Pentagon Rejects Report That It Hid Iran War Injuries
The Pentagon denied on Monday that it has failed to disclose complete statistics on the number of U.S. service members injured in the Iran war, after The New York Times reported earlier in the day that dozens of U.S. service members were hurt in three undisclosed Iran strikes last week, citing unnamed U.S. officials.
Department of Defense spokesperson Sean Parnell said the Pentagon “rejects these baseless and malicious accusations of hiding injury numbers,” with a screenshot of the Times’ report, accusing the paper of attempting to “further distress the American people in the wake of three service members killed in action.”
Parnell did not explicitly address the three alleged attacks reported by the Times in his statement posted to X.
An unnamed U.S. military official told the Times the Pentagon is not required to release injury statistics, particularly when the service members quickly return to duty, and also said it has stopped announcing the sites Iran hits each day in order to avoid revealing information that could help Iran.
Parnell noted in his tweet that “U.S. military casualty information is publicly available and regularly updated online on the Defense Casualty Analysis System for everyone, including the media, to review.”
The Pentagon announced over the weekend that three U.S. service members were killed in Iranian attacks in Jordan and Iraq on Friday and Saturday. Two were killed in a ballistic missile and drone attack on a U.S. base in Jordan, and one service member is missing. The third was killed Saturday during the detonation of an Iranian drone in Iraq. The deaths bring the total number of U.S. service members killed in the war with Iran to 17. Fighting between the two sides has escalated over the past week after the collapse of a fragile ceasefire agreement reached last month. The U.S. carried out its ninth consecutive day of attacks against Iranian military sites overnight Sunday, into Monday.
Officials on both sides have said they are open to negotiations, even as fighting has ramped back up. Iranian foreign ministry spokesperson Esmail Baghaei said Monday Iran had received proposals from mediators to de-escalate, while Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters Sunday “I think we’re always open to diplomacy,” but “it has to be real. It has to be a deal that they’re willing to live by,” noting Iran continued attacks on ships in the Strait of Hormuz despite agreeing the waterway would reopen.