← Americans on Iranian Soil

קמפיין הגיוס האיראני לקראת פלישה - והודעות ה-SMS: ״הגנה על המולדת״ — The Iranian recruitment campaign ahead of an invasion, and the SMS messages: "defense of the homeland"

Israel Hayom, an Israeli newspaper, published קמפיין הגיוס האיראני לקראת פלישה - והודעות ה-SMS: ״הגנה על המולדת״. The page that opened showed no byline and no publication date. It speaks of events as "today (Sunday)" and "yesterday (Saturday)," and it says a letter from Iran's parliament speaker marked 30 days since the war began. The article says Iran is texting civilians to mobilize against a possible American ground invasion, and that the Pentagon is preparing weeks of ground operations. An American family should care because the story is about U.S. soldiers possibly fighting on Iranian ground. The same page quotes the U.S. secretary of state saying ground forces are not needed, and it says the president has not approved a plan.

Background for a new reader. The United States and Israel began bombing Iran on 28 February 2026; Washington calls its part Operation Epic Fury. Through March the argument in Washington was whether to add ground troops, meaning American soldiers physically inside Iran, to what had been an air and sea war. Israeli outlets, writing in Hebrew, Russian, Spanish, French and English, followed that argument closely and often passed on American reports to their readers. This page is one of those reports.

Evidence rating: MODERATE. The rating covers Israel Hayom's report, attributed to the Washington Post, that the Pentagon was preparing weeks of ground operations in Iran, including seizing Kharg Island. The page also carries the White House line that these are options the President has not approved, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio's statement that the goals can be met without ground forces.

What the article says

Israel Hayom says that while the foreign ministers of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Egypt met that Sunday in Islamabad to talk about ending the war, and while American forces kept building up in the region, Iran was preparing for a possible ground invasion. Text messages sent to Iranian residents the day before, a Saturday, called for volunteers for "defense of the homeland's soil." The paper says Iranian opposition channels received screenshots. The campaign is called Janfada, which the paper glosses as self-sacrifice or devotion. The message, as the paper gives it, said that following threats by the "American-Zionist enemy" to Iran's islands and borders, a national initiative had been launched to declare readiness to defend the homeland, and it pointed people to a signup site. Those words are the message's, as Israel Hayom reports them.

The paper quotes Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, speaker of Iran's parliament, from a letter that day marking 30 days of war. It describes him as one of the most powerful people in the country now, and it says that follows a series of killings of senior leaders since the war opened. It does not say on this page who carried out those killings. Ghalibaf wrote that the enemy speaks in public about contacts while secretly planning a ground attack, and that Iranian forces are waiting for the Americans, to burn them and to punish their regional allies once and for all. He called for national unity and said Iran was in a great world war at its most critical stage. He wrote that Iran can punish the United States, make it regret the attack, and secure Iran's legitimate rights, and that the launches continue, the missiles will not stop, and their determination has only grown.

Status: Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf is alive. The threat above is his letter, as Israel Hayom quotes it. This page does not say he has carried it out.

Israel Hayom says an Isfahan resident told the Wall Street Journal that masked security forces flooded that city's streets and nearby towns the day before and set up checkpoints at key points. It says similar reports had spread across the country during the war. It says CNN reported the previous week that Iran had posted more forces and air defenses on Kharg Island, the island through which about 90 percent of Iran's crude-oil exports pass, and had planted mines along its coast, preparing for a possible American attempt to capture it. Earlier in the war, the paper says, the United States bombed the island. The American military said about 90 targets were hit, including naval-mine warehouses and missile storage bunkers. Trump said at the time that forces avoided the island's oil infrastructure for reasons of fairness.

The paper then turns to American forces arriving in the region. It says U.S. Central Command, the headquarters for American forces in the Middle East, announced on Saturday that the amphibious assault ship USS Tripoli had arrived in the area, carrying fighter jets, transport planes, and amphibious craft, as part of a Marine expeditionary unit of about 3,500 sailors and fighters. The paper calls this the first significant American ground force to reach the Middle East since the war began. Another expeditionary unit was on its way from California.

Israel Hayom says the Wall Street Journal reported that the Pentagon is considering sending up to 10,000 more fighters to the region, to join about 5,000 Marines and thousands of paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division, a U.S. Army paratrooper unit, already ordered to move there. It then gives the Washington Post report.

היום דיווח ה״וושינגטון פוסט״ כי הפנטגון מכין תוכניות לשבועות של מבצעים קרקעיים באיראן - ובהם תפיסת האי ח'ארג ותקיפות אתרי נשק לאורך החוף ובסמוך למצר הורמוז.

Israel Hayom, quoting the Washington Post. The page shows no publication date. Translated: today the Washington Post reported that the Pentagon is preparing plans for weeks of ground operations in Iran, including seizure of Kharg Island and strikes on weapons sites along the coast and near the Strait of Hormuz. The Strait of Hormuz is the narrow sea passage beside Iran that much of the world's oil traffic uses. The paper says this is not a broad invasion but a series of combined raids by special forces and infantry. One source said the missions would take weeks, not months. Another estimated several months. The White House, the paper says, made clear that the preparations are meant to give the president maximum options, and that Trump had not yet approved any plan.

The missions on the table, as the paper lists them from those reports, include taking Kharg and using it as leverage to force Tehran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, taking key islands in the strait itself, striking Iranian weapons sites along the coast that threaten commercial and military ships, and even removing the enriched-uranium stocks from the country. The paper says the question behind all of those options is the same: restoring free movement in the strait.

Israel Hayom says Rubio told reporters on Friday that this is not going to be a prolonged confrontation, and that the United States can achieve all of its goals without ground forces. It cites an AP-NORC poll finding that 62 percent of Americans oppose deploying ground forces in Iran. The paper says that number reflects the scars of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. It says that for Trump, who promised to end the "forever wars" of earlier administrations, any decision to deploy ground forces would carry heavy political weight, especially since Congress had not approved the military action. The paper says the administration calls it a military operation and objects to calling it a war.

What other reporting and posts add

• Dating this page. The Washington Post story this page cites is dated 28 March 2026, a Saturday, in its own address: washingtonpost.com/national-security/2026/03/28/trump-iran-ground-troops-marines/. A post the next day quotes it: "The Pentagon is preparing for weeks of ground operations in Iran...Any potential ground operation would fall short of a full-scale invasion and could instead involve raids by a mixture of Special Operations forces and conventional infantry troops." So this Israel Hayom page's "today (Sunday)" is most likely 29 March 2026. Post. (capture: twitter/t50__v593.md)
• The recruitment drive, from the Journal. A 30 March 2026 digest, citing the Wall Street Journal: "Iran has launched a campaign, called "Janfada" or "Sacrificing Life," to recruit volunteers to fight American forces amid reports the U.S. may launch a ground operation." It also quotes an Iranian military spokesperson promising "captivity, dismemberment and disappearance" for any occupier. Digest on X. (capture: twitter/t49__v587.md)
• How big the drive really was is disputed. Wikipedia's article on the campaign, as a September capture summarizes it, says organizers claim more than 31 million registrants and that "Critics and members of the Iranian diaspora have questioned the accuracy of these figures, citing a lack of independently verified data." (capture: twitter/t48__v565.md)
• Rubio's exact words. An X trending page on 29 March 2026 quoted Secretary of State Marco Rubio from that Friday: "We can achieve all of our objectives without ground troops." The same page carried a post saying "62% of Americans strongly oppose ground troops," a slightly different figure from the AP-NORC number on this page. X trend page. (capture: twitter/t50__v591.md)
• Ghalibaf's threat in English. A KETV item carried by another site quotes Ghalibaf, from Iranian state media, saying Iran was "waiting for the arrival of American troops on the ground to set them on fire and punish their regional partners forever." 1st Sky Omaha / KETV. (capture: twitter/t49__v588.md)

What it shows

On one page, in Hebrew, Israel Hayom set the Pentagon's plans for weeks of ground operations beside Rubio's statement that ground forces are not needed, while Marines on the USS Tripoli arrived in the region. The plans, the forces, and the denial arrived in the same week. See No Boots on the Ground and Kharg Island and the Uranium Raid.

Check it yourself

• Israel Hayom

Research captures: twitter/t49__v587.md, twitter/t50__v593.md, twitter/t50__v591.md, twitter/t49__v588.md, twitter/t48__v565.md

Last Updated: 2026-09-26