When Israel passed a death penalty law that solely targets Palestinians, it was to be expected that the country’s far right would celebrate. Even as much of the international community roundly condemns Israel for the law – with the United Nations human rights chief calling it a possible “war crime” – there has been little pushback inside Israel.

According to Israeli rights groups and analysts, the introduction of a death penalty targeting people by their ethnicity is just the latest iteration in a long line of legal measures described as having normalised an “apartheid” legal system under which Palestinians are subject to codified discrimination to the benefit of their Israeli neighbours and occupiers.

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The new law means that military courts in the occupied West Bank, which solely try Palestinians, will, by default, impose the death sentence on anyone found guilty by Israel’s legal system of carrying out an unlawful killing of Israelis when the act is defined by the court as “terrorism”.

Conversely, any Israeli citizen charged with an unlawful killing in the occupied West Bank – such as the seven Palestinians killed during a spike in settler violence that has followed the start of the Israel-United States war on Iran – are tried in Israel’s civilian courts.

Conviction rates for Palestinians tried in military courts run to 99.74 percent. In contrast, the conviction rate from 2005 to 2024 for Israelis tried for crimes committed in the West Bank is about 3 percent.

Hardwired discrimination

“I wasn’t surprised,” Arab lawmaker Aida Touma-Suleiman of the left-wing Hadash party said. She responded to the voting results by leaving the parliamentary chamber in disgust.

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“I knew there’d be scenes of happiness once it passed, and I just didn’t want to be there to see it,” she continued. “I’d already seen enough through three weeks of deliberations. I couldn’t see any more.”

Touma-Suleiman said that while she expected celebrations from far-right anti-Palestinian figures, such as National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, it was particularly “painful” seeing “the public feel exactly the same way”.

Laws passed since Israel’s inception in 1948 at the expense of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians forced to flee from their homes have entrenched inequality between Palestinians and Israelis.

Some of these include the Absentees’ Property Law of 1950, which enabled the seizure of land and homes belonging to Palestinians displaced in 1948, and 2003’s Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law, which in effect blocks reunifications for Palestinian families divided by Israel’s occupation.

In 2018, the Nation-State Law championed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu codified Jewish legal supremacy in matters of identity, settlement and collective rights; downgraded the Arabic language; and asserted a constitutional preference for Jewish self-determination.

Palestinians and their supporters take part in a rally to protest against the Nation-State Law in Tel Aviv in 2018 [File: Ammar Awad/Reuters]

“Fundamentally, this is an apartheid regime,” Yair Dvir from the Israeli rights group B’Tselem, told Al Jazeera.

“There are entire sets of laws that differentiate between Jews and Palestinians. There’s nothing new in this. It goes back to Israel’s foundation in 1948 and the beginning of the occupation of the West Bank in 1967,” he said.

In this light, Dvir said, the new death penalty law was not the exception as much as it was the rule.

“It’s part of the system and what makes up daily life for people here,” he said. “It shapes how people see reality. This is not an extraordinary incident. It’s just an extreme example – denying Palestinians the right to life – of what most people in Israel accept as normal.”

According to Dvir and other Israeli analysts who spoke to Al Jazeera, the dehumanisation of Palestinians has deepened to the point where capital punishment not only can pass with little dissent but is also openly celebrated by parliament members.

Fast-tracked oppression

“This is just the latest example in a series of blatant violations of international law and Israel’s own basic laws, which provide at least the fig leaf of democracy and equality,” Tirza Leibowitz, the deputy director of projects at Physicians for Human Rights – Israel, told Al Jazeera.

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“It’s not just the prison conditions,” under which thousands of Palestinians are subject to inhumane conditions while often being held without charge, she said. “It’s a legal system that either refuses to investigate crimes against Palestinians or actively shields the abuse, torture and medical neglect of them.”

There are currently more than 100 Palestinians whose killings in the West Bank since the start of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza in October 2023 have yet to be fully investigated. Leibowitz pointed to the case of 17-year-old Walid Ahmad, whose death by starvation in custody was ruled “undeterminable” by an Israeli judge, as an example of the limited value placed on Palestinian lives.

Equally telling was the dropping of charges against soldiers alleged to have sexually abused a Palestinian detainee at the Sde Temain prison in July 2024. At the time of their arrests, far-right protesters, including lawmakers, stormed the detention facility where the suspects were being held in a show of support for the soldiers.

“It all sends a message. … Essentially, it normalises the systematic abuse and denigration of Palestinians,” she said, adding that the apartheid nature of the new legislation was just the latest piece in a much larger puzzle.

Touma-Suleiman was equally reluctant to regard the new law in isolation. In her speech in parliament denouncing it, she referenced the 2018 law enshrining Israel as a Jewish nation-state.

“I was as disgusted then as I am now,” she said, “I met Netanyahu as I was leaving the chamber after that vote and found myself eye to eye with him. I told him then that history would remember him as the founder of Israel as an apartheid state. He smiled at me in the way he does and said I should be happy to live in the Middle East’s only democracy.”

Four years later, during the last general election, Touma-Suleiman witnessed that Israeli democracy firsthand. “I saw Ben-Gvir campaigning in a fairly working-class market. The crowd behind him was chanting, ‘Death to Arabs’. He turned, saying, ‘No. Death to terrorists”, knowing that as a politician, he couldn’t be seen condoning such speech.

“He and his allies have now passed a law that makes them both the same thing.”

India has begun counting its population in the world’s largest census, which will include caste enumeration for the first time in nearly a century.

This year’s census is a $1.24bn exercise during which more than three million Indian officials will spend a year surveying about 1.4 billion Indians about their household composition, living conditions and access to basic amenities.

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The last census was conducted in 2011. Another one was due in 2021, but it was delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, leaving India’s data on such things as its demographics, housing conditions and welfare amenities outdated.

How will the gargantuan task of counting more than a billion people spread out across a vast country be carried out, and why is the latest census being watched particularly closely?

Here’s what we know:

How will India’s census take place?

According to the Press Information Bureau, India’s first modern census was conducted from 1865 to 1872 during the British colonial period, but it did not happen simultaneously across all regions of the country. It was only in 1881 that India conducted its first coordinated census.

After independence in 1947, India conducted its first census in 1951.

The census this year, which is the eighth since independence, will take place across the country’s 28 states and eight union territories (federally run territories), which include more than 7,000 towns and 640,000 villages.

For the first time, the census will be conducted digitally. Its 30 million enumerators will use digital tools like mobile applications on smartphones to collect and submit data by asking people 33 questions. Individuals will also have the option to self-enumerate through an online portal and then receive a unique digital ID, which can be submitted to the officials collecting data.

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The census will take place in two phases.

At a news conference in India’s capital, New Delhi, on Tuesday, Registrar General and Census Commissioner Mritunjay Kumar Narayan said the first phase of the census begins on Wednesday and will continue until September.

During this phase, known as the House Listing and Housing Census, people will be asked “How many people live in your house?” “Do you own the house?” and questions linked to the household’s access to basic amenities like fuel, water, electricity, internet and transport.

The second phase, known as the population enumeration phase, will take place in February and will focus on gathering socioeconomic details and information on education, migration and fertility. Caste enumeration will take place in this phase.

The census is scheduled to conclude next year on March 31.

Why is a census important?

Dipa Sinha, a development economist who works on social policy, said that along with counting the number of people in the country, a census shows demographic trends.

“It also tells us the distribution between rural and urban areas. It gives broad demographic structure,” she told Al Jazeera, adding that details of people’s occupations and religions are also collected in census surveys.

She said such information helps governments plan policies and citizens to claim their rights. Census data also form the basis for allocations under antipoverty programmes, she noted.

Sinha added that India’s latest census is drawing particular attention because the government is planning a delimitation exercise, which is basically redrawing the boundaries of electoral constituencies based on population.

Politicians in southern India, where population growth has been stalling, have raised concerns that if delimitation is done purely based on population size, then northern India, where most of India’s population is located, will get outsized political representation. The bulk of representation in the Indian Parliament already comes from the north, which has been a source of north-south tensions.

“So given that the population has grown at very different places in different parts of the country, the information from this census could become highly politically relevant,” Sinha said.

In addition, “the government has passed a women’s reservation bill last year, which says that once the new census is in place and the delimitation is done, the country would have one-third reservation for women in the parliament. So all of this makes the census something that has an impact,” she added.

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How has India’s census evolved?

When India’s census was carried out under British rule, questions mainly focused on registering household data, such as the number, age and gender of residents, their caste and religion. How proficient a person was in the English language was also part of the data collected in the census then.

Postcolonial India’s census has evolved to include questions not only about individuals’ identities but also to assess their socioeconomic status and living conditions.

In 1971, according to the Press Information Bureau, the census also tracked internal migration by collecting data on people’s last place of residence, which provided crucial insights into India’s population movement patterns.

Details on employment, disability and fertility status were standard questions in the 2011 census.

This year, questions on couples’ relationship status have also been included. Couples in a live-in relationship will be counted as married “if they consider their relationship as a stable union”, according to the census portal.

Has the delay in carrying out the census had an impact?

Government officials blamed the five-year delay in the census initially on the COVID-19 pandemic and later on administrative issues.

Experts said the delay has left significant data gaps. Ashwini Deshpande, an economist at Ashoka University, argued the census matters beyond what it directly measures.

“Since it is a full enumeration of the entire population, all large-scale surveys – which, by design, capture only a subset of households – rely on the census as their sampling frame,” she told Al Jazeera.

She explained that a sampling frame is essentially the master list from which survey samples are drawn and, if that list is outdated, surveys risk being unrepresentative in ways that are difficult to detect or correct.

“With India’s last census now well over a decade old, every major survey conducted in this period is working off a frame that no longer reflects the population it is meant to represent. That is not a minor technical inconvenience. It introduces systematic errors into the data that policymakers, researchers and planners depend on,” she said.

Sinha noted that the delay in conducting the census has also meant there is a lack of information on India’s demographics at a time of rapid economic and political changes.

Why is this year’s census controversial?

Besides being delayed, this year’s census has been marred by controversy over the resistance by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government to include questions on caste.

Comprehensive caste data have not been collected since 1931, and India completely stopped the caste census in 1951 to prevent what the government at the time said was “social divisions”.

Limited information continued to be collected about Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Scheduled Tribes (STs), the caste groups located on the lowest rung of the caste hierarchy. This was recorded through the National Sample Survey. The SCs, or Dalits, are communities often excluded from the larger society under the traditional caste hierarchy while STs are tribal communities.

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Some states have also carried out a caste census to gather information about poverty rates, education levels and employment of marginalised communities to enable policy-making.

Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has historically opposed caste enumeration in the census, saying it believed it would create further divisions in society. In an interview with News 18 India in 2024, Modi said people demanding a caste census thought like “urban Naxals”. Naxals are mostly members of far-left and tribal groups that have waged armed rebellion against exploitation of their resources and militarisation.

However, in May, the government announced caste enumeration would be included in the census after pressure from campaigners and caste groups.

The process will take place in the second phase of the census and will involve asking every individual their caste rather than simply recording whether someone belongs to an SC or ST as previous censuses have done.

“This would be the first systematic, population-wide count of jati [caste] since 1931, which makes it a genuinely historic – and deeply contested – exercise,” Deshpande, the Ashoka University economist, said.

She noted that the debate for including caste enumeration is split along a familiar fault line.

“Those in favour argue that without granular caste data, we are essentially flying blind. We cannot assess how resources, opportunities and deprivations are actually distributed across the caste hierarchy, nor can we design or evaluate policies with any precision. If caste continues to shape life outcomes – and the evidence strongly suggests it does – then not counting it is a political choice masquerading as neutrality,” she said.

“Those opposed argue the reverse, that enumerating jati will harden identities, entrench divisions and give caste an official permanence it might otherwise gradually lose,” she noted, adding that the opposing camp’s concern is that the state, by cataloguing every subcaste, lends caste a kind of bureaucratic legitimacy that “deepens rather than dissolves social cleavages”.

“What makes this particularly fraught is that the debate is not just academic. It has direct implications for reservations policy, political representation and the ongoing legal battles over OBC subcategorisation,” she added, referring to Other Backward Classes, the bureaucratic categorisation of Hindus from unprivileged castes.

“The census, in other words, is not merely a measurement exercise. It is a political one.”

Why is including caste important in the census?

India’s caste system, which came into existence thousands of years ago, divided society into privileged and unprivileged castes, whose privileges and rights are based on one’s birth. A person born in an unprivileged caste can never rise to become a member of a privileged caste. For thousands of years, unprivileged people were seen as impure and were called “untouchables”.

In the 1950s, the Indian Constitution banned discrimination based on caste and announced reservation quotas in jobs and education for people from traditionally disadvantaged communities.

But analysts said discrimination has continued, making it important to carry out caste enumeration in the census.

“The number of disadvantaged groups in the country are plenty and diverse, and each of their problems are different,” Sukhadeo Thorat, an emeritus professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, told Al Jazeera.

“They suffer from social discrimination and exclusion. Some of them are denied property rights, business ownership and education for several years. The people belonging to Indigenous tribes, they suffer from physical and social isolation and prejudice. Religious minority groups like Christians and Muslims are also facing problems of discrimination and undermining of their religious rights,” Thorat said.

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“So in order to develop and identify every group’s specific problem and address it, you need data, and that can only come through a caste census,” he added.

Independent researcher Yashwant Zagade added that a caste census will also determine how privilege works in India.

“The government has institutionally made marginalised communities in India invisible. We have no knowledge of the kind of privileges they get to enjoy compared to people from upper castes or no information of what their social status is. This is why it is important to carry out a separate caste enumeration,” he told Al Jazeera.

While the government has revealed the 33 questions that people will be asked in the first phase of the census, it remains unclear what sort of questions they will be asked as part of the caste enumeration process in February.

Thorat, who was the first Dalit to head the body that governs universities in India, said that based on the caste censuses carried out by states like Telangana and Bihar, the questions would largely be confined to an individual’s socioeconomic status, education and wealth.

However, he stressed that questions focusing on discrimination, such as whether people experience untouchability, should be included.

“In order to understand to what level this practice of untouchability and caste discrimination is carried out today, the census should include this question of discrimination in a detailed manner,” he said.

He added that instead of asking each social group a standard set of questions, specific questions should be framed for each group to understand their individual problems.

Are there concerns about how the census will be used?

There are worries about how the census will be used due to the BJP government’s pledge to implement a National Register of Citizens (NRC), which would contain the names of Indian citizens and is meant to identify and deport undocumented immigrants.

It has been implemented so far only in the northeastern state of Assam, where nearly two million people, including Hindus and Muslims, were left off the citizenship list published in August 2019. The BJP has declared its intent to implement the NRC nationwide.

Modi’s government has also implemented the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) in 2024, which fast-tracks citizenship for non-Muslims. Rights groups say making faith as a basis for citizenship is against the spirit of India’s secular constitution.

“The census would be something that would be linked to citizenship, which has not happened in the past,” Sinha, the development economist, said, adding that people impacted by the CAA would now be particularly concerned about how the census might be used to determine their citizenship.

Critics have accused the right-wing government of weaponising the CAA and NRC to target Muslims and said hundreds of Muslims were unlawfully deported to Bangladesh last year. “India’s ruling BJP is fuelling discrimination by arbitrarily expelling Bengali Muslims from the country, including Indian citizens,” Elaine Pearson, Asia director at Human Rights Watch, said in July.

Several BJP leaders have called Muslims, who are 14 percent of India’s population, a threat to India and falsely claimed that Muslims will overtake India’s Hindu population in the next decade.

There are also concerns about how data from the census will be used.

“There has been an issue on data credibility in the last decade,” Sinha said, “and that has also a lot to do with two things. One is that there has been a lack of transparency, so oftentimes, data is not shared or some data is trashed out because they suddenly declare that the quality is not good without giving enough justification.”

“Secondly, there have been frequent changes in methodology and sampling,” she said.

She called for the census to be conducted through an act of parliament with full transparency and defined methodologies.

“When the census is governed by an act of the parliament, one hopes that that will not be distorted in any way because there are checks and balances in general,” Sinha added.

By Al Jazeera Staff, AFP and Reuters

The United Kingdom will convene talks with dozens of countries on reopening the Strait of Hormuz, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has announced, as the US-Israeli war on Iran has effectively shuttered the critical Gulf waterway.

Speaking during a news conference on Wednesday, Starmer said UK Foreign Minister Yvette Cooper would host a virtual meeting of 35 countries on Thursday to assess measures to reopen the strait “after the fighting has stopped”.

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The meeting will “assess all viable diplomatic and political measures that we can take to restore freedom of navigation, guarantee the safety of trapped ships and seafarers and resume the movement of vital commodities”, the UK prime minister said.

“Following that meeting, we will also convene our military planners to look at how we can marshal our capabilities and make the strait accessible and safe after the fighting has stopped,” Starmer added.

Starmer says reopening the Strait of Hormuz ‘will not be easy’ [File: Jaimi Joy/Pool via Reuters]

Countries around the world have raised serious concerns about Iran’s effective closure of the strait, through which about one-fifth of the world’s oil and liquified natural gas supplies transit, amid US-Israeli attacks on Iran and Iranian attacks on targets across the Middle East.

The closure has sent global energy prices soaring and pushed nations to announce that they would release some of their strategic oil and gas reserves in an effort to lessen the crisis.

Starmer said on Wednesday that countries that recently signed a statement saying they were ready “to contribute to appropriate efforts to ensure safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz” would take part in this week’s talks.

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In addition to the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the Netherlands are among the countries to have signed it.

“I do have to level with people on this. This [reopening] will not be easy,” Starmer said.

The UK and other European countries have faced condemnation from US President Donald Trump, who has accused them of both failing to take action to reopen the strait and not providing sufficient support to Washington in its war effort.

On Tuesday, Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform that “all those countries that can’t get jet fuel because of the Strait of Hormuz, like the United Kingdom” should either buy from the US or “build up some delayed courage, go to the Strait, and just TAKE IT”.

“You’ll have to start learning how to fight for yourself, the U.S.A. won’t be there to help you anymore, just like you weren’t there for us. Iran has been, essentially, decimated. The hard part is done. Go get your own oil!” Trump said.

By Al Jazeera Staff, AFP, Reuters and The Associated Press

Russia says it will continue to provide assistance to Cuba, a day after a Russian-flagged tanker provided the island nation with its first shipment of crude oil in three months.

“Cuba is our closest friend and partner in the Caribbean, and we don’t have the right to abandon it. Assistance to Cuba will continue,” Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Maria Zakharova said at a weekly briefing on Wednesday.

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Zakharova also said that Russia stands in solidarity with Cuba and demands that the US lift its “blockade on an independent sovereign state”.

Zakharova’s announcement comes a day after United States President Donald Trump’s administration allowed the Anatoly Kolodkin to proceed despite an ongoing US energy blockade. The Aframax tanker entered the Bay of Matanzas – the country’s largest supertanker and fuel storage port – carrying 730,000 barrels of oil after a three-week journey from Russia.

Cuba has been suffering from an energy crisis since January, when US forces abducted Venezuelan President and Cuban ally Nicolas Maduro.

His removal deprived Cuba of one of its main oil suppliers.

The energy crisis has led to frequent blackouts across the country of 10 million people and brought hospitals, public transportation, and farm production to the brink of collapse.

Cubans, including Energy and Mines Minister Vicente de la O Levy, cheered the ship’s arrival.

“Our gratitude to the Government and People of Russia for all the support we are receiving. A valuable shipment that arrives amidst the complex energy situation we are facing,” de la O Levy wrote on social media.

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Moscow historically maintains close ties to Havana and has criticised Washington for blocking fuel deliveries to the island.

Trump said on Sunday he had “no problem” with Russia sending oil to the island, saying he had allowed it to pass through for humanitarian reasons.

“Cuba’s finished. They have a bad regime. They have very bad and corrupt leadership, and whether or not they get a boat of oil, it’s not going to matter,” he said.

The fuel gives Cuba’s government breathing room amid growing pressure from the Trump administration.

Cuba produces barely 40 percent of its required fuel and relies on imports to sustain its energy grid. Experts say the shipment could produce about 180,000 barrels of diesel, enough to meet Cuba’s daily demand for nine or 10 days.

When Mojtaba Khamenei’s elevation as Iran’s new supreme leader was announced, many observers treated it chiefly as a confirmation of a new hardliner order in Tehran. Subsequent rumours about his injury or even death, sparked by his disappearance from public view, have fuelled speculations of what that may mean for the Iranian regime.

What many analyses fail to register is that the power consolidation under way in Iran is structural rather than personal. What the war has reinforced is a broader regime of securitised rule whose logic exceeds any one successor. This process will continue with or without Mojtaba Khamenei at the helm.

Economic restructuring

To grasp the ongoing transformation in Iran, one has to move beyond succession intrigue and return to political economy. After the end of the war with Iraq in 1989, Iran went through a protracted phase of “market-oriented restructuring”. Under the banners of privatisation and economic development, the state did not simply retreat; it was reorganised.

Public assets were transferred into the hands of quasi-state conglomerates, parastatal foundations, and politically connected institutions. What emerged was not less statism, but a different configuration of state power: less accountable and more deeply entangled with mechanisms of upward redistribution.

It was on this terrain that what I call the military-bonyad complex took shape. Following the amendment of Article 44 of the 1979 Constitution, which authorised “public and non-governmental entities” to acquire up to 80 percent of shares in major state industries, the years after 2006 saw a large-scale transfer of assets from government ministries to firms affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and the religious-revolutionary foundations (bonyads), including the Mostazafan Foundation, Setad, the Astan Quds Razavi Foundation, and the Martyrs’ Foundation.

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Security-linked conglomerates were thus among the chief beneficiaries of market-oriented restructuring. By the end of the 2000s, this process had produced a dense bloc linking coercive institutions to parastatal capital: a nexus that came to dominate major sectors of the economy while extending its reach across the unelected core of the state.

Sanctions and consolidation of power

After four rounds of United Nations Security Council sanctions from 2006 to 2010, the United States shifted its strategy to impose sweeping unilateral and extraterritorial measures targeting Iran’s oil exports, financial system, and access to international banking. Sanctions expanded again after US President Donald Trump’s administration withdrew from the nuclear deal with Iran in 2018.

These sanctions did not reverse the transformation in the state; they deepened it. Contrary to the common view of sanctions as instruments for weakening authoritarian states from the outside, their effects in Iran have been far more uneven and perverse.

They inflicted immense damage on the broader economy, while selectively empowering the very actors best positioned to operate through opacity, coercion, and sanctions evasion. As access to formal trade and finance narrowed, shadow networks, protected channels, and security-linked conglomerates and intermediaries acquired greater strategic and economic value.

The result was not simply a weaker state, but a more securitised one. The costs of this order were socialised downward, borne by ordinary Iranians through inflation, unemployment, precarious labour, subsidy retrenchment, rising inequality, and deepening political exclusion.

This is the broader setting in which the uprisings of the past decade must be situated, from the protests of 2017 and 2019 to the Women, Life, Freedom revolt and the January 2026 unrest that preceded the present war.

These mobilisations did not emerge out of nothing, nor can they be reduced to a simple struggle over economic and social freedoms. They were rooted in a compound crisis of livelihood, legitimacy, and representation. They expressed anger not only at repression, but at a political order whose exclusions had become increasingly material as well as juridical: an order that fused neoliberal dispossession and sanctions management with intensifying authoritarian closure.

War and a narrowing political horizon

The uprising that Washington and Tel Aviv called for at the start of the war has not materialised. Instead, Iran’s national police chief, Ahmad-Reza Radan, has declared that the state now views “all our issues” through the prism of war, warning that those who take to the streets will be treated not as protesters but as enemies.

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When he added that the security forces had “their fingers on the triggers”, the meaning was unmistakable: this was a direct warning that any domestic dissent would be met with armed force under wartime conditions.

This does not imply that the Islamic Republic was, before the war, somehow more restrained in its treatment of dissent. On the contrary, the regime had long met popular revolt with extraordinary violence. Over the past decade, protests had become more geographically extensive, more socially heterogeneous, and more explicitly anti-systemic. The state’s response had escalated accordingly.

What the war has changed is not the fact of repression, but its political logic and legitimating language. External conflict has given the regime a new framework through which domestic dissent can be criminalised, militarised, and pre-emptively crushed. The distinction between foreign enemy and domestic opponent is being deliberately collapsed.

What is at stake, then, is more than a quantitative increase in coercion. The war has accelerated a shift in the political grammar of rule: towards a martial logic in which society appears primarily as an object of surveillance, discipline, and threat management. War, in this sense, does not simply harden foreign policy. It restructures the domestic field, expanding the authority of those institutions most invested in governing through emergency, securitisation, and force.

Iran with or without Mojtaba Khamenei

This is why the significance of Mojtaba Khamenei’s election as supreme leader lies not in novelty but in the continuation of already established trends. If the rumours of his death prove true, that trajectory is unlikely to change in any fundamental way.

Over the course of his father Ali Khamenei’s rule, the Office of the Supreme Leader was transformed from a relatively modest clerical secretariat into the regime’s central institutional command post, with reach across security, finance, communications, the seminaries, and the wider unelected state.

This was not simply an administrative expansion. It was a political response to an authority deficit. Compared to Iran’s first supreme leader, Ruhollah Khomeini, Ali Khamenei lacked the same level of charisma and clerical standing. He compensated not through personal authority alone, but by building up the office around him.

The result is that the office now matters more than the individual who occupies it. If Mojtaba is gone, his replacement will most likely come from the same clerical-security constellation and remain closely aligned with the military-bonyad complex that now dominates the Islamic Republic’s coercive and economic core.

Even if a new successor initially lacks Mojtaba’s political positioning or Ali Khamenei’s accumulated authority, the structure of the office itself is designed to consolidate power over time. The religious dimension of the system would remain important, but increasingly as a source of legitimacy for an order whose real centre of gravity lies in the security apparatus and the institutions clustered around the supreme leader’s office.

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What a post-war Iran is likely to produce, then, is not a system moving beyond supreme leadership, but a more tightly securitised Islamic Republic. In practice, that means a political order that is harder, narrower, and more militarised than before. Rather than opening the way to transformation, war is more likely to deepen the trends already under way: a shrinking political field, greater reliance on coercion, and an even more opaque system of rule.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

The United States is continuing to build its military presence in the Gulf as its war with Iran enters its second month.

The February 28 launch of “Operation Epic Fury”, the joint US-Israeli air campaign targeting Iranian military and nuclear infrastructure, has continued for more than four weeks with strikes across Iran, killing thousands.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced on Tuesday that the US had deployed a third aircraft carrier, the USS George HW Bush, to join two carrier groups already in the region – the USS Abraham Lincoln in the Arabian Sea, and the USS Gerald Ford, which is currently undergoing maintenance and repairs in Croatia.

On board these carriers and their accompanying warships are thousands of sailors, Marines and specialised support personnel.

Al Jazeera explains what the various forces sent to the Middle East are and their combat capabilities.

(Al Jazeera)

What is a Carrier Strike Group (CSG)?

The military doesn’t deploy an aircraft carrier by itself. A Carrier Strike Group (CSG) is the aircraft carrier plus its escort ships and support units that act as a floating base. As of April 1, the USS Abraham Lincoln is the only carrier currently launching daily combat sorties against Iranian targets. The USS George HW Bush is currently in transit and is expected to eventually replace the Ford, which has been on an extended deployment in the Mediterranean.

A CSG typically includes:

• An aircraft carrier.
• Approximately 60-75 fighter jets and helicopters.
• Usually 2-4 Burke-class destroyers.
• A guided-missile cruiser.
• Typically, a submarine for underwater protection.
• Supply ships.

(Al Jazeera)

What is an Amphibious Ready Group (ARG)?

An Amphibious Ready Group (ARG) acts as a mini aircraft carrier and carries US Marines and equipment for landing operations. The main feature of an ARG is that it can launch sea-to-land invasions. The USS Tripoli ARG is currently active and stationed, having arrived in the Middle East on March 27, while the USS Boxer ARG is en route and expected to arrive in mid-April.

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An ARG typically includes:

• Three specialised ships.
• Approximately 2,200 Marines, known as a Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU).
• Short-takeoff aircraft.
• Landing craft for beach assaults.

The main difference between an Amphibious Ready Group (ARG) and a Carrier Strike Group (CSG) is their mission. An ARG is built to put troops on land, while a CSG is built to project air power and fight major wars at sea.

The USS Tripoli (LHA-7) amphibious assault ship enters the Singapore Strait, amid the US-Israeli war with Iran, as seen from Singapore, on March 17, 2026 [Edgar Su/Reuters]

What is a Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU)?

A Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU) is a self-contained, rapid-response force typically consisting of 2,200 to 2,500 personnel from the United States Marine Corps, capable of conducting sea-based combat and humanitarian missions.

On Friday, US Central Command confirmed that 2,200 Marines from the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU) had arrived in Middle Eastern waters after being ordered to depart Sasebo, Japan, where they are normally stationed, on March 13.

A second Marine Expeditionary Unit, carrying roughly 2,500 Marines from the 11th MEU, is also inbound after leaving San Diego on March 18.

Additionally, the Pentagon ordered approximately 2,000 soldiers from the US Army’s 82nd Airborne Division to begin moving to the Middle East.

The additional deployments will add to the 50,000 US troops already stationed in the Middle East.

(Al Jazeera)

Which units make up an MEU?

The 2,200 Marines and Sailors within an MEU are divided into four specific roles, including:

1. Command Element (approximately 200 troops): For planning, coordination, and command-and-control.
2. Ground Combat Element (approximately 1,200 troops): Built around an infantry battalion with artillery and armoured vehicles.
3. Aviation Combat Element (approximately 500 troops): Composite squadron with transport helicopters and attack aircraft.
4. Logistics Combat Element (approximately 300 troops): Provides up to 15 days of self-sustainment, including medical, engineering and maintenance.

How are they deployed?

MEUs are almost always deployed by sea, on board a three-ship Amphibious Ready Group (ARG), which essentially acts as a floating base.

These ships typically include:

1. A Landing Helicopter Assault/Dock – Essentially a small aircraft carrier that carries short-takeoff aircraft, including Ospreys, F-35Bs, Harriers, and Attack Helicopters.
2. An Amphibious Transport Dock – A mid-sized ship that carries a mix of troops and heavy vehicles.
3. A Dock Landing Ship – Focuses mostly on carrying cargo and heavy gear.

This image from video provided by US Central Command shows sailors and Marines on board the USS Tripoli arriving in the US Central Command area of responsibility, on March 27, 2026 [US Central Command via AP]

When are MEUs deployed?

MEUs can carry out sea-to-land assaults, raids, evacuations, humanitarian aid, disaster relief and other military operations. They are usually the first at the scene of a conflict.

US Marines from Company B, 1st Battalion Landing Team, 5th Marines, 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit and their Philippine counterparts storm a beach along the Philippine coast to simulate a combat rubber boat raid [File: Bullit Marquez/AP Photo]

How many MEUs does the US have?

The United States Marine Corps maintains seven active Marine Expeditionary Units, two of which – the 31st MEU and the 11th MEU – are assigned to the Iran war.

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The MEUs are divided between the East Coast, the West Coast and the Asia Pacific. They include:

• East Coast: 22nd MEU, 24th MEU, 26th MEU.
• West Coast: 11th MEU, 13th MEU, 15th MEU.
• Asia Pacific: 31st MEU.

Typically, three MEUs are deployed or forward-positioned at any given time. They rotate through deployments around regions such as the Mediterranean, the Gulf and the Asia Pacific.

When have MEUs been deployed in the past?

MEUs have been used in several US invasions.

During the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, the 15th and 26th MEUs launched from ships in the Arabian Sea and flew more than 640km (400 miles) inland in one of the longest amphibious vertical-insertions in history.

In 2003, the 15th MEU was among the first units to cross the border from Kuwait, securing the critical port of Umm Qasr. The 31st MEU was also pulled in to fight in the Second Battle of Fallujah in 2004.

Most recently, the 22nd MEU provided sea-based support for the January 3 abduction of Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela.

Counting the Cost

Can Russia help fill the global energy gap?

Higher crude prices due to the disruption in the Strait of Hormuz have helped Russia earn more from energy exports.

Published On 1 Apr 20261 Apr 2026

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By Al Jazeera Staff, AFP and Reuters

Russia’s ⁠Ministry of Defence says its forces have taken full control of the Luhansk region in ⁠eastern Ukraine, suggesting they have wrested control of an area that had remained ⁠beyond their grasp since the beginning of their 2022 invasion.

“Units of the ‘West’ military grouping have completed the liberation of the Luhansk People’s Republic,” the ministry said in a statement on Wednesday, using Moscow’s preferred name for the Ukrainian region.

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There was no immediate confirmation of the development from Ukraine.

Russia’s Defence Ministry added that Russian forces also took control of the village of Verkhnya Pysarivka in northeastern Ukraine’s Kharkiv region and the village of Boikove in ‌the ‌Zaporizhia region in southeastern Ukraine.

Luhansk and Donetsk make up the wider Donbas area. More than 99 percent of Luhansk has long been under Russian control and was one of four Ukrainian regions Moscow annexed in 2022. Russia also controls about three-quarters of Donetsk.

The Kremlin ⁠on Wednesday reiterated its demand that Ukrainian forces withdraw from the entirety of Donetsk, which Kyiv has repeatedly dismissed.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy should have taken the difficult decision to withdraw his forces ⁠from the Donbas area “yesterday” to end what Russia calls the “hot phase” of the war.

Peskov’s comment came a day after Zelenskyy claimed Russia had given the United States an ultimatum, saying it would harden its terms for a peace settlement ‌if Ukrainian forces did not withdraw from the Donbas within two months.

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Zelenskyy added that he was surprised anyone could believe Russia could ‌hope to conquer the remainder of the Donbas within that timeframe. He said Ukraine wanted a diplomatic solution ‌but ‌would only agree to a ceasefire at the current front lines.

Two people killed in drone attacks on Ukraine

Swarms of Russian drones attacked Ukraine overnight into Wednesday. Two women were killed in an attack on a civilian car on the front line in the Kherson region, the Regional Prosecutor’s Office said in a statement.

An image posted by Ukraine’s Nova Poshta mailing company showed a warehouse in the western city of Lutsk in flames with thick smoke pouring from its roof.

Zelenskyy said in a social media post that Russia had used 339 drones in its overnight attacks.

“We proposed a ceasefire for Easter. In response, we’re getting Shaheds,” he said, referring to the Iranian-designed drones that Russia uses.

The Ukrainian leader said he would hold a video call with US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner on Wednesday to discuss negotiations with Russia, now stalled due to the US-Israel war on Iran.

Ukrainian drones on Tuesday struck Russia’s Baltic Sea port of ‌Ust-Luga for the fifth time in 10 days, likely adding to Russia’s difficulties in exporting crude oil.

Meanwhile, several countries reported Ukrainian drones crossing into their airspace. Estonia’s armed forces said several drones appeared ⁠to have strayed ⁠from Ukraine while headed to Russia.

Separately, Finnish police said a drone detected in Finland on Tuesday had been carrying ‌explosives. Latvian police said they had launched an investigation after debris from a drone was found in the country on Wednesday.

On Sunday, a Ukrainian drone crashed in Finland, marking ‌the first time the Ukraine war had spilled onto Finnish soil. Last week, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania reported drones of Ukrainian origin on their territory in connection with ‌attacks ‌on the Russian oil terminal.

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii ⁠Sybiha said at a news conference on Tuesday that Ukraine “never aimed drones at these countries”.

By Al Jazeera Staff, AFP and Reuters

Italy woke up ⁠angry and disillusioned on Wednesday after the national team missed out on the FIFA World Cup for the third time in a row by losing a playoff to Bosnia and Herzegovina, prolonging a sporting nightmare for ⁠the football-mad country.

“The World Cup curse,” said the front page of Italy’s main daily Corriere della Sera, calling for rebuilding in a country that has produced some of the game’s greatest players but has won only one match at the finals since lifting the trophy for the fourth time in 2006.

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Headlines in La ‌Gazzetta dello Sport and Corriere dello Sport, the country’s two main sports newspapers, said “We’re all staying at home”, in reference to another summer without a World Cup.

Fans in Rome were left stunned after Italy suffered a 4-1 penalty shootout loss to Bosnia on Tuesday following a 1-1 draw, their third playoff defeat in a row after they lost to Sweden and North Macedonia.

Italy went ‌down to 10 men in the 42nd minute as Alessandro Bastoni was punished for a late last-man tackle, a key turning point in the match, with Italy leading at the time.

“Everything went badly from the start of the match. The team wasn’t good, players out of form ⁠coming in and playing [anyway] … it makes no sense. Honestly, I’m shocked,” ⁠Davide Caldaretta, who watched the game at a pub in Rome, told the Reuters news agency.

Melanie Cardillo told Reuters that she was “really upset ‌and ‌disappointed”.

She added, “Even when you’re let down, you always hold out hope. And this is the third time in a row.”

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The Azzurri last qualified for the World Cup finals in 2014, when Bosnia made their only previous appearance at the tournament.

The Balkan team will play in Group B this year with ⁠cohosts Canada, Qatar and Switzerland.

‘Italian football needs to be rebuilt’

The defeat triggered outrage across the country, with Italy’s Sport Minister Andrea Abodi calling on Italian Football Federation (FIGC) President Gabriele Gravina to ⁠quit.

“It’s clear that Italian football needs to be rebuilt from the ground up and that starts with changes at the top of the FIGC,” Abodi said in a statement.

Gravina said he would not resign, but a board meeting next week would decide whether he will keep his position.

Abodi’s comments came amid hostilities between the Italian government and Gravina, who, speaking to the media after Italy’s defeat, lashed out at a perceived lack of support for football from the state.

Gravina also referred to other sports as “amateur” and “state sports” compared with football due to the large number of athletes, particularly Olympians, who are nominally employed by Italy’s armed forces and police.

Italy claimed a record 30 medals at the recent Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics, including 10 gold, and left the 2024 Summer Games in Paris with 40 medals.

The Mediterranean nation also has top performers in a wide variety of other sports, with tennis star Jannik Sinner, a four-time Grand Slam winner, the most obvious example.

“I believe it is a mistake to deny responsibility for the third missed World Cup qualification and accuse the institutions of a presumed failure while downplaying the importance and professionalism of other sports,” added Abodi, who has been sport minister in Giorgia Meloni’s hard-right government since 2022.

Speed skater Francesca Lollobrigida, who won two Olympic gold medals this past winter, was one of several athletes to react to Gravina’s comments, sarcastically saying on Instagram, “I’m an amateur.”

Meanwhile, former Italian Premier Matteo Renzi said Italy’s elimination was “unfortunately” not an April Fool’s joke.

“It’s a sign that Italian football has failed,” he said. “Football isn’t just entertainment in our country; it’s part of our culture and national identity.”