🇺🇸🇮🇷⚡️ — Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer:

Trump dragged America into a war—an illegal, costly war without any goals or without any endgame—and has the nerve to call it a “mini-war”

The best way to lower costs and end this chaos is to end this illegal war: Democrats are forcing a seventh vote on our War Powers Resolution this week to withdraw U.S. troops from hostilities with Iran

If Republicans vote against our resolution, they will continue to bear the blame for Trump’s war

🇱🇧⚔️🇮🇱 Hezbollah released footage showing an FPV drone strike on an Israeli Merkava tank in the town of Al-Bayada, southern Lebanon. The drone struck the closed rear hatch of the tank.

Notably, Hezbollah drone operators are getting more and more accurate with their strikes. Some of the first videos showed missed hits, however almost all of the new ones show impacts, including on moving targets (soldiers).

🔗 AMK Mapping 🇳🇿 (@AMK_Mapping_)

🇮🇱❌🇵🇸 The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians

Male and female Palestinians describe brutal sexual abuse at the hands of Israel’s prison guards, soldiers, settlers and interrogators.

There is no evidence that Israeli leaders order rapes. But in recent years they have built a security apparatus where sexual violence has become, as a United Nations report put it last year, one of Israel’s “standard operating procedures” and “a major element in the ill treatment of Palestinians.” A report out last month, from the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, a Geneva-based advocacy group often critical of Israel, concludes that Israel employs “systematic sexual violence” that is “widely practiced as part of an organized state policy.”

What does this standard operating procedure look like? Sami al-Sai, 46, a freelance journalist, says that as he was being taken to a prison cell after his detention in 2024, a group of guards threw him to the ground.

“They were all hitting me, and one stepped on my head and neck,” he said. “Someone pulled my pants down. They pulled down my boxers.” And then one of the guards pulled out a rubber baton used to beat prisoners.

“They were trying to force it into my rectum, and I was bracing myself to prevent it, but I couldn’t,” he said, speaking with increasing anxiety. “It was so painful.” The guards were laughing at him, he said. “Then I heard someone say, ‘Give me the carrots,’” he recalled, adding that they then used a carrot. “It was extremely painful,” he said. “I was praying for death.”

After he was dumped into his cell, he concluded that the spot where he had been raped had been used before, for he found other people’s vomit, blood and broken teeth crushed into his skin.

By one count, Israel has detained 20,000 people in the West Bank alone since the Oct. 7 attacks, and more than 9,000 Palestinians were still being held as of this month. Many have not been charged but were detained under ill-defined security grounds, and since 2023, most have been denied visits from the Red Cross and lawyers.

“Israeli forces systematically employ rape and sexual torture to humiliate Palestinian female detainees,” the Euro-Med report said. It cited a 42-year-old woman who said she had been shackled naked to a metal table as Israeli soldiers forcibly had sex with her over two days while other soldiers filmed the attacks. Afterward, she said, she was shown photos of her being raped and told they would be published if she did not cooperate with Israeli intelligence.

It’s impossible to know how common sexual assaults against Palestinians are. My reporting for this article is based on conversations with 14 men and women who said they had been sexually assaulted by Israeli settlers or members of the security forces. I also spoke to family members, investigators, officials and others.

I found these victims by asking around among lawyers, human rights groups, aid workers and ordinary Palestinians themselves. In many cases it was possible to corroborate the victims’ stories in part by talking to witnesses or, more commonly, to those whom the victims had confided in, such as family members, lawyers and social workers; in other cases it was not possible, perhaps because shame left people reluctant to acknowledge abuse even to loved ones.

Save the Children commissioned a survey last year of children ages 12 to 17 who had been in Israeli detention; more than half reported witnessing or experiencing sexual violence. Save the Children said that the true figure was probably higher because stigma left some unwilling to acknowledge what had happened to them.

🔗 https://archive.ph/wCOUZ

🇺🇦⚔️🇷🇺 Western Zaporozhye ORBAT

Despite Russian successes earlier this year in deeply infiltrating toward Veselyanka and Novoyakovlevka, Ukrainian counterattacks continue to roll back previous advances.

Ukraine reinforced the line with the 🇺🇦153rd Mechanized Brigade, redeployed from Kherson to support the 🇺🇦128th Mountain Assault Brigade along the Stepovaya - Mali Shcherbaky axis, while the main counterattacks toward Stepnogorsk are being conducted by an assortment of HUR special forces units (Tymur & the International Legion).

Russia, meanwhile, seeking to consolidate its gains, deployed the two reserve regiments of the 🇷🇺7th Air Assault Division (387th and 1445th Regiments) alongside the 108th and 247th Air Assault Regiments. Furthermore, around the March–April timeframe, additional elements of the 🇷🇺299th Airborne Regiment (98th Airborne Division) arrived from Kherson.

Despite this, elements of the 7th, 104th, and 98th VDV Divisions, as well as the 11th VDV Brigade, now operating in the area alongside various regiments of the 19th and 42nd Motor Rifle Divisions (58th Combined Arms Army), remain unable to regain significant initiative, as the battle for Stepnogorsk enters its seventh month.

🔗 Unit Observer

🇺🇸🔥 Intense heat from this large wildfire in Broward County, Florida is rising so rapidly that it’s cooling and condensing onto smoke particles, creating these towering pyrocumulus clouds. Ash was even found on cars in Pembroke Pines. More than 11,000 acres burned so far.

🔗 Brandon Orr (@BrandonOrrWPLG)