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RED LINE
The US and Iran traded strikes for a sixth consecutive day Thursday, and Iran declared the Strait of Hormuz a “red line” it will not let Washington control, hours after CENTCOM launched yet another wave of attacks at 2pm ET.
CENTCOM said the latest strikes, the second US wave of the day, targeted Iranian military capabilities used to threaten shipping in the strait. Kuwait’s Defense Ministry said its air defenses intercepted four cruise missiles and 21 drones fired from Iran earlier Thursday, causing material damage but no casualties; sirens sounded in Bahrain shortly after. Explosions were reported on Kharg Island, Iran’s main oil export terminal, which normally handles up to 90 percent of the country’s crude exports. Iran’s Health Ministry says at least 35 people have been killed and more than 300 wounded since fighting resumed roughly a week ago, a figure that does not yet reflect Thursday’s strikes or Wednesday night’s strikes near Tehran, the first to reach the capital region in this round of the war.
Iran’s “red line” declaration carries weight because there is no real way around it. Roughly 20 million barrels of oil a day, about a quarter of the world’s seaborne crude trade, normally pass through the strait, and the alternatives Gulf states have spent years building cannot absorb anywhere close to that volume. The UAE’s Habshan-Fujairah pipeline, its main bypass route, carries under 2 million barrels a day and has already been targeted three times this year by Iranian drone strikes on Fujairah’s storage tanks. Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline offers similar partial relief, and Iraq has reopened a long-shuttered pipeline to Turkey at a fraction of its former capacity. Iran’s own bypass option, the Jask terminal on the Gulf of Oman, has exported no oil since a single test shipment in 2024 and remains non-operational. None of these routes were built to replace Hormuz. They were built to survive losing it partially, not entirely, and Iran has demonstrated it can strike them too.
The Treasury Department announced Tuesday it is intensifying efforts to dismantle an Iranian sanctions-evasion network tied to Mohammad Hossein Shamkhani, which Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent called one of the regime’s “most profitable engines.” Trump separately said Tuesday he is considering adding Iran and Hezbollah to a bipartisan Russia sanctions bill making its way through Congress.
🌍 TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: Iran’s “red line” framing of the strait marks a shift in register from its earlier statements, which focused on retaliation for specific strikes. Declaring the waterway itself off-limits to American interference reframes the entire blockade standoff as a matter of Iranian sovereignty rather than a tit-for-tat military exchange, a distinction that matters because it forecloses the kind of face-saving de-escalation that a purely retaliatory posture would allow.
🇺🇸 What American readers need to know: This is now the sixth straight day the US and Iran have exchanged fire, and Iran has just said, in its own words, that it will not back down over the Strait of Hormuz. There is no real workaround if it stays closed. Kuwait was attacked again today, and the strikes have moved from Iran’s coast into range of its capital.
Sources: ABC News (US — 2pm ET strike wave, live coverage, July 16); Jerusalem Post (Israel — Kuwait interception details, Kharg Island explosions, July 16); Al Jazeera (Qatar, state-funded/editorially independent — Iran Health Ministry casualty figure, sixth day of exchanges, July 16); NPR (US — tanker strike, six consecutive days framing, July 16); Fox News (US — Treasury sanctions network, Bessent quote, Russia sanctions bill, July 15); The Conversation (Hormuz bypass pipeline capacities, Fujairah strikes, July); IEA (Hormuz daily volume, Jask terminal non-operational status)
GO TO HELL
Vice President JD Vance spent three hours on Joe Rogan’s podcast this week accusing elements of Israel’s government of running a paid influence campaign to sabotage his own Iran diplomacy, then pivoted to musing that Jeffrey Epstein had unspecified ties to Israeli intelligence, a break with a close US ally unlike anything a sitting vice president has said in decades.
Vance’s central grievance was a Time investigation published Monday. It reported that Brad Parscale, Trump’s former campaign manager, was paid through Israeli-linked, FARA-registered funds to run a digital operation attacking the ceasefire framework Vance had personally negotiated. The operation produced roughly 100 pieces of content a month aimed at conservative influencers. Foreign Agents Registration Act filings show the arrangement in detail: the Israeli-hired ad agency Havas paid Parscale’s firm, Clock Tower X, to aim 80 percent of that content at Gen Z audiences on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and podcasts. The contract also called for folding the messaging into Salem Media Network properties, where Parscale serves as chief strategy officer, and for trying to shape how AI chatbots describe the war. Time reported that individual influencers were paid a base rate plus a per-view bonus, netting some of them thousands of dollars per post. One, a young conservative commentator named Eyal Yakoby, confirmed being paid through the arrangement. An Israeli official told Time the campaign had backfired badly. “We are pissed at Brad Parscale. He was supposed to make things better.” Vance described the operation to Rogan as a discreet, extremely well-funded campaign specifically built to derail the deal he was pursuing. Asked directly whether the war would have happened at all without Israeli influence, Vance said yes, crediting Trump’s own independent opposition to Iran having a nuclear weapon rather than any pressure from Israel. His complaint was narrower: that a paid campaign had worked specifically to undermine the ceasefire deal he negotiated, not that Israel had caused the war itself. Of the people Time identified as having taken the money while attacking him, Vance said, “Well, go to hell.” Parscale has denied ever working to undermine Trump’s Iran policy, calling the claim “completely false.” An anonymous US official told Time the campaign became a US concern specifically because it was aimed at changing American policy toward Iran, not merely Israeli public relations.
Nearly two hours into the same interview, Rogan asked Vance whether he believed theories that Epstein worked for Mossad. Vance responded that Epstein clearly had connections to the highest levels of both American and Israeli intelligence, floating Mossad, the CIA, or some other country’s intelligence service as possibilities. Vance, who has long described himself as an early skeptic of the official Epstein narrative, offered no new evidence, but the claim lands differently coming from a sitting vice president than from the online conspiracy communities that have circulated it for years. A 2020 FBI Los Angeles field office memo, previously reported, quotes a bureau source describing Epstein as a “co-opted Mossad agent” who had been “trained as a spy,” though the FBI has never confirmed the assessment as its own.
🌍 TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: Al Jazeera’s Washington correspondent called Vance’s remarks “unheard of” for a sitting US vice president. That reaction points to a gap in how this story is being covered. American coverage has focused heavily on the Epstein angle. The rest of the world is watching something bigger: a sitting US vice president accusing one of America’s closest allies of running a foreign influence operation that shaped US war policy.
🇺🇸 What American readers need to know: Your vice president just said, on the record, that a foreign government’s paid influence campaign attacked the ceasefire deal he personally negotiated. He also said the war itself would likely have happened regardless, driven by Trump’s own opposition to an Iranian nuclear weapon. He revived Epstein-Mossad conspiracy theories with the authority of his office behind them, without offering new evidence for either claim.
Sources: Al Jazeera (Qatar, state-funded/editorially independent — Vance interview quotes, “unheard of” characterization, July 16); Time (US — Clock Tower X, FARA filing details, Havas contract, Salem Media Network, AI targeting, influencer payment structure, July 13); The Hill (US — Parscale/Time details, $45 million figure, July 16); Washington Examiner (US — “go to hell” quote in full context, July 16); Times of Israel (Israel, right-centre — Parscale denial, Israeli official “pissed” quote, Eyal Yakoby confirmation, July 15); Al Jazeera (Qatar — Epstein/Mossad quotes in full, July 16); Middle East Eye (UK — 2020 FBI memo, “co-opted Mossad agent” quote, July 16)
NOT DRUGS
Nine days after ICE killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston, the case against him has fallen apart. The Harris County District Attorney’s Office said Thursday it does not believe the substance the FBI found in his van was methamphetamine, or drugs of any kind.
The reversal came a day after Houston Public Media and other outlets reported on the FBI’s July 14 search warrant, which described agents observing a “white crystal-like substance packaged in small plastic bags” in the van and cited potential drug offenses as grounds for the search. Harris County prosecutors, who are pursuing their own separate criminal investigation into the shooting, told ABC13 they have reviewed the collected substance and do not believe it to be a controlled substance, though the office has not yet said what it believes the material actually is. The DA’s office also confirmed Thursday it still has not been able to identify the ICE agents involved in the shooting nine days after it happened; Congresswoman Sylvia Garcia said the agents were reassigned out of Houston following the killing.
A public viewing for Salgado Araujo was held Thursday evening in Houston, ahead of a funeral this week attended by family flying in from Mexico. His brother Victor, who was in the van when Lorenzo was killed, has told his attorney that an agent approached the passenger door, shouted “stop,” and fired within moments, an account that continues to conflict directly with DHS’s version that agents fired only after Salgado Araujo tried to run one of them over.
In Maine, the agent who killed Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero has still not been named by ICE, DHS, or the FBI, but local reporting has identified him as David Brouillette, 37, a former Department of Veterans Affairs police officer and Army veteran hired by ICE earlier this year. The identification, first made by a crowdsourced ICE-monitoring site and an immigrant-rights group, was corroborated by Brouillette’s ex-wife, Ashley Brouillette, who told the Portland Press Herald that he called her after the shooting asking her to vouch for him. “He was asking me to lie for him and to cover for his character,” she said. She told the paper she refused, and that footage she has seen of the shooting does not support his account that Durán Guerrero drove at him.
🇺🇸 What American readers need to know: The federal government suggested a dead man had drugs in his van; the local prosecutors who reviewed the actual evidence say he didn’t. Nine days after the shooting, nobody outside the federal government even knows the names of the agents involved. In Maine, the public knows the other agent’s name only because his own ex-wife wouldn’t lie for him.
Sources: ABC13 Houston (US — DA’s office says substance not drugs, agent reassignment, identification status, July 16); Houston Public Media (US — Victor Salgado Araujo’s account, public viewing details, July 15); Portland Press Herald (US — Ashley Brouillette account, ex-wife quote, July 16); Central Maine/Kennebec Journal (US — Brouillette background, VA and Maine Correctional Center employment history, July 16)
ALSO DEVELOPING — Trump is scheduled to deliver a primetime address at 9pm ET tonight, his first formal national speech since April, expected to focus on unsubstantiated claims of foreign election interference, including allegations of Chinese meddling in the 2020 election, alongside a repeat of his false claims that he won that race. The address comes as polling shows Democrats favored to retake the US House in November. Sources: CNN, CNBC, Votebeat.
WAR DAY 139 | NUMBERS AT PUBLICATION
🇮🇷 Iran: 3,468+ killed (Al Jazeera tracker, frozen since June 1) — separately, Iranian health officials report at least 35 killed and 300 wounded in the past week (Al Jazeera, July 15); figures are not additive, see sourcing note
🇱🇧 Lebanon: 4,324 killed (Lebanon Health Ministry, updated July 13)
🇮🇱 Israel: 26 killed (Al Jazeera tracker, frozen since June 1)
🌍 Gulf states/Iraq: 118+ killed (Al Jazeera tracker, frozen since June 1 — does not reflect this week’s strikes on Bahrain, Kuwait, and Jordan)
🇺🇸 US military: 13 killed, 381 injured (Al Jazeera tracker, frozen since June 1)
🛢️ Brent crude: $84.90/barrel (OilPrice.com, July 16 evening)
⛽ US national gas average: $3.94/gallon (AAA)
Sourcing note: Iran’s cumulative figure is the Al Jazeera tracker base, frozen since June 1. The past-week figure of 35 killed and 300 wounded, from Iranian health officials via Al Jazeera, covers strikes since roughly July 9 and is not confirmed as additive to the frozen base; the two are presented separately to avoid double-counting or understating the toll. Neither figure reflects Thursday’s strikes. Lebanon updated separately by Lebanon’s Health Ministry. Methodology differs between sources; figures should not be treated as directly comparable.
“Whenever the people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government.” — Thomas Jefferson, 1789
