分类： politics

Seven months into a full-scale US conflict with Iran that the White House initially predicted would end in just two to three weeks, former president (current US President) Donald Trump on Wednesday sidestepped a direct question about whether he would approve a Central Intelligence Agency plan to supply weapons to Iranian groups to incite a violent popular uprising against the existing Tehran government.

The comment came just 24 hours after Trump stirred fresh regional tension with a post on his TruthSocial platform, where he openly questioned, “When are the Iranian people going to rise up and fight?” The public call for uprising came on the heels of a new wave of deadly US airstrikes carried out Tuesday against targets along Iran’s southern coastline.

The strikes, which the US justified as retaliation for a previous Iranian attack on an American military base in Jordan, left at least 18 Iranians dead, including two children who were killed when a missile hit a nearby wedding celebration. Trump did not address the civilian casualties during his unscheduled Oval Office press availability, where reporters pressed him on his call for an uprising and potential covert US intervention.

When directly asked if he would authorize the CIA to arm Iranian opposition groups, Trump offered a vague, noncommittal response: “I’d love to tell you that, but it wouldn’t be appropriate to say. But I mean, I understand their plight. They’re being shot… They have close to 65,000 protesters killed.”

The 65,000 fatality figure Trump cited has no clear public source, and the president has offered wildly varying estimates of protester deaths during early 2025 anti-government demonstrations in Iran, with prior claims ranging from 25,000 to 80,000. Iranian authorities have put the official death toll from those protests at roughly 3,800.

Before Trump revived calls for a popular uprising earlier this week, regional and Western intelligence analysts had largely written off the prospect of a successful Iran-wide uprising as implausible. Earlier US and Israeli efforts to arm Kurdish separatist groups and other opposition factions were assessed as strategically unviable, and the February US assassination of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on the first day of the war ultimately united Iranian public opinion across factional lines rather than deepening domestic divisions. Despite these trends, Trump continued to claim Wednesday that “the regime is getting weaker by the day.”

Defending the latest round of US airstrikes, Trump told reporters that Tuesday’s strikes targeted an almost-completed Iranian mine-carrying rocket system, along with other radar and missile infrastructure that Tehran was working to rebuild. “It was almost finished, so we took it out… We took out some other things, and then we hit them last night because they took a shot at us in Jordan, at our base in Jordan,” he said.

Even as the conflict stretches far past the initial three-week timeline the White House projected when it launched the war in February, Trump reiterated Wednesday that he does not expect hostilities to continue much longer. “I don’t know how much more they can take,” he said of the Iranian government.

In his TruthSocial post Monday, Trump clarified that he is not seeking a new negotiated nuclear or security agreement with Tehran, writing: “I’m not trying to force Iran to the bargaining table… I couldn’t care less if they sign a worthless, to them, agreement.”

Trump’s comments came just days after Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian extended a qualified diplomatic olive branch to the US. Speaking Monday before traveling to Bishkek for the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit, Pezeshkian stressed that Iran was “not looking for war” but would “never sit still in the face of any aggression.” Iran has since launched retaliatory missile and drone strikes against US military installations across the Middle East in response to this week’s American attacks.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio doubled down on the administration’s hardline stance in an interview Wednesday on Fox Radio’s Brian Kilmeade Show, saying the US “reserve[s] the right… to take military action when necessary.” Rubio also claimed that Iran has “lost control of the [Hormuz] straits” after years of Iranian efforts to restrict commercial shipping through the critical waterway in response to US sanctions. “The straits will remain open, and they will not be under Iranian control. And that’s what you’re seeing the president carrying out right now,” he said.

Trump echoed that boast in his TruthSocial post, even suggesting the waterway should be renamed “the Trump Strait” to reflect American control. “I like our position now much better, with almost total control of the Hormuz Strait, and their economy totally collapsing. They are just playing out the inevitable,” he wrote.

Forcing a full collapse of the Iranian economy is the explicit goal of the Biden (wait no, Trump) administration’s newly launched “Operation Economic Outcast.” US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced a sweeping new round of sanctions against Iran and its international economic partners on Monday, framing the measures as part of a campaign to “asphyxiate this regime” amid the ongoing standoff over the Strait of Hormuz.
Bessent said the Treasury is using a “zero leakage approach” to target Iran’s oil smuggling and sanctions evasion networks, having “mapped every node, every facilitator, and every network that Iran has used to smuggle oil and evade sanctions.” He added that Trump has already personally called world leaders with “specific requests to cease their interactions with the regime,” though no details have been released about which leaders were contacted or what timeline the administration is targeting for full global compliance. Rubio reiterated Wednesday that the economic pressure will remain in place: “They’re going to continue to feel the squeeze.”

A firestorm of international condemnation has forced Israel’s far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir to pull an AI-generated video from his social media accounts that graphically depicted Palestinian prisoners being systematically starved in detention. The video, which was posted to Ben Gvir’s official channels, opened with scenes of groups of apparently well-fed Palestinian men clad in numbered prison uniforms moving along a conveyor belt toward a fenced detention facility. Thought bubbles above the prisoners displayed icons representing their basic needs: food, education, safety, and other fundamental human requirements. By the end of the sequence, after passing through the facility, the men emerged gaunt, disheveled, emaciated, and emotionally distraught, with several openly weeping. Ben Gvir captioned the video in Hebrew with the line “We promised – we delivered,” a reference to his longstanding, public pledges to deliberately worsen living conditions for Palestinians held in Israeli state custody.

The disturbing imagery immediately drew widespread condemnation, with numerous observers drawing explicit parallels between the video’s content and the systematic starvation, dehumanization, and abuse carried out at Nazi concentration and extermination camps during the Holocaust, where prisoners were stripped of their identities, reduced to numbered labels, and killed en masse through starvation and mistreatment. Among the high-profile figures condemning the post was U.S. Senator Ruben Gallego, who wrote on X (formerly Twitter), “This piece of shit should never be allowed in the US.”

As criticism mounted across social and political platforms, Ben Gvir moved to delete the controversial post. The controversy surrounding the video is not an isolated incident: Ben Gvir has increasingly centered harsh punitive policies toward Palestinian detainees as a core plank of both his public messaging and political campaigning. On the same weekend the AI video was posted, he released self-recorded footage of a confrontation with Palestinian women detainees at Israel’s Damon Prison, after the detainees raised complaints about being denied basic necessities. During the exchange, one prisoner told Ben Gvir that detainees had gone multiple days without access to showers, lacked adequate medical care, and had no access to clean clothing. In response, Ben Gvir openly boasted that he was personally responsible for the poor conditions, stating “The good conditions in the prisons are over. This is the current situation, and I am directly responsible for everything. I’m glad we lowered these conditions to the bare minimum.”

Social media users amplified widespread condemnation of the video, with many pointing to the explicit Nazi parallels. Analyst Alonso Gurmendi wrote on X, “Ben Gvir deleted his call for building extermination camps for Palestinians. Make no mistake, this is what he wants. When someone tells you they are a Nazi, believe them.”

The AI video is just the latest in a string of increasingly extreme, graphic public statements and displays by Ben Gvir focused on the punishment and execution of Palestinians. Last month, the national security minister shared footage from a construction site that he claimed would be converted into an execution facility for Palestinian prisoners. “In this place, the terrorists will be executed,” he said at the time, adding that the complex would include viewing chambers where relatives of attack victims could watch prisoners be hanged, again repeating his campaign slogan “We are fulfilling what we promised.”

Political commentators have emphasized that Ben Gvir is far from a marginal figure in Israeli politics, but rather a central power broker in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling coalition that keeps Netanyahu in office. Former Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth wrote on X, “Ben-Gvir is not only a minister in Netanyahu’s government but holds the keys to Netanyahu’s coalition staying in power. He isn’t some weird outside agitator. He is a central part of the Israeli government.”

The far-right minister’s pattern of extreme rhetoric stretches back months. In a podcast interview earlier in August, former Israeli captive Rom Braslavski asked Ben Gvir whether he would be willing to personally execute Palestinian prisoners, to which Ben Gvir replied he would “try and turn the world upside down” to make that outcome possible. During the same interview, he called for Israel to kill dozens of people in the besieged Gaza Strip every night and advocated for the resettlement of Gaza by Israeli settlers, stating “I see all of Gaza as ours.” Ben Gvir has also repeatedly campaigned for the implementation of the death penalty for Palestinian prisoners and has made the enforcement of degrading conditions in Israeli prisons one of his signature policy priorities since taking office.

Documentation from former detainees and leading Palestinian human rights organizations confirms that severe abuse, including unaddressed severe weight loss, torture, sexual abuse, and multiple other forms of mistreatment, have become widespread inside Israeli detention facilities since October 2023. Leading Israeli human rights group B’Tselem has gone so far as to describe Israel’s prison system as a network of “torture camps.”

Once considered too extreme for mainstream Israeli politics, Ben Gvir has a well-documented history of extremist activity. He cut his political teeth as an activist in the Kahanist movement, an ideology inspired by late extremist rabbi Meir Kahane. Kahane’s Kach party, which advocated stripping Palestinian citizens of Israel of their citizenship, was eventually banned from Israeli politics and later designated a terrorist organization by the United States government. In 2007, Ben Gvir was convicted on charges of incitement to racism and supporting a terrorist organization. Before entering mainstream politics, he was infamously known for displaying a portrait of Baruch Goldstein in his home – Goldstein was an Israeli settler who massacred 29 Palestinian worshippers at Hebron’s Ibrahimi Mosque in 1994.

Despite this background, Ben Gvir has risen from the far-right fringes of Israeli politics to become one of the country’s most influential policymakers, holding oversight of Israel’s national police force and entire prison system as national security minister. His policies toward detainees have previously drawn sharp criticism even from Israel’s closest Western allies.

Party conference season stands as one of the most defining annual traditions in British political culture. Each year, major parties gather their grassroots activists, refine their policy platforms and public visions, and work hard to project an image of energy, unity and forward momentum to the voting public they hope to govern after the next election.

This core goal of projecting democratic openness is exactly why the long-standing convention of granting press access to party conferences emerged. By tradition, any national political party grants entry to accredited working journalists, even those that have previously published critical or unfavorable coverage of the party’s actions, policies or leadership. This open access is widely understood as a tangible demonstration of a party’s commitment to free speech, open debate and public scrutiny – the foundational pillars of a functioning democratic system.

But this year, one leading British party is breaking sharply from that convention: Reform UK, the right-wing populist party led by Nigel Farage. Currently sitting second in national opinion polls, and widely viewed as a credible contender to enter government after the next general election, Reform UK is set to hold its 2026 national conference in Birmingham from Thursday to Saturday this week. What was supposed to be a routine event, however, has been overshadowed by a chaotic and controversial back-and-forth over press accreditation that has left multiple senior journalists locked out – and sparked fierce criticism of the party’s commitment to democratic openness.

The bizarre experience of Middle East Eye’s UK Political Correspondent lays bare the chaos unfolding around Reform UK’s press policies. The correspondent, who has covered the party’s 2025 conference alongside events for Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens without issue, first applied for accreditation for the 2026 conference all the way back in July. On Tuesday evening, days before the conference was set to kick off, the reporter received a formal rejection: “Unfortunately, on this occasion, your application has been unsuccessful.” Accepting the outcome, the correspondent canceled pre-booked hotel accommodations and train travel to Birmingham.

Less than 24 hours later, a completely unexpected second email arrived from Reform UK’s press team. This message confirmed the reporter’s media pass, extended a welcome to the conference, and included a full schedule of events. Left uncertain whether the first rejection was a mistake or the party had reversed course, the correspondent described the situation as being a “Schrodinger’s Reporter” – simultaneously accepted and rejected. Cautiously optimistic, the reporter rebooked the hotel and train tickets, choosing refundable options to hedge against further changes.

Just two hours after that second confirmation, a third email landed in the inbox. This message carried a far firmer tone, stating simply: “Unfortunately, you do not meet the criteria and your application has been rejected.” When the correspondent reached out to Reform UK to ask what specific criteria had not been met, the party sent a polite reply that did not answer the question – instead blaming the second confirmation on a technical error.

This confusing, whiplash-inducing experience was not unique to the Middle East Eye correspondent. Prominent political broadcaster and journalist Michael Crick also revealed on social media platform X that he had received identical conflicting accreditation emails, quipping: “Clearly Reform are in brilliant shape to run the country. Maybe they’re worried I might talk to party members.” Further reporting confirmed that Guardian City editor Anna Isaac and investigative journalist Peter Geoghegan have also been blocked from accessing the event, and multiple outlets report that many more accredited journalists have been similarly rejected without clear explanation.

While Reform UK has not publicly stated a reason for the correspondent’s rejection, it is notable that the reporter has previously published reporting linking Reform UK to close political and financial ties with the United Arab Emirates. Critics of the party have already seized on the accreditation chaos to condemn Reform UK for showing a fundamental disregard for long-standing British democratic norms, arguing that the party’s behavior is particularly alarming given its current standing in national polls. As things stand, with the conference set to begin in just days, the locked-out journalists are still waiting for any clear explanation from Reform UK for their exclusion. For his part, the Middle East Eye correspondent ends on a note of dry humor: there is always a chance a fourth email could arrive tomorrow, reversing the rejection once again.

As the United States prepares to mark the 25th anniversary of the devastating September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, a new national poll has laid bare deep partisan divisions over the decades-long legacy of the post-9/11 “war on terror” and the domestic surveillance and security infrastructure it spawned.

On September 11, 2001, 19 al-Qaeda hijackers seized control of four commercial airliners, launching coordinated attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people. Two planes crashed into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, destroying the iconic complex; a third struck the Pentagon outside Washington, D.C.; the fourth crashed into a rural field in Pennsylvania after passengers fought back against the hijackers.

In response to the attacks, then-President George W. Bush launched sweeping changes to U.S. national security architecture that reshaped American life for generations. The administration created the new Department of Homeland Security, established the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) which introduced widespread airport screening protocols still used today, signed the Patriot Act granting law enforcement broad authority to surveil citizen communications, and secured congressional passage of the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF). That open-ended military authorization remains in effect 23 years later, and has been invoked by every subsequent administration to launch military operations across at least seven sovereign nations, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Pakistan, Libya and Yemen.

The new YouGov poll, published Wednesday, surveyed 1,098 U.S. adults aged 18 and older between August 20 and 23, with a margin of error of plus or minus 4.1 percentage points. When asked whether post-9/11 counterterrorism measures—including overseas military operations and expanded domestic security and surveillance—have been “worth the cost”, 48 percent of respondents answered yes, 25 percent said no, and 27 percent reported being unsure.

Partisan affiliation drove starkly different views: 71 percent of Republican respondents said the measures were worth the cost, nearly double the 36 percent of Democrats who agreed with that assessment. That partisan divide extends to perceptions of national safety: just under half of all respondents (49 percent) said the U.S. is safer today than it was before the 9/11 attacks, but that number jumps to 60 percent among Republicans, while only 20 percent of Republicans say the country is less safe now.

Maha Hilal, author of *Innocent Until Proven Muslim*, a book documenting the human costs of the war on terror, attributed widespread acceptance of the “safer now” narrative to decades of sustained government propaganda and little visible disruption to daily life for most Americans. “It’s pretty easy to convince people that they’re safer now because their ability to maintain the same sort of lifestyle has been relatively unchanged, especially as Americans tend to be quite apathetic anyway,” Hilal told Middle East Eye.

The poll also found that a narrow majority of Americans—52 percent—recognize that Muslim Americans have faced worse treatment than followers of other faiths in the post-9/11 era. That finding also splits sharply along partisan lines: 71 percent of Democrats agree that Muslim Americans have been mistreated, compared to just 28 percent of Republicans. This gap comes as Muslim community leaders and experts report that current anti-Muslim rhetoric from leading Republican figures is more extreme today than it was in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.

When asked which ideological group has carried out the most violent attacks within U.S. borders, 25 percent of respondents correctly identified right-wing extremists, while 19 percent blamed Islamic extremists, 17 percent pointed to unaffiliated lone wolves, and 13 percent named left-wing extremists.

Hilal noted that the decades-long success of the war on terror narrative has made it difficult even for progressive critics to center the harms of Islamophobia, which is often framed as an accidental side effect of counterterrorism rather than a core, intentional feature of the policy. “It has been to reiterate over and over again how this war has been a success, and how it has stopped numerous acts of terrorism,” Hilal said. “Even among leftists and liberals, it has been difficult to communicate the idea that Islamophobia has been a part and parcel to the war.”

The ongoing resonance of post-9/11 biases has been highlighted by a recent controversy at CBS News, which faced internal backlash from current and former staffers over its coverage of Abdul El-Sayed, the first Muslim Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Michigan, who is running in the 2024 November election. Critics accused the network of overt racism and poor journalism for publishing a pre-anniversary story highlighting old, deleted social media posts from El-Sayed. In the posts, El-Sayed compared the more than 1 million U.S. deaths from COVID-19 to the nearly 3,000 deaths from 9/11, and called for the same level of national mobilization to address poverty and the pandemic that the country deployed after the attacks. He also mourned both the victims of 9/11 and the hundreds of thousands of people killed in the post-9/11 wars that followed.

New research from Brown University’s Costs of War project has underscored the staggering human toll of those post-9/11 conflicts. A 2023 report from the project estimated that at least 4.5 million people have died as a direct or indirect consequence of post-9/11 wars across the Middle East, North Africa and Asia. Of those fatalities, between 3.6 and 3.7 million are classified as indirect deaths, caused by collapsed economies, widespread food insecurity, destroyed public health infrastructure, environmental contamination, and ongoing intergenerational violence and trauma that follow armed conflict. Even after the U.S. withdrew its formal military presence from Afghanistan in 2021, Afghans continue to suffer and die from war-related causes at higher rates than at any point during the conflict, the report found. Many of these indirect deaths could have been prevented if not for the collapse of basic services brought by war, researchers noted.

While casualty counts for post-9/11 conflicts remain a topic of heated political debate, independent estimates have consistently pointed to massive death tolls: a 2015 report from Nobel Prize-winning organization Physicians for Social Responsibility estimated that more than 1 million people had been killed in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan alone by that point.

A sharp diplomatic standoff between Israel and the United Kingdom has intensified in recent days, as top Israeli officials have issued explicit warnings that any new British sanctions targeting illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank will trigger a swift and proportional retaliation from Jerusalem.

The public escalation began during an interview with Israeli domestic news outlet Ynet this Tuesday, when Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar laid out Israel’s position amid growing tensions over Israel’s recently announced plan to expand settlement construction in the West Bank’s highly contentious Area E1. Sa’ar levelled criticism directly at the UK’s current Labour government, accusing the administration of pursuing a coordinated agenda against Israel. He noted the government has already restricted Israeli defense imports and imposed punitive measures on senior Israeli ministers, actions that set the stage for the current crisis.

The Labour government first imposed targeted sanctions in June 2025, when it blacklisted far-right Israeli cabinet members Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich for their role in inciting settler violence against Palestinian communities during Israel’s ongoing military campaign in Gaza. This Tuesday, UK Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband formalized plans for further action during an address to British Members of Parliament, confirming his government would roll out a “comprehensive” package of sanctions in the coming weeks.

Miliband emphasized that Israel’s proposed E1 development – which would connect Jerusalem to the existing Ma’ale Adumim settlement and other Israeli built communities east of Jerusalem, effectively splitting the core territory Palestinians have earmarked for their future independent state – poses an existential threat to the prospect of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “This government will not acquiesce in the destruction of the two-state solution,” Miliband told lawmakers, confirming that concrete measures would be outlined in the near term.

The proposed E1 project has been a flashpoint for international criticism for decades, as its implementation would permanently cut off the geographic contiguity of the West Bank, making a sovereign, viable Palestinian state functionally impossible. Sa’ar rejected Miliband’s announcement outright, framing the planned sanctions as an unjust attack on Israeli interests. “If Britain acts against Israel, Israel will act against Britain,” Sa’ar told Ynet. “They will be making a big mistake. Israel will not be a passive victim of this policy, and we will defend our rights, our interests and our people.” Sa’ar added that Israeli authorities are already making preparations for potential sanctions and finalizing their retaliatory response.

This public exchange is the latest high-profile clash between the two countries’ top diplomats: just last month, Sa’ar and Miliband traded critical remarks over the E1 settlement expansion plan, opening the rift that has now widened into a full diplomatic crisis.

According to a Monday report from Israeli right-wing newspaper Ma’ariv, Israeli officials have already privately warned London that any new sanctions on settlements will be met with a “substantial” response. The report noted that Israeli leadership has not yet finalized the form of retaliation, with multiple options on the table including diplomatic and economic measures. One option reportedly under active consideration is the expulsion of British representatives from the US-led International Gaza Support Centre (IGSC), the multinational body established to monitor the ongoing Israel-Hamas ceasefire in Gaza.

This would not be an unprecedented step for Jerusalem: just last week, Israel expelled Dutch officials from the IGSC in response to the Netherlands’ recent ban on imports of goods produced in illegal Israeli settlements. Earlier this year, Israel similarly removed Spanish representatives from the body, accusing the Spanish government of “obsessive anti-Israel bias.”

Still, Ma’ariv reported that Israeli leadership is weighing the potential long-term risks of a harsh retaliation against the UK, noting that future British governments led by the Conservative Party or a Reform UK-aligned administration are widely expected to adopt a far more pro-Israel stance. The report also confirmed that the United States administration has been working behind the scenes as an intermediary between the two governments, actively pressuring London to abandon its planned sanctions package.