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ABC News – Iran live updates: Trump says Iranian people have asked US to ‘keep bombing’

President Donald Trump announced “major combat operations” against Iran on Feb. 28, with massive joint U.S.-Israeli strikes targeting military and government sites, officials said.

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Time – ‘Safe and sound’: How a U.S. Airman Shot Down in Iran Was Rescued From a Mountain Crevice

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The Hindu – Iran hangs two convicted of links with Israel in pre-war protests: judiciary

Iran executed two men on Sunday (April 5, 2026) convicted of acting on behalf of Israel and the United States during a wave of anti-government protests earlier this year, the judiciary said.

“Mohammad-Amin Biglari and Shahin Vahedparast… were hanged after the case was reviewed and the final verdict was confirmed by the Supreme Court,” the judiciary’s Mizan Online website said.

The two men were involved in the anti-government protests that peaked in January, it added.

The demonstrations broke out in late December over rising living costs before spreading nationwide and evolving into anti-government protests that peaked on January 8 and 9.

Iranian authorities said the rallies began peaceful before turning into “foreign-instigated riots” involving killings and vandalism.

Iran has carried out multiple executions in recent days of people linked to the protests or opposition groups, including members of the banned People’s Mujahedin (MEK).

The executions come against the backdrop of Iran’s war with Israel and the United States, which erupted on February 28 with strikes that killed the Islamic republic’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei.

On Saturday (April 4, 2026), Iran executed two members of the MEK after four other convicted members of the group were put to death earlier in the week.

On Thursday (April 2, 2026), it also executed a man convicted of acting on behalf of Israel and the United States during the protests, following similar executions of three others last month.

Tehran has said more than 3,000 people were killed during the unrest, including members of the security forces and bystanders, attributing the violence to “terrorist acts”.

The U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA), however, said it had recorded more than 7,000 deaths, the vast majority of them protesters, adding that the toll could be higher.

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New York Times – Downed U.S. Air Force Officer Rescued Deep Inside in Iran, Trump Says

An Air Force weapons officer whose fighter jet had been shot down in Iran was rescued by U.S. Special Operations forces in a risky Saturday night mission that took commandos deep into enemy territory, said current and former U.S. officials briefed on the operation.

President Trump confirmed in a social media post just after midnight that the stranded officer had been brought out of Iran safely by U.S. forces. “He sustained injuries, but he will be just fine,” Mr. Trump said. He added that there were no U.S. casualties.

President Trump said in a social media post just after midnight that the Air Force officer who had been shot down in Iran had been brought out safely by U.S. forces. “He sustained injuries, but he will be just fine,” Mr. Trump said. He described a tense rescue operation with officials in the United States monitoring the officer’s location at all times and dozens of aircraft sent to retrieve him. The weapons systems officer, a colonel, was one of two members of the F–15E Strike Eagle who ejected from the cockpit on Friday after Iran’s military shot down the plane. The pilot had been rescued earlier.

A building housing several government ministries in Kuwait was significantly damaged after it was targeted by an Iranian drone on Saturday evening, the country’s Ministry of Finance said. The Ministries Complex houses agencies including the finance, justice, and industry and commerce ministries. No casualties were reported, the ministry said, adding that employees would work remotely on Sunday.

Kuwaiti authorities said early Sunday that drone strikes they attributed to Iran significantly damaged two power and water desalination plants, forcing the shutdown of two electricity-generating units. Kuwait Petroleum Corporation also said its oil complex in the Shuwaikh district in Kuwait City was targeted by Iranian drones early Sunday, sparking a fire, causing damage, and prompting the evacuation of the building. No casualties were reported in either attack, the company and Kuwait’s Ministry of Electricity, Water and Renewable Energy said in a joint statement.

The Human Rights Activists News Agency reported that at least nine civilians were killed across Iran in the past 24 hours during U.S. and Israeli strikes. The group recorded 272 attacks in 14 provinces on Saturday, with a total of at least 184 people injured or killed. Tehran saw the highest number of strikes, followed by Khuzestan and Isfahan.

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The Fulcrum – The U.S. Built a Blueprint to Avoid Civilian War Casualties. Trump Officials Scrapped It.

Images from the missile strike in southern Iran were more horrifying than any of the case studies Air Force combat veteran Wes J. Bryant had pored over in his mission to overhaul how the U.S. military safeguards civilian life.

Parents wept over their children’s bodies. Crushed desks and blood-stained backpacks poked through the rubble. The death toll from the attack on an elementary school in Minab climbed past 165, most of them under age 12, with nearly 100 others wounded, according to Iranian health officials. Photos of small coffins and rows of fresh graves went viral, a devastating emblem of Day 1 in the open-ended U.S.-Israeli war in Iran.

Bryant, a former special operations targeting specialist, said he couldn’t help but think of what-ifs as he monitored fallout from the Feb. 28 attack.

Just over a year ago, he had been a senior adviser in an ambitious new Defense Department program aimed at reducing civilian harm during operations. Finally, Bryant said, the military was getting serious about reforms. He worked out of a newly opened Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, where his supervisor was a veteran strike-team targeter who had served as a United Nations war crimes investigator.

Today, that momentum is gone. Bryant was forced out of government in cuts last spring. The civilian protection mission was dissolved as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made “lethality” a top priority. And the world has witnessed a tragedy in Minab that, if U.S. responsibility is confirmed, would be the most civilians killed by the military in a single attack in decades.

Dismantling the fledgling harm-reduction effort, defense analysts say, is among several ways the Trump administration has reorganized national security around two principles: more aggression, less accountability.

Trump and his aides lowered the authorization level for lethal force, broadened target categories, inflated threat assessments and fired inspectors general, according to more than a dozen current and former national security personnel. Nearly all spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.

“We’re departing from the rules and norms that we’ve tried to establish as a global community since at least World War II,” Bryant said. “There’s zero accountability.”

Citing open-source intelligence and government officials, several news outlets have concluded that the strike in Minab most likely was carried out by the United States. President Donald Trump, without providing evidence, told reporters March 7 that it was “done by Iran.” Hegseth, standing next to the president aboard Air Force One, said the matter was under investigation.

The next day, the open-source research outfit Bellingcat said it had authenticated a video showing a Tomahawk missile strike next to the school in Minab. Iranian state media later showed fragments of a U.S.-made Tomahawk, as identified by Bellingcat and others, at the site. The United States is the only party to the conflict known to possess Tomahawks. U.N. human rights experts have called for an investigation into whether the attack violated international law.

The Department of Defense and White House did not respond to requests for comment.

Since the post-9/11 invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, successive U.S. administrations have faced controversies over civilian deaths. Defense officials eager to shed the legacy of the “forever wars” have periodically called for better protections for civilians, but there was no standardized framework until 2022, when Biden-era leaders adopted a strategy rooted in work that had begun under the first Trump presidency.

Formalized in a 2022 action plan and in a Defense Department instruction, the initiatives are known collectively as Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response, a clunky name often shortened to CHMR and pronounced “chimmer.” Around 200 personnel were assigned to the mission, including roughly 30 at the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, a coordination hub near the Pentagon.

The CHMR strategy calls for more in-depth planning before an attack, such as real-time mapping of the civilian presence in an area and in-depth analysis of the risks. After an operation, reports of harm to noncombatants would prompt an assessment or investigation to figure out what went wrong and then incorporate those lessons into training.

By the time Trump returned to power, harm-mitigation teams were embedded with regional commands and special operations leadership. During Senate confirmation hearings, several Trump nominees for top defense posts voiced support for the mission. Once in office, however, they stood by as the program was gutted, current and former national security officials said.

Around 90% of the CHMR mission is gone, former personnel said, with no more than a single adviser now at most commands. At Central Command, where a 10-person team was cut to one, “a handful” of the eliminated positions were backfilled to help with the Iran campaign. Defense officials can’t formally close the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence without congressional approval, but Bryant and others say it now exists mostly on paper.

“It has no mission or mandate or budget,” Bryant said.

Global conflict monitors have since recorded a dramatic increase in deadly U.S. military operations. Even before the Iran campaign, the number of strikes worldwide since Trump returned to office had surpassed the total from all four years of Joe Biden’s presidency.

Had the Defense Department’s harm-reduction mission continued apace, current and former officials say, the policies almost certainly would’ve reduced the number of noncombatants harmed over the past year.

Beyond the moral considerations, they added, civilian casualties fuel militant recruiting and hinder intelligence-gathering. Retired Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who commanded U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, explains the risk in an equation he calls “insurgent math”: For every innocent killed, at least 10 new enemies are created.

U.S.-Israeli strikes have already killed more than 1,200 civilians in Iran, including nearly 200 children, according to Human Rights Activists News Agency, a U.S.-based group that verifies casualties through a network in Iran. The group says hundreds more deaths are under review, a difficult process given Iran’s internet blackout and dangerous conditions.

A mourner holds a portrait of students during a funeral held after a school in Iran’s Hormozgan province was bombed. Thousands attended the ceremony. Stringer/Anadolu via Getty Images
Defense analysts say the civilian toll of the Iran campaign, on top of dozens of recent noncombatant casualties in Yemen and Somalia, reopens dark chapters from the “war on terror” that had prompted reforms in the first place.

“It’s a recipe for disaster,” a senior counterterrorism official who left the government a few months ago said of the Trump administration’s yearlong bombing spree. “It’s ‘Groundhog Day’ — every day we’re just killing people and making more enemies.”

In 2015, two dozen patients and 14 staff members were killed when a heavily armed U.S. gunship fired for over an hour on a Doctors Without Borders hospital in northern Afghanistan, a disaster that has become a cautionary tale for military planners.

“Our patients burned in their beds, our medical staff were decapitated or lost limbs. Others were shot from the air while they fled the burning building,” the international aid group said in a report about the destruction of its trauma center in Kunduz.

A U.S. military investigation found that multiple human and systems errors had resulted in the strike team mistaking the building for a Taliban target. The Obama administration apologized and offered payouts of $6,000 to families of the dead.

Human rights advocates had hoped the Kunduz debacle would force the U.S. military into taking concrete steps to protect civilians during U.S. combat operations. Within a couple years, however, the issue came roaring back with high civilian casualties in U.S.-led efforts to dislodge Islamic State extremists from strongholds in Syria and Iraq.

The aftermath of the U.S. airstrike on the Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, that killed 42 people. Najim Rahim/AP Images
In a single week in March 2017, U.S. operations resulted in three incidents of mass civilian casualties: A drone attack on a mosque in Syria killed around 50; a strike in another part of Syria killed 40 in a school filled with displaced families; and bombing in the Iraqi city of Mosul led to a building collapse that killed more than 100 people taking shelter inside.

In heavy U.S. fighting to break Islamic State control over the Syrian city of Raqqa, “military leaders too often lacked a complete picture of conditions on the ground; too often waved off reports of civilian casualties; and too rarely learned any lessons from strikes gone wrong,” according to an analysis by the Pentagon-adjacent Rand Corp. think tank.

Under pressure from lawmakers, Trump’s then-Defense Secretary James Mattis ordered a review of civilian casualty protocols.

Released in 2019, the review Mattis launched was seen by some advocacy groups as narrow in scope but still a step in the right direction. Yet the issue soon dropped from national discourse, overshadowed by the coronavirus pandemic and landmark racial justice protests.

During the Biden administration’s chaotic withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan in August 2021, a missile strike in Kabul killed an aid worker and nine of his relatives, including seven children. Then-Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin apologized and said the department would “endeavor to learn from this horrible mistake.”

That incident, along with a New York Times investigative series into deaths from U.S. airstrikes, spurred the adoption of the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response action plan in 2022. When they established the new Civilian Protection Center of Excellence the next year, defense officials tapped Michael McNerney — the lead author of the blunt RAND report — to be its director.

“The strike against the aid worker and his family in Kabul pushed Austin to say, ‘Do it right now,’” Bryant said.

The first harm-mitigation teams were assigned to leaders in charge of some of the military’s most sensitive counterterrorism and intelligence-gathering operations: Central Command at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida; the Joint Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg, North Carolina; and Africa Command in Stuttgart, Germany.

A former CHMR adviser who joined in 2024 after a career in international conflict work said he was reassured to find a serious campaign with a $7 million budget and deep expertise. The adviser spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.

Only a few years before, he recalled, he’d had to plead with the Pentagon to pay attention. “It was like a back-of-the-envelope thing — the cost of a Hellfire missile and the cost of hiring people to work on this.”

Bryant became the de facto liaison between the harm-mitigation team and special operations commanders. In December, he described the experience in detail in a private briefing for aides of Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., who had sought information on civilian casualty protocols involving boat strikes in the Caribbean Sea.

Bryant’s notes from the briefing, reviewed by ProPublica, describe an embrace of the CHMR mission by Adm. Frank Bradley, who at the time was head of the Joint Special Operations Command. In October, Bradley was promoted to lead Special Operations Command.

At the end of 2024 and into early 2025, Bryant worked closely with the commander’s staff. The notes describe Bradley as “incredibly supportive” of the three-person CHMR team embedded in his command.

Bradley, Bryant wrote, directed “comprehensive lookbacks” on civilian casualties in errant strikes and used the findings to mandate changes. He also introduced training on how to integrate harm prevention and international law into operations against high-value targets. “We viewed Bradley as a model,” Bryant said.

Still, the military remained slow to offer compensation to victims and some of the new policies were difficult to independently monitor, according to a report by the Stimson Center, a foreign policy think tank. The CHMR program also faced opposition from critics who say civilian protections are already baked into laws of war and targeting protocols; the argument is that extra oversight “could have a chilling effect” on commanders’ abilities to quickly tailor operations.

To keep reforms on track, Bryant said, CHMR advisers would have to break through a culture of denial among leaders who pride themselves on precision and moral authority.

“The initial gut response of all commands,” Bryant said, “is: ‘No, we didn’t kill civilians.’”

As the Trump administration returned to the White House pledging deep cuts across the federal government, military and political leaders scrambled to preserve the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response framework.

At first, CHMR advisers were heartened by Senate confirmation hearings where Trump’s nominees for senior defense posts affirmed support for civilian protections.

Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote during his confirmation that commanders “see positive impacts from the program.” Elbridge Colby, undersecretary of defense for policy, wrote that it’s in the national interest to “seek to reduce civilian harm to the degree possible.”

When questioned about cuts to the CHMR mission at a hearing last summer, U.S. Navy Vice Adm. Brad Cooper, head of Central Command, said he was committed to integrating the ideas as “part of our culture.”

Despite the top-level support, current and former officials say, the CHMR mission didn’t stand a chance under Hegseth’s signature lethality doctrine.

The former Fox News personality, who served as an Army National Guard infantry officer in Iraq and Afghanistan, disdains rules of engagement and other guardrails as constraining to the “warrior ethos.” He has defended U.S. troops accused of war crimes, including a Navy SEAL charged with stabbing an imprisoned teenage militant to death and then posing for a photo with the corpse.

A month after taking charge, Hegseth fired the military’s top judge advocate generals, known as JAGs, who provide guidance to keep operations in line with U.S. or international law. Hegseth has described the attorneys as “roadblocks” and used the term “jagoff.”

At the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, the staff tried in vain to save the program. At one point, Bryant said, he even floated the idea of renaming it the “Center for Precision Warfare” to put the mission in terms Hegseth wouldn’t consider “woke.”

By late February 2025, the CHMR mission was imploding, say current and former defense personnel.

Shortly before his job was eliminated, Bryant openly spoke out against the cuts in The Washington Post and Boston Globe, which he said landed him in deep trouble at the Pentagon. He was placed on leave in March, his security clearance at risk of revocation.

Bryant formally resigned in September and has since become a vocal critic of the administration’s defense policies. In columns and on TV, he warns that Hegseth’s cavalier attitude toward the rule of law and civilian protections is corroding military professionalism.

Bryant said it was hard to watch Bradley, the special operations commander and enthusiastic adopter of CHMR, defending a controversial “double-tap” on an alleged drug boat in which survivors of a first strike were killed in a follow-up hit. Legal experts have said such strikes could violate laws of warfare. Bradley did not respond to a request for comment.

“Everything else starts slipping when you have this culture of higher tolerance for civilian casualties,” Bryant said.

Concerns were renewed in early 2025 with the Trump administration’s revived counterterrorism campaign against Islamist militants regrouping in parts of Africa and the Middle East.

Last April, a U.S. air strike hit a migrant detention center in northwestern Yemen, killing at least 61 African migrants and injuring dozens of others in what Amnesty International says “qualifies as an indiscriminate attack and should be investigated as a war crime.”

Operations in Somalia also have become more lethal. In 2024, Biden’s last year in office, conflict monitors recorded 21 strikes in Somalia, with a combined death toll of 189. In year one of Trump’s second term, the U.S. carried out at least 125 strikes, with reported fatalities as high as 359, according to the New America think tank, which monitors counterterrorism operations.

“It is a strategy focused primarily on killing people,” said Alexander Palmer, a terrorism researcher at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Last September, the U.S. military announced an attack in northeastern Somalia targeting a weapons dealer for the Islamist militia Al-Shabaab, a U.S.-designated terrorist group. On the ground, however, villagers said the missile strike incinerated Omar Abdullahi, a respected elder nicknamed “Omar Peacemaker” for his role as a clan mediator.

After the death, the U.S. military released no details, citing operational security.

“The U.S. killed an innocent man without proof or remorse,” Abdullahi’s brother, Ali, told Somali news outlets. “He preached peace, not war. Now his blood stains our soil.”

In Iran, former personnel say, the CHMR mission could have made a difference.

Under the scrapped harm-prevention framework, they said, plans for civilian protection would’ve begun months ago, when orders to draw up a potential Iran campaign likely came down from the White House and Pentagon.

CHMR personnel across commands would immediately begin a detailed mapping of what planners call “the civilian environment,” in this case a picture of the infrastructure and movements of ordinary Iranians. They would also check and update the “no-strike list,” which names civilian targets such as schools and hospitals that are strictly off-limits.

One key question is whether the school was on the no-strike list. It sits a few yards from a naval base for the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. The building was formerly part of the base, though it has been marked on maps as a school since at least 2013, according to visual forensics investigations.

“Whoever ‘hits the button’ on a Tomahawk — they’re part of a system,” the former adviser said. “What you want is for that person to feel really confident that when they hit that button, they’re not going to hit schoolchildren.”

If the guardrails failed and the Defense Department faced a disaster like the school strike, Bryant said, CHMR advisers would’ve jumped in to help with transparent public statements and an immediate inquiry.

Instead, he called the Trump administration’s response to the attack “shameful.”

“It’s back to where we were years ago,” Bryant said. If confirmed, “this will go down as one of the most egregious failures in targeting and civilian harm-mitigation in modern U.S. history.”

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USA Today – Trump says ‘We got him!’ as US forces rescue crew member missing in Iran

The second crew member of an F-15E Strike Eagle fighter jet that crashed in Iran has been rescued by U.S. forces, President Donald Trump said early Sunday in a social media post.

In the Truth Social post, the president described an intense search and rescue operation that led to the crew member being found safe.

“This brave Warrior was behind enemy lines in the treacherous mountains of Iran, being hunted down by our enemies, who were getting closer and closer by the hour, but was never truly alone,” Trump said.

On Friday, the F‑15E fighter went down over Iran, prompting a U.S. rescue mission that quickly recovered one crew member. But another from the fighter aircraft had remained missing as of late Friday.

Trump said the crew member sustained injuries but “he will be just fine.”

Separately, an A-10 “Warthog” plane that was part of the search-and-rescue mission was fired on by Iranian forces. The Warthog pilot ejected over the Persian Gulf but was rescued, according to the New York Times and CBS News.

Earlier Saturday, Trump posted that Iranian military leaders were “terminated” by U.S. strikes in Iran.

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Bloomberg – Trump Warns Iran It Has 48 Hours Left as Airman Remains Missing

President Donald Trump said Saturday that time was running out on his 10-day deadline for Iran to make a peace deal with the US and threatened that the Islamic Republic would face “all hell” in 48 hours.

“Remember when I gave Iran ten days to MAKE A DEAL or OPEN UP THE HORMUZ STRAIT,” Trump said in a social-media post the day before Easter. “Time is running out — 48 hours before all Hell will reign down on them. Glory be to God!”

Trump had extended a five-day deadline to April 6 as preliminary discussions for peace talks got under way in late March. As attacks intensified from all sides, including Iran’s downing of two US military aircraft, Trump’s rhetoric has hardened from his recent attempts to find a way out of the growing conflict.

Trump has warned that if Iran doesn’t agree to his terms — which the government has rejected — and open the Strait of Hormuz to all shipping traffic out of the Persian Gulf, the US would bomb the country’s civilian energy infrastructure, strikes that would likely constitute a war crime under international law.

Missing Pilot

In Iran, the US continued search-and-rescue operations for a crew member from an F-15E fighter jet shot down by Iran on Friday, as Tehran kept up attacks on Gulf Arab states and Israel. A second US combat plane reportedly crashed in the Persian Gulf the same day. The incidents mark a significant blow for Washington as the war enters its sixth week with energy prices rising and little sign of an end to the conflict.

Trump declined to discuss the search-and-rescue operations in an interview with NBC News on Friday. He said the events wouldn’t affect any peace negotiations with Iran, according to a reporter who spoke to him on a call.

On Saturday, Iran said US-Israeli strikes hit petrochemical plants and forced the evacuation of a large industrial zone. Other attacks targeting the perimeter of Iran’s Bushehr nuclear power plant left one security staff member dead, Iran’s semi-official Tasnim news agency reported. The main sections of the facility, where Russia’s state nuclear company Rosatom has workers, were unaffected, Tasnim said.

Iran continued to fire missiles and drones across much of the Middle East. Dubai authorities reported that debris from an aerial interception fell on the facade of an Oracle Corp. building in Dubai Internet City on Saturday morning. They also reported debris hitting a building in the nearby Dubai Marina area. No fire or injuries were reported.

Iran fired more missiles at Israel. There was damage to a parking lot in Tel Aviv and to buildings in several outlying towns, authorities said, describing the impacts as caused by debris from interceptions. There were no immediate reports of casualties.

The downing of the US jet came despite Trump’s claim in a primetime address on Wednesday that Iran no longer had anti-aircraft equipment. His military commanders, as well as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, have previously touted US air superiority over Iranian territory.

It’s the first known combat loss of a US or Israeli plane since the two countries began attacking Iran on Feb. 28. Three US aircraft were downed by friendly fire in Kuwait early in the war, while others have been destroyed or damaged at airbases by Iranian drones and missiles.

Read More: Iran Says Iraqi Ships Are Allowed to Use Strait of Hormuz

The US rescued one of the F-15 crew members, according to an American official who asked not to be identified discussing sensitive information. The status of the second person is unclear and Iranian media said Tehran offered a reward of about $66,000 to citizens who capture the person alive.

The lone pilot of the second plane — an A-10 Warthog — was safely rescued, the New York Times reported.

Read More: Italy’s Meloni Visits Doha to Bolster Energy Supplies Hit by War

Iran Hits Energy Plants

Iran has continued to hit key energy infrastructure in the past two days.

The UAE’s largest natural gas processing facility, Habshan, suspended operations after debris from a projectile interception sparked a fire. A drone attack set ablaze Kuwait’s Mina Al-Ahmadi oil refinery, which can process almost 350,000 barrels a day of crude.

The United Arab Emirates, of which Dubai is a member, said it detected 79 projectiles fired from Iran on Saturday, including 23 ballistic missiles. That was the highest number of projectiles since March 8, according to data published by UAE authorities, and continued a trend of more numerous attacks over the last three days.

The UAE, like other Gulf states and Israel, has intercepted the vast majority of Iranian attacks.

Israel’s military said it hit air defense sites and missile storage facilities in a wave of airstrikes on Tehran on Friday. Iran said US-Israeli strikes hit a petrochemical zone in Mahshahr, in the southwestern Khuzestan province on Saturday. Authorities ordered the evacuation of all personnel and said any potential pollutants don’t pose a risk to nearby cities, the semi-official Fars news agency reported.

Peace Efforts Stall

Iran has shown little sign of accepting Trump’s demands for peace and has laid out its own conditions — most of them unacceptable to the US and Israel.

The New York Times, citing US intelligence reports, said Iranian personnel have been digging out underground missile bunkers and silos struck by American and Israeli bombs and returning them to operation hours after attacks. That casts doubt on the US and Israel’s ability to destroy Iran’s missile capability — one of their key war goals.

Despite Trump’s weekend threat, the president signaled this week he may be willing to pull US forces out of the conflict in two to three weeks, even if the Strait of Hormuz is still effectively shut.

US allies are stepping up efforts to ensure the waterway — through which one fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas supplies normally flow — is reopened soon.

Iran’s military said Saturday that Iraq would be exempt from shipping restrictions in the trait, opening the potential of as much as 3 million barrels a day of Iraqi oil cargoes.

More than 40 of their foreign ministers met virtually on Thursday to discuss plans, signaling to Trump their concern about the closure.

On Saturday, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said in a social media post that he spoke by phone with Mark Rutte, secretary-general of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization saying the situation was heading for a deadlock and “urged the international community to step up efforts to end the war.”

The group, convened by the UK, was clear that any ceasefire talks with Iran needed to include a solution for Hormuz, people familiar with the discussions said. Still, the meeting, which the US and Iran were not part of, showed the coalition of countries deem it necessary to prepare for having to reopen the strait without Washington.

Nations such as France and the UK have said military options are unlikely to work until there’s a ceasefire.

Bahrain, supported by Jordan and Arab Gulf states, is proposing a United Nations Security Council resolution aimed at helping re-open Hormuz, according to the UAE. It would provide “a clear legal basis for all states to mobilize and support safe passage,” the UAE said in a post on X.

It’s unclear when a vote on the resolution will take place.

Russia, an Iranian ally, pushed back on the initiative, with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov saying it would “legitimize aggression against Iran.” The comments signal Moscow may use its veto power, as one of five permanent members of the Security Council.

Ships Trickle Through Strait

Iran appeared to tighten its grip on the strait on Thursday, when its media reported that the government is drafting a protocol with Oman to monitor traffic. That would require shippers to pay tolls to Iran, according to its deputy foreign minister.

The passage is officially in international waters and any attempt by Iran to assert control over traffic will be opposed strongly by Western powers and Gulf Arab states.

A trickle of ships is managing to pass through. A French container ship and a Japanese-owned tanker have crossed the Strait of Hormuz in the past two days, in what appear to be the first such transits since the war in Iran shuttered the crucial waterway.

The energy shock, which has seen gasoline pump prices in the country jump to more than $4 a gallon on average carries political risks for Trump and his Republican Party in the November midterm elections.

US benchmark oil prices, or WTI futures, closed at more than $111 a barrel last week and have almost doubled this year.

More than 5,000 people have been killed in the conflict, almost three-quarters of them in Iran, according to government organizations and the US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency. Just over 1,300 people have been killed in Lebanon, where Israel is fighting a parallel war against Iran-allied Hezbollah.

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Financial Times – In Tehran, neighbours wonder where the next bombs will land

At about 4am one day this week, a three-storey house in a residential neighbourhood of western Tehran was obliterated in an air strike. The iron frame was torn apart and nearby buildings, including a high-rise across the street, were severely damaged.

Amid the shattered glass, confused and shocked neighbours gathered to make sense of the destruction. “Who lived there?” they asked, according to one person present at the scene. Rescue teams arrived with dogs, combing through the rubble for survivors. Locals later speculated that a commander in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps could have been the target, although it was not confirmed.

For residents of the city, dazed and ripped awake through the night by bombs that feel as if they are landing all around them, daily life seems like a gamble.

President Donald Trump said on Wednesday that the US would hit Iran “extremely hard” over the coming weeks and “bring them back to the Stone Ages, where they belong”. And Israel, which has led the bombing campaign on Tehran, announced last week an “acceleration” of attacks on what it said was its remaining list of military targets.

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U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran’s energy infrastructure, including oil refineries, gas treatment facilities and fuel storage depots, pose severe health and environmental risks to civilian populations in Iran, Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) and Human Rights Activists in Iran (HRA) warned today. All parties to the conflict must cease attacks on energy infrastructure that lead to widespread public health harm, in violation of international legal prohibitions on attacks on energy that cause disproportionate civilian harm.

These dangers are unfolding in a health system already severely impacted by overwhelming demands following violence against civilians and attacks on health workers by the Iranian regime earlier this year, direct damage to health facilities, as well as ongoing shortages in medical supplies due to sanctions and economic crisis. Iranian health care workers have reported to HRA severe consequences stemming from U.S. and Israeli attacks on energy and health care infrastructure.

“During the period following the strikes on fuel depots, even in our hospital, which is not specialized in respiratory care, we observed a noticeable number of patients presenting with breathing difficulties, persistent coughing, and signs of airway irritation,” said a general surgeon in Iran. “One of the major challenges has been supply constraints. At different points, we faced shortages of key medications.”

Patients in Iran are presenting with “severe asthma attacks[…], and several previously healthy individuals presenting with bronchospasm, persistent cough, and reduced oxygen saturation,” a specialist in Tehran told HRA. 

“The strain on our facility has also been amplified by damage to smaller health care centers. Patients who would normally be stabilized or treated locally are instead referred to us, increasing the load.[…] The volume and acuity of cases exceed[ed] routine capacity,” said a health care provider at a specialized hospital in Tehran.

Environmental toxicologists have also highlighted the short- and long-term health harms populations can face from large-scale oil fires.

‘Heath effects of exposure to burning oil have been well documented in those exposed during the war in the Persian Gulf in 1991 and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010. The wide range of documented respiratory and cardiovascular effects noted were observed in relatively healthy populations, whereas effects are likely to be far more severe in the general population, which includes the very young and elderly, many with pre-existing health problems. The additional ‘oil- related combustion’ problems are easy to prevent by avoiding attacks on energy infrastructure. All parties to the current conflict in the Gulf must not attack energy facilities,” said Alastair Hay, PhD, OBE, professor emeritus of environmental toxicology, University of Leeds, and PHR Advisory Council member.

Evidence from past large-scale oil fires shows that oil combustion releases a complex mixture of toxic pollutants, including a wide range of particulates of all sizes, sulfur and nitrogen oxides, volatile organic compounds, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, acid aerosols, and heavy metals. These emissions can travel over long distances, degrading air quality and contaminating water and soil.

Preliminary reports from affected areas in Iran, describing dense smoke plumes and accounts of “black rain,” are consistent with the release of hazardous combustion byproducts. Exposure to these pollutants is associated with acute respiratory symptoms such as shortness of breath, cough, eye irritation, and skin conditions, as well as exacerbations of cardiovascular disease and respiratory diseases such as sinus and asthma conditions.

In a single attack on an oil depot in Alborz, HRA documented at least six civilian deaths and 21 injuries, underscoring that these strikes are not only causing serious health impacts but also directly resulting in civilian casualties.

Evidence also indicates the potential for long-term health effects. These include chronic respiratory illness, reduced lung function, and other systemic impacts. The scale and duration of these fires raise serious concerns about sustained exposure, particularly for populations living in close proximity to the affected sites.

During recent nationwide protests, Iranian health facilities were overwhelmed by mass casualties and subjected to interference, surveillance, and the targeting of medical personnel. Security forces have reportedly entered hospitals, detained patients, and pressured providers to conceal evidence of injuries. These actions have further undermined the ability of the health system to deliver safe, independent care.

Iranian retaliatory attacks on energy infrastructure across the region carry similarly serious and foreseeable health and environmental risks, impacting civilian populations in the targeted Gulf states.

Effective mitigation of attacks on energy requires coordinated public health interventions. Among these are real-time air quality monitoring, access to protective measures such as high-efficiency filtration and appropriate respiratory protection, and the capacity to provide timely clinical care and long-term medical surveillance. During an ongoing war and with internal barriers to sufficient resources, such responses may be delayed, inadequate, or inaccessible to people most at risk.

International law generally prohibits attacks on energy infrastructure and mandates that such attacks must not cause disproportionate harm to civilians. The foreseeable, severe, and reverberating consequences of the destruction of energy infrastructure on civilian life – in the immediate and long-term – require heightened precautions and consideration in any civilian harm assessment in the planning of an attack.

PHR​ and HRA​ call on Israel, the United States, and Iran to end all threats to and attacks on energy infrastructure in violation of international law and to adhere to their obligations to protect civilians and civilian infrastructure, including facilities essential to public health and environmental safety. ​ ​PHR ​and HRA ​also ​​call​​ on the governments of affected countries to implement immediate measures to mitigate exposure, protect affected populations, and ensure that the health system is supported to respond effectively.

Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) is a New York-based advocacy organization that uses science and medicine to prevent mass atrocities and severe human rights violations.

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The Telegraph – Iran recruits 12-year-olds to ‘defend homeland’

Iran is recruiting children as young as 12 to “defend the homeland” in a new nationwide campaign for the US-Israeli war.

Children will take part in surveillance, patrols and checkpoint inspections under the new plans announced last week by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corp (IRGC).

Registration booths have been set up at mosques and major city squares across Tehran, with similar campaigns expected in other cities.

Just days after the new recruitment campaign was launched, an 11-year-old boy was killed in a drone strike at a military checkpoint in Tehran.

Alireza Jafari, who under normal circumstances would have been in the fifth grade at school (Year 6), was instead stationed at the checkpoint on Artesh Highway, helping his father “defend Iran”.

The Basij Teachers Organisation confirmed that Alireza was killed “while on duty”, performing security tasks in a war that has already claimed nearly 1,600 civilian lives.

Alireza’s death highlighted concerns about the IRGC’s recruitment tactics for wartime security operations and its manpower problems.

His mother told the state-affiliated Hamshahri newspaper about the “personnel shortage” that led her husband to bring their son to work.

The “Defenders of the Homeland Iran” was announced by Rahim Nadali, the cultural and artistic deputy of the IRGC’s Mohammad Rasoulollah Corps in Tehran.

Mr Nadali told Iranian media the campaign responded to public demand for ways to support fighters against US-Israeli aggression, and allowed people to contribute based on their skills and expertise.

“We launched a plan we call ‘For Iran’, which is a registration programme for homeland defence fighters,” Mr Nadali said. “We set the minimum age at 12 years and above.”

The campaign encompasses multiple categories of service.

Operational and security roles include participation in intelligence patrols, checkpoint inspections and operational patrols.

Support and logistics duties involve vehicle convoys, financial contributions and equipment provision.

Service and supply tasks include cooking, distributing needed items to fighters and repairing homes damaged by attacks.

Medical roles call for doctors and nurses to staff clinics and treat the wounded.

The campaign openly violates international humanitarian law, which grants children a special protected status as civilians and prohibits their use in armed conflict.

The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court explicitly defines the recruitment or use of children under 15 in armed forces or hostilities as a war crime.

The death adds to mounting casualties in Iran’s month-long war with the United States and Israel.

According to the US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency group, at least 1,568 Iranian civilians have been killed since fighting began on Feb 28, including 236 children.

The organisation documented 360 attacks across 199 incidents in 18 provinces on Saturday alone, with 70 per cent of strikes concentrated on Tehran’s residential neighbourhoods.

The Norway-based Hengaw rights group called the IRGC plan to recruit children a “systematic crime against children” and urged international bodies, including the United Nations and Unicef to increase legal and diplomatic pressure to prevent the use of minors in military roles.

Iran has a history of recruiting children for security and even combat roles, including deploying child soldiers during the 1980s war with Iraq.

Stories of children sacrificing themselves to destroy Iraqi tanks were taught in Iranian schools as part of ideological education.

In 2016, Human Rights Watch reported that Iran was recruiting Afghan children to fight in Syria.

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