Shalom, friends.

The chayalim on the Lebanon ridge cleared armed Hezbollah off their positions under orders cut to immediate threats, while the Washington room seats Iran as referee of strikes on Iran’s own proxy. At home Netanyahu spends the last weeks of his majority buying haredi votes for the Attorney General’s office and an October 7 commission. And in Geneva a UN body built to document violence against women sat through a survivor’s testimony and changed nothing.

⚡️Flash Brief: The Day in 90 Seconds or Less

Lebanon ROE: The IDF kills armed Hezbollah operatives in the first strikes under immediate-threat-only orders. See The War Today.
Leiter breaks ranks: Jerusalem’s ambassador says the Washington peace track is derailing. See The War Today.
Drone swarm: A downed F-15 pilot describes an Iranian meshed-drone formation moving as one body, a capability US intelligence had not assessed. See The War Today.
The package: Netanyahu buys haredi votes to split the AG’s office and stand up an October 7 commission, with an October 20 vote. See Inside Israel.
Reserved slots: Netanyahu threatens to walk from Likud unless granted up to ten handpicked slate slots before the primary. See Inside Israel.
Second genocide finding: The UN inquiry counts armed teenage fighters as children to carry a Gaza “genocide” claim it gathered no data for. See Israel and the World.
The empty chair: Freed hostage Ilana Gritzewsky confronts the UN’s October 7 rape denier in Geneva, who keeps her eyes on her screen. See Israel and the World.
Montreal manifesto: The Cote-des-Neiges shooter named “influential Zionists” as targets, and Jerusalem asks Canada to arm guards at Jewish sites. See Israel and the World.
IHRA stripped: British doctors vote to drop the antisemitism definition across the NHS, calling it a “chilling effect” on speech. See Israel and the World.
Haredi shutdown: The factions plan a nationwide rush-hour blockade over evader arrests, and Ben-Gvir backs the street against his own police. See Developments to Watch.
Doha in the north: Qatar moves to mediate the Lebanon front, seating Hezbollah’s financier at a second table within days. See Developments to Watch.

Below: what Leiter’s public break tells you about a round sold as removing Hezbollah, the package Netanyahu is spending his majority on, and why the UN’s children figure was built to travel.

The week’s Iran-deal machinery has stepped back, and what it leaves exposed is sharper. On the Lebanon front even the principals working the room can see the round was sold as removing Hezbollah and now runs on a pilot withdrawal. At home the draft fight and the legal-guild fight have fused into a single transaction, and Netanyahu is locking down what he wants. The institutional front moves with the most coherence, because Geneva, the British Medical Association, and a Montreal manifesto are running the same play in three arenas.

The War Today

IDF Fires Under New Orders as Leiter Admits Washington Round Derailing

The first strikes on the Lebanese front since the weekend renewal landed Tuesday on the Ali al-Taher ridge at the edge of the security zone, in two incidents hours apart — soldiers fired warning shots, then killed armed Hezbollah men advancing on their positions. They were the first kills under orders cut to immediate threats only. As the rounds were fired, the fifth round of Jerusalem-Beirut talks opened in Washington, set to run through tomorrow on a pilot program that would pull the IDF out of pockets it took “for the purpose of negotiations, to then withdraw from them” and let the Lebanese army try to disarm Hezbollah in the vacated ground. Ambassador Yechiel Leiter warned the process “is in danger of derailing” and denounced the US-brokered deconfliction cell that seats Iran and writes Israel out. Aoun answered that he would accept nothing short of a full end to the “occupation,” and Lebanese reporting floated the remains of navigator Ron Arad, missing since 1986, as a prisoner-exchange chip.

Assessment: Even the principals working the room can see the premise has slipped: the round was sold as removing Hezbollah, and it now runs on a pilot withdrawal and a remains-for-prisoners sweetener while the disarmament clause goes to a Lebanese army that has never enforced it.

Downed F-15 Pilot Describes an Iranian Drone Swarm Moving as One Body

The American F-15 crew shot down over Iran in April during Operation Epic Fury was brought down by a drone formation US intelligence had not assessed Tehran could field, according to the pilot’s debrief surfaced Tuesday. The pilot told intelligence officials he saw “multiple drones interconnected and moving as one,” large craft with smaller ones slung beneath them “like legs,” a “minefield of drones” he and others likened to something out of science fiction. The capability has a name — one-to-many meshed networking, a single operator flying many craft as one synchronized body — and initial assessments hold that the formation may be what knocked the jet out of the sky, the first US fighter Iran has ever downed. The account has split the intelligence community, with officials unsure whether the pilot saw what he described or whether the second crewman saw it at all. The navigator hid in the mountains for over a day before special forces pulled him out. The cause of the April downing remains under investigation more than two months on.

Assessment: If the swarm is real, the memorandum just traded away two weeks of leverage against a regime that came out of the war holding a capability its principal adversary did not know it had — while leaving the stockpile inside Iran and the inspectors locked out. A drone formation that can drop a fourth-generation fighter sets the price of the next sortie higher than the one the air force was an hour from flying. The intelligence split is its own warning.

Inside Israel

Netanyahu Buys the AG Split With the Draft Bills and an October Date

Netanyahu, Deri and Gafni settled on a package to clear the plenum before dissolution: Basic Law: Torah Study in all three readings, the bill barring arrest of draft evaders, and a kashrut law that rolls back Matan Kahana’s reform and hands Shas a run of religious-services appointments. In return the haredi parties drop the daycare subsidy they fought the spring over, withdraw the dissolution threat to hold the vote at the October 20 date Netanyahu wanted, and deliver their votes for the bill splitting the Attorney General’s office in second and third reading plus a first reading of a government-appointed October 7 commission — a panel the updated text lets operate even with an opposition boycott. Shas and UTJ publicly denied the arrangement hours after Ynet reported it. Illouz called it spitting in the face of the serving public, Eisenkot a liquidation sale of the national interest, Lapid a liquidation sale of the country. Gantz said the next government would let no one hold the state hostage.

Assessment: The deal is the draft fight and the legal-guild fight fused into one transaction — the haredi votes the coalition needs to carve up the Attorney General’s office and stand up a October 7 inquiry, bought with the exemption-by-other-means the same coalition could not pass as a statute. The inquiry it is buying is not great, a panel the coalition appoints and can convene without the opposition, but it beats the alternative the critics treat as the “neutral” default, because a state commission whose chair the High Court’s president hand-picks is no cleaner [unfortunately there is no untainted hand left to pick]. Both branches spent the years around October 7 forfeiting the public’s trust, the government on whose watch the wall fell and the bench that spent the prior year at war over its own power, and neither has the standing left to sit in sole judgment of a failure it played a part in. Whether the bills survive the handful of coalition members already on record against Basic Law: Torah Study (Solomon, Illouz, Edelstein, Sofer, Hauslich) is the open question.

Netanyahu Demands Ten Reserved Slots and Threatens to Walk

Netanyahu told Likud Central Committee chairman Haim Katz he would leave the party if his demand for eight to ten reserved slots on the next slate is refused, with the list otherwise chosen by roughly 150,000 members in a primary. Katz warned the demand could crush Likud, and he and David Bitan called it a political exercise. Regev, carrying the leadership’s line, said the reserved spots are settled in principle and only the number, ten or seven, is still being negotiated. The reported targets include Tally Gotliv, whom Regev declined to disown despite the spliced-video stunt and the covert-officer exposure that ran through the immunity fight.

Assessment: Netanyahu is locking down the one institution an election cannot take from him while his grip on everything outside the party comes apart — a prime minister seating his own list before a vote he may not win, threatening to take his mandates elsewhere if the committee will not let him. The walk-out threat is leverage the membership has to take seriously precisely because he is right that he carries most of the votes, which is also why Katz reads ten reserved slots as a hostage negotiation. Reserving a slot for Gotliv after the covert-officer affair tells you what the list is being built to reward.

Israel and the World

UN Inquiry Reaches for the Children Count to Carry a Second Genocide Finding

The UN’s standing Commission of Inquiry on the Palestinian territories accused Israel of “genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes” in Gaza and “war crimes” in Judea and Samaria, its second such report in nine months, this one built around the claim that Israeli forces “deliberately targeted and killed” Palestinian children as proof of genocidal intent. The seven-member panel, chaired by Srinivasan Muralidhar, says children were roughly 30 percent of the Gaza dead and alleges torture, forced stripping, and sexual and gender-based violence against minors in detention. It collected no casualty data of its own. It counted as a child every Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighter aged sixteen and seventeen who died with a rifle in hand, against an IDF figure of around 40 percent of the Gaza dead being combatants in a war Hamas fought from inside hospitals, schools, and booby-trapped homes. The commission does not speak for the UN and has drawn sustained criticism for bias, yet its full text sits on the official OHCHR website, where a European foreign ministry will surely lift it scrubbed of provenance. Israel’s Geneva mission called it a “libelous sham” and a modern blood libel, and the Foreign Ministry rejected it outright. The same afternoon, a Pakistan-sponsored Security Council resolution to “protect peacekeepers” passed with language blaming Israel for the deaths of seven UNIFIL personnel in Lebanon.

Assessment: A panel that gathers no numbers, quotes its own prior reports across rounds, and lands a “genocide” finding on a body the UN itself does not claim is producing a political instrument dressed as a legal one, and the children framing is the version engineered to travel furthest before anyone reads the footnote that a Hamas fighter at seventeen still shoots at soldiers. None of it was drafted in response to anything Israel did this month [and the next round is likely already half-written — even before this one was posted]. The OHCHR letterhead is the laundering step — the place a number born in a Hamas press shop gets washed into “established” before a sanctioning capital cites it back. Watch which European ministry quotes the children figure first, because that is what the document was built for.

Freed Hostage Forces the UN’s Rape Denier to Look at the Evidence

Ilana Gritzewsky, freed from Hamas captivity, testified at the 62nd session of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva and confronted Reem Alsalem, the UN’s special rapporteur on violence against women, who had claimed no evidence existed for sexual violence on October 7. Brought to Geneva by UN Watch, she described being sexually abused at her kibbutz, beaten and mutilated, waking half-naked with seven terrorists over her, then days of captivity in Gaza. “I am living proof of sexual violence by Hamas,” she told Alsalem. “Why were you silent? Please look at me. Do you believe us now? Will you apologize?” Alsalem did not look at her during the testimony, kept her eyes on her screen, and used her right of reply to praise women’s-rights progress in Kuwait, Russia and Kyrgyzstan before leaving the chamber with her head down. Her report to the council names “Palestinian suffering” eleven times and the October 7 atrocities zero. The same Geneva body has issued 112 condemnations of Israel since 2006, nearly half of all the condemnations it has handed the rest of the planet combined.

Assessment: Alsalem’s report did not omit October 7 by oversight. The UN office charged with documenting violence against women has been turned into the body that erases the women Hamas raped, and the rapporteur sat through a survivor’s testimony rather than amend a word of it. This is the casualty-machine laundering we have been tracking, run in reverse — the hostile count gets the UN letterhead, and the Israeli victim gets the empty chair. The eleven mentions of Palestinian suffering are what will travel out of Geneva, not the woman who stood up.

Montreal Manifesto Names Its Targets and Jerusalem Asks Canada to Arm the Guards

The gunman who opened fire Monday in Cote-des-Neiges left a manifesto that named “influential Zionists” among his intended victims and ran the familiar antisemitic conspiracy themes throughout, according to the document now in circulation. Quebec authorities identified the shooter as Seth Hatfield, 25, of Alberta. Michael Moshe Mizrahi z”l, an Israeli citizen and longtime member of the community, and a Montreal police officer were killed. A second officer was wounded and is in stable condition. Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli called for armed guards at Jewish institutions abroad and said he had warned Ottawa it was tracking the path Australia already walked.

Assessment: The manifesto closes the question the early reporting left open and reopens nothing the diaspora doesn’t already know: a Western capital’s Jewish quarter is a soft target, and the trigger needs no organizing cell behind it, only the permission slip the surrounding culture keeps signing. Chikli is asking for armed guards as standing infrastructure, and the request itself carries the indictment [a sovereign Jewish state asking another government to please post rifles outside the kosher market has already rendered its verdict on the host]. Ottawa will work the Montreal sequence the way these get worked everywhere, thoroughly and after the funerals.

British Doctors Strip the Antisemitism Definition Out of the NHS

The British Medical Association voted at its annual meeting to drop the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism across the National Health Service, the standard Britain adopted in 2016 and the NHS attached to protect Jewish staff and patients. Senior doctors backing the move argued the definition carries a “chilling effect” on speech.

Assessment: A doctors’ union deciding which definition of Jew-hate the health service may use is the campaign migrating from the campus and the council chamber into the clinic, where a Jewish nurse and a Jewish patient now have one less instrument to name what is done to them. The only speech the IHRA definition chills is the speech that treats Jews as fair game, and a profession that finds that constraint intolerable has told you what it wants the freedom to say. Antizionism dressed as a free-expression principle is still Jew-hate, here wearing a white coat.

Briefly Noted

Diplomacy & Geopolitics

JNS: The House Education and Workforce Committee marks up eleven bills Thursday, among them the No Antisemitism in Education Act and a measure tying federal funds to how schools answer Jew-hate complaints.

Public Diplomacy & Media

JTA: An Upper West Side Assembly primary pits Rabbi Stephanie Ruskay against Mamdani-endorsed public defender Eli Northrup, with the right to protest outside synagogues on the ballot.
Jerusalem Post: The aliyah group Belong released a satirical AI video daring Trump, Ivanka and Kushner to move to Israel if the Iran deal is as safe as Washington claims.
JNS: Mosab Hassan Yousef, the former Hamas insider known as the Green Prince, told the JNS summit that Trump’s pause “killed the opportunity” against Iran and that Israel’s survival “does not depend on superpowers.”

Domestic & Law

Ynet News: Two Haredi women, 23 and 24, were arrested at Krakow airport with 50 kilograms of khat in their suitcases, the latest of the young couriers Israeli organizers recruit with a ticket and 5,000 shekels. The lawyer who handles these cases says the belief that Poland would only confiscate and deport has now collapsed into months of detention.
Walla: Kiryat Malachi is planning an absorption village of 70 to 100 units for olim from Western Europe and the United States, built around an ulpan and a managed community to receive Jews leaving the West over rising Jew-hate.

Economy, Tech & Infrastructure

Times of Israel: Herzliya adtech firm AppsFlyer raised over $1 billion from Google, Meta, Moloco and Unity at a $2.7 billion valuation, the four ad platforms taking non-controlling stakes ahead of a planned IPO.
Globes: Tower Semiconductor’s market cap crossed $37 billion, briefly passing Leumi, Hapoalim, Elbit and Teva after a 690% run on AI-infrastructure demand.

Culture, Religion & Society

JNS: Israel’s Heritage Ministry opened its second international archaeology conference at Herodium in Judea and Samaria, where Ambassador Mike Huckabee told the crowd that “without Israel, without the Jewish foundation, there would not be an America.” Sovereignty-by-accumulation gets a spade: the excavation puts Jewish history in the ground UNESCO insists isn’t Jewish.

Developments to Watch

Judea & Samaria

Bethlehem arms-dealer roll-up — Overnight, the IDF, Shin Bet and Border Police searched some fifty buildings across the Bethlehem area and arrested nineteen, the cell built around weapons dealers moving arms into the district.

Northern Front (Lebanon / Syria)

Doha moves to broker the northern front — Arab outlets report Qatar will mediate between Israel, Lebanon and Hezbollah, with Washington said to have approved and even initiated the role. The same Qatari money-and-mediation model now running the south arrives in the north as the Washington talks open, and a Doha channel layered onto the deconfliction cell hands Hezbollah’s financier a second seat at the table within days.
Lebanon’s sovereigntists pre-reject any deal that keeps Hezbollah — Kataeb leader Samy Gemayel declared his bloc “will not coexist with Hezbollah regardless of the outcome of the negotiations.” The Christian and sovereigntist camp is laying down a marker before the Washington round produces anything, and a settlement that leaves Hezbollah armed sets off the fight inside Beirut before it does anything for the quiet on the Yellow Line.

Gaza & Southern Theater

First foreign officers arrive for the Gaza force — Moroccan military officers landed in Israel to help build the international stabilization force the Board of Peace has struggled to stand up.

Regional Axis (Iran, Houthis, Militias)

Tehran writes the missiles out in Islamabad — Iran’s negotiators publicly contradicted Pakistan’s prime minister mid-visit, denying that ballistic missiles were ever discussed, and Pezeshkian’s own line is that the program “was not in the MoU and never will be.”
Oman and Iran stand up a Hormuz toll body — Muscat and Tehran agreed to form a joint foreign-ministry working group on administering navigation through the strait, “costs” explicitly on its agenda. The transit fee the reopening was sold to remove is being institutionalized instead of dropped.

Diplomatic & Legal

The Senate votes to pull US forces off Iran — The Republican-led chamber passed a war-powers resolution directing withdrawal of US forces from Iran, 50-48, days after the House cleared the same text. The vote is non-binding, but it tells Tehran the chamber that must approve the sanctions relief and frozen-fund clauses is hostile, which narrows what Washington can actually deliver inside the sixty-day window the deal runs on.

Home Front & Politics

Haredi parties plan a nationwide shutdown and Ben-Gvir backs the street — The factions are organizing a nationwide traffic disruption over draft-evader arrests, with the heaviest blockades set for the late-afternoon rush, and National Security Minister Ben-Gvir condemned police conduct at last week’s Bnei Brak riot and warned that commanders “will be required to answer for their actions.” The minister who runs the police siding with the crowds against his own officers tells the next blockade what it can do without consequence. And it lands the same week every closed highway moves the public sanctions number further from the parties organizing the closure.

None of it resolves this week. The ridge will see another contact, the plenum another vote, Geneva another report. And Israel will meet each one the way it met today’s, moving first. Because the referees have all picked a side. That is the cost of the position it has been backed into: a state that has to be its own last line on every front at once, because the bodies built to share the load have signed off. It stopped waiting for them a while ago.

— Uri Zehavi · Intelligence Editor
With Modi Zehavi · Data + Research Analyst

Know someone who thinks the people stripping the antisemitism definition out of the NHS would stop at the clinic door? Disabuse them.