Saturday War Roundup, 6/28/25

Mostly no commentary required.

Thomas Keith @iwasnevrhere_

12h

Leaked testimonies to Haaretz confirm what Palestinians already knew: IDF commanders ordered live fire on civilians at aid distribution sites. No warnings, no tear gas, just sniper rounds, mortar shells, tank fire. Children shot for arriving early. Families shelled for standing in line. Soldiers describe it plainly: “It’s a killing field.”

The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a U.S.-evangelical-IDF proxy, runs the aid sites. But Israel controls the perimeter with remote machine guns, mortars, and contractors paid per house they demolish. Each distribution is preceded by a round of “deterrence fire”, a euphemism for murder.

At least 549 Palestinians have been killed near these zones since May 27. Many more wounded. There’s no enemy fire. No combatants. Just a population starved, corralled, and executed for seeking food.

Every bullet in a Gaza breadline is Zionism doing exactly what it was built to do.

+972 Magazine @972mag

‘I’m bored, so I shoot’

Israeli soldiers describe the near-total absence of firing regulations in Gaza, with troops shooting as they please, setting homes ablaze, and leaving corpses on the streets — all with their commanders’ permission.

From July 2024.

‘I’m bored, so I shoot’: The Israeli army’s approval of free-for-all violence in Gaza

Joshua Landis @joshua_landis

3h

Washington has paid 70% of Israel’s military costs since Oct 7, 2023.

At same time Washington is cutting Pell Grants awarded to 7.4 million poor students during the 2025-26 school year, at a cost of $38.1 billion by 23% to just $5,710 a year.

How much is going to Israel?

$17.9 B in direct aid

$4.86 B in Pentagon regional ops

$20.3 B in deferred arms deals

billions more in shipping losses, stockpile transfers, and corporate handouts

Why not pay for education? American politicians have wrong priorities.

Trita Parsi @tparsi

MUST READ by

@dandcaldwell and @jekavanagh:

"Look closely, and you’ll notice something peculiar: Many of the aircraft involved in the operation do not appear to have taken off from the large U.S. air bases in the Middle East — or, if they did, that fact has been carefully concealed. Whether this reflects a choice made to spare gulf state partners’ ties with Iran or because these states denied the United States permission to use bases on their territory, the implication is the same. When the president decided it was time for the United States to act against Iran, the 40,000 troops and billions of dollars’ worth of military hardware that Washington keeps parked in the Middle East were of limited use."

https://washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/06/28/iran-strike-american-military-vulnerability/…

12:17 PM · Jun 28, 2025

Will Schryver @imetatronink

17h

As I have argued for several years, the United States is simply not able to prosecute a protracted high-intensity war against any of its putative adversaries: Russia, China, or even Iran. It cannot be done. Not now, and likely not within a decade.

US Missile Defenses Heavily Depleted in Shielding Israel: report

From newsweek.com

The art of the double cross:

Trump suspends possible Iran sanctions relief after Khamenei speech

Khameini said in his speech that Iran won.

President Trump said Friday he halted plans to potentially ease sanctions on Iran after Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei downplayed the success of U.S. and Israeli airstrikes on Iran's nuclear program.

…

Why it matters: Trump and his advisers had hoped Iran would agree to a meeting with the U.S. next week, in which the White House planned to offer incentives — including limited sanctions relief — to jumpstart negotiations.

DD Geopolitics @DD_Geopolitics

19h

 Iran's President, Masoud Pezeshkian:

'Trump better watch his tone when addressing the Supreme Leader'

As close as we’re likely to get to any kind of debate or declaration of war:

47-53, US Senate OFFICIALLY DECLINES to block Trump from further military action against the Iranian Regime

Did the Supreme Leader have a point?

DD Geopolitics @DD_Geopolitics

5h

 NEW: Less than a week after the U.S. struck Iran’s Fordow nuclear site with GBU-57 bunker busters, construction crews and heavy equipment have been spotted at the site.

 Satellite imagery shows rapid repair or reconstruction efforts underway at one of Iran’s most fortified underground nuclear facilities.

Lengthy, comprehensive article—highly recommended:

Last Christian Town In West Bank Attacked And Besieged By Israeli Settlers

The last entirely-Christian town in the Israeli-controlled West Bank is enduring a wave of attacks by violent Jewish settlers, a local church leader says, prompting families to flee and leading clergy to declare the town is "no longer safe" for its inhabitants. Ominously, settlers have also set up an "outpost" on the fringe of that town -- Taybeh, Ramallah -- a 4,500-year-old community with huge significance in the story of Jesus Christ.

Follow the link for the graphics:

The Economy - And Its Future - In Four Charts

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

Substituting debt for earnings while enriching the rich will bear bitter fruit.

Climbing above the craziness of the Normalized Now news flow to view the economy from a quiet, windswept peak helps clear the mind of clutter. The entire economy--and its future--can be distilled down to four charts that tell the underlying story of the U.S. economy over the past 55 years.

Many of the thousands of charts floating around illuminate some aspect of the economy, but these four tell the primary story:

1. The gains from rising productivity--the only durable source of prosperity--were shifted from wages to owners of capital.

2. As wages lost ground, the central bank (Federal Reserve) replaced cash earnings with debt, by a) lowering interest rates for 40 years, b) increasing the money supply and c) opening the flood gates of credit.

3. Wage earners used credit to pay expenses, the wealthy used credit to buy income-producing assets.

4. As a result, assets such as houses are now unaffordable to all but the wealthy.

The net result of these dynamics is the rich got much, much richer, and wage earners became debt-serfs paying interest to the wealthy owners of their debts. Let's start by noting the difference between an owner-occupied house and an asset (for example a rental property) that generates income.

...

The wealthy who already own assets have a much deeper pool of credit to tap, and the cost of borrowing money is lower for them, too. So the wealthy tapped the expanding pool of "money" and credit to buy income-producing assets: stocks, real estate, enterprises, etc.

Given the limited quantity of real-world assets that generate income, this relentless credit-fueled demand from the wealthy pushed the valuations of assets higher, rendering them less affordable to wage earners.

This massive, sustained transfer of wealth via credit expansion has been going on so long that it's now normalized: very few people can recall an economy that shared the gains with wage earners rather than diverting most of the nation's wealth to the already-wealthy.

This chart of wages' share of the nation's income is the key snapshot of the economy's core dynamic. No, it's not tech, or the stock market, it's this systemic shift of income from wage earners to owners of capital.

This article hits on themes that I’ve tried to emphasize over a long time:

Donald, the American toy is breaking, be careful

After World War II, the U.S. used its economic power, technological dynamism and cultural influence to shape the world order. However, the foundations of this supremacy are weakening. The U.S. share of global GDP has fallen from 50% in the mid-20th century to around 15% today, when adjusted for purchasing power parity. Globalisation, promoted by the United States itself, has redistributed productive capacity, benefiting China in particular.

Domestically, the United States faces a civil war that has been kept under the radar and deliberately downplayed in terms of its severity. Growing economic inequality, increasingly acute political polarisation and a weakening of the collective civic spirit are just some of the problems affecting the health of American society. The chronic inability of various governments to address crucial issues such as wage stagnation, health disparities and deteriorating infrastructure has undermined the country’s internal cohesion and moral authority. Immigration is certainly a problem, but it is one of many on a long list of unresolved issues that have been left to fester.

And why are they so big? Because they have based their economic stability on the principle of global political domination, both militarily and monetarily; with that engine failing, inevitably everything else can only crumble bit by bit, leaving carnage in its wake.

There is no longer pure military invincibility. Dependence on armed intervention as a means of resolving internal crises – this was the American doctrine in the 20th century and beyond – has proved to be a deleterious addiction. This has meant that new conflicts, which have not gone as the U.S. government had hoped, have led to a worsening of the situation in terms of the domestic economy, strategic planning and international credibility.

Who, in fact, still believes in the U.S. as the world’s super-cop? …

…

Things are no longer as they were, and America will have to decide, before it is too late, what position to take in an increasingly multipolar world. Because the day may come when the United States, finding itself in a terrible crisis, will receive help from no one. And that would be the logical and just retribution for all the evil they have spread throughout the world.