The ceasefire is not a ceasefire. The blockades are still active. US soldiers are questioning orders. Iran closed the case on a seven-year-old boy whose body was never found. Lebanon is being forced to negotiate while Israel still kills its people. This is what day 55 looks like when the shooting pauses and the strangulation continues.
The uniform does not guarantee unanimity. Dissent inside the US military over the Iran war is growing. Unsplash
Wars produce casualties on the battlefield. This one is producing them inside the ranks of the military itself. On April 23, Al Jazeera's The Take documented what has been building for weeks: opposition to the US-Israel war on Iran is spreading inside the United States military, not just among the public, but among the people ordered to fight it.
Mike Prysner, executive director of the Center on Conscience & War, described service members who are questioning orders, exploring conscientious objection pathways, and in some cases speaking out publicly. This is not a mass mutiny. It is something quieter and potentially more corrosive: a slow erosion of the assumption that when the commander-in-chief says go, everyone goes.
"From protests to quiet resistance, dissent is rising inside the United States military over the US-Israel war on Iran." Al Jazeera, The Take, April 23, 2026
The timing matters. This is not the first week of the war, when adrenaline and patriotism carry the formation forward. This is day 55. The initial strikes of February 28 are two months behind us. The Supreme Leader of Iran was killed on day one. The navy was sunk. The air force was demolished, in Trump's own words. And yet the war has not ended. The ceasefire has been extended but the blockade remains. The talks have not happened. The oil price is still above $4 a gallon at American pumps, and the average service member pumping that gas is starting to ask what exactly they are still doing there.
The institutional architecture is also fracturing. On the same day dissent made headlines, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth fired Navy Secretary John Phelan, making him the 34th senior official removed under the Trump administration since the war began. Phelan was replaced by Undersecretary Hung Cao, a 25-year Navy combat veteran. Whether Cao's appointment stabilizes the Navy or simply removes another dissenting voice depends on who you ask. But the pattern is clear: the war has consumed more generals and secretaries than it has Iranian cities.
Meanwhile, the US Senate voted 55-46 to defeat a war powers resolution led by Democrat Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, which would have curbed Trump's authority to wage war on Iran. It was the fifth such attempt. Five failures. Republican Rand Paul crossed the aisle to support it. Democrat John Fetterman crossed the other way to oppose it. Three senators, including Democrat Mark Warner, simply did not vote. When the chamber cannot even agree on whether the president should have unchecked war powers, the military personnel being sent into the Gulf have even less clarity about the mission's legitimacy.
The US blockade of Iranian ports involves at least 17 warships and 10,000 soldiers. Unsplash
Two navies. One strait. No exit.
The Strait of Hormuz, 21 nautical miles at its narrowest, is the chokepoint through which 20 percent of the world's oil and liquefied natural gas once flowed freely. Since the war began on February 28, it has become a contested corridor where rival militaries control opposite ends and neither side allows free passage.
On March 4, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps declared full control of the strait and announced that all vessels would need IRGC clearance to transit. On April 13, the United States imposed a naval blockade on Iranian ports, controlling which ships could enter the Gulf from the Arabian Sea side. The result: a maritime standoff where ships need approval from both the IRGC and the US Navy to move through the strait, and most simply cannot get it.
On April 23, Donald Trump escalated. He ordered the US Navy to "shoot and kill" any Iranian boat laying mines in the Strait of Hormuz, and demanded that mine-sweeping operations be "tripled up." His words were deliberately unambiguous:
"I have ordered the United States Navy to shoot and kill any boat, small boats though they may be (Their naval ships are ALL, 159 of them, at the bottom of the sea!), that is putting mines in the waters of the Strait of Hormuz. There is to be no hesitation." Donald Trump, Truth Social, April 23, 2026
This is a shoot-to-kill order on the world's most important shipping lane, issued during what is officially called a "ceasefire." The Pentagon simultaneously denied a Washington Post report, sourced to three unnamed officials, that it could take six months to clear Iranian-laid mines from the strait. Calling the report "cherry-picked and false" is easy. Clearing the mines is not.
Iran, for its part, has not been passive. On April 22, IRGC gunboats captured two foreign container ships attempting to exit the strait and fired on a third. Earlier that week, the US military had fired on and captured the Iranian-flagged container ship Touska near the strait. Iran called that piracy. The US called it enforcement. The captured ships on both sides are the new normal of a naval war that the word "ceasefire" does not cover.
Iran also reported this week that it received its first revenue from tolls imposed on vessels transiting the strait. The IRGC is not just blocking traffic. It is taxing what it allows through. A war economy in miniature, operating at the narrowest point of the Persian Gulf.
A classroom without its children. The Shajareh Tayyebeh school in Minab was struck on the first day of the war. Unsplash
There are 3,375 confirmed dead in Iran since the war began, according to the country's Legal Medicine Organisation. About 40 percent of recovered bodies could not be immediately identified due to the extent of damage. But the number that stops you is one.
Makan Nasiri was seven years old. He was a student at the Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab, Hormozgan province, in southern Iran. The school sat next to an IRGC base. On February 28, the first day of the war, it was bombed.
Washington did not claim responsibility for the strike. But evidence, including an Amnesty International investigation, suggests that US Tomahawk missiles were likely used. It became the single deadliest incident involving civilians since the start of the war.
The revised death toll, provided on April 9 by Minab's general prosecutor Ebrahim Taheri, stands at 156 people. Of those, 120 were students: 73 boys and 47 girls. Twenty-six teachers were killed, all women, one of them six months pregnant. Seven parents, a school bus driver, and a clinic technician also died.
Makan's mother, Asieh Rahinejad, received a call from a teacher that morning telling her to pick him up immediately. She did not yet know the war had started. She called the school bus driver to collect her son. A second missile struck the school within minutes. The bus driver never arrived.
Forensic experts identified every body. Many were torn to pieces. DNA testing was extensive. But Makan Nasiri left no trace. Not a fragment. Not a stain. After nearly seven weeks of searching, Iranian authorities informed his parents that his case has been closed.
"About 40 percent of all bodies recovered during the war could not be immediately identified due to extensive damage." Iran Legal Medicine Organisation
A seven-year-old boy is not a statistic. He is not a collateral damage line item in a Pentagon briefing. He is not a data point in a blockade strategy. He is a child who went to school on a Saturday morning and was erased so thoroughly that the forensic science of a nation could not find a single cell to bury. His parents have no grave to visit. No prayer to close over. The war took their son and then, seven weeks later, the state took even the hope of finding him.
Symbolic belongings of the Minab schoolgirls were laid in Valiasr Square in Tehran on April 22. Small shoes. Backpacks. Pencils. The artifacts of children who will not need them again.
Lebanon's south: towns reduced to rubble, residents barred from returning. Unsplash
On the same day Trump was ordering the Navy to shoot Iranian boats, Lebanon and Israel were sitting down for direct talks in Washington, DC. It was the second such meeting, following an initial session on April 14. The Lebanese delegation will ask for an extension to the current ceasefire as a precondition for continuing the talks. Lebanon's Prime Minister Nawaf Salam says his country will also seek a full Israeli withdrawal and the return of Lebanese captives held by Israel.
These talks are happening while Israel is still on Lebanese soil. Still conducting demolitions. Still killing people. On April 22, Israel killed five people in Lebanon, including the front-line reporter Amal Khalil. On April 23, the Lebanese Health Ministry reported that an Israeli attack killed three more. Since March 2, when Israel intensified its war on Lebanon after Hezbollah's retaliation for the killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, 2,294 people have been killed in Lebanon, including journalists and medics. More than 1.2 million people have been displaced.
Israel has established what it calls a "yellow line," a 10-kilometer buffer zone from the border. Residents are not allowed to return to their homes within it. Israel has demolished houses and entire villages inside this zone. Al Jazeera visited three towns, al-Mansouri, Majdal Zoun, and Qlaileh, on a tour organized by Hezbollah. The towns were destroyed. Buildings reduced to dust and rubble.
The shopowner in Beirut who broke into laughter when asked about the negotiations captured the absurdity better than any analyst. "If I say the wrong thing, someone might come hit me," he told Al Jazeera. That is what it means to negotiate while you are still being bombed.
Hezbollah has rejected the talks outright. Hundreds of protesters descended on downtown Beirut the day before the previous round. Retired US Army Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, speaking to Al Jazeera, identified the fundamental problem: "We have Israel, Lebanon and the United States there. We don't have Hezbollah." A negotiation about Lebanon's future that excludes the most powerful armed force in the country is not a negotiation. It is theater with diplomatic language.
Trump also extended the Lebanon ceasefire by three weeks on April 23. But as with Iran, the word "ceasefire" is being stretched past its breaking point. Israel has committed 2,400 violations of the Gaza ceasefire deal with Hamas since October. The Gaza Government Media Office counts targeted strikes, arrests, blockades, and forced starvation among them. If the Lebanon ceasefire follows the same pattern, the extension is not a path to peace. It is a longer runway for more of the same.
The talks nobody wants but everyone attends. Diplomacy under siege. Unsplash
Trump has been repeating a claim daily for the past week: that Iran's leadership is fractured. "Iran is having a very hard time figuring out who their leader is!" he posted. "The infighting is between the 'Hardliners', who have been losing BADLY on the battlefield, and the 'Moderates', who are not very moderate at all (but gaining respect!), is CRAZY!"
Iran's response was coordinated and deliberate. President Masoud Pezeshkian, Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, and Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf all posted the same message on X:
"In Iran, there are no radicals or moderates. We are all 'Iranian' and 'revolutionary', and with the iron unity of the nation and government, with complete obedience to the Supreme Leader of the Revolution, we will make the aggressor criminal regret his actions." Supreme National Security Council statement, reposted by Pezeshkian, Araghchi, and Ghalibaf
First Vice President Mohammad Reza Aref added in English: "Iran is not a land of rifts, but a stronghold of unity. Our political diversity is our democracy, yet in times of peril, we are a 'Single Hand' under one flag."
Who is right? The truth is buried in classified briefings that neither side will release. Trump's claim of a leadership rift serves a clear strategic purpose: it justifies extending the ceasefire while blaming Iran for the stalled diplomacy. If Tehran is too divided to negotiate, Washington does not need to offer anything. It can simply maintain the blockade and wait for the rift to widen.
Tehran's unity narrative serves its own purpose: it signals to the population that resistance is not fractured and to the US that there is no weakened faction to exploit. Both narratives are weapons. Neither is fully true. But the New York Times reported on April 23, citing unidentified Iranian officials, that Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei, who replaced his father Ali Khamenei after the latter was killed in the February 28 strikes, is "gravely wounded" but "mentally sharp." The Pentagon has previously said the younger Khamenei was wounded and "disfigured." He has not made a public appearance since taking power.
A leader who cannot show his face is a vulnerability, regardless of how unified the public statements sound. Iran's government is not fractured in the way Trump describes, with competing factions fighting for control. But a wounded, invisible Supreme Leader is a different kind of fracture, one that does not produce public infighting but rather a power vacuum filled by committee and guesswork. That is not unity. It is survival mode.
Araghchi dismissed allegations of military-civilian discord: "The battlefield and diplomacy are fully coordinated fronts in the same war. Iranians are all united, more than ever before." Perhaps. But a nation under blockade, with its navy sunk, its air force demolished, and its supreme leader in hiding, does not need to fracture to be weak. The weakness is the condition.
The blockade's real weapon is not a missile. It is economic suffocation. Unsplash
The White House said on April 22 that Trump is "satisfied" with the siege on Iran. That word, "satisfied," is worth pausing on. It does not mean the war is going well. It means the president believes the status quo, a naval blockade strangling Iran's economy while the ceasefire prevents new airstrikes, is producing enough pressure without requiring him to either restart the bombing or make concessions for a deal.
Trump himself described the logic plainly: "Iran's Navy is lying at the bottom of the Sea, their Air Force is demolished, their Anti-Aircraft and Radar Weaponry is gone, their leaders are no longer with us, the Blockade is airtight and strong and, from there, it only gets worse. Time is not on their side! A Deal will only be made when it's appropriate and good for the United States of America, our Allies and, in fact, the rest of the World."
That is not a peace plan. It is a siege doctrine. The goal is not to negotiate. The goal is to make negotiation unnecessary by making the alternative, continued economic suffocation, so unbearable that Iran capitulates. The problem is that Iran has not capitulated in 55 days of war, blockade, and the killing of its supreme leader. There is no historical precedent suggesting it will capitulate next week.
The blockade involves at least 10,000 soldiers, 17 warships, and more than 100 aircraft. The US military's Central Command has turned back 31 vessels, mostly oil tankers. On April 23, the Pentagon announced that US forces boarded a tanker in the Indian Ocean that it alleged was providing material support to Iran. It was the second such boarding in three days. The US military also intercepted at least three Iranian-flagged tankers in Asian waters near India, Malaysia, and Sri Lanka, redirecting them away from their positions.
Iran's parliament speaker said the country would not reopen the Strait of Hormuz as long as the US naval blockade remains in place, calling it a "blatant violation" of the ceasefire. Iran has set the lifting of the blockade as a precondition for resuming talks. The US has refused. The result is a diplomatic impasse where both sides insist they want negotiations but neither will make the move the other requires to start them.
This is not a stalemate. A stalemate implies two forces pushing against each other with equal weight. This is a siege, and sieges end one of two ways: the besieged breaks, or the besieger runs out of patience. Trump has said there is no deadline. That means the siege continues indefinitely, and the people of Iran pay the price in food shortages, medicine shortages, and economic collapse while two navies play chicken in a 39-kilometer strait.
Dissent is not treason. It is what happens when a mission loses its meaning. Unsplash
Consider what the word "ceasefire" actually means on day 55:
In Iran, air defenses were activated over Tehran on April 23. There was no official confirmation of an attack. But air defenses do not activate for nothing. Israel's Defense Minister Israel Katz said on April 23 that his country is "prepared to renew the war against Iran" and is awaiting the green light from Trump to return Iran to the "age of darkness." The Israeli military is "ready in defence and offence, and the targets are marked."
In Lebanon, a ceasefire extension was announced while Israel was still conducting strikes. Israeli forces killed a journalist, three civilians, and continued demolitions in the south. The Lebanese delegation sat across from Israeli diplomats in Washington while their country was still being bombed. Hezbollah, excluded from the talks, continues to control the territory Israel claims to be negotiating over.
In Gaza, an Israeli air strike on April 23 killed five Palestinians including three children near Al-Qassam mosque in Beit Lahia. Israel has committed 2,400 violations of the Gaza ceasefire. The UN Secretary-General called Gaza a "graveyard for children" in November 2023. More than 20,000 children have been killed since. An average of at least 47 women and girls were killed each day between October 2023 and December 2025, totaling more than 38,000, according to UN Women.
In the Strait of Hormuz, both navies are still seizing and firing on ships. Trump ordered shoot-to-kill for Iranian mine-layers. The IRGC is collecting tolls on shipping. The US is intercepting tankers across the Indian Ocean. This is not a pause. It is a war conducted by other means: blockade, interception, economic strangulation, and the constant threat of escalation.
In Washington, the Senate has failed five times to check the president's war powers. The Navy secretary has been fired. Service members are looking into conscientious objection. The military is not cracking. It is groaning under a mission that has no defined endpoint, no clear victory condition, and no exit strategy beyond waiting for the other side to break.
The war is day 55. It has killed a supreme leader, sunk a navy, demolished an air force, destroyed an elementary school full of children, displaced millions in Lebanon, produced a famine in Somalia where 6.5 million people now face hunger, and left a seven-year-old boy so thoroughly erased that forensic science gave up looking for him.
And the man who started it says he is "satisfied."
No one knows. That is the honest answer, and it is the one nobody in power will give.
Trump says time is not on Iran's side. But time is not on anyone's side in a siege. The US economy is feeling the oil price shock. The military is losing senior officials faster than it is losing battles. Service members are questioning orders. The Senate cannot restrain the president. The public is divided. And Israel, the partner in this war, is openly saying it is ready to restart bombing the moment Trump gives the word.
Iran says it wants talks. But it will not talk while the blockade remains. The US will not lift the blockade while Iran maintains its own restrictions on Hormuz. Neither side will move first. The ceasefire has no deadline. The blockade has no endpoint. The war has no exit.
Makan Nasiri's parents have no grave to visit. The children of Gaza have no safety. The displaced of Lebanon have no homes. The sailors of Hormuz have no safe passage. And the soldiers of the United States military, ordered into a war with no defined end, are beginning to ask whether the order still makes sense.
That question, once it spreads, is harder to stop than any missile.
[1] Al Jazeera, "How Trump's Iran war is driving military dissent," The Take, April 23, 2026
[2] Al Jazeera, "US to 'shoot and kill' Iranian boats laying mines in Hormuz, Trump says," April 23, 2026
[3] Al Jazeera, "Iran dismisses Trump's claim of leadership rift, says nation is 'one soul'," April 23, 2026
[4] Al Jazeera, "Makan Nasiri, the only child still missing from the school bombed in Iran's Minab," April 23, 2026
[5] Al Jazeera, "How Iran raised Hormuz stakes by capturing ships," April 23, 2026
[6] Al Jazeera, "Mixed views in Lebanon ahead of controversial talks with Israel," April 23, 2026
[7] Al Jazeera, "Iran war: What's happening on day 55 after Trump extended ceasefire?" April 23, 2026
[8] Al Jazeera, "Israeli strike kills five in Gaza, including three children," April 23, 2026
[9] Amnesty International, "US responsible for deadly attack on Iranian school," March 16, 2026
[10] UN Women, "More than 38,000 women and girls killed in Gaza," April 2026
[11] New York Times, "Mojtaba Khamenei gravely wounded but mentally sharp," April 23, 2026
[12] Washington Post, "Classified briefing: six months to clear Hormuz mines," April 2026 (denied by Pentagon)
[13] US Central Command, blockade enforcement data, April 23, 2026
[14] Iran Legal Medicine Organisation, casualty statistics, April 2026
[15] Save the Children, "20,000+ children killed in Gaza," September 2025