Iran wins, Israel murders more children

26 June 2026

Over the course of the last week Iran has decisively defeated the combined forces of Israel and the US, two nuclear powers. Its leaders are meticulously, uncompromisingly working through the ramifications of their victory, conscious they have multiple ways to ensure the outcomes they seek—none more so than their ability to shut down the Strait of Hormuz at will. They have placed Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon as the first item on the Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding. The geopolitics of West Asia have already been reshaped.

Trump, acknowledging Israel First’s defeat, has scurried towards an Israel Second or Third or even lower position—it’s going down by the day. Having made a catastrophic blunder by letting Netanyahu and Mossad persuade him that regime change or the reduction of Iran to a state of civil war would be easy, Trump has authored a military defeat that is in many ways more devastating than the loss against Vietnam. All of a sudden, he’s talking about how much he respects the Iranian government’s resolution, clarity and commitment to defending its people. Why shouldn’t Iran have weapons to defend itself, he reasoned.

JD Vance delivered an extraordinary response to Israeli society’s narcissistic howls of betrayal. “Donald J. Trump is the only head of state in the entire world who is sympathetic to the nation of Israel at this moment in time,” he declared publicly—momentarily forgetting about Keir Starmer (an easy thing to do). “If I was in the cabinet of the Israeli government, I might not be attacking the only powerful ally that I have anywhere left in the entire world.” Addressing Israel in an interview with the complicit New York Times, Vance added: “You’re a country of nine million people. You can’t just kill your way out of solving every single national security problem that you have.”

Biden and Harris didn’t come close to being as critical of Israel during their time in office. Nor did Trump in his first term. Nor Obama, whose preference was to domino bomb Arab countries. Some commentators have compared Vance’s rebuke to Reagan’s criticism of Israel during its 1982 invasion of Lebanon. On that occasion Reagan’s press secretary reported that the president expressed “outrage” to the Israel prime minister Menachem Begin and told him he wanted the invasion “to stop and to stop now.” Reagan also used the word “holocaust” to describe Israel’s bombing.

Begin said later that the statement “hurt me very deeply”. This is because he and most Zionists are particularly sensitive when people use the words “holocaust” and “genocide” without referring to the Nazi holocaust, believing it’s antisemitic to suggest that anyone can suffer like the Jews. (As many will know, I’m Jewish and my dad came out of Nazi Germany on the kindertransport, so I have some background here.) The wider Zionist movement has driven the debate so hard most people don’t have a clue that, in addition to six million Jews, the Nazis also murdered more than half a million Roma (their first targets), hundreds of thousands of disabled people, thousands of homosexuals, political opponents and Jehovah’s Witnesses, three million Soviet prisoners of war and at least three million non-Jewish Poles—or some seven to nine million others, all off the battlefield.

Yet as significant as Reagan’s words might have been, he didn’t make them directly in public. We have to go back to 1956 to find a powerful example of this: Eisenhower during the Suez crisis. As Eisenhower stated on national radio: “We believe these actions to have been taken in error. We do not accept the use of force as a wise or proper instrument for the settlement of international disputes.” This is hardly as devastating as Vance’s rebuke.

We’re all through with listening to political leaders who cosplay as humans, saying, for instance, that they’ll recognise Palestine while simultaneously providing Israel with the weapons, trade and diplomatic support to carry out a genocide. As Chocolate put it, “Action Speaks Louder than Words”. However, with Trump, surprisingly, there are signs of action. Even if Israel has access to Epstein paedophile info that could bring him down, Trump has entered into an outline agreement with Iran that is transformationally disadvantageous for Israel.

Trump surely understands there’s no route to victory over Iran. He has also witnessed mounting domestic opposition to the war within the Republican party and the implosion of his America First base. On 18 June Tucker Carlson declared: “How could I or any American voter support a political party that’s not loyal to the United States? That puts the interests of a foreign country above those of its own citizens?” Three days ago Trump also witnessed Democratic candidates Darializa Avila Chevalier, Brad Lander and Claire Valdez win dramatic victories in New York primaries after running campaigns that foregrounded their opposition to Israel. Surrounded by Zionists, even Trump can see that the US political landscape has shifted dramatically, perhaps irreversibly. If only the Democratic Party establishment could keep up.

Israel, meanwhile, is in a state of mourning and fury. This stands as the most glorious indicator that its entire strategy for extending its borders and turning West Asia into its playground, one where it can kill kids at will, has collapsed. Because Israel is a bona fide psychopathic society—meaning it doesn’t register any empathy for its victims—it can’t understand that it has made a giant miscalculation. Instead it believes the rest of the world is wrong. Even Keir Starmer, who is beginning to look like Israel’s only diehard supporter of diminishing significance, is wrong. Israel is an extremely sick country. Currently there is no prospect it will recover.

Even the “centrist opposition” led by Gadi Eisenkot (Yashar) and Avigdor Liberman (Yisrael Beiteinu), which is quite likely to defeat Netanyahu in elections that must be held before 27 October, is promising to set right Netanyahu’s failure to defeat Hamas (which retains its weapons), Hezbollah (which is achieving major victories over the IDF), and of course Iran (which has become the strongest power in West Asia). Trying to hold the government’s ground, Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s far-right national security minister, declared: “For every tear of an Israeli mother, a thousand Lebanese mothers must weep.” He added: “All of Lebanon must burn.”

Ben-Gvir made his comments at a point when Israel has killed at least 4,230 Lebanese (during its current invasion), 3,468 Iranians (in tandem with the US), and more than 73,000 in Gaza (which doesn’t include those who’ve died under the rubble or as a result of lack of food, healthcare, humane living conditions etc). Although there are exceptions, Israelis as a whole don’t believe that Arab and Persian people are of equal value to Jewish-Israeli people—there has been breathtakingly little opposition to the genocide—and get all upset when you explain that their viewpoint is the ultimate expression of colonialist racism.

A death cult driven by an accelerating death drive—more specially, the outward form of the death drive that Freud saw as a way to protect the self from self-destruction—Israel has responded by turning to its favorite form of entertainment: killing children. IDF soldiers take great pleasure in posting videos that mark the death of Palestinians, the younger the better. I haven’t been able to trace any record of an Israeli politician who has expressed regret at the number of Palestinian children murdered. Social media is replete with Israeli-Jewish teenagers laughing and celebrating when they hear of the deaths of their Palestinian peers.

To vent societal frustration, the IDF has started to drop football-shaped cluster bombs in the town of Doueir in south Lebanon—to welcome children back to the homes it has destroyed. The move echoes Israel’s use of cluster munitions that resembled a “a small black football” in Lebanon back in 2006, as Reuters reported at the time. Responding to Israel’s latest line in infanticide, UN representative Mohamad Safa recalled that when he was six years old Israel “dropped bombs disguised as toys on us in Lebanon.” He asked on X: “What kind of monster terrorist must one be to leave a cluster bomb disguised as footballs during the World Cup, to attract children to play with it to tear them apart?”

Last Saturday the IDF killed two children and their parents during an attack on the town of Barish in southern Lebanon. On Sunday or Monday, the least moral army in the world killed a 16-year-old girl, Raghad Hassan Ashour, while she was walking to school. Two days ago it killed a 12-year-old child named Ahmed, who was taken out in a drone strike in the al-Mawasi area of Gaza, which had been designated a “safe zone”.

These killings follow the murder a 7-month-old baby, Sam Abu Haikal, in Hebron earlier this month. He was in his mother’s arms, sitting in the backseat of a car his father was driving. When his father noticed Israeli soldiers he slowed the vehicle and stopped. That’s when an IDF soldier fired a bullet into Sam’s head. Close-range target practice. The mother has shrapnel lodged near her broken heart. According to the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, Sam was the thirteenth child killed in the West Bank in 2026. Israeli soldiers have killed a total of 236 children in the occupied territory since 7/10.

On Tuesday the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory published a major, 94-page report titled “‘The essence of childhood has been destroyed’: Israel’s deliberate targeting of Palestinian children in the Occupied Palestinian Territory since 7 October 2023”. It finds “indisputable evidence” that Israeli security forces have “deliberately targeted and killed Palestinian children”. In doing so Israel has attacked “the very capacity of the Palestinian people to exist and to determine their future”—making it foundational to Israel’s genocidal intent. The report adds that between 7 October 2023 and 7 October 2025 the IDF has killed at least 20,179 children, accounting for nearly 30% of all fatalities, and injured another 44,143. The report also notes that between the Gaze “ceasefire” of 10 October 2025 and 31 March 2026 the IDF has killed more than 100 children.

https://www.un.org/unispal/document/coi-report-23jun26/

On 23 June my youngest daughter turned 21, which gave me pause for thought. Then again every day I think about my daughters, or any kids, or any humans, I pause for thought. How can Israeli Jews as a grouping be anything other than psychopathic if they are unable to understand what it must feel like to lose a child?

Israel’s infanticide, its genocide, its ecocide, its everything-cide, will never stop of its own accord. Nor will liberal Zionists do anything meaningful to try to half the ongoing genocide, because their devotion to Israel and love of Israel transcends their opposition to mass murder. Israel therefore has to be stopped by force—economic and military force—because this is the only language that it might register.

If ever there was any doubt that the resistance would come from within West Asia, that doubt is now over. Following almost 50 years of covert and overt attacks on its autonomy, Iran leads the way. Formed as national liberation movements, Hamas and Hezbollah remain resilient. The days that followed the overthrow of Asaad, when it appeared that Israel First was powering its way to total victory, are hard to remember.

How long Israel holds on—gouging out the hearts of children as it plunges to new depths of immorality—partly depends on how long the US, the UK and Germany plus the EU continue to provide it with weapons, trade and diplomatic support. For those of us who live in these countries along with other states that are helping prop up Israel, this is our task: to compel our governments to withdraw all economic, military and diplomatic support and root out Zionism’s occupation of our democratic institutions, judiciaries, media institutions, tech infrastructure, wider corporate sector, police forces and surveillance operations.

Having failed to reach the World Cup finals, Israel’s game of genocide football will explode in its face, it’s just a matter of when.

Free Palestine, end the ethnic cleansing of Lebanon!