US Press
Washington reads the Iran war's costs and one West Bank attack
Graphic: Times of Palestine
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What the American press put in front of its readers on Sunday, and what a Palestinian reader should take from it.
The Washington Post led its national security file with the assessment prepared for Pete Hegseth in which the heads of the army, navy and air force, together with the combatant commanders for Europe, Asia and Latin America, warn that prolonging large-scale operations against Iran is unsustainable and weakens American capacity elsewhere.
The paper dates the warnings to the 14 August edition of the Secretary of Defense Orders Book. This is the first reporting in weeks that treats the Iran war as a question of resources rather than of resolve.
The New York Times carried the West Bank into the American Sunday under the headline "Israeli Settlers Attack Palestinians, Drawing Sharp Rebukes", with Netanyahu's condemnation as its organising fact. Its Middle East page also reported long fuel queues in Iran, which it attributes to the war and the American blockade squeezing supply — a civilian cost, reported as such, of the policy the Pentagon is now arguing about internally.
Politico's defence desk reported that the carrier USS Abraham Lincoln has passed Singapore on its way home from the Middle East. Read beside the Post, it is the visible half of an argument the Pentagon is having in writing.
Axios stayed on Ukraine and Venezuela: the CIA director John Ratcliffe proposing a Trump–Putin–Zelensky meeting during a covert Moscow trip, and the president's claim of a deal covering 65 billion barrels of Venezuelan reserves. Neither touches Palestine, and that is the point worth noting — the administration's announced wins this weekend are elsewhere.
The Hill and The Atlantic were domestic almost throughout, on the midterms, the courts and the trade fight with Canada.
The shape of the week for Palestinians is legible in the gaps. The Gaza plan agreed last October is not in the American Sunday papers at all: no stabilisation force, no governance committee, no reconstruction money. What is there is an Iran war its own commanders want reduced, and a settler attack summarised through the sentence an Israeli prime minister said about it.
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