#war

There has not been a military draft since 1973, when U.S. involvement in the war in Vietnam was winding down.

But in 1980, President Jimmy Carter signed a law requiring men between the ages of 18 to 25 to register for military conscription. Since then, the federal government has relied on voluntary compliance with that law, not automatic enrollment. Men who are 26 are allowed to enroll late to comply with the law.

The agency’s proposal to automatically enroll men in the draft was submitted to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs on March 30.

The proposal was made about a month after the U.S. and Israel began a war against Iran.

There are currently no formal plans to reinstate a draft.

The Pew survey released on Tuesday reported that overall, 60% said they have an unfavorable view of Israel. In 2022, only 42% of Americans held negative views of Israel.  There was a sharp divide between Democrats and Republicans. 41% of Republicans have an unfavorable view of Israel; that number is double with Democrats. There was also a large split between younger and older Americans. 70% of Americans under 50 had an unfavorable view of Israel, including 57% of Republicans.

On Tuesday, Trump announced a new ceasefire with Iran. Within hours, Israel violated the ceasefire with a massive round of strikes on Lebanon.

The Palestinian Journalists Syndicate said after Wishah’s death that the IDF has killed 260 Palestinian journalists and wounded 550 since October 7, 2023. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 129 members of the press were killed around the world in 2025, and the state of Israel was responsible for two-thirds of the deaths. The IDF has a unit that is dedicated to justifying the killing of journalists by attempting to link them to Hamas, and the IDF has previously accused Wishah of being a Hamas fighter, an allegation denied by Al Jazeera.

Israel has been constantly violating the so-called ceasefire deal it signed back in October, killing at least 736 Palestinians and wounding 2,035, according to the latest numbers from Gaza’s Health Ministry.

US officials were aware that a statement from Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif on the US-Iran ceasefire that was issued on Tuesday included a truce in Lebanon as part of the deal, according to media reports. The New York Times reported that the US had already seen and signed off on Sharif’s statement before he posted it

A diplomatic source familiar with the negotiations leading up to the ceasefire announcement told ITV News that Iranian and Pakistani officials ended the talks with the understanding that the US was aware that the truce also applied to Lebanon, contradicting claims from Trump and Vice President JD Vance that it did not.

Israel not only continued its attacks on Lebanon, but it also dramatically escalated the bombardment, launching a new military operation dubbed “Operation Eternal Darkness” and killing hundreds of people across the country. According to NBC News, Trump asked Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to scale down the attack, but heavy Israeli strikes continued on Thursday.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi affirmed in a statement on Wednesday that the ceasefire must include Lebanon or the deal will be off. “The Iran-US Ceasefire terms are clear and explicit: the US must choose—ceasefire or continued war via Israel. It cannot have both,” Araghchi wrote on X. “The world sees the massacres in Lebanon. The ball is in the US court, and the world is watching whether it will act on its commitments.”

The two-week pause in the fighting was announced by Pakistan's Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif - who has been serving as mediator between the warring parties. Sharif said the US and its allies "have agreed to an immediate ceasefire everywhere including Lebanon and elsewhere".

The guns were supposed to have fallen silent. It was, after all, just hours after US President Donald Trump had announced that a two-week ceasefire had been agreed to halt the war in the Middle East. But just as the region was breathing a sigh of relief, Israeli jets conducted a 10-minute blitz across Lebanon - a massive aerial attack that killed at least 303 people and wounded 1,150 others, according to Lebanon's health ministry. Local and Western condemnation was swift and widespread, but no criticism came from the US against its ally in this war. Iran said this was "a blatant violation" of the ceasefire deal and has asked the US to halt the Israeli "aggression".

In Lebanon, opponents and supporters of Hezbollah are coming together in anger, united in the view that what happened here was unacceptable and unjustifiable.

This last bit may be Israel’s goal:

Iran's President Masoud Pezeshkian denounced the "blatant violations" by Israel, which, he added may render negotiations "meaningless".

Israel’s Channel 12 cites a security official as saying that the Iranians demanded extending the ceasefire to Lebanon, where Israel has been invading the south of the country.

US President Donald Trump says he has agreed to a two-week ceasefire with Iran, paving the way for a temporary cessation of US-Israeli strikes in exchange for the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz. Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi says Tehran has also accepted the truce, adding that safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz during the two-week period would be possible in coordination with Iranian armed forces. Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, who mediated the ceasefire deal, says the agreement between Iran and the US, along with their allies, also includes “Lebanon and elsewhere” and is effective immediately. He also confirmed that talks between Iran and the US will begin in Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad. Dozens of Democratic lawmakers condemn Trump’s threatening rhetoric towards Iran, calling for his removal from office despite the announcement of the ceasefire deal. The US oil benchmark plunged more than 17 percent after the ceasefire announcement while major stock markets in Japan and South Korea opened strongly.

“We have ordered an acceleration in the destruction of Lebanese homes in contact-line villages to neutralize threats to Israeli communities, in accordance with the model of Beit Hanoun and Rafah in Gaza,” Katz said, referring to border towns that were largely obliterated.

Lebanese returned to find homes, infrastructure and some entire villages destroyed. Israel said it had dismantled Hezbollah infrastructure that could have been used to launch an Oct. 7-style attack, and it continued to strike what it said were militant targets on a near-daily basis after the truce.

In the latest fighting, Israel has launched blistering air raids across Lebanon, killing more than 1,000 people — mostly outside of the border area — and displacing over a million.

Produced by the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP), the Global Peace Index (GPI) is the world’s leading measure of global peacefulness. This report presents the most comprehensive data-driven analysis to-date on trends in peace, its economic value, and how to develop peaceful societies. The Global Peace Index covers 99.7% of the world’s population, and is calculated using 23 qualitative and quantitative indicators from highly respected sources, as detailed in the Global Peace Index methodology, and measures the state of peace across three domains:

– the level of Societal Safety and Security,

– the extent of Ongoing Domestic and International Conflict,

– and the degree of Militarisation.

Every US presidential administration since President Nixon has maintained an understanding with Israel under which the US and Israel do not acknowledge Israel’s nuclear weapons program, and the US doesn’t pressure Israel to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty. The ambiguity has allowed the US presidents to provide military assistance without worrying about the 1976 Symington Amendment, a foreign assistance law that prohibits aid to countries that traffic in or receive nuclear enrichment equipment or technology outside of international safeguards.

Israel’s nuclear arsenal, which is estimated to be somewhere between 70 and 400 nuclear warheads, is almost always missing from the conversation in US media coverage and political discussions surrounding Iran’s nuclear program, which has never been used to develop weapons. Unlike Israel, Iran is a signatory of the NPT, and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Iranian supreme leader killed by an Israeli strike on February 28, had maintained a Fatwa banning the development of nuclear weapons.

According to Israel's Channel 12, Iran must fulfil a number of demands for the war to end.

The proposals request that Iran must "commit never to pursue nuclear weapons", pledge to dismantle nuclear facilities and to hand over the enriched amounts of uranium it possesses to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN nuclear watchdog, which is to monitor the issue going forward. According to the proposals, Iran would agree that its missile programme be limited in range and quantity. Additionally, Iran would stop funding regional proxies - Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza and the Houthis in Yemen. Iran would also be required to reopen the Strait of Hormuz so it could function as a "free maritime corridor". Closure of the strait - through which a fifth of the world's oil and gas supplies pass - has sent prices spiking and led to fears of recession in the world economy. All international sanctions would be lifted on Iran, the plan says. Full sanctions were reimposed last November after Iran suspended inspections of its nuclear facilities in the wake of Israeli and US bombing of several of its nuclear sites and military bases.

According to Press TV, Iran has listed five conditions to end the war. They include a complete halt to "aggression and assassinations by the enemy". Other Iranian conditions include "concrete mechanisms to ensure that the war is not reimposed on the Islamic Republic", though it is unclear what guarantees could be provided and which countries would take part - or monitor their observation. On the economic front, Iran is also demanding the payment of war damages and reparations, as well as the right to remain solely in charge of the Strait of Hormuz.

Between March 2 and March 16, Israeli attacks have killed at least 886 people – including 67 women, 111 children, and 38 health workers – and wounded 2,141, according to Lebanon’s Ministry of Public Health.

More than a million Lebanese have been displaced from their homes, with Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz on Monday saying he would not allow the return of people to the country’s south until the safety of Israelis is guaranteed.

Since October 7, 2023, Israeli attacks in Lebanon have killed at least 5,282 people, according to the latest figures from the Lebanese Health Ministry and historical data compiled by ACLED.

Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza has killed more than 72,000 Palestinians, and the enclave of 2.3 million people has been turned into rubble. Israel has killed more than 800 Palestinians since the latest ceasefire brokered by the United States in October 2025.

Israel and Hezbollah signed a ceasefire deal on November 26, 2024, after nearly two months of fighting and Israeli incursion in southern Lebanon. But Israel refused to pull out its troops and continued attacks in violation of the deal.

On March 12, the Israeli army expanded its forced displacement orders for residents of southern Lebanon – from the Litani River to north of the Zahrani River, about 40km (25 miles) north of the Israeli border.

According to the Norwegian Refugee Council, Israel’s sweeping evacuation orders now cover more than 1,470sq km (568sq miles), or about 14 percent of the country’s territory.

The map below shows more than 100 towns and villages across the country that are under forced evacuation orders from the Israeli military.

At its peak, 899,725 people were forcefully displaced by Israeli forces. Most of them had returned by last October, only to be forced to flee again.

Israeli attacks during these 14 months caused widespread destruction to homes and infrastructure. The World Bank estimated damage to residential buildings alone at approximately $2.8bn. About 99,000 homes were damaged or destroyed, leaving many families unable to return even after the ceasefire.

“The mullahs are desperate and scrambling,” he said at a recent Pentagon press briefing, referring to Iran’s Shiite Muslim clerics. He later recited Psalm 144, a passage of Scripture that Jews and Christians share: “Blessed be the Lord, my rock, who trains my hands for war and my fingers for battle.”

Hegseth has a history of defending the Crusades, the brutal medieval wars that pitted Christians against Muslims. In his 2020 book “American Crusade,” he wrote that those who enjoy Western civilization should “thank a crusader.” Two of his tattoos draw from crusader imagery: the Jerusalem Cross and the phrase “Deus Vult,” or “God wills it,” which Hegseth has called “the rallying cry of Christian knights as they marched to Jerusalem.”

Matthew D. Taylor, a visiting scholar at Georgetown who studies religious extremism and has been a frequent Hegseth critic, said, “The U.S. voluntarily going to war against a Muslim country with the military under the leadership of Pete Hegseth is exactly the kind of scenario that people like me were warning about before the election and throughout his appointment process.”

Taylor said Hegseth’s rhetoric and leadership “can only inflame and reinforce the fears and deep animosity that the regime in Iran has towards the U.S.”

Hegseth’s church network, the CREC, preaches a patriarchal form of Christianity, where women cannot serve in leadership, and pastors argue that homosexuality should be criminalized. Hegseth last year reposted a video in which a CREC pastor opposed women’s right to vote. Wilson, its most prominent leader, identifies as a Christian nationalist and preached at the Pentagon in February at Hegseth’s invitation.

Both Wilson and Hegseth have questioned Muslim immigration to the United States. Wilson argues the country should restrict Muslim immigration in order to remain predominantly Christian. In “American Crusade,” Hegseth lamented growing Muslim birth rates and that Muhammad was a popular boys’ name in the U.S.

As head of the armed forces, Hegseth has overseen changes that are in line with his conservative Christian worldview, including banning transgender troops, curtailing diversity initiatives and reviewing women in combat roles.

Writing in the Economist, Badr Albusaidi, the Omani minister who mediated the latest nuclear talks between Iran and the US, offered an unusually damning assessment of events leading up to the US and Israel’s bombing of Iran and the war it has triggered across the Middle East.

“It was a shock but not a surprise when on 28 February – just a few hours after the latest and most substantive talks – Israel and America again launched an unlawful military strike against the peace that had briefly appeared really possible,” Albusaidi wrote.

According to Albusaidi, Iran and the US had been on the “verge of a real deal” in nuclear negotiations held in Geneva in February, describing the talks as “substantive”.

Sources said the Iranians had agreed to highly significant concessions including a reduction and pause on their enrichment of uranium and also offered the US the chance to participate in a future civil nuclear programme, in exchange for a lifting of sanctions and unfreezing of assets.

Albusaidi blamed “Israel’s leadership” for persuading Trump to join the war on the false basis that Iran’s regime would offer an “unconditional surrender” after the assassination of its supreme leader Ali Khamenei.

“The American administration’s greatest miscalculation, of course, was allowing itself to be drawn into this war in the first place,” he wrote. “This is not America’s war, and there is no likely scenario in which both Israel and America will get what they want from it.”

In comments to reporters last Thursday, Albusaidi said the US was intent on causing irreversible damage to international law and helping Israel re-order the Middle East to its own benefit.

“Oman’s view is that the military attacks against Iran by the United States and Israel are illegal and that for as long as they continue to pursue hostilities, those states that launched this war are in breach of international law,” he said.

Though they speak of the war’s failure—the lack of strategy, the lack of preparation, the absence of an end goal, and the confusion surrounding its objectives—very few in mainstream media have taken what should have been the obvious moral position: that the war itself is criminal, unjustifiable, and illegal under international law.

That position should have been obvious the moment the first bomb was dropped over Tehran. The aggression—particularly while negotiations between Iran and the United States were underway under Omani mediation—was ethically indefensible.

Any remaining doubt should have disappeared when US-Israeli strikes hit civilian areas, including schools and residential districts in the city of Minab in southern Iran, killing hundreds of civilians, mostly children and women.

This moral silence is not new. In fact, it has often been masked by a familiar rhetorical device: the selective invocation of women’s rights. 

In nearly every US war on Arab and Muslim countries, women’s rights have featured heavily in the propaganda used to justify war. The vast majority of mainstream media organizations, think tanks, human rights groups, and activists—even those who rejected military interventionism on principle—agreed at least on that particular premise: the urgency of women’s rights.

The same scenario was repeated in Gaza during the ongoing genocide, where UN agencies estimate that women and children make up roughly 70 percent of the more than 72,200 Palestinians killed since October 2023. According to data compiled by ‘UN Women’ and Gaza’s health authorities, the total includes an estimated 33,000 women and girls.

Yet mainstream media continues to center Israeli claims about abuses of women’s rights by Hamas in Gaza, as if the tens of thousands of women killed and maimed by Israeli bombardment were not even worthy of serious consideration.

The same pattern is now repeating itself in Iran. The administration of Donald Trump—a man known for his degrading views and actions toward women—has been allowed, along with war criminal Netanyahu, to frame the war against Iran as a struggle for women’s rights and liberation.

“I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran,” Kent wrote. “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.” That sentence alone is politically explosive. It does not merely criticize tactics. It indicts the rationale of the war itself. Then Kent went further. “Early in this administration, high-ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the American media deployed a misinformation campaign that wholly undermined your America First platform and sowed pro-war sentiments to encourage a war with Iran,” he wrote. And then the bluntest line of all: “This was a lie and is the same tactic the Israelis used to draw us into the disastrous Iraq war.”

Someone in his position had access to intelligence, internal deliberations, threat assessments and strategic discussions that the public will never see in full. When such a figure concludes that there was “no imminent threat,” that judgment is not casual. It does not prove everything, but it gives weight to the suspicion that the public case for war was not merely weak, but manufactured.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Joe Kent, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, announced his resignation on Tuesday, citing his concerns about the justification for military strikes in Iran and saying he “cannot in good conscience” back the Trump administration’s war.

“Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby,” Kent said in a statement posted on social media, making claims President Donald Trump has denied.

Kent, a former Green Beret and political candidate with connections to right-wing extremists, was confirmed last July on a 52-44 vote. As head of the National Counterterrorism Center, he was in charge of an agency tasked with analyzing and detecting terrorist threats.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has issued a statement condemning the trend of Israeli forces deliberately targeting Lebanese health care workers in the ongoing war against southern Lebanon, calling it a “tragic development” in the escalating crisis.

The Israeli narrative is, as ever, “Hezbollah.” Though they offered no evidence to support the assertion, the IDF is claiming that Hezbollah is in some way using ambulances for military operations in resistance of the ongoing Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon.

Though no evidence is available of Hezbollah using ambulances to carry out military attacks, there is actually substantial evidence of the IDF using ambulances themselves to carry out ground raids against Hezbollah, with a large raid against Hezbollah in Nabi Chit involving IDF commandos in Lebanese ambulances.

Attacking ambulances and killing health care workers is, of course, illegal under international humanitarian law. Though there are some situations whereby specific ambulances can lose protected status, the blanket targeting of an entire nations ambulance stock on the notion that some of them might secretly be in league with Hezbollah is plainly not allowed. Moreover, the use of ambulances to disguise military forces, as Israel specifically did in Nabi Chit, is itself a violation of international law.

The Global Peace Index (GPI) is a report produced by the Australia-based NGO Institute for Economics & Peace (IEP) which measures the relative position of nations' and regions' peacefulness.[2] The GPI ranks 163 independent states and territories (collectively accounting for 99.7 per cent of the world's population) according to their levels of peacefulness.

The 2025 GPI indicates Iceland, Ireland, New Zealand, Austria, Switzerland, Singapore, Portugal, Denmark, Slovenia, Finland, the Czech Republic, and Japan to be the most peaceful countries, and Russia, Ukraine, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Yemen, Afghanistan, Syria, South Sudan, Israel, Mali, Myanmar, Burkina Faso, Somalia, the Central African Republic, and North Korea to be the least peaceful.

In 2017, 23 indicators were used to establish peacefulness scores for each country. The indicators were originally selected with the assistance of an expert panel in 2007 and are reviewed by the expert panel on an annual basis.

An additional aim of the GPI database is to facilitate deeper study of the concept of positive peace, or those attitudes, institutions, and structures that drive peacefulness in society. The GPI also examines relationships between peace and reliable international measures, including democracy and transparency, education and material well-being. As such, it seeks to understand the relative importance of a range of potential determinants, or "drivers", which may influence the nurturing of peaceful societies, both internally and externally.[

Researchers have determined that Positive Peace, which includes the attitudes, institutions, and structures that pre-empt conflict and facilitate functional societies, is the main driver of peace. The eight pillars of positive peace are well-functioning government, sound business environment, acceptance of the rights of others, good relations with neighbours, free flow of information, high levels of human capital, low levels of corruption, and equitable distribution of resources.