Iran’s state television network briefly lost control of one of its main channels on Wednesday after hackers interrupted programming and aired a message from Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi calling on the Iranian military to side with protesters against the Islamic Republic. Channel Two of the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting — IRIB — was reportedly hijacked for several minutes, during which Pahlavi urged military personnel to join the Iranian people in opposing the regime, according to reports from Iran International.

The disruption comes just days after U.S. and Israeli airstrikes targeted two IRIB complexes in Tehran — strikes that killed and injured several employees and temporarily knocked both radio and television broadcasts off the air. Following those explosions, which were visible across parts of Tehran, broadcasts resumed from an alternate studio near the Jame Jam district. A presenter told viewers that the network had come under U.S. and Israeli attack before programming returned, though technical problems and reduced scheduling continued afterward.

This is not the first time Iranian state broadcasts have been disrupted. In January, anti-regime activists reportedly hacked Iran’s Badr satellite, allowing them to transmit Pahlavi’s calls for protests and messages encouraging Iran’s military and security forces to support demonstrators. What was once an irregular tactic is becoming a pattern — a sustained campaign of information infiltration that is accelerating as Iran’s physical broadcast infrastructure is simultaneously degraded by airstrikes.

Meanwhile, Iranian authorities appear to be tightening control over the country’s information flow from the other direction. According to reports, some citizens have received warning messages threatening legal action if they access international internet services. The messages warn that continued use of the global internet could result in blocked service and referral to judicial authorities — a digital crackdown intended to wall off the population from outside reporting about the war as the regime’s grip on its own broadcast infrastructure deteriorates.

American and Israeli forces have begun taking control of Iranian airspace, and within days it will be uncontested, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth told reporters at the Pentagon Wednesday. That milestone — “complete control” over Iranian skies — will allow U.S. and Israeli air power to complete their missions of destroying Iran’s defense industrial base and eliminating Iranian leadership affiliated with the weakened regime without opposition of any kind.

Hegseth was explicit about what total airspace dominance means in practice: the freedom to strike any target, anywhere in Iran, at any hour, with no threat from Iranian air defenses, interceptors, or radar systems that no longer exist. He said the campaign is “winning decisively, devastatingly, and without mercy,” and confirmed that more bombers and fighter aircraft are still arriving in the region — a posture of escalation, not conclusion.

Speaking alongside General Dan Caine, Hegseth said Iran still has some capacity to fire missiles and drones “at civilian targets” — but that capacity is a shadow of what it was. Caine provided the campaign’s sharpest public data on the degradation of Iran’s retaliatory ability to date:

Caine added that the time had come to expand strikes deeper into Iranian territory. He reaffirmed that the operation was “launched with clear military objectives”: eliminate Iran’s ballistic missile systems, destroy its navy, and ensure that Iran cannot “rapidly rebuild or reconstitute its combat capability or combat power.” Iran’s military power is being “decimated,” Hegseth said, and he insisted Washington holds the endurance advantage: “We can easily sustain this fight as long as necessary. Iran lacks the endurance to sustain a prolonged conflict with the United States.”

Hegseth also disclosed that the leader of an Iranian group accused of plotting to assassinate President Donald Trump was killed in the campaign. He declined to identify the individual but said the figure had not been the primary target of the military operation — and that he personally ensured the person was placed on the target list.

An American submarine destroyed the Iranian Navy frigate IRIS Dena in the Indian Ocean on Wednesday — approximately 40 kilometers, or 25 miles, south of Sri Lanka — confirming a historical first. At least 80 crew members were killed, Sri Lanka’s deputy foreign minister reported. The country’s foreign minister had earlier stated that about 30 of the approximately 180 people aboard had been rescued, with the search operation still underway. Sri Lanka’s navy received a distress call Wednesday morning and dispatched two naval vessels and a military aircraft.

Hegseth’s framing was unmistakably deliberate. The United States War Department — predecessor to the Department of Defense, dissolved after 1947 — governed the American military through World War II, including the Pacific submarine campaign that sank Japanese warships across the Pacific with torpedo kills that became legendary. By invoking the War Department and the last war in which America used a torpedo to sink an enemy vessel, Hegseth was signaling the totality of intent behind the current campaign: this is not a police action, a deterrence exercise, or a targeted counter-terrorism operation. It is war — and it is being fought to a conclusion.

The sinking extends the conflict’s operational geography dramatically beyond the Persian Gulf, Strait of Hormuz, and Gulf of Oman — where CENTCOM had already confirmed zero Iranian vessels remain underway. The Indian Ocean strike signals a strategy of total Iranian naval denial across every theater simultaneously. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, in the first official Iranian acknowledgment of the loss, described the Dena as having been operating “as a guest of India’s Navy” in international waters — a framing that raises potential diplomatic sensitivities with New Delhi, which has thus far maintained careful neutrality in the conflict.

Air defense systems detected and intercepted a ballistic missile believed to have been launched from Iran on Wednesday. The missile traveled through Iraqi and Syrian airspace toward the eastern Mediterranean — and was intercepted before it could enter Turkish airspace. Debris reportedly fell in Turkey’s Hatay province, and a Turkish official suggested the missile may have been heading toward a military installation in Cyprus before it was destroyed. No casualties were reported.

Elsewhere in the region, Iranian forces said they launched missile strikes against “separatist groups” in northern Iraq — targeting camps belonging to Iranian Kurdish opposition groups near the Iranian border. U.S. troops remain stationed in Iraq’s Kurdish region, and drone attacks have been reported in Erbil and at its airport. Pro-Iranian Shiite militias in Iraq regard American forces there as legitimate targets. Reports also indicate pro-Iranian groups launched projectiles toward Kuwait, drawing complaints from Kuwaiti officials. President Trump has spoken with Kurdish regional leaders about possible steps against Iran, according to reports.

At sea, a container ship sailing through the Strait of Hormuz was struck by what maritime monitors described as an “unknown projectile” just above the waterline, according to the United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations. A fire broke out in the vessel’s engine room after the impact, forcing the crew to abandon ship. The vessel was sailing under the Maltese flag, though that information was not independently confirmed, and was located roughly two nautical miles north of an Omani exclave in the strategically vital strait — a narrow waterway through which a significant portion of the world’s oil supplies passes. It remained unclear who was responsible for the attack.

Israel and the United States are increasingly targeting Iran’s internal security apparatus — striking the organizations responsible for suppressing protests and maintaining the Islamic Republic’s grip on power. According to a report by The Wall Street Journal, Israeli airstrikes have focused on elements of Iran’s domestic enforcement network, including the Basij paramilitary force and senior intelligence officials. U.S. forces have also struck facilities tied to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, including its headquarters in Tehran.

These security forces were central to the brutal crackdown on anti-government protests earlier in 2026. During demonstrations in January, IRGC units, Basij militants, and police forces opened fire on crowds and carried out mass arrests in what analysts describe as one of the deadliest political crackdowns in decades. Israeli officials say the strategy is intended to weaken Iran’s “police state” from the air — potentially allowing internal opposition movements to challenge the regime on the ground.

Analysts caution, however, that airstrikes alone may not be enough to topple Iran’s government. While widespread unrest has simmered across the country, the regime still maintains tight control over weapons and security forces on the ground — leaving the outcome uncertain unless large-scale defections occur. The coordinated pressure — physical destruction of security infrastructure from above, presidential calls for defection from Washington, and Pahlavi’s messages infiltrating state media — represents a multi-domain effort to fracture the regime’s coercive apparatus simultaneously from every direction.

The U.S. Senate failed to pass a measure Wednesday that would have curtailed President Trump’s ability to continue military operations in Iran without congressional approval. The 47–52 vote saw cross-party defections that reflected the genuine complexity of the constitutional question: most Republicans backed the administration’s authority to act; most Democrats opposed the war on legal grounds; but neither caucus held together completely.

Democrats say the operation — which has no set end date and has led to the deaths of six Americans so far — is equivalent to declaring war, which only Congress has the constitutional power to do. A few key members of Congress received advance notice of the strikes but did not vote to authorize them. The House is expected to vote on its own war powers resolution Thursday, which Speaker Johnson is confident will also fail.

Republicans largely view Operation Epic Fury as a necessary, short-term campaign against a country that poses a serious and sustained threat to the U.S. and its allies and that has consistently resisted diplomacy. Many Americans have questioned the justification for the campaign, particularly since President Trump said that June’s Operation Midnight Hammer — which struck three Iranian nuclear facilities — had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear arsenal. General Caine addressed this directly Wednesday, saying the current operation was “launched with clear military objectives” rooted in Iran’s continuing refusal to halt nuclear enrichment and its reconstitution of missile production capabilities.

The nuclear backdrop is worth recalling: the U.S. entered a nuclear deal with Iran in 2015 under President Obama alongside China, France, Russia, and the U.K. Iran was supposed to dismantle much of its nuclear program under that agreement. Trump withdrew the U.S. from the deal in 2018, saying it “enriched the Iranian regime and enabled its malign behavior, while at best delaying its ability to pursue nuclear weapons.” The president has since said Iran would not agree to stop enhancing its nuclear capacity — and that this was among the reasons for launching the current campaign.

Speaking in a video message reviewed by Worthy News, CENTCOM Commander Admiral Brad Cooper described Operation Epic Fury as “an unprecedented operation to eliminate Iran’s ability to threaten Americans,” ordered by the President and the Secretary of War. Cooper opened by expressing condolences for the six American service members killed in an Iranian missile strike on a military facility in Kuwait.

Cooper confirmed that the operation involves more than 50,000 U.S. troops, roughly 200 fighter aircraft, two aircraft carriers, and long-range B-2, B-1, and B-52 bombers — the largest U.S. military buildup in the Middle East in a generation. Long-range bombers struck missile facilities deep inside Iran while naval forces launched cruise missiles against command centers and radar installations. Within the first 100 hours of combat, forces had struck nearly 2,000 targets using more than 2,000 munitions, destroying missile sites, air-defense systems, and command centers.

On the naval dimension, Cooper was unambiguous: the campaign has destroyed 17 Iranian ships, including Iran’s most operational submarine, and as of his briefing, “there is not a single Iranian ship underway in the Arabian Gulf, the Strait of Hormuz, or the Gulf of Oman.” Iran has responded with more than 500 ballistic missiles and over 2,000 drones, but Cooper assesses that capability as “rapidly weakening.” U.S. and Israeli forces continue to hunt Iran’s remaining mobile missile launchers. His conclusion: “The two most powerful air forces in the world — the United States and Israel — are dominating the skies.”