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The remains of the final Israeli hostage being held in Gaza has finally been recovered following a dramatic last-ditch effort, Israel said Monday — well over two years after the Israel-Hamas war broke out. Police officer Ran Gvili’s body was located and identified following a “large-scale operation” in a cemetery in northern Gaza over the weekend, according to Israel’s Defense Force. “There are officially no more hostages in captivity in Gaza,” the IDF confirmed in statement in X. Gvili’s body will now be returned to his family in the Jewish state for burial, officials said. Israeli teams started combing through...

More than 36,500 killed in deadliest two days in Iran protest crackdown: report. More than 36,500 Iranians were allegedly killed during a brutal, two-day crackdown against anti-regime protesters, the deadliest in the history of the Islamic Republic, according to a new report. The latest estimates paint a horrific image of the violence that fell across Iran on Jan. 8 and 9 when Tehran’s security forces opened fire on thousands of civilians protesting the government’s rule and failure to fix the nation’s ailing economy. Despite downplaying the death toll in recent weeks, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ own records allegedly acknowledge...

The U.S. is continuing to build up its military presence in the Middle East ahead of a possible attack on Iran. The USS Abraham Lincoln and its Carrier Strike Group (CSG) is now in the Indian Ocean, a U.S. Navy official told The War Zone on Thursday. The CSG was in the South China Sea until U.S. President Donald Trump ordered it moved west. In addition, more cargo jets and aerial refueling tankers have arrived in the region. Trump on Thursday said a large naval presence is heading to the region. These movements come as Trump has threatened to strike...

The ‘nothing ever happens’ people seem to be, sadly, correct about Iran thus far, although one hopes that the brutal Islamic Republic might still be overthrown. It’s hard to know what to think, and at times like this we all turn to the experts to give their analysis of what might happen and what might follow. Foreign policy expertise is hard work, because it requires both a specific knowledge of the national culture and the relative strength of personalities. Because there are so many factors involved, analysts frequently get things completely wrong, the Iraq and Afghanistan debacles being the notorious...

Per capita per unit time, suppose around 30,000 Iranians were massacred in just a couple of days. Let’s contrast that with Gazan civilian deaths, which may be of the same order of magnitude relative to population, but spread over two years. Let’s put Gazan deaths at 50,000 (a likely overestimate). Iran: 167 deaths per million per day (30,000 of 90 million killed in 2 days) Gaza: 34 deaths per million per day (50,000 of 2 million killed in 2 years) Even this is not a fair comparison. Per-capita rates implicitly treat all 90 million Iranians as equally at risk as...

ranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has been transferred to an underground bunker in Iran after senior officials in the country’s security forces assessed that concerns are growing over a possible American strike, Iran International reported Saturday. Khamenei's son, Masoud, has assumed governing authority. Meanwhile, Iran Times, a newspaper identified with the IRGC, quoted the Iranian Defense Ministry spokesperson as saying that Iran’s defensive and missile capabilities have become more effective, and are quantitatively and qualitatively superior compared to what they were during Operation Rising Lion in June 2025. At the same time, levels of preparedness and tension ahead of...

Donald Trump’s strangely artificial Board of Peace event in Davos on Thursday looked like a Hollywood rendering of an international summit. Everything was too slick, faintly uncanny. Like an AI-generated image, it was photo-real yet failed the most basic human glance test. Too perfect. No wabi-sabi. The first tell was visual: the set, complete with a crisp new institutional logo: a globe on a shield, flanked by olive branches. It carried the unmistakable whiff of Grok or ChatGPT, but the strangeness went deeper than design. The speeches themselves were weirdly messianic and utopian. The most peculiar part was the show-within-a-show:...

CAIRO (AP) — Desperate Palestinians at a garbage dump in a Gaza neighborhood dug with their bare hands for plastic items to burn to keep warm in the cold and damp winter in the enclave, battered by two years of the Israel-Hamas war. The scene in the Muwasi area of the city of Khan Younis contrasted starkly with the vision of the territory projected by world leaders gathered in Davos, Switzerland, where they inaugurated U.S. President Donald Trump’s Board of Peace that will oversee Gaza. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Trump claimed that “record levels” of humanitarian aid...

Pink Floyd co-founder Rogers Waters defended the murderous regime in Iran, one week after defending former Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro, calling claims that Iran has been a leading sponsor of terrorism around the world “nonsense.” “The government sent the police out to protect those grocers, those business owners, those ordinary working people in Iran, ok? And they were attacked by a gang of armed thugs who murdered, we believe, armed thugs, probably organized by MI6 and the CIA,” Waters said about the deadly response from Iran’s government to protesters in an appearance this weekend on Piers Morgan Uncensored. Water went...

Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Saturday said authorities “must break the back of the seditionists” and blamed US President Donald Trump for “casualties” after the Islamic Republic’s bloody crackdown on a protest wave against the country’s clerical authorities. Iranian authorities have repeatedly blamed the US for the mass demonstrations they have called “riots” and “terrorist” operations. Trump had threatened to strike Iran if it did not stop killing protesters, but starting Wednesday sounded a more conciliatory tone, saying he was assured the killings would stop. In a speech broadcast by state television to mark a religious holiday, Khamenei...

Democratic Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib went on an emotional rant about the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) recruitment posts on social media during a Friday shadow hearing in Minnesota. The hearing, chaired by Democratic Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar and Democratic Washington Rep. Pramila Jayapal, discussed the recent heightened presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations in Minnesota and the fatal shooting of Renee Good. When it was Tlaib’s turn to speak, she used her time to passionately suggest that recent DHS social media posts evoked “neo-Nazi” and “white nationalist” imagery. Tlaib held up a printed Jan. 9 social media...

Hezbollah leader Naim Qassem has declared that the terror group will not give up its weapons, warning that such a move would mean "the end of Lebanon." According to Qassem, Hezbollah is prepared to pay additional prices in order to preserve its military capabilities. "The weapons in our hands are meant to defend ourselves, our resistance, our people, and our homeland," he said. Qassem also claimed that relinquishing the weapons would weaken Lebanon and advance Israel’s strategic objectives. Warning the Lebanese government against implementing plans to disarm militias, Qassem claimed such plans are being promoted under pressure from the United...

The White House announced on Jan. 16 the names of members appointed to the Gaza Board of Peace, which President Donald Trump created as part of phase two of a U.S.-backed plan to end the war in Gaza. Among the “founding executive board” members are U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, presidential special envoy Steve Witkoff, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. The board also includes private equity executive Marc Rowan, World Bank President Ajay Banga, and U.S. national security adviser Robert Gabriel, according to a White House statement. The board, to be chaired by...

Iran is once again on fire. For the better part of the last month, Iranians have been taking to the streets in large numbers to demand change. The proximate cause for the protests was spiraling inflation, but as the crowds grew, Iranians clamored for the end of the Islamic regime. Despite the avalanche of speculation, no one knows what will happen in Iran. That is the nature of popular uprisings, they are unpredictable. To many analysts, journalists, pundits, and academics, this round of protests feels different from previous ones in 2009, 2017, 2019, and 2022—and maybe they are. Or maybe...

After more than 2,000 Druze were killed in a brutal massacre, Sheikh Hikmat al-Hijri says Israel’s airstrikes halted the bloodshed, condemns Syria’s rulers as jihadists and calls for an independent Druze entity in Sweida

Iranian Activist Masih Alinejad Slams Ana Kasparian's Ridiculous Iran Comments | WATCH Iranian activist Masih Alinejad torches Piers Morgan for platforming regime-apologist drivel amid Iran's bloody crackdown, because nothing says 'uncensored' like fueling tyrants' excuses to kill.

President Trump was briefed on new options for military strikes in Iran, a senior U.S. official confirmed Sunday. Mr. Trump appeared to lay out his red line for action on Friday when he warned that if the Iranian government began "killing people like they have in the past, we would get involved." "We'll be hitting them very hard where it hurts," he said at the White House. "And that doesn't mean boots on the ground, but it means hitting them very, very hard where it hurts." On social media, Mr. Trump offered his support for the protesters, saying that "Iran...

Hussam al-Astal, the commander of an anti-Hamas armed militia that operates in the eastern Khan Yunis area, published a video in which he claims that his men eliminated the head of the investigations department in Hamas's Khan Yunis police. The assassination occurred when the department head was shot at close range, close to his home in the Hamas-controlled al-Mawasi area. Hamas initially blamed the Shin Bet for the elimination. In the recorded video, Hussam al-Astal shows off a gun that he claims was taken from the target. He harshly calls out Hamas and claims, "This is a man who harmed...

An Iranian protester told KAN Reshet Bet that many Iranians admire Netanyahu and Israeli strikes, while blaming economic collapse, repression, and inflation for the unrest. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is currently the most popular person in Iran, a Tehran resident told KAN Reshet Bet on Wednesday... They also told KAN that Iranians were "impressed" by Israeli strikes on Iran in June, as part of Operation Rising Lion, as the air force "focused only on regime infrastructure and did not harm civilians." ...The Iranian is an opponent of the Islamic Republic regime and has participated in demonstrations over the past 11...

President Donald Trump is set to be briefed by top aides this week as he plots out the level of his response to the Iranian regime's brutal crackdown against citizen-led protests. Trump's top military and diplomatic staffers, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, and Joint Chiefs Chair Gen. Dan Caine, are anticipated to be present at the meeting, per the Wall Street Journal. The meeting comes as Trump is understood to be considering further US involvement in the region, but no final decisions are expected to emerge until after Tuesday's scheduled meeting. Putting U.S. troops'...