The US military bombed Iran throughout the weekend, striking about 140 targets Saturday night—the largest single barrage of the week—and launching at least two more rounds on Sunday. The Sunday New York Times reported that, in all, US forces have struck some 310 targets in Iran over the past week.
Late Friday, US President Donald Trump once again threatened to destroy the entire country in a post on Truth Social. “1000 Missiles are Locked and Loaded and aimed at the Islamic Republic of Iran,” he wrote, declaring that the US military stood ready “for a one year period of time, subject to extension, to completely decimate and destroy all areas of Iran—PRAISE BE TO ALLAH!”
The weekend attacks completed the abrogation of the “ceasefire” Washington and Tehran signed on June 17. “The United States has stated to them, in no uncertain terms, that the Cease Fire is OVER!” Trump wrote Friday.
The “ceasefire” itself marked the failure of the American campaign to overthrow the Iranian government and dominate the Strait of Hormuz. The Washington Post’s editorial board wrote Wednesday that of the four objectives Trump named in March—destroying Iran’s missile capabilities, destroying its navy, denying it a nuclear weapon and cutting off its proxies—“None of these objectives is fully complete.”
Even as Trump sought a temporary negotiated settlement, both factions of the US political establishment condemned it for conceding too much to Iran.
Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina—who died Saturday at age 71—told CBS’s Face the Nation on June 21: “If this deal fails, President Trump is going to take the Strait of Hormuz over by force,” adding, “If Iran contests control of the Strait of Hormuz by the United States, we will obliterate them.”
Senator Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, said June 17 that Trump had “offered concession after concession to the Iranian regime for next to nothing in return.”
The attacks continued over the weekend, with Democrats excoriating Trump’s failure to achieve the aims of US imperialism in the Middle East.
Representative Jim Himes of Connecticut, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, told CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday that “all of the nuclear materials are still there. They’re just buried behind a bunch of rubble.
“The more concerning question, Jake, is the regime survived what the president promised us would be a regime-ending attack on them,” Himes told host Jake Tapper. “By the way, it’s not dust. The president keeps talking about nuclear dust. It’s not dust. This stuff is down there and recoverable.”
“So my concern is that, on the backside of this war, Iran is going to be more motivated than they were a year ago to actually produce the weapon that they know will forever take off the table an attack on their country,” he said.
Senator Adam Schiff of California said Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press: “Iran has realized that it has a kind of nuclear weapon already, and that is the ability with minimal force to close the Strait of Hormuz and to choke off a big part of the world’s oil supply.” He called the war a “huge strategic failure.”
Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Yechiel Leiter, told CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday that Iran had “forced the US to go back into kinetic activity,” and pledged: “We’re a partner, we’re an ally. If the United States calls on us to rejoin kinetic activity against Iran, we’re going to be there for the United States.”
Under the June 17 memorandum, Washington ended the blockade it had thrown around Iran’s ports in April and licensed Iranian oil sales, while Tehran pledged safe passage for commercial ships through the Strait of Hormuz, toll-free for 60 days.
US warplanes hit some 80 sites on July 7 and roughly 90 the next day, and the US Treasury canceled the waiver that had let Iran sell its oil. On July 9, US strikes severed the rail line to Mashhad during the burial of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader the United States and Israel assassinated, along with members of his family, in the war’s opening attack.
On Sunday, six ships transited the strait, against more than 130 a day before the war. CNN reported Sunday that the United States has expended half its THAAD interceptors, nearly half of its Patriot interceptors and about 30 percent of its Tomahawk cruise missiles—stocks earmarked for a future war with China. Gasoline, at $3.88 a gallon, costs 30 percent more than before the war, and the White House has asked Congress for another $87.6 billion in emergency war spending.
Launched by the United States and Israel on February 28, the war is now in its 135th day. Iranian authorities counted more than 3,400 dead by mid-June, before the past weeks of bombing, and Amnesty International has documented at least 39 political executions and more than 6,000 arrests inside Iran since the war began. The World Bank called the choking of the Strait of Hormuz “the largest oil supply shock on record,” and the International Monetary Fund cited the war’s energy shock this month in cutting its forecast for world growth this year to 3 percent.
The assault on Iran unfolds alongside Israel’s continuing onslaught against Gaza and Lebanon. Gaza’s Health Ministry put the death toll there at more than 73,000 as of July 6. In Lebanon, where a truce nominally took effect June 21, an Israeli drone strike on July 6 murdered a school principal, her mother and two others, and Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz declared on July 9 that Israeli troops would remain in Gaza, Lebanon and Syria.