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Deal Or No Deal
Thursday began with a threat and ended with a cancellation, and neither the threat nor the cancellation moved Iran.
Early Thursday morning Washington time, President Trump posted to Truth Social that the United States would hit Iran “VERY HARD TONIGHT” and promised to seize Kharg Island, the Persian Gulf hub through which roughly 90 percent of Iran’s oil exports flow, along with other Iranian oil infrastructure. The posts landed against the backdrop of a second straight day of US-Iran exchanges following Trump’s accusation that an Iranian drone downed a US Army Apache helicopter near the Strait of Hormuz. Both crew members survived, rescued by an unmanned Navy drone boat. Iran struck US military bases in Bahrain, Kuwait, and Jordan in response to American attacks. Following those exchanges, Iran announced the full closure of the Strait of Hormuz to all marine traffic.
By Thursday afternoon, the strikes were off. Trump posted again on Truth Social: “Based on the fact that discussions with the Islamic Republic of Iran have been brought to the highest level of Iranian leadership and approved, I have, as President of the United States of America, cancelled the scheduled strikes and bombings against Iran this evening.” He added that the naval blockade would remain in place “until this Transaction is finalized” and that “Time and place of the signing” would “be announced shortly.” He told the New York Post the deal is “pretty much all wrapped up.”
Iran has not confirmed any of this. Al Jazeera’s live coverage noted there was no confirmation from Tehran. Tasnim, the semi-official news agency closely linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), cautioned that “until any potential understanding is officially announced by Iran, any statements by Trump on this matter should be viewed in the context of his previous claims.” A senior Iranian official told MS NOW that Iran has not agreed to any memorandum of understanding or framework. A Qatari delegation arrived in Tehran on Wednesday to facilitate indirect talks; Pakistan and Qatar have been mediating for weeks.
The framework under negotiation, as previously reported, remains a 60-day memorandum of understanding: Hormuz reopens, Iran clears the mines it deployed in the waterway, the US lifts its blockade on Iranian ports, Iran is permitted to sell oil, and both sides begin negotiations toward a permanent agreement on the nuclear question. The points of disagreement have not changed: what happens to Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile, who controls Hormuz long-term, whether frozen Iranian assets are released and when. Neither side has confirmed those gaps are closed.
This is the third time Trump has pulled back from strikes against Iran after announcing them publicly. Each time the pattern is the same: escalatory posts, a reversal citing talks, a deal described as imminent, and an Iran that neither confirms nor signs. The Strait remains closed. The blockade remains in place. The ships are still waiting.
🌍 TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: Outside the United States, the dominant question is not whether a deal is coming but whether Trump’s word means anything when it comes to Iran. Al Jazeera’s live coverage treated the cancellation with notable skepticism, foregrounding the absence of Iranian confirmation and Tasnim’s explicit caveat. The Washington Times noted that the Qatari delegation’s presence in Tehran on Wednesday was the closest thing to a genuine development — quiet mediation rather than Truth Social declarations.
The threat to seize Kharg Island generated significant attention in Gulf state coverage. Kharg Island was already struck by US forces in March. Trump acknowledged in a Fox News interview Thursday that taking the island would require public support he does not have. That acknowledgment — that there are military actions in this war the American public would not back — is the kind of signal regional governments read carefully.
The full closure of the Strait of Hormuz, announced by Iran following the latest exchange, is the sharpest pressure point. Roughly 20 percent of the world’s energy supply transits that waterway. Markets registered the cancellation immediately — Brent crude fell sharply on the deal signal. But the strait remains closed. Until ships move, the market’s optimism is a bet on a deal that has not been confirmed by the party that controls the waterway.
🇺🇸 WHAT AMERICAN READERS NEED TO KNOW: Trump threatened to launch strikes tonight, then called them off, citing a breakthrough Iran has not confirmed. This is the third time this sequence has played out. The naval blockade continues. The Strait of Hormuz remains closed. Brent crude dropped on the announcement — which means your gas prices could fall if a deal materializes — but Iran has explicitly declined to confirm that one has been reached. The gap between what Washington is announcing and what Tehran is confirming is the only number that matters right now. Watch it.
Sources: Bloomberg (US markets/business — cancellation announcement, timeline); Al Jazeera (Qatar, state-funded/editorially independent — live coverage, Iranian non-confirmation, Tasnim caveat); NPR (US — Kharg Island context, blockade status, deal framework); NBC News live blog (US — helicopter downing, Iranian base strikes, Tasnim quote, Iranian official denial); The Hill (US — Kharg Island 90% export figure, Trump Fox News interview); Washington Times (US — Qatari delegation, deal skepticism context)
The Situation Room and the Sex Offender
The rest of the world has been watching the Jeffrey Epstein story differently than American media for months. On Thursday, it got a great deal harder to look away.
An excerpt from Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump — a forthcoming book by New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, published Thursday in the New York Times Magazine — describes in detail how Trump’s most senior officials used the White House Situation Room, the classified national security bunker, for a series of damage-control meetings about the Epstein files. The meetings were held without Trump, who, the authors write, wanted “the whole Epstein issue buried, and was snapping at anyone who mentioned it.” His staff largely avoided the subject in direct conversations with him, managing the crisis among themselves.
The July 17, 2025 meeting was triggered by two converging crises: the Justice Department and FBI had just released a memo stating their review found no Epstein “client list,” which, rather than ending the pressure, accelerated the MAGA backlash. Simultaneously, the Wall Street Journal was preparing a story about Trump’s relationship with Epstein, and the president’s attempts to kill it had failed. Trump personally called News Corp chief executive Robert Thomson, owner Rupert Murdoch, and Journal editor in chief Emma Tucker, reportedly “practically shouting” at Tucker that she must “hate America.” The story ran. Vice President JD Vance floated the idea of enlisting Tucker Carlson to interview Ghislaine Maxwell in prison, in hopes she would publicly state that Trump had not been involved in Epstein’s crimes. Vance also pushed for full release of the files. Then-Attorney General Pam Bondi, whose February 2025 claim that a client list was “sitting on her desk” had set off the initial firestorm, brought Epstein binders to a Roosevelt Room meeting with MAGA influencers — described in the excerpt as “an egregious misstep.” Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino erupted at Bondi afterward: “You f*cked this thing up from the start.” Bongino and Kash Patel both subsequently told a White House official that Bondi needed to resign. “This is going to be President Trump’s Iran-Contra,” Bongino said. The book publishes June 23.
The international dimension of this story has been running for months and is considerably further along than the American one. In the United Kingdom, the Epstein files triggered what amounts to a constitutional reckoning. Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, formerly Prince Andrew and stripped of his royal titles by King Charles III, was arrested on February 19 of this year, on his 66th birthday, following weeks of revelations about his dealings with Epstein. Peter Mandelson, fired as UK ambassador to Washington over his own correspondence with Epstein, was himself arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office earlier this year. Channel 4 News noted this week that the latest Haberman/Swan revelations renew scrutiny of both Trump and Mountbatten-Windsor simultaneously. The British press is covering the Situation Room meetings not as a political scandal but as a governance story: what does it mean that the room used to authorize the raid that killed Osama bin Laden was repurposed, repeatedly, to manage a domestic sex-abuse crisis involving the president himself?
🌍 TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: Business Standard in India, which carried the full Haberman/Swan piece, framed it around the internal polling dimension — focus groups conducted in March 2026 showing that voter concerns about Epstein were breaking through to the Trump base “to an alarming extent,” according to a memo circulated to roughly a dozen Trump advisers. That framing, Epstein as a political liability that Trump’s own coalition will not let die, is how the story reads outside American partisan media, where it tends to be filed either as vindication or as a witch hunt. The international press is treating it as neither. It is reading it as a document of institutional dysfunction: a presidency spending classified national security resources on reputation management for its own leader.
IBTimes UK covered the specific unverified allegation raised in the Situation Room meetings at length. The allegation, drawn from civil litigation emails, is unverified and contested. What is documented and confirmed is that it was raised in the Situation Room as a potential crisis, and that officials debated whether to release it publicly. That a sitting vice president and chief of staff were managing this question in a classified setting is the story the rest of the world is reading.
🇺🇸 WHAT AMERICAN READERS NEED TO KNOW: The Haberman/Swan excerpt is drawn from a book that publishes June 23, based on hundreds of interviews. It describes a White House that used its most classified meeting space — not for foreign policy, not for national security — but for political damage control around the president’s relationship with a convicted sex offender. The UK has already arrested a former member of the royal family over Epstein. The US has made no comparable accountability move. That asymmetry is not lost on the countries watching.
Sources: Axios (US — book excerpt summary, Vance/Maxwell gambit, Trump/Tucker call, Bongino quote); Business Standard (India — full NYT syndication, focus group polling memo detail); IBTimes UK (UK — Situation Room allegation detail, Vance quote); NBC News live blog (US — Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor arrest, February 19, 2026); Channel 4 News (UK — Mountbatten-Windsor/Trump dual scrutiny framing)
Pope Leo In Arguineguín
Pope Leo XIV traveled to Spain’s Canary Islands on Thursday and walked to the port of Arguineguín — one of Europe’s most active migration arrival points — to address the migrants who survive the crossing and the aid workers who pull them from the water.
“Dear migrants, before saying anything else to you, I want to bow before your dignity,” Leo said. “You are not just numbers or files. You are people who have left behind families and homes.” He called those who exploit migrants “monsters” and described the Mediterranean and Atlantic becoming “unmarked graves.” In what he framed as “an appeal to the conscience” of politicians and governments, he said “human dignity has no passport and does not lose its value when crossing a border.”
Tito Villarmea, captain of the salvage boat Guardamar Urania, addressed the pope at the pier. He has saved more than 20,000 people patrolling the ocean near the islands. He recalled pulling a woman from the water as she wept over her teenage daughter’s body. “I wish we didn’t have to save anyone again,” he said.
The numbers at Arguineguín are not abstractions. According to the Spanish nongovernmental organization Caminando Fronteras, nearly 3,090 people died trying to reach Spain in 2025 — through the Canary Islands or the Balearic route. In the first six months of 2026, 1,300 have already died. Most arrivals come from Senegal, Mali, Mauritania, Gambia, and other parts of sub-Saharan Africa.
Thursday’s visit followed Leo’s June 8 speech to the Spanish parliament — the first papal address to Spanish lawmakers in history — where he received a standing ovation after calling for a “moral renewal” in legislatures and demanding respect for migrants’ inherent dignity. He praised the 16th-century School of Salamanca, Spanish theologians who argued that reason could not be invoked to legitimize force or self-interest, and acknowledged that “society and the church herself did not always live up to these insights.”
Spain’s Socialist-led government has moved in the opposite direction from the rest of Europe and the United States, defending immigration on economic and humanitarian grounds and launching a legalization push earlier this year for hundreds of thousands of immigrants living and working in the country without authorization.
🌍 TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: Al Jazeera covered the Arguineguín address as a direct challenge to European governments that have moved toward externalization and deterrence — the model Italy has been attempting with Albania, the tightening across the continent. The setting was deliberate: Arguineguín was briefly infamous in 2020 when thousands of migrants were held in an open-air holding pen on the pier without adequate food, water, or sanitation. Leo chose that pier specifically. The Spanish press read the visit as a pointed contrast between Leo’s message and the direction of EU migration policy.
Leo is the first American pope, and he has not been subtle about the American dimension of his migration position. In November 2025, he described the treatment of immigrants in the United States as “extremely disrespectful.” His presence in Arguineguín on Thursday, saying “human dignity has no passport” while hundreds of thousands of people are being deported across the United States, is not incidental framing.
🇺🇸 WHAT AMERICAN READERS NEED TO KNOW: The first American pope stood at a European migrant pier Thursday and told the survivors: I bow before your dignity. He said people who are indifferent to migrant suffering are as monstrous as those who exploit them. He has said the same, in different language, about what is happening in the United States. The administration has not responded. The Catholic Church in America — whose bishops issued a formal statement earlier this year against mass deportation — is watching the same pope make that position visible on a world stage.
Sources: Al Jazeera (Qatar, state-funded/editorially independent — Arguineguín address, “dignity has no passport” quote, crossing death figures from Caminando Fronteras); Salt Lake Tribune/AP (US wire — full “I want to bow” quote, direct address text); NPR (US — Spanish parliament speech, School of Salamanca reference, Spain legalization push); Religion News Service (US — Villarmea pier address, Arguineguín context, drowning account); America Magazine (US Catholic — parliamentary speech analysis, standing ovation)
Fifty-Six Percent
In 2025, the year a ceasefire nominally paused fighting in Gaza and a deal temporarily halted hostilities in Lebanon, Israel was responsible for 56 percent of every civilian killed by explosive weapons anywhere on earth.
The Explosive Weapons Monitor — a research initiative of the International Network on Explosive Weapons (INEW), a coalition of nearly 50 nongovernmental organizations including Human Rights Watch, Save the Children, and Humanity & Inclusion — released its annual report this week. It found at least 22,616 civilians killed by explosive weapons across 65 countries and territories in 2025. That figure is down 21 percent from 2024, largely because ceasefire agreements reduced the scale of Israeli attacks on Gaza and Lebanon. The reduction does not change what the report found: the majority of those deaths, 56 percent, were attributed to Israeli armed forces, most of them in Palestine.
The report documented a 52 percent increase in attacks on humanitarian aid operations, to 2,541 incidents. About 90 percent of those incidents were recorded in Palestine. Attacks on education increased 64 percent, to 1,416. Countries’ armed forces were responsible for 85 percent of all incidents affecting civilians or civilian infrastructure across the 65 countries studied.
In Gaza, Israeli strikes are continuing under the nominal October 2025 “ceasefire.” The UN human rights office documented at least 200 Palestinians killed by Israeli attacks since February 28 of this year. The UN noted this week that Israel has systematically targeted Gaza’s police force — a drone strike on April 24 in Al Mawasi killed four police workers and four civilians, including a nine-year-old boy. A UN Security Council Commission of Inquiry has concluded that four of the five acts of genocide as defined by the Genocide Convention have been committed in Gaza since October 2023.
In Lebanon, where Israeli strikes resumed in March and continued through at least June 9, more than 3,500 people were killed by Israeli strikes between March 2 and June 4 alone, according to NPR. Israel struck southern Lebanon as recently as Tuesday, hitting the city of Tyre and issuing evacuation warnings that for the first time included the port area. Lebanon’s health figures now stand at 3,696 killed and 11,413 injured since Israel renewed widespread attacks in March, per the Al Jazeera tracker.
Israel has not responded to the Explosive Weapons Monitor report.
🌍 TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: The Explosive Weapons Monitor report received sustained coverage in Turkish, Australian, and South Asian outlets this week. It received notably little in mainstream American media. The gap matters because the methodology here is not from a government or a party to the conflict — INEW is a coalition of established international humanitarian organizations, drawing on data from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data project and Insecurity Insight, both widely used by academics and policymakers. The report’s authors noted the decline in civilian deaths with explicit caution: it reflects ceasefire periods, not a change in conduct. The 56 percent figure covers a year in which Israel was, for portions of it, nominally observing a ceasefire.
The report’s framing of “normalization” is what international humanitarian organizations are focused on. When more than half of all global explosive weapon civilian deaths in a calendar year come from one military, and the international response remains largely unchanged, the concern is not only the deaths themselves — it is whether the threshold for what is considered unacceptable has shifted permanently.
🇺🇸 WHAT AMERICAN READERS NEED TO KNOW: The United States is Israel’s primary arms supplier, a relationship that has continued through the period covered by this report. The Explosive Weapons Monitor is not a fringe organization — its member groups include Save the Children and Human Rights Watch. When they find that one military accounts for 56 percent of global explosive weapon civilian deaths in a year — even a year with a ceasefire — that finding carries weight. American media has largely not covered it. ROTWR is covering it because this is exactly the kind of documented international record that deserves to reach American readers.
Sources: Explosive Weapons Monitor / INEW (international NGO coalition — 56% figure, 22,616 total, attack on aid increase, methodology note); Daily Sabah (Turkey — report coverage, “normalization” framing); Common Dreams (US — INEW member organization breakdown, full report summary); NPR (US — Lebanon 3,500+ killed March 2–June 4); UN News/OHCHR (UN — Gaza police targeting, April 24 strike, 200 killed since February 28)
WAR DAY 104 | NUMBERS AT PUBLICATION
🇮🇷 Iran: 3,468 killed, 26,500+ injured (Iran Ministry of Health, via Al Jazeera live tracker, last updated June 1)
🇱🇧 Lebanon: 3,696 killed, 11,413 injured (Al Jazeera live tracker, last updated June 1)
🇮🇱 Israel: 26 killed, 7,791 injured (Al Jazeera live tracker, last updated June 1)
🌍 Gulf states/Iraq: 131 killed — Iraq 118, Kuwait 7, Bahrain 3, Oman 3 (Al Jazeera live tracker, last updated June 1)
🇺🇸 US military: 13 killed, 381 injured (Al Jazeera live tracker, last updated June 1)
🛢️ Brent crude: $89.10/barrel (OilPrice.com — dropped sharply on Trump strike cancellation and deal signal)
⛽ US national gas average: $4.13/gallon (AAA)
Sourcing note: All war casualty figures sourced to the Al Jazeera live tracker, last updated June 1, 2026. Iran figure sourced to Iran’s Ministry of Health. Israel, Lebanon, Gulf states/Iraq, and US figures sourced to Al Jazeera tracking. Methodology differs between sources; figures should not be treated as directly comparable. Lebanon and Israel figures as of June 1; strikes in Lebanon continued through at least June 9.
“Whenever the people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government.” — Thomas Jefferson, 1789
