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'Diplomacy, Not Catastrophe' Needed as Israel Appears Poised for US-Enabled War on Iran
"It would be a catastrophic mistake to be led into a war by the same neocons that claimed the Iraq war would be a cakewalk," warned one group.
Jun 12, 2025
Israel is likely preparing to bomb Iran even as the Trump administration works toward a nuclear deal with Tehran, stoking fears of Iranian retaliation against U.S. military bases and other American or allied sites in an already inflamed region, and prompting calls for urgent diplomacy to avoid war.
U.S. and European officials told Western media Thursday that Israel is preparing to unilaterally attack Iran as negotiations between Washington and Tehran draw closer to a preliminary framework for an agreement to curb Iran's nuclear development. The government of fugitive Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu opposes any such deal.
"If this escalates, innocent lives will be caught in the crossfire in Iran and across the region."
American intelligence agencies have periodically concluded over the past two decades that Iran—which has not started a war since the 19th century but supports proxy attacks on Israel—is not developing nuclear weapons.
While President Donald Trump—who has repeatedly threatened to bomb Iran if a nuclear deal is not reached—has publicly opposed an Israeli attack on Iran, numerous observers are warning that Tehran and its proxies would very likely view the U.S. as complicit in any such action.
"If Israel does strike Iran in the next days or hours, and even if they do so in defiance of Trump's warnings, the likelihood that the Iranians will perceive it as an independent act by Israel in defiance of Trump is essentially zero," Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, said Wednesday on social media. "There is no plausible deniability."
Vahid Razavi, an Iranian American advocate for human rights and ethics in technology and founder of ParentsPlea.com, told Common Dreams Thursday that "Israel will only attack Iran with the support and blessing of the United States."
"The 'good cop/bad cop' game that Trump and Israel are playing in the region is a distraction," Razavi added. "There is no substantial difference in U.S. and Israeli policy toward Iran."
Iran has threatened an "unprecedented response" if Israel attacks.
"In case of any conflict, the U.S. must leave the region because all its bases are within our range, and we will target all of them in the host countries regardless," Iranian Defense Minister Aziz Nasirzadeh said Thursday during a televised address.
Nasirzadeh's remarks followed a Wednesday threat by an official from Ansar Allah that the Yemeni rebel group also known as the Houthis is "at the highest level of preparedness for any possible American escalation against us."
"Any escalation against the Islamic Republic of Iran is also dangerous and will drag the entire region into the abyss of war," the unnamed official told Newsweek.
The Trump administration stands accused of war crimes in Yemen amid an escalation of the decadeslong U.S. bombing of the country as part of the so-called War on Terror. Successive U.S. administrations also backed a Saudi-led war on Yemen that has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, while Israeli and British forces have bombed the country since 2024 in retaliation for Houthi missile attacks on Red Sea shipping and Israel.
Last October, Iran launched a limited missile strike on Israel in response to the assassinations of Hassan Nasrallah, who led the Lebanon-based resistance group Hezbollah, and Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh. This prompted retaliatory Israeli attacks on targets in and around Tehran, including the headquarters of the elite Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.
The prospect of another Israeli attack on Iran prompted the U.S. on Wednesday to order the evacuation of some diplomats from Iraq and call for the voluntary departure of American military families from the region.
Meanwhile, numerous observers stressed the need for a diplomatic resolution to avoid a wider war in the Middle East—and possibly beyond.
"We must face the reality: if this escalates, innocent lives will be caught in the crossfire in Iran and across the region, and at home there may be new, dire threats to the civil liberties of our community," the National Iranian American Council (NIAC) said in a statement Thursday.
"We are working to ensure our leaders hear us loud and clear: We need diplomacy, not catastrophe," NIAC added. "We are organizing multiple actions in the coming days against a potential war and in support of peace and ask for your support to fuel this vital effort."
Former Democratic Ohio state Sen. Nina Turner succinctly said Wednesday: "No war with Iran. No war, period."Keep ReadingShow Less
When Will Western Support for Israeli Genocide Finally Crack?
The U.S., U.K., Canadian, and other governments remain deeply complicit in Israel's atrocities and violations of international law. But the rhetoric is shifting and protest movement is growing louder.
Jun 05, 2025
After 20 months of horror in Gaza, political rhetoric in Western countries is finally starting to shift—but will words translate into action? And what exactly can other countries do when the United States still shields Israel from efforts to enforce international law, as it did at the UN Security Council on June 5th?
On May 30th, Tom Fletcher, the UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, accused Israel of committing a war crime by using starvation as a weapon against the people of Gaza. In a searing interview with the BBC, Fletcher explained how Israel’s policy of forced starvation fits into its larger strategy of ethnic cleansing.
“We’re seeing food set on the borders and not being allowed in, when there is a population on the other side of the border that is starving,” Fletcher said. “And we’re hearing Israeli ministers say that is to put pressure on the population of Gaza.”
If the so-called international community were really “very, very clear on that,” the United States and Israel would not be able to wage a campaign of genocide for more than 600 days while the world looks on in horror.
He was referring to statements like the one from Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who openly admitted that the starvation policy is meant to leave Palestinians “totally despairing, understanding that there’s no hope and nothing to look for," so that they will submit to ethnic cleansing from Gaza and a “new life in other places.”
Fletcher called on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to stop this campaign of forced displacement, and insisted, “we would expect governments all over the world to stand for international humanitarian law. The international community is very, very clear on that.”
Palestinians might wish that were true. If the so-called international community were really “very, very clear on that,” the United States and Israel would not be able to wage a campaign of genocide for more than 600 days while the world looks on in horror.
Some Western governments have finally started using stronger language to condemn Israel’s actions. But the question is: Will they act? Or is this just more political theater to appease public outrage while the machinery of destruction grinds on?
This moment should force a reckoning: How is it possible that the U.S. and Israel can perpetrate such crimes with impunity? What would it take for U.S. allies to ignore pressure from Washington and enforce international law?
If impoverished, war-ravaged Yemen can single-handedly deny Israel access to the Suez Canal and the Red Sea, and drive the Israeli port of Eilat into bankruptcy, more powerful countries can surely isolate Israel diplomatically and economically, protect the Palestinians and end the genocide. But they haven’t even tried.
Some are now making tentative moves. On May 19th, the U.K., France, and Canada jointly condemned Israel’s actions as “intolerable,” “unacceptable,” “abhorrent,” “wholly disproportionate,” and “egregious.” The U.K. suspended trade talks with Israel, and they promised “further concrete actions,” including targeted sanctions, if Israel does not end its offensive in Gaza and lift its restrictions on humanitarian aid.
The three countries publicly committed to the Arab Plan for the reconstruction of Gaza, and to building an international consensus for it at the UN’s High-Level Two-State Solution Conference in New York on June 17th-20th, which is to be co-chaired by France and Saudi Arabia.
They also committed to recognizing Palestinian statehood. Of the UN’s 193 member states, 147 already recognize Palestine as a sovereign nation, including ten more since Israel launched its genocide in Gaza. President Emmanuel Macron, under pressure from the leftist La France Insoumise party, says France may officially recognize Palestine at the UN conference in June.
Canada’s new prime minister, Mark Carney, claimed during his election campaign that Canada already had an arms embargo against Israel, but was swiftly challenged on that. Canada has suspended a small number of export licenses, but it’s still supplying parts for Israel’s 39 F-35s, and for 36 more that Israel has ordered from Lockheed Martin.
A General Dynamics factory in Quebec is the sole supplier of artillery propellant for deadly 155 mm artillery shells used in Gaza, and it took an emergency campaign by human rights groups in August 2024 to force Canada to scrap a new contract for that same factory to supply Israel with 50,000 high-explosive mortar shells.
The U.K. is just as compromised. The new Labour government elected in July 2024 quickly restored funding to UNRWA, as Canada has. In September, it suspended 30 out of 350 arms export licenses to Israel, mostly for parts used in warplanes, helicopters, drones, and targeting. But, like Canada, the U.K. still supplies many other parts that end up in Israeli F-35s bombing Gaza.
Declassified UK published a report on the F-35 program that revealed how it compromises the sovereignty of partner countries. While the U.K. produces 15% of the parts that go into every F-35, the U.S. military takes immediate ownership of the British-made parts, stores them on British air force bases, and then orders the U.K. to ship them to Texas for use in new planes or to Israel and other countries as spare parts for planes already in use.
Shipping these planes and parts to Israel is in clear violation of U.S., U.K. and other countries’ arms export laws. British campaigners argue that if the U.K. is serious about halting genocide, it must stop all shipments of F-35 parts sent to Israel–directly or indirectly. With huge marches in London drawing hundreds of thousands of people, and protests on June 17th at three factories that make F-35 parts, activists will keep applying more pressure until they result in the “concrete actions” the British government has promised.
Denmark is facing a similar conflict. Amnesty International, Oxfam, Action Aid, and Al-Haq are in court suing the Danish government and the nation's largest weapons company, Terma, to stop them from sending Israel critical bomb release mechanisms and other F-35 parts.
These disputes over Canadian artillery propellant, Danish bomb-release mechanisms, and the multinational nature of the F-35 program highlight how any country that provides even small but critical parts or materials for deadly weapons systems must ensure they are not used to commit war crimes.
In turn, all steps to cut off Israel’s weapons supplies can help to save Palestinian lives, and the full arms embargo that the UN General Assembly voted for in September 2024 can be instrumental in ending the genocide if more countries will join it. As Sam Perlo-Freeman of Campaign Against the Arms Trade said of the U.K.’s legal obligation to stop shipping F-35 parts,
“These spare parts are essential to keep Israel’s F-35s flying, and therefore stopping them will reduce the number of bombings and killings of civilians Israel can commit. It is as simple as that.”
Germany was responsible for 30% of Israel’s arms imports between 2019 and 2023, largely through two large warship deals. Four German-built Saar 6 corvettes, Israel’s largest warships, are already bombarding Gaza, while ThyssenKrupp is building three new submarines for Israel in Kiel.
But no country has provided a greater share of the tools of genocide in Gaza than the United States, including nearly all the warplanes, helicopters, bombs, and air-to-ground missiles that are destroying Gaza and killing Palestinians. The U.S. government has a legal responsibility to stop sending all these weapons, which Israel uses mainly to commit industrial-scale war crimes, up to and including genocide, against the people of Palestine, as well as to attack its other neighbors.
Trump’s military and political support for Israel’s genocide stands in stark contradiction to the image he promotes of himself as a peacemaker—and which his most loyal followers believe in.
Yet there are signs that Trump is beginning to assert some independence from Netanyahu and from the war hawks in his own party and inner circle. He refused to visit Israel on his recent Middle East tour, he’s negotiating with Iran despite Israeli opposition, and he removed Mike Waltz as National Security Advisor for engaging in unauthorized warmongering against Iran with Netanyahu. His decisions to end the Yemen bombing campaign and lift sanctions on Syria suggest an unpredictable but real departure from the neocon playbook, as do his negotiations with Russia and Iran.
Has Netanyahu finally overplayed his hand? His campaign of ethnic cleansing, territorial expansion in pursuit of a biblical “Greater Israel,” the deliberate starvation of Gaza, and his efforts to entangle the U.S. in a war with Iran have pushed Israel’s longtime allies to the edge. The emerging rift between Trump and Netanyahu could mark the beginning of the end of the decades-long blanket of impunity the U.S. has wrapped around Israel. It could also give other governments the political space to respond to Israeli war crimes without fear of U.S. retaliation.
The huge and consistent protests throughout Europe are putting pressure on Western governments to take action. A new survey conducted in Britain, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy and Spain shows that very few Europeans—between 6% and 16% in each country—find Israel’s assault on Gaza proportionate or justified.
For now, however, the Western governments remain deeply complicit in Israel’s atrocities and violations of international law. The rhetoric is shifting—but history will judge this moment not by what governments say, but by what they do.
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US Strikes on Yemen Oil Port That Killed 84 Civilians Called 'Apparent War Crime'
Human Rights Watch said the April bombings, which also wounded more than 150 civilians, demonstrated "a callous disregard for civilian lives" and should be investigated.
Jun 04, 2025
The April bombing of a Yemeni oil port by U.S. forces that killed and wounded hundreds of civilians and disrupted the delivery of lifesaving aid to one of the world's most war-torn nations was "an apparent war crime" that should be investigated, a leading international human rights group said Wednesday.
On April 17, a series of U.S. airstrikes destroyed the Ras Isa oil Port on the Red Sea north of Hodeidah, killing 84 people and wounding more than 150 others, according to first responders, local officials, and a probe by the U.K.-based independent monitor Airwars.
The bombings were part of the Trump administration's response to resistance by Houthi rebels to Israel's annihilation of Gaza, which has included ballistic missile strikes targeting Israel and Red Sea shipping related to the key U.S. ally.
"The U.S. has been implicated in laws-of-war violations in Yemen since it began 'targeted killing operations' in 2002."
"U.S. forces took action to eliminate this source of fuel for the Iran-backed Houthi terrorists and deprive them of illegal revenue that has funded Houthi efforts to terrorize the entire region for over 10 years," U.S. Central Command said at the time, adding that "this strike was not intended to harm the people of Yemen."
However, the first four U.S. strikes on the port happened while workers were still on the job. Officials said first responders including paramedics and rescue workers who rushed to the scene were killed in subsequent strikes, known as "double taps" in military parlance.
Human Rights Watch said Wednesday that of the strikes' victims, "49 were people who worked at the port, several were truck drivers, and two were civil defense personnel. Others may have been workers' family members. Three were identified as children."
"The list contained one person identified as a 'colonel,' but who was not necessarily a military member," HRW continued. "The Hodeidah branch of the government-owned Yemen Oil Company posted photographs of 49 employees they said were killed."
HRW Yemen and Bahrain researcher Niku Jafarnia said Wednesday that "the U.S. government's decision to strike Ras Isa Port, a critical entry point for aid in Yemen, while hundreds of workers were present demonstrates a callous disregard for civilians' lives."
"At a time when the majority of Yemenis don't have adequate access to food and water, the attack's impact on humanitarian aid could be enormous, particularly after Trump administration aid cutbacks," Jafarnia added.
U.S. airstrikes on Yemen, which averaged around a dozen per month during the final year of the Biden administration, soared to more than 60 in March under President Donald Trump, according to the Yemen Data Project.
Other recent U.S. massacres in Yemen include a series of March 15 strikes on residential areas in the capital Sanaa that killed at least 53 people including numerous women and children, an April 20 strike on the Farwah market in the Shuub neighborhood of the capital Sanaa that killed at least 12 people and wounded 30 others, and the April 28 bombing of a detention center for African migrants in the city of Sa'ada that left at least 68 people dead and dozens more wounded.
These strikes came after President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth loosened the U.S. military's rules of engagement to allow the bombing of a wider range of targets and people. In March, Hegseth announced that the Pentagon's Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Office and Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, which was established during the Biden administration, would be closed.
Hegseth—who has supported pardons for convicted U.S. war criminals—lamented during his Senate confirmation hearing that "restrictive rules of engagement" have "made it more difficult to defeat our enemies," who "should get bullets, not attorneys," according to his 2024 book The War on Warriors.
The U.S has been bombing and conducting ground raids in Yemen since the beginning of the so-called War on Terror launched by the George W. Bush administration in response to the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States. Airwars says hundreds of Yemeni civilians have been killed in 181 declared U.S. actions since 2002.
In 2015, then-President Barack Obama announced that U.S. forces would provide "logistical and intelligence support" to the Saudi-led coalition intervening in the ongoing Yemeni civil war on behalf of the national government as it battled Iran-backed Houthi rebels. That assistance included refueling Saudi and Emirati warplanes that were bombing Yemeni targets and killing thousands of civilians while a blockade fueled famine and illness that claimed hundred of thousands of lives.
"The U.S. has been implicated in laws-of-war violations in Yemen since it began 'targeted killing operations' in 2002 against Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula," HRW said Wednesday. "Those strikes continued until at least 2019 and killed many civilians, including 12 people attending a wedding in 2013. To Human Rights Watch's knowledge, the U.S. has never acknowledged or provided compensation for civilians harmed in this or other unlawful attacks."
The Pentagon has only acknowledged 13 civilian deaths caused by U.S. military action in Yemen since 2002. The Trump administration has been especially tight-lipped about civilian casualties resulting from its operations, a stance some critics have called ironic given that top administration officials including Hegseth discussed highly sensitive plans for attacking Yemen on a Signal group chat in which a journalist was inadvertently included.
"The recent U.S. airstrikes in Yemen are just the latest causing civilian harm in the country over the past two decades," Jafarnia said. "The Trump administration should reverse past U.S. practice and provide prompt compensation to those unlawfully harmed."
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