Democrats push to end Iran war, Republicans digs in
US Democratic lawmakers are stepping up efforts to end the war with Iran after their sweeping midterm election victory, promising legislative action when they take control of Congress in January.
US Democratic lawmakers are stepping up efforts to end the war with Iran after their sweeping midterm election victory, promising legislative action when they take control of Congress in January.
Democrats won control of both chambers of Congress in the November 3 elections, a defeat for Republicans that President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance acknowledged was driven in part by public dissatisfaction with the war.
“Last week, voters were loud and clear: Trump’s economy doesn’t work for Americans,” Senate Democrats said in a statement on X on Friday.
“When Senate Democrats are back in the majority next year, we will take immediate action to end Trump’s war in Iran, stop his reckless tariffs, and lower costs for everything from energy to groceries to housing.”
A Reuters/Ipsos poll released Tuesday found that 71 percent of Americans wanted Congress to pass legislation ending the conflict, including 93 percent of Democrats and 51 percent of Republicans.
The growing pressure has reached the current Republican-controlled Congress, where Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky, a frequent critic of Trump, has pledged to force another vote on ending the war before his term expires.
Massie introduced a War Powers resolution on November 10 directing the president to remove US forces from hostilities with Iran.
In a post on X Saturday, Massie said he could force a vote by mid-December, provided House Speaker Mike Johnson does not cancel scheduled legislative days. He added that two other resolutions seeking to end the war could reach the House floor even sooner.
But Republican lawmakers, including some who have criticized the conflict, remain reluctant to use congressional powers to force its conclusion.
“A Republican Congress is not going to send bills to a Republican president that he's going to veto,” Representative Tom Cole of Oklahoma, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, told reporters this week.
The disagreement is expected to become a central issue in negotiations over government funding, which expires on December 11, raising the possibility of another shutdown confrontation.
Several Republicans have previously joined Democrats in attempts to restrict Trump's military operations, although most of the party has remained aligned with the president.
A war that was supposed to last weeks
The pressure has intensified as the conflict approaches its ninth month, far exceeding the administration's initial expectations.
“We are now in week 37 of Trump’s ‘2 to 3 week’ war with Iran,” Democratic Representative Jason Crow of Colorado wrote on X.
Representative Jimmy Panetta, a California Democrat, also accused Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth of continuing the war in violation of the War Powers Resolution of 1973 and failing to provide transparency over deadly strikes on civilians, including an elementary school in Iran.
“Congress will exercise its constitutional authority to hold him accountable,” Panetta said.
Democrats will have several options when they take control of Congress on January 3, including legislation restricting military operations, limits on war funding and congressional investigations into the administration's conduct.
But their ability to compel an end to the conflict remains uncertain. Trump could veto legislation passed by Congress, requiring two-thirds majorities in both chambers to override him.
Iranian state television has warned that modified versions of the country's Khorramshahr ballistic missile could reach American military bases in Europe, explicitly naming RAF Fairford in Britain as a potential target.
"The range of Iran's missiles is not limited to what they have seen," the report, broadcast Saturday, said, claiming that modifications to the Khorramshahr's warhead could increase its range severalfold.
The Khorramshahr-4, unveiled in 2023, has a claimed range of 2,000 kilometers while carrying a warhead weighing 1,500 kilograms. A lighter warhead could extend its range, although the extent of any increase remains unverified.
The broadcast included a review of missiles and drones Iran has used in its wars with Israel and the United States since June 2025, presenting the Khorramshahr as part of a broader arsenal capable of threatening American installations farther afield.
In a warning directed at Britain, the report suggested that British air defenses were not necessarily more capable than Israel's, which it claimed Iranian missiles had already penetrated during the war.
There has been no independent confirmation that Iran possesses a modified Khorramshahr capable of reaching RAF Fairford.
The broadcast invoked an order by Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei that Iran's armed forces should face no geographical restrictions in responding to attacks by the United States or Israel.
Khamenei issued the directive on October 31, calling for immediate and effective retaliation without geographical limits and ordering military commanders to update their list of potential targets.
Iran's Revolutionary Guards subsequently said the country's longstanding self-imposed limit of 2,000 kilometers on ballistic missile ranges had been lifted, although they did not specify whether longer-range missiles had been developed or deployed.
The broadcast follows a series of warnings from senior Iranian officials that American bases in Europe and on distant islands could become targets if Washington launches further attacks.
Mohsen Rezaei, secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, said earlier this week that Tehran would no longer confine its response to nearby US military installations and could strike bases in European countries.
The threats come as diplomatic efforts to end the war remain stalled, with Tehran demanding an end to the US naval blockade of Iranian ports and relief from sanctions before negotiations can resume.
Washington has maintained its economic pressure campaign, while President Donald Trump has declared that he wants a total victory over Iran and suggested the United States no longer needs a negotiated agreement.
The latest state television report went further than previous warnings by naming a specific British installation and linking the threat to a purportedly extended-range version of the Khorramshahr missile.
The Iranian and Israeli people are natural allies against Iran's Revolutionary Guards (IRGC), and the fight against the force will be won in public opinion as much as on the battlefield, according to Arab-Israeli activist Yoseph Haddad.
“The Iranian people and the Israeli people, we love each other, we support each other,” Haddad said in Iran International’s Washington studio. “Every place I went for a demonstration, for a protest, I had Iranians at my back helping me.”
Haddad, a Christian from Nazareth and a volunteer Israeli army veteran, is one of Israel’s best-known advocates abroad. He ran second on Amcha Yisrael, a new right-wing list led by retired Brigadier General Ofer Winter, in Israel’s October 27 election. The list won 1.68 percent of the vote and no seats.
‘The same mission’
Haddad said he wanted to turn the ties between ordinary Israelis and Iranians into a common campaign.
“My plan is to take that relationship between the Israeli people and the Iranian people and strengthen it, and with the numbers, together we serve the same mission, which is one: destroying the IRGC and bringing security to Israel and the entire Middle East,” he said.
Israel has fought on what Haddad called seven fronts since the Hamas-led attack of October 7, 2023, including direct war with the Islamic Republic. In his view, Israel won militarily but stopped short of finishing the job, and the reason was the battle for public opinion.
“You know why we were stopped? Because of the public diplomacy and anti-Israel propaganda,” he said. “The way to fight the IRGC and to destroy the IRGC is through public diplomacy.”
He said Israel’s own government had fallen short. “We could have done more for Israeli public diplomacy. We could have done more for the Iranian people’s public diplomacy, and especially for the Iranian people against the IRGC,” he said.
He accused Qatar, which has hosted Hamas’s political office and funds Al Jazeera, of dominating that arena. “We completely gave that arena to Qatar, and they are shifting the narrative,” he said.
An Arab in the Israeli army
Haddad served in the Golani Brigade and was badly wounded by a Hezbollah anti-tank missile in the 2006 Lebanon war. “It was my Jewish brothers in arms who saved my life and who brought me back to Israel,” he said.
Arab citizens, about a fifth of Israel’s population, are exempt from compulsory service, and Haddad volunteered.
“I, as an Arab, was a commander over Jewish soldiers in the IDF,” he said, rejecting the charge that Israel is an apartheid state.
In 2024 he lit a torch at Israel’s official Independence Day ceremony. “This is something huge for an Israeli, yes, but for an Arab Israeli, it’s absolutely crazy,” he said.
Criticism of Arab-led parties
Arab-led parties won a record 19 seats in the October 27 election, and their backing helped opposition leader Gadi Eisenkot win the mandate to form a government. Haddad said the result showed Israel’s democracy works, but he accused the parties’ leaders of neglecting their own voters.
“When the election comes, all the leaders stop talking about Gaza, stop talking about Jenin and Ramallah, and finally they start talking again about Nazareth and Haifa,” he said. “They’re lying to us, time after time.”
He singled out Ahmad Tibi, the veteran head of Ta’al. “He tells you that Israel is an apartheid state. He tells you that he doesn’t want Israel as a Jewish state,”
He also said Tibi was protected by his parliamentary immunity. “He hit a cop, but because he’s a politician, he has immunity. No one can do anything to him,” Haddad said.
Haddad said he had once been kept out of a Knesset committee session chaired by Joint List lawmaker Aida Touma-Sliman on the claim that Israel is an apartheid state.
“I told her, ‘You guys are actually the apartheid, because you don’t want to listen to me, and I’m one of you, an Arab just like you,’” he said. “Pure apartheid toward me.”
He also cited Sami Abu Shehadeh, head of the Balad party, who withdrew from the election in October after the Central Elections Committee voted to bar him over remarks after the October 7 attack.
“They don’t want to set a precedent,” Haddad said of the Supreme Court, which recommended the withdrawal rather than ruling. “I’m all for freedom of speech, until you start to incite to terrorism.”
Teaching children to die
Haddad said the Guards’ proxies indoctrinate children from an early age, and that education can work in both directions. He praised the United Arab Emirates, which designated the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist group in 2014 and later began teaching the Holocaust in schools.
Of children raised by Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, he said: “When you arrive at age 12, you’re already serving in their terrorist organization, completely brainwashed. When you arrive at age 16, you’re ready to die.”
Haddad said he hoped Israelis and Iranians would build a common front.
"Together, the people of Israel and the people of Iran, we can actually do it," he said.
The Islamic Republic will keep pursuing a nuclear weapon as long as it remains in power, and Washington should keep up military, economic and covert pressure even while it talks to Tehran, Roger Zakheim, director of the Ronald Reagan Institute, told Iran International.
Speaking on Veterans Day, Zakheim said President Donald Trump had set “the first principle” right by vowing to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, a promise he said Trump had made more than 90 times.
“My own view is that as long as this regime is in place, it will pursue a nuclear weapon,” he said. “So if he’s going to prevent the nuclear program, the regime will have to change as well.”
The interview came as Qatar stepped up its mediation. Its foreign ministry said on Tuesday that talks had made progress and that both sides had spoken positively about a diplomatic solution, a day after Qatar’s prime minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, met Trump at the White House. Mohsen Rezaei, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, called reports of negotiations or a meeting in Qatar “a pure lie.”
Zakheim, author of a new book on Reagan’s doctrine of peace through strength, said he had no objection to diplomacy, pointing to Reagan’s talks with Mikhail Gorbachev, as long as the pressure continues.
“I’m fine with talks to probe, to explore, to push, as long as we’re squeezing them at the same time: the blockade, the covert operation, the military presence, the ability to carry out a military operation at any moment,” he said. “If it’s diplomacy and everything else stops, I’d be very concerned.”
The US naval blockade of Iranian ports, first imposed in April, remains in place alongside a Treasury sanctions campaign the administration calls Economic Fury. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in Paris on Tuesday that the economic campaign was “so devastating that right now there is no need for major combat operations.”
Zakheim called the memorandum of understanding reached in June “a very flawed agreement.” Any new deal would need verification involving the United States, “not some third party we can’t trust or don’t know,” he said, and should be “ripped up” if Iran failed to comply.
The June 17 memorandum declared an end to military operations and set a 60-day window for a final deal on Iran’s nuclear program and sanctions. It soon unraveled over control of the Strait of Hormuz, and the deadline passed in August without an agreement.
“They’re just talking about talking,” Zakheim said.
Zakheim gave Trump high marks for Operation Midnight Hammer, the June 2025 US strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites at Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan, and for Operation Epic Fury, the US-Israeli campaign launched on February 28 that killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
“The decapitation, the attacks on the nuclear sites, taking out both the ballistic and cruise missile sites, has made this regime weaker,” he said.
But voters had soured on the war, he said, because the president “didn’t win decisively and got stuck in 140 days of diplomacy with a regime that will never compromise.”
He said he hoped a “very consequential covert program” was under way, with Washington backing those who want to replace the Islamic Republic. “We’ve never had an opportunity like the one we have right now to support the people in Iran who are freedom-loving,” he said, adding that Iran’s borders were “more porous than ever” and its skies open.
“It’s an unnatural regime that oppresses its people,” he said.
Iran executed at least 691 people in the first ten months of 2026, including 36 protesters, according to Norway-based Iran Human Rights, which recorded at least 77 executions in October alone.
No one was calling for US troops on the ground, Zakheim said, but Washington must be ready to strike again if Tehran rebuilds its nuclear or ballistic missile programs.
“After Midnight Hammer and Epic Fury, I felt it was the beginning of the end of this regime, and I still stand by that,” he said.
Democrats won control of both chambers of Congress in the November 3 midterm elections, with anger over the war’s part in pushing up the cost of living helping drive the result, according to Reuters. They also plan to cut Trump’s $1.5 trillion defense budget request, Military.com reported. Zakheim said the president was right to seek it.
The Constitution gives the president, as commander in chief, authority over military and foreign affairs that Congress does not share, Zakheim said, and presidents often turn to foreign policy after midterm losses “because it’s the one thing they can control.” Congress holds the power to declare war and to fund the military.
He warned against a “new generation of détente advocates” and what he called “full-on declinists,” some of whom won seats in the midterms.
“They believe that if only America would retreat from the world and leave, the Iranians would be just fine,” he said. “There’s no evidence of that in the history since 1979.”
He traced Washington’s experience with the Islamic Republic to the 444-day hostage crisis, which ended as Reagan was sworn in in January 1981, and the 1983 bombing of the US Marine barracks in Beirut, which he described as America’s first encounter with Hezbollah.
“You don’t have to look far back to find the number of times this regime has murdered Americans,” he said
Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shirin Ebadi accused the Islamic Republic on Friday of funding threats against journalists abroad while failing to provide for people at home, after two Iranian men were convicted in London of assisting Iranian intelligence operations.
“The Islamic Republic keeps careful accounts. It has a budget for killing journalists, but not for people’s bread,” Ebadi, a lawyer who has lived in exile since 2009, wrote on her Telegram channel.
She shared an audio recording of Mostafa Sepahvand, one of two men convicted on Thursday at London’s Woolwich Crown Court of helping Iranian intelligence target Iran International journalists.
In it, Sepahvand complains about his travel and car-hire costs, the risk of arrest and the work of tracking down where journalists lived. He says he was sent only £3,500, about $4,600, though he had spent up to £8,000, about $10,600.
British prosecutors said he had been promised £150,000, about $200,000, and help resolving a criminal case against him in Iran, to “finish off” one of his targets.
“Even following journalists through the streets of London has a price,” Ebadi wrote. “The agent has to be paid, his car and travel covered, and if he is supposed to kill someone, the fee has to match the risk.”
In Iran, she wrote, there are families who cannot afford meat or medicine, workers who wait months for their wages and prisoners who cannot buy “even a packet of biscuits.” Yet the state had offered £150,000 to locate and eliminate a journalist working thousands of kilometers away.
“A government that won’t give workers what they are owed sets a fee for killing journalists, and apparently can’t even pay that on time,” she wrote. “In the Islamic Republic, even the lives of its opponents have a price. Only the lives of the Iranian people are worth nothing in its accounts.”
Sepahvand, 41, and Farhad Javadi Manesh, 46, were unanimously convicted of conduct likely to assist a foreign intelligence service under Britain’s National Security Act. Sepahvand was also convicted of surveillance and reconnaissance with intent to commit serious violence. They will be sentenced on December 17.
Prosecutors said the men watched Iran International journalists and others in Britain on behalf of Iranian intelligence. Tehran has denied involvement in plots against its critics abroad.
France is investigating a cyberattack on freezers that store blood for hospital patients, its national blood service told Iran International, weeks after Paris blamed Iran’s Revolutionary Guards for hacking the freezers of hundreds of French supermarkets.
The service, the Établissement français du sang (EFS), said in a written reply that a judicial investigation was under way and that it could not comment on it or give details.
The attack took place on the night of November 1 to 2. Hackers took over the control systems of cold rooms at three regional centers and changed their temperature and defrost settings, the EFS said earlier.
Some units were reset from about minus 30 degrees Celsius to 110 degrees, the French weekly Le Canard enchaîné reported. That was the setting, not the temperature the blood products reached.
Alarms and an on-call technician caught the problem, and the products were moved to other sites or otherwise secured, the EFS said. No samples or blood products were lost. The service has not said when the attack was detected, how long the transfer took, or how the stocks were moved.
The attack came the same night that supermarkets in at least nine European countries, including Belgium and Luxembourg, reported suspected cyberattacks that sent fridge and freezer temperatures soaring.
The Paris prosecutor’s office has not yet linked the attack on the blood service to the supermarket cases and said its investigation is continuing, Agence France-Presse reported.
On October 11 and 12, hackers took control of refrigeration systems at about 700 supermarkets and other businesses across France, letting fridges and freezers warm up. Some stores had to throw out their entire stock of fresh and frozen food, and officials said the attacks caused heavy losses and, at some sites, fires.
A joint report by French intelligence and cybersecurity agencies named Shahid Kaveh, an offensive cyber unit of the Revolutionary Guards, as responsible, and said it worked behind front groups posing as independent hacker collectives. Paris prosecutors have requested international arrest warrants for suspects.
Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot summoned Iran’s ambassador and said France would seek European Union sanctions against those responsible. France was weighing further measures, he said, including some it might never make public.
