Day: June 17, 2025

Trump could decide to help Israel by joining the fight against Iran, or refrain from involving the US in a new overseas war – either choice will upset his supporters

• Follow live updates in the Middle East crisis

As Donald Trump considers a direct intervention in Israel’s conflict with Iran, another war has broken out in Washington between conservative hawks, calling for immediate US strikes on uranium enrichment facilities, and Maga isolationists, who are demanding Trump stick to his campaign pledge not to involve the US in new overseas wars.

At stake is whether the US could target the mountain redoubt that is home to the Fordow fuel enrichment plant, a key uranium enrichment site hidden 80 to 90 metres underground that cannot be targeted directly by Israeli jets – although they can attack some of the infrastructure that allows the plant to operate.

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In today’s newsletter: Whether or not regime change is even desirable to Benjamin Netanyahu, a sudden transformation in Tehran looks very unlikely

Good morning. As the conflict between Iran and Israel has heated up in the days since Israel’s surprise attack last week, a consensus has emerged that, while Tehran’s nuclear ambitions have been severely compromised, it is all but impossible for Israel to extinguish them permanently without American support.

Nonetheless, Israel hopes that scuttling Iran’s nuclear talks with the US and severely weakening the regime as a military threat will make its gambit worthwhile. And there is another goal that Benjamin Netanyahu appears to believe is possible: regime change.

Grooming gangs | A culture of “blindness, ignorance and prejudice” led to repeated failures over decades to properly investigate cases in which children were abused by grooming gangs, a report has said. Louise Casey said that the authorities had shied away from collecting data on the ethnicity of perpetrators.

Gaza | At least 37 Palestinians were killed on Monday in new shootings near food distribution centres run by private US contractors, local authorities said. The death toll, blamed by witnesses on Israeli troops, was the highest yet reported in the near-daily shootings since the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation began operations three weeks ago.

India | Investigators are preparing to study the pilots’ last words for clues as to the cause of the Air India plane crash, after recovering the cockpit voice recorder from the wreckage. The voice recorder was in the Boeing 787 aircraft’s second black box, which Indian authorities said they had found on Sunday.

Carers | The mother of a teenager with cerebral palsy has demanded an end to the “sickening harassment” of unpaid carers after a significant legal victory against the government. Nicola Green was pursued by the Department for Work and Pensions for more than a year after she was accused of fraudulently claiming nearly £3,000 in carer’s allowance.

UK news | A second person who died in a tandem skydiving incident in Devon has been identified as Adam Harrison, 30, from Bournemouth. Emergency services were called to the area around Dunkeswell aerodrome on Friday. Harrison, who was a tandem skydive instructor, and Belinda Taylor, 48, from Totnes, were confirmed dead at the scene.

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