“US Israel Iran War”

The Iranian regime is playing its game again: drag everything out to stay in power until the American public grows tired of high gasoline prices; or until the November midterm elections, when the Democrats might win; or until 2029 when President Donald J. Trump’s term finally ends and he is replaced, with luck, by an invertebrate.

Iran’s regime has been using two tactics. It says: “We need time. We are, because of the strikes, fractured and our leadership divided.” Or, as Vice President J.D. Vance naively noted on its behalf: it says it does not know what it wants. “The Iranians aren’t themselves quite clear in what direction they want to go,” Vance, with a straight face, told reporters at the White House; “they are also just a fractured country.”

As the American public waits for President Donald Trump to decide whether to attack the Iranian regime again or not, the Iranian regime has made its warlike intentions clear.

Trump seemed to be more in favor of striking Iran again as of Saturday morning, since he had canceled all his weekend plans and posted a map showing an American flag over Iran with the comment, “United States of the Middle East?”

THE Iranian regime is reframing its ‘tolls’ on traffic in the Strait of Hormuz as a ‘maritime insurance policy’.

On Saturday, Fars – a media outlet associated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) – reported that it has seen a plan by Iran’s Ministry of Economics to force shipping companies to pay ‘verifiable insurance policies’.

Ebrahim Azizi, the chairman of the National Security Committee to Iran’s Parliament, also said that Iran has prepared a ‘professional mechanism’ to permit ‘only commercial vessels and parties co-operating with Iran’.

President Donald Trump revealed on Friday that a 20-year moratorium on Iran’s nuclear program would be sufficient for him on that portion of a possible agreement to end the war.

The president’s acknowledgement on Air Force One following his trip to China appears to suggest a shift in his thinking, given he has repeatedly said they must agree to completely and permanently dismantle its nuclear program.

Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei is probably still alive and hiding in a bunker, Binyamin Netanyahu has said amid speculation over the new Iranian supreme leader’s health.

“I think he is alive. What his condition is, it’s hard to say, you know? He’s holed up in some bunker or in some secret place,” the Israeli prime minister told 60 Minutes. He added, however: “I don’t think he has the same authority that his father [had].”

No matter how hard the Iranians try to pretend they have the upper hand in negotiations to end hostilities with the US, the inescapable reality is that the ayatollahs desperately need to seal a deal – and quickly – if the Islamic Republic is to stand any chance of surviving the conflict.

While Iranian negotiators are doing their level best to string out negotiations with the Trump administration in the hope of securing a better deal, their efforts are nothing more than an attempt to conceal the regime’s catastrophic weakness.

President Donald Trump has dismissed Iran’s response to US proposals to end the war as “totally unacceptable”.

Iran’s semi-official Tasnim news agency said Tehran’s proposal, sent via Pakistan, which has served as a mediator, included an immediate end to the war on all fronts, a halt to the US naval blockade of Iranian ports and guarantees of no further attacks on Iran.

A ceasefire meant to facilitate talks to end the war launched by the US and Israel in February has been largely observed, despite occasional exchanges of fire.

President Donald Trump slammed Iran for “playing games with the United States” for 47 years, but soon, “they will be laughing no longer,” he said in a Truth Social post on Sunday afternoon.

Good answer

ABC: ‘Trump gave Iran 48 hours to open Strait of Hormuz 50 days ago. Nothing happened’

Trump’s UN envoy Waltz: ‘I think we should take a step back. 50 days to deal with a 50-year-old problem’ pic.twitter.com/NLgZSZwQ1e

— RT (@RT_com) May 10, 2026

Is the war between Iran and the US-Israel tandem over bar the shouting? Even a week ago, the question might have sounded fanciful, as President Donald Trump was still threatening to wipe Iran off the map. Now, however, he is talking of “progress” towards a deal confirming what he and his aides, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, present as the end of military engagement.

Several new developments may have contributed to this new optimistic vision.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday that President Donald Trump told him he would want to “go in” to Iran to remove enriched uranium from the country.

“I’m not going to talk about military means, but the president, what President Trump has said to me, ‘I want to go in there.’ And I think it can be done physically; that’s not the problem. If you have an agreement and you go in and you take it out, why not? That’s the best way,” Netanyahu said.

Iran has sent its response to US proposals to end the war via mediators in Pakistan, Iranian state media report.

No details have been released. The US has not made details of its proposals public, either, but reports suggest they centre on a 14-point memorandum of understanding, which could lead to negotiations on Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

A ceasefire meant to facilitate talks to end the war launched by the US and Israel in February has been largely observed, despite occasional exchanges of fire.

However, Iran has continued to block the Strait of Hormuz – leading to a rise in world oil prices – and the US has been enforcing a blockade of Iranian ports to exert pressure on Tehran to agree to its terms.

In 1759, Samuel Johnson wrote: “No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned.” Certainly being a sailor then was dangerous too, with privateering and piracy rife. But being a sailor in the Arabian Gulf in 2026 is, according to the International Maritime Organisation (IMO), an unprecedented humanitarian crisis that even Johnson could not expect.

No one knows what mental toll will be exacted by the enforced imprisonment of 20,000 seafarers on board 2,000 vessels trapped either side of the Strait of Hormuz for the past ten weeks. “I have seen Iranian drones and missiles flying at low altitude,” one stuck seafarer told the Seafarers’ Happiness Index, a project led by the Mission to Seafarers, an industry welfare association. “I also hear the sound of fighter jets, but we can’t identify which country they belong to.