分类： politics

The Trump administration finds itself mired in a diplomatic and military quagmire of its own making over Iran, with new revelations showing the U.S. military is actively crowdsourcing innovative strategies from defense experts to break the prolonged stalemate and force Tehran into a deal favorable to President Donald Trump.

According to a Monday report from CNN, a recent email circulated by an intelligence officer within U.S. Central Command (Centcom) explicitly called for “new creative and unconventional ways to pressure and punish Iran”, a signal that senior defense officials never anticipated the ongoing conflict would stretch on for as long as it has. While a Centcom spokesperson pushed back on framing the move as unusual, noting the command has a long track record of pursuing innovative problem-solving, the public request for outside ideas underscores the lack of a clear path forward for the White House.

The intermittent, tit-for-tat military escalation between the U.S., Israel and Iran that began in late February has triggered cascading global consequences. In response to the hostilities, Iran moved to close off shipping access through the Strait of Hormuz, a critical chokepoint that carries roughly 20% of the world’s daily oil supplies. The closure sent global energy prices soaring, a development that has directly hit the economic interests of Trump’s core voter base ahead of any potential election.

Amid growing regional pressure to de-escalate, Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman emphasized in a Sunday phone call with Trump the urgent need for dialogue to cool tensions, urging all parties to prioritize a truce that would open the door for negotiated diplomatic solutions.

The situation has been further muddled by conflicting public statements over the status of talks. Last Saturday, Trump announced he had called off planned military strikes against Iran and claimed negotiations between Washington and Tehran would officially kick off on Monday. Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One on Sunday, Trump argued that Iran had clear motivation to negotiate: “Obviously, they don’t want to be attacked. Now what we’re doing is we’re talking to them in the form of a negotiation. It begins tomorrow afternoon.”

But Iranian officials have flatly denied Trump’s claim that bilateral talks are underway. Esmaeil Baghaei, spokesperson for Iran’s foreign ministry, clarified during a press briefing that Tehran is currently holding only “constructive” discussions with Oman, focused on establishing new secure shipping routes through the Strait of Hormuz. “We are not currently negotiating with the United States. Our negotiations are with Oman to secure passage through the Strait of Hormuz,” Baghaei stated. He added that the status quo in the strait will remain in place as long as the U.S. maintains its naval blockade of Iranian ports, and urged both regional and international powers to respond to Iran’s responsible diplomatic outreach with a constructive approach.

The unexpected dismissal of International Criminal Court (ICC) Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan by the court’s governing body, the Assembly of States Parties (ASP), has ignited fierce debate across the global legal community, with leading international law experts warning that the move poses a profound threat to the long-held principle of prosecutorial independence at the world’s highest permanent criminal tribunal. On July 24, ASP delegates voted to remove Khan from office after upholding a finding that he had engaged in “serious misconduct and a serious breach of duty” through inappropriate behavior toward a subordinate staff member. Khan has repeatedly and vehemently denied all allegations of wrongdoing against him.

This outcome directly contradicted the earlier findings of an independent judicial panel convened specifically to evaluate evidence gathered through a United Nations-led fact-finding probe. In March, three impartial judges appointed by the ASP’s executive bureau unanimously ruled that the evidence presented failed to prove any violation of the ICC’s governing legal framework. A month before the full ASP vote, however, the 21-member ASP bureau disregarded the judicial panel’s conclusion and issued its own recommendation that Khan be removed, citing an alleged sexual relationship with a subordinate as the core violation. Adding further controversy to the process, the bureau also modified voting procedures to lower the threshold for removal, replacing the original requirement of two separate votes—one on whether misconduct occurred, and a second on whether removal was warranted—with a single up-or-down vote on dismissal.

William Schabas, a preeminent international law professor at Middlesex University and one of the world’s leading authorities on the ICC, has emerged as a prominent critic of the process, warning that the dismissal has inflicted lasting damage on the court’s integrity and the independence of the prosecutorial office. Schabas argues that the ASP, as a fundamentally political body whose delegates vote according to directives from their national governments, is not suited to deliver impartial, judicial findings of misconduct. He points out multiple critical flaws in the ASP’s final decision: it does not qualify as a formal judicial judgment, it fails to outline which evidence the body accepted or rejected, and it never explicitly identifies the specific actions that are deemed to constitute “serious misconduct”.

Schabas notes that while some delegates likely voted for dismissal based on a genuine belief that Khan had violated rules, particularly after a high-profile CNN interview with the complainant, many other votes were almost certainly driven by political motivations. He specifically highlights that widespread anger among certain ICC member states over Khan’s decision to pursue war crime prosecutions against Israeli leaders was a major contributing factor to the dismissal. He added that other states may have voted to remove Khan in exchange for concessions from either Israel or the United States, which has openly opposed the ICC’s probe into Israeli actions in Gaza.

Khan made history during his tenure as the first ICC prosecutor to seek arrest warrants for sitting leaders of non-African states. The targets of his warrants included Russian President Vladimir Putin for actions in Ukraine, Myanmar’s military leader Min Aung Hlaing, senior Taliban leaders in Afghanistan, former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, and most controversially, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. Khan’s May 2024 request for warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant over alleged war crimes in the Gaza Strip marked the first time the ICC has pursued criminal charges against leaders of a Western-aligned state. The move immediately triggered harsh retaliation from the United States, which imposed sanctions on Khan, his two deputy prosecutors, and eight ICC judges. In the weeks leading up to the dismissal vote, senior U.S. officials openly vowed to “dismantle the ICC, brick by brick” over the prosecution, with former President Donald Trump explicitly stating that the U.S. campaign against the court is intended to protect Netanyahu. The ICC is currently hearing Israeli appeals to invalidate the arrest warrants.

Looking ahead to the future of the court, Schabas warns that Khan’s dismissal has already created a chilling effect that will shape the work of the next ICC prosecutor. He explained that the next person to hold the role will constantly operate under the threat that independent investigations or arrest warrants targeting powerful leaders or high-priority state interests could provoke retaliation through disciplinary proceedings. Beyond the immediate threat to the next prosecutor, Schabas argues that the entire disciplinary process in this case was improvised and violated the formal procedures outlined in the Rome Statute, the ICC’s founding treaty, and the court’s existing rules of evidence and procedure. He emphasized that current ICC rules do not provide adequate protection for prosecutorial independence, noting that due process is critical not only to protect the personal rights of the sitting prosecutor but also to safeguard the institutional independence of the office itself.

To address these fundamental flaws, Schabas is calling for a full revision of the ICC’s governing rules to require that any future effort to remove an elected prosecutor be decided through a formal judicial process, rather than a political vote by the ASP. He argues that for prosecutorial independence to be meaningful, a prosecutor must be secure in the knowledge that they can only be removed from office after a properly constituted tribunal of independent, impartial judges has made a formal finding of misconduct, and that if such a tribunal clears the prosecutor, the ASP should have no authority to overrule that decision and order removal. Schabas’ concerns echo broader criticism from human rights groups and other legal experts, who have widely scrutinized the bureau’s handling of the investigation and raised repeated alarms that the entire process was politicized and failed to meet basic standards of due process.

A controversial plan by Israeli far-right national security minister Itamar Ben Gvir to place Nile crocodiles in moats surrounding facilities holding Palestinian prisoners has been temporarily blocked by a Jerusalem District Court ruling, Israeli media has confirmed.

The scheme, which had secured backing from Ben Gvir’s own ministry and the Israel Prison Service (IPS), had already seen preliminary construction work underway: crews had begun digging trenches around a portion of Ketziot Prison, located in Israel’s Negev desert. Under the proposal, predatory Nile crocodiles would be stationed in these newly dug moats as an added security perimeter around the prison complex.

The court’s temporary injunction was issued just hours after Israeli animal welfare group Let the Animals Live filed a legal petition against the plan, naming Environmental Protection Minister Idit Silman, Ben Gvir, and the IPS as respondents. Notably, the legal challenge centered exclusively on risks to the crocodiles and potential harm to prison personnel, rather than addressing the longstanding documented abuses faced by Palestinian detainees held in Israeli custody.

The pathway for Ben Gvir’s proposal was cleared earlier in July 2025, when Minister Silman issued a regulatory order reclassifying Nile crocodiles from a protected native species to a “tended animal,” removing legal barriers to their transfer and deployment at the prison site. The petition disputes this regulatory change, arguing Silman sidelined formal input from legal experts and the Nature and Parks Authority, and calling for the crocodile’s protected status to be reinstated.

In his Sunday ruling, Judge Avraham Rubin found that the claims of potential harm to the crocodiles were serious enough to warrant immediate intervention. “The claims regarding the expected harm to the crocodiles merit investigation and justify issuing an order prohibiting the transfer, or any action related to locating or preparing crocodiles for transfer,” Rubin wrote in his decision. The temporary injunction will remain in effect until a full ruling on the case, with Silman, Ben Gvir, and the IPS given until Wednesday to submit formal responses to the court.

Israeli environmental and conservation bodies have voiced opposition to the plan from its earliest stages. Both the Environmental Protection Ministry and the Nature and Parks Authority have publicly stated that Silman’s reclassification of the Nile crocodile lacks any scientific foundation, and have echoed concerns that relocating the large predators to a high-traffic prison site puts correctional staff at unnecessary risk.

The crocodile moat scheme is only the latest in a string of harsh measures pushed by Ben Gvir aimed at worsening already poor detention conditions for Palestinians held in Israeli custody. Previous proposals and implemented policies have included restrictions on family visitations, reduced food access, deliberate denial of medical care, extended solitary confinement, and reports of routine torture.

The court ruling came on the same day that video footage of Ben Gvir circulated widely on social media, showing the far-right politician mocking a female Palestinian detainee who had raised complaints about inhumane conditions inside her facility.

According to data collected by Palestinian prisoner advocacy organizations, more than 9,600 Palestinians are currently held in Israeli detention facilities as of 2025. That population includes 84 women and 350 minor children, with widespread documentation of ongoing abuses including medical neglect, physical assault, sexual violence, and rape that human rights groups characterize as systematic torture against the detainee population.

Dawn breaks slowly over the spread-out tent homes and livestock enclosures of Ras al-Ahmar, a small Palestinian community tucked into the arid northern Jordan Valley. The only sound cutting through the still morning air is the desperate bleating of thirsty cattle and sheep, waiting for water that will not flow from the community’s destroyed wells.

Just days after Israeli military forces demolished three of the village’s primary water wells, hundreds of residents are locked in a desperate race to secure enough water to sustain their households, their subsistence crops, and their grazing livestock — all in one of the occupied West Bank’s most parched, water-scarce regions.

For 60-year-old Ali Bani Odeh, the demolition of the wells was far more than the loss of basic infrastructure. A father of four and grandfather to 14 children, Odeh has spent his entire adult life working this land, tending crops and raising animals to support his extended family. Today, he and dozens of other local families face an uncertain future: with no consistent water source, it is unclear how much longer they can remain on their ancestral land.

“Water is everything for us,” Odeh told reporters from Middle East Eye. “Without water, we cannot live. We need it for our families, our sheep and our crops. Since the wells were destroyed, we have been forced to bring water from town at a much higher cost, and even then, we’re not always allowed to pass.”

Families are now forced to haul water from distant urban centers at prices three times the standard rate, while Israeli military checkpoints and strict movement restrictions often block or delay water tankers from reaching the isolated village entirely.

Abdullah Bisharat, head of the Ras al-Ahmar village council, described the destroyed wells as the beating heart of the community. “The wells were the lifeline of this community,” Bisharat said. According to his accounting, the three wells supplied more than 47 local families, totaling more than 600 residents, and irrigated roughly 7,500 dunams (more than 1,850 acres) of working farmland. They also provided water for thousands of sheep and goats, the primary source of household income for nearly all families in the community.

“Their destruction has affected every aspect of daily life, from drinking water and agriculture to livestock, leaving dozens of families struggling to meet their most basic needs,” Bisharat added.

Residents note that the demolition of the wells marks the most severe escalation in a months-long water crisis driven by repeated attacks from Israeli settlers. For months, settlers have repeatedly cut the above-ground pipelines that brought water to the community, forcing families to already rely on overpriced water tankers. This attack, however, eliminated the community’s last independent water source by destroying the wells themselves.

Obeida Bani Odeh, Ali’s son, says the loss of the wells threatens not just his family’s livelihood, but their ability to remain in Ras al-Ahmar at all. “We cannot survive here without water,” he said. “For months, the pipelines supplying our community were repeatedly cut, and we had to bring water from nearby towns, often at three times the usual cost. Now the wells have been destroyed, and there is no reliable source of water left for our families or our livestock.”

He explained that the crisis extends far beyond water scarcity. Frequent settler violence and strict movement controls have made it nearly impossible to bring in not just water, but animal feed and other essential supplies. “The settlers attack everyone, from the young to the old,” Obeida said. “They want to make people afraid and force them to leave. But we have been living on this land for generations.”

Today, roughly 700,000 Israeli settlers reside in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, spread across more than 300 formal settlements and unauthorized outposts. The International Court of Justice has repeatedly ruled that all Israeli settlements in occupied Palestinian territory violate international law, a finding that Israel has repeatedly rejected.

Settler violence and targeted attacks against Palestinian herding and farming communities in the West Bank have spiked dramatically in recent years. United Nations data shows that between January 2023 and April 2026, at least 5,910 Palestinians have been internally displaced from their homes in the West Bank as a direct result of settler violence.

Aref Daraghmeh, a prominent Palestinian human rights activist working in the Jordan Valley, says the demolition of water infrastructure in Ras al-Ahmar is part of a broader, systematic campaign to take control of the region’s limited natural resources. “Water has become a silent war against Palestinians in the Jordan Valley,” Daraghmeh told Middle East Eye. “The occupation has taken control of many Palestinian water sources, while the water available to Palestinian communities is insufficient for agriculture and sustaining life on the land.”

Daraghmeh explains that restricted water access has gutted Palestinian agricultural activity across the Jordan Valley, making it increasingly impossible for small-scale farmers and herders to maintain their livelihoods. As water becomes harder to access, communities face mounting pressure to abandon their land, even as Israeli settlement agriculture expands across the region. Strict movement controls have compounded these challenges, he added. “The Jordan Valley is effectively under closure,” Daraghmeh said. “Military checkpoints control movement, roads are restricted, and residents often have to wait for hours before they can enter or leave their communities.”

These restrictions also block farmers from accessing grazing lands and transporting livestock, crops, and supplies to market, piling additional pressure on communities already crippled by water scarcity.

For Ali Bani Odeh, however, leaving Ras al-Ahmar is not a choice he is willing to make. Displaced from his original family home as a child, he says he will not be forced to move again. “I have left before, but I will not leave this place,” Ali said. “If we leave, they will take over the land. We are staying because this is where our lives and our history are.”

A sharp public rebuke from Iran’s top foreign affairs spokesperson has laid bare a dramatic breakdown in what was once a steadily improving relationship between Iran and Kuwait, bringing long-simmering regional tensions to a head.

Last week, Esmaeil Baghaei, spokesperson for Iran’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, took to social media to label Kuwait as “part of the fire of the wicked,” warning that “the smoke of ingratitude and the absence of foresight will blind the eyes of the ungrateful.” The fiery comments came amid a wave of Iranian missile strikes targeting U.S. military installations hosted on Kuwaiti territory, part of a broader campaign Tehran has waged against American bases across the Gulf region since the start of 2024. Leveraging its long-standing strategy of asymmetric warfare to avoid direct confrontation, Iran’s strikes have inflicted substantial damage on the targeted facilities.

Kuwait has pushed back firmly against Iranian claims, denying that it allows the U.S. to launch offensive strikes from its soil and dismissing Iran’s attacks as “criminal aggression.”

To understand the current rupture, it is necessary to unpack the decades-long, roller-coaster history of relations between the two neighboring Persian Gulf states. The first major fracture came just one year after the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, when Saddam Hussein launched his 1980 invasion of Iran. Kuwait aligned firmly with Iraq during the eight-year Iran-Iraq War, providing billions of dollars in loans to Baghdad, opening its ports to Iraqi weapons shipments, and granting critical logistical support for Iraq’s war effort.

Dr. Alam Saleh, a Middle East affairs lecturer at the Australian National University, notes that Kuwait’s stance grew out of two core strategic fears. After the Islamic Revolution, Kuwait’s ruling Al-Sabah monarchy worried that Iran’s new revolutionary government would seek regional hegemony in the Persian Gulf, and would incite Kuwait’s large Shia population to rise up against royal rule. During the war, Iran was widely blamed for a string of attacks on Kuwaiti targets, including oil tankers, the U.S. and French embassies, Kuwait International Airport, and multiple hijackings of Kuwait Airways flights. But Saleh emphasizes that direct responsibility for these attacks on the Iranian state has never been definitively proven.

The dynamic shifted dramatically in 1990, when Saddam turned on his former ally and invaded Kuwait. Saddam justified the invasion by claiming Kuwait was using American-assisted drilling technology to overextract oil from the shared Rumaila field, driving down global oil prices and crippling Iraq’s already war-debt-burdened economy. Days before the invasion, a meeting with then-U.S. Ambassador to Iraq April Glaspie left Saddam believing the U.S. would not intervene in the conflict, giving him what he saw as a green light to seize the territory he had long claimed as Iraq’s own. But the U.S. ultimately led a 42-nation coalition to oust Iraqi forces from Kuwait in the 1991 Gulf War.

In the wake of the invasion, Iran stepped in as a key partner for Kuwait, extending critical humanitarian assistance that is still referenced by Iranian officials today. As more than a million Kuwaitis fled the invasion to neighboring countries, Iran welcomed tens of thousands of refugees, including foreign workers, stateless people, and Iraqi nationals opposed to Saddam. The Iranian government set up temporary refugee camps in the southwestern border province of Khuzestan, providing food, shelter, safe passage, political asylum, and evacuation flights for those stranded by the conflict. Contemporary records show that British MPs who visited the camps praised Iran’s response to the crisis, with Conservative MP Michael Jopling noting in a 1991 parliamentary debate that “the Iranians seemed to be dealing adequately with the massive crisis which confronted them.”

Before retreating, Iraqi forces launched a campaign of systematic sabotage against Kuwait’s critical infrastructure, blowing up oil facilities, dumping millions of barrels of crude oil into the Persian Gulf (creating the largest marine oil spill in recorded history at that time), and igniting more than 600 burning oil wells. The toxic smoke from the wells spread as far as southwestern Iran, causing widespread air pollution, public health risks, and environmental damage in Iranian territory.

Iran again contributed to international recovery efforts, sending a team of 47 experienced oil industry experts and engineers to help extinguish the fires. Having built extensive expertise in oil facility repair and firefighting during the Iran-Iraq War, when Iraqi forces repeatedly targeted Iran’s energy infrastructure, the Iranian team was assigned to the heavily damaged Burgan oil field, Kuwait’s largest. Operating in dangerous conditions amid unexploded Iraqi landmines, the team successfully capped 28 burning wells. The operation was widely seen as a goodwill gesture that helped repair bilateral relations, as both countries now shared Iraq as a common enemy.

Over the following decade, relations warmed steadily. “Throughout the 1990s Iran and Kuwait expanded diplomatic dialogue, trade and security cooperation while managing their differences pragmatically,” Saleh explained.

But the growing U.S. military presence in the region, anchored in Kuwait, created a new fault line in the relationship. Following the Gulf War, the U.S. began building and expanding military bases across the Middle East; today, it hosts 13,500 troops across five bases in Kuwait, more than any other Middle Eastern country. Some analysts have even argued that the U.S. deliberately encouraged Saddam’s invasion to create a pretext for a permanent military presence in the Persian Gulf to control regional oil production.

Tehran has long viewed the permanent U.S. military presence in the region as a threat to its sovereignty and a form of Western imperialism. “Iran opposes all long-term US military bases in the Persian Gulf, arguing that they undermine regional security, but generally separates this issue from its bilateral relations with Kuwait,” Saleh notes. Still, public evidence confirms that Kuwait has served as a key logistics and command hub for U.S. regional operations, contradicting Kuwait’s claims that it does not allow its territory to be used for offensive strikes. Earlier this month, The Wall Street Journal reported that Kuwait joined Bahrain in secretly launching airstrikes against Iranian drone and missile storage facilities, a move that deepened Iranian anger. Tehran has also criticized Kuwait for backing former U.S. President Donald Trump’s hardline policy toward Iran, which Iranian analysts view as evidence of Kuwaiti complicity in anti-Iran aggression.

The latest source of tension is Kuwait’s recent ratification of a five-year defense pact with Pakistan, the country that has been tapped to mediate between Iran and the U.S. in ongoing negotiations. While Kuwait and Pakistan first signed a defense partnership in 2023, the new agreement expands cooperation to include military training, personnel exchanges, intelligence sharing, and technology collaboration. While the pact itself is not unusual, analysts note its timing is significant, signaling a shift in Kuwait’s approach to regional security amid ongoing regional conflict.

Iran has responded cautiously so far. “Iran will monitor the agreement but is unlikely to oppose it unless it is used against Iranian interests,” Saleh observed. “Since Pakistan has also acted as a mediator, Tehran is expected to maintain constructive relations with both countries while closely watching developments in the Persian Gulf.”