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WAR CRIMES
Iran’s Foreign Ministry formally accused the United States of war crimes overnight, hours after fresh strikes on bridges in southern Iran killed eight people and wounded twenty, and a tanker was struck by an unidentified projectile off the coast of Oman.
Iranian state media said the overnight strikes hit six bridges in Hormozgan province and infrastructure in several other provinces. In a statement Thursday, Iran’s Foreign Ministry said the US had committed “numerous war crimes, particularly by targeting civilian facilities and infrastructure,” citing strikes on a mineral water production facility, a maritime traffic control center in Chabahar, and the children’s cancer hospital in Ahvaz reported earlier this week. Iran’s ambassador to the UN sent a letter to the Security Council documenting what he described as 42 US violations of the June 17 memorandum of understanding since it was signed. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard separately claimed it struck US forces at al-Tanf in Syria in retaliation for a deadly strike on Iranian troops in Iranshahr; CENTCOM has not confirmed the claim, and it could not be independently verified.
Separately, new reporting this week renewed attention on the US military’s still-unreleased investigation into a February 28 strike that killed 168 people, most of them girls between 7 and 12, plus 14 teachers, at an elementary school in Minab.
The strike hit Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school on the first day of the war, fewer than 100 yards from a long-standing IRGC naval installation, according to a satellite imagery analysis by Amnesty International. The school itself had been part of the same military compound until a dividing wall went up sometime between 2013 and 2016. More than 120 House Democrats and 46 Senate Democrats sent separate letters to the Pentagon in March asking whether the Maven Smart System, a Palantir-built AI targeting platform the Pentagon used extensively in the opening days of the war, had identified the school as a target, and whether a human had verified that target before the strike. CNN reported that US Central Command had built its targeting coordinates using outdated Defense Intelligence Agency data that had not been updated to reflect the school’s presence. Later reporting citing former military officials concluded humans, not AI, bore responsibility: stale, human-curated data was fed into the targeting system, which then executed on it. Congress’s specific question about human verification remains formally unanswered five months later. Since the strike, the Pentagon has cut its CENTCOM civilian casualty assessment team from ten people to one and reduced its Civilian Protection Center of Excellence workforce by roughly 90 percent, while separately moving to expand the Maven system’s use fleet-wide by September. Trump, asked about the strike on Fox News this week, suggested the widely circulated footage of the aftermath might be artificial intelligence rather than real.
The strait standoff driving the broader war traces back to a single ambiguous clause. Vaez, writing in the New York Times this week, identified Article 5 of the MOU, the paragraph assigning Iran responsibility for reopening the Strait of Hormuz, as the specific text both sides now interpret differently: Iran read it as recognition of its control over the strait, while Washington read it as Iran ceding two of its three shipping corridors so the US could establish an alternative route through Oman’s waters. Vaez said that ambiguity, which he called “diplomatic malpractice,” is what actually triggered Iran’s naval mining and the current fighting, not the reverse. He also said elements within the Trump administration, including UN Ambassador Mike Waltz’s separate negotiation of that Oman corridor with the International Maritime Organization, have undercut the same MOU Vice President Vance negotiated, alongside a separate Rubio-brokered Lebanon-Israel arrangement that undermined a different article of the same document.
Kuwait’s foreign ministry, which absorbed Iranian strikes this week, called Iran’s continued attacks a “serious breach” of international law and said Tehran bears full responsibility for their consequences.
🇺🇸 What American readers need to know: Iran has now formally told the UN Security Council that the US is committing war crimes against it. Your own government struck an elementary school in February, killing 168 people, most of them girls, using an AI targeting system fed outdated data, and Congress still hasn’t gotten an answer on whether a human verified the target beforehand. Since then, the Pentagon has cut the team that assesses civilian casualties while expanding the same AI system’s use. Your president has suggested the footage of the strike might be fake. The clause that started the current fighting over the strait was ambiguous by design, and parts of your own administration have been working against each other on how to interpret it.
Sources: Dawn (Pakistan — overnight bridge strikes, casualty count, tanker strike off Oman, July 17); CNN (US — Foreign Ministry war crimes statement, Kuwait “serious breach” statement, July 16); Press TV (Iran, state media — UN ambassador letter, 42 violations count, July 17); Al Jazeera (Qatar, state-funded/editorially independent — hospital strike context, July 16); Military Times (US — Maven Smart System details, congressional letters, Amnesty satellite analysis, Semafor “humans not AI” finding, Pentagon oversight cuts, March 24); CNN (US — outdated DIA intelligence, 168 killed per Iranian state media, March 11); Democracy Now (US — Vaez interview, Article 5 analysis, Waltz/Rubio internal division, July 16)
HALF THE CAUCUS
More than half of House Democrats voted this week to cut $3.3 billion in annual US military aid to Israel, a measure that failed but marked the sharpest break yet between the party’s mainstream and decades of near-unanimous support for the relationship.
The amendment, proposed by Republican Congressmember Thomas Massie and defeated by House Republicans along with Democratic Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and caucus chair Pete Aguilar, would have eliminated the aid entirely except for funding Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system. It drew support from more than 100 Democrats, including former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who said Americans “are rightly demanding an end to a perpetual cycle of war” and that the Netanyahu government could not sustain its current course. Representative Pramila Jayapal, who has called for ending military assistance to Israel since before the vote was politically popular within her own party, called the tally “a sea change.” She said the shift was possible only because of what has happened in Gaza, echoing a line from colleague Rashida Tlaib that has stayed with her: it took the horror of the war itself to force Democrats to confront that taxpayer money should not fund it.
A related measure, Representative Delia Ramirez’s Block the Bombs Act, which would block offensive weapons funding to Israel specifically, has grown to more than 80 co-sponsors. Jeffries and Aguilar have said they intend to keep working against both efforts going forward.
🇺🇸 What American readers need to know: Half your representatives in the House just voted to cut billions in military aid to one of America’s closest allies. It failed, but a threshold got crossed this week that would have been unthinkable a few years ago, and a Republican wrote the bill that got Democrats there.
Sources: Democracy Now (US — Jayapal interview, Massie sponsorship, Iron Dome exemption, Tlaib reference, Block the Bombs Act, July 16); Democracy Now (US — Pelosi quote, vote breakdown, July 16); WBUR/Here & Now (US — broader Democratic shift context, July 16)
CERTIFIED
Harris County prosecutors have certified U-Visa protection for the three witnesses to Lorenzo Salgado Araujo’s killing, formally recognizing them as crime victims whose cooperation matters to a criminal investigation. Federal immigration authorities are moving to deport them anyway. The irony is direct: the crime under investigation is the killing itself, and the agency whose conduct is being investigated, ICE, is also the one pushing to deport the only men who saw it happen.
Victor Salgado Araujo, the dead man’s brother, has been detained at the Montgomery Processing Center in Conroe since the morning of the shooting and has been ordered to appear before an immigration judge, according to his attorney. His account of what happened, relayed through that attorney, includes his brother’s last words. As Victor pulled him from the van, Lorenzo grabbed his own stomach, realized he was bleeding, and said in Spanish, “They’re killing me. They’re killing me.” DHS has said Salgado Araujo “weaponized” his vehicle against agents. The other witnesses’ attorney, Hugo Balderas-Ibarra, told the New York Times the account is false, saying the van never rammed the agents and their lives were never in danger. Representative Sylvia Garcia, who has visited the detained witnesses, said their account of the shooting is “totally different” from the federal government’s.
The case has drawn a formal response from Mexico’s government. President Claudia Sheinbaum said this week her administration would ask US prosecutors to investigate the deaths of 17 Mexican citizens linked to ICE operations or detention since Trump returned to office, including Salgado Araujo’s killing specifically. Harris County District Attorney Sean Teare’s office, which certified the U-Visa requests for Victor Salgado Araujo and the two other witnesses, Jose Trinidad Rojas and Daniel Tirado Pantoja, has not said whether it can shield the men from federal removal while its own investigation continues.
🇺🇸 What American readers need to know: The same local prosecutors investigating this killing have certified these three men as protected witnesses. The federal government that killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo is now trying to deport the only other people who saw it happen, and a foreign government is now formally asking American prosecutors to investigate American agents.
Sources: Houston Public Media (US — Victor’s account, Lorenzo’s last words, July 15); LatinTimes (US — U-Visa certification, Sheinbaum context, July 16); Yahoo/Houston Chronicle (US — deportation hearing order, Garcia quote, July 14); Jezebel (US — Balderas-Ibarra quote disputing DHS account, July)
WHAT CHECKED OUT
President Trump delivered a primetime address to the nation Thursday night, covering the economy, crime, and what he called new evidence of foreign election interference. Most of the speech’s specific claims about elections and voter fraud rest on intelligence this publication has no way to independently verify, so we are not reporting them here. Three things Trump said do check out against independent data.
Inflation did post its largest monthly decline in more than six years. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Tuesday that the Consumer Price Index fell 0.4 percent in June, the sharpest drop since April 2020, driven almost entirely by a reversal in gas and energy prices that had spiked earlier this year, in part because of the Iran war itself. Core inflation, which excludes food and energy, held flat.
The stock market has also set genuine records. The Dow Jones Industrial Average and S&P 500 both closed at all-time highs multiple times over the past two weeks, continuing a rally that has held even as the Iran war has escalated.
The murder rate has fallen to a genuine multi-decade low, though the specific framing Trump used goes further than the data supports. The Council on Criminal Justice’s own analysis, corroborated by independent crime researchers, projects the 2025 national homicide rate at roughly 4.0 per 100,000, the lowest recorded since at least 1960; the “lowest since 1900” framing is disputed by experts because standardized national data does not extend that far back. The decline itself also began before Trump’s current term, during the final year of the Biden administration.
🇺🇸 What American readers need to know: Real economic and crime data back up parts of what your president said last night. The election claims in the same speech are a separate matter, resting on intelligence nobody outside the government has seen.
Sources: CBS News (US — June CPI decline, energy price context, July 14); CNBC (US — CPI breakdown, core inflation figure, July 14); CNBC (US — Dow and S&P record closes, July 5); Axios (US — Council on Criminal Justice homicide data, decline predates current term, January 2026); Poynter (US — “since 1900” framing dispute among experts, February 2026)
WAR DAY 141 | NUMBERS AT PUBLICATION
🇮🇷 Iran: 3,468+ killed (Al Jazeera tracker, frozen since June 1) — separately, Iranian officials report 8 killed and 20 wounded in Thursday night’s strikes on Hormozgan bridges alone, on top of the 35+ killed and 300+ wounded reported for the week prior; 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 ongoing strikes on Bahrain, Kuwait, and Jordan)
🇺🇸 US military: 13 killed, 381 injured (Al Jazeera tracker, frozen since June 1)
🛢️ Brent crude: $84.78/barrel (OilPrice.com, July 17)
⛽ US national gas average: $3.98/gallon (AAA)
Sourcing note: Iran’s cumulative figure is the Al Jazeera tracker base, frozen since June 1. The past-week and Thursday-night figures, from Iranian officials via Dawn and Al Jazeera, are not confirmed as additive to that base or to each other; each is presented separately to avoid double-counting or understating the toll. 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
