> I'd trim the bit about Polymarket to

Heck no, that's removing the important part of the news! Specifically, that a new kind of unregulated anonymous bet-making is leading to new kind of violence against journalists.

In contrast, the piece isn't really about Iran, or about Missiles, although those underscore the gravity or perversion of what's going on.

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Such a cut isn't necessary either, compare the original versus this 79-character version:

    Gamblers trying to win a bet on Polymarket are vowing to kill me if I don’t rewrite an Iran missile story
    Gamblers                     on Polymarket     vow    to kill me if I don’t rewrite an Iran missile story

The assumption that Gamblers care about winning a bet should be obvious and implicit, so that's an obvious thing to omit. The ongoing nature of the vowing is also unnecessary when simply having past cases is bad enough.

"I will kill you if you do not do X" is still a threat to kill you. All the more so when X is a thing the person will obviously not do. Rewriting the story would destroy whatever credibility they have as a journalist, and probably is literally not even possible assuming they work for any kind of reasonable organization (hey boss, I need you to update that story I wrote so a different set of gamblers win). Also, even if they did update it, they'd probably start receiving death threats from the gamblers on the other side of the bet they just screwed over.

Honestly kind of crazy that you call such an ultimatum a "rewrite option", as if that diminishes the fact that it's a death threat in any way whatsoever.