News reported that “as the strikes were announced, Iranian media reported a series of explosions across Hormozgan province, the southern Iranian province that borders the Strait of Hormuz,” a key trade route through which Iran has largely restricted ship traffic since Iran and Israel began bombing the country in late February.
As Drop Site detailed:
- Sirik: At least four explosions were heard in the coastal town on the eastern side of the strait, according to Tasnim News, with a local source saying the blasts were coming from the sea.
- Minab: An explosion was reported near the city, about 60 miles east of Bandar Abbas, according to Mehr News.
- Korgan Port: Several explosions were also heard near the port area on the Gulf of Oman coast, according to Mehr News.
- Bandar Abbas: An explosion was also reported in Iran’s main commercial port and naval hub overlooking the Strait of Hormuz, according to the Fars Gulf Broadcasting Center.
Trita Parsi, co-founder and executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and an expert on US-Iranian relations, said, “It appears the US/Israel-Iran war has started again... or perhaps more accurately, it never really ended.”
Fox News’ Trey Yingst reported on air late Wednesday that “President Trump told me that Iran called him tonight. Top Iranian officials and President Trump spoke directly, according to the commander in chief tonight, as the president was sitting in the Situation Room, and he told me that the Iranians asked them to stop bombing, and the president said to me, ‘The bombing will stop shortly.’”
According to Reuters, Iran’s media contradicted that reporting, with an unnamed senior Iranian official saying, “Trump’s false claim that Iranian officials contacted him is a cover to evade war with Iran.”
Asked by Yingst what will happen if the Iranians don’t sign a new deal soon, Trump reportedly responded, “We’ll bomb the shit out of them tomorrow night.”
Arab states condemned Israel publicly, but quietly moved on from Gaza
MEM, June 11, 2026
![An aerial view of destruction in Sheikh Ridwan neighborhood following the Israeli forces' withdrawal with the ceasefire agreement in Gaza City, Gaza on October 17, 2025. [Mohammed Abu Samra - Anadolu Agency]](https://i0.wp.com/www.middleeastmonitor.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/AA-20251017-39440420-39440381-SHEIKH_RIDWAN_NEIGHBORHOOD_SUFFERS_EXTENSIVE_DAMAGE_FOLLOWING_ISRAELI_FORCES_WITHDRAWAL.jpg?fit=920%2C613&ssl=1)
An aerial view of destruction in Sheikh Ridwan neighborhood following the Israeli forces’ withdrawal with the ceasefire agreement in Gaza City, Gaza on October 17, 2025. [Mohammed Abu Samra – Anadolu Agency]
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Since the launch of Israel’s devastating war on Gaza, Tel Aviv—heavily shielded by Western political pressure and strategic intimidation against any state rejecting its actions—has faced widespread regional rhetorical backlash. Almost all Arab states, including those with formal ties to Israel, have issued varying forms of public condemnation. Yet behind the theatre of diplomatic outrage, a far more cynical reality has solidified: the core normalizers—including the Abraham Accords signatories, alongside Jordan and Egypt—have fiercely protected their foundational ties to Tel Aviv, ensuring that the machinery of state relations remains fundamentally uninterrupted.
In other words, business continued as usual, albeit with varying degrees of public caution. Shockingly, not a single normaliser country took concrete diplomatic or legal steps that could amount to the actions taken by non-Arab European nations.
While European governments like Spain and Norway formally recognised the State of Palestine, and Madrid officially intervened in the genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, Arab capitals remained entirely absent from these legal mechanisms.
Even the United Kingdom, a staunch Western ally of Tel Aviv, moved to partially suspend arms export licenses over international humanitarian law concerns. By contrast, the Arab normalizers refrained from any punitive measures—whether legal, economic, or diplomatic—that could fundamentally disrupt their bilateral frameworks with Israel.
READ: Israel plans wide Gaza operation amid ceasefires elsewhere
The profound irony lies in the stark divergence between rhetoric and responsibility. From the constituent members of the League of Arab States (LAS), the regional public naturally expected serious, immediate, and material reactions to the catastrophe in Gaza. After all, the Palestinian struggle is explicitly enshrined in almost every single LAS document as the supreme, ‘central cause’ of the Arab world—a boilerplate phrase mechanically inserted into nearly every summit declaration, including those ostensibly dedicated to economic reform or environmental cooperation. Yet, despite the immense, unyielding public rage boiling across the Arab streets, these governments stood their ground.
Instead of translating their institutional mandates into punitive diplomatic, legal and economic actions against Israel, they chose to hide behind empty rhetoric and meaningless communiqués, weaponising the Palestinian cause as a convenient distraction to pacify local populations while ensuring that their actual state policies remained entirely unchanged.
Even the official media apparatuses of the LAS countries actively collude in disillusioning the Arab audience. They tirelessly repeat empty government slogans and safe debates on Israeli aggression—though even this minimal coverage is heavily sanitized or absent in the UAE and Bahrain, and strictly curtailed in Morocco. Crucially, these networks enforce an absolute embargo on debating their own governments’ shameful positions. As a frequent guest on these regional talk shows, I have witnessed this systemic paralysis firsthand. I repeatedly pleaded with a Libyan TV station to dedicate a few episodes of its flagship program to analysing these regional diplomatic failures. They never did. The explanation they gave me was chillingly simple: ‘We are based in Jordan, and doing anything like that is highly likely to generate severe problems for us with the host authorities. The same happened with another one based in Istanbul.
Nowhere is the disconnect between moral posturing and material reality more visible than in the ledger of regional trade. As I have previously argued in these pages, Arab capitals possess immense economic and financial levers—ranging from sovereign wealth divestments to the suspension of market access—that could exert genuine pressure on Tel Aviv. Yet, they have deliberately chosen not to leverage them. Instead, the economic machinery has hummingly defied all expectations.
The UAE-Israel Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA), which systematically removed tariffs on 96 percent of goods and was signed just months before October 2023, went into full force implementation within months as if nothing was happening, and it remains so today.
According to the UN Comtrade Israel-UAE Registry Israel-UAE Registry, bilateral commerce did not freeze nor even slow; it thrived. The UAE alone exported over $1.6 billion worth of goods to Israel. Most damningly, this transactional pipeline included hundreds of millions of dollars in refined petroleum—highly needed to keep Israel’s killing machine turning—beside vital industrial metals. While the streets of Amman, Cairo, and Casablanca burned with indignation, the normalisers ensured that the fuel, funds, and supply lines keeping the Israeli economy resilient were never compromised.
READ: Former European leaders urge tougher EU action against Israel over Gaza and West Bank
This absolute insulation of state policy from popular will exposes the grim effectiveness of the modern Arab security state. Historically, authoritarian regimes across the region approached the Palestinian cause very cautiously, fearing that a failure to project nominal solidarity had the potential to become a lightning rod for domestic uprisings. Today, that calculus has fundamentally shifted. Through sophisticated digital surveillance networks—frequently utilising Israel’s own advanced cyber-intelligence and surveillance products—intense policing, and a strategic pivoting toward hyper-nationalistic or purely transactional domestic development projects, such as the UAE’s tech-driven economic models, these ruling elites have effectively decoupled public sentiment from executive state actions. In countries like Egypt and Jordan, security apparatuses are highly adept at acting as pressure valves. They systematically permit tightly controlled, heavily policed street protests within designated perimeters, allowing the public to exhaust its emotional fury and chant anti-normalisation slogans for the cameras. Yet, the moment that popular outrage attempts to cross the line from performative condemnation to demanding actual structural policy changes—such as the blockage of transit corridors or the total severance of treaties—the state security fist clamps down instantly. The message written into this enforcement strategy is as clear as it is cynical: public rage is tolerated as an emotional outlet, but it will never be permitted to interfere with the permanent geostrategic and economic architecture of the state. Even a country like Libya, despite its long history of unyielding ideological, financial, and military support for Palestine under the late Muammar Gaddafi, has been neutralised by internal division; today, its fragmented authorities are no more active or effective in confronting Tel Aviv than, say, Egypt.
Ultimately, the ongoing tragedy in Gaza has pulled back the curtain on a profound structural mutation in Middle Eastern geopolitics.
The era in which the Palestinian struggle served as the ultimate litmus test for Arab state legitimacy is effectively over, replaced by cold, hyper-transactional policies.
Even the LAS’ usually empty statements now hardly criticise Israel more openly than some of its individual members do, showcasing a total institutional breakdown. By protecting the underlying architecture of normalization, keeping the trade pipelines operational, and managing domestic anger as a security threat rather than a political mandate, the region’s leaders have sent an unmistakable signal to the global community: business as usual is outlasting a genocide. While the modern security apparatus can successfully suppress the rage of the Arab street today, building a regional order on such a cavernous moral vacuum is a dangerous gamble. In their desperate bid to secure immediate geostrategic alignments, the Arab normalisers may have preserved their treaties, but they have undeniably sown the seeds of deep, systemic instability for generations to come.
Wednesday, June 10, 2026
𝐈𝐫𝐚𝐧 𝐬𝐚𝐲𝐬 𝐔𝐒 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐈𝐬𝐫𝐚𝐞𝐥 𝐮𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐫𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐝𝐢𝐩𝐥𝐨𝐦𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐜 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐜𝐞𝐬𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐫𝐨𝐮𝐠𝐡 𝐜𝐞𝐚𝐬𝐞𝐟𝐢𝐫𝐞 𝐯𝐢𝐨𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬
The Dawn, 10 June 2026
Diplomatic efforts with the United States cannot advance under repeated ceasefire violations, Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baghaei said, following overnight clashes in the Gulf between Tehran and Washington, Reuters reports.
Baghaei accused Washington of undermining diplomacy through contradictory messages, shifting positions and repeated ceasefire violations, and said Israel was also damaging the process through repeated ceasefire breaches in Lebanon.
Exodus From Lebanon’s Tyre as Israel Orders Locals Out of Christian Quarter
Lebanese church leaders appear for international intervention amid attacks
by Jason Ditz | June 9, 2026
For the first time since they invaded Lebanon in March, the Israeli military issued an explicit evacuation warning for the Christian quarter of the ancient city of Tyre, claiming there were Hezbollah secretly hiding amongst the Christians.
What followed was an attempt by the remaining Christian population to flee northward, an effort that would’ve been a lot easier if Israel hadn’t destroyed the bridge over the Litani River that is directly north of the city over a month ago. The locals are trying to reach Sidon and in some cases Beirut.
Meanwhile, attacks on Tyre continued apace, killing at least 9 and wounded dozens of others. At least 15 strikes were reported against Tyre on Tuesday morning alone, with no signs that the attacks are slowing, and no signs that any of the people hit in the airstrikes are actually anything to do with Hezbollah.
People inspect the damage in the aftermath of an Israeli strike that hit near Jabal Amel Hospital on Monday, in Tyre, Lebanon, June 2, 2026. REUTERS/Aziz Taher
Christian religious leaders from Tyre were quick to call for international intervention to protect their historic neighborhood, saying the targeting of the Christian quarter would amount to a humanitarian catastrophe.
Christian leaders further disputed the claim that Hezbollah was operating in the Christian neighborhood in the first place, saying it was a fabricated Israeli pretext to justify attacking that part of the city, which had previously been largely left alone.
Not that Tyre in general hasn’t been a constant target of the IDF. Jabal Amel Hospital, one of Tyre’s largest, has been hit no less than three times so far this month, most recently over the weekend. The hospital has been significantly damaged by the attacks, and a large number of health care workers wounded.
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Jason Ditz is Senior Editor for Antiwar.com. He has 20 years of experience in foreign policy research and his work has appeared in The American Conservative, Responsible Statecraft, Forbes, Toronto Star, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Providence Journal, Washington Times, and the Detroit Free Press.
Tuesday, June 09, 2026
Hamas: Iran seeking end to war on all fronts, including Gaza
Middle East Monitor, June 9, 2026
![Hamas spokesman Hazem Qassem [hamas.ps]](https://i0.wp.com/www.middleeastmonitor.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Untitled-1-copy5.png?fit=920%2C613&ssl=1)
Hamas spokesman Hazem Qassem [hamas.ps]
Hamas spokesman Hazem Qassem said the movement highly valued the Iranian and Yemeni responses to what he described as escalating Israeli aggression against the Lebanese people, saying the stance represented a genuine model of solidarity among the region’s nations in confronting Israeli attacks.
In a press statement on Monday, Qassem said Hamas viewed the position as “the true form of solidarity that should prevail among all components of the nation”. He called on regional forces to regard this level of support and backing as a duty at this stage in support of the Palestinian and Lebanese peoples.
Qassem said Hamas had received repeated assurances from Iranian and Yemeni officials that they were seeking to end the war on all fronts, including the ongoing war in the Gaza Strip.
He added that Iran had provided the movement with political, military and financial support and continued to declare its backing for the Palestinian people and their right to resist, while also supporting efforts aimed at securing a ceasefire.
Qassem said Hamas hoped that the current state of solidarity and direct support would extend to Gaza and that the enclave would remain central to regional efforts linked to ending the war and halting the aggression.
Israeli health authorities reported 77 new casualties in 24 hours as resistance operations continue on multiple fronts
77 Israeli Casualties in 24 Hours as Media Say Iran Changed the Regional Equation
Key Developments
- Israel’s Health Ministry reported 77 new casualties in the past 24 hours, bringing the total since February to 9,119.
- Israeli authorities acknowledged 1,219 casualties linked to the Lebanon front since the ceasefire with Iran took effect in April.
- Iranian officials warned that any future attacks on Iran or the Resistance Axis would trigger a decisive and costly response.
Israeli Casualties
Israel’s Health Ministry announced on Monday that 77 new casualties had been recorded over the previous 24 hours, bringing the total number of casualties since the outbreak of the US-Israeli war against Iran in February to 9,119.
The figures were released as fighting and military operations continue across multiple fronts involving Iran, Lebanon and Yemen, following months of regional escalation.
According to the ministry’s latest update, casualty numbers have continued to rise despite repeated announcements of ceasefire arrangements.
The Lebanon Front
Israeli health authorities reported that 1,219 casualties have been recorded in connection with the Lebanon front alone since the ceasefire with Iran took effect on April 8.
The ministry also acknowledged that 803 casualties have entered Israeli hospitals since the ceasefire agreement with Lebanon was announced on April 17.
The figures come as the Lebanese resistance continues to carry out military operations against Israeli occupation forces in southern Lebanon, citing ongoing Israeli attacks and repeated violations of the ceasefire agreement.
Israeli attacks on Lebanon also continued on Monday.
According to Al Mayadeen correspondents, Israeli warplanes carried out strikes on Nabatieh, Deir Qanoun Ras al-Ain and areas around Tyre, while artillery shelling targeted towns in southern Lebanon.
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