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The Pentagon says nearly 100 US service members have been injured since strikes on Iran escalated this month, a disclosure that came as it pushed back on a report accusing it of concealing troop injuries.

Getting into it: Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell made the announcement late Monday, saying nearly 100 service members “were deemed to have some degree of injury since July 7,” with 96% having returned to duty. “They are determined to get back in the fight,” he said. “The vast majority of injuries experienced were minor concussions.” Separately, the Pentagon’s Defense Casualty Analysis System lists 427 service members injured since the war began in February.

The statement was a direct response to a New York Times report claiming the Pentagon had sat on injury data from Iranian strikes and kept the toll out of public view. Several US officials, speaking anonymously, said Iran had struck US forces in Jordan three times in the week before Friday’s deadly attack, injuring dozens of troops and damaging several helicopters, none of which the Pentagon had disclosed.

Parnell rejected the framing in the story, saying, “Injuries in the military encompass everything from minor sprained ankles during routine training to incidents entirely unrelated to combat operations.” He also said citing “raw numbers without context” painted a “deliberately misleading and incomplete picture” and dismissed the suggestion that the Pentagon was hiding its casualty count as “baseless” and “malicious.”

This all comes as the total US death toll stands at 18, including three service members killed in recent days: two in an Iranian attack on Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan on Friday, identified as 1st Lt. Tyler Feehan and Pvt. Isabella Gonzales, and a third in northern Iraq while safely detonating unexploded ordnance recovered from a downed Iranian drone.

Trump has vowed retaliation for the latest deaths, writing Monday that “every time Iran kills an American Soldier they will pay for that killing many times over!” and saying he’d delivered that directive to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine.