State of the Union: War with Iran Edges Closer

Ahead of President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address, there is a flurry of activity taking place inside the White House and Pentagon as Trump continues to deliberate whether he will authorize military strikes on Iran. A new round of talks between the U.S. and Iran are scheduled for Thursday in Geneva.

Iranian officials tell Drop Site they are showing an “almost unbelievable level of flexibility” in talks with the U.S. to avert war, saying Tehran has “decided to exercise maximum flexibility on the nuclear issue, but only on the strict condition that it would genuinely prevent the outbreak of war.”

Officials said Iran is directly addressing U.S. concerns on the nuclear issue with concrete proposals, and asserting a willingness to expand talks to other issues once a deal to avert imminent conflict has been concluded. Although talks are scheduled for Thursday, the prospects for a deal that would halt the U.S. drive to war remain fragile.

Drop Site’s Jeremy Scahill and Murtaza Hussain join Ryan Grim to discuss the latest.

In the second half of the broadcast, Drop Site’s Sharif Abdel Kouddous discusses a new joint investigation by the independent research groups Earshot and Forensic Architecture on the Israeli military’s massacre of 15 Palestinian aid workers in southern Gaza on March 23, 2025. The report, based on eyewitness testimony and audio and visual analysis, found that Israeli soldiers fired nearly a thousand bullets at the aid workers—with at least eight shots fired at point blank range in execution-style killings.

Read all of Drop Site’s coverage of Iran here.

Read about the 2025 massacre of Palestinian aid workers here.

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