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War & Peace
3 Months of Trump's Disastrous Iran War Has Cost US Consumers $60 Billion in Extra Energy Costs
The average US household, according to Moody's, has shouldered nearly $450 in extra fuel costs due to the Republican president's unprovoked Middle East war.
May 29, 2026
Americans have made clear since President Donald Trump joined Israel in beginning an unprovoked war on Iran that they view the conflict-of-choice as damaging to their financial well-being—and that they blame the president for the higher cost of fuel since the war started in February.
On Friday, Moody's Analytics put an exact number on the heightened financial anxiety families across the country have been feeling over the past three months as Iran's closure of the Strait of Hormuz has sent fuel prices soaring: $447.19.
That's how much the average US household has had to additionally spend on fuel-related expenses since Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyanu launched their attack on February 28, Moody's told CNBC.
Altogether, Americans have spent a total of nearly $60 billion on gas, airline fares, and other related costs as the strait, a key shipping route for oil, has remained effectively closed.
According to AAA, the average price of a gallon of regular gas stands at $4.39—up close to 50% since early March. Diesel now costs $5.52 per gallon, forcing consumers to pay $20 billion more in additional expenses on groceries and other goods.
"The economy isn’t just soft, it’s struggling," Mark Zandi, Moody's chief economist, said Thursday. "The Iran war needs to end, and the Strait of Hormuz needs to be reopened soon, or recession will become more likely than not."
"Unless the war ends soon, financially pressed consumers will have no option but to turn more cautious in their spending."
As CNBC reported Friday, "higher energy costs can force consumers to raid their savings and lean more on debt to cover expenses."
Trump flatly said earlier this month that he doesn't consider Americans' financial situation "even a little bit" when it comes to the war on Iran, while National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett posited earlier this week that Americans are "spending more money" not because higher prices are forcing them to but because they're "very, very optimistic about the state of the economy." He also bragged recently that "credit card spending is through the roof"—a sign several observers took not as a positive omen for the economy but as a sign that families are being forced to take on debt to pay for gas and other essentials.
Zandi provided a reality check Friday.
"Unless the war ends soon, financially pressed consumers will have no option but to turn more cautious in their spending, threatening the already soft economy,” he told CNBC, warning that families could end up spending nearly $2,000 extra on fuel-related costs if the war continues reaches the one-year mark.
Republicans emphasized last year that Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act would give bigger tax returns to families across the country. Any benefit, said Zandi, has now been canceled out by the president's war.
On Thursday, US Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Chuck Schumer (D-NY), and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) said the White House is in denial about the fact that Americans are struggling with the impact of Trump's foreign policy decisions as the Pentagon vastly underestimates how much the conflict has cost in public statements.
The acting comptroller of the Pentagon told Congress in April that the war had cost $25 billion, increasing the estimate to $29 billion two weeks later.
The senators told the Congressional Budget Office Friday that independent analyses had put the real cost of the war at $40 billion-$50 billion.
“It is essential," said the lawmakers, "that Congress and the American public receive accurate, comprehensive estimates of the costs of the war in Iran."
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France Asks Top Prosecutor to Probe Alleged Israeli Abuse of Gaza Flotilla Members
French nationals and people from dozens of countries who were abducted from the Global Sumud Flotilla say they were beaten, tortured, and sexually assaulted by their Israeli captors.
May 29, 2026
France's government on Friday asked prosecutors to investigate Israel's alleged mistreatment of French nationals aboard the last Global Sumud Flotilla, which was intercepted earlier this month in international waters while trying to break the illegal decadeslong Israeli blockade of Gaza.
“Based on a report I requested from our Consul General in Turkey—who informed me of sexual violence, exposure to the cold, beatings, and repeated humiliation of French nationals—all of these acts are likely to constitute criminal offenses," French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot said during an interview with France Inter, adding, "I decided yesterday to refer the matter to the public prosecutor."
The move follows France's indefinite ban from its territory of far-right Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who posted a video on social media showing him joyfully humiliating detained activists, journalists, and others who were mostly kneeling with their hands tied behind their backs and their foreheads forced to the ground following the May 18 interception of flotilla vessels off the coast of Cyprus and the abduction of all aboard.
“We cannot tolerate that French nationals can be threatened, intimidated, or brutalized in this way—all the more so by a public official," Barrot said last week.
People from around 40 countries—including 37 French nationals—were seized from dozens of flotilla vessels and held in harsh conditions on what many of them called a "torture boat."
According to Global Sumud Flotilla (GSF): "Detained humanitarians, doctors, and journalists were processed one by one through a darkened shipping container. Inside, groups of three to five soldiers systematically brutalized each person who came through the door while those waiting outside listened to the screams.”
French medical professional Meriem Hadjal said she was "subjected to torture" in the container, where at least one Israeli soldier allegedly sexually assaulted her.
"We were treated like animals," Hadjal added, accusing her Israeli captors of "sadism."
GSF said Tuesday that "legal proceedings are now active in Turkey, Italy, and Spain, with Italian prosecutors opening an investigation into kidnapping and sexual assault" of flotilla members.
Numerous national governments condemned Israel's treatment of the flotilla abductees, including the United States. US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee said that Ben-Gvir "betrayed the dignity" of his nation, which receives billions of dollars in annual armed aid and diplomatic cover from the United States to carry out what many experts say is a genocidal war on Gaza.
Malaysia is reportedly preparing to initiate proceedings against Israel at the International Court of Justice over the abduction and alleged torture of its citizens, 29 of whom were aboard the flotilla. The ICJ is currently weighing a genocide case against Israel filed by South Africa and formally supported by nearly 20 nations.
“We will not remain silent, we will not stop. While the legal team gathers all documentation on violations of international law; they were kidnapped more than once, they were tortured,” Amirudin Shari, chief minister of the Malaysian state of Selangor, said during a homecoming ceremony for the flotilla members at Kuala Lumpur International Airport.
Israeli troops have physically and psychologically tortured past flotilla abductees. Dozens of members of the previous Global Sumud mission required medical attention for broken ribs, noses, and other injuries inflicted by Israeli forces. In 2010, Israeli troops killed nine activists aboard one of the first-ever Gaza flotillas, including Turkish-American teenager Furkan Doğan.
As some countries pursue justice for flotilla members, others have declined to act. In the United Kingdom, Zarah Sultana, who represents Coventry South for the socialist Your Party in Parliament, is demanding "urgent action" in the wake of abuse allegations made by British flotilla abductees.
"France is acting. Spain is showing leadership. Where is the UK government?" Sultana said Friday on X. "Nothing but a simp for Israel, a genocidal apartheid state."
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Guatemalan President Denies Deal With US for Joint Strikes on Drug Cartels
“There is no agreement authorizing foreign military operations by any country in national territory,” the office of President Bernardo Arévalo said in response to a New York Times report.
May 28, 2026
While acknowledging a request for US support in fighting drug cartels, Guatemala's president on Thursday refuted reporting by The New York Times claiming his government "has agreed to carry out joint strikes with the United States military inside its territory"—action that would violate the country's Constitution.
Citing "three people familiar with the talks," the Times reported that "President Bernardo Arévalo of Guatemala agreed to both airstrikes and other military action in a call with [US] Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth... with operations to start as early as next month."
However, Arévalo's office pushed back in a statement stressing that “there is no agreement authorizing foreign military operations by any country in national territory."
The presidential statement said that Guatemalan Defense Minister Henry Sáenz wrote to Hegseth "to request US cooperation in operations led by Guatemalan security forces against narco-trafficking organizations as part of a strategy launched in 2024."
"This request falls within the framework of existing bilateral agreements on the matter, and adheres to constitutional provisions and laws regarding cooperation agreements on civil and military security," the office added.
Arévalo's office stressed that Guatemala's Constitution stipulates that foreign military forces can only be deployed in the country if authorized by a two-thirds vote of the national Legislature.
A source from Arévalo's government told El País Thursday on condition of anonymity that the Trump administration has been exerting "great pressure" for two months.
“What they offered us is to select one or two places to bomb and televise everything," the source said. "But we have been clear that this is not going to happen. It cannot operate a US military force in the country, simply because it is unconstitutional."
Arévalo's office said it is seeking US assistance in training, strategic and tactical support, and intelligence sharing, pointing to recent actions against drug trafficking, including the capture of an arsenal in Las Cruces, Petén, the seizure of a narcotics laboratory in Ayutla, San Marcos, and the capture of numerous suspected narco-traffickers.
Asked during a Thursday press conference about the possibility of joint combat operations like those reportedly carried out by US and Ecuadorian forces in the South American nation, Arévalo claimed unfamiliarity with the details of the agreement between those two countries.
Progressive US lawmakers are demanding answers about “reports of serious human rights violations and the bombing of what appear to have been civilian facilities" in Ecuador, including a "dairy and cattle farm with no known links to armed groups or drug trafficking" where unarmed civilians were allegedly tortured.
Arévalo brushed off a suggestion that his request for US cooperation could open the door to human rights violations in Guatemala, telling reporters that "the best defense against any violation of human rights is our respect and commitment to the laws of the republic and to current legislation."
While Guatemala does suffer from serious narco-trafficking issues, many Guatemalans are wary of US intervention, given past meddling including the 1954 CIA-orchestrated overthrow of reformist President Jacobo Árbenz, which was followed by decades of right-wing repression, civil war, and a US-backed genocide against Indigenous Mayan peoples during which around 200,000 people were killed.
In March, the Trump administration lifted longstanding restrictions on arms transfers to Guatemala.
“Now, our soldiers are going to have access to modern technology, radars, night viewfinders," Sáenz told La Hora on Friday.
The defense minister said he discussed closer counter-narcotics cooperation with the United States during the “Shield of the Americas” summit, during which senior officials from over a dozen nations—most of them ruled by right-wing governments—gathered at President Donald Trump's golf resort near Miami.
In addition to Guatemala, the Trump administration has been trying to pressure other Latin American nations into launching joint military operations against narco-traffickers. President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico has vehemently rejected US requests, even as President Donald Trump has threatened "to do something" about cartels in her country.
“The epicenter of cartel violence is not Mexico, it’s the United States,” Sheinbaum defiantly declared in March. “The cartels are fueled by the United States’ demand for drugs and armed with US weapons, and thanks to the United States, they are able to orchestrate enormous bloodshed and chaos throughout Latin America.”
In January, Trump ordered the bombing and invasion of Venezuela, whose president, Nicolás Maduro, was abducted to the United States on dubious "narco-terrorism" allegations that were then significantly walked back.
Trump has also threatened to attack Colombia, Panama, and Cuba, whose people are bracing for what many observers fear is an impending US war. If Trump does order military action against Cuba, it would be the 12th country he's attacked during the course of his two White House terms. Trump also ordered the ongoing bombing campaign targeting boats his administration claims—without providing evidence—were smuggling drugs in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean. Around 200 people have been killed by the US strikes.
As Nick Turse of The Intercept reported Wednesday:
Trump has turned the Western Hemisphere into a war zone as part of what he and others have called the Donroe Doctrine. This bastardization of the 1823 Monroe Doctrine has been used to justify strikes on civilian boats in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean; an attack on Venezuela and the abduction of its president; CIA operations in Mexico; joint counter-cartel operations in Ecuador dubbed “Operation Total Extermination”; and increased military and intelligence operations elsewhere in Latin America.
Experts contend that, like the boat strikes, any airstrikes carried out against drug cartels would likely constitute illegal acts of murder, even if conducted with the permission of governments in targeted countries.
“As with the boat strikes, depending on the facts, further attacks could amount to premeditated killings outside of armed conflict, which some of us lawyers would refer to as murder,” former US State Department lawyer Brian Finucane told The New York Times on Thursday.
“Congress never authorized any of these strikes," he added. "So US personnel who participate in these actions could face consequences down the road, after the Trump administration.”
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‘A War Criminal Admitting to His Crimes’: Netanyahu Says He Ordered Military to Seize 70% of Gaza
The head of a pro-Israel lobbying group called it "a blatant violation of the ceasefire and clear undermining of any plan for post-conflict Gaza."
May 28, 2026
As Israel expands its control over the Gaza Strip in violation of last year's ceasefire agreement, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Thursday that he had ordered the military to take over even more territory.
During a conference at the Ein Prat pre-military academy in an illegal Israeli settlement in the occupied West Bank, the prime minister acknowledged that Israel has gradually expanded its control over Gaza since the ceasefire agreement was implemented in October.
"We are now in 60% of the Gaza Strip, more or less. We were at 50%; now we’ve moved to 60%," he told the crowd.
"My directive," he continued, "is to move to—"
Members of the audience then interrupted with shouts of "100! 100!"
"Wait, let's go in order," Netanyahu responded. "First 70%. Let's start with that."
The Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor has said Israel's expansion of control in Gaza and construction of fortified military sites “directly contradicts the requirements of the second phase of the ceasefire agreement" and is creating conditions of "de facto annexation."
That agreement required Israeli forces to withdraw behind a so-called "yellow line" that left the military occupying about 53% of the country. Even that occupation was meant to be temporary, with later stages of the agreement involving a full pullout of Israeli troops as Hamas and other militant groups in the strip disarm.
But in recent months, the opposite has happened. The Israel Defense Forces have gradually pushed the yellow line deeper into Palestinian territory to the point where it encompasses more than 60% of the coastal strip, leaving Palestinians near the yellow line to wake up and learn they are in an "open-fire zone" where they can be shot on sight.
According to data from the United Nations Human Rights Office shared with Reuters on Wednesday, 152 Palestinians—comprising 102 men, 15 women, and 35 children—had been killed near the boundary during the ceasefire period up to February 5, which the office's head said raises "serious concerns that the Israeli army is shooting at and killing presumed civilians simply on the basis of their proximity to the so-called yellow line."
Netanyahu's remark follows Israel's orders on Wednesday for more than 200,000 residents of southern Lebanon to forcibly evacuate north of the Zahrani River despite an ongoing ceasefire that began last month.
Israel has systematically razed villages across southern Lebanon since the beginning of March, gradually pushing northward to the point where it now effectively controls about a fifth of the country's territory.
Those ordered to flee their homes on Wednesday joined more than 1 million Lebanese already forcibly displaced by Israel's forced expulsion orders and bombardments. More than 3,200 Lebanese have been killed, including hundreds of women and children.
Israel's far-right settler movement—represented in the Netanyahu government by figures like Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich—speaks openly about ethnically cleansing Gaza and Lebanon of their residents to make way for permanent Israeli settlers, in a similar fashion to the intensifying annexation of the West Bank.
On Wednesday, Defense Minister Israel Katz said that Israel was pushing for the mass “voluntary migration” of Palestinians from Gaza and said the government would implement a plan for it “at the right time and in the right manner."
Human rights groups have said that the creation of unlivable conditions in Gaza to push its residents to leave would amount to the war crime of forced transfer.
Itay Epshtain, an Israeli expert in international law and the law of armed conflict, said Katz had "publicly committed himself to the mass deportation of Palestinians from Gaza" and that "members of Israel’s government openly endorsed conduct in gross and systemic breach of peremptory norms of international law."
Netanyahu, meanwhile, has previously expressed sympathy for the idea of "Greater Israel," which involves the expansion of the nation's borders to conquer all or part of current-day Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Egypt, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia in accordance with Biblical descriptions.
The International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu for war crimes and crimes against humanity during Israel's genocidal military campaign in Gaza, and is reportedly taking actions against Smotrich and Ben-Gvir as well.
Dylan Williams, the vice president for government affairs at the Center for International Policy, said that Netanyahu's pledge on Thursday to further expand Israel's territorial control in Gaza was "a war criminal admitting to his crimes."
Ilan Goldberg, the senior vice president of the pro-Israel lobbying group JStreet, said plans to expand were "a blatant violation of the ceasefire and clear undermining of any plan for post-conflict Gaza."
"Yes, Hamas needs to disarm," he said. "But Israel cannot be launching plans to retake all of Gaza."
Owen Jones, a British journalist, lamented the lack of coverage of the slow-motion ethnic cleansing in the Western press.
"Israel doesn't try to hide its crimes. It broadcasts them to the world, knowing it has impunity," he said on Thursday. "Netanyahu boasts of annexing Gaza. Yesterday, his defense minister said the plan was to remove Gaza's population. No front page headlines. No Western denunciations."
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