Democrats in Congress have sounded the alarm over US President Donald Trump pledging to commit more war crimes in Iran after he traded threats to energy infrastructure with the Iranian government, with the Republican declaring Saturday that he would take out the country’s power plants unless it reopened the Strait of Hormuz to all traffic.

Just a day after Trump claimed that “we are getting very close to meeting our objectives as we consider winding down our great Military efforts in the Middle East with respect to the Terrorist Regime of Iran,” in a post that remains pinned to the top of his Truth Social profile, the president took to the platform with a clear threat on Saturday night.

“If Iran doesn’t FULLY OPEN, WITHOUT THREAT, the Strait of Hormuz, within 48 HOURS from this exact point in time, the United States of America will hit and obliterate their various POWER PLANTS, STARTING WITH THE BIGGEST ONE FIRST!” Trump said.

Trump’s post came after Ali Mousavi, the Iranian representative to the International Maritime Organisation, told the Chinese news agency Xinhua on Friday that the Strait of Hormuz — the waterway between the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman that is a key shipping route, including for fossil fuels — remains open to all vessels not linked to “Iran’s enemies.”

It also followed the Israeli military — which is bombing Iran alongside the United States — suggesting that the US was responsible for a Saturday attack on Iran’s uranium enrichment complex in Natanz.

According to The Associated Press, with his new threat, Trump “may have meant the Bushehr nuclear power plant, Iran’s biggest, which was already hit last week, or Damavand, a natural gas plant near Tehran, Iran’s capital.”

Responding to Trump’s Saturday post, US Representative Don Beyer (D-Va.) said: “It’s important not to shy away from candidly discussing the president’s increasingly erratic behaviour. His worsening instability is a clear and growing threat, not only to the American people but to the world.”

Trump has no plan to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, so he is threatening to attack Iran’s civil power plants. This would be an attack on civilians. This is what Putin is doing in Ukraine. This would be a war crime. End this war in Iran.

— Ed Markey (@SenMarkey) March 22, 2026

Hell-bent on destruction
Representative Yassamin Ansari (D-Ariz.) was similarly critical  over Trump’s pledge “From ‘help is on the way’ for Iranian protestors to threatening war crimes against an entire population. The United States is being run by a maniacal tyrant hell-bent on destroying this country and the world along with it.”

Other critics also pointed out that Article 56 of the Geneva Convention states in part that “works or installations containing dangerous forces, namely dams, dykes, and nuclear electrical generating stations, shall not be made the object of attack, even where these objects are military objectives, if such attack may cause the release of dangerous forces and consequent severe losses among the civilian population.”

The AP reported that after that strike on the Natanz complex, “Iranian missiles struck two communities in southern Israel late Saturday, leaving buildings shattered and dozens injured in dual attacks not far from Israel’s main nuclear research center.”

“Israel’s military said it was not able to intercept missiles that hit the southern cities of Dimona and Arad, the largest near the centre in Israel’s sparsely populated Negev desert,” according to the news agency. “It was the first time Iranian missiles penetrated Israel’s air defence systems in the area around the nuclear site.”

Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Speaker of Iran’s Parliament, said on X on Saturday that “if the Israeli regime is unable to intercept missiles in the heavily protected Dimona area, it is, operationally, a sign of entering a new phase of the battle… Israel’s skies are defenseless.”

After Trump’s threat, the Speaker added on Sunday that “immediately after the power plants and infrastructure in our country are targeted, the critical infrastructure, energy infrastructure, and oil facilities throughout the region will be considered legitimate targets and will be irreversibly destroyed, and the price of oil will remain high for a long time.”

Jessica Corbett is a senior editor and staff writer for Common Dreams. This article is republished under Creative Commons.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

A Solomon Islands academic says the US and Israel illegal bombing of Iran is “deeply alarming” and the Pacific region does not need “more global instability”

US President Donald Trump warned yesterday that Operation Epic Fury against Iran — “one of the largest, most complex, most overwhelming military offensives the world has ever seen” — will continue until all of Washington’s objectives are achieved.

The US military says it has sunk a dozen Iranian warships and is “going after the rest” in attacks which Trump said have killed 48 top Iranian leaders, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Six American service members have also been killed and five seriously injured.

At least three Pacific Island governments have advised their nationals stuck in the Gulf region to remain calm and leave when it is possible to do so.

The joint US-Israeli strikes — and Iranian retaliation — have turned international law on its head, according to some experts.

Reacting to the conflict, Solomon Islands National University’s vice-chancellor Dr Transform Aqorau said the Pacific must remain an “ocean of peace”.

‘Deeply alarming’
“The escalating conflict between the United States, Israel, and Iran is deeply alarming,” he wrote in a Facebook post yesterday.

“Missiles are flying. Civilians are dying. Oil tankers have reportedly been hit. The Strait of Hormuz — one of the world’s most critical oil routes — is now closed.

“Some leaders speak of success. But war never has winners. The real cost is paid by ordinary people.

“And the Pacific will not be immune,” he wrote.

He said if oil supplies from the Gulf were disrupted, global fuel prices would surge.

“For Pacific Island countries — heavily dependent on imported fuel — this means higher electricity costs, more expensive transport, rising food prices, and increased cost of living.

“Our already fragile economies could face another severe external shock.”

Struggling with issues
Dr Aqorau said the region was struggling with a myriad of issues, including climate change, rising sea levels, drug problems, mental health pressures, youth unemployment, diabetes, slow economic growth, and growing populations.

“We do not need more global instability. We need peace,” he said.

“Pacific leaders have declared our region an ‘Ocean of Peace’ — a commitment to unity, sovereignty, dialogue, and non-militarisation. This is not just symbolic. It is strategic.

“Our islands have suffered before from global power rivalries and war. We know the long shadows they cast.”

He added that as the global order shifted, the Pacific must look more to each other for solidarity and cooperation.

‘Strength in regional unity’
“Our strength is in regional unity. Our security must be rooted in development, climate resilience, and human wellbeing — not militarisation.

“War diverts resources from schools to weapons, from hospitals to missiles, from climate action to destruction. Peace creates the space for progress.”

He said the Pacific must stand firm as an ocean of peace.

“In a world drifting toward conflict, let us choose stability. Let us choose cooperation. Let us choose peace.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Dozens of teenage girls were attending their regular training sessions of volleyball, basketball, and gymnastics in the main sports hall in Lamerd, a city near the Persian coast, when a missile slammed into the building at 5pm on Saturday.

Additional strikes hit two nearby residential areas and a hall adjacent to a school, as the US and Israel pounded targets across Iran on the first day of what President Donald Trump declared as a “regime change” war.

According to local officials cited in Iranian state media, the strikes on Lamerd killed at least 18 civilians and wounded scores more.

“Within seconds of the missile strike, the windows shattered into thousands of fragments. Sports equipment, balls, tables, barriers flew through the air. Black smoke filled the space,” Mohammed Saed Khorshedy, a 29-year-old worker at the gym who witnessed the attack, told Drop Site News.

“The smell of gunpowder made breathing almost impossible. The screaming began immediately, layered with the sound of debris collapsing and concrete falling from the ceiling.”

The facility sits on the outskirts of Lamerd, a quiet city in Fars province, near the surrounding Zagros mountain range, giving the natural landscape an uneven, rugged character.

Gym building at crossroads
The rectangular building is at a crossroads connecting the city center to Bandar Assaluyeh, an industrial port and energy hub on the Persian Gulf.

The sports hall was poorly maintained, with deteriorating walls surrounded by a low perimeter fence. A high arched metal roof sat atop a reinforced concrete frame and a rubber floor for volleyball and other sports.

The missile struck the middle of the roof, destroying a large part of the building. The main court, small spectator stands, changing rooms, and coach’s office were all reduced to rubble.

Hossein Gholami, a 50-year-old elementary school teacher, was returning from work when he heard the blast. His 16-year-old daughter, Zahra, was training in the hall.

“I noticed a strange gathering of people at the corner of the street leading to the sports hall,” Gholami told Drop Site.

“The screaming was rising from a distance. A colleague ran toward me, waving his arm, and said in a shaken voice: ‘Zahra, the hall, there has been an explosion.’

“I felt as though the ground had split beneath my feet. Everything around me became hazy,” he said. “I ran immediately, and with every step the columns of black smoke rose higher, while the smell of fire and flames entered my nose with force.”

Scene of horror
When he reached the site, he came upon a scene of horror.

“The continuous screaming of the injured mixed with the sounds of secondary explosions. The ground was covered in debris and shattered glass. It was difficult to move with all the rubble. Ambulances arrived after about twenty minutes, but most of the injured were in critical condition,” he said.

“The smell of blood and burns covered everything…the survivors were injured with fractures and burns from the shrapnel.”

Later, he learned that Zahra was among the dead.

“Every time I close my eyes I see her face, her smile, and I hear the sound of the explosion,” Gholami said.

There has been no public statement by the US or Israeli on the Lamerd strikes.

CENTCOM and the Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

165 killed – many schoolgirls
The bombing of the sports hall in Lamerd came hours after a strike on a girls’ elementary school in Minab, another small city on the Persian Gulf, further east near the Strait of Hormuz, that, according to the state-run IRNA news agency, killed 165 people, many of them schoolgirls.

Neither the US nor Israel claimed that strike. The Israeli military said it was not aware of strikes in the area of Minab; CENTCOM’s spokesperson said they were “looking into” reports.

Another strike hit an adjacent IRGC naval base and the USS Abraham Lincoln is stationed nearby.

The governor of Lamerd said “The United States and the Zionist regime fired missiles at the sports hall while female students were playing inside,” according to the Fars news agency.

As of Sunday morning, the Iranian Red Crescent and state-linked media have reported preliminary casualty figures of more than 200 people killed and more than 740 injured across Iran, though the actual toll is expected to be significantly higher.

Iran launched retaliatory strikes across nine countries in the region: Israel, Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, with a total of 18 killed, including three US servicemen, according to a tally by Al Jazeera.

Mir Dehdasht, an administrative officer at Azad university whose 15-year-old daughter Rabab Dehdasht was training at the sports hall, was at home when a neighbour knocked on his door to tell him the facility had been attacked.

‘Their voices were deafening’
“I ran immediately toward the place, and when I arrived, I found burning cars and rubble scattered everywhere,” Dehdasht told Drop Site. “The injured were bleeding heavily, some had lost consciousness on the ground, others were screaming without stopping.

“Their voices were deafening.”

He continued: “Blood and dust covered everything, and the rubble blocked quick access to the building. Rescue teams were working with extreme care to bring out the injured athletes and the bodies of the victims.

“The screaming filled everything,” he said. “Robab did not survive the force of the explosion, while others survived but with life-threatening injuries. I felt complete helplessness.”

Farhad Za’eri, a retired Ministry of Health employee, received the news of the strike by phone. His 16-year-old daughter Elahe, was also there.

“I left immediately with some neighbors. The roads were unusually congested and there was a sense of anxiety throughout the neighborhood,” Za’eri told Drop Site. “When we arrived, the rescue teams were already there and they had begun bringing out the bodies one by one.”

“I did not know what I would see,” he continued, “but when I got close to the place where they were bringing out the victims, I felt a heaviness in my chest.

‘Mark of pain’
“Every body that was lifted carried the mark of pain, and the rescue effort was trying to distinguish between those who could still be saved and those whose lives had ended,” he said.

“There were voices from every direction, everyone was trying to understand what had happened. In that moment, everything inside me was silent, and I was waiting for them to tell me about my daughter Elahe.”

Elahe’s body was eventually brought out. “My daughter’s body was completely destroyed. It appears she was directly hit by the strike. The lower part of her body was completely destroyed,” Za’eri said.

“How can a father describe what he feels when he sees his child like this? All my memories of her, her laugh, her training, her dreams, collapsed before my eyes in a single moment.”

This articles was published first by Drop Site News in collaboration with Egab.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Iran attracts an onslaught of negative media in New Zealand and Western media. But is it fair or deserved? David Robie has spent several weeks travelling in the country on sabbatical and finds the media negativity far from the reality of the “most friendly” country he has ever visited in the first of a three-part series.

The headlines were chilling as we flew into Turkey and then Iran. “All out war”, trumpeted The New Zealand Herald, as being an imminent response to last month’s surprise drone attack knocking out almost 50 percent of Saudi Arabia’s oil production, blaming the attack on the Islamic Republic without convincing evidence.

President Donald Trump warned that the US was “locked and loaded” if Iran was found to be behind the attacks, and then later apparently backed off and relied on even heavier sanctions.

The next day the Herald belatedly ran the other side of the story, quoting Iranian President Hassan Rouhani’s response denying the allegations and warning that Iran would defend itself in the case of a US-Saudi attack while offering the “hand of friendship and brotherhood” for overseeing security in the Persian Gulf.

WATCH: Rouhani – US sanctions have failed

President Hassan Rouhani says US sanctions have failed to bring Iran’s economy to its knees. Al Jazeera video

Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani, in a press conference on Monday, has said US sanctions have failed to bring Iran’s economy to its knees.

Houthi forces in neighbouring Yemen, invaded by a Saudi-led coalition in 2015 that led to widely condemned four-year civil war, claimed to have carried out the drone and rocket attack on the two oil installations at Abaiq and Khurais.

Given the rising geopolitical tensions, as I was about to visit the country for several weeks as a visitor on sabbatical, I was keen to see the realities on the ground in Iran behind the sabre-rattling.

Hadn’t we seen this sort of situation before, attempts at regime change by Washington on the flimsiest of evidence? The unjustified invasion of Iraq in 2003, for example, based on the fictitious claims of Saddam Hussein’s Weapons of Mass Destruction. And look at the chaos and destruction of a nation that resulted from that overwhelming military attack.

Vietnam pretext
And then there was the 1964 manufactured Bay of Tonkin incident that was used as a pretext for US escalation of the war on North Vietnam. What a disaster with the eventual humiliating airlift withdrawal of US combat troops in 1975.

Just a few weeks before the Saudi oil installations attack, Al Jazeera UpFront interviewer and columnist Mehdi Hasan wrote in The Intercept in response to a Washington assessment blaming Iran for an earlier attack on two Saudi oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz:

“Why would you trust the word of a single official on such a sensitive and contentious issue? And why, oh why, would you rely on the testimony of a member of the Trump administration, known globally, of course, for its stringent and unbending adherence to the truth?”

Hasan added this qualification:

“If you’re going to trust the word of a single anonymous official, in this administration of fanatical hawks and shameless dissemblers, why not trust this particular official who was quoted in The New York Times?

One American official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential internal planning, said the new intelligence of an increased Iranian threat was “small stuff” and did not merit the military planning being driven by Mr Bolton [then still National Security Adviser before being sacked by Trump]. The official also said the ultimate goal of the year-long economic sanctions campaign by the Trump administration was to draw Iran into an armed conflict with the United States.

Hasan added a rather stinging rebuke about the performance of Western journalists generally.

Lessons for journalists

“Plenty of journalists say they want to learn the lessons of Iraq. But the sad reality is that many of my colleagues in the media are, wittingly or unwittingly, becoming complicit in this administration’s cynical and dangerous attempt ‘to draw Iran into an armed conflict with the United States’.”

Confronted with the tensions and about to arrive in Iran for my first visit – and hopefully not last to this fascinating, friendly and vibrant country with a proud history of ancient civilisations – I consulted our MFAT’s “Travel Safe” website.

Sadly, our government’s advice to travellers is just as flawed as media reports.

Under a large red exclamation icon, the site warns “do not travel within 100km of the border with Afghanistan, within 10km of the Iraqi border or east of the line running from Bam to Jask close to the Pakistan border due to the threat of terrorism and violent crime”.

I won’t quibble about the Iraqi or Pakistan borders – as I did not personally visit those areas, but I suspect the warning is exaggerated, especially when you consider that some two million pilgrims have just been crossing the border into Iraq peacefully, as usual, for the annual Arba’een pilgrimage to Karbala.

However, the Afghan border warning is way off the mark. I have just come back from a week-long visit to Mashhad, Iran’s second city – a beautiful and peaceful metropolis that hosts the world’s third-largest mosque, the Haram-e Razavi shrine. This is only a three-hour drive from the border.

For the next section, “Exercise increased caution”, the NZ government advisory warns: “Elsewhere in Iran exercise increased caution due to the potential for civil unrest and the regional threat of terrorism”.

Laughable advisory
Frankly, this is laughable when you consider what New Zealand suffered on March 15 with a terrorist gunman killing a total of 51 peaceful worshippers at two Christchurch mosques being a far worse attack that either of the Iranian incidents mentioned on Travel Safe – in Ahvaz on 22 September 2018 and the capital Tehran on 7 June 2017.

This does not mean no caution is needed given that the repressive rule under the Shah deposed in 1979 has been continued by the revolutionary regime. But for travellers like us, Iran is an astoundingly friendly country that welcomes tourists with genuine enthusiasm and with few overt signs of the restrictions that rile many (such as the hijab rules that have led to widespread White Wednesday protests and agitation over the tragic death of the so-called “Blue Girl” football stadium protester that gained an interim victory last week).

On September 2, 29-year-old Sahar Khodayari, set herself on fire in front of the Tehran revolutionary courthouse after learning she could face a prison sentence for up to two years following her protest attempt to enter the capital’s Azadi Stadium dressed as a boy.

She was dubbed the Blue Girl because this was the colour of her favourite team, Esteghial FC.

Although attendance by women at football matches has been banned since 1981, sometimes exceptions have been made for matches played by the national Iranian team and some women have posed as men to attend.

After Khodayari’s tragic self-immolation, a ban on women at Azadi Stadium was lifted, but it is unclear whether this is permanent or applies elsewhere in the country.

The White Wednesdays campaign was launched by US-based Iranian journalist Masih Alinejad to oppose compulsory hijab wearing.

No hijab photos
The campaign persuades women to post photos or videos of themselves without headscarves and the journalist publishes them on her social media sites. News reports have cited authorities as saying protesters face up to 10 years, but scores of women have protested anyway.

In recent weeks, the detention of two Australian social media “influencers” for allegedly taking photographs with a drone without a permit – and now set free – and the arrest of a British-Iranian social anthropologist without charge have also contributed to negative headlines. (Another dual citizen academic has been detained since 2016).

No Family Visits or Lawyer Allowed for Detained Anthropologist Kameel Ahmady Two Weeks Into Detention

“We reject these authoritarian rules and I would say 90 percent of Iranians don’t accept them. But we Iranians have become very good at pretending, we are very adaptable people,” says an Esfahan manufacturer, who spent time in New Zealand as a student.

Another Iranian, from Mashhad, who also studied in New Zealand, says, “Our future has been destroyed. For young people like us, we have limited choices.”

However, the country has far more nuanced realities than Western media generally give credit. Back to columnist Mehdi Hasan – what is his advice for journalists in order to provide a more balanced account of the country?

He has four suggestions: “stop the stenography”; get the facts straight; context, context, context; and get better sources.

Under his stenography heading, he condemns “passing along the claims of US officials to readers of viewers, without checking whether they are true or not”.

Getting facts right
Getting facts right – “Iran does not have nuclear weapons. Iran does not have a nuclear weapons programme. Iran has complied with the terms of the nuclear deal.”

It is the US that scuttled the nuclear deal – known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) – last year while Europe and the UN were satisfied it was working. Trump imposed the punitive sanctions that have rightly been branded by both Rouhani and Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif as “economic terrorism”, especially Washington’s efforts to cut off Iranian revenue from the sale of its oil (a policy currently being defiantly thwarted by China).

Clearly this blunt “maximum pressure” attempt at “regime change” has failed and now the US policy has been exposed as “maximum deceit”, according to the Iranian leadership.

Hasan says journalists ought to provide context by reporting more historical background to the issues. For example, how often do stories report that the US “Eisenhower administration toppled the democratically elected government of Iranian Prime Minister Dr Mohammad Mossadegh in a CIA coup in 1953?” He had nationalised the British-owned Anglo-Iranian oil company (later rebranded as British Petroleum).

“Or that the Carter administration offered safe haven to the repressive dictator, the Shah of Iran, after he fled from the Iranian Revolution in 1979?”

And the Reagan administration encouraged Saddam Hussein’s Iraq to launch a surprise invasion of Iran in 1981, a bitter protracted war that lasted eight years with unprepared Iranian conscripts – young and old – suffering most of the estimated one million casualties.

Hasan also urges the use of better sources. Do not simply rely on administration officials, whether in Washington or Wellington. Look to a wider range of sceptical voices and analysts. And Al Jazeera, Turkey’s TRT News and Iran’s Press TV channels are good for more balanced and background perspectives.

Among academics I have talked to, media management social scientist Professor Reza Ebrahimzadeh of the Islamic Azad University at Esfahan, argues that foreign news organisations need to do a far better job in providing “context and history” about Iran to promote global understanding.

More journalists from New Zealand need to go to Iran to see for themselves.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz