Trump spent a day walking back the twenty-percent transit fee and replaced it with a blockade of every Iranian port, with the power plants and the bridges promised for next week. The strait is open to everyone but the state that spent months announcing it shut. Trump also used a phone call to tell Netanyahu to pull out of southern Syria and Lebanon — the ground his own delegation sat over in Rome yesterday. At home, with three days left, the coalition is spending its majority on the things that outlive it: an arrest freeze that runs past the election, a hundred and three communities unsealed, and a manslaughter conviction sent to the president's desk.

Flash Brief: The Day in 90 Seconds or Less

• Hormuz: Trump scraps the transit toll for a blockade of every Iranian port and promises power plants next. See The War Today.
• Syria and Lebanon: Trump tells Netanyahu to pull back as the sixth round of Israel-Lebanon talks opens in Rome. See The War Today.
• Gaza: Hamas asks a blockaded Tehran for money and cover as a strike kills four Jabaliya operatives. See The War Today.
• Draft law: The arrest freeze passes 58-54, Zamir refuses to sign mass exemptions, and Haskel resigns. See Inside Israel.
• Sovereignty: Smotrich unseals two cabinet decisions held back to spare Washington, putting 103 approved communities on the record. See Inside Israel.
• Azaria: Katz asks Herzog to expunge the manslaughter conviction three days before the Knesset dissolves. See Inside Israel.
• US aid: Jeffries kills Massie's $3.3 billion cut and writes its argument into the 2028 memorandum. See Israel and the World.
• Hasbara: The Foreign Ministry pays Brad Parscale $1.5 million a month to work Trump's base, and loses ground. See Israel and the World.
• Khalil: Mahmoud Khalil sues Betar, Canary Mission, and Heritage under the 1871 Ku Klux Klan Act. See Israel and the World.
• ICC: Britain's bar keeps Karim Khan suspended nine days before the court votes on removing him. See Briefly Noted.
• Iran: A New York Times account of a Mossad effort to groom Ahmadinejad surfaces, and former officers doubt it. See Developments to Watch.

Washington owns most of what moved today, and Israel is being told. What Jerusalem still controls, it is converting into concrete and statute — the two forms a successor cannot undo with a memo. And where Israel does still hold an instrument, it keeps turning up in someone else's hand: Jeffries makes the case for ending the American subsidy by quoting Netanyahu back to him, and the Foreign Ministry's own media buy financed the charge it was hired to refute.

The War Today

Trump Drops the Hormuz Toll and Closes Every Iranian Port Instead

Trump scrapped the twenty-percent Hormuz transit fee a day after announcing it, and replaced it with what he called a full blockade of every vessel moving to or from an Iranian port. The reversal came out of "highly productive conversations with Middle East leadership," the fee traded for Gulf trade and investment deals he attached no country and no figure to. "The Strait of Hormuz is open to all ship traffic except for Iran," he wrote. CENTCOM opened a seven-hour wave against missile and drone sites, naval assets and coastal defenses down the southern coast — a fourth consecutive day — and the blockade took effect at four in the afternoon Eastern. Nineteen American warships now sit in the Arabian Sea, two carriers and an amphibious ship carrying more than a thousand Marines among them. Tehran answered where it can reach. The IRGC claimed a simultaneous missile and drone run that destroyed storage sheds at Isa Air Base in Bahrain and hit the MQ-9 ramp at Ali Salem in Kuwait, and said Hormuz stays shut until America "ends its aggression." Kuwait's air defenses engaged five cruise missiles, one ballistic missile and thirty-three drones overnight, shrapnel fell across the country, and a Kuwaiti naval vessel took a hit that wounded four sailors. Bahrain's sirens ran at eight in the evening and again at three in the morning. Jordan downed three Iranian ballistic missiles over the kingdom after downing four the night before, while the Guards' own channels claimed roughly fifteen got through to Jordanian bases. Adm. Brad Cooper put Iranian attacks at seven commercial ships in seven days, with nearly a dozen crew killed, missing or injured. The IRGC then widened the threat, warning that regional energy exports will be "for everyone or for no one" and hinting it could send the Houthis to close Bab el-Mandeb. Trump promised the strikes run nightly and then escalate: "next week comes the power plants. Next week comes the bridges," unless Tehran negotiates. He declined to rule out a ground operation, saying "we have someone who will do it for us." Iranian officials put the latest round at two killed and more than 260 wounded, and a government spokesman claimed more than thirty civilians killed across recent nights. American munitions also reportedly hit a wheat silo at Hoveyzeh and a bottled-water plant at Dehloran. In Haifa, Michael Katz, 82, died of the wounds an Iranian ballistic missile gave him in April, three months in hospital and the fifth death from the strike that took his building.

Trump Tells Netanyahu to Leave Syria and Lebanon as Rome Convenes

Trump used a phone call last Thursday to press Netanyahu to begin pulling Israeli troops out of southern Syria and Lebanon, warning that the Syrian deployment invites escalation. "They don't want you there. You should redeploy." Netanyahu pushed back on security grounds, and IDF sources said the account surprised them and that nothing has changed on the ground. Washington had spent months seeking an Israel-Syria security agreement before concluding Netanyahu would not meet its terms, a pullout among them. Al-Sharaa — who commanded al-Qaeda's Nusra Front until 2016 and whose forces the UN documents killing Druze in Sweida — told Trump that Israel is blocking regional stability by refusing to withdraw. The sixth round of Israel-Lebanon talks opened yesterday in Rome, at the US embassy, Ambassador Leiter leading the Israeli delegation, focused on the pilot zone the Lebanese army is to take over as the IDF steps back. Sa'ar says Israel is ready to move. Beirut wants both designated areas transferred on a schedule. Jerusalem insists the second waits on results in the first, and Lebanon's deputy prime minister Tarek Mitri said the framework "contains no reference" to any withdrawal timeline, adding that "Washington is the sponsor and not the mediator in these talks." An American official called the day productive and said the sides would continue. Lebanon separately arrested a "high-level agent" close to Hezbollah on charges of spying for Israel. Netanyahu is expected to fly to Washington on Saturday night seeking his first meeting with Trump since February 11, with no meeting yet on the books. At Ben Gurion, the Americans froze the removal of their refueling tankers as the exchange with Iran escalated, and Regev capped them at twenty planes and sent the rest to air force bases, with as many as 50,000 summer tickets at risk.

📚 Closed Dossier: The Permission Layer — Netanyahu flying to Washington to argue for a security zone the president has now told him twice to hand back is the specific claim this Dossier develops — that the war's durable product is a split in which Israel keeps the capability and Jerusalem loses the decision to use it.

Hamas Asks a Blockaded Tehran to Underwrite the Rebuild

A delegation under political bureau chief Mohammed Ismail Darwish met Araghchi and Ghalibaf on the sidelines of Khamenei's funeral on July 4 and handed Tehran a list of demands: money, help rebuilding military capability, and Iran as a "diplomatic safety net" that would fold Hamas's terms into the Iranian negotiation with Washington. The enforcement went on regardless. In northern Gaza the air force killed Mohammed Marwan Salem, whom the army identifies as head of military security for Hamas's Central Jabaliya Battalion and whom the Hamas-run interior ministry buried as the colonel commanding the Jabaliya police station. Three died with him — Abd al-Malek Abu al-Jabin, a Nukhba operative who ran the investigations department of the Hamas police, Yaman Mohammed Jibril Ubaid, and Ghassan Akram Salama Dakas of the Western Jabaliya Battalion, also on the police roster. Gaza health officials put that strike at seven or eight dead, a woman among them. The day before, a strike in Gaza City killed Osama Naim Hamdi Shamlakh, a cell commander who spent the war rebuilding Hamas's naval force. Palestinian medical officials reported a ten-year-old boy, Muataz Abu Shaar, shot in Rafah, and four members of the Abu Qassem family killed in a helicopter strike on their home in Deir el-Balah, none of it corroborated beyond Gaza sourcing. Mahmoud Al-Habbash, Abbas's own advisor on religious affairs, went on Al-Arabiya and dismissed the government dissolution outright: "a Hamas committee handing over to a Hamas committee. Is this a joke?... an attempt at deception and a maneuver." The UN's deputy special coordinator Ramez Kabrouv accused Hamas of armed raids on aid distribution centers in Jabaliya and described a pattern of intimidation and diversion, which Hamas called law enforcement.

Inside Israel

The Arrest Freeze Passes 58-54 as Zamir Refuses and Haskel Quits

Sharren Haskel resigned as deputy foreign minister minutes after voting against the arrest freeze, which passed 58 to 54 yesterday. The law halts arrests, investigations and prosecutions of haredi draft evaders until late January 2027, extends that protection to men who become eligible after it takes effect, and suspends the criminal proceedings already open. Some 72,000 men were liable to arrest until it passed, by the attorney general's own May count. Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir had written to Netanyahu, Israel Katz and Boaz Bismuth asking them to strike the clause handing the army the job of deciding which yeshiva students qualify for protection: the bill "provides an incentive not to report for military service," it is "clearly and unequivocally inconsistent with the needs of the IDF," and "the IDF will not sign mass exemptions." Bismuth answered by questioning the letter's timing. Netanyahu walked out of the plenum after the opposition shouted "shame" at him and was absent when his name was called, his third missed vote after the Basic Law and the October 7 commission bill. Haskel left Gideon Sa'ar a letter — "You lied to me, you lied to the people of Israel" — and asked the House Committee to recognize her as a single-member faction, a step the law's one-third threshold does not appear to permit her. Yuli Edelstein, Dan Illouz and Moshe Solomon also voted against. Michal Woldiger and Ofir Sofer were absent. Yesh Atid, Yisrael Beiteinu and the Movement for Quality Government petitioned the High Court within the hour, and haredi MKs warned that any intervention would bring mass civil unrest. Katz voted in favor, and Goldknopf came across the floor to shake his hand. Sagit Afik required haredi MKs to declare relatives facing enforcement proceedings. They declared none. The army is short roughly 12,000 soldiers, about 7,500 of them combat. Outside a Hashmonaim Brigade squad-commanders' ceremony, protesters chanted "we will die and not enlist" at the graduates and went for the car of Lt. Col. (res.) Yossi Levy, who escorts haredi soldiers. One of them told a haredi fighter the Torah does not protect him and he would burn in Gaza. Shavut Ra'anan, a founder of the Reservists' Wives Forum, called the law a chillul HaShem and said the parties her members have backed for years sold the IDF for political survival. Haredi officials reportedly expect Bagatz to strike the law down and want only to reach the end of bein hazmanim without arrests, which is what the rabbis have been arranging for months by keeping students in the batei midrash.

Smotrich Unseals Two Cabinet Decisions Held Back to Spare Washington

The government disclosed two security cabinet decisions yesterday that it had kept from publication. In March the cabinet approved 34 new communities in Judea and Samaria, joining 69 approved earlier in this government's term for a total of 103. Last month it voted NIS 1.3 billion for pioneer neighborhoods at those sites — prefabricated homes, roads, water and power — and last night it added NIS 1.075 billion to pave the roads connecting them. Both earlier decisions were withheld to avoid embarrassing the United States during the tensions running with Washington at the time. The communities sit at strategic points across Samaria (nine), Binyamin (seven), the Jordan Valley (seven), Gush Etzion (six), the South Hebron Hills (four) and the Megillot regional council (one). Mitzpe Yair and Yishuv HaDa'at are legalized. Smotrich and Settlements Minister Orit Strock announced the details together, calling it a day of celebration and the largest settlement decision in the history of Zionism. Smotrich initiated the proposal with Katz, and said the budgets exist so the decisions "will not stay on paper but will take shape on the ground."

Katz Asks Herzog to Erase Elor Azaria's Manslaughter Conviction

Defense Minister Israel Katz wrote to President Isaac Herzog yesterday backing Elor Azaria's request to have his criminal record expunged. Azaria shot Abdel Fattah al-Sharif in the head at close range in Hebron in March 2016, minutes after al-Sharif and a second terrorist stabbed a soldier in Tel Rumeida and while al-Sharif lay wounded on the ground. A military court convicted him of manslaughter in 2017 and sentenced him to 18 months. Then chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot cut it to 14, a parole board took off a third more, and Azaria walked after nine. Katz cited Azaria's record as a combat medic before the shooting, the decade since, and the sentence served, and argued that October 7 put the circumstances Israeli soldiers have operated in "in broader context." Granting the request, he wrote, "does not erase what happened" but expresses the principle of rehabilitation.

Israel and the World

Jeffries Opposes the Aid Cut and Writes Its Argument Into 2028

The House votes today on Thomas Massie's amendment stripping $3.3 billion of the $3.8 billion Washington sends Israel every year, leaving only the $500 million for missile defense. Republican votes will kill it. Hakeem Jeffries told his caucus he will vote no, calling the amendment overly broad and a brake on the fight against Hamas and Hezbollah. He then declined to whip anyone, citing "good faith reasons that will result in Members voting in a variety of different ways." His letter demands a "major reset," blames the "far-right Netanyahu government" for isolating Israel, calls for American support for the creation of a Palestinian state, asks for sanctions and criminal liability against Israelis in Judea and Samaria, and writes direct military subsidy out of the memorandum that replaces this one in 2028. "Israel has an advanced economy and is capable of paying for its own sophisticated weapons, as the Prime Minister recently acknowledged." Greg Casar, who chairs the Progressive Caucus, sent a competing letter hours later urging Democrats to vote for the cut, invoking the Hamas-run ministry's undifferentiated 70,000. AIPAC and J Street both lobbied against Massie, who lost his primary in May over this issue and says he will not fund "genocide." Senate Democrats voted in lockstep last night to block the motion opening debate on the 2027 defense authorization, Jack Reed refusing to advance "a bill that enables an ongoing war against Iran that Congress never authorized."

Jerusalem Rented a MAGA Network and Bought the Charge Against Itself

Time reported yesterday that Israel's Foreign Ministry is paying Brad Parscale $1.5 million a month to work Trump's base. The ad agency Havas signed Parscale's Clock Tower X last September, and the FARA filings carry the terms. The contract sets a hundred original pieces of content a month, at least eighty percent of it aimed at Gen Z across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and podcasts. It guarantees fifty million impressions, pushed through the Salem Media Network, where Parscale is chief strategy officer. He also promised to move how ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini describe Israel and the war. Publicly the contract fought online antisemitism. A Foreign Ministry official gave Time the working objective: stopping young conservatives from turning against Israel. Three people familiar with the operation describe conservative influencers taking suggested phrasings in private group chats and drawing payment against the impressions their posts generated. After the June 17 memorandum with Iran, a senior American official watched MAGA accounts denounce the ceasefire in near-identical language, collected the screenshots, and traced them to Parscale. Parscale denies any effort against Trump and calls the charge that he worked to prolong the war completely false. He sold himself as uniquely wired into the president's world. He has reportedly not spoken to Trump in more than five years. Netanyahu's office declined to comment, and the White House says it was unaware of the campaign. Pew now puts favorable American views of the Israeli government at 32 percent, the lowest in decades, with 57 percent of young Republicans — the contract's named target — unfavorable, up from 50 the year before. "We have paid him lots of money," an Israeli official told Time. "But what did he do with it? Things have only gotten worse."

Khalil Turns an 1871 Klan Statute on the Groups That Documented Him

Mahmoud Khalil sued in Manhattan federal court yesterday under the Ku Klux Klan Act, the 1871 anti-conspiracy statute Congress wrote to stop government officials from working with vigilantes and last reached for against the organizers of the 2017 Charlottesville march. The complaint names Betar USA, Canary Mission, and the Heritage Foundation alongside Marco Rubio, Stephen Miller, former DHS secretary Kristi Noem, and acting Attorney General Todd Blanche. It casts Heritage's Project Esther — a 2024 plan for fighting Jew-hate — as the "blueprint for the conspiracy," and alleges Betar and Canary Mission "nominated" campus activists whom DHS and ICE then arrested within a day or two. Khalil, the Columbia protest leader immigration officers arrested in March 2025, spent 104 days in a Louisiana jail and holds a stay blocking his deportation while the case moves toward the Supreme Court. At a press conference at New York City Hall he said "the state of Israel and the Zionist organizations in this country that operate on behalf of Israel" know their conduct "cannot survive honest scrutiny," so they "brand criticism of a government as hatred of a people" and "rebrand documented atrocities as debates." The Center for Constitutional Rights filed for him. Betar USA has already agreed to halt its New York operations under a settlement with state Attorney General Letitia James, whose office found the group ran a "campaign of violence, harassment, and intimidation" against Arab, Muslim, and Jewish New Yorkers.

Briefly Noted

Frontline & Security

• JNS: An IDF military court sentenced a serving conscript to five years for selling an Iranian handler two videos of Israel's air defenses intercepting missiles overhead — a handler who found him on Telegram in 2025 with an offer of paid "photography assignments." The court came down from the seven years prosecutors asked because he passed nothing from his own duties and reported the contact himself.
• Jerusalem Post: Central Arava Regional Council head Meir Tzur says the Jordan border is a torn wire fence nobody patrols — "any citizen can cross, they don't even have to jump" — and a military source concedes the IDF catches about half the weapons crossing it. The sensored fence meant to replace it is not due before 2028.
• Ynet: The Air Force is raising Col. "G.," 42, to brigadier-general and sending her to Washington as air attaché — the first woman it has promoted to the rank, after she took its first female squadron command in 2019 and its first female base command in 2024. In a 2020 interview she put it plainly: "I compare myself to my peers, not to other women."

Diplomacy & Geopolitics

• Times of Israel: Britain's Bar Standards Board upheld its June suspension of Karim Khan, keeping the ICC's chief prosecutor barred from practicing law in his own country nine days before the Assembly of States Parties votes on removing him — the man who signed the Netanyahu warrant heading to that ballot as a lawyer his own bar will not let into a courtroom.
• Jerusalem Post: Germany told Brussels that any EU move to boycott or tighten trade terms with Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria is a foreign-policy question needing all 27 capitals — the threshold Kallas has spent months trying to route around, and the one the measure does not have.
• Israel Hayom: The Palestinian Authority went to UNESCO for recognition of Solomon's Pools — the Herodian reservoirs that watered the Second Temple — as a Palestinian heritage site, days after Central Command blocked a mosque cornerstone ceremony on the grounds. The heritage group Shomrim al HaNetzach wrote Netanyahu that five sites are registered already and 24 more are queued, Herodion and the Hasmonean palaces among them.
• Jewish Insider: Mike Lawler and Josh Gottheimer introduced a bill giving the State Department 180 days to produce a plan for dismantling UNRWA and handing off its portfolio, with implementation to begin within a year of that filing. The clause requiring that "no interruption of critical humanitarian services" occur in the transition is what decides whether this is a wind-down or a rebrand.

Public Diplomacy & Media

• The JC: BBC chair Samir Shah's annual report names the Glastonbury "death to the IDF" broadcast and the Gaza documentary fronted by a Hamas official's son among the failures that "affect confidence in our journalism." Shah's list files them between a Panorama edit and an un-bleeped tic at the Bafta awards.
• JNS: The IDF handed JNS the standing closure orders for the ground where Ro Khanna says armed "settlers" detained him at gunpoint — a military zone since February 2025, extended through 2027 — and Huckabee put on the record that the embassy Khanna thanked for the rescue heard nothing until after his vehicle was stopped. The armed civilians were reservists on leave, and the soldiers who answered their call checked the vehicle and waved it through.
• Times of Israel: Pro-Palestinian activists — who have picketed Michael Solomonov's Philadelphia restaurants since the group gave $100,000 to United Hatzalah after October 7 — claimed his six closures as a boycott victory. Co-owner Steve Cook puts the closures down to inflation and a saturated fast-casual market, and says every protest the campaign staged produced a short-term jump in business.

Domestic & Law

• Times of Israel: The Knesset voted 46-41 to hand kosher certification back to the Chief Rabbinate alone. Shas collected the repeal a week after the Rabbinate, under court order, appeared to recognize Tzohar.
• Israel Hayom: The Knesset scrapped the 10,000-resident threshold and let the interior minister seat a local council before anyone lives there. Nine new communities between Mevo'ot Arad and Route 25 get the municipality first, the residents after.
• Jerusalem Post: The High Court voided Yehuda Eliyahu's Israel Land Authority appointment over his "high degree of connection" to Smotrich. Eliyahu must now prove a "substantial relevant advantage" over candidates who lack a minister's acquaintance.

Economy, Tech & Infrastructure

• JNS: Moody's held Israel at Baa1 with a stable outlook, projecting 3.7% growth this year if the ceasefires hold. Downgrade triggers include a judiciary "weaker than expected" after the reforms — the legal guild's case as a credit opinion.
• Globes: Tokyo picked Tower Semiconductor to lead a government-backed expansion of its Japanese silicon-photonics fabs. Tower's 2028 revenue target jumped from $2.8 billion to $3.6 billion — the AI buildout arriving on an Israeli balance sheet.
• Jerusalem Post: American tankers parked at Ben Gurion have crowded the airport so badly that Israir left a new wide-body in Larnaca. The Transport Ministry has frozen further American arrivals — the Air Force has had bases available all along.

Culture, Religion & Society

• Algemeiner: A painting of Amsterdam's Nieuwe Kerk interior, pulled off a municipal trash pile by a passerby who then kept it in his cellar for years, carried a "Collectie Goudstikker" label on the back tying it to the roughly 1,400 works the Nazis took from the Dutch-Jewish dealer Jacques Goudstikker — the third recovered since last year, after one found in the home of a Dutch Waffen-SS commander's granddaughter and one spotted in an Argentine real-estate listing. The Dutch government returned two hundred of them in 2006 and has been letting the rest surface on its own ever since.
• Ynet: Ben-Gurion House released a rare recording of Isser Harel, the Shin Bet's first chief, recounting the warning Washington sent on the eve of the declaration: George Marshall's message that the Arab armies would attack and Israel had no chance of holding, and that the United States would not lift a finger. Harel's verdict, delivered to a room of students years later, was that had Ben-Gurion heeded it there would be no state.
• Times of Israel: Tel Aviv University's Eshbal Ratzon argues in Tarbiz that the Qumran sect genuinely ran its 364-day calendar, the one that slips a month every twenty-four years, until the drift grew indefensible and a Hasmonean king who shared its halachic instincts made a return to Jerusalem's reckoning painless. She reads the original schism as a political and personal rivalry dressed as a dispute over the festivals, abandoned without a single scroll conceding there had ever been a problem.

Developments to Watch

Northern Front (Lebanon / Syria)

• A Turkish warship ties up in Syria — A Turkish naval vessel reportedly docked at a Syrian port, the first such call in fifteen years. Al-Sharaa's navy hosted it. Whether Ankara converts the call into a standing presence decides how much coastline Israel has to plan around.

Regional Axis (Iran, Houthis, Militias)

• A memorial its convener skipped — Iranian-aligned media put Tehran's memorial for Ali Khamenei on Mojtaba's invitation, and Mojtaba did not come. His brothers did, the eldest reportedly speaking in a leader's register. The regime can produce the successor's name but not the successor.
• Baghdad promises to disarm what it cannot — Standing beside Trump, al-Zaidi pledged that no militia keeps weapons past September 30. Trump answered that American troops are not needed in Iraq at all. The militias already refused Baghdad through intermediaries, so the withdrawal buys a disarmament nobody has agreed to.
• Israel's man in Tehran is on the front page — The New York Times laid out a years-long Mossad effort to groom Ahmadinejad for a post-regime Iran. Former Israeli intelligence officers do not credit the account. Tehran says the Guards hold him under house arrest, and he surfaced twice this week smiling and waving. Real or not, it is public now, and the strikes have no political endgame behind them.
• Europe's regulator closes the Gulf's sky — EASA told airlines to avoid the airspace of Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, the UAE and the Gulf of Oman. It listed Iran, Iraq and Lebanon last week. The monarchies that spent a decade accommodating Tehran now share an advisory with the states being bombed.

Diplomatic & Legal

• Washington warns Britain's next prime minister — The State Department says bans on goods from Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria "subvert US interests." Andy Burnham has said he is weighing one, and he can now open his premiership in a fight with Trump.

Home Front & Politics

• Both sides take the street today — Some 140 haredi men report to enlist this morning. The Eda Haredit is protesting outside the draft offices, its posters calling enlistment a gzeirat shmad. Hundreds of pre-conscription teens carry stretchers to the Knesset today. The exemption is law now, and the protest is aimed at the volunteers.

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