The Brazilian leader, who has consistently pushed for a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine, objected to attempts to single out Moscow as the sole culprit behind the conflict, telling the French newspaper on Tuesday that “Western countries also bear part of the responsibility.”

“Joe Biden, with whom I spoke at length, thought Russia needed to be destroyed,” Lula said, without elaborating when the conversation took place. “And Europe, which for a long time embodied a middle way in the world, has now aligned itself with Washington and is spending billions on rearmament. That worries me. If all we talk about is war, there will never be peace.”

Moscow has long described the Ukraine conflict as a Western proxy war against Russia and has repeatedly condemned arms supplies to Kiev as counterproductive to the peace process. US President Donald Trump’s special envoy Keith Kellogg acknowledged last week that President Vladimir Putin was “in a way” right, while US Secretary of State Marco Rubio also previously characterized the conflict as a proxy war.

“Frankly, it’s a proxy war between nuclear powers – the United States, helping Ukraine, and Russia,” Rubio said in March, noting that the current White House administration is eager to see it end.

Trump has repeatedly rebuked Biden for funneling “crazy” amounts of American taxpayer money to Kiev, arguing last month that the conflict “should have remained a European situation.”

Trump has frequently used campaign rallies to claim that only he could prevent World War III and resolve the conflict between Ukraine and Russia within 24 hours – a claim he later acknowledged was hyperbolic. His efforts at mediation have faced resistance from European NATO members, who back continued military support for Ukraine.

Last month, following pressure from Trump, Kiev dropped its opposition to direct talks with Moscow, which it had abandoned back in 2022. Since then, the two sides have held two rounds of negotiations in Istanbul.

The first meeting was initiated by Putin on May 16 and resulted in a major prisoner swap. During the second round of negotiations on Monday, the two sides exchanged draft memorandums outlining a roadmap toward an eventual peace deal.

Havana, Jun 19 (Prensa Latina) Cuban authorities today withdrew part of the staff based in the Cuban Embassy in Iran.

"Women and children were evacuated in the face of Zionist aggression against #Iran. We include a minor and three Cuban journalists residing in Tehran," said the island's Foreign Minister, Bruno Rodriguez, on social network X.

He also affirmed that our mission will maintain daily work and consular attention to Cubans living in the Persian nation.

Iran’s mission to the United Nations declined to respond to the Israeli claim, which was linked to a ballistic missile that struck Or Yehuda, Israel, and nearby towns. No one was killed by the missile or its bomblets, and it was unclear if anyone was injured.

[Video]

A munition lands on a sidewalk in Or Yehuda, Israel on Thursday morning.CreditCredit...Or Yehuda Municipality Cluster munitions have warheads that burst and scatter numerous bomblets, and are known for causing indiscriminate harm to civilians. More than 100 countries have signed on to a 2008 agreement to prohibit them — but Israel and Iran have not adopted the ban, nor have major powers like the United States, Russia, China and India.

Videos and photographs verified by The New York Times show an unexploded bomblet on the patio of an apartment building in Or Yehuda after an Iranian missile barrage on Thursday.

The object, which resembles a narrow artillery shell or rocket warhead, is most likely a submunition similar to those that have armed some Iranian ballistic missiles since 2014, according to Fabian Hinz, a research fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a London-based think tank.

“The chances of hitting something increase when you have a missile that might not be as pinpoint-accurate as you would like it to be,” Mr. Hinz said in an interview. “Sometimes you might not need that much destructive force — imagine you want to hit an air-defense or a missile-defense system. These things are not armored, they are pretty soft targets, so just having a geographical spread of the attack could be worth it even if the explosive force and penetrative power is less.”

Trevor Ball, a former U.S. Army explosive ordnance disposal technician, seconded Mr. Hinz’s identification of the item as a submunition from a cluster weapon. Surveillance footage showing an object striking a sidewalk in Or Yehuda appears consistent with a submunition explosion, he said.

The Times also verified photographs and videos showing three small craters in the same area consistent with explosions of submunitions from cluster warheads. The craters are in a sidewalk, a backyard, and the parking lot of a hospital.

The Home Front Command, the Israeli military unit responsible for emergency response and civilian guidance, said in a statement that “a missile containing submunitions struck and dispersed over a relatively wide area,” and warned the public that some of the unexploded submunitions may still detonate and are therefore dangerous. It urged anyone who finds such an object to report it immediately to the authorities.

The command said it had found at least 10 sites in central Israel that may have been struck by submunitions from a cluster weapon.

The Times was not able to independently verify all of those sites, or verify that the submunitions came from a warhead that would be illegal under the 2008 international agreement, the Convention on Cluster Munitions. It prohibits warheads containing ten or more submunitions that each weigh less than four kilograms.

Israel has used cluster munitions in past wars, most recently in 2006 in Lebanon. Russia and Ukraine have used them in the war underway between them since 2022.

Experts say there is very limited publicly available information about the different warheads used on Iran’s expansive arsenal of ballistic missiles. If Iran used missiles carrying cluster warheads, it suggests that it is digging deep into its arsenal and not holding back from using a controversial weapon.

Israel and Iran have been exchanging fire since Israeli forces began an aerial attack on Iran last Friday, targeting its nuclear infrastructure and top military commanders.

Since then, Iran has launched more than 400 missiles at Israel. Most have been shot down by Israeli air defense systems but some have hit military facilities, residential buildings and, on Thursday, a hospital. Those attacks have killed at least 24 people, according to the Israeli authorities.

Israeli warplanes have conducted strikes in both rural and urban areas. As of Thursday, 224 people in Iran have been killed, according to the Iranian health ministry. Israeli strikes have killed at least 10 senior Iranian military leaders.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu answered “yes” when he was asked in a televised interview with Kan, the Israeli public broadcaster, if Iranian missile with a “fragmenting warhead” had hit Israel.

“There are smaller bombs that if you touch them they explode,” he said. He did not explicitly refer to the missile on Thursday as a cluster munition.

Mr. Hinz, who has studied Iranian ballistic missiles extensively, said that the submunition seen in the images from Israel can be carried by at least two Iranian missiles — the Qiam, which is an Iranian-made version of a Soviet SCUD missile, and the much larger Khorramshahr, which can carry up to 80 submunitions.

Cluster munitions, first used by the German Luftwaffe during the Spanish Civil War, have long been controversial.

“Cluster munitions cannot distinguish between soldiers and civilians because they spread their submunitions over a wide area and leave behind unexploded submunitions that endanger civilians, like land mines, for months or years to come,” said Bonnie Docherty, a senior arms adviser at Human Rights Watch.

Since the adoption of the 2008 convention, 99 percent of global stockpiles have been destroyed, according to the Cluster Munition Coalition.

The Israeli military circulated a digital flyer with a photo of what looks to be an unexploded projectile and a warning that “it may explode upon touch or movement.”

Trump official to The Grayzone: CIA's Ratcliffe acts as 'Mossad stenographer' on Iran

A Trump official tells The Grayzone the Mossad is using CIA Director John Ratcliffe and US CENTCOM's Gen. Michael Kurilla to influence Trump with cooked intelligence on Iran's nuclear program.

An official in the administration of President Donald Trump has told The Grayzone that CIA Director John Ratcliffe and US CENTCOM Commander Gen. Michael Kurilla have become vehicles for Israel's Mossad and military as they seek to manipulate the US into attacking Iran. The official referred to Ratcliffe as "Mossad's stenographer."

According to the official, Ratcliffe and Kurilla have pressured Trump to join Israel's war more directly by regurgitating overblown briefings they received from the Israeli military and Mossad director David Barnea – but without informing the president they the intelligence derived from a foreign third party.

During the Trump administration's meetings with Israeli intelligence officials including Barnea, the official said the Israelis have demonstrated a single-minded focus on regime change, clamoring for authorization to assassinate Iran's leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The official have emphasized that the moment to take out Khamenei is now.

The issue of Iran's nuclear enrichment capacity is of secondary concern in the Israelis' presentations, which the official characterized as tactless, hyper-aggressive exercises in fear-mongering. At one point, the Trump official recalled, an Israeli intelligence briefer declared that Iran could transfer a nuclear weapon to Yemen's Houthi militia in less than a week.

According to the official, Trump's lead negotiator with Iran, Steve Witkoff, has been pushing the president to preserve the diplomatic track. However, an Israeli assassination of Khamanei would almost certainly be the nail in the coffin of nuclear negotiations – which is precisely why the Israelis seem so determined to do it.

If the US enters the war by attacking Iran, the official fears that Iran will activate IRGC-backed Popular Mobilization Units to attack US troops and bases in Iraq and Syria, leading to American casualties and triggering escalation well beyond the initial scope of Iran's nuclear program.

Having launched a damaging war of attrition with Iran, Tel Aviv is deploying every mechanism at its disposal to compel the US to lurch headlong into the conflict it initiated, but which it can not finish on its own.

Inside the Trump administration, the source told The Grayzone that top officials who have questioned the logic of attacking Iran such as Director of Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and her deputy, former CIA officer and director for the National Counter-Terrorism Center Joe Kent, have been excluded from meetings by White House Chief of Staff Suzie Wiles.

Taking the lead in briefing the president is a highly suggestible CIA director whom Israel has groomed since he first entered Congress.

AIPAC director boasts of influence over Ratcliffe

This April, The Grayzone released exclusive audio of remarks by AIPAC CEO Elliot Brandt to an off-the-record Israel lobby session in Washington DC. Boasting of his organization's success in recruiting members of Congress, he described CIA Director John Ratcliffe as a "lifeline" inside the administration.

“You know that one of the first candidates I ever met with as an AIPAC professional in my job when he was a candidate for Congress was a guy named John Ratcliffe,” Brandt recalled. “He was challenging a long time member of Congress in Dallas. I said, this guy looks like he could win the race, and, we go talk to him. He had a good understanding of issues, and a couple of weeks ago, he took the oath as the CIA director, for crying out loud. This is a guy that we had a chance to speak to, so there are, there are a lot – I wouldn’t call them lifelines, but there are lifelines in there.”

Besides Ratcliffe, AIPAC CEO Elliott Brandt also named Marco Rubio and Mike Waltz, two former Republican congressmen cultivated by AIPAC in advance of their appointment to key national security positions in the Trump administration.

“They all have relationships with key AIPAC leaders from their communities,” said the AIPAC CEO. “So the lines of communication are good should there be something questionable or curious, and we need access on the conversation.”

This May, Waltz was outed by colleagues for secretly coordinating with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to orchestrate a US attack on Iran, costing him his job as National Security Council director. Secretary of State Rubio assumed the role of acting National Security Director, granting him control over more cabinet level positions than any US official since Henry Kissinger. Meanwhile, Ratcliffe quickly emerged as the key channel of Israeli influence in the administration.

The CIA director has come a long way since entering politics as the mayor of a backwater Texas town with a population of 7000.

A small town Texas mayor becomes big time Israeli asset

With no experience in the US military or intelligence, Ratcliffe spent the early part of his political career as mayor of Heath, a small town outside of Dallas, which was broken by a year-long stint as a US Attorney between 2007-08. He entered Congress in 2014, and emerged two years later as one of Trump's fiercest attack dogs on the Judiciary Committee. The backbencher also served on the House Intelligence Committee.

Trump rewarded Ratcliffe's loyalty by nominating him as Director of National Intelligence in 2019, but quickly withdrew the nomination after Ratcliffe was exposed for lying about his role in several federal terrorism cases.

His most absurd embellishment was on the prosecution of the directors of the Dallas-based Holy Land Foundation, in which he boasted that "he convicted individuals who were funneling money to Hamas behind the front of a charitable organization." In fact, Ratcliffe played no discernible role in the case at all, prompting several Republican senators to withdraw support for his nomination when the lie came to light.

It is notable nonetheless that Ratcliffe sought credit for taking down the Holy Land Foundation, as the case was one of the most politicized and legally dubious prosecutions of the Bush-era "war on terror," leading to life sentences for Palestinian American defendants whose only crime was sending charitable donations to organizations in the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip which were not on any government watchlist, and which also received support from the International Committee of the Red Cross and USAID. What's more, the case was heavily influenced by Israeli intelligence.

Following a mistrial that proved embarrassing for the US government, Israel's Mossad dispatched an agent to Texas to testify against the Holy Land directors. The judge allowed the agent to testify in secret, with the courtroom cleared, and under an assumed identity as "Avi." The agent proceeded to brandish a series of questionable documents that supposedly proved the Holy Land Foundation was set up as the nexus of a vast terrorist financing network that had enabled several suicide bombings by Hamas.

While Ratcliffe's fantastical claims about his role in the case tanked his nomination in 2019, Trump successfully installed him as DNI the following year, paving the way for his nomination as CIA director upon Trump's re-election.

In 2024, the Jewish Daily Forward listed Ratcliffe among "Trump's Jewish advisors and pro-Israel cabinet."