US will hold Iran responsible for Houthi attacks on ships, Trump says
US President Donald Trump on Thursday threatened Iran with major military action if Yemen’s Houthis carried out further attacks on commercial shipping.
Trump said the Houthis had resumed attacks amid the US conflict with Iran, accusing the group of firing at two Saudi ships overnight.
“If they do this again, the US will hold Iran responsible, in that the Houthis are a Surrogate and/or Proxy of Iran” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
He said both Iran and the Houthis would face “major military punishment” if further attacks occurred.
File photo shows Iranian miners resting after work at a mine.
Iranian workers who have gone months without pay may have only two months of financial resilience left without government intervention, a labor representative warned on Thursday, as wage arrears mount following conflict between the United States and the Islamic Republic.
"The country will certainly face significant unrest among workers by the end of the summer if the current trend continues," Akbar Shokat, executive secretary of the Workers' House in Qom province, told the ILNA news agency.
Many workers, according to ILNA, who were temporarily laid off during the conflict and turned to jobs such as ride-hailing to make ends meet have since been recalled to factories, only to find that wages for June and July remain unpaid. Having returned to work, they are also no longer eligible for unemployment benefits.
Most Iranian workers, Shokat said, already live below the poverty line after years of wage suppression, leaving them with little capacity to absorb further economic pressure.
Employers accused of withholding wages
Shokat accused some employers of exploiting the current economic conditions by reducing production and delaying wage payments despite having sufficient raw materials and finished goods in storage.
"Some employers are taking advantage of the current situation," he said, adding that businesses which accumulated wealth over previous decades had a moral responsibility not to shift the burden of the crisis onto workers.
He urged the government to introduce emergency economic measures, including customs exemptions for imported raw materials and bank financing for manufacturers, to help companies continue operations and prevent further wage delays.
Shokat also called for legal action against employers who withhold workers' wages while stockpiling goods.
Strikes spread across sectors
ILNA has reported a growing number of labor protests in recent weeks.
On June 23, the agency reported that 1,600 workers at Tabriz Machinery Group stopped work after two months without pay, demanding payment of wages owed for May and June.
Earlier, healthcare workers in Islam-Abad-e Gharb of Kermanshah province gathered to protest low wages, delayed payments and worsening living conditions, criticizing what they described as unequal pay across Iran's health system and incomes that remain well below the poverty line.
Economic pressures deepen
The labor concerns come as Iran's economy faces mounting pressure following the conflict with the United States. The rial has weakened sharply against foreign currencies in the open market, with the US dollar trading above 1.91 million rials.
Separately, Saeed Shojaei, deputy planning minister at the Ministry of Industry, Mine and Trade, told the Ettelaat newspaper on July 15 that financial losses from electricity shortages affecting industry are expected to increase from about 3,030 trillion rials in the 2024 to 4,730 trillion rials in 2025.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio attends the 33rd ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF), part of the ASEAN Foreign Ministers' Meeting, at the Philippine International Convention Center on July 23, 2026 in Pasay, Metro Manila, Philippines.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said President Donald Trump’s policy toward Iran was “a head for an eye,” warning Tehran it would pay a heavy price for attacks on Americans and US interests.
Rubio made the remark when asked about Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi invoking the principle of “an eye for an eye.”
“The president’s policy is a head for an eye,” Rubio told reporters at an ASEAN summit in Manila.
“They will pay a very heavy price for the things they’re doing. They’re already paying a very heavy price,” he said.
Rubio said Iran’s industrial and defense industrial bases had been “decimated” and that Tehran was continuing to lose missile launchers and radar systems.
“They’re losing launchers. They’re losing radars every single night. They are suffering billions of dollars in damage, and their economy is a disaster,” he said.
Despite Iran’s rhetoric, Rubio said, “they are suffering tremendously, and they’re going to suffer more until they come to their senses.”
US goal is denuclearized Iran
Rubio said the Trump administration’s goal was a denuclearized Iran, not regime change.
“I think the US is seeking a denuclearized Iran that will never have a nuclear weapon,” Rubio said.
“Our issue and our concern and our focus is denuclearizing Iran. They can never have a nuclear weapon.”
Asked whether Washington was comfortable leaving Iran’s current leadership in power, Rubio replied: “They can’t have a nuclear weapon.”
He also rejected suggestions that Trump had made regime change an objective of the conflict.
“He never said regime change was a goal,” Rubio said.
“From day one of the operation, it was very clear that we were going to degrade their missile launchers, their drones, and their factories and their navy.”
Rubio said Trump had argued that the Iranian people deserved better leadership, but added that Washington’s national interest was ensuring Iran never acquired a nuclear weapon.
Iran not ready for a deal
Rubio said he did not believe Iran was ready to reach an agreement with Washington despite repeated indirect messages seeking talks.
"These people are calling us every day, begging, let's do a deal. They send us messages through other countries, third countries," Rubio said.
"The problem is, every time these people do a deal, they either break it or after they make it, they want to change the deal."
"I don't think they're serious about making a deal," he said, adding: "I think they'll be ready soon because the price they're paying is very high."
Rubio said Iran had suffered extensive military and economic damage.
"They're losing launchers. They're losing radars every single night. They are suffering billions of dollars in damage, and their economy is a disaster," he said.
Despite Iran's rhetoric, Rubio said, "they are suffering tremendously, and they're going to suffer more until they come to their senses."
Warning to Iran
Asked about Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi's remarks invoking "an eye for an eye," Rubio responded: "The president's policy is a head for an eye."
"They will pay a very heavy price for the things they're doing. They're already paying a very heavy price," Rubio said.
He said Iran's industrial and defense industrial bases had been "decimated" and said Tehran would continue to pay a price for its actions.
Russia question
Asked about a report that US intelligence analysts were investigating whether Russia had assisted Iranian drone strikes on CIA facilities in the Persian Gulf, Rubio declined to comment on the specific allegation.
"Let's imagine that were true. I certainly wouldn't discuss it in the press," he said.
Rubio said Iran had spent years building up the military capabilities it was now using.
"Nothing that Iran is doing, nothing that anyone's doing to help Iran is in any way increasing their ability to target Americans," he said.
"Iran has spent the better part of 20 years not just sponsoring terrorism, but building long-range rockets, short-range missiles and drones."
He said Tehran had intended to double its stockpile and use its missiles and drones to deter action against a nuclear weapons programme.
"The world will be a safer place because we addressed it," Rubio said, referring to US military action against Iran's capabilities.
US federal prosecutors said the man convicted of stabbing author Salman Rushdie contacted a person in Iran before the 2022 attack to confirm that the fatwa calling for Rushdie's death remained valid, the New York Times reported, as his federal terrorism trial opened on Wednesday.
The trial in federal court in Buffalo will determine whether Hadi Matar acted independently out of religious anger or carried out the attack in response to the fatwa issued by Iran’s first Supreme Leader Ruhollah Khomeini and in service of Lebanon's Hezbollah, according to the New York Times.
"He wanted everyone to know he was doing this in the service of Hezbollah," federal prosecutor Timothy C. Lynch said in his opening statement. "He wanted to do it so he could be perceived as an Islamic martyr."
Matar, 28, faces charges of providing material support to a designated terrorist organization and committing an act of terrorism transcending national boundaries. If convicted on all counts, he could spend the rest of his life in prison.
He was convicted last year in a separate New York state case of attempted murder and sentenced to 25 years in prison for the August 2022 attack.
Prosecutors point to Iran contact
According to the New York Times, federal prosecutors say Matar contacted a person identified as Kamyar in Iran in May 2022, about three months before the attack.
Prosecutors say Matar wrote that he knew where to find Rushdie but was unsure "how to do it." They said he then asked whether the fatwa against the author remained valid and proceeded with the attack after receiving confirmation.
Hadi Matar, who stabbed author Salman Rushdie, appears in court.
Ruhollah Khomeini, issued the fatwa in 1989 after the publication of The Satanic Verses, a novel that prompted protests from many Muslims over its depiction of a fictionalized version of the Prophet Muhammad.
Hezbollah evidence disputed
Prosecutors, Lynch said, will present text messages, notebook entries, propaganda videos and other evidence that they argue shows Matar was motivated by Hezbollah and Iranian leaders.
Matar, according to prosecutors, compiled propaganda videos titled "Rushdie Fatwa 1.6" that included a 2006 speech by former Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah condemning cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad. They also said Matar sent the videos to others.
Prosecutors further say Matar used the name and birth date of a Hezbollah fighter on a fake identification card and kept notes weighing the advantages and disadvantages of killing Rushdie.
Defense lawyer Nathaniel L. Barone II rejected that his client acted on behalf of Iran or Hezbollah.
"The government didn't know what Hadi Matar's mental state was at that time," Barone told the court.
Before the trial, Barone described Matar as a religious man angered by The Satanic Verses, arguing the attack stemmed from personal outrage rather than direction from a foreign government or militant group.
Rushdie expected to testify
Rushdie is expected to testify this week about the attack, as he did during the state trial last year.
The author was stabbed more than a dozen times while preparing to speak at the Chautauqua Institution in western New York about writers living in political exile. He suffered severe nerve damage and lost sight in one eye.
Prosecutors must persuade jurors that Matar did more than act on personal religious conviction and instead knowingly provided support to Hezbollah, a key legal distinction that could determine whether the terrorism charges succeed.
People talk and work at Nook Cafe in Tehran, Iran in this file photo from September 2024
The latest round of café closures in Tehran is a reminder to ordinary Iranians that wartime or otherwise, those in power still decide how much space they are allowed to occupy.
On Sunday morning, authorities sealed several well-known cafés on Sanaei Street in central Tehran, with reports of similar closures in nearby Iranshahr. Among them were Dobar, 1401, Sam Café, Jo Café and Café Man.
The website Emtedad reported that each café was given a different explanation. Some were told it was because of hijab. Others because they served sandwiches. Others because they had chairs on the pavement.
The variety of reasons almost felt more revealing than any single one.
Hamed, who manages one of the affected cafés, says staff had already been warned that officials would come to seal the premises before inspectors even arrived.
"They told us they were coming," he says. "Now I'm trying to work out how we're supposed to pay wages, rent and everything else. First there was the war. Now this. Every few weeks there's another blow for small businesses and ordinary people."
The official explanations seemed almost secondary. The decision, many felt, had already been made.
Sanaei has become a familiar place in these dispatches because it represents something increasingly scarce in Tehran: a refuge. Its cafés are not cheap, often more expensive than many young people can comfortably afford. Yet they remain full. Students spend hours over a single coffee. Couples linger. Friends argue about politics, music and migration.
After weeks of war, blackouts and an internet that barely functioned, the street had slowly begun to feel alive again. For a few weeks, Sanaei almost felt like itself again. That, many people now believe, was precisely the problem.
Shiva, 33, who regularly meets friends there, says cafés are more than businesses. They are among the last places where the city still feels like a city.
"The war could have brought people together," she says. "Instead, it feels as though they're using its aftermath to settle scores with people they don't see as loyal."
Whether that is the authorities' intention is impossible to know. What is striking is how many people independently reached almost the same conclusion.
Many believe the authorities fear respite almost as much as dissent. When a city begins to relax, people gather, talk, laugh and slowly reclaim public life. Moments like Sunday's, they believe, are periodic reminders that no part of that life exists beyond the state's reach.
Ladan, a 28-year-old nurse who rarely visits Sanaei anymore because cafés have become too expensive, nevertheless took the closures personally.
"It almost feels as though someone decided the war hadn't put enough pressure on people," she says. "So they went after the places where people still gathered. It's difficult not to feel that ordinary life itself has become the target."
That helps explain why the closures provoked such bitterness. It was not the inconvenience, but the contempt. Many people felt that after months of war, inflation, blackouts and uncertainty, the authorities' instinct was still not to ask what society needed, but to remind society who remained in charge.
The Islamic Republic has already lost many of the social battles it once fought so fiercely, at least in Tehran. Compulsory hijab is openly challenged. Young men and women mix freely. Cafés remain among the few places where a generation battered by protests, repression and war can still carve out something resembling an ordinary life.
But losing the social argument is not the same as losing the power to enforce it. That may be the real message behind Sunday's closures: not that chairs on the pavement or sandwiches suddenly became intolerable, but that almost any pretext can be enough to take away a business, a meeting place or simply somewhere people had begun to feel at ease.
Hamed shrugs when asked whether the cafés will eventually reopen.
"They probably will," he says. "But that's not really the point anymore."
Perhaps he is right. After everything people have lived through, the instinct of those in power still seems to be not to give society a little more room to breathe, but to remind it that even breathing remains a privilege, not a right.
A view the panel at Iran International town hall in Washington, DC (July 2026)
The US may be peeling away layers of Iran's leadership, but without a plan for what comes next, bombing the coast and seizing islands cannot reach the problem in Tehran, and risk delivering an IRGC takeover rather than real change, experts said at an Iran International town hall.
The panel, held at Iran International's Washington headquarters and moderated by Fardad Farahzad, brought together Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute, Ilan Berman of the American Foreign Policy Council, and Iranian-American analyst Fereshteh Pezeshk.
The discussion came amid renewed US strikes, with attacks tearing through bridges and infrastructure across Iran's south.
Is Washington heading for a ground operation?
The question hanging over the room was whether the air campaign is a prelude to something larger. Rubin framed the choice in stark terms.
"When you have a hornet's nest, you have two good options. One is to leave it alone. The other one is to get rid of it," he said. "The last thing you want to do is sit underneath it lightly tapping it with a stick, and we're getting to the point where that stick tapping is over."
The open question, he added, is "are we heading to boots on the ground? And if we're heading to boots on the ground, are we simply talking about the islands in the Persian Gulf, or are we talking about some of the ports?"
Pezeshk talked about the risks. A move onto Iranian soil, she argued, would be "disastrous," and not only in military terms. "A very good population of Iranians, unlike the rest of the Middle East, are pro-American," she said, describing "a chasm between the people and the Islamic Republic" after the killing on Iran's streets.
Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute at Iran International town hall in Washington
An occupation, she warned, could close that chasm rather than widen it. "The solution is in Tehran, not on the coasts. You've got to resolve that problem."
Berman placed the same question inside American politics, noting that gasoline prices and looming midterm elections are shaping every decision the administration makes.
The task now, he said, is to establish what military planners call escalation dominance, "to show the Iranian regime that they have more firepower and they have politically more will to stay and to fight."
Regime change or transformation?
The most contested idea of the evening came from Berman, who argued that a quieter transformation has already taken place inside the Islamic Republic.
The current rulers, he said, "have a different DNA. They behave differently, they negotiate differently," a shift he traced in part to a war that opened at the very top of the escalation ladder with the killing of the supreme leader.
However, he pointed out that the change has not produced true regime change. “The Trump administration hasn’t dug deep enough... “You haven’t had regime change as most of us have historically thought about it – a transition from the Islamic Republic to a fundamentally different governing system.”
Rubin pushed the logic toward the machinery of power, describing an effort to peel away the leadership layer by layer. With the Revolutionary Guards numbering well over 100,000, he argued, "somewhere along those ranks there is someone who wants to enrich himself" and would deal with Washington.
But he cautioned that the administration may not know who actually runs the country, comparing its approach to "negotiating with the doorman in a skyscraper rather than negotiating with the owner."
Both men returned to a warning that any transition badly managed could produce something worse.
Iranian-American analyst Fereshteh Pezeshk at Iran International town hall
Pezeshk offered the strongest caution against treating decapitation strikes as a complete regime-change strategy. “You have to resolve the political issue in Tehran, not the manifestation.”
She pressed the point harder: removing the leadership without a plan for the day after risks chaos. "How do you ensure it's not going to be a Taliban-like power that comes in? Are you working with the opposition? Are you inclusive enough?" She saw little sign of that groundwork.
"The guy sitting in Tehran is going to be there forever until they die. The US president, two and a half years from now, is gone."
The next uprising, and a fumbled chance
If there was a shared conviction, it was that Iran's streets, not its negotiators, will decide the outcome, and that Washington keeps missing its moments there.
Berman described unrest in Iran as a cyclical force, erupting roughly every two and a half years and accelerating. The lesson of the past six months, he said, is that the US was caught flat-footed when it mattered.
When the internet went dark in January, he recounted, the administration assumed it could "just pierce that veil" with Starlink units and VPNs. Instead it found the jamming, aided by Russia and China, far more robust than expected, and its own tools not prepositioned.
"One of the most important lessons that this last half year has brought is we should be thinking now about the next round of protests, because the next protest is going to start."
Pezeshk argued it already had. She credited the January protests, set off in part by an opposition call to the streets, as "one of the biggest protests ever in Iranian history," met with a killing she put at around 40,000. Her frustration was that such a force draws so little attention in Washington.
The Kurds, the islands, and a mafia state
Asked whether the US might arm Kurdish or other groups to open a ground front, the panel was wary. Rubin noted Washington's long reluctance to back separatist movements in the region, and Pezeshk attributed the on-again, off-again talk to "the chaos of the Trump administration."
Berman said officials he had spoken to were "very nervous about the steadfastness and the resolve of these elements."
Ilan Berman of the American Foreign Policy Council
Rubin, speaking "as an analyst rather than advocate," sketched where a limited campaign might fall: not the ports, but strategic islands, from Abu Musa and the Tunbs to Kish and Qeshm, "the gateway to Bandar Abbas."
He warned that seizing Iranian territory could backfire by rallying a fiercely nationalist public. The Islamic Republic, he argued, would not be moved by the loss of land the way a normal state would.
"They act like a mafia. They don't care if part of the country is gone as long as they're still in power."
Pezeshk’s argument was that territorial occupation – whether by US forces, Kurdish groups or another regional actor – could unite Iranians around national sovereignty.
Can an ideological system make a lasting deal?
Rubin argued that the Islamic Republic’s political identity limits its ability to reach the kind of pragmatic agreement sought by the Trump administration. Rubin argued that the Islamic Republic’s political identity limits its ability to reach the kind of pragmatic agreement sought by the Trump administration.
Pezeshk was skeptical any lasting deal is possible with a system she sees as ideological to its core.
Persian Gulf states, she said, want development, not confrontation, "they do not want to go back to the 18th century," while the Islamic Republic "has a tolerance for absorbing a lot of pain just because they don't care about their people."
Whether the war ends at the table or on the coast, the panel's consensus held that its true resolution lies elsewhere.
As Rubin put it, the nuclear file, the missiles and the proxies are all "the manifestation of the root cause, which is the Islamic Republic."
