The US secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, has been hammered on the true costs of the Iran war during a Senate hearing and dubbed a war criminal by anti-war activists.
“The greatest obstacle to peace is the incompetence of the secretary of defense and of the president of the United States”, declared Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. “Pete Hegseth, you’re a war criminal. You should be arrested!” an anti-war activist shouted at the US secretary of defense, who was on Capitol Hill Thursday to testify at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing about the administration’s unprecedented Pentagon budget request, President Donald Trump’s illegal war on Iran, and more.
“What you’re doing is despicable”, the CodePink activist, Gus, told Hegseth as he was escorted out of the hearing and arrested. “The American people do not want to go into this war. We don’t want to fight a war with Israel!”
As civilian casualties across the Middle East and gasoline prices across the United States have soared, so has the US public’s disapproval of Trump and Israel’s war on Iran. There are ceasefire agreements in place for both that assault and Israel’s related attacks supposedly targeting Hezbollah in Lebanon but, as Amnesty International noted in a Wednesday statement demanding international action to promote sustainable peace in the region, those deals are ‘fragile, temporary, and in danger of collapse at any moment’.
Hegseth – whose controversial Senate confirmation required a tiebreaking vote from Vice President JD Vance – last appeared before the Senate committee in June. As the panel’s ranking member, Senator Jack Reed (Democrat (D)-Rhode Island) pointed out to the Pentagon chief in his opening remarks Thursday, since then, “you and President Trump have unwisely taken the United States to war with Iran”.
That war has killed at least 3,375 Iranians and injured another 25,000, while recent Israeli attacks on Lebanon have killed more than 2,200 people and wounded over 7,500, according to Amnesty International. Iran and Hezbollah’s retaliatory strikes have killed at least 21 civilians in Israel, four Palestinians in the illegally occupied West Bank, and 29 people across the Gulf, including 13 US service members.
The Department of War – as Hegseth and Trump call it – estimated that the first six days of the Iran assault cost an average of $1.88 billion per day, and Pentagon comptroller Jules ‘Jay’ Hurst told Congress on Wednesday that it cost $25 billion in total, though some lawmakers and experts believe the figure could be far higher.
Beyond the Middle East, Hegseth has led a US attack on Venezuela and directed an “ongoing illegal boat strike campaign in the Caribbean and Pacific”, Reed noted. At the defense secretary’s direction, the senator continued, “our forces have bombed Yemen, Somalia, Iraq, Syria, Nigeria, and Ecuador”.
“In the United States, you have deployed thousands of troops to cities like Washington, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Portland to police American citizens”, Reed told Hegseth. “And you have personally intervened to end the careers of dozens of military leaders, without explanation.”
Reed went on to express skepticism about Trump’s massive defense budget request and rip into the president’s incoherent strategy on the Iran war. He also acknowledged various costs of the conflict, stressing that “American families are bearing the cost of a war they wanted nothing to do with, and have gained nothing from”.
Other standout moments from the hearing included Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) grilling Hegseth about others’ suspicious bets related to the Iran war and oil prices, as well as his own investments. The latter drew hostile responses from the secretary.
Senator Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) has had a contentious relationship with Hegseth since the retired US Navy captain participated in a November video advising military service members that they have a duty to disobey unlawful orders, which drew legally dubious retaliation from the Pentagon secretary.
On Thursday, Kelly questioned Hegseth about his March declaration that “no quarter” will be given to “our enemies” in Iran – which was similar to previous comments from the secretary, who said last September that “we also don’t fight with stupid rules of engagement. We untie the hands of our warfighters to intimidate, demoralise, hunt and kill the enemies of our country. No more politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement, just common sense, maximum lethality, and authority for warfighters.”
Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.), a former Central Intelligence Agency analyst who joined Kelly in the video to service members, questioned Hegseth about how he would handle Trump directing him to have troops seize ballots or voting machines during the 2026 midterm elections. Hegseth was openly dismissive of Slotkin, chuckling at her, calling her question “yet another ‘gotcha’ hypothetical, which is your specialty,” and accusing the senator of “performing for cable news”.
As Hegseth, Hurst and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Dan Caine testified on Capitol Hill for the second day in a row – they also appeared before the House Armed Services Committee on Wednesday – the United States’ largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy group sent Congress a report calling for the defense secretary’s impeachment. “The record presented here establishes that military operations carried out under Secretary Hegseth’s leadership constituted war crimes under US and international law, including the killing of civilians, the destruction of infrastructure indispensable to civilian survival, and the targeting of protected religious and other civilian sites”, states the foreword of the report from the Council on American-Islamic Relations and CAIR Action.
“These crimes were not accidental”, the foreword continues. “They followed deliberate decisions to strip away legal oversight, weaken operational restraints and dismantle civilian harm mitigation structures, even as senior Trump administration officials warned President Trump that a US-Israel war on Iran was not feasible and risked broader regional escalation.”
CAIR Action executive director Basim Elkarra, the report’s co-author, said in a statement that Hegseth’s record not only “establishes a basis for impeachment” but also “raises serious questions of criminal liability”.
Republished from Common Dreams, 30 April 2026
Jessica Corbett
Jessica Corbett is a staff writer for Common Dreams.