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THE GULF WIDENS
The ceasefire that was already gone this morning is now a war with no geographic edges, and no pause between rounds. Iran spent Wednesday striking American allies across four countries at once. The US answered with a seven-hour bombing run overnight, then launched a second wave Wednesday morning before the smoke from the first had cleared.
US Central Command said the overnight operation, which concluded at 10pm EDT Tuesday, sent fighter aircraft, drones, and naval vessels against “dozens of military targets” near the Strait of Hormuz and along Iran’s coastline. Less than eight hours later, CENTCOM said it began a fresh round of strikes at 6am ET Wednesday, completed by 7:30am, hitting Iran’s coastal defense systems and cruise missile storage and launch sites on Greater Tunb Island. Iranian state media reported explosions in Bandar Abbas, Qeshm, Hengam, Sirik, and Bushehr. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said in response that it had struck US military assets in Bahrain, Kuwait, and Jordan overnight, claiming heavy damage to the US Fifth Fleet’s headquarters and fuel depots in Bahrain and to a logistics hub at Mina Abdullah in Kuwait. Jordan’s military said it intercepted three Iranian ballistic missiles before they reached the ground. Qatar and the UAE also intercepted incoming drones and missiles this week. The Gulf Cooperation Council’s secretary-general, Jasem al-Budaiwi, called Iran’s strikes on Bahrain, Kuwait, and Jordan “treacherous,” saying they injured Kuwaiti military personnel and risked dragging the region into further instability.
Iranian officials say the human cost is mounting on their side too. Health officials in Tehran told Al Jazeera that hundreds of US strikes over the past week have killed at least 35 people and wounded 300. Iranian state media reported that shrapnel from an earlier wave of strikes hit Imam Ali Hospital in the port city of Chabahar, and Iranian sources said Wednesday’s strikes hit soldiers’ accommodation at a military base in Bampur, in the country’s southeast, with no immediate word on casualties there. CENTCOM has publicly disputed some Iranian claims, rejecting one report that US forces hit a civilian wheat storage facility as false and saying the actual targets were military sites in seven named locations.
Trump has already told Iran what comes next if it does not return to the table. “Next week it gets really bad for them... next week comes the power plants,” he said, adding that the US would knock out Iran’s bridges too. This is not a new threat. Trump made nearly the same one in April, prompting Amnesty International’s secretary general to warn of “atrocity crimes” against Iran’s roughly 90 million civilians and a UN spokesperson to say publicly that such attacks are banned under international law regardless of any military justification. More than 100 international law experts signed an open letter at the time warning of potential war crimes. Rachel VanLandingham, a retired US Air Force judge advocate general, told PBS that Trump was “threatening a war crime and... engaging in a war crime through that rhetoric itself,” pointing to the same legal standard the US State Department applied when it concluded Russia committed war crimes by destroying Ukraine’s power grid in winter. Trump postponed the April threat under pressure, delaying strikes on power plants and energy infrastructure by five days pending negotiations. Wednesday’s version was, in substance, the same threat, repeated.
The US resumed its naval blockade of Iranian ports at 8pm GMT Tuesday and has deployed roughly 21 vessels to the region, according to CENTCOM. The Treasury Department separately said it froze more than $130 million by sanctioning cryptocurrency wallets linked to Iran’s central bank.
🌍 TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: The Gulf Cooperation Council’s language this week, calling Iran’s strikes “treacherous” and describing them as an unprecedented escalation that disregards international norms, is notable because it is not directed at Washington. Al-Budaiwi’s statement came from the body representing Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Oman, and it names Iran as the aggressor against three of its own members without qualification. That is a sharper break from the region’s usual posture of hedging between Washington and Tehran than American coverage of the statement conveyed. A Tehran-based defense analyst told Al Jazeera that Iran views any US strikes launched from bases in the region as making those host countries legitimate targets in turn, “as long as the United States attacks Iran from the countries of the region.” That logic is precisely what is now playing out in Bahrain, Kuwait, and Jordan, and it means the GCC states have no path to neutrality simply by declining to participate.
🇺🇸 What American readers need to know: The US hit Iran twice in under 24 hours today, and the war has stopped being a US-Iran story and become a regional one. Three Gulf allies were hit by Iranian strikes this week, one of them a Gulf Cooperation Council member whose forces were injured. Your government has frozen $130 million in Iranian assets and has told Iran directly what comes next if it does not negotiate: its power plants and its bridges.
Sources: Al Jazeera (Qatar, state-funded/editorially independent — seven-hour strike operation, IRGC Gulf claims, Jordan interceptions, GCC statement, blockade, crypto sanctions, July 15); Al Jazeera (Qatar — 35 killed/300 wounded per Iranian health officials, strike locations, defense analyst quote, July 15); CNBC (US — second Wednesday strike wave, Greater Tunb Island target, Trump “next week” power plants quote, July 15); Amnesty International (Callamard “atrocity crimes” warning, April 2026); PBS NewsHour (VanLandingham quote, Russia/Ukraine power grid war crimes parallel, April 2026); Newsweek (100+ legal experts open letter, UN spokesperson statement, July 15); CENTCOM (US military — wheat storage facility claim denial, July 14 target list); Democracy Now (US — Trump infrastructure threat, July 15); NewsCord/multiple Iranian state media (Imam Ali Hospital shrapnel damage, Chabahar, July 8-9)
ASESINATO
Colombia’s outgoing president called it murder. Mexico’s Senate condemned it. Chinese state media carried it worldwide. Six days into the deadliest week for ICE enforcement in the agency’s history, the international reaction to Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero’s killing has outpaced anything the deaths of ICE’s other victims produced, and a Texas prosecutor is now threatening to do something no other case this year has managed: bring charges.
President Gustavo Petro, whose term ends August 7, posted a statement in Spanish Tuesday calling Durán Guerrero’s killing a murder at the hands of the US government. “They killed him for believing him to be an inferior being without rights,” Petro wrote, invoking language echoing the Nuremberg-era prohibition on persecuting a population group. He said Colombia’s foreign service would pursue swift legal action so the agents responsible would answer for what he called a homicide. The statement was picked up within hours by China’s state news agency Xinhua and carried in outlets across Latin America and Asia. Colombia’s outgoing government, currently in a disputed transition after President-elect Abelardo de la Espriella alleged fraud and suspended the handover process, is nonetheless still the government providing consular assistance to Durán Guerrero’s family in Maine.
In Houston, the case against ICE has taken a more concrete turn. Harris County District Attorney Sean Teare told CBS News his office has issued dozens of subpoenas in its investigation into the killing of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo and is ready to file criminal charges against federal agents if the evidence supports it. Investigators are examining potential offenses including murder, criminally negligent homicide, and tampering with evidence. “You can’t come into our community, take someone’s life, hide behind a badge,” Teare said, adding that the tactics used in the operation bore no resemblance to the standards of any law enforcement agency he has worked with.
Al Jazeera’s own accounting of the pattern, drawing on a Wall Street Journal count of more than a dozen incidents in which federal immigration agents fired at people inside vehicles between July 2025 and January 2026, lists Salgado Araujo and Durán Guerrero alongside Silverio Villegas Gonzalez, a Chicago line cook shot after dropping his child at daycare, and Ruben Ray Martinez, a US citizen shot while driving in March 2025. Renee Good and Alex Pretti, killed in Minneapolis in January, are part of the same list; prosecutors there told Democracy Now they have only now received evidence in that case, six months on.
🌍 TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: Petro’s statement did more than condemn a killing. By explicitly invoking the Nuremberg-era prohibition on persecuting a population group, he placed Durán Guerrero’s death inside a legal and historical framework American coverage of the killing did not use. Xinhua’s decision to carry the statement gave a Chinese state audience a framing of American immigration enforcement that positions it as systematic persecution rather than isolated law enforcement error, a framing no US outlet applied to the same facts.
🇺🇸 What American readers need to know: A foreign head of state called your government’s agents murderers this week, in a statement that reached hundreds of millions of readers abroad. A Texas prosecutor is now openly discussing what charges federal agents might face. Neither of these things has happened after any of ICE’s previous fatal shootings this year.
Sources: Bangor Daily News (US — Petro statement, 11th fatal ICE shooting count, July 15); Boston Globe (US — Petro “victim of the state” quote, Durán Guerrero background, July 14); Xinhua (China, state news agency — Petro statement carried in full, July 15); Al Jazeera (Qatar, state-funded/editorially independent — pattern accounting, WSJ vehicle-shooting count, July 14); CBS News (US — Teare quotes, subpoena count, July 14); LatinTimes (US — Teare “hide behind a badge” quote, potential charges, July 14); Democracy Now (US — Minnesota prosecutors evidence delay, July 15); ColombiaOne (Colombia — Petro transition context, disputed handover)
DEIR AL-BALAH
A father, a mother, and their six-year-old daughter were killed Wednesday when an Israeli strike hit their apartment building in central Gaza. Their three-year-old son survived, pulled from the wreckage by Palestinian Civil Defence crews.
Omar Abu Qassem, his wife Asma, and their daughter Habeeba died in Deir al-Balah as ceasefire talks in Cairo, mediated by Egypt, Turkey, and Qatar, wrapped up Tuesday without a breakthrough on the next phase of the US-brokered truce. The Israeli military said the strike targeted a Hamas member; it offered no further explanation for the deaths of his wife and daughter. A relative, Abu Anas Shahin, asked Reuters what kind of cruelty allows a three-year-old to be the only survivor of his family. The strike was one of at least a dozen Israeli attacks on Gaza over the previous two days, which also killed eight people, including a police officer, at a station in the Jabaliya refugee camp Tuesday, and a ten-year-old boy shot by Israeli forces in Rafah.
The killings bring the toll since October’s “ceasefire” took effect to more than 1,100 Palestinians, at least 275 of them children, according to Gaza health officials. The UN’s human rights office said last month that Israeli forces have attacked Gaza’s police at least a dozen times this year alone, including during what it described as routine traffic direction and street patrols, and that the pattern “raises concerns that Israeli forces apply no distinction between police personnel and fighters.” According to the UN’s sexual and reproductive health agency, 96 percent of children in Gaza now say they believe death is imminent.
🇺🇸 What American readers need to know: The Gaza ceasefire your government brokered has not stopped Israeli forces from killing Palestinian civilians, including children, on a near-daily basis. A UN Commission of Inquiry found in September that this pattern, killing, inflicting conditions calculated to destroy a population, meets the legal definition of genocide. Talks to move the ceasefire into its next phase stalled again this week while the killing continued underneath them.
Sources: Al Jazeera (Qatar, state-funded/editorially independent — Deir al-Balah strike, cumulative toll, UN reproductive health agency figure, July 15); Reuters via GV Wire (Shahin quote, family details, July 15); Las Vegas Sun/AP (Jabaliya police station strike, UN human rights office quote, July 15); Daily Sabah (Turkey — Cairo talks, Rafah child killed, July 15)
WAR DAY 138 | NUMBERS AT PUBLICATION
🇮🇷 Iran: 35+ killed, 300+ wounded over the past week (Iranian health officials via Al Jazeera, July 15 — this is a new weekly accounting distinct from the frozen Al Jazeera tracker cited in prior editions; methodology not directly comparable to earlier floor estimates)
🇱🇧 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: $85.63/barrel (OilPrice.com, July 15 evening)
⛽ US national gas average: $3.89/gallon (AAA)
Sourcing note: Iran’s casualty figure tonight reflects Iranian Health Ministry data on strikes over the past week, reported via Al Jazeera, and should be read as a distinct weekly accounting rather than a running total on the same methodology as the frozen tracker figures used for Israel, Gulf states, and US military below. Lebanon updated separately by Lebanon’s Health Ministry. US equity markets closed higher Wednesday on cooling inflation data; the move was not significant enough to warrant inclusion as a standard line.
“Whenever the people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government.” — Thomas Jefferson, 1789
