Less than a month after the United States and Iran signed a Memorandum of Understanding, supposed to provide a framework for a ceasefire, the US resumed its illegal war on Iran on July 10. The Iranian regime has retaliated by targeting US allies across the Persian Gulf.
The US and Israel launched their illegal war of aggression against Iran on February 28, bombing civilian populations and assassinating political and military leaders. Since then, the war has spilled into the region and Israel has bombed, invaded and occupied southern Lebanon.
The war was preceded by a 12-day joint military assault on Iran in June last year and comes on the back of decades of US-led economic warfare, crippling sanctions, covert intelligence operations and military attacks.
Apart from raising the threat of a nuclear disaster, the war has impacted global supply chains due to the blockade in the Strait of Hormuz, driving up the cost of fuel, fertilisers, food and other essentials. It is having a heavy impact on ordinary people across the globe and devastating the lives of people in the Global South.
The war has also set back the struggle of the Iranian people for democracy and human rights against a repressive theocratic regime.
Israel has used the war to advance its own territorial ambitions and to attempt to distract global attention from its genocide in Gaza, and its land grabs and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank.
While at the NATO Leaders Summit in Turkey on July 8, US President Donald Trump said the ceasefire with Iran was “over” and that the peace negotiations were “a waste of time”.
This followed disputes over the management of the Strait of Hormuz and Iran’s protest at the US-brokered Lebanese-Israeli agreement, linking Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon to Hezbollah’s disarmament.
At the time of publication, the US had bombed locations across Iran over 12 nights, targeting military and civilian infrastructure, including desalination plants, a railway station and bridges.
Trump is threatening to further escalate US attacks, including targeting an Iranian underground nuclear site at Kuh-e Kolang Gaz La, known as Pickaxe Mountain, located just two kilometers from the Natanz nuclear facility.
While Americans went without basic healthcare, the US government spent more than US$71.8 billion during the first two months of the war — about $1.2 billion each day.
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth claims that the US has spent US$37.5 billion on its war and asked a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing on July 21 for an additional $67.2 billion in military spending as a “supplemental funding request”.
Hegseth told the committee that “every dollar appropriated to the Department of War will be focused on building the lethality of our Joint Force and reinforcing ‘Peace Through Strength’”.
Meanwhile, Trump’s US$1.5 trillion defence budget bill remains blocked in the Senate, after it failed to gain sufficient votes to move ahead.
The only “winners” from the US-Israeli war on Iran are the energy billionaires in the G7 countries, who, according to an Oxfam report, “have pocketed $301 million a day since the US-Israel war against Iran.
Meanwhile, the report said “[t]he consequences of the war will push more than 32.5 million people into poverty by the end of this year”.