Tag: israel

Staggering number of US troops wounded in Trump’s Iran war

As many as 150 US troops have been wounded in the Iran war, Reuters has reported. 

The figure, disclosed on Tuesday, is far higher than the Pentagon‘s previously acknowledged tally of eight seriously wounded. 

Seven US service members have been killed after Donald Trump launched strikes against Iran on February 28.

The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 

The human toll comes amid mounting concerns over the financial cost, the Pentagon having burned through $5.6 billion worth of munitions in the first two days of the war alone. 

Gas prices have rocketed to an average of $3.5 per gallon from $2.9 before the war began, oil prices now at levels unseen since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. 

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Crushing the Right to Conscientiously Object

As the U.S. and Israel’s deeply unpopular war with Iran enters its second week, social media platform X is censoring the accounts of people providing information to military servicemembers on how they can refuse to serve. This is particularly relevant as fears have grown that U.S. ground troops may enter the conflict.

The Center on Conscience & War, an 80-year-old nonprofit that, according to its website, “advocates for the rights of conscience, opposes military conscription, and serves all conscientious objectors to war,” was banned on X for 12 hours. The center’s executive director, Mike Prysner, shared a notice that the center received from X which labeled their posts as having “violated X rules” against “illegal and regulated behaviors.”

Prysner wrote: “This is the post @CCW4COs was suspended for, informing service members of their legal right under DoDI 1332.14 to report “failure to adapt” within first 365 days of service and receive an entry-level discharge.”

It remains legal to conscientiously object to military service. The only conceivable way that the post could be framed as encouraging illegal or irregular behavior would be to recast such objections as mutiny, which is exactly what pro-Israeli voices on social media have been frantically doing in the last few days.

In response to conservative commentator Candace Owens also encouraging those in the U.S. military to conscientiously object to serving in Iran, pro-Israel journalist Emily Schrader wrote on X:

“This is illegal. She is literally advocating mutiny. Under 18 U.S.C. § 2387 (Advocating overthrow or disloyalty in the armed forces). It is a crime for any person, including civilians, to willfully advocate or attempt to cause:
• insubordination in the armed forces
• disloyalty among service members
• mutiny or refusal of duty
It also criminalizes distributing materials intended to encourage those outcomes.
The penalty can be up to 10 years in prison and fines.”

Other pro-Israel voices like Bill Ackman, the billionaire hedge-fund manager, reposted Shrader’s sentiments.

The social media ban on the Center for Conscience and War came less than 24 hours after its executive director, Prysner, also wrote via social media regarding anecdotal evidence of troops being readied for combat:

“I just spoke with the mother of a service member in this unit. They were given one last call home before having to turn in their phones. He told his mom they were going ‘boots on the ground’ tonight.”

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Trump Says He Will Make a ‘Mutual’ Decision With Netanyahu on When To End Iran War

President Trump said on Sunday that any decision to end the war with Iran would be a “mutual” one made with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The president made the comments in a phone call with The Times of Israel, where he claimed that the US and Israel have “destroyed” Iran.

“Iran was going to destroy Israel and everything else around it… We’ve worked together. We’ve destroyed a country that wanted to destroy Israel,” Trump said.

When asked if he alone would decide when the war is over or if Netanyahu would have a say, the president said, “I think it’s mutual… a little bit. We’ve been talking. I’ll make a decision at the right time, but everything’s going to be taken into account.”

After the US and Israel first launched the war on February 28, Trump suggested it could last four weeks, but the timeline has repeatedly shifted, and there are signs that the US is preparing for a long, open-ended conflict.

The US-Israeli bombing campaign, which has killed more than 1,200 civilians, and the Israeli strike that killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei have not stopped the Iranian military’s response or fractured the government in any way, as Khamenei’s son, Mojtaba Khamenei, has been chosen as the new leader.

In his interview with the Times of Israel, Trump also praised Netanyahu and reiterated his call for Israeli President Isaac Herzog to pardon him. “Bibi Netanyahu should be given that pardon immediately. I think [Herzog is] doing a terrible thing by not giving it. We want Bibi to be focused on the war, not on a ridiculous pardon,” Trump said.

“Bibi’s done a great job. He’s been a wartime prime minister. We’ve worked together. We’ve destroyed a country that wanted to destroy Israel. Would have destroyed Israel if I wasn’t around,” the president added.

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Lindsay Graham Met With Israeli Intelligence In Attempt To Lobby Trump On War With Iran

Republican South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham made multiple trips to Israel in recent weeks to gather ammunition for his push to get President Trump to strike Iran, sitting down with members of the country’s spy agency along the way.

“They’ll tell me things our own government won’t tell me,” Graham told the Wall Street Journal (WSJ). The South Carolina Republican also admitted to advising Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the best way to pitch Trump on military action, according to the same report. Netanyahu ultimately presented intelligence to the president that helped convince him to green-light the operation, WSJ reported.

Israel Hayom, an Israeli outlet, confirmed the tight relationship between Graham and Netanyahu, describing the senator as one of four central figures behind the war. The outlet reported that Graham flew back to Mar-a-Lago from his Middle East tour carrying word that Gulf states wanted the U.S. to act, a message that clashed with what was being reported publicly at the time.

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Epic Fury, Epic Incoherence, Epic Propaganda

The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps did not confess to accidentally bombing a girls school in the Iranian city of Minab last weekend, killing 165 students. Israeli warplanes weren’t involved, either, and U.S. military investigators have tentatively concluded that U.S. forces were responsible.

Here’s a huge and amazing story from Fox News on Wednesday: Thousands of Iraqi Kurds launch ground offensive in Iran. Absolutely nothing of the kind occurred, not even close, as Fox itself was later obliged to admit in a sideways kind of way.

A major US radar installation at Qatar’s Al-Udeid Air Base was not destroyed by an Iranian drone strike in the early hours of the war. The USS Abraham Lincoln was not hit by four Iranian ballistic missiles last Sunday. And no, 650 U.S. troops were not killed in the first two days of fighting. The number of U.S. servicemen who lost their lives: six.

Elon Musk’s X has been an absolute swamp of “fake news” and video-game imagery and burning buildings in Dubai that actually burned in Tel Aviv last summer. I can’t even be bothered to debunk a fraction of it. More pressing business is at hand.

Let’s get something important out of the way, up front.

Its about what we mean when we talk about “the war.”

The wildly ambitious American-Israeli operation that began last weekend as a now-or-never confrontation with the hydra-headed Khomeinist military-industrial theocracy in Tehran had become, by the third day, another war altogether.

By Wednesday the war was primarily an all-out Khomeinist war against a dozen countries in the Greater Middle East, a war of survival that was itself merely an immediate extension of the war the regime had been waging against the Iranian people since last December.

The European Union’s foreign affairs and security chief Kaja Kallas described the state of play succinctly on Wednesday: “Tehran’s strategy is to sow chaos and set the region on fire. By indiscriminately attacking its neighbours, the regime is making a strong case for its own demise.”

The war Kaja Kallas described is merely the most urgently prosecuted campaign in the same war the Iranian regime has been waging in various forms and phases, both subterranean and out in the open, by regional proxy and by state satrapy, ever since 1979.

The many Khomeinist wars against Israel and by necessary extension against the United States and the rest of “the west” have been waged most consistently and brutally against the democratic rights of the Iranian people themselves, especially Iran’s women and Iran’s minorities.

Those are the “forever wars” you haven’t been hearing much about over the past week in all the complaints, from the “left” as well as from the “right,” from certain Liberal Party pseuds and Code Pink noisemakers and batshit MAGA influencers Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly about what the White House has gotten itself into.

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Attacks on Iran a breach of international law, Swiss defence minister says

The United States and Israel have broken international law with their attacks on Iran, said Swiss Defence Minister Martin Pfister in an interview published on March 8.

He is the latest European leader to raise concerns about the conflict.

Legal experts have said many countries will consider the attacks unjustified under the United Nations Charter, under which member countries must refrain from using force or the threat of force without UN authorisation or unless acting in self-defence.

Mr Pfister, speaking to the SonntagsZeitung newspaper, said: “The Federal Council is of the opinion that the attack on Iran constitutes a violation of international law.

“In our view, it constitutes a violation on the prohibition of violence.” He also called on all sides to halt the fighting to protect the civilian population. The Federal Council is the Swiss Cabinet.

Mr Pfister said he was referring to all the countries not complying with the prohibition on violence, including the US and Israel.

“The Americans and Israel have attacked Iran from the air. In doing so, they, like Iran, violated international law,” he added.

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Israeli minister calls for widespread Palestinian emigration to West

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich called on Palestinians to “voluntarily emigrate” to Western countries on Tuesday in response to an op-ed by Likud MK Danny Danon and Yesh Atid MK Ram Ben Barak that was published in the Wall Street Journal and called on Western countries to accept Gazan refugees.

“I welcome the initiative of voluntary relocation of Gazan Arabs to countries worldwide,” Smotrich wrote. “This is the right humanitarian solution for the residents of Gaza and the whole area after 75 years of being poor refugees. The majority of Gaza is fourth and fifth generations to 1948 refugees who, instead of being rehabilitated long ago like hundreds of millions of refugees around the world, were held hostage in Gaza in poverty and overcrowding and were a symbol of the desire to destroy the State of Israel and of the refugees’ return to Jaffa, Haifa, Acre, and Tiberias.”

He went on to say this has bred the hatred for Israel and Jews “upon which the population in Gaza is raised and educated” and led them to believe that the only solution is the destruction of Israel.

“The small area of the Gaza Strip, which doesn’t have any natural resources or independent sources of income, has no chance of independent, economic, and diplomatic existence in such high density long-term,” he went on. “Therefore, the only solution to end the suffering and the pain of Jews and Arabs alike is for countries around the world who truly want what’s good for the refugees to accept them along with support and economic aid from the international community, including the State of Israel.”

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Israel’s Death Cult Grips the US

The admission this week by U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, echoed by Mike Johnson, speaker of the House of Representatives, that Israel forced Washington’s hand in attacking Iran has rightly caused consternation.

Breathing life into something that would normally be treated as an antisemitic trope, Rubio argued that the Trump administration had been left with no choice but to attack Iran because, had it not, Israel would have launched an attack anyway, exposing U.S. soldiers to retaliation.

Rubio stated: 

“The president made the very wise decision: We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action, we knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties.”

Rubio was using the term “preemptively” in a highly irregular and misleading way.

In international law, aggression is an illegal application of force — the “supreme international crime,” according to the 1950 principles set out by the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal. But there is a potential mitigating factor if the attacking state can show it was acting pre-emptively: that is, it was acting to prevent a plausible, immediate and severe threat of attack.

Rubio, however, was not suggesting that the U.S. acted “preemptively” against a threat from Iran. He meant Washington had acted preemptively to stop its ally, Israel, from setting off a chain of military events that would lead to U.S. soldiers being harmed.

Had the Trump administration really been acting preemptively in these circumstances, the U.S. should have attacked Israel, not Iran.

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Israel Air Force strikes Iranian oil facilities, military source says

IDF sources confirmed to The Jerusalem Post on Saturday night that the air force has attacked significant oil resources in the Tehran region of Iran.

According to the sources, the oil resources being attacked are directly connected to Iran’s military industrial complex.

It was unclear what distinctions the IDF would make in such attacks regarding differing oil sites, but there was a clear effort by the sources to emphasize the military nature of the sites, which might otherwise be framed as harming Iran’s economic power more broadly, even if a new regime might later take over.

In the past, senior Israeli sources have told the Post that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has in recent years taken over certain portions of the economy, especially in the oil sector.

Iranian opposition reports indicated that as many as 30 sites might be under attack.

This vector of attack on the Islamic regime‘s power is the newest front after prior attacks on air defenses, ballistic missiles, top Iranian leaders, ballistic missile supply chain locations, and regime repression forces.

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How Israel and the FBI manipulated assassination plots to goad Trump into Iran war

The FBI manufactured plots to convince Trump that Iran sought to kill him, while Israel and its administration allies exploited the president’s deepest fears to keep him on the war path.

“I got him before he got me,” an ebullient President Donald Trump remarked to a reporter when asked about his motives for authorizing the killing of Iran’s Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, on February 28, 2026.

With his off-the-cuff remark, Trump revealed that anxiety about his own assassination at the hands of Iranian agents influenced his decision to initiate a US-Israeli regime change war that has already resulted in American casualties, the bombings of schools and hospitals inside Iran, devastating Iranian retaliatory strikes on US military bases and embassies, and a spiraling global economic crisis.

Trump’s generalized fears of assassination were well-founded. He was nearly killed in Butler, Pennsylvania on July 13, 2024 by a 20-year-old engineering student named Thomas Crooks who managed to fire eight rounds at the former president from a rooftop, slicing his ear and missing his head by a hair’s breadth. Two months later, a drifter named Ryan Routh was arrested after hiding for hours in the shrubbery outside the former president’s Mar-a-Lago estate in West Palm Beach, Florida. Routh had been spotted after pointing an assault rifle toward a Secret Service agent as Trump played golf 400 yards away. 

Officials have yet to produce any evidence that Iran played a role in either of these attempts on Trump’s life. Yet since those fateful events, Israel-aligned Trump advisors, Israeli intelligence, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself have gone to extreme lengths in order to tie Tehran to the plots. More shocking still is the fact that the FBI has manufactured a series of assassination plots, successfully convincing Trump that Iran was hunting him on US soil with highly sophisticated teams of hit men.

The man accused of leading the most significant of these operations, Asif Merchant, is currently on trial in a Brooklyn, NY federal court. After the US granted him a visa despite his presence on a terror watchlist, Merchant was in the constant company of an FBI confidential informant who ultimately steered the contrived plot to its conclusion. He never stood a chance of realizing his plans, and did not appear serious about doing so.

Independent journalist Ken Silva puts it succinctly in his forthcoming investigative book, “The Trump Assassination Plots”: “A closer look at the Merchant case reveals that at the very least…it was a highly controlled FBI sting operation that never posed a threat to Trump. More nefariously, records and whistleblower disclosures indicate that Merchant may have been the patsy in a case totally fabricated by the undercover agents.”

Authorities arrested Merchant on July 12, 2024 – just one day before Crooks attempted to kill Trump in Butler. Hours after the failed Butler assassination, FBI agents interrogated Merchant about whether it was in fact Iran that had Crooks under its control. 

At that point, Trump was still campaigning to be a “President of Peace. On the campaign stump, he warned that his opponent, Kamala Harris, “would get us into World War III guaranteed.” Trump vowed to resolve the war between Ukraine and Russia in one day, and distanced himself from pro-war Republicans who sought regime change in Iran. 

Pro-war elements in Trump’s coterie exercised multiple points of leverage to reverse the president’s anti-interventionist instincts. Ultra-Zionist billionaires supplied vital and well-documented influence over Trump’s policies by keeping his campaign war chest flush. But Trump remained an erratic personality whose petty grievances kept his aides in a perpetual state of uncertainty.

It was only by exploiting Trump’s deepest psychological vulnerability – his fear of an assassin’s bullet – that Israel and its cutouts in his administration were able to secure their influence over the president, keeping him on the warpath against Iran. 

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