Nearly 100 US troops have been injured during the past two weeks of fighting in the Middle East, the Pentagon said on Monday, as Donald Trump faces deepening opposition to the costs of his Iran war.
Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said “nearly 100 service members were deemed to have some degree of injury” since the US resumed air strikes against Iran on July 7th and that 96 per cent have returned to duty.
“They are determined to get back in the fight,” Parnell wrote on X as the Trump administration sought to defend against allegations that it has obscured casualty figures.
The “vast majority of injuries experienced were minor concussions”, Parnell added.
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He said the military had not withheld or misrepresented US casualties in the war. “Claims of concealment are fabrications meant to further distress the American people in the wake of three service members killed in action,” he said in a statement on Monday.
The announcement came hours after the Pentagon identified two US soldiers killed in an Iranian attack on an air base in Jordan on Friday night as Tyler James Feehan (25) of Hawaii and 19-year-old Isabella Gonzales of Texas.
US Central Command said it was analysing remains found at the attack site in Jordan, as it sought to locate a third soldier believed to have been killed in the attack. A fourth US service member was killed Saturday in northern Iraq, the military said.
In the days since the collapse of a fragile truce, the Pentagon has provided little information about the US military strategy after nearly five months of war. The last major Pentagon briefing on the war was in early May.
In the past several months, the Trump administration has failed to disclose how the Iran war has drained US supplies of critical, costly weapons, and how Iran retained and rebuilt substantial missile capabilities.
The protracted conflict has weighed on Trump’s approval ratings amid higher energy prices and mounting casualties.
Centcom, which oversees American military operations in the Middle East, said US forces completed a tenth wave of strikes against Iran on Monday night, targeting the nation’s military installations “to degrade Iran’s ability to continue attacking commercial vessels flowing through the Strait of Hormuz”.
The UK Maritime Trade Operations Centre meanwhile said another tanker had been hit by a projectile off the coast of Oman.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said two “violating” oil tankers that had attempted to transit through an unauthorised “hazardous” route south of the Strait of Hormuz “caught fire following explosions and were brought to a halt”.
Despite launching the war on the premise of eliminating Iran’s nuclear programme, White House officials increasingly concede that their focus has shifted to the strait — as the US struggles to assert control over the trade route that Iran has turned into a powerful chokepoint.
US secretary of state Marco Rubio on Monday said stopping Iran from attacking ships in the strait, through which a fifth of the world’s oil transits before the war, is “the only reason why the US is conducting strikes”.
The tit-for-tat escalation in the weeks since an April ceasefire broke down has sent US petrol prices climbing back above $4 a gallon, after ratcheting steadily higher in recent weeks, according to data from the AAA motoring group released on Monday.
- Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2026. Additional reporting: New York Times.
