Record Press Deaths and the Fight Over War Powers
The Committee to Protect Journalists has confirmed that journalist killings hit an all-time high in 2025, with Israel responsible for two-thirds of all press deaths worldwide across 2024 and 2025. The February 25, 2026 edition of Drop Site Daily assembles this finding alongside a sprawling set of developments: a looming U.S.-Iran confrontation, Pentagon pressure on an AI company, congressional maneuvering over war powers, and the charged spectacle of a State of the Union address interrupted by heckling lawmakers.
The CPJ report anchors the entire dispatch. The numbers are staggering.
This marks back-to-back record years for press fatalities due to Israel's continued and unprecedented targeting of journalists and media workers. More than 60% of the 86 members of the press killed by Israeli fire in 2025 were Palestinians reporting from Gaza, where human rights groups and U.N. experts agree a genocide is taking place.
Among those killed was Hossam Shabat, a 23-year-old Al Jazeera Mubasher correspondent and Drop Site contributor, assassinated in an Israeli strike on his car in Beit Lahia on March 24, 2025. The CPJ report also documents a sharp rise in drone killings of journalists, from two in 2023 to 39 in 2025. These are not collateral casualties in a fog of war. The Israeli military, per CPJ, has carried out more targeted killings of journalists than any other government's military since the organization began documenting press deaths in 1992.
Gaza and the West Bank: Detention, Demolition, and Aid Restrictions
The daily toll continues. Nine Palestinian bodies arrived at hospitals in the preceding 24 hours, three from new strikes and six recovered from rubble. The total recorded death toll since October 7, 2023 stands at 72,082 killed, with 171,761 injured.
Administrative detention, which allows Israel to hold Palestinians indefinitely without charge or trial, has surged to its highest levels in decades. The Palestine Center for Prisoner Studies reports more than 1,400 new or renewed detention orders in just the first two months of 2026, with the total number of administrative detainees rising from roughly 1,300 before October 7, 2023 to more than 3,500 in February 2026. The targets now include activists, students, journalists, lawmakers, women, and children.
Meanwhile, 37 international aid organizations face an imminent Israeli ban for refusing to hand over staff data. The groups, including Doctors Without Borders, the Norwegian Refugee Council, and Oxfam, have petitioned the Israeli Supreme Court.
The demand to transfer personal data raises acute security and legal risks. It exposes national staff to potential retaliation and undermines established data protection and confidentiality safeguards.
In the occupied West Bank, the United States Embassy announced it would offer passport services inside the illegal settlement of Efrat, a first. Hamas called the move a "dangerous precedent" and a "blatant alignment" with Israeli settlement and annexation policies. It is worth noting that offering consular services is not the same as formal diplomatic recognition of sovereignty over the territory, though it is easy to see why critics read it as a de facto endorsement.
Iran: Diplomacy and the Shadow of Strikes
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi struck a notably conciliatory tone, insisting Iran would never build a nuclear weapon while framing the upcoming Geneva talks as an opening.
Iran will under no circumstances ever develop a nuclear weapon.
Araghchi called the negotiations a "historic opportunity" for a fair and rapid agreement. Hours later, President Donald Trump told reporters that "Iran wants a deal more than I do," but that Tehran refuses to say the "magic words" about not building a bomb. The irony, as Drop Site noted, is that Araghchi had said precisely those words on social media earlier the same day.
The military buildup tells a different story than the diplomatic language. Twelve U.S. F-22 stealth fighters departed the United Kingdom for an Israeli Air Force base in southern Israel, and open-source analysts have tracked dozens more fighter jets, refueling aircraft, and hundreds of cargo flights surging into the region since mid-February. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer weighed in carefully.
The administration has to make its case to the American people as something as important as this.
Whether that case will ever be made publicly, or whether a strike would proceed without meaningful congressional authorization, remains the central unanswered question.
War Powers and Congressional Maneuvering
Representatives Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie have been pushing a bipartisan war powers resolution requiring explicit congressional authorization before any military action against Iran. But according to reporting from Capital and Empire, Democratic leadership has been quietly working to undermine the effort, with a senior committee staffer allegedly inflating projections of Democratic defections to sap momentum.
Khanna told Breaking Points he expects to have the votes by early next week, and did not mince words about the opposition.
Powerful interests seeking regime change are pressuring lawmakers who fear alienating major donors and entrenched lobbying groups.
Not every lawmaker was as forthcoming. Representative Ritchie Torres refused to say how he would vote, telling Drop Site he "does not recognize Drop Site News," despite having previously taken questions from the outlet's Capitol Hill correspondent. The response reads more like a dodge than a principled objection.
Representative Mike Lawler argued the resolution would "tie the president's hands," pointing to Iranian support for Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis. He also repeated unsubstantiated claims that these groups operate in Venezuela and threaten the Western Hemisphere. Drop Site flagged the claims as unsubstantiated, a notable editorial choice in a roundup format that otherwise sticks close to sourced reporting.
Hegseth, Anthropic, and the AI-Military Nexus
In one of the dispatch's more unusual items, War Secretary Pete Hegseth delivered an ultimatum to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei.
Hegseth gave Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei an ultimatum to remove safeguards on Anthropic's advanced AI systems--including bans on mass domestic surveillance and autonomous lethal use--or face termination of its military contract.
The demand puts Anthropic in an extraordinarily difficult position: comply and abandon the safety commitments that distinguish the company from competitors, or lose a lucrative defense contract. The tension between AI safety principles and military revenue is not new, but a direct ultimatum from the Pentagon makes it concrete.
Separately, an AI safety super PAC largely funded by Anthropic has poured nearly $700,000 into a North Carolina congressional primary to support incumbent Valerie Foushee over progressive challenger Nida Allam. Foushee sits on the House Democrats' AI task force and previously received major backing from the now-imprisoned FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried. The pattern of tech money flowing into congressional races to protect friendly incumbents is by now well documented, though the specific combination of AI safety branding and political spending invites scrutiny.
State of the Union: Heckling and Stock Trading
Representatives Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar made the most visible splash at Trump's State of the Union address, repeatedly interrupting the president. Tlaib shouted at Trump to "release the Epstein files," while Omar fired back after Trump criticized Democrats for not standing in applause.
You should be ashamed.
The heckling covered immigration, claims about fraud in Somali-American communities, and the Epstein files. Whether such disruptions advance the causes Tlaib and Omar champion or merely generate spectacle is a perennial debate. The moments did, however, guarantee that these issues received airtime they would not otherwise have gotten.
In a lighter moment, Trump endorsed a ban on congressional stock trading. Senator Elizabeth Warren, who has pushed such legislation for over a decade, stood and clapped, exclaiming "Let's pass it!" Whether the endorsement leads to action or remains rhetorical remains to be seen. Trump's track record on populist economic promises, as Warren herself has noted, is mixed at best.
Donald Trump has promised to get private equity out of housing for over a year now. And what has he done? Zero.
Global Roundup
The dispatch covers a remarkable breadth of international developments. A Quad-backed proposal calls for a 90-day ceasefire in Sudan, though Sudanese Army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan has signaled resistance to anything short of a full Rapid Support Forces withdrawal. A new report from The Sentry links RSF commander Mohamed "Hemedti" Hamdan Dagalo to Dubai property transferred to a sanctioned financier. Honduras ended its Cuban medical mission under U.S. pressure. Bolivia restored cooperation with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration after a 17-year break. M23 spokesperson Willy Ngoma was killed in a drone strike in eastern Congo. Pakistani and Afghan forces exchanged fire along their border. Sierra Leone and Guinea traded accusations over detained border forces.
Each of these stories deserves its own deep reporting. The roundup format necessarily compresses them, but it serves an important function: connecting disparate conflicts and policy decisions into a single picture of how American power, military force, and diplomatic pressure shape events worldwide on any given day.
Bottom Line
This edition of Drop Site Daily captures a moment when several slow-burning crises are accelerating simultaneously. The CPJ report on journalist killings provides hard data for what has long been alleged. The U.S. military buildup near Iran proceeds alongside diplomatic signals that could mean either a deal or a pretext. Congressional authority over war-making is being contested in real time, with both parties working to avoid accountability. And the Pentagon's ultimatum to an AI company over safety guardrails signals that the militarization of artificial intelligence is no longer a theoretical concern but an active policy dispute. The sheer density of the roundup is itself the point: these events are not isolated. They are the interconnected machinery of a single geopolitical moment.