The Brief

More than 3,000 people — including over 1,200 Iranian civilians, 773 in Lebanon, and 13 American service members — have been killed since the U.S.-Israeli military campaign against Iran began on February 28, with the conflict now in its third week and no ceasefire in prospect. The U.S. has struck more than 15,000 targets across Iran under Operation Epic Fury, displaced 3.2 million Iranians, and spent an estimated $16.5 billion, while Congress has declined to invoke its war powers authority and 56 percent of Americans oppose the campaign.

The Report

The death toll from the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran has passed 3,000 across the region as the conflict enters its third week with sustained airstrikes, retaliatory missile fire, and no diplomatic channel producing results.

Iran’s Health Ministry reports 1,444 killed and over 18,500 injured since strikes began on February 28, though the Iranian government has separately claimed 3,117 dead, and non-governmental health officials have estimated figures as high as 32,000. The discrepancy reflects both the opacity of wartime reporting and the political incentives shaping each count. In Lebanon, where Israeli forces have struck Hezbollah positions and infrastructure since the group opened a retaliatory front on March 2, between 687 and 773 people have been killed, including 98 children. Fourteen Israelis have died, with more than 2,000 wounded, primarily from Iranian ballistic missile strikes.

Thirteen American service members have died — seven from enemy fire, six in a KC-135 refuelling aircraft crash in western Iraq whose cause the Pentagon says was neither hostile nor friendly fire, and one from a health-related incident. Roughly 140 have been wounded, with eight severely injured. Six of the seven combat deaths occurred in a single unmanned aircraft attack on Port Shuaiba, Kuwait, on March 1, killing reservists whose families described them as weeks from coming home.

The campaign’s scope has been considerable. U.S. and Israeli forces launched nearly 900 strikes in the first twelve hours of Operation Epic Fury, killing Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and dozens of senior officials on the opening night. His son Mojtaba Khamenei was appointed successor by the Assembly of Experts on March 8 and has since been reported injured in subsequent strikes. More than 90 Iranian naval vessels have been damaged or destroyed. On March 13, the U.S. struck military targets on Kharg Island — the terminal handling 90 percent of Iran’s crude exports — while President Trump stated he had chosen not to destroy the oil infrastructure itself, for “reasons of decency.”

Iran’s retaliation has followed a strategy of horizontal escalation, targeting U.S. embassies, military installations, and shipping across the Gulf. Attacks have struck facilities in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, and Jordan, killing at least 46 people across those nations. Hezbollah has maintained rocket fire into northern Israel. A French soldier was killed in the Irbil region, prompting President Macron to call the incident “unacceptable.”

Domestically, Congress voted down war powers challenges on March 5 — 47-53 in the Senate, blocked 219-212 in the House — largely along party lines. The UN Security Council adopted Resolution 2817 condemning Iran’s attacks on neighbouring states by a vote of 13-0-2, with Russia and China abstaining. Russia called the resolution “extremely unbalanced” for omitting mention of the strikes that initiated the conflict.

The humanitarian toll continues to mount. Up to 3.2 million Iranians have been displaced, most from Tehran and major cities toward northern and rural areas. In Lebanon, more than 830,000 have fled their homes. Twenty-five Iranian hospitals have been damaged, nine rendered non-functional. Oil prices have reached $119.50 per barrel, with the Strait of Hormuz — through which 20 percent of global oil and a third of the world’s fertiliser supply passes — under persistent threat.

The war has cost the United States an estimated $16.5 billion in its first twelve days. An additional 2,200 Marines are deploying to the region aboard the USS Tripoli.

The Angle

The most revealing number in the first two weeks of this war is not the death toll. It is 47-53 — the Senate vote that decided, in effect, that the constitutional question of who authorises a major war could wait. The House vote was functionally identical: the motion to even consider war powers was blocked before debate could begin. The mechanism designed to prevent exactly this situation performed exactly as designed — which is to say, it produced a result and moved on, indifferent to whether the result was adequate to the question being asked.

What makes this particular abdication notable is its context. Fifty-six percent of the public opposes the war. The campaign has already cost more in twelve days than the annual budget of most federal agencies. Thirteen service members are dead. The constitutional text on the matter is not ambiguous — Madison did not leave much room for interpretation. And still the vote fell on party lines, with the familiar arithmetic of partisanship applied to a question that was supposed to sit above it. The tool worked. It simply was not designed for this.

The war itself has settled into the pattern that modern air campaigns produce: enormous kinetic output, carefully managed escalation, and a growing humanitarian crisis that exists mostly in the gap between what the strikes are hitting and what the cameras can reach. Fifteen thousand targets struck. Three point two million displaced. Twenty-five hospitals damaged. These are the numbers of a campaign operating at industrial scale against a country whose military was already degraded by last summer’s Twelve-Day War and whose civilian population spent January burying 30,000 of its own people killed by its own government. The strategic logic may be sound. The question no one in Washington is required to answer — because the vote made sure of it — is whether the tool being applied is proportionate to the problem it is supposed to solve, or whether it is simply the tool that was available.

Trump’s remark that he spared Kharg Island’s oil infrastructure for “reasons of decency” while levelling its military installations is the kind of statement that only makes sense inside the logic of a campaign where the distinction between restraint and devastation has become a matter of targeting coordinates. Decency, in this usage, means the refinery still stands. The school in Minab does not.

The cost of a war that a majority opposes, that Congress chose not to authorise, and that no one can yet define the end of is $16.5 billion and climbing — so far denominated only in dollars.