Wednesday, July 29 — Mitzpe Institute

Iran fired ballistic missiles onto an American base in Jordan last night, and American and Saudi aircraft answered two hours later on militia depots across seven Iraqi provinces. Every round in that exchange landed on somebody else's ground. None of it came at Israel, and Washington is still withholding approval for the Iranian energy targets Jerusalem wants. What the country governs on its own it spent the day contesting with itself — the defense minister voided the restraining order his Central Command chief then went to court to keep, and the bench held the haredi arrest freeze suspended while enlistment climbs on the enforcement the coalition legislated against.

Flash Brief: The Day in 90 Seconds or Less

Iran: Tehran fires missiles at a Jordanian base hosting Americans, and American and Saudi jets answer across seven Iraqi provinces. See The War Today.
Lebanon: A Hezbollah drone hits an IDF vehicle on the ridge the ceasefire keeps Israeli ground troops from taking. See The War Today.
Gaza: The cabinet grants the stabilization force legal immunity as Rafah rehabilitation opens with no condition on Hamas's weapons. See The War Today.
Judea and Samaria: Katz voids an administrative restraining order his Central Command chief and the prosecution go to court to keep. See Inside Israel.
Haredi draft: Enlistment passes 4,000 for the year as the High Court keeps the arrest-freeze law suspended. See Inside Israel.
Press attacks: A masked man puts bricks and a death threat through Channel 12's doors, and the Shin Bet joins the case. See Inside Israel.
The Netherlands: The widest European ban yet reaches the Golan and can jail a Dutch citizen who buys beyond the Green Line. See Israel and the World.
Rome: Twenty-five delegations open the two-state alliance's first working session and adjourn it into a seminar on interfaith dialogue. See Israel and the World.
ICC polling: Forty-nine percent of Americans want Netanyahu arrested on the warrant, ahead of the 47 percent who call him guilty. See Israel and the World.
Diaspora: Seven countries count twenty Jews murdered in a year, the deadliest for the diaspora since the 1994 AMIA bombing. See Israel and the World.
New York: Mamdani seats eighteen judicial screeners with no Jew among them, in a city where Jews absorb half the hate crimes. See Israel and the World.

Nothing came off the table today except where somebody physically took it off. Israeli engineers pulled a 55-meter Hezbollah command route out of the ground at Haddatha, and in the pilot zones Israel handed to the Lebanese army no prosecutor has yet signed a single house-search warrant. Amsterdam wrote six years in prison into an ordinance that never reached the floor of the States General, and the twenty-five delegations that convened in Rome to deliver a Palestinian state produced a stocktaking.

The War Today

Iran Breaks the Pause at a Jordanian Base and Pays in Iraq

The IRGC fired ballistic missiles from Iranian soil at the Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan at 5:45 p.m. Eastern, the first Iranian fire at American forces since Trump halted the bombing over the weekend, and CENTCOM reported every missile intercepted with Jordan counting five. Two hours later American and Saudi aircraft hit Popular Mobilization Forces logistics and weapons sites across seven Iraqi provinces, from Basra to Nineveh, an answer CENTCOM tied to more than thirty IRGC-directed drone attacks in seventy-two hours and to six hundred against American personnel and facilities since February. The militia umbrella claims twenty of its fighters killed and thirty-two wounded, having first put eight dead in Nineveh, and the wire services carry no independent count. Trump promised to "beat the fing s" out of Iran and said the strikes were coordinated with Baghdad, which Iraq's National Security Council answered by condemning them in emergency session and stating that security concerns inside Iraq are the Iraqi government's to handle. Muqtada al-Sadr told the militias to stop launching from Iraqi ground, and Harakat Hezbollah al-Nujaba promised consequences for American and Saudi interests. Riyadh says the drones that came at its eastern oilfields launched from Iraq, the militias deny it, Baghdad has opened an inquiry and asked the Saudis for imagery or wreckage, and the Houthis have claimed the Aramco strikes as their own. Iranian state media claimed an American missile hit an uninhabited stretch near Piranshahr in West Azerbaijan with no casualties, the first reported American strike on Iranian soil since the halt and one Washington has not confirmed. Tehran is expected within weeks to take delivery of the first of up to 400 Chinese shoulder-fired air-defense launchers, QW-12 and FN-16, bought for sixty to seventy million dollars through a Hong Kong intermediary and flown out of Urumqi through Pakistan, with Beijing calling the account groundless and Islamabad calling it concocted.

Assessment Every missile in this exchange lands on somebody else's ground. Iran fires from its own territory at an American base in Jordan, Washington and Riyadh answer inside Iraq, and the one country in the region nobody is shooting at is the one American jets take off from — Katz said as much at the Channel 14 defense conference, along with the disclosure that Washington is still withholding approval for the Iranian energy targets Israel wants. Riyadh struck the address it could reach. The Houthis claimed the Aramco strikes themselves, and Bab el-Mandeb is a harder place to bomb than a militia headquarters in Nineveh. [The base Iran missed last night is the one where its fire killed two Americans twelve days ago.] A regime that cannot cover its own airspace is restocking it with four hundred Chinese launchers routed overland through Pakistan, arriving inside the halt Trump extended to let the talks run.

Hezbollah Puts a Drone on the Ridge

An explosive drone hit an unmanned IDF engineering vehicle overnight at the Ali al-Taher ridge inside the security zone north of Beaufort, the first time Hezbollah has put an aerial munition on an Israeli vehicle since the framework took force. Nobody was hurt, and Northern Command is weighing a response. Dozens of Hezbollah operatives remain underground beneath that ridge, in a complex the air force could not reach earlier in the war and the ceasefire has kept ground troops from taking. The demolition work went on around it. The 401st Brigade's combat team under the 91st Division, with the 601st Engineering Battalion and Yahalom, destroyed a 55-meter Hezbollah command route with three rooms dug under a construction-materials plant in Haddatha, three hundred meters from a UNIFIL building, and a shaft nearby held dozens of weapons. Troops seized Kalashnikovs, RPGs, explosives and grenades across the zone in recent days and fired on a man who kept advancing on their position at Ras el-Bayada after warning shots. Israel has told mediators it will agree to no further withdrawals when the delegations meet in Rome on August 4. In the pilot zones Israel handed to the Lebanese army, no prosecutor has yet authorized a single house search — Article 14 of the Lebanese constitution makes the home inviolable, and the prosecutor says he will sign nothing without solid evidence first — while Hezbollah's Islamic Health Organization works Zawtar al-Gharbiya in the open, recovering its own dead alongside the soldiers sent to replace it.

Israel Grants the Stabilization Force Immunity While Hamas Keeps Every Rifle

The security cabinet granted the international stabilization force legal immunity ahead of its entry into designated areas of the Strip on Sunday, opening with a Board of Peace rehabilitation pilot in Rafah that carries no condition on Hamas surrendering its weapons. The first tranche is roughly two hundred representatives from Uganda and Morocco, with Kosovar and Kazakh soldiers expected in the opening stage and talks running with Albania, Vietnam and Georgia. Political and security officials asked Washington to postpone the next phase to avoid giving back what the army has taken, and Washington refused. They warn the force will narrow the IDF's freedom to strike and let Hamas recover, while Israel holds the Yellow Line until the Strip is demilitarized. The head of the Eshkol Regional Council wrote to Netanyahu and the cabinet that no stage of rehabilitation should advance while Hamas keeps its military and governing capabilities. Vetting finished on a first class of five thousand police cadets drawn from two hundred thousand applications, to be trained abroad on no announced timetable. And the United States is taking over the tunnel work, with four new concrete plants going up on the Gaza border, the existing plants' workers told they now answer to the American administration for pay and control, and part of the output pouring the stabilization force's headquarters base near Re'im. Southern Command kept striking through all of it. An airstrike in Khan Yunis killed Muhammad Khalil Muhammad Aslam, the Islamic Jihad Nukhba platoon commander whose cell abducted Israelis on October 7, a precision strike in Deir al-Balah killed the head of Hamas's internal security service, and the air force dismantled weapons stores in central and northern Gaza including one built inside a mosque.

Inside Israel

Katz Voids the Restraining Order Bluth Went to Court to Keep

Israel Katz instructed the security services yesterday not to renew the administrative restraining order on Tal Yinon Dardik, citing defects in the way Central Command issued it on a Shin Bet recommendation, and said the problem would be handled by other means. Central Command chief Maj. Gen. Avi Bluth and the Jerusalem District Prosecution went to the Jerusalem District Court hours later to keep the order standing, against their minister's published position. Dardik is suspected of the March raid on Khirbet Humsa. The evidence places him at the scene but will not carry an indictment, so the case against him runs on his alleged breach of the order. He has held restriction orders since he was seventeen, has refused every custody alternative offered him including the ones ministers brought to his cell, and is three weeks into a hunger strike that put him in Hadassah Mount Scopus. Katz visited him there last week. The order runs to the end of the year either way. Police this morning arrested the masked man filmed in IDF uniform beating a Palestinian on the ground during the June rampage at Huwara — taken in northern Samaria by district detectives working with Border Police and the Shin Bet, his army-issued M16 and pistol seized. The IDF also detained three Bashan Pioneers activists who crossed into Syria near Mount Hermon, handed them to police, and said police have to prosecute in order to deter the next crossing. It was the fourth attempt in weeks, eight days after troops on the border held their fire when the drone feed showed peyot on the men they were about to strike.

Assessment Katz has the better of the legal argument and the worse of the timing. A military appeals committee found the order defective on its own terms, and the Khirbet Humsa evidence will not carry a charge. Underneath it sits the question of who sets enforcement policy in Judea and Samaria, and three weeks out from the Likud primary the minister answered it by overruling the general and the Shin Bet together. Honenu reads the appeal as officials fighting the elected level. Bluth is the general who has spent his tenure letting the farms and the northern Samaria communities go up, and he is now in a district court against his own minister. The arrests at Huwara and at the Hermon are Israel's answer to the "settler terrorism" charge that reached the White House this week on retired Israeli officers' letterhead.

Haredi Enlistment Hits Four Thousand as the Budget Reopens Mid-Recess

More than 4,000 haredi men enlisted in the year to July, about a thousand of them into combat, against 2,800 the year before, 2,200 in the war's first year and roughly 1,700 before the war — above the 3,500 the Manpower Directorate's own planning chief estimated to the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee a month ago. The army credits the arrest waves and the move from cutting institutions to sanctioning individuals. Hours after the figures surfaced, the nine-justice panel issued an interim order keeping the arrest-freeze law suspended and said judgment would follow shortly, after a ninety-minute hearing the government boycotted and the Knesset's own counsel told the bench there was no choice but to strike the law down. Shas's Council of Torah Sages published a ruling the same day that conscripting yeshiva students is absolutely forbidden and that the rulings of a court it accuses of persecuting Torah scholars carry no validity. Justice Mintz, the bench's most conservative member and himself Orthodox, told the haredi organization's representative arguing that position in court that he could not believe what he was hearing. The Finance Committee then convened this morning to move some NIS 16 billion, NIS 111 million of it to haredi education — NIS 85 million to institutions without full core studies and NIS 26 million to yeshiva students who dropped out.

Shin Bet Joins the Newsroom Attacks as the Ministers Stay Silent

A masked man put two bricks through the glass doors of Channel 12's Tel Aviv newsroom at 1:12 in the morning, the third smashed newsroom door in under a month across two outlets, after murder threats against journalists were sprayed on a wall nearby. He left a note beside the bricks demanding the station apologize for its Sde Teiman coverage, adding that an insincere apology would do, that "next time the brick will be directed at one of your heads," and that "in the end someone will die." The Shin Bet has now joined the investigation alongside the Tel Aviv district's crime unit. There are no prints on the bricks and no suspect in custody, the man arriving masked and gloved and leaving nothing forensic behind, and detectives are working area camera footage to trace his route in and out. Keshet's board wrote to David Zini, Baharav-Miara and Commissioner Danny Levy calling it an escalation of terror against the press, Herzog telephoned the commissioner, and Channel 12 put the responsibility on the government and the communications minister. No minister said anything.

Assessment A man who promises the next brick will find a head is running a terror campaign against Israeli journalists, and after three doors the police have no prints and no one in custody. The demand is an apology for Sde Teiman, which is the fight the coalition has run against Channel 12 in the Knesset all term, and every minister who can find a microphone for an unfriendly broadcast found none for this. The Shin Bet inherits the case while it stands up joint war rooms with the cyber directorate for October 27 and writes the opinions that decide who may appear on a ballot — Zini reassessed a list his predecessor had called a continuation of Kach, found a link to it instead, and the registrar cleared it to run. A service built to stop terror is being handed every domestic political question the political level will not answer itself. The Sde Teiman coverage earned an apology Channel 12 has never made, and the anger behind that demand is honestly come by. It buys nothing here. A masked man who leaves a note promising that in the end someone will die has forfeited the grievance he came to press, and nobody collects an apology in bricks and death threats. Our whole claim in this conflict rests on what we refuse to do when we are in the right, and a quarrel with a newsroom is not worth the smallest piece of it.

Israel and the World

The Dutch Ban Covers the Golan and Follows Buyers Home

The Netherlands' ban on goods from Israeli communities takes force on September 22, and its text runs wider than any other European state's. It reaches the Golan Heights as well as Judea and Samaria, which no other national ban does. The prohibition covers purchase and sale as well as import, closing the route through a second EU market, and catches any product carrying a component or ingredient from those areas. And it binds Dutch citizens wherever they stand: a Dutch national who knowingly buys beyond the Green Line while visiting Israel can be prosecuted on landing back home, with a maximum sentence of six years. The prohibition reaches the shopper as well as the shipment. A Dutch tourist who buys a bottle of Golan wine in a Jerusalem grocery, or a jar of honey from a roadside stand in Samaria, falls under the same prohibition as an importer moving pallets, and he carries it home with him. The center-left coalition passed it as an ordinance, without a debate in the States General. The ordinance reaches goods only, so the Amsterdam-based Booking.com keeps advertising hotels in those communities and on the Golan. This is the fourth national ban an EU member has imposed. Roughly 1% of Israeli exports originate in the communities, worth about $200 million a year to the EU, and the Netherlands takes about 5% of Israeli exports overall. The stated legal hook is the ICJ's July 2024 advisory opinion.

Assessment Two hundred million dollars a year is a rounding error. The statute is the asset, and the Dutch drafters supplied what the Irish and Spanish texts left out: the Golan, the resale leg, and a citizen who carries the prohibition through Ben Gurion in his hand luggage. The copy is worth having precisely because the Netherlands was never Ireland — it takes a twentieth of Israel's exports and never ran hostility to Israel as a national brand, so the next capital to lift the language can point at a mainstream trading partner instead of a declared opponent, and Burnham took office promising to consider one. What this costs Israel is the Dutch importer who reads six years of prison into a supply contract and stops buying Israeli at all. [This is insane. Six years in a Dutch prison for buying my favorite arak, from friends who run a distillery in Katsrin? No wonder the Jews of Amsterdam had to endure a Jew-hunt in 2024.]

Rome Convenes Twenty-Five Delegations for a State and Adjourns to Interfaith Dialogue

Twenty-five delegations opened the first working session of the Global Alliance on the Two-State Solution in Rome yesterday, co-chaired by Italy's Antonio Tajani and Saudi Foreign Minister Faisal bin Farhan, with the second day running today. The Arab League, the European Union, Turkey, Qatar and the Netherlands sat alongside representatives of "Palestine" and the UN, and Varsen Aghabekian, the Palestinian Authority's state minister for foreign affairs, took the ministerial segment. Italy's foreign ministry put the purpose as taking stock of the political process a year after the New York Declaration and finding synergies with Security Council Resolution 2803 and the Board of Peace, whose High Representative for Gaza coordinated the technical sessions on the 20-point plan. The two days close with a seminar on interfaith dialogue. In New York yesterday afternoon, Israel's UN ambassador Danny Danon asked the Security Council to designate Hamas a terrorist organization and sanction it, calling its refusal to disarm the obstacle to the plan Resolution 2803 endorsed. Ramiz Alakbarov, the deputy special coordinator for the Middle East peace process, told the Council no political process can succeed while Gaza remains devastated.

Assessment A year after the New York Declaration laid out its phased path to a Palestinian state, the alliance built to deliver it convened twenty-five delegations, took stock, and adjourned into a seminar on interfaith dialogue. Nobody in that room is paying for the delay — Riyadh keeps a condition it can go on charging Washington for, Brussels holds a position that costs its members nothing, and Ramallah keeps a seat it has not faced an election to hold — and the bill for the state not existing goes to Israel alone. The Board of Peace coordinating those sessions is supposed to be executing a plan whose first phase is a disarmament Hamas has refused throughout, and the Security Council that endorsed the plan will still not write the group's name into a resolution. Danon said it to the Council's face yesterday afternoon.

📚 Closed Dossier: The Tollgate State — This session is the Dossier's mechanism running in a room — a state held in the conditional tense pays Riyadh, Brussels and Ramallah a rent for staying unbuilt, and bills Israel for its absence.

Americans Back Arresting Netanyahu Faster Than They Back the Charge

Forty-nine percent of Americans say Netanyahu should be arrested on the ICC warrant while he is in the United States, against 27 percent who say he should not and 23 percent unsure. The split runs 68 percent of Democrats, 55 percent of independents and 24 percent of Republicans. The same Economist/YouGov survey of 1,559 adults, published the night of the White House meeting, puts 47 percent at guilty of war crimes in Gaza and 43 percent at Israel committing "genocide" — 42 percent gave that answer in September 2025. Asked today whether he worries about landing in a country that recognizes the court, Netanyahu said he thinks about it, noted the special forces he served alongside for five years, and called the ICC an unelected bureaucracy sitting in The Hague. The question is keyed to September 8, when he is due in New York for the General Assembly, in a city whose mayor has conceded his police cannot serve the warrant.

Seven Countries Count Twenty Murdered and Answer at the Gate

Twenty Jews were murdered in four antisemitic attacks on three continents last year, the deadliest year for the diaspora since the 1994 AMIA bombing in Buenos Aires: fifteen at a Hanukkah celebration on Sydney's Bondi Beach, two outside Manchester's Heaton Park Synagogue on Yom Kippur, two outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, one in the Boulder firebombing at a walk for the hostages. The J7 Task Force, whose member organizations speak for more than ninety percent of the Jews living outside Israel, logged over 23,000 incidents in 2025 across Argentina, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Britain and the United States, total incidents up 136 percent against 2022 and violent ones up 97 percent. Germany carries the highest per-capita rate of the seven at nearly seventy incidents per thousand Jewish residents. Anti-Zionism motivated 48 percent of Britain's incidents and 45 percent of America's. Ireland, given its own section this year, logged 143 incidents at sixty-five per thousand Jews with no national strategy against antisemitism and no dedicated security funding for religious buildings. The surge language is gone from the second annual report: Jew-hate across the seven countries is now "our new normal," and governments are asked to "stop reacting after Jews are attacked." The days around its release supplied the illustration. A team defeated the alarms at the Grand Synagogue of Levallois-Perret outside Paris and took more than a dozen Torah scrolls and nothing else — no damage, no other property. A founding board member of Berlin's Kahal Adat Jisroel was threatened with death and shown Hitler salutes on his way to shul. Swastikas and "Zionzim is not welcome" went up across the Pasadena Jewish Temple's recovery mural, painted on the one wall the Eaton Fire left standing and commissioned in the first place after anti-Zionist graffiti hit that wall in January. Two branches of Kiva's Bagel Bar in Toronto, a Jewish-owned bakery open since 1979, were attacked between Saturday and Monday, one storefront's glass shattered and the other hit by gunfire, with police believing the same SUV was used at both and nobody hurt. Before dawn on Monday someone fired on the American consulate general downtown, the second time this year, and Toronto police have connected none of it, to each other or to the criminals-for-hire network behind the March shooting at that consulate. In New York last Thursday a 50-year-old Jewish man was stabbed on the Upper West Side seconds after stepping out of his synagogue at 86th and Amsterdam, and an Asian man was stabbed minutes later at 84th and Central Park West, with witnesses saying the attacker shouted "Allahu Akbar." Raul Morales, 51, was arraigned the next day on two counts of attempted murder as a hate crime and pleaded not guilty, and both men are expected to recover. And in Golders Green, Andy Burnham launched his social-care plan from Jewish Care's campus and called it the gold standard, Yvette Cooper casting the venue as solidarity with a community stabbed a few streets away, while Communities Secretary Angela Rayner said the security she sees at a Jewish school is the security she sees going into GCHQ.

Assessment Every government in the report has answered at the gate. Britain's outgoing prime minister put over £250 million across three years into community security last month, more than 500 additional officers into Jewish neighborhoods and £32.4 million into hardening buildings, and his successor's Communities Secretary now concedes that a Jewish primary school runs the perimeter of a signals-intelligence headquarters. The report's most consequential figure is the motive: anti-Zionism drove nearly half the incidents in Britain and America, which is precisely the category the enforcement machinery is being lawyered out of naming. Barristers acting for Health Workers 4 Palestine have written to NHS trusts warning that adopting the IHRA definition would breach the Equality Act and the Human Rights Act, and arguing that calls for Israel's dissolution do not qualify as antisemitism — this after the British Medical Association voted to drop IHRA across the health service and the government's own adviser on antisemitism recommended every trust adopt it. Five hundred officers can be hired inside a year. A definition litigated out of a health service does not come back in one.

Mamdani's Judicial Screen Excludes the Community Carrying Half New York's Hate Crimes

New York's Mayor's Advisory Committee on the Judiciary, which screens and recommends the candidates the mayor appoints to the city's courts, has eighteen newly seated members and not one Jew among them. Zohran Mamdani announced the appointments last Wednesday. His own January executive order said the membership "shall reflect the cosmopolitan population of the City of New York," and his chief counsel, Ramzi Kassem, called the appointees "a truly representative cross-section of the legal profession in New York City" — in a city where Jews are roughly a tenth of residents and everywhere in the bar. The Brandeis Association of Queens, the New York County Jewish Lawyers Guild, the Brooklyn Brandeis Society and the Bronx County Jewish Bar Association wrote to Mamdani on Monday, calling the omission part of a pattern that also produced his revocation of the IHRA definition and an administration map of the city's immigrant enclaves with the Jewish neighborhoods left off. They singled out the rejection of retired Appellate Division Justice John Leventhal, which they called unprecedented. Jewish attorneys sat on the committee under previous mayors. A City Hall spokesman called the charge that the selections were "motivated by religion" false, said Mamdani has appointed a dozen judges "including Jewish judges," and attributed the Leventhal decision to his having served on Ghislaine Maxwell's legal team. City Hall did not say whether any other Jewish candidate was considered, and did not dispute that the committee has no Jews on it. The next day Mamdani named thirteen members to the Panel for Educational Policy, which votes on the school system's policies and contracts. One of them, the Brooklyn College sociologist Madeline Fox, signed a July 2025 open letter asserting there is "no rampant crisis of antisemitism" on American campuses and calling congressional scrutiny of it part of "a far-right authoritarian attack on higher education."

Assessment The exclusion sits in the appointments, where it outlasts every statement either side makes about it. The working definition Mamdani revoked is the instrument under which more than half of New York's confirmed hate crimes get classified, and the screen for the judges who will hear those cases now seats nobody from the community filing the complaints. That community absorbed 178 confirmed anti-Jewish hate crimes in the first half of this year, 55.3 percent of the city's total and more than eight times the anti-Muslim count, at roughly a tenth of the population — which is why the City Council speaker spent Monday moving $750,000 into the Brooklyn district attorney's hate-crimes bureau. City Hall's answer, a dozen judges already appointed and one candidate disqualified by a client, addresses a charge the letter never made. The bar associations asked why there is not one Jew on the committee, and City Hall has not said.

Briefly Noted

Frontline & Security

Arutz Sheva: Police and Border Police pulled a Matador anti-tank missile believed stolen from the IDF out of a weapons cache in Kafr Qara, seizing assault rifles, handguns, explosives and ammunition across raids there and in Kafr Qassem and arresting five. The campaign that turned it up is aimed at criminal feuds, and an anti-tank launcher is not feud inventory.
Times of Israel: An Israeli who served in a classified IDF unit in both conscript and reserve service was charged with contact with a foreign agent and attempted delivery of information to the enemy, after a handler presenting himself as Iranian intelligence asked him to help recruit a serving soldier.
Ynet: CENTCOM commander Adm. Brad Cooper told his forces that the footage they post lets Iran watch its own missiles land in near-real time, and crews across the region are expected to hand in the phones they use to call home.
Israel Hayom: The air force reopened Squadron 193 at Palmachim with three Sikorsky SH-60 Seahawks, named Shalach in Israeli service, a year after the Atalef retired and left the navy without a maritime helicopter. Two of the three are still being fitted out and flight-tested before they enter service, with two more aircraft due by year's end.

Diplomacy & Geopolitics

Ynet: Hegseth is pressing Britain and France to co-lead a naval coalition in the Strait of Hormuz, with a London conference planned to assign which navies hunt mines and which escort civilian shipping, and five British and American officials say the effort has not moved. European capitals want a stable ceasefire before they commit hulls, and they are still angry that Washington opened the war in February without telling them.
Algemeiner: Chad filed to leave the International Criminal Court on Monday — the fifth state to go after Venezuela, Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger — charging the court with concentrating nine of its thirteen investigations on Africa, while Rubio promises to dismantle the institution "brick by brick, if necessary." A withdrawal takes a year to take effect and leaves every proceeding already opened running, and none of the five left over Israel.
Walla: Iran weighed firing a ballistic missile at a Ukrainian Black Sea port after a Ukrainian strike killed a sailor aboard an Iranian cargo ship in the Caspian, and diplomatic contacts have held the escalation off for now, with Araghchi settling for calling the attack a UN Charter violation meant to drag Europe into Iran's war with the United States. The Caspian route to Russia is the supply line Tehran has left since the American blockade closed its Gulf ports.

Public Diplomacy & Media

Jewish News UK: Hackney's Green-led council voted to begin terminating the borough's 1968 twinning with Haifa and every municipal tie attached to it, opening the process before the equalities impact assessment meant to precede it.
JNS: Haley Stevens spent a Democratic Senate debate defending her pro-Israel record while Abdul El-Sayed ran against the roughly $30 million an AIPAC-affiliated super PAC has spent to elect her, accusing pro-Israel groups of buying influence and pushing Washington into "stupid wars." Michigan Democrats vote on August 4.
Arutz Sheva: Boualem Sansal, the Algerian-French novelist who served a year of a five-year sentence for "undermining state security" before his pardon, told Kan in his first Israeli interview that the real charge was his refusal to stop saying he supports Israel.
Algemeiner: Boy George released "We Will Dance Again," sung partly in Hebrew, opening on "You say genocide, I say war / When you're attacked, that's what the army's for" and naming the Nova victims as raped and murdered "for the crime of dancing."

Domestic & Law

Walla: The State Attorney's cyber department indicted an Israeli who served in a classified unit as a conscript and again as a reservist for contact with a foreign agent and attempting to pass information to the enemy, after a man presenting himself as Iranian intelligence asked him to help recruit a second soldier for the same contact. The court permitted only a narrow paraphrase and kept his identity and every other name in the case under seal.
Ynet: Ayelet Shaked, justice minister when the recorded conversations took place, testified as a witness at the national fraud unit in the Neve Tzedek investigation, where then-Bar Association chair Efi Naveh is suspected of trading the Bar's endorsement for Eitan Orenstein's appointment as president of the Tel Aviv District Court on a single stated condition — that Orenstein pull a judge Naveh disliked off her tort docket. Judge Dalia Ganot resigned, Orenstein has moved his retirement up, and two years after detectives searched both men's homes the investigation is still taking testimony.
Arutz Sheva: A Bat Yam small claims court ordered activist Boaz Drori to pay NIS 5,000 to Shlomo Baruch Yered, a teenage shepherd from Maale Tzidhar in Gush Etzion, over an X post that took video of the boy pulling a baby goat out of a water well and published it as Jewish residents "polluting Palestinian water wells" in an "organized wave of attacks." The judge rejected the truthful-publication and good-faith defenses and held that not knowing the boy's name did not excuse hanging the charge on him.

Economy, Tech & Infrastructure

Ynet News: Restricted tanker traffic through Hormuz has carried Brent from about $77 at the end of June to near $96, and Israeli 95-octane is forecast to rise 25 to 30 agorot at the start of August, to roughly NIS 7.75 a liter. The two conditions that would cancel the increase — the strait fully reopening, the dollar dropping below three shekels — are not Jerusalem's to arrange.
Israel Hayom: Israel's Economy Ministry published a draft order barring imports of goods made with forced labor, days after Washington's Section 301 action put the economies without such a prohibition — Israel among them — under an added 12.5% duty against 10% for those that had already legislated.
Globes: Cyera signed a letter of intent to buy Oasis Security for $1 billion, an all-Israeli deal pairing a data-security unicorn last valued at $12 billion with a startup that secures the non-human identities AI agents run on. Both founding teams came out of army intelligence — Unit 8200 and Talpiot on the buyer's side, Unit 81 on the seller's — and the billion stayed inside the Israeli sector.

Culture, Religion & Society

JTA: Meg Keene's novel with Israeli characters went unsold in 2024 — editors kept calling it too Jewish for a market where anything pro-Israel had turned radioactive — and she now runs a fiction imprint at Wicked Son Press, one of several Jewish-founded houses answering the lockout by owning the presses.
JNS: Fire ripped through the Agri Star kosher meat plant in Postville, Iowa, before dawn yesterday — no injuries, multiple departments called in — and the company says it is too soon to know whether High Holiday distribution suffers, with Rosh Hashanah six weeks out.
Jewish News UK: Ashdod's deputy beaches director took a metal detector out to recover a swimmer's lost jewellery and surfaced a silver-plated coin struck at Salamis in Cyprus in the mid-fifth century BCE, the first of its type ever found in Israel and hard evidence of the sea trade running between Cyprus and the coast under the Persians.

Developments to Watch

Judea & Samaria

Twenty-six battalions before the chagim — the IDF is holding Judea and Samaria with twenty-six battalions, two of them added after Netanyahu ordered reinforcement following the fatal shooting near Havat Gilad. The deployment is sized for what the security establishment expects in the run-up to the High Holy Days: a broad popular uprising out of the villages, weapons seized and the Israeli communities and farms beside them attacked, now that the barrier of fear has broken.

Northern Front (Lebanon / Syria)

Hezbollah's bank tests the south — Hezbollah moved this week to open a new Al-Qard Al-Hassan branch near Tyre, the lending arm Israel has struck repeatedly and last hit in March. An-Nahar reports it backed off after southern residents objected that a branch would make their town a target, so the brake on Hezbollah's rebuilding came from Shiite neighbors and not from the army charged with disarming it.

Regional Axis (Iran, Houthis, Militias)

Iran hunts Israeli ministers — Israel's security establishment warned serving and former senior officials that Tehran is working to reach them physically and fast, and the Shin Bet moved Netanyahu's flight to Nevatim and put Sunday's cabinet underground. A regime owing its public an answer for Khamenei has found the answer it can deliver without a missile, and the Mossad broke up the cell sent to carry it last week. LIKELY TO ESCALATE
The Houthis write China an exemption — The Houthis are weighing transit fees on most traffic through Bab el-Mandeb, worked out with Iranian officials at Khamenei's funeral, with Chinese ships exempted and Beijing already clearing its tankers with them one by one. A blockade that bills everyone except the buyer of the crude it is squeezing is a customs house, and it builds the precedent Tehran wants at Hormuz.
Iran's death row goes on strike — At least 1,500 condemned prisoners at Ghezel Hesar outside Tehran have refused food for two weeks over the surge in executions, and rights groups say some have sewn their lips shut. Eight of the twelve sentenced over the Isfahan square protests are still alive, and the regime negotiating over Hormuz spent Tuesday morning hanging two of their co-defendants in that square.
Jordan's notables move on the bases — Hundreds of Jordanian public figures and lawyers signed an open letter demanding the removal of the roughly 4,000 American troops in the kingdom, arguing the bases drag Jordan into defending Israel in a war it is not party to. Amman depends on $1.65 billion a year in American aid and will not move, so every Iranian salvo lands on a government that absorbs the cost at home and cannot answer it.

Diplomatic & Legal

Tehran's ultimatum on Hormuz — Iran rejected Oman's Gulf-backed plan to run the Strait of Hormuz jointly on the Malacca model, demanded the inbound lane and part of the outbound under full Iranian control, and its deputy foreign minister said the strait stays closed if Muscat refuses. Washington answered that there will be no tolls, so a mediation both sides called productive last week now runs on two positions that cannot both hold.
The Iran Sanctions Act rides a Russia bill — The Senate folded a five-year extension of the 1996 Iran Sanctions Act, which expires at the end of the year, into the Russia sanctions package Lindsey Graham negotiated before his death. Washington's one standing statutory pressure on Tehran now lives or dies with a bill about Ukraine, in the same weeks it is negotiating with Tehran over the strait.

Home Front & Politics

The money the army has not seen — A senior officer warns the IDF will meet the next round short of munitions and interceptor missiles, and calls it a force-building failure. Netanyahu approved another NIS 15 billion for defense at the start of the month, the Defense Ministry is still waiting for it, and the review of the further NIS 25 billion behind that waits until October — months past the round Washington is deciding whether to open.