Tag: iran

“We May Have To Evacuate Tehran”: Iranian President’s Remarks Stun Amid Water Crisis

Coming off a very ‘hot’ geopolitical summer which saw Israel and the US attack Tehran and the Islamic Republic’s nuclear energy facilities, Iran is now facing yet another immensely threatening crisis amid historic drought: lack of water for the population of 90+ million.

Rainfall has been at record lows, causing reservoirs to be nearly empty, in an already arid Middle East climate. The situation has grown so acute that President Masoud Pezeshkian has warned that if the drought persists for another month, Tehran’s water would have to be rationed. But this appears to be happening currently, as no rain is expected for at least the next ten days.

Already Iranians are being urged to conserve water and only use what’s available for the most pressing needs. Pezeshkian has actually said something stunning and unprecedented on Monday, though some are describing it as obvious hyperbole: 

“If rationing doesn’t work,” Pezeshkian said, “we may have to evacuate Tehran.“

The alarming statement resulted in an avalanche of criticism in Iranian media, also with former Tehran mayor Gholamhossein Karbaschi dismissing the idea as “a joke” and saying that “evacuating Tehran makes no sense at all”.

Some regional analysts and officials report an over 90% decrease in rainfall compared with last year. The NY Times summarizes of how dire the situation is:

Iran’s officials have begun rationing water in the capital, Tehran, amid a drought so severe that the president has warned the capital may need to be evacuated.

The country is facing the worst drought in six decades, and major dams are at critically low levels. Water authorities this week said the main dams feeding Tehran, on which more than 10 million people depend, were at 5 percent capacity.

On Sunday, the spokesman for Iran’s water industry, Isa Bozorgzadeh, told reporters that water pressure would be lowered from midnight until the morning “so that we can both reduce urban leakage and create an opportunity for city reservoirs to refill.”

People have in some cases taken to TikTok and other social media to show that faucets in their homes have stopped producing water for hours at a time.

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Tulsi Gabbard Claims Trump Has Ended Regime Change Wars, Ignoring His Regime Change Wars In Iran and Venezuela.

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard recently claimed that under the current Trump administration, America’s regime change wars are over.

At a Bahrain security summit, Gabbard said, “For decades, our foreign policy has been trapped in a counterproductive and endless cycle of regime change or nation building, It was a one-size-fits-all approach, of toppling regimes, trying to impose our system of governance on others, intervene in conflicts that were barely understood and walk away with more enemies than allies.”

Along with this, she implied that “America’s former strategy of ‘regime change or nation building’ had ended under President Donald Trump”.

The idea that America’s regime change policy has ended under Trump would be news to Iran and Venezuela, where Trump has attempted/is attempting to carry out regime change.

Last June, Trump joined in on Israel’s bombing of military infrastructure in Iran.

While the bombing was sold as an attempt to stop Iran from getting Nuclear Weapons, Trump’s own annual threat assessment report from the intelligence community from March of this year found no evidence Iran was building or planning on building a nuclear weapon, writing, “We continue to assess Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and that Khamenei has not reauthorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003” .

In a later interview with The Daily Caller, Trump admitted he carried out the Iran bombing for Israel, saying, “nobody has done more for Israel than I have, including the recent attacks with Iran”.

In a speech to the Israeli Knesset last month, Trump bragged about his Iran bombing, along with a list of other pro-Israel policies and went on to brag that his pro-Israel donor Miriam Adelson was, “responsible for so much”, adding, “I actually asked her once, I said, ‘So, Miriam, I know you love Israel. What do you love more, the United States or Israel?’ She refused to answer. That means, that might mean, Israel”.

As for Israel’s intention behind the Iran bombing, the Israeli paper Times of Israel reported that leaked Israeli transcripts during the bombing, “make it clear that Israel was also looking to destabilize the regime and even to kill Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei”.

The paper reported that, “Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said that Israel needed to ‘keep searching for the leader,’ referring to Khamenei, whom (Israeli defense minister Israel) Katz later said Jerusalem sought to kill”.

The paper reported that, “Netanyahu said entire Iranian neighborhoods and districts should be evacuated, and that Israel should work on destabilizing the Islamic regime”, quoting him saying, “if Khamenei reacts to an American strike, it could be the end of the regime”.

One Trump administration official told the Grayzone that “CIA Director John Ratcliffe and US CENTCOM Commander Gen. Michael Kurilla have become vehicles for Israel’s Mossad and military as they seek to manipulate the US into attacking Iran.” adding “During the Trump administration’s meetings with Israeli intelligence officials … Israelis have demonstrated a single-minded focus on regime change, clamoring for authorization to assassinate Iran’s leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei”.

The University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab uncovered that during the bombing, Israeli intelligence ran a propaganda campaign in Persian on social media, “promoting regime change in Iran.”

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Secret Israeli military bunker located under Tel Aviv tower struck by Iran, analysis shows

The Grayzone has geolocated the underground bunker of an important military command and control center nestled within a densely populated Tel Aviv neighborhood. Known as ‘Site 81,’ the U.S.-built facility houses a hyper-secretive intelligence base.

When Iran struck a series of targets in the heart of north Tel Aviv with ballistic missiles on June 13, Israeli authorities immediately cordoned off the area to prevent journalists from filming the damage. “The building on this compound was just hit,” Trey Yingst of Fox News reported as he arrived that evening at the site of HaKirya, Israel’s Defense Ministry headquarters, and the nearby Azrieli Center. But within seconds, Israeli police officers arrived to aggressively shunt Yingst away from where he was standing, just north of the HaKirya Bridge on the west side of Menachem Begin Road. 

That day, Iranian missiles struck the north tower of the Da Vinci apartment complex roughly 550 meters southwest of Yingst’s location. The Grayzone has determined that the building sits immediately south of the “Canarit” / “Kannarit” Israeli Air Force towers and above an underground military intelligence bunker jointly administered by the US and Israeli militaries. According to an analysis of leaked emails, public documents, and Israeli news reports, the location is host to a highly secretive, electromagnetically shielded intelligence facility known as “Site 81.”

Israel aggressively censors information relating to its urban military and intelligence facilities while simultaneously accusing its adversaries of engaging in ‘human shielding’ – a practice of protecting military targets with civilian populations that is prohibited by international humanitarian law. While the existence of a U.S. Army project to expand Site 81 to a 6,000 square-meter facility was widely reported from government records circa 2013, the specific location remained unknown.

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Trump Threatens To Bomb Iran Again, Says He’s ‘Not Going To Wait So Long’

President Trump on Sunday said that he would bomb Iran again if the country restarts its nuclear program, warning the US was “not going to wait so long this time,” a threat that comes amid growing signs that another US-Israeli war against Iran may be coming.

“The B2s, what they did. Those beautiful flying wings, what they did, they hit every single target. And just in case, we shot 30 Tomahawks out of a submarine,” Trump said in a speech at Naval Station Norfolk in Virginia, during a celebration of the US Navy’s 250th birthday, referring to the US bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities on June 22.

Trump claimed in the speech that Iran was going to have a nuclear weapon “within a month,” but before Israel launched the war, US intelligence determined Tehran was not pursuing a nuclear weapon, and even if it chose to, it would take years to actually develop a deliverable weapon.

“They were going to have a nuclear weapon within a month,” Trump told a crowd of US Navy sailors. “And now they can start the operation all over again, but I hope they don’t because we’ll have to take care of that too if they do, I let them know that. You want to do that, it’s fine, but we’re going to take care of that and we’re not going to wait so long.”

Trump went on to say that he had B-2 pilots visit him in the Oval Office, who said the US had been working on plans to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities for 22 years, but that no president before him wanted to do it.

The president has previously acknowledged that he bombed Iran on behalf of Israel. “Look, nobody has done more for Israel than I have, including the recent attacks with Iran, wiping that thing out,” he said in an interview with the Daily Caller published on September 1.

Since the ceasefire that ended the 12-day US-Israeli war on Iran, Trump has threatened to bomb Iran again several times. At the same time, the Trump administration is demanding that Iran enter negotiations to give up its nuclear enrichment program and place limits on its ballistic missiles, demands that Iranian officials have made clear are a non-starter.

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US Demands of Iran Make Another War Likely

The Trump administration is committed to ramping up the pressure on Iran, The Washington Post has reported, and the demands that the US is making of Tehran make another US-Israeli war on the country more likely.

According to the report, the US is demanding that Iran accept four conditions as a baseline for negotiations, including committing to “meaningful” and direct talks, agreeing to end its uranium enrichment program, imposing curbs on its ballistic missile program, and ceasing funding of its allies in the region.

Before the 12-Day War, Iran made it clear that it wouldn’t end its uranium enrichment altogether, although it was willing to reduce its enrichment to much lower levels and was exploring the idea of an enrichment consortium involving other regional countries. But those negotiations were abruptly ended when Israel launched the war on June 13, two days before Washington and Tehran were set to hold another round of talks.

In the wake of the US-Israeli bombing campaign, Iran has maintained that it won’t give up its nuclear enrichment program, framing it as a matter of national pride. Iranian officials have also made clear they will never accept a deal that would impose limits on its ballistic missile program since the weapons are the only real deterrent Tehran has.

The Post report comes after the UN Security Council reimposed sanctions on Iran under the “snapback” mechanism under the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, which was triggered by France, the UK, and Germany. Both Iran and Russia have rejected the reimposition of the sanctions as “illegal,” pointing to the fact that the US quit the nuclear deal back in 2018.

Arab officials told the Post that they’re worried another war could be coming. “The region today cannot go through the same Iranian-Israeli war or the other wars of the last two years. The cost is too high,” a senior Arab government official told the paper.

Israeli officials have been threatening that another attack on Iran may come soon. “We are monitoring what is happening across the Middle East and in Iran and are preparing for a variety of scenarios and options; one of them is that we may need to act again against Iran,” a senior IDF official told the Israeli newspaper Maariv on Monday.

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What is a sleeper cell, and why are US officials on high alert?

As tensions escalate between the United States and Iran, the threat of sleeper cells has “never been higher,” according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, although no specific or credible threats have yet emerged.

In a memo obtained by NewsNation, CBP Commissioner Rodney Scott said, “Thousands of Iranian nationals have been documented entering the United States illegally and countless more were likely in the known and unknown got-a-ways.”

While there is no current actionable intelligence, Scott emphasized the need for vigilance: “Though we have not received any specific credible threats … the threat of sleeper cells or sympathizers acting on their own, or at the behest of Iran has never been higher.”

U.S. President Donald Trump said on social media that Israel and Iran have agreed to a “complete and total ceasefire” to be phased in over 24 hours.

Trump said on Truth Social that the ceasefire would bring an “Official END” to war, a major change in the hostilities that follows a U.S. strike over the weekend on three Iranian nuclear sites.

What are sleeper cells, and how do they operate?

Sleeper cells are spies or terrorists who operate in rival countries and remain inactive until they are essentially ordered to act.

NewsNation national security contributor Tracy Walder explained that while the concept of Iranian sleeper cells in the U.S. is not new, there may have been a recent influx of agents.Timeline: How US conducted bombings on Iranian nuclear sites 

“They have sleeper cells here. Quite frankly, they have for decades. … They are just waiting for the right moment,” Walder said.

A recent Homeland Security threat assessment confirms that Iran remains a primary state sponsor of terrorism and continues efforts to target both current and former U.S. officials. That assessment echoes similar warnings issued by the Biden administration in 2024.

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Israel Wants ‘Aerial Corridor’ Over Syria to Strike Iran

Tel Aviv’s primary objective in discussions with Damascus is to establish an aerial corridor over Syria so Israel can restart its war against Iran. 

Axios reports that Israel presented the Syrian government, led by Ahmed al-Sharaa, with a maximalist agreement that would establish a no-fly zone over Syria. Additionally, Tel Aviv wants a large swath of Syria, from the Israeli border to Damascus, to become a demilitarized zone. 

An Israeli source told the outlet that an essential part of the agreement will be maintaining the ability to use Syrian airspace to attack Iran. “A central principle of the Israeli proposal is maintaining an aerial corridor to Iran via Syria, which would allow for potential future Israeli strikes in Iran,” they said. 

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu started an unprovoked war with Iran in June. Tel Aviv targeted leadership in Tehran, nuclear facilities, and scientists. President Donald Trump joined the war by striking three Iranian nuclear sites that Israel lacked the military capability to destroy. 

Israeli forces currently occupy southern Syria. Israel promised to withdraw its troops from Syria if Damascus accepted the agreement. On Wednesday, Sharaa said a deal with Israel was possible “in the coming days.”

Tel Aviv made a similar agreement with Hezbollah, where Israeli soldiers were scheduled to withdraw from South Lebanon after Hezbollah moved its forces out of the region. However, after the Hezbollah withdrawal, Tel Aviv maintained its occupation. Israel is now demanding that Hezbollah entirely disarm. 

The Israeli invasion of Syria began after President Bashar al-Assad was overthrown by al-Sharaa last year. Al-Sharaa, formerly Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, is the founder of al-Qaeda’s Syria affiliate. President Donald Trump has met with Sharaa and lifted some sanctions on Syria in a push to get Damascus to make a deal with Tel Aviv.

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Discussions Before Iran War Indicate Nuclear Weapons Issue Was Less Pressing Than Netanyahu Claimed

Private discussions between Israeli officials before launching the war against Iran in June indicate that Tehran’s development of nuclear weapons was not an immediate concern. At the time, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Iran’s nuclear program was an immediate threat. 

“We are at a historic moment with a crucial decision. If we don’t stop [them], within a few years, they will get tens of thousands of kilograms of [nuclear] explosives,” the Prime Minister said at a top-secret meeting the day before launching the war. “Iran has already enriched fissile material at a level that is enough for eight to nine bombs, and they are working on the weaponization.” 

According to The Times of Israel, one unnamed senior military official said the attack would prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon in “the long term” and the war would “improve Israel’s strategic balance.”

Publicly, Netanyahu gave far more alarming warnings about Tehran’s breakout time to build a nuclear weapon. He said, “Iran’s nuclear teams were racing to build nuclear warheads. The Israeli intelligence agency Mossad claimed Iran could assemble a nuclear weapon within 15 days. 

The private discussions also reveal that Israeli officials believed that they would not be able to destroy Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium and were depending on Trump entering the conflict. “The basic assumption is that at the end of the operation, Iran will still possess enriched material,” one official said.

Tel Aviv needed the US to destroy the Fordo nuclear facility. One senior official admitted, “Fordo will be destroyed only if the US attacks it.” Setergetic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer was confident that Trump would decide to bomb Fordo and provide Israel with assistance in shooting down Iranian missiles. 

The conversations additionally reveal that Tel Aviv was trying to overthrow the Iranian government, not just destroy its nuclear and ballistic missile programs. 

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U.S. Plan To Disarm Hezbollah Is a Diplomatic Dead End

The United States has given Lebanon until the end of the year to disarm Hezbollah in exchange for ending Israeli military operations there. This proposal, delivered to President Joseph Aoun, offers incremental Israeli withdrawals over the next few months in return for Hezbollah’s gradual dissolution—an outcome that’s nearly impossible in practice and already rejected by the group. Washington’s attempt to link Israeli withdrawals to Hezbollah’s disarmament ignores military and political realities. Disarming the terrorist group is not a matter of transactional diplomacy, but a near-impossible task that risks wasting diplomatic capital while the greater Middle East sinks deeper into instability.

Deputy Special Envoy to the Middle East Morgan Ortagus and U.S. Ambassador to Turkey Tom Barrack delivered the offer, which outlines an Israeli concession of five border points in cooperation with the Lebanese military. Ideal as it sounds, the Iran-backed group has had its teeth sunk into Lebanese civil, political, and even military sectors for decades, and it is the first watershed moment for the legitimacy of Aoun’s new administration. A former army chief, Aoun countered with a point-for-point trade that Israel has since rejected, given the terrorist group’s outright refusal to disarm.

The Lebanese Army still presented the disarmament plan, which won cabinet approval in early September despite Shiite ministers walking out in protest—but it still sidesteps the core problem: Disarmament cannot be bargained with a terrorist organization that’s already embedded in the political and military state. 

In fact, the same Shiite cabinet members who walked out during the discussion were members of Hezbollah’s Loyalty to the Resistance Bloc party, the allied Shiite Amal party, and one independent Shiite minister. Simultaneously a foreign terrorist organization and a political party, Hezbollah is a “state within a state,” with deep-seated influence in the Lebanese government that has blocked legislative business and influenced elections. 

Two possible outcomes could have resulted from the deal: Aoun could attempt to disarm Hezbollah and risk another civil war, or the government could stall and prompt Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to intervene militarily. 

Given Israel’s strike in Qatar against Hamas leadership earlier this week, the latter was more probable. Any hope for the former was lost last week when Ortagus visited Lebanon alongside U.S. Army commanders, indicating clearly that the U.S. is lending strategic expertise to help the Lebanese Army execute the plan. Israel has already begun its campaign against Hezbollah sites in northeast Lebanon. Additionally, Israel recently refocused its military personnel and hardware to their two-pronged effort in Gaza and Lebanon, backed by American shipments of military aid as well.

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Israeli intel campaign used US comedian in effort to flip Iranian scientists

A mysterious online campaign linked to Israel’s intelligence services attempted to recruit Iranians to overthrow their government. Some appear to have been placed by an Atlanta-based comedian and influencer.

Desi Banks, an Atlanta comedian and content creator, is known for his light-hearted comic sketches and currently has more than nine million followers on the social media platform Instagram. There is no public record of Banks commenting on sensitive Middle East issues, and each of his ad campaigns on Meta’s platforms relates to his work as an entertainer.

The comedian, who did not respond to repeated requests for comment, seems to have served a surprising role in an apparent Israeli intelligence operation over the last year to recruit members of Iran’s security and intelligence services – including those working in nuclear centers – into aiding the overthrow of their government. Would-be defectors were offered both money and the protection of their families.

Google advertising transparency records show that a production company owned by Banks, Desi Banks Productions LLC, served a set of four Persian-language recruitment ads across at least 19 countries, including the U.S., Sweden, France, Germany, India, and numerous others across the Middle East and Africa.

The four ad campaigns included both overt and deceptive redirections into recruitment pages purporting to be run by Israel’s foreign intelligence services, the Mossad. Others advertise lucrative, tax-free jobs at apparently fictitious international consulting firms.

The most aggressive campaign redirected users to the Mossad’s official, Persian-language recruitment form, advising viewers to activate their virtual private network (VPN) before clicking. According to Google’s ad disclosure portal, this campaign was the sole instance of a Google ad directly linking to the Mossad’s official website, mossad.gov.il.

Germany-based family members of Iranian nuclear engineers appear to be a major focus of the effort, as Germany is the only country identified by the Google ad transparency portal as being targeted with all four ad campaigns.

“You are just one click away from making history,” read the Mossad recruitment ad, captioned atop a darkened cartoon of a man walking down a multi-lane road. “Call Now. The future belongs to you.”

This direct call to espionage was targeted to viewers in at least 18 countries, including the United States.

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