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 leader of Yemen’s Houthi rebels has threatened Saudi Arabia after days of fighting between the two countries, Al Jazeera reports.
In a televised address, Sayyed Abdul-Malik
Al Houthi has blamed the Saudi leadership for advancing US and Israeli
objectives in the region.
“The United States and Israel are the source of evil and instability in the world,” al-Houthi says.
He adds that the US, Israel and their
allies “fuel instability through warmongering and the plundering of the
wealth of nations, from Palestine to other regions”.
Al Houthi also says that Israel’s aim of
changing the map of the Middle East to create a “Greater Israel” is the
“driving force behind all the wars in the region”.
“This axis has no respect for
international agreements and United Nations resolutions, but also boasts
of genocide against nations and the destruction of civilisations,” Al
Houthi adds.
He alleges that Saudi Arabia’s attacks on
Yemen have been ongoing for years, have no legal justification, and are
“carried out within the framework of alignment and loyalty to the United
States and Israel”.
A
small motorboat passes anchored vessels in the Strait of Hormuz off
Bandar Abbas, Iran, Thursday, June 11, 2026. [AP Photo/Amirhosein
Khorgooi]
US President Donald Trump threatened
Tuesday to destroy Iran’s power plants and bridges, as the United States
reimposed its naval blockade of Iranian ports and bombed the country
for a fourth day.
“We’re going to hit them very hard
tomorrow night. We’re going to hit them very hard the night after, and
then next week it gets really bad for them, because next week comes the
power plants. Next week comes the bridges,” Trump told Fox News. “We’re
going to knock out all their power plants. We’re going to knock out all
their bridges unless they get to the table and negotiate.”
The deliberate destruction of civilian
infrastructure is a war crime under international law. In April, Trump
threatened to bomb Iran “back to the Stone Ages.” In June he posted that
the United States might be “forced to militarily complete the job,” and
that if that happened, “the Islamic Republic of Iran will no longer
exist!”
Trump’s genocidal threats to destroy
Iranian civilization, and his renewed attacks, are a testament to the
deepening crisis of the war. Trump has achieved none of the war’s
objectives, from overthrowing the Iranian government to controlling the
Strait of Hormuz.
Underscoring the degree of the crisis,
Trump backed off Tuesday from the 20 percent toll on the Strait of
Hormuz that he had proclaimed only a day earlier. On Monday he had
declared the United States “THE GUARDIAN OF THE HORMUZ STRAIT,” to be
“reimbursed, at the rate of 20 percent on all cargo shipped” through the
waterway.
On Tuesday, citing “highly productive
conversations with Middle East leadership,” he announced that he would
“replace the 20 percent United States Reimbursement Fee with Trade and
Investment Deals that the various Gulf States will be making into the
United States.”
The renewed blockade took effect at 4 p.m.
Eastern time, one hour after US forces opened a new round of airstrikes
across southern Iran.
Ship traffic through the strait, which
normally carries about one-fifth of the world’s oil, has nearly stopped.
The maritime data firm Kpler counted 10 transits Monday, against more
than 130 a day before the war.
US forces began Tuesday’s strikes at 3
p.m., the military said. Iranian officials and news agencies reported
strikes on the city of Bushehr, home of Iran’s only operating nuclear
power plant, on the Abadan oil refinery, Mahshahr, the islands of Qeshm
and Kish, Sirik and Bandar Abbas.
Over three nights beginning Saturday, US
warplanes and warships had already hit more than 300 sites, by the
military’s own count.
Iran has declared the strait “closed until further notice” and is enforcing the closure with missiles.
Early Tuesday, Iranian cruise missiles
struck two tankers of the Emirati state oil company, the Mombasa and the
Al Bahiyah, in Omani waters, killing an Indian crew member and wounding
eight others, according to the UAE’s defense ministry.
Iran struck back across the Gulf on
Tuesday, firing missiles and drones at bases housing US forces. Kuwait’s
army said it intercepted a ballistic missile, five cruise missiles and
33 drones, and that four of its sailors were wounded; Jordan said it
shot down four missiles. Sirens sounded across Bahrain.
The bombing continued into the night.
Iranian state media reported new American strikes late Tuesday along the
southern coast and said a “US projectile” killed three civilians in a
town in Hormozgan province.
Tehran has ruled out talks under fire. “If
the US thinks its military attacks and blockade will force us to
request negotiations, it’s making a mistake,” Iranian Deputy Foreign
Minister Kazem Gharibabadi told Iranian state media Tuesday.
Iran’s parliament, meeting Monday night in
its first open session in more than four months, took up a bill to
require Iranian permits and fees for every ship in the strait, with
American and Israeli ships barred outright, under a draft reported by Al Jazeera.
The Trump administration claims that it
can wage war again because it had a pause. The White House maintains
that the June “ceasefire” ended the earlier hostilities and that its
July 10 letter to Congress restarted the 60-day clock of the War Powers
Resolution.
The response in major pro-war publications demonstrates the degree of the crisis gripping the Trump administration.
“The Trump administration wasn’t
bargaining for an open-ended conflict when it rolled the dice in late
February and joined Israel’s military campaign to eliminate Iran’s
leadership and cripple its arsenal of ballistic missiles and launchers,”
the Wall Street Journal’s national security correspondent, Michael Gordon, wrote Tuesday in an analysis titled “The Battle for Hormuz.”
“This is going to be a long-term effort,”
Joseph Votel, the retired Army general who commanded US forces in the
Middle East from 2016 to 2019, told the Journal. In the Washington Post,
columnist David Ignatius raised the prospect of a war lasting years,
citing an American negotiator’s forecast that peace “will come in two
weeks, or two months, or two years.”
“In retrospect, this was clearly a war
based on fatally flawed assumptions,” John Hannah, a former national
security adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney and now a senior fellow
at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America, said in a New York Times
analysis published Tuesday, “none more damaging than the president’s
apparent conviction that Iran’s revolutionary regime was a flimsy house
of cards ready to collapse in a hail of American airstrikes and
bellicose Truth Social posts.”
The Financial Times’ editorial
board wrote Tuesday: “The quagmire underlines once again the foolishness
of the war launched by Trump against the advice of many of his allies
and without much understanding of his enemy. A crisis of Trump’s own
making has left Tehran with newfound leverage in the strait, which Iran
had never before closed in the past.”
In a Reuters/Ipsos poll completed Sunday,
79 percent of Americans said they expect US involvement in Iran to “go
on for an extended period of time.” Only 37 percent approved of the
renewed strikes.
Establishing US control over the Strait of
Hormuz would require a massive escalation. Holding the strait would
take a ground war, military analysts told the Associated Press Tuesday.
“It’s very difficult to envision any scenario where you could
satisfactorily secure the Strait of Hormuz absent ground forces,” said
Jason Campbell of the Middle East Institute, a former Pentagon
official—an operation, he said, that would require tens of thousands of
troops, months of preparation and “very high costs.”
The forces such an operation would draw on
are in place. The Abraham Lincoln and George H.W. Bush carrier groups,
the assault ships Tripoli and Boxer with thousands of Marines aboard,
and more than 20 warships in all are on station, with more than 50,000
US troops in the Middle East—by the military’s own account its largest
force in the region since the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz has
said that the Israeli military won’t withdraw from Gaza even if Hamas
disarms and that he plans to establish three settlements in the area of northern Gaza that the IDF has destroyed.
“We are not retreating from the Yellow Line,” Katz said on Monday during a visit to northern Gaza
with reporters from Israel’s Channel 14. “Unequivocally, as long as
Hamas does not truly disarm, and even after that, we remain inside of
Gaza to bring up three Nahal outposts (military settlements).”
Nahal settlements are a type of Jewish
settlement in Israeli-occupied territory that are established by Israeli
soldiers with the goal of transitioning them to permanent civilian
communities. Katz first vowed in December 2025
that Israel would “never leave” Gaza and would establish Nahala
settlements, though he has remained quiet about the plan since then,
likely due to international backlash.
Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz said
in a report aired on Monday that the destruction in Gaza, which he
described as “the result of a deliberate policy”, “feels good”. pic.twitter.com/4bfytEmzYN— Middle East Eye (@MiddleEastEye) July 14, 2026
In his remarks on Monday, Katz said that a
permanent Israeli presence was needed in Gaza to “improve the hold and
defense of the communities,” referring to Israeli towns near the Gaza
border.
Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has also recently said that plans have been drawn up
for the establishment of three Jewish settlements inside Gaza and that
he is just waiting on approval from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu.
Katz also boasted of the destruction of
Gaza cities during his visit to the northern part of the Strip. When
asked how the view of the destruction made him feel, the Israeli
minister said, “I feel good. Thank God. This is all the result of a
deliberate policy aimed at removing threats. Instead of the raid
method—going in and out—the IDF is inside, the terrorists are outside,
and the houses are destroyed.”
Katz’s plans for Gaza go against the
US-backed outline for a peace plan for Gaza that was approved by the UN
Security Council, and the US has remained silent as Israel continues to
constantly violate the ceasefire deal signed in October 2025, which was
meant to lead to the implementation of the full peace plan.
Now that Hamas has released all Israeli
captives and recovered the bodies of the deceased, Israeli officials try
to justify the continued occupation and attacks in Gaza by demanding
that Hamas disarm, but the comments from Katz and other Israeli
officials reveal that the real goal is permanent occupation.
The former congressman tells Robert
Scheer that a provision buried in the 2027 National Defense
Authorization Act could integrate the United States and Israel at the
highest levels of military technology—without meaningful public debate
or congressional scrutiny.
Former Congressman Dennis Kucinich has
spent decades warning about the machinery of permanent war. But in a new
conversation with Robert Scheer, he argues that Congress is now on the
verge of crossing a line without precedent in American military history.
At the center of Kucinich’s warning is
Section 219 of the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act, a provision
he says would formally integrate key areas of U.S. and Israeli military
development, including artificial intelligence, autonomous weapons,
quantum sensing, cyber and electronic warfare, biotechnology, missile
defense, drones and directed-energy systems.
“They call it integration, but I call it a merger,” Kucinich tells Scheer.
The implications, he argues, go far beyond
traditional military aid or weapons sales. Kucinich warns that the
provision could create new counterintelligence risks, deepen U.S.
dependence on Israel’s military infrastructure and technology, blur
questions of war powers and further entangle Washington in Israel’s
expanding regional conflicts.
Even more alarming, Kucinich says, is how
little debate the proposal has received. Rather than being considered
through a separate treaty or subjected to extensive congressional
hearings, the provision has been folded into a massive defense
authorization bill that lawmakers will face enormous political pressure
to support.
“This provision has been smuggled into the bill,” Kucinich argues. “There’s never been any debate.”
For Scheer, the contradiction is
impossible to ignore. At the moment the United States marks 250 years
since declaring its independence, Washington may be moving toward an
unprecedented military dependence on another state—one whose conduct in
Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon has placed it at the center of
international accusations of genocide and grave violations of
international law.
In this urgent edition of Scheer Intelligence,
Scheer and Kucinich examine what Section 219 could mean for American
sovereignty, constitutional government and the future of war—and why a
provision of such consequence has received so little attention from
Congress, the Democratic opposition and the mainstream press.
The Strait
of Hormuz will never be opened by “war, evil, and American aggression”,
the Iranian army’s spokesperson, Brigadier General Mohammad Akraminia,
was cited as saying by the Tasnim news agency.
The country’s
armed forces will not relent over the key waterway, Akraminia added.
Respecting the rights of the Iranian people is the only way to open the
Strait of Hormuz, he added.
“We are obligated to avenge the blood of the martyrs, especially the martyred leader of the Islamic Revolution,” Akraminia said.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Monday announced what he characterized as a “campaign to dismantle” the International Criminal Court, the Hague-based tribunal tasked with investigating and charging individuals with war crimes and other violations.
In a video posted to social media,
Rubio accused the international court of “waging a war against our
country—not with bullets or missiles, but with statutes, compacts, and
the force of so-called international law.” The top American diplomat threatened that the US “will teach the ICC the full meaning of American resolve.”
The US State Department said in a statement
that Rubio’s new campaign against the ICC would “feature a
whole-of-government response to systematically disable” the court’s
“ability to operate, target American servicemen or officials, or
otherwise threaten American sovereignty.” The US is not party to the
Rome Statute, the 1998 treaty that established the ICC.
US President Donald Trump and his subordinates, who have been accused of myriad violations of international law, have adopted an increasingly aggressive posture toward the ICC since taking power last January.
In a February 6, 2025 executive order, Trump declared “a national emergency to address” the purported “threat” posed by the ICC and announced sanctions against court officials, including its judges. The president’s order cited the ICC’s “investigations concerning personnel of the United States and certain of its allies, including Israel,” which is also not party to the Rome Statute.
Rubio warned in an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal on Monday that US officials accused of international crimes could be next to face ICC action.
“Border Patrol agents working to remove
violent criminals from our country, US Marines risking their lives to
restore order in the Western Hemisphere, federal prosecutors working to
dismantle terror networks plotting attacks on the American homeland—all
would face the constant risk of persecution for the ‘crime’ of defending
our country,” Rubio wrote. “Using all the tools at our government’s
disposal, working beside every ally with whom we can make common cause,
we will dismantle the ICC—brick by brick, if necessary.”
Raed Jarrar, advocacy director of the human rights group Democracy
for the Arab World Now (DAWN), said in response to Rubio’s op-ed that
“when the world’s most powerful country aims to dismantle the world’s
only permanent international court, it sends the message that the
powerful are above the law.”
“It is not the ICC that Rubio is
dismantling brick by brick, but the rules-based international order that
grew out of the ashes of World War II,” said Jarrar. “Rubio’s attack
doesn’t just underscore US hypocrisy, but undermines access to justice
across the globe, from Ukraine to Sudan and could amount to obstruction of justice, a crime under the Rome Statute in and of itself.”
In his op-ed, Rubio pointed to DAWN’s call earlier this year
for Iran and other Middle East nations to grant the ICC jurisdiction to
investigate apparent war crimes committed during the conflict launched
in late February by Trump and Netanyahu.
Omar Shakir, DAWN’s executive director,
said Monday that Rubio mischaracterized the group’s call as focusing
solely on actions by US personnel. That move, said Shakir, “begs the
question: Is the secretary of state worried because he knows US
personnel committed war crimes in Iran?”
Under Rubio’s plan, the State Department
is threatening to impose “increased sanctions against the ICC and
affiliated organizations,” hit court personnel with “visa revocations
and travel bans,” and pressure other nations that aren’t party to the
Rome Statute to “leverage their diplomatic networks to take similar
actions alongside” the Trump administration.
Kenneth Roth, the former executive director of Human Rights Watch who has demanded international accountability for the Trump administration over its illegal assault on Iran, wrote Monday that Rubio “can’t even make an honest case for attacking the International Criminal Court.”
“He makes it sound like the ICC acts out
of the blue anywhere it wants when in fact it acts only against crimes
committed on the territory of states that have invited it,” Roth wrote.
“He never explains why the United States should be able to commit crimes
on the territory of those states with impunity, contrary to the desire
of their sovereign governments for an international backstop to
reinforce justice for such crimes.”
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.
