Is Another 9/11-Scale False Flag Possible as Trump and Netanyahu Get Desperate?

Kevin Barrett • September 5, 2026

https://www.unz.com/kbarrett/is-another-9-11-scale-false-flag-possible-as-trump-and-netanyahu-get-desperate/

The Genocidal Zionist Entity faces a crisis. Its Epstein-syndicate-blackmailed asset Trump is deep underwater in the polls. And Israel’s war on Iran, fought using the hijacked US military, is shaping up as a catastrophic defeat.

The US desperately needs to end the Iran war and stop the bleeding. American allies are the biggest victims of the slow-motion economic train wreck caused by the Resistance Axis’s blockade of West Asian oil and fertilizer exports.

In Asia, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan have nearly exhausted their strategic energy stockpiles. And in Europe, whose industrial economy was crippled by the US demolition of the Nordstream pipeline, energy supply shocks tied to the Hormuz shutdown are making matters even worse. Europe is beginning to face escalating shortages of diesel, jet fuel, and heating fuel.

America’s West Asian vassals are in equally dire shape. The fragile economies of Jordan and Egypt have been hit with fertilizer shortages and skyrocketing energy bills. And of course America’s petrodollar slaves—the UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain, Saudia Arabia, and Qatar—are being strangled economically by the Resistance Axis’s control of Hormuz and Bab al-Mandab.

If those increasingly desperate countries try to live on their savings, by cashing in their American bonds, the bond market will implode. The AI bubble, consisting of vast investments without much return, will pop. Economic Armageddon will ensue.

And then there is the petrodollar issue. US bases in those countries have been devastated by Iranian drone and rocket fire, and most have been all but abandoned. If the Americans don’t make painful concessions to Iran, they will be completely driven out of the region. That threatens the petrodollar—and with it, the planet-girdling ring of US bases paid for by the “exorbitant privilege” that allows US oligarchs to print unlimited currency and force the world to accept it.

So the US is faced with a choice between surrendering to Iran and limiting the damage to its empire, or escalating towards apocalyptic destruction. Surrendering while claiming victory is clearly the best option from the US perspective.

But the Israelis see things differently. For them, the war with Iran is existential. If the US surrenders, and Iran emerges stronger than ever, a revitalized Resistance Axis will emerge at the same moment that global and US public opinion are turning decisively against the Genocidal Entity. That will not only put an end to the endless expansionism of the Greater Israel project, but likely lead to the liberation of all of Occupied Palestine.

Historically, when “Israel” senses an existential threat, and the US doesn’t care, terrible things happen. In 1963, US president Kennedy vowed to shut down Israel’s nuclear weapons program. Israel’s founding father Ben Gurion, outraged by Kennedy’s intransigence, resigned as Prime Minister in June 1963 and largely disappeared from view. Zionist-controlled sources like Gemini claim Ben Gurion dedicated himself “to a quiet life centered around study and writing.” But many historians, following Michael Collins Piper and Laurent Guyénot, believe Ben Gurion “went dark” to devote himself to orchestrating Kennedy’s assassination. Following the JFK coup d’état, Lyndon Johnson, an Israeli asset, greenlighted Zionist nukes, the 1967 war of expansion, and even the attempted murder of 293 American sailors aboard the USS Liberty.

Even more terrible things happened in 2001, when American indifference to the Greater Israel project was allowing the Zionist entity to drift towards disaster. The “Israeli” economy was dead-in-the-water due to the dotcom bust, settlers were emigrating rather than immigrating, and a steady stream of Resistance fighters and martyrs were making life miserable for the settlers who chose to remain. Demographic forecasts suggested that Zionism was doomed, while the region was increasingly united against the Genocidal Entity—in part due to surging Islamic fervor and solidarity.

“Israel” responded by orchestrating the false flag 9/11 attack on America. Mendaciously attributed to Muslims, the massacre at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon stampeded America into a war designed to destroy “seven countries in five years”—namely, the seven countries that Israel viewed as its enemies. It also unleashed a multigenerational wave of “permanent Islamophobia” in service to Israel’s long-term interests.

The JFK and 9/11 coups illustrate Israel’s willingness to use spectacular violence against the United States in order to fend off what it views as existential crises. Today, looming defeat in the Israeli-US war on Iran represents, for Israel, the mother of all existential crises. A spectacularly bloody attack on the American homeland, attributed to Iran, might stampede the US into the kind of escalation that Israel desperately desires.

Killing Trump?

Israel might assassinate Trump and blame Iran. The media hue and cry—“we must finish the job our martyred president Trump started”—could conceivably move US public opinion in the direction of supporting a ground invasion of Iran.

Israel has clearly been paving the road toward this scenario. Netanyahu has consistently terrorized Trump with claims that Iranians are lurking behind every bush waiting to kill him. Most recently, Israel’s bogus claim that Iran was planning to shoot down Air Force One convinced Trump to sneak out of that plane in a catering container, leaving his advisors and press corps aboard the jet as bait for anti-Trump missiles.

The cowardly American president has repeatedly threatened that if Iran kills him it will be “wiped off the face of the Earth” or “blown up” or “decimated and destroyed.” In one especially unhinged tweet, Trump ranted:

“1000 Missiles are Locked and Loaded and aimed at the Islamic Republic of Iran, with thousands of more to immediately follow, should the Iranian Government act on its threat, pronounced in many corners of the Globe, to assassinate, or attempt to assassinate, the sitting President of the United States of America, in this case, ME! Orders have already been given, and the U.S. Military is ready, willing, and able, for a one year period of time, subject to extension, to completely decimate and destroy all areas of Iran – PRAISE BE TO ALLAH!”

In these and many other similar statements, Trump seems to be all but begging for the Israelis to assassinate him and blame Iran! Is the US president really that stupid?

I submit that Trump appears to be suffering from a peculiar variety of Stockholm Syndrome, a psychiatric diagnosis that describes when a captive or abuse victim forms a mindlessly slavish bond of loyalty or affection toward their captor or abuser. In this case, the abusive captor is Israel, which holds Epstein-style kompromat on Trump. But it goes beyond blackmail: Trump’s entire career has been spent fronting for Jewish organized crime. His hotels and casinos were money laundries and pump-and-dumps and bust-outs. His TV shows, including Miss Teen USA, Miss USA, and Miss Universe pageants, had Epstein-class Jewish mobsters as producers. There is a reason that kosher nostra kingpins Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff serve as Trump’s handlers. And there is a reason that Netanyahu holds the keys to the White House and can barge in and start wars whenever he likes.

Trump feels so fearful and helpless in the hands of Israel and its Jewish mob that he overcompensates by ranting about Iran wanting to kill him, when in fact he knows, at a deep and perhaps not entirely conscious level, that it is Israel that can and quite possibly will kill him any time it likes. By ranting about imaginary Iranian assassins, Stockholm-syndrome-suffering Trump imagines that he will please his Israeli captors and perhaps earn their mercy.

Israel’s hold over Trump, and its ability to kill him at will, has been demonstrated not only by the Zionists’ killing of heavily-protected (by Zionists) Charlie Kirk, but also by at least two of the three alleged assassination attempts on the orange baboon’s life. Israel-loyal elements of Trump’s security were likely involved in the two blatantly fake attacks on Trump: the Butler, Pennsylvania ear nick heard round the world, and the White House Correspondents’ Dinner farce. Since space does not permit a detailed analysis here, please watch John Hankey’s documentaries Trump in the Crosshairs (on Butler) and Hoax: The White House Correspondent’s Dinner.

Spoiler alert: It is overwhelmingly obvious that Trump had carefully rehearsed his performance in Butler, Pennsylvania, and that he was likewise well-prepared for the Correspondents’ Dinner fake shooting, which he calmly sat through with a knowing smirk while others, including his wife Melania, panicked. The Mossad elements of Trump’s security that organized these events no doubt filmed Trump rehearsing for them. If Trump ever disobeys them, they could leak the videos of Trump practicing diving to the ground, popping a pro wrestling blood capsule and decorating his ear and face with red streaks, and then leaping to his feet, against all Secret Service protocol, to shake his fist in front of the flag, with complicit photographers at the ready, yelling “fight fight fight!”

But since Trump is such an abject slave, while potential successor JD Vance looks askance on the war-on-Iran-for-Israel, the Israelis probably won’t kill their best-ever US asset. Instead, they might fake a “failed” attempt on Trump’s life with an “Iranian drone.” Or they might explode a radioactive dirty bomb in Washington DC or some other high profile location, hoping that an ostensible Iranian “nuclear attack on America” would evoke a nuclear response. With Israel-owned madman Trump in charge, they could conceivably get their wish. Or they might mount a devastating cyber-attack on American infrastructure, causing such chaos that confused, frightened, angry Americans might be vulnerable to media propaganda blaming Iran and demanding a US invasion. A combination of the above elements—a dirty-bomb-plus-cyber-attack-plus-fake-Trump-assassination-attempt—could maximize the mayhem and its effect on American public opinion.

Such an operation could be designed to create a state of emergency, offering Trump a pretext to cancel elections and declare himself president-for-life, as he has been increasingly threatening to do. This scenario fits perfectly with the “end democracy” movement spearheaded by Zionist tech-fascist oligarch Peter Thiel and his chief ideologue, Curtis Yarvin. And it would solve Trump’s biggest problem: How to survive the 2026 elections, and avoid impeachment and prison, despite his and his party’s extreme unpopularity.

But would Americans fall for another huge false flag? Commentators with mainstream-media-level audiences like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens and the Young Turks are increasingly voicing suspicions about Israeli involvement in the JFK assassination, the USS Liberty false flag, 9/11, the Butler shooting, and the murder of Charlie Kirk. These and other voices are all but screaming from the rooftops that Israel is capable of slaughtering American presidents, and thousands of American civilians, while using their control of mainstream media to stampede the nation into war.

Given the growing public awareness of Israeli involvement in the JFK and 9/11 coups, among other atrocities, and the massive unpopularity of Israel’s genocide of Gaza, the Zionists would be risking the mother of all backlashes if they mounted another spectacular false flag attack on America. But given their arrogant scorn for the goyim, and their oft-proved ability to get away with gargantuan crimes, such a scenario cannot be ruled out.

UK Announces Sanctions on Israeli West Bank Settlements, says ‘Settler Terrorists’ Are Committing Ethnic Cleansing

Israel retaliated with sanctions against British MPs and says it will shutter the UK's consulate in East Jerusalem

by Dave DeCamp | September 8, 2026 

https://news.antiwar.com/2026/09/08/uk-announces-sanctions-on-israeli-west-bank-settlements-says-settler-terrorists-are-committing-ethnic-cleansing/

British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband announced on Tuesday that the UK was imposing trade restrictions on Jewish settlements in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, which are illegal under international law, and said that “settler terrorists” are committing “ethnic cleansing” against the Palestinian population.

Miliband said it was the official position of the British government that the “occupation is unlawful because of Israel’s entrenchment of its control, its intention to extend permanent sovereignty and its expansionist agenda via illegal settlements.” He added that the “British government agrees that there is ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in areas of the West Bank perpetrated by settler terrorists.”

According to The Guardian, the sanctions include:

• An import ban on goods from illegal settlements in the occupied territories.
• A comprehensive sanctions regime against providing services such as construction or financing for Israeli settlements.
• A ban on the advertising in the UK of illegal settlement properties.
• Personal sanctions against key individuals accused of promoting settler violence.
• A new ban on arms licenses and other exports that “materially contribute to the occupation”

The announcement marks a shift in the British government’s position on Israel since new Prime Minister Andy Burnham took power in July.

Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar announced “retaliatory measures,” which include sanctions on 11 British members of parliament, the closure of the UK’s consulate in East Jerusalem, and the removal of British personnel from a military post in southern Israel meant to oversee the ceasefire in Gaza, which Israel has constantly violated with daily attacks.

US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee suggested the UK could face economic retaliation in the US and accused the British government of “Jew hatred” despite Miliband himself being Jewish, a fact he was confronted with in an interview with the BBC. In his remarks, Miliband recounted visiting his grandmother, who lived in Israel, when he was a child and said he had “unwavering” support for the state of Israel, and noted elsewhere in his speech that the “sanctions regime will target illegal settlements and settlement expansion, not Israel.”

The UK was one of 12 countries that signed a joint statement released Tuesday confirming their “intention to introduce national and/or support European restrictions on trade in goods with settlements which are illegal under international law, or that they are actively considering these and other measures, in accordance with their national procedures.”

The other 11 countries that signed the statement include Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Iceland, Ireland, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain, and Sweden. The statement noted the “unprecedented levels of settler violence and settlement expansion” that have been taking place in the West Bank.

The 12 countries said Israel’s actions were “undermining the possibility of a two-State solution” and called on the Israeli government to “immediately halt the expansion of settlements and civilian administrative powers, ensure accountability for settler violence, and investigate allegations against Israeli forces.”

US universities get millions to do military research for Israel

The projects, which often fail to disclose their funding, include efforts to create surveillance robots and improve missile guidance

Mila Halgren Alex Rewegan

Sep 03, 2026

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/israel-military-us-universities/?mc_cid=9c7272cd77&mc_eid=944feb3e1c

See an insect crawling in the corner of the room? It might be a surveillance robot, thanks to research at Carnegie Mellon University to develop cockroach-like robots with, and for, the Israeli military.

Robot cockroaches, “terror-network” mapping, and rapid missile guidance are just three examples of at least 70 research projects U.S. universities have conducted on behalf of the Israeli Ministry of Defense (IMoD). Over a thousand pages of internal university and U.S./Israeli military documents reveal a sweeping, decades-long program to sponsor military research collaborations with at least 30 U.S. universities, from Cornell to the University of California at San Diego, since at least 2009.

Projects are conducted in collaboration with the Israeli military and sometimes explicitly incorporate environmental conditions in Palestine into the work. One project designed fuel cells for “distributed sensor networks” tailored to the temperature and soil conditions of an Israeli border that could monitor “potential terrorist activity” for “border security.”

Recent reports from Dropsite News, The Nation, and the Anti-War Initiative found millions of Israeli military dollars flowing into U.S. schools. Public records obtained from 13 U.S. universities reveal this money was directed via a U.S. arms export program to fund collaborations with Israeli scientists and military officials.

These projects are not funded by traditional academic grants. Instead, they are procured as “defense articles and services,” paid for with U.S. taxpayer dollars via the Foreign Military Financing (FMF) program – the same mechanism Israel uses to purchase F-35 fighter jets and other U.S. defense exports.

At least 11 contracts sent U.S. scientists to Israel to work face to face with their counterparts at an Israeli university and/or the IMoD, earmarking funds for U.S. professors to attend meetings and present their research to the IMoD.

The research

Though research subjects span the breadth of Israel’s military interests, including drone swarms, missile guidance, fuel cells, and quantum sensing, we highlight just a few threads to illustrate how U.S. universities support Israel’s military.

Alongside robotic cockroaches, Prof. Sarah Bergbreiter built “inchworm-like” crawlers with an IMoD scientist at the University of Maryland. Profs. Indejrit Chopra, also at Maryland, and Kenneth Breuer at Brown University were inspired by hummingbirds and bats to develop micro-drones that can search caves and demolished buildings. Columbia Prof. Hod Lipson built the Flexipod, a “soft quadrupedal robot” agile enough to do backflips and navigate varied terrain.

The IDF has used other drones to collect massive surveillance datasets that are fed into AI software to track targets and accelerate “kill-chains.” Recent Israeli innovations in this area follows years of IMoD-sponsored research at U.S. universities on this kind of technology.

In December 2016, the IDF prototyped an AI tool to “Tell You What’s Happening in a Video,” generating captions to help soldiers “keep an eye on the battlefield.”

The following year, Prof. Kate Saenko received $120,000 from the IMoD for research on “Generating Natural Language Descriptions for Video” using AI to automatically describe and classify people and objects in a video. While sponsored by a second IMoD contract on “Zero Shot Captioning,” or using machine-learning to describe things not seen before, Saenko’s group presented software for the “detection of novel objects” titled “Learning To Detect Every Thing” at a Tel Aviv conference.

Saenko told RS the conference paper was not related to her IMoD funding, but did not answer repeated requests to clarify which of her papers are.

According to an ex-IDF intelligence officer, a human eye “will go over [AI-generated] targets before each attack, but it need not spend a lot of time on them.” One IMoD-sponsored project at the University of California, Berkeley could make that process even faster.

Neuroscientist Robert Knight tested electrodes in a brain-computer-interface (BCI) for “cognitive enhancement” of “high throughput tasks requiring visual recognition.” In his internal proposal to the IMoD, but not in his published study, Knight discusses applications like “detecting ‘suspicious’ activity.”

Prof. V.S. Subrahmanian at the University of Maryland received IMoD funding to study “Targeting of Terror Networks” to “find weak points for the destabilization of terrorist networks.” He has applied these algorithms to identify alleged “sympathizers” of Hezbollah on social media.

Another of Subrahmanian's IMoD contracts on “Massive Social Networks” involved analyzing “1.04 million person-days” of cellular location data for tracking population flow in Israel and its Occupied Territories. The study notes its algorithms are “related to… monitoring for evading targets by a flock of unmanned air vehicles.”

Other IMoD-sponsored projects studied drone swarms directly.

“Human-Robot Interaction Design for a Single Operator with Many Robots” was the IMoD project of Prof. Holly Yanco, the director of the University of Massachusetts’ Lowell’s Robotics Center. MIT Prof. Emilio Frazzoli devised “trajectory optimization” algorithms for groups of quadrotors, emphasizing his results are “easy to implement and may be used directly.”

When reached for comment, Frazzoli stated his research was on a “very basic/generic problem in robotics: how to generate a path to move one robot from point A to point B,” and that there was “nothing specific to defense” about the work.

Frazzoli’s IMoD-sponsored contract was titled “Rapidly Exploring Random Trees for Missile Guidance.”

Prof. Joaquim Martins at the University of Michigan optimized “package delivery UAV” fleets for the IMoD, given “mission requirements” with “various package weights and delivery distances.” He found that quadrotors are best for “long-range missions with small numbers of customers,” and thanked Israeli arms company Rafael’s CTO of Multi-Domain Warfare for help with “research methodology.” Martins’ published paper only lists civilian applications like delivering “medical supplies” despite its IMoD sponsorship.

This is not the only seeming example of a gap between an IMoD proposal and the published paper that followed it. In 2015, Profs. Alexander Yarin (University of Illinois Chicago) and Eyal Zussman (Technion) submitted a chemical sensing proposal telling the IMoD their “Overall research objective is to develop [a] fundamental understanding of sampling and detect[ing] buried explosives,” elaborating that “the detection of buried improvised explosives and mines [is] a major challenge in the battlefield.”

But a public-facing paper detailing experiments nearly identical to their internal application only listed civilian applications like “mining,” without any references to "explosives" or the "battlefield." The paper did not acknowledge any funding sources, including the IMoD. Neither professor responded to a request for comment.

The funding pipeline

The research is purchased by the IMoD Mission to USA, the Israeli military procurement office that spends roughly $3.3 billion in annual U.S. aid to buy defense goods and services.

As analyst Christian Sorensen of Eisenhower Media Network explained over e-mail: “US taxpayers give money to the US government. The US government then sends billions of dollars to Israel. Israel uses that money – there’s not a strict accounting – to purchase goods and services from US war corporations and research from US academic institutions."

To receive IMoD funds, universities like UC Irvine certified they were “entering into an agreement to sell defense articles … to the foreign government listed above,” and that the payment would be made “under the provisions of the Arms Export Control Act.” The projects are classified as Direct Commercial Contracts (DCCs), or sales from a defense contractor to a foreign military, subsidized by the U.S. government. Because only DCCs of over $100 million to Israel require legislative notification, the program has no public reporting mechanism or granular congressional oversight, and we do not know if any other countries use DCCs to sponsor U.S. science. In an e-mail to the IMoD, one university administrator called this funding arrangement a “departure from standard process.”

For over 35 years, Israel was one of just ten countries authorized to use DCCs, spending over a billion dollars annually on defense exports from private entities such as these research projects. But in April 2026, the Pentagon extended this privilege to over 50 countries.

A bureaucratic carve-out known as the Fundamental Research Exclusion allows the IMoD to bypass export controls for defense research it sponsors if the results are eventually “published and shared broadly.”

Both MIT and the University of California systems censored their funding databases after student activists discovered their schools’ IMoD contracts. In July 2025, an MIT professor canceled a proposed IMoD contract due to public backlash.

A spokesperson for the State Department referred questions about this purchasing arrangement to a fact sheet on U.S.-Israeli Security Cooperation. The sheet notes that the U.S. participates in “a variety of exchanges with Israel,” including research and weapons development.

The Israeli Ministry of Defense declined to comment.

Evidence confirms US munition directly struck Iranian wedding, killing five: Report

The US military became known for bombing wedding parties in Afghanistan and Yemen during its so-called War on Terror after 9/11

News Desk

SEP 4, 2026

https://thecradle.co/articles/evidence-confirms-us-munition-directly-struck-iranian-wedding-killing-five-report

Video and images from the scene of a US airstrike on a wedding in Iran show that the explosion was caused by a direct hit from a US munition, according to a Reuters analysis published on 4 September.

Weapons experts who reviewed Reuters-verified footage said the damage pattern of the 2 September strike in the city of Kuhestak in Hormozgan Province near the Strait of Hormuz was consistent with a direct strike by a US precision-guided munition.

The strike on the wedding party for a fisherman’s daughter initially killed four people and wounded nearly 70. A fifth victim, a 22-year-old woman, died of her injuries in the hospital a short time later.

Among those killed were two children, four-year-old Amir-Mohammad Karimi and 16-year-old Mohammad Malahi.

A man injured in the strike told the Iranian Red Crescent that “Blocks were falling and hitting people’s heads. And many small children and women that were there were terribly injured. So many.”

On Thursday, mourners in Kuhestak tossed petals over flag-draped coffins during funerals for the victims.

“If it was a military location, it wouldn’t be so painful. This was a wedding ceremony, but they turned people’s joy into mourning,” a resident told Iran’s semi-official Tasnim News Agency.

The finding comes as US Vice President JD Vance admitted that Washington is investigating the attack.

On Thursday, Vance stated that “sometimes things happen” when asked whether the US military was responsible for the massacre.

Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei described the strike as the “true face of the war crime,” stating that a wedding ceremony was “brutally bombed as part of America’s desperate struggle to conceal its failure.”

The US military became known for carrying out drone strikes on wedding parties in Afghanistan and Yemen during the so-called War on Terror. The strikes often killed dozens of civilians, including brides, children, and entire families.

Kuhestak is located about 30 kilometers from the town of Minab, where US forces targeted an elementary school, killing more than 160 schoolgirls and teachers on the first day of the current US-Israeli war on Iran in late February.

US President Donald Trump repeatedly denied responsibility for the Minab massacre, even though a preliminary Pentagon investigation also pointed to US responsibility in that case. The outcome of the investigation was never made public.

Following the wedding massacre in Kuhestak, Iranian officials “promised that such crimes will not go unanswered and that the United States will be held accountable for its systematic targeting of civilians,” Iran’s Mehr News Agency wrote.

Tehran vows ‘faster, harder, more painful’ strikes after IRGC responds to US attacks

Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf said the ‘rules have changed’ while stressing that the ‘era of proportionate responses’ has ended

News Desk

SEP 6, 2026

https://thecradle.co/articles/tehran-vows-faster-harder-more-painful-strikes-after-irgc-responds-to-us-attacks

Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf warned on 6 September that Tehran will strike back harder and faster in response to any new US strikes, following the latest exchange of fire between Washington and the Islamic Republic. 

Washington must “understand” before it is “too late” that “the era of ‘proportionate responses’ is over,” the parliament speaker said.

“From now on, any aggression against Iran’s interests and security will receive a faster, heavier and more painful response,” he added. 

Ghalibaf was further quoted as saying that the “rules of the game have changed.”

He described Tehran’s latest military operations targeting US military bases across the region as “only the beginning.”

Earlier on Sunday, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) said it targeted US warships in response to attacks on Iranian vessels. 

The operation involved several ballistic missiles, according to the IRGC.

“The two warships, after sustaining damage and fearing another attack, were forced to flee the area of engagement,” it said. 

The aircraft carrier and US destroyer had been “harassing” Iranian vessels.

“The enemy, which had for years roamed the region with false pride and hollow claims, is now forced to officially acknowledge that two US Navy warships came under attack. CENTCOM’s acknowledgment confirming this operation is living evidence of the enemy’s strategic defeat and proof of the offensive power of the IRGC.”

The night before, the IRGC said it struck three oil tankers in response to US attacks on Iranian vessels that were carried out by Washington in “desperation.”

US Central Command (CENTCOM) released a statement on the exchange of fire, saying it "struck three Iranian crude oil carriers, Sept. 5, after the IRGC launched ballistic missiles toward two U.S. Navy warships patrolling regional waters.

It claimed the IRGC operations were “failed attacks,” and added: “Let the message to the IRGC be clear: If you shoot at two of our ships, we will impose an even higher economic cost —taking out three of yours.”

According to reports from IRIB, the US military carried out missile strikes targeting three Iranian oil tankers in the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman.

An IRIB correspondent stationed on Kharg Island, Bushehr Province, reported that an Iranian oil tanker was struck by US forces near the strategic island. Onboard cooling systems successfully contained and extinguished the resulting fires within the hour, and no casualties were reported.

Simultaneously, a separate IRIB report confirmed that US forces targeted two additional oil tankers off the coast, comprising one loaded vessel and one empty carrier. Emergency rescue teams successfully evacuated both crews to the shore unharmed.

Ghalibaf’s Sunday warning echoed a statement made by the Iranian military over the weekend. 

“Mischief, insecurity and harassment of Iranian ships” will be met with “more severe strikes than before,” said the Iranian army’s Khatam al-Anbiya Central Headquarters. 

Late on Tuesday, Washington carried out a new and massive escalation, launching a series of strikes on the Islamic Republic, including a strike that killed and wounded dozens at a wedding in the country’s south.

Tehran has responded with heavy missile and drone attacks on US military infrastructure across the region in recent days.

The escalation follows the declaration of a US economic war of illegal sanctions against Tehran.

US Congress passes bill punishing universities that boycott Israel

The legislation threatens to cut federal aid to universities that engage in any form of boycotts against Israel

MEE staff

Published date: 4 September 2026 

https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/us-congress-passes-bill-punishing-universities-boycott-israel

The US House of Representatives on Thursday passed a Republican-led bill that aims to penalise universities that engage in boycotts of Israel or attempt to prevent students from participating in exchange programmes in Israel.

The Protect Economic and Academic Freedom Act passed by 237 to 169 votes.

The act would solely apply to universities that are part of federal student aid programmes. Further, it instructs institutions receiving federal funding for international study and foreign language programmes to verify annually that they do not restrict students participating in programmes in Israel or students from Israel participating in programmes on their campus. 

Thirty-three Democrats, most of whom are up for re-election and have a history of supporting Israel, went against their party to vote for the bill. Two Republicans opposed. The fate of the bill now depends on a Senate decision. 

The presentation of the bill by House Republican leaders is seen by some as an attempt to exploit divisions among Democrats ahead of the midterm elections, where voters will decide who controls Congress for the final two years of Donald Trump’s term. 

“Our universities should not use taxpayer-funded federal programs to discriminate against Israeli students, faculty, institutions, or businesses simply because they are Israeli,” Tim Walberg, the Republican chair of the House education committee, said on the House floor. 

Pro-Palestinian activists deny that protests at US campuses are antisemitic in nature and maintain that critics intentionally conflate criticism of Israel with antisemitism to shut down dissent.

Republican Congresswoman Virginia Foxx described anti-war protests on university campuses as antisemitic.

“The antisemitic rot that has corroded college campuses must be eradicated,” Foxx said.

“Today, the House sent a clear message: if an institution of higher education chooses to capitulate to the caustic BDS [Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions] movement, there will be consequences - starting with this bipartisan legislation.”

The war in Gaza has destroyed most of the Palestinian enclave since Hamas-led fighters killed 1,200 people during an attack on 7 October 2023. Israeli attacks since then have killed more than 73,000 Palestinians, according to the Palestinian health ministry.

In the wake of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, student and faculty groups at several prominent universities have strengthened the call for administrators to engage in the BDS movement. 

At most universities, the call either remains unanswered or is firmly rejected. 

Bobby Scott, the senior Democrat on the education committee, criticised the bill as inessential and potentially interfering with the First Amendment’s protections of protest. 

“No college or university has embraced the BDS movement anyway. So, we should combat antisemitism wherever it occurs, but we should not do so by punishing protected speech or conflating a student’s view with university policies,” said Scott on the House floor. 

Congressman Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat, said before the vote that he opposed the BDS movement but would vote no because he supported Americans' right to free expression.

"It is the only way to ensure speech I do agree with is equally protected," Nadler said.

The bill's proponents argue that their aim is not to police speech on campus but rather to counter discrimination.

The divisions and contradictions in the Democratic Party’s stance on Israel have surfaced in recent months. In July, more than 100 House Democrats endorsed a bill scrapping some military aid to Israel.