Shavua tov, friends.

Apologies for the delay — a few factors were at play: a lot happened over the shabbat break and I had some personal logistics issues. Back to normal tomorrow.

“You don’t make peace with friends,” Rabin said, and the weekend’s wreckage is the harder half of his rule — you make agreements with enemies who have not agreed to anything. The Lebanon framework was three days old when it produced its first funeral, the Hormuz memorandum reopened the strait on a signature and kept it mined in fact, and the coalition’s “ninety-day” arrest freeze was drafted to run six months. Every page signed this spring keeps meeting the same wall: the only party whose compliance matters never put its name to the thing. The army, the Gulf navies, and one Golani platoon are left enforcing clauses no signatory will.

⚡️Flash Brief: The Day in 90 Seconds or Less

First funeral: Cpt. David Hazutt z”l falls near Deir Siryan, the first Israeli killed since Friday’s framework was signed. See The War Today.
Hormuz: CENTCOM hits ten Iranian sites after a tanker strike as Tehran fires on Bahrain and Kuwait. See The War Today.
Gaza deck: Four Hamas commanders eliminated, including an October 7 Nukhba operative who crossed the fence himself. See The War Today.
Arrest freeze: Katz advances a “ninety-day” draft-evader freeze that Section 38 keeps in force for six months. See Inside Israel.
Five in a day: Arab-sector murders hit 141 for 2026 as a stolen IDF launcher turns up staged for a clan hit. See Inside Israel.
The slate: Netanyahu pledges a “broad national government” while demanding eleven reserved slots in his own top twenty. See Inside Israel.
Armenia: Jerusalem recognizes the Armenian Genocide as Washington clears a $700 million engine sale to Ankara. See Israel and the World.
Ljubljana: Slovenia’s new government pulls down the PLO flag within the hour of taking office. See Israel and the World.
Carlson: Sky News hands Tucker Carlson primetime for the “master-slave” control libel, largely unchallenged. See Israel and the World.
The sort: A Mamdani-backed slate unseats Dan Goldman as activists chase Scott Wiener from Pride events. See Israel and the World.
Iranian plots: Belgium, Germany and Australia work the IRGC roster after synagogue bombings and arson attacks. See Israel and the World.
Aliyah: Western immigration jumps to 38 percent of the total as Jerusalem funds Diaspora education the other direction. See Israel and the World.

Below: the registration mechanism inside the arrest freeze that writes the next exemption law for the coalition, the clause the Hormuz memorandum was sold to resolve and is now drawing Gulf fire, and the Long Brief behind the aliyah-and-education ledger.

The difference between paper and reality are enormous — whether you’re in Beirut, DC, Tehran, Jerusalem, or Kiryat Shmona. The coalition writes a six-month freeze and calls it ninety days. The one place the gap closes is the target deck — the names from October 7 and the names rebuilding to repeat it keep turning out to be the same names, and the army is enforcing on the ground every clause the paperwork left for someone else.

The War Today

A Golani Captain Falls the Same Weekend Beirut Signs the Page

Cpt. David Hazutt z”l, 21, a Golani platoon commander from Ashkelon, was killed at around 2 a.m. when his platoon searching for a terror suspect near Deir Siryan ran into a Hezbollah gunman, who also wounded a second soldier before the troops turned to hunt him through the night. He is the first Israeli killed since the trilateral framework was signed Friday. The army kept working the south through the weekend — RPG-armed Hezbollah operatives killed near Nabatiya and a rocket launcher destroyed in the same Saturday strike — while Naim Qassem called the agreement a surrender and his supporters rioted across the south, and Katz repeated that the IDF stays in the security zone until Hezbollah is disarmed “throughout Lebanon,” not just to the Litani.

Assessment: The framework was three days old when it produced its first funeral, which is the gap between what Beirut signed and what the man holding the line near Deir Siryan was sent into [the deal ends a war the gunmen had not been told was over]. Qassem rejecting the page his own government put its name to is the operational reading the brief has carried all spring — the only signatory whose compliance matters never agreed to anything, and the army is left enforcing a disarmament clause one platoon-commander’s life at a time. Katz holding the zone “until Hezbollah is disarmed throughout Lebanon” is the one honest line in the weekend’s paperwork, because it ties the withdrawal to a condition no party in Beirut has the courts, the will, or the rifles to meet.

CENTCOM Hits Ten Iranian Sites as Tehran Fires on Bahrain and Kuwait

US Navy and Air Force aircraft struck ten Iranian military targets in and around the Strait of Hormuz overnight Saturday — surveillance, communications, air defenses, drone-storage and mine-laying sites, two of them newly built — after a one-way Iranian drone hit the Panama-flagged tanker M/T Kiku carrying more than two million barrels of crude, damaging its bridge with the crew unharmed. Iran answered with missiles and drones at Bahrain and Kuwait, where a residential building in Manama’s Al-Mahrak district took significant damage with no casualties and Kuwaiti air defenses intercepted two projectiles. Tehran threatened a “complete halt” to negotiations and tied the escalation to the multinational naval body’s move to expand a transit route off Oman without Iran’s oversight, while Trump warned he may yet “complete the job.” Bahrain called it a deliberate violation of the Islamabad memorandum and asked the Security Council to hold Tehran accountable.

Assessment: The flashpoint is exactly the clause the memorandum was sold to resolve — who administers Hormuz — and Tehran is firing on Gulf capitals to keep the toll it signed away on paper [the strait reopened on the signature and stayed mined in fact]. Two of the ten CENTCOM targets being newly built tells you what the regime did with the interim window the deal bought it: rebuild the very capabilities the strikes just removed, which is the reconstruction cycle we have tracked through every ceasefire on every front. The Gulf states that took Iranian fire for backing Washington during the war are taking it again under the deal meant to end it, and Bahrain is now on the UN record naming the violator, a paper trail that will matter exactly as much as every prior one.

Four Hamas Commanders Eliminated as the Targeting Deck Reaches October 7 Again

The IDF and Shin Bet eliminated four Hamas commanders in a series of strikes disclosed over the weekend. Friday’s strike in the central Gaza Strip killed Mansour Sami Mahmoud Shahtout, commander of Hamas’s naval police in the Central Camps, along with two fellow naval-police commanders riding in an armed vehicle the army assessed as an immediate threat to troops. Thursday’s operation killed Walid Haniyeh — deputy commander of a Nukhba company, nephew of the assassinated Ismail Haniyeh — who crossed the fence on October 7, directed a kidnapping cell, and spent the two and a half years since recruiting and training. Across the weekend, reservists of the Etzioni Brigade also killed two armed men approaching the fence from near Hader in the southern Syria buffer zone and held the bodies.

Assessment: Every name on the Gaza deck answers the same question, and this weekend it answered it twice on one roster — the men who carried out October 7 and the men rebuilding to do it again keep turning out to be the same men, the disarmament the truce never enforced still being enforced one target folder at a time. The naval police labeled as “police” is the offer-is-refusal move made literal: a force kept under the military wing, presented as civilian, directing attacks on troops until the strike finds the vehicle. South of all of it, two gunmen walking at the Hader fence are why Katz’s “we do not leave the security zones in Syria and Lebanon” is a posture the army is paying to hold, not a slogan — the seam stays open whether or not anyone in Beirut or Damascus signs a page about it.

Inside Israel

Katz Backs a Ninety-Day Arrest Freeze That Runs Six Months

Defense Minister Israel Katz asked the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee on Sunday to convene urgently and advance a temporary order freezing the arrest of haredi draft evaders, after Cabinet Secretary Yossi Fuchs sent committee chair Boaz Bismuth a letter, written at Netanyahu’s direction, warning the arrests are deepening the rupture with the haredi public and risk a “civil war.” Fuchs framed the freeze as a three-month measure running only to the election and conditioned on supervised proof that an evader is genuinely a Torah student. The text Bismuth released in the afternoon does more than that. Section 38 of Basic Law: the Knesset extends any lapsing statute past dissolution, so the “ninety-day” order stays in force for six months, and its registration-and-declaration mechanism builds the very status definitions a permanent exemption law would later inherit as its baseline. The freeze arrives alongside the coalition’s parallel track: three marathon House Committee sessions next week to fast-track Basic Law: Torah Study before the Knesset dissolves, with Knesset legal adviser Sagit Afik on record that the bill’s transfer out of the Constitution Committee has no legal footing and that she opposes the legislation. Netanyahu launched the whole sequence at Saturday’s press conference by quoting hesder rosh-yeshivas describing arrests pulled out of yeshivas — arrests of which not a single case is known to have occurred.

Assessment: The Prime Minister built the predicate for a six-month enforcement holiday on an event that did not happen, and the coalition is legislating against its own Knesset legal adviser’s warning that the process has no standing [the part nobody says aloud is that the temporary order is the permanent one wearing a ninety-day costume]. The registration mechanism is the tell — once the state holds a supervised list of men it has agreed not to draft, the next exemption law writes itself off that list, which is why the haredi parties will spend the marathon week defending the database and not the deadline. Katz signing the letter that tells the police to stop enforcing the law is the Defense Minister conceding the manpower argument his own Chief of Staff has spent the spring losing.

Five Murdered in a Day as Car Bombs Reach Jewish Cities

Five Israeli Arabs were killed in under a day across the country on Sunday, pushing the 2026 toll to 141 murdered — already running ahead of last year’s record pace. Bakr Nusirat, 19, was shot dead at the entrance to his Taybeh home returning from a wedding, killed in the same spot where his cousin died a year earlier in a land feud. Nusirat had been arrested in 2025 on suspicion of ordering a murder and released for lack of evidence. At dawn a car bomb killed Iyad Raab, 38, on a Jaffa street as his six-year-old son sat beside him, the blast 150 meters from a kindergarten as children left for school, police examining it as blood-revenge for a teenager’s murder days earlier. Two more men, Adnan Ghanem and Ghalib Abu-Ras, were shot in a car in Kalansua in a feud that has now taken nine lives. By afternoon a third vehicle exploded at a Holon gas station, killing a man of about thirty. The Prime Minister’s Office crime-unit head, Roi Kahlon, warned that the syndicates are building “alternative governance” inside the state and that prosecutors, police, and witnesses increasingly fear touching these files — and in the Negev police seized a stolen IDF LAW anti-armor launcher loaded into a vehicle for a clan hit in Tel Sheva, days after recovering twelve crates of stolen army ammunition in Rahat.

Assessment: A stolen shoulder-fired anti-tank weapon staged for a gang killing is the same manpower-and-enforcement failure the draft fight produces, pointed at a different population [the looted army stockpile is arming the clans and the leakage from the base is more than just a basic security story]. Kahlon naming “alternative governance” is the official admission that the state has ceded ground inside the Green Line to syndicates the security cabinet has never treated as the strategic threat its own crime czar now says they are. The car bomb beside a Jaffa kindergarten is what the deterrence gap costs when the same coalition spending its remaining weeks shielding draft evaders has no week left for the 141.

Netanyahu Reaches for the Center While Locking the List From Inside

Netanyahu opened his pre-election repositioning at Saturday’s press conference, pledging a “broad national government,” invoking Begin’s “no more civil war,” and casting unnamed forces as seeking to rift the people — language his centrist rivals have been using and which clashes with the coalition’s current legislative agenda. He paired it with a direct strike on Gadi Eisenkot, branding the former Chief of Staff too cautious to have ordered Rafah, the Philadelphi Corridor, or the expanded Lebanon operations; Eisenkot answered that Netanyahu “blindly” led the country to a “historic low.” The unity talk runs against the move underneath it: in calls with Likud municipal heads, Netanyahu raised his demand to eleven reserved slots inside the top twenty of the party list, up from ten inside the top thirty, effectively seeking to appoint at least half the realistic list, which one local chief called a bypass that empties the primaries of meaning. The Constitution Committee voted Sunday to postpone the primaries to August 4, with revised rules due Thursday, after the party court partly upheld David Bitan’s petition against canceling them outright. At the same press conference Netanyahu ruled out a Palestinian state west of the Jordan, arguing the war has converted a divided public into a consensus against two states.

Assessment: The rebrand and the slate demand are the same maneuver read at two altitudes — Netanyahu courts the center-right voters Eisenkot is drawing while making sure that whatever list the election produces, he has already chosen half of it. Eleven guaranteed slots inside the top twenty is the elected branch’s version of the move the coalition is running on the courts and the comptroller: lock the personnel the ballot box is about to reshuffle before it gets the chance. The “broad national government” is the offer to everyone outside Likud, made by a man whose first priority is controlling who sits inside it [a unity appeal is a strange thing to launch the same week you demand the power to appoint your own backbench].

Israel and the World

Jerusalem Recognizes the Armenian Genocide as Washington Arms Ankara

Israel’s cabinet voted unanimously this morning to recognize the Armenian Genocide, ending a taboo the Foreign Ministry guarded for decades. Gideon Sa’ar brought the resolution, which names the murder of 1.5 million Armenians, Assyrians and Greeks in the final years of the Ottoman Empire and condemns its denial, distortion, and minimization. Israel becomes the 35th government to recognize it — though the measure now goes to the Knesset plenum. Netanyahu told the cabinet that Erdogan calls for the annihilation of the Jewish state nearly every day, that Israel takes those words seriously, and that it will draw its American friends’ attention to them. The Foreign Ministry, after Erdogan accused “Zionism” of threatening Turkey’s survival, correctly called him a dictator who jails journalists, massacres Kurds, occupies Cyprus and backs jihadists. The timing sits against a Trump White House courting Ankara: the administration has notified Congress of a $700 million F-110 jet-engine sale, bypassing the usual review, signaled an F-35 reentry is under examination, and the President flies to a NATO summit in Turkey on July 7.

Assessment: Bipartisan alarm on the Hill over the F-35s tells the Israelis what the cabinet vote already assumes — that the brake on arming a NATO member who calls for Israel’s destruction will have to come from Congress, because it is not coming from the Oval Office [the ally who would not let Jerusalem read its own war’s terms is not going to veto a sale to Ankara on Jerusalem’s behalf]. The MFA spent decades swallowing the historical record to keep the NATO giant in Ankara calm has decided the calm is no longer worth buying.

Slovenia Pulls Down the PLO Flag and Turns Toward Jerusalem

Slovenia’s new government moved against its predecessor’s posture within the hour of taking office. Minutes after the confidence vote seated Janez Jansa, maintenance workers pulled down the PLO flag that had flown over the government building in Ljubljana for two years. Jansa, who called his predecessors’ record “crazy,” has signaled he will relocate Slovenia’s embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and, by multiple accounts, withdraw the 2024 recognition of “Palestine” the prior coalition extended. He rightly views Israel as a strategic partner in regional stability and counterterrorism. The reversal lands the same week European capitals continue to weigh the bloc-wide sanctions file on Israeli ministers, and days after Sa’ar cut contact with EU foreign-policy chief Kaja Kallas.

Assessment: The entire Slovenian posture — recognition, the arms-transit ban, the entry bans, the Eurovision boycott — traveled on the domestic politics of whoever held the chair in Ljubljana, not on anything Israel did, and it reverses on the same wiring now that the chair has changed hands. Of course, the partisan sort will deliver a different result when the winds change in Slovenia. A Palestinian “state” recognized by a hundred and fifty governments and unbuilt by all of them moves up and down with each capital’s coalition math, because the recognition was never a judgment about reality but scapegoating and realpolitik. Jansa can lower a flag in twenty minutes for the same reason his predecessor raised it — the flag answers to Ljubljana’s voters, and the “state” it flies for answers to no one.

Sky News Hands Carlson Primetime for the Control Libel

[You’d be forgiven for thinking we covered this months ago, but no this is a different one…] Sky News broadcast a long, largely unchallenged interview in which Tucker Carlson described the United States and Israel as locked in a “master-slave relationship,” telling viewers “there are a lot of reasons why Israel has been able to control the United States for decades” and that he hoped the arrangement was now ending. Anchor Yalda Hakim queried whether Netanyahu was “in charge” but let the framing itself pass, alongside Carlson’s claims that Syria’s Ahmed al-Sharaa was “installed” because Assad was “unacceptable to Israel” and that Israel is “the most violent country in the world by far per capita.” Carlson commands roughly 33 million followers and seems to command fewer than 33 firing neurons. Ted Cruz called him “the most dangerous demagogue in America.” It’s not really a left or right problem, a Quinnipiac survey just put the share of US voters who think Washington is “too supportive” of Israel at 48 percent, the highest since the question was first asked in 2017, 66 percent among Democrats and 20 percent among Republicans, with Netanyahu underwater 48 to 20.

Assessment: Carlson has run this for a year. What changed is the carriage, a legacy outlet chasing his audience by airing his repugnant, idiotic view and the convergence where the populist right and the activist left reach the same accusation through different doors. The Quinnipiac line is the downstream meter — the libel need not persuade the median voter, only move the floor, and a 48 percent plurality is that floor moving.

Wikipedia Expels Its Co-Founder Over a Bias-Correction Project

Wikipedia indefinitely banned co-founder Larry Sanger after he submitted a “WikiProject Intellectual Diversity” proposal aimed, among other things, at curbing the platform’s slant against “currently disfavoured views and groups,” Jewish and pro-Israel perspectives among them. Administrators cited “off-wiki canvassing,” which Sanger denies. He described the process as a “kangaroo court” run by “mob rule,” with no formal charges, no separation of prosecutor and judge, and selective enforcement of vague rules. The ban landed days after he filed the application for community review.

Assessment: The platform that trains the AI models that answer increasingly more queries removed the man who proposed auditing its bias, on a procedural charge from a process he says has no procedure. Whoever holds the edit history holds the substrate — Wikipedia feeds the AI training corpora, the AI feeds the search summaries, and both feed the classroom and the policy memo. So a contested entry settled by the better-organized editing bloc does not stay on the page where it was won. Sanger is the rare adversary inside the institution willing to name the mechanism, which is exactly the canvassing his own platform exists to make unwinnable.

Socialist Sweep Unseats Goldman and the Sort Turns on Its Own Jews

A Mamdani-backed slate ran the table in New York’s Democratic primaries this week, and the night’s biggest scalp was Dan Goldman, the Jewish incumbent in the 10th District, unseated by Brad Lander — who accuses Israel of genocide in Gaza and told supporters he would be “one of the Jewish members of Congress most willing to stand up for Palestinian human rights.” Hakeem Jeffries congratulated the winners on Saturday, including the two who had already declined to back him for speaker. All the while attendees at one victory party broke into a chant about ousting him next. The harassment is no longer reserved for AIPAC’s friends. Scott Wiener, the front-runner for Pelosi’s seat and a man who has himself accused Israel of genocide, was chased out of San Francisco LGBTQ events twice in a week. Once off the route to a Pride Shabbat service, by activists screaming antisemitic slurs and calling him a genocide enabler. In rural Tennessee, thousands of mailers ran a Young Republicans platform plank reading “No wars for Jews,” and when a Jewish state lawmaker confronted the man behind them with “I am a Jew,” the answer came back: “We will not fight wars for you.” Federal filings the same week describe a 19-year-old plotting to assassinate a Tennessee senator for taking “money from the pro-Israel lobby,” naming four more AIPAC-linked members to follow.

Assessment: The partisan sort has kept going — past the words, past the lobby, past the donors, to the Jew who happens to be standing there. Lander accuses Israel of genocide and still gets to be the Jewish member who stands up for Palestinians [the credential the activists hand out, and the one they withdraw the moment it suits them]. Wiener checks every box the left asks of him [and some how was un-me-too’ed], and the crowd at the trans march decided his Jewish background outweighed the legislative record on their own signature issue — which is the entire content of the “antizionism, not Jew-hate” distinction, demonstrated live. The Tennessee plank and the assassination filing arrive from the opposite flank using the same grammar, two extremist networks converging on the one object both can agree to name. Jeffries blessing the candidates who wants him out of his job is the establishment ratifying the faction that is coming for it.

Belgium, Germany and Australia Work the Iranian Plot Roster After the Attacks

Belgian federal police took three suspects into custody Thursday over the March 9 bombing outside the Liege synagogue, part of a seven-person sweep. The detainees are said to have acted for pay on behalf of handlers prosecutors declined to name, and the Islamist Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamiya (if that’s too long, just read IRGC proxy) has claimed the Liege blast alongside attacks on a Jewish school in Amsterdam and synagogues in Rotterdam. In Hamburg, the trial opened of two men — Ali S., who prosecutors say worked for the IRGC’s intelligence arm and kept close contact with the Quds Force, and an Afghan accomplice — charged in an Iranian plot to murder the head of Germany’s largest Jewish organization along with a pro-Israel activist and Jewish businesses, by assassination and arson. London counter-terror police searched two homes in the city’s north-west over suspected Iran-linked offenses, with the Met’s counter-terror commander citing a “marked increase in the tempo” of national-security and state-threat work over the past year. Australia’s spy chief said the IRGC used two agents who had lived in Australia to direct the Sydney and Melbourne arson attacks, and that Tehran now treats the country as a “legitimate target for covertly directed acts of violence.”

Assessment: Western jurisdictions are reading the same indictment off the same patron — the round leaves the envelope first, the state works the case after a synagogue burns. Belgium’s suspects acted for pay on behalf of handlers the prosecutors will not name — which is the entire Iranian model stated in one clause: a regime that subcontracts the Jew-killing to local muscle and a cartel courier so the trail ends two arrests short of Tehran. Burgess naming Australia a “legitimate target” is an intelligence chief stating what every European Jewish community already runs its security budget around. The open question is the same one the London files raise — whether any of these states carries a single case past the courtroom door to the state that drafted the contract, or lets it lapse the way the encampment charges did.

Aliyah From the West Surges as Jerusalem Funds the Other Direction

Israel absorbed 22,522 new immigrants in 2025, and beneath a slight headline decline the composition shifted hard toward the West. Arrivals from the US, France, the UK and Canada rose 25 percent to 8,499, lifting the Western share of all aliyah from 21 percent to 38 percent in a single year, with French immigration up 51 percent and US arrivals climbing to 3,781. The cohort skews young, working-age, professional, and family-forming. The cabinet unanimously approved a NIS 200 million national plan, proposed by Netanyahu and Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli and built with the Jewish Federations of North America, to strengthen Jewish education across Diaspora communities — JFNA’s Gary Torgow and Eric Fingerhut were brought into the cabinet room for the vote.

Assessment: The two numbers point in opposite directions on the map and the same direction in the ledger — a Western Jewry that is both sending its skilled young families to Israel at a 51-percent French clip and receiving Israeli money to hold the ground it is standing on. This is the one body allocating to both its center and its rim at once, which is what a people does when it has stopped pretending the diaspora’s continuity is somebody else’s budget line. The aliyah figure is the threat environment of the prior entries converted into a moving van, and the NIS 200 million is Jerusalem conceding that not everyone is coming and the schools have to be worth keeping. Whether a government initiative routed through a federation system can move faster than the vocabulary radicalizing the campuses those students attend is the test the money has not yet passed.

📚 Long Brief: The Long Brief: The Inverted Body — The Western-aliyah surge and the NIS 200 million for Diaspora schools, moving in opposite directions on the map and the same direction in the ledger, are the one-transnational-body argument this Long Brief builds in full — a people that allocates to its political center and its distributed rim at once, against a diaspora institutional class still budgeting as if continuity were somebody else’s line item.

Briefly Noted

Frontline & Security

Arutz Sheva: The Gideonim unit pulled a senior Tanzim arms dealer out of his bed in Balata overnight, a man the IDF and Yamam had missed on several prior attempts and who the Shin Bet flagged as days from an attack. The grade of target the army keeps reaching one operative at a time is the buildup it cannot let mature into northern Samaria’s version of Gaza.
Jerusalem Post: Montenegrin police and the FBI arrested an Iranian-Turkish national wanted in New York for hacking that hit more than 150 American universities for an estimated $3.4 billion, work prosecutors trace to the IRGC.

Diplomacy & Geopolitics

JNS: A House Appropriations provision from Rosa DeLauro directs the Pentagon to report within 30 days on whether US-supplied weapons are being used in violation of the Gaza ceasefire. The oversight clause is draftable in advance of any finding — the instrument waiting for the appropriations vehicle, not a response to anything on the ground.
JNS: The House Education and Workforce Committee advanced three bills on campus Jew-hate and university BDS, including a Stefanik measure forcing schools to publish Title VI complaint investigations.
Times of Israel: Israel is readying an aid delegation to earthquake-stricken Venezuela as NATAN, ZAKA and IsraAid mobilize — a deployment Jerusalem is preparing for a regime that severed relations and runs one of the hemisphere’s most reliable anti-Israel lines.

Public Diplomacy & Media

Algemeiner: Senator Chris Van Hollen endorsed Abdul El-Sayed, the anti-Israel candidate in Michigan’s Senate race, joining Sanders and the UAW behind a campaign built on hostility to the Jewish state.
Times of Israel: The Israel Football Association says it will keep chasing World Cup qualification through UEFA, declining to return to the Asian confederation that the Arab-led boycotts forced it out of in 1974, even as match-day protest flags follow the team across Europe.

Domestic & Law

Ynet: Jerusalem’s municipality approved handing the landmark Bikur Cholim hospital building on Rehov HaNevi’im — one of the city’s 110 protected monuments — to a Slonim hasidic girls’ school, over the Council for Conservation’s objection.
Arutz Sheva: A woman passed a Chief Rabbinate certification exam for the first time, in the laws of mourning, after the High Court ruled women must be permitted to sit the tests.
Times of Israel: Israel extradited Israeli-American businessman Michael Fein to the US to face a $28 million bank- and wire-fraud indictment over Missouri and Oklahoma apartment deals, the approval signed by Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu acting in the justice minister’s place.

Economy, Tech & Infrastructure

Globes: Rafael signed a Spyder air-defense deal with Romania worth over €2 billion, the second-largest defense sale in Israeli history after IAI’s Arrow 3 to Germany.
Globes: US neocloud firm Crusoe leased another 100 megawatts of data-center space across three Israeli sites, bringing its commitment here to $10 billion over 10-15 years.
Globes: Anduril’s cofounder and CEO Brian Schimpf brings a delegation to Israel this week to sell command-and-control systems to the Defense Ministry, with three retired generals interviewing to run its Israeli operation.
Jerusalem Post: The Eastern Rail Line opened for partial service with three new stations, the first new commercial line since 2018 and the first to run through Arab towns long starved of decent transit. Israel Railways puts the eventual capacity gain at roughly 30%.

Culture, Religion & Society

JTA: Texas approved the nation’s first statewide K-12 required-reading list 9-5, mandating Anne Frank’s diary alongside Bible passages.
Jerusalem Post: A 2,700-year-old standing stone at Tel Eton, deliberately decommissioned and buried, may be the first physical trace of Hezekiah’s religious centralization — the biblical reform turning up in a private Judean residence, where the archaeological floor is, as ever, closer than people think.

Developments to Watch

Northern Front (Lebanon / Syria)

Hezbollah braces to hit a soldier the deal cannot cover — Security officials assess Hezbollah may strike IDF forces in the security zone in answer to the framework Qassem has rejected, with the group judged to be “losing it” over a page Beirut signed and the rifles never agreed to. LIKELY TO ESCALATE
Europe moves to staff the zone Israel will not vacate — European capitals are circulating a post-UNIFIL replacement force for southern Lebanon as Zamir approves continued operations and ties any withdrawal to a disarmament no Lebanese court or rifle can deliver.

Regional Axis (Iran, Houthis, Militias)

Vance opens a direct line to the IRGC in Doha — The Vice President disclosed that CENTCOM officers will sit with Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps officials in Qatar, a first contact dressed as tension-reduction. Washington is now talking soldier-to-soldier with the body that fired on Bahrain and Kuwait this weekend, and a standing channel to the IRGC is the structure that lets the regime answer each Gulf strike with a meeting and never a cost.
Tehran hooks the Lebanon page to a wider bargain — Iran’s foreign ministry tied its compliance on the southern Lebanon front to “broader regional agreements,” folding Beirut’s framework into the same ledger as Hormuz and the nuclear track. The regime is pricing every front against every other, which leaves the soldier in the zone hostage to a deal being haggled three capitals away.
Iran warns ships off “unauthorized” Hormuz routes — Tehran told vessels that crossings outside the lanes it administers are “dangerous,” the same warning that produced this weekend’s tanker strike and the CENTCOM answer.
Baghdad rounds up Iran’s men as Araghchi flies in — Iraqi special forces raided the Green Zone to arrest politicians tied to Iran-backed militias, an effort the new government frames for Washington’s benefit, hours before Araghchi arrives to “discuss regional developments.”

Home Front & Politics

Ben-Gvir moves to kill the Lebanon deal in cabinet — The National Security Minister called the framework “a big mistake” and demanded a full cabinet vote, having been refused once already.

The signatures accumulated faster than the enforcement all spring, and the bill keeps arriving in the worst ways. A platoon commander near Deir Siryan, a Gulf capital under Iranian fire, a Jaffa kindergarten 150 meters from a car bomb, a Jewish congressman unseated by the word genocide in his own party’s primary — these are the costs of the frameworks-for-show. Jerusalem reaches for what’s left: recognition Ankara cannot answer, a targeting deck that closes the gap one folder at a time, two hundred million shekels for schools in the diaspora.

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

A “ninety-day” order that Basic Law keeps alive for six months is the most honest thing the coalition has published this month, and nobody is supposed to read the fine print. Read it with us.