Iran was laying plans on Saturday to cut off water supplies periodically to Tehran’s 10-million-strong population as it battles its worst drought in many decades.

Rainfall in the capital has this year been at its lowest level in a century, local officials say, and half of Iran’s provinces have not seen a drop fall in months.

Now, to save water, the government is planning water cuts in Tehran — and several local news outlets have already reported pipes running dry overnight in some areas.

“This will help avoid waste even though it may cause inconvenience,” Iran’s Energy Minister Abbas Ali Abadi said on state television.

In a speech broadcast on Friday, Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian had warned that Tehran might have to be evacuated if no rain falls before the end of the year.

But he gave no details about how such a vast operation would be conducted.

Tehran nestles on the southern slopes of the Alborz mountains and has hot dry summers usually relieved by autumn rains and winter snowfall.

Reservoirs run dry 

Tehran is by far the country’s biggest city and its inhabitants use three million cubic metres of water per day, according to local media.

The main Amir Kabir dam on the Karaj river, one of five reservoirs serving the capital, is running dry and holds only 14 million cubic litres, according to Behzad Parsa, director general of the Tehran water company, cited by the official news agency IRNA.

During the same period last year, the reservoir held 86 million cubic metres, he added, but now it only has enough to maintain supplies to the Tehran region for less than two weeks.

On Saturday, state television broadcast images of several dams, serving the central city of Isfahan and Tabriz in the northwest, showing significantly lower water levels compared to previous years.

Hassan Hosseini, the deputy Iran’s second-largest city Mashhad, told IRNA agency on Thursday that night-time water cuts were being considered to address the water shortage.

And over the summer on July and August, two public holidays were declared in Tehran to save water and energy, at a time when power outages were almost daily during the intense heatwave.

WASHINGTON: The US Supreme Court on Friday allowed President Donald Trump’s administration to withhold for now about $4 billion needed to fully fund a food aid programme for 42 million low-income Americans this month amid the federal government shutdown.

The court’s order, known as an administrative stay, gives a lower court additional time to consider the administration’s formal request to only partially fund the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Programme, known as SNAP or food stamps, for November. The administration had faced a judge-ordered Friday deadline to fully fund the programme.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who issued the stay, set it to expire two days after the Boston-based 1st US Circuit Court of Appeals rules on the administration’s request to halt a judge’s order that the US Department of Agriculture promptly pay the full amount of this month’s SNAP benefits, which cost $8.5 billion to $9 billion per month.

Jackson expects lower court to act quickly

The ruling by US District Judge John McConnell in Providence, Rhode Island, on Thursday came after the administration said it would provide $4.65 billion in emergency funding to partially cover SNAP benefits for November.

Jackson, the liberal justice assigned to review emergency appeals from a group of states that include Rhode Island, said the 1st Circuit was expected to rule on the administration’s request to block McConnell’s order “with dispatch.”

US Attorney General Pam Bondi noted the Supreme Court’s decision in a post on X, which paused a court ruling she deemed “judicial activism at its worst.”

Department of Justice lawyers told the Supreme Court that McConnell’s ruling, if allowed to stand, would “sow further shutdown chaos” by prompting “a run on the bank by way of judicial fiat.”

The administration originally planned to suspend SNAP benefits altogether in November, citing a lack of funding because of the shutdown.

But McConnell last week ordered the USDA to use emergency SNAP funding to cover part of this month’s cost. In Thursday’s ruling, he ordered the USDA to make up for the shortfall with money from a separate department programme with $23.35 billion in funding, derived from tariffs, that supports child nutrition.

McConnell, an appointee of Democratic President Barack Obama, accused the Republican Trump administration of withholding SNAP benefits for “political reasons.”

His ruling was a win for a coalition of legal challengers comprising cities, unions, and nonprofits represented by the liberal legal group Democracy Forward, and prompted the administration to ask the 1st Circuit on Friday to halt the order.

The plaintiffs told the 1st Circuit that the administration showed disregard for the harm that would befall nearly one in eight Americans if McConnell’s decision were paused and SNAP recipients were denied full benefits.

“The court should deny Defendants’ motion and not allow them to further delay getting vital food assistance to individuals and families who need it now,” the lawyers wrote.

Confusion over states’ funding

The 1st Circuit on Friday denied the Trump administration’s request to administratively stay McConnell’s ruling.

It has yet to issue a ruling on the administration’s formal request to halt the judge’s order, but the 1st Circuit panel, which consisted of three judges appointed by Democratic presidents, said it would do so “as quickly as possible.”

Skye Perryman, the head of Democracy Forward, told MSNBC that the courts hearing cases over the withholding of SNAP benefits “have been very clear, that this administration not only had the legal authority to make these payments but that the administration must make these payments.”

Hours before Friday’s Supreme Court order, the USDA informed states it was working to comply with McConnell’s order by making funds available to fully fund SNAP, even as the administration moved to appeal McConnell’s ruling, causing confusion.

After receiving the USDA memo, states including New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts said they had directed state agencies to issue SNAP benefits in full for November.

“President Trump should never have put the American people in this position,” Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey, a Democrat, said in a statement.

SNAP benefits lapsed at the start of the month for the first time in the programme’s 60-year history. Recipients have turned to already-strained food pantries and made sacrifices like forgoing medications to stretch tight budgets.

SNAP benefits are paid monthly to eligible Americans whose income is less than 130% of the federal poverty line. The maximum monthly benefit for the 2026 fiscal year is $298 for a one-person household and $546 for a two-person household.

WASHINGTON: The US gathered intelligence last year that Israel’s military lawyers warned there was evidence that could support war crimes charges against Israel for its military campaign in Gaza —operations reliant on American-supplied weapons, five former US officials said.

The previously unreported intelligence, described by the former officials as among the most startling shared with top US policymakers during the war, pointed to doubts within the Israeli military about the legality of its tactics that contrasted sharply with Israel’s public stance defending its actions.

Two of the former US officials said the material was not broadly circulated within the US government until late in the Biden administration, when it was disseminated more widely ahead of a congressional briefing in December 2024.

The intelligence deepened concerns in Washington over Israel’s conduct in a war it said was necessary to eliminate Palestinian Hamas fighters embedded in civilian infrastructure. There were concerns Israel was intentionally targeting civilians and humanitarian workers, a potential war crime which Israel has strongly denied.

US officials expressed alarm at the findings, particularly as the mounting civilian death toll in Gaza raised concerns that Israel’s operations might breach international legal standards on acceptable collateral damage.

The former US officials Reuters spoke to did not provide details on what evidence — such as specific wartime incidents — had caused concerns among Israel’s military lawyers.

Israel has killed more than 68,000 Palestinians during a two-year military campaign, say Gaza health officials. Israel’s military has said at least 20,000 of the fatalities were combatants.

Reuters spoke to nine former US officials in then-President Joe Biden’s administration, including six who had direct knowledge of the intelligence and the subsequent debate within the US government. All spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.

Reports of internal US government dissent over Israel’s Gaza campaign emerged during Biden’s presidency. This account — based on detailed recollections from those involved — offers a fuller picture of the debate’s intensity in the administration’s final weeks, which ended with President Donald Trump’s inauguration in January.

Israeli Ambassador to the US, Yechiel Leiter, declined to comment when asked for a response about the US intelligence and the internal Biden administration debate about it. Neither the Israeli prime minister’s office nor the Israeli military spokesperson immediately responded to requests for comment.

Debate intensified in final days of Biden term

The intelligence prompted an interagency meeting at the National Security Council where officials and lawyers debated how and whether to respond to the new findings.

A US finding that Israel was committing war crimes would have required, under US law, blocking future arms shipments and ending intelligence sharing with Israel. Israel’s intelligence services have worked closely with the US for decades and provide critical information, in particular, about events occurring in the Middle East.

Biden administration conversations in December included officials from across the government, including the State Department, the Pentagon, the intelligence community and the White House. Biden was also briefed on the matter by his national security advisers.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. “We do not comment on intelligence matters,” a State Department spokesperson said in response to emailed questions about Reuters reporting.

The American debate about whether the Israelis had committed war crimes in Gaza ended when lawyers from across the US government determined that it was still legal for the US to continue supporting Israel with weapons and intelligence because the US had not gathered its own evidence that Israel was violating the law of armed conflict, according to three former US officials.

They reasoned that the intelligence and evidence gathered by the US itself did not prove the Israelis had intentionally killed civilians and humanitarians or blocked aid, a key factor in legal liability.

Some senior Biden administration officials feared that a formal US finding of Israeli war crimes would force Washington to cut off arms and intelligence support — a move they worried could embolden Hamas, delay ceasefire negotiations, and shift the political narrative in favour of the group. Hamas killed 1,200 people and abducted 251 in its October 7, 2023, attack, prompting Israel’s military response.

The decision to stay the course exasperated some of those involved who believed that the Biden administration should have been more forceful in calling out Israel’s alleged abuses and the US role in enabling them, said former US officials.

President Trump and his officials were briefed by Biden’s team on the intelligence but showed little interest in the subject after they took over in January and began siding more powerfully with the Israelis, said the former US officials.

State Department lawyers repeatedly raised concerns

Even before the US gathered war crimes intelligence from within the Israeli military, some lawyers at the State Department, which oversees legal assessments of foreign military conduct, repeatedly raised concerns with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken that Israel might be committing war crimes, according to five former US officials.

As early as December 2023, lawyers from the State Department’s legal bureau told Blinken in meetings that they believed Israel’s military conduct in Gaza likely amounted to violations of international humanitarian law and potentially war crimes, two of the US officials said.

But they never made a conclusive assessment that Israel was violating international humanitarian law, a move that other US officials at the State Department saw as the legal bureau pulling its punches.

“They saw their job as being justifying a political decision,” one of the former US officials said. “Even when the evidence clearly pointed to war crimes, the Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card was proving intent,” one of the officials said.

The lack of a definitive conclusion by the State Department’s lawyers was largely reflected in a US government report produced during the Biden administration in May 2024, when Washington said Israel might have violated international humanitarian law using US-supplied weapons during its military operation in Gaza.

The report, which was prepared by the State Department, stopped short of a definitive assessment, citing the fog of war.

“What I can say is that the Biden administration constantly reviewed Israel’s adherence to the laws of armed conflict, as well as the requirements of our own laws,” Blinken said through a spokesperson for this story.

Blinken declined to comment on the intelligence matters.

International concerns about possible war crimes

Last November the International Criminal Court in The Hague issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defence chief, as well as Hamas leader Mohammed Deif, for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Gaza conflict. Hamas has since confirmed Israel killed Deif.

Israel has rejected the jurisdiction of the Hague-based court and denies war crimes in Gaza. Hamas leaders have dismissed allegations that they committed war crimes.

Among the issues debated by US officials in the final weeks of the Biden administration was whether the government would be complicit if Israeli officials were to face charges in an international tribunal, said people familiar with this debate.

US officials publicly defended Israel but also privately debated the issue in light of intelligence reports, and they became a point of political vulnerability for Democrats. Biden and later Vice President Kamala Harris waged ultimately unsuccessful presidential campaigns.

Biden did not respond to a request for comment.

Democratic US Senator Chris Van Hollen, a critic of Israel’s Gaza campaign, its restrictions on aid to Palestinian civilians and US support for the operation, said the Reuters report underscored “a pattern of deliberate blindness on behalf of the Biden administration with respect to the use and abuse of American weapons in Gaza.”

“The Biden administration deliberately looked the other way in the face of overwhelming evidence that war crimes were being committed with US weapons in Gaza,” Van Hollen, of Maryland, told Reuters.

Israel, which is fighting a genocide case at the International Court of Justice, rejects genocide allegations as politically motivated and says that its military campaign targets Hamas, not Gaza’s civilian population.

The Israeli military says it seeks to minimise civilian harm while targeting Palestinian fighters embedded in hospitals, schools and shelters, using warnings and appropriate munitions. An Israeli military official told Reuters in September that the military was investigating about 2,000 incidents of possible misconduct, including civilian deaths and damage to infrastructure.

Some cases came to light through the genocide case filed at the International Court of Justice, the official said.