Thursday, July 30 — Mitzpe Institute

CENTCOM ran two hours over southern Iran overnight — twice the size of its last package — and left alone the bridges and power stations Trump spent the week threatening. A month ago the thinning Patriot and THAAD stocks were why Washington stopped. Adm. Brad Cooper has put that shortage in front of the president as the argument for taking Iran's missile array apart over fourteen days. Israel meanwhile is a second day into deciding how to answer a Hezbollah drone that came off the one tunnel complex its own ground troops are not permitted to enter.

Flash Brief: The Day in 90 Seconds or Less

Iran: CENTCOM strikes dozens of IRGC targets, and Trump has not answered a fourteen-day plan to destroy Iran's missiles. See The War Today.
Egypt: An Iranian drone burns an American LNG hull at Damietta as the first Qatari cargo in three weeks clears Hormuz. See The War Today.
Lebanon: Northern Command's answer to the Ali al-Taher drone sits with Netanyahu a second day. See The War Today.
Comptroller: Police summon Haskel to establish which of two sworn High Court affidavits about filmed ballots is false. See Inside Israel.
Haredi draft: Enforcement moves to the Rabbinate's certification exams and the check-in desk at Ben Gurion. See Inside Israel.
Turkey: Fidan receives Hamas's new bureau chief in Ankara while Washington weighs selling Turkey F-35s. See Israel and the World.
Beirut: A judge gives security forces thirty days to find the banker photographed with Netanyahu in Washington. See Israel and the World.
India: Amnesty publishes 2,596 arms shipments to Israel and lists the Indian companies that sent them. See Israel and the World.
New York: Mamdani calls a judicial panel with no Jews unintentional, in a bar up to half Jewish. See Israel and the World.
Britain: Hackney's Greens move to end the Haifa twinning and tell British Jews to condemn Israel first. See Israel and the World.

Nobody pressing the case against Israel today moved on Israel. Hackney's Greens voted to begin ending a Haifa twinning the borough has held since 1968, and the Green benches rose for a councillor, raised Orthodox, who told the chamber that British Jews must condemn "the genocide" before they can ask anyone to fight Jew-hate. Beirut, which has authorized no house search in the zones Israel handed the Lebanese army, had its security services verify that a photograph had not been altered and then gave them thirty days to find the bank chairman in it. Inside Israel the week's real enforcement ran through a national serious-crime unit taking a coalition MK's statement under caution, and a check-in desk at Ben Gurion.

The War Today

Interceptor Shortage Becomes the Argument for a Bigger War on Iran

CENTCOM ran a two-hour wave against dozens of IRGC targets across southern Iran overnight, the first direct American strike in six days and roughly twice the size of the last package: military command centers, missile and drone facilities, coastal surveillance and air defenses, and naval capability, with explosions reported at Bushehr, Borazjan, Abadan, Ahvaz, Kish, Bandar Abbas, Qeshm and Sirik. It left alone the bridges and power stations Trump had spent the week threatening. The wave answered five Iranian ballistic missiles fired Tuesday night at the Muwaffaq Salti air base and CENTCOM's forward headquarters in Jordan, all of them intercepted, and it followed the American and Saudi strikes on the Iraqi militias, where a US official puts the Iranian dead at about twenty advisers, Revolutionary Guards and technical personnel among them. Iraqi militia officials say six and an Iranian paper says four. Iranian provincial officials allege one American missile hit a family home on Qeshm Island, killing a father, a mother and their two-year-old and wounding two more children, an account carried only by Iranian state and provincial channels against a CENTCOM tally that lists military targets and nothing else. Behind the retaliation sits a decision Trump has not made. Adm. Brad Cooper has put a ten-to-fourteen-day continuous air campaign against Iran's missile array in front of him, presented aboard Air Force One last week hours after the president received the coffins of four Americans killed in this war, and argued that hitting harder now spends fewer interceptors later. Gen. Dan Caine told the same room that Patriot and THAAD stocks are thinning and that other theaters have claims on them, while stopping short of saying the operation cannot run. The IDF denied that Zamir apologized to Cooper over what Katz disclosed about which aircraft fly out of Israeli bases, saying the two have not spoken since.

Assessment The interceptor shortage has switched sides in this argument — for a month it was the reason Washington stopped, and Cooper has made it the reason to go bigger. His case is that a missile array taken apart over two weeks spends fewer Patriots across the following year than trading single rounds does, which is the only version of escalation in that room that reads as thrift. It rests on a conclusion Israeli and regional assessments say Washington has already reached: that talks with Tehran will yield nothing on Hormuz and nothing on the bomb, and that the next serious round has Israel in it. So the restraint of the past week is where the interceptor lines catch up, and what Cooper's plan actually has to clear is a Republican majority at risk in November and a sixty-day authorization Congress wrote for an operation.

Iran's Drone Reaches Egypt as Hormuz Cracks Open

A drone hit the American-owned floating LNG storage unit Energos Winter at Egypt's Mediterranean port of Damietta yesterday, and the fire spread to a second carrier, the Gaslog Salem. Crews evacuated, the fire came under control, nobody was hurt, and nobody claimed it. Cairo spent the evening insisting no attack had happened at all, Egyptian security officials calling it an engine-room fire aboard a decommissioned vessel, before the cabinet confirmed this morning that a drone caused it. Two Iranians told the New York Times the drone launched from Iran and was meant to signal that Tehran can disrupt shipping and global energy far more severely if the fighting widens. They would not say whether Iranian forces or a proxy flew it. Damietta's SEGAS liquefaction plant had appeared last weekend on a target list circulated through pro-Iranian Telegram channels, after Ukraine struck a ship running between Russia and Iran in the Caspian, and the port sits thirty miles from Port Said. Since February the Revolutionary Guards have fired at American facilities in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman, Jordan and Iraq, missiles have been intercepted over Turkey, a drone hit a British base in Cyprus, and Azerbaijan has accused Tehran of flying drones over its territory. Egypt was the one coast left out. Brent rose almost 8% to about $90.75 before easing after the American strikes, and the American strategic reserve fell to 307.7 million barrels, its lowest in more than forty years, with refineries running at 97% of capacity. The strait itself cracked open in the same hours. The first QatarEnergy-controlled LNG tanker to exit Hormuz in nearly three weeks sailed overnight and twelve commodity ships transited yesterday, with the Revolutionary Guards' own channels claiming the Qatari hull passed by Iranian permission along the corridor Iran designated. Washington sanctioned the IRGC-backed operation that sells transiting vessels mandatory "insurance" against the danger the IRGC manufactures.

Northern Command's Answer to the Ali al-Taher Drone Waits on Netanyahu

More than a day after Hezbollah put an explosive drone into an unmanned IDF engineering vehicle at the Ali al-Taher ridge, Israel has not decided how to answer. The army has marked the tunnel complex under the ridge as the target and is waiting on Netanyahu and the political echelon, with the response not expected to reach Beirut's southern suburbs. It worked the ridge in the meantime, dropping incendiary munitions over Ali al-Taher and running a controlled demolition at Tibnit beside it, with overnight bombing at Mansouri, Majdal Zoun and Mazraat Beit al-Sayyad and shelling toward Wadi al-Hujair and Wadi al-Salouqi. Hezbollah says it neither denies nor confirms the drone, and asserts that Israel violates the ceasefire hundreds of times a day. Zamir spent yesterday inside the zone with Northern Command's Rafi Milo and the 91st Division's Yuval Gaz, telling troops the IDF will not leave the ground it holds until long-term security is guaranteed and that it will go deeper if required. The Kfir Brigade is now in the sector, moved into Lebanon within weeks of coming out of Gaza after nearly three years of almost continuous combat. Israeli assessments read the drone as Tehran asking Hezbollah to light the front and pull Washington into a commitment.

Assessment A violation whose answer sits on the prime minister's desk for a second day is the violation Hezbollah is learning from. The group ran this experiment twice in 2023 — the Megiddo bombing Israel attributes to its direction, the tent on Har Dov — and both times an unanswered minor event told it what Israel would absorb, which is how Hezbollah builds tolerance for the next tier. The drone came off the one complex the framework keeps Israeli ground troops out of, so the group can fire from a position Israel agreed not to take and absorb a response it gets to plan around. Tehran's incentive runs the same direction: a lit front in Lebanon is the fastest route to the wider American war the regime wants Trump argued into, which makes the tunnels the cheapest target Israel has and the delay its most expensive option.

Inside Israel

Police Summon Haskel and the Comptroller Vote Becomes a False-Affidavit Inquiry

Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara and State Attorney Amit Aisman instructed police to establish which of two sworn statements filed with the High Court is false, and Lahav 433, the national serious-crime unit, summoned MK Sharren Haskel to give evidence next week. Haskel, who chairs Israel First and entered the Knesset on Sa'ar's New Hope list before its merger with Likud, swore on July 16 that New Hope's members were required to back Likud's candidate "without reservation and without the possibility of expressing an independent position," and that in the repeat round they were required to film themselves voting and show the footage to Netanyahu as proof of how they had voted. Likud's own affidavit says the opposite, that "the photographs were taken at the personal initiative of the members of Knesset, without any demand being made of them to do so," and Likud asked the court to strike Haskel's statement because she does not name whoever issued the demand. That motion was filed through Michael Rabello, the party's lawyer and the candidate whose election is the subject of it. Rabello lost the first round on June 3 to retired justice Yosef Elron 60-57 and won the repeat 61-57, with five Likud MKs filming themselves inside the booth and a Shas MK displaying his ballot outside it. Haskel swore hers not in the petitions against that election but inside her own case for permission to leave the faction, a split she says Likud and New Hope have left deliberately unfinished to keep her from taking the state funding attached to her seat. What she tells police decides whether a criminal file opens on a false affidavit submitted to the High Court. The court voided the vote in early July, the rerun it ordered has not been scheduled, Rabello has declined to take up the office, and Israel has had no State Comptroller since Englman's term ended on the fourth.

Draft Enforcement Moves to the Rabbinate Exam and the Airport Check-In Desk

ITIM petitioned the High Court yesterday to stop the Chief Rabbinate counting yeshiva years studied while a man's military status is unresolved toward the three years that qualify him to sit rabbinical certification exams, certificates that substitute for an academic degree in some public-sector posts and carry their own salary grade. Roughly 150 of this year's examinees were aged 20 to 24, and the court gave the Rabbinate, its examinations department and the Religious Services Ministry until September 14 to answer. ITIM wrote to the Rabbinate in November, sent reminders and a pre-litigation warning in March, and got nothing back while the Rabbinate held April's exams and reopened registration in June under the same rules. The Population and Immigration Authority moved its exit-ban check from passport control forward to check-in at Ben Gurion, closing the automated-gate loophole that let men under bans tailgate through behind another traveler, with thousands of Uman-bound flights to come before Rosh Hashanah. Zamir told Hasmonean Brigade commanders on the Lebanon border that the army has to grow and that haredi integration is vital to the state's security, against draft figures of at least 4,000 in the year to July, about a thousand of them into combat, still under the army's own 4,800 target and far under the 12,000 recruits it says it needs, and counted through an education-ministry classification the IDF concedes it cannot verify. Senior religious-Zionist rabbis answered the arrests: a declaration headed by Rabbi Yaakov Ariel and signed by Zalman Melamed, Shmuel Eliyahu, Elyakim Levanon and Yaakov Shapira among others rejects arrests and criminal enforcement against yeshiva students outright, holding that they deepen the rift and push conscription further away, while calling on all sides to drop the violence at the anti-draft protests. And the money stopped. An eleven-hour opposition filibuster ran the Finance Committee past the hours a recess allows and killed about NIS 392 million in transfers, NIS 284 million of it for haredi education and NIS 83 million for Strock's Settlements Ministry, after Shas and Religious Zionism fought over the division until the chairman saw the coalition had lost its majority in the room and closed the session. Any further hearing now needs the Arrangements Committee, where the opposition says it will refuse.

Assessment Every gate that has moved a haredi man toward an induction center this year belongs to someone the coalition does not command. Ariel and Melamed sign as men whose own students serve, which is what makes their objection expensive: the arrests are the one measure with a demonstrated effect on the number, and a declaration against them offers nothing to the roughly 80,000 men aged 18 to 24 believed eligible and still outside. Strock's ministry and the haredi education networks lost NIS 392 million to each other, three months before an election that has Religious Zionism sitting on the threshold. The cost lands where it has landed all along — a Taub Center study puts the reservist who served 233 days down nearly five percent in earnings and the fathers past 290 days down more, with first-degree enrolment among the population carrying the burden at its lowest since 2018.

Israel and the World

Turkey Receives Hamas's New Bureau Chief as Washington Weighs Its F-35s

Hakan Fidan received Khalil al-Hayya in Ankara yesterday, the first high-level meeting Hamas's newly elected political bureau chief has held since taking the post on July 20, and Turkey's own foreign ministry published the photograph of the delegation. Fidan congratulated him, reaffirmed Turkish backing for the Palestinian "just cause" on every international platform, promised to push more aid into Gaza, and said Ankara appreciates the role Hamas has played in the peace process. Al-Hayya, who is based in Qatar, briefed him on Gaza and Judea and Samaria, alleged intensified "illegal settlement activities" and attacks on Jerusalem's holy sites, and claimed Hamas is approaching peace negotiations and a reconciliation with Fatah. Netanyahu spent his Washington visit working the case against selling Ankara F-35s, carrying maps into the Oval Office to show Trump that Israel holds roughly 0.1 percent of Syrian territory against Turkey's 5 percent, and came out saying he had convinced the president that the two governments do not see Turkish arms sales the same way. Katz told Channel 14 that Israel seeks no military confrontation with Turkey and then reached back to the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople to say Jerusalem would defend itself. Eli Cohen said Israel would put its own bases inside Syria if Ankara puts up Turkish ones.

Assessment Ankara took a seat at the two-state alliance's opening session in Rome on Tuesday and hosted Hamas's political bureau chief on Wednesday — a NATO member telling the room it holds the relationship with the party whose disarmament is the first phase of the plan that Rome session convened to advance. Israel answers with maps because the sale gets decided in a room it holds no seat in, and Netanyahu described the arrangement himself on American television this week, calling Trump the senior partner and himself the junior one. The brake is narrow and statutory — the July finding that Ankara qualifies for nothing until it surrenders its S-400s, which the administration can waive and Congress can only contest. Waive it, and the cost lands in Syria as a basing race Israel has already said it will run.

Beirut Answers Normalization With a Treason Case Over One Dinner

Judge Ahmad Rami al-Hajj of Lebanon's Court of Cassation gave the security forces thirty days to locate and question Antoun Sehnaoui, chairman of SGBL and one of the country's most prominent bankers, over a photograph of him with Benjamin and Sara Netanyahu at a Washington dinner. When the thirty days run out the case passes to the Military Court, which can then issue an arrest warrant. Twenty Lebanese lawyers filed the complaint that opened it hours earlier, charging Sehnaoui with contact and dealing with the Israeli enemy, violation of the Israel boycott law, treason, and crimes against state security. Before the judge moved, the judiciary had the security services verify that the photograph was authentic and had not been altered digitally or generated by AI. Sehnaoui organized the dinner — one of the events around Lindsey Graham's funeral — with his partner Morgan Ortagus, the American envoy to Lebanon, and he has publicly supported normalization with Israel through the war with Hezbollah.

Amnesty Takes the Complicity Case to Israel's Largest Arms Customer

Amnesty International published "Made in India" today, an accounting of 2,596 arms shipments from Indian state-owned and private companies to Israel between October 7, 2023 and November 30, 2025. By its own count the consignments carried 390,516 small-arms parts, 564,970 pieces of explosive ordnance and 298 military-vehicle components, including 155mm high-explosive shells to Elbit Systems and warheads for SkyStriker attack drones. The tally is built from customs classifications, codes 9301 through 9307 and 8710, and excludes shipments labeled only with internal part numbers, hundreds of dual-use small-arms components, and items the researchers judged likely bound for anti-missile defense. Secretary General Agnes Callamard grounded the demand for an immediate halt in the ICJ's provisional-measures orders, asserting that New Delhi cannot credibly claim it did not know the transfers carried a substantial risk of contributing to serious violations of international law. Amnesty wrote to the Indian government and nine named companies in June and July and had no reply by publication. India is the largest buyer of Israeli weapons, upgraded the relationship to a Special Strategic Partnership when Modi visited Israel this year, and is reportedly in discussions to manufacture Iron Dome interceptors. It has refused to join South Africa's Genocide Convention case at the ICJ, rejected calls for an arms embargo, and its Supreme Court dismissed a 2024 petition to halt the exports on the ground that foreign policy belongs to the government.

Assessment Amnesty's own methodology carves the interceptors out of the ledger, excluding the shipments likely bound for anti-missile defense, so what it publishes counts only the offensive munitions while the relationship it indicts is reportedly negotiating to build Iron Dome rounds for Israel. The report aims past a foreign ministry that has already refused both the case and the embargo, and lands on India's courts and its procurement politics, where the letters to nine named companies build the notice record a second petition needs after the first was dismissed as the government's business. Israel now has a public parts list of its munitions suppliers with company names on it, which is what a divestment campaign runs on and what the next capital drafting an ordinance of its own reads first.

Mamdani Pleads Intent While His Next Appointment Names the Acceptable Jew

Mamdani said the absence of any Jewish member from his Advisory Committee on the Judiciary was not deliberate, that he never asked nominees about religion, and that "any suggestion that the composition of the advisory committee was motivated by religion is false." His chief counsel, Ramzi Kassem, had called the panel a "truly representative cross-section of the legal profession in New York City," in a bar where by some estimates between a third and a half of the lawyers are Jewish. The mayor rejected one Jewish nominee, retired justice John Leventhal — one of nine names submitted from outside his office — over Leventhal's work on Ghislaine Maxwell's defense team, saying he wanted no association between the committee and "the Epstein world." Since the criticism from Jewish legal groups and the ADL he has named at least one Jew to the city school board: Maddy Fox, a signatory to a 2025 letter from Jewish academics accusing the Trump administration of "weaponizing" antisemitism. The panel row lands on top of the two-and-a-half-minute video in which he called Netanyahu "a war criminal" and "the architect of a horrific genocide," which passed 200 million views before the Jewish establishment could answer it and which ran days before a Jewish man was stabbed near a synagogue on the Upper West Side by an attacker witnesses say shouted "Allahu akbar." Jonathan Greenblatt located the rhetoric in an "antisemitic worldview." Rabbi Joshua Davidson of Temple Emanu-El wrote that rhetoric not antisemitic in intent can still be antisemitic in effect. Rabbi Angela Buchdahl of Central Synagogue told the mayor he cannot claim to protect Jews while using his office to make Jewish identity "morally tainted and imperilled."

Hackney's Greens Condition Fighting Jew-Hate on British Jews Condemning Israel

Hackney council gave initial approval to begin ending the twinning with Haifa it has held since 1968, after the Green Party took 42 seats in the May local elections and cut Labour from two decades of control to nine. Mayor Zoe Garbett opened the session by naming the council's "complicity in a humanitarian crisis," launched a review of the borough's pension holdings, and put Haifa on the same list. The vote starts a process rather than a severance: a letter to Haifa's mayor, an equalities assessment, a cross-party working group, then a final vote before the full council. Nearly three decades of the link ran through a training partnership between Homerton University Hospital and Haifa's Rambam Medical Center. The borough's Orthodox Jewish community, by the council's own report, numbers close to 29,000 — around an eighth of Hackney. Green councillor Sam Mathys moved the motion on an ICJ finding that Israel's acts could plausibly amount to genocide, a reading the court's own former president says it never made. Green councillor Florence Schechter, raised Orthodox, called Israel's conduct a chillul HaShem, said Israel's actions should not reflect on all Jewish people, and then told the chamber that "if the Jewish people of Britain want to fight rising antisemitism, the first thing they must do is condemn the genocide in Palestine." The Green benches stood to applaud. Simche Steinberger, one of six Conservative councillors representing the Charedi wards, said none of the six Jewish members had been consulted. In Birmingham, where the Greens govern in coalition, the cabinet member for children and families, Kamal Hawwash, told an Algerian broadcaster on October 7, 2023 that of the Israelis then being seized, "the first thing they can do is keep these people and negotiate on many issues," and that Palestinians have a right under international law to use weapons. He has not confirmed that he accepts the IHRA definition his own council adopted.

Assessment A party that won two boroughs in May is spending the win on the only foreign policy a council owns, which is the terms on which its own Jews are acceptable. Schechter set those terms in a speech that also insisted Israel's conduct should not reflect on all Jews, and the benches applauded both halves. The detwinning costs Israel nothing. It costs Homerton a training relationship with one of Israel's major trauma hospitals, and it costs the borough's Charedi wards a council that consulted none of their six members. Hawwash matters more than the vote: Britain added another £25 million for hardening Jewish schools and synagogues last week, and money buys walls while the IHRA definition — now declined by a cabinet member for children, after barristers told NHS trusts that adopting it would breach the Equality Act — is what decides whether what happens outside the walls is ever written down as a crime.

Briefly Noted

Frontline & Security

JNS: The IDF killed the last sniper-cell commander left in Hamas's Nuseirat Battalion, Ahmad Hisham Mahmoud Louh, and Mahmoud Ali Mahmoud Taroush, a platoon commander who crossed into Israel on October 7, in separate strikes on Monday.
Walla: Hiking groups from across the country and residents of Judea and Samaria have organized a series of walks near Havat Gilad for tomorrow after last weekend's attack there — hundreds are expected, and the organizers went to the army for coordination and permits inside a day.
Times of Israel: Adm. Brad Cooper told American troops across the region to stop filming their bases, because Iran is reading its own strike results off their footage in near real time — and in Jordan, some are said to be days from handing the phones in.
Times of Israel: A federal jury in Buffalo convicted Hadi Matar on every count, including transnational terrorism, for the 2022 stabbing that left Salman Rushdie blind in his right eye. Prosecutors ran the case on Khomeini's 1989 decree ordering Rushdie's death, and Tehran's answer to a verdict naming its fatwa as the motive is that it had nothing to do with the man who acted on it.

Diplomacy & Geopolitics

Times of Israel: Opposition leader Yair Lapid used his Washington trip to sit down with ten Senate Democrats convened by Jacky Rosen, several of whom voted in April to block arms sales to Israel, and told them they were wrong and not to "give up on Israel." Forty of the forty-seven Senate Democrats voted for one of those resolutions, which is the number Lapid's argument has to move.
Times of Israel: Washington is weighing whether to delay or block Aurelien Lechevallier, Macron's pick for ambassador to the United States, after France's UN mission in Geneva posted that America "used to be a beacon of human rights" — the offense being an American vote against renewing the mandate of Volker Turk, the UN human-rights chief and a standing critic of Israel's conduct in Gaza. Paris had wanted him in post by September, and a row over a single social-media post may leave the French embassy in Washington without an ambassador well past it.

Public Diplomacy & Media

Jerusalem Post: Australia's eSafety Commissioner has taken Telegram to court for leaving execution and mass-shooting footage tied to the Christchurch and Buffalo attacks online long after the platform was put on notice, with civil penalties running up to A$54.6 million.
Jerusalem Post: TikTok published its rules for the October 27 Knesset election — no paid political advertising, labels on realistic AI content, and removal of anything impersonating a candidate or faking the date, the polling stations, or who is eligible to vote. For every other medium the Central Elections Committee writes the rules, and on TikTok the company wrote its own and will police them.
JNS: Frans Timmermans — former Dutch foreign minister, former EU commissioner, recently nominated minister of state — told De Morgen that Israel's "right and far right" reason "exactly the same" as the Nazis, and the Central Jewish Board's Chanan Hertzberger has asked Prime Minister Rob Jetten to strip him of the title. Timmermans said in 2015 that the new antisemitism hides behind anti-Zionism.

Domestic & Law

Ynet News: The Tax Authority is entering Bnei Brak again, two weeks after a crowd besieged its inspectors' vehicle there, and only with advance coordination and a police escort — the condition it now applies to every locality it classes high-risk. Its director had frozen the Iran-war compensation claims filed by the city's own residents until the municipality condemned the attack, and what he got instead was a meeting where the mayor distanced himself from it.
Israel Hayom: Three haredi parties built in municipal races are going for Knesset seats against the rule that has decided every haredi ballot — the rabbis name the representatives and the public ratifies them — and one of them, HaKahal, announced primaries so its voters pick the list themselves. A senior United Torah Judaism figure's answer was that they are all "jumping on a wagon that does not exist," and neither Rabbi Landau nor the Gur Rebbe is among the rabbis any of the three will name.
Walla: Likud asked the Central Elections Committee to rule that the organized free hosting of Israeli citizens who live abroad and fly home to vote is election bribery, with hosting your own relative left alone. Israelis abroad cannot vote from where they live, and Likud's counsel added a reason of his own: people who are not "with us in the traffic" and do not pay taxes here should not decide what happens here.

Economy, Tech & Infrastructure

JNS: A consortium of banks led by Bank Leumi signed a NIS 9.6 billion ($3.1 billion) financing agreement for the roughly 41-kilometer Nofit light rail linking Haifa and the Krayot to Nazareth, a year behind schedule because of the war and now due to open in 2029.
Jerusalem Post: Israeli exports hit a record $169 billion, past the $166 billion set in 2022 and past the Economy Ministry's own $165 billion forecast, carried by software and R&D against weaker chemicals and pharmaceuticals. Europe bought less and the Asian markets took up the slack.
Globes: Regulated 95-octane gasoline rises 61 agorot to NIS 8.09 a liter at midnight Saturday, with Brent near $100 and the shekel down from 2.98 to 3.08 against the dollar over the month. Excise tax is NIS 3.61 of that pump price, the one component the Treasury sets itself.
Israel Hayom: Israir won Civil Aviation Authority approval yesterday to fly the two Airbus A330s it bought for about $85 million with its own crews. The first route applications go east, and the United States waits on a further certification.

Culture, Religion & Society

Times of Israel: Shimon and Rivka Herzl left a Belgrade cemetery yesterday after years of negotiation, and Israel will rebury Theodor Herzl's grandparents beside him on Mount Herzl on August 5, seventy-seven years to the day on the Hebrew calendar after his own reinterment there. Shimon led Belgrade's Jewish community and blew the shofar at the synagogue of Rabbi Yehuda Alkalai, whose writings prefigured political Zionism a generation before Herzl built a movement on it.
Arutz Sheva: Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi Kalman Ber has written to the ombudsman for complaints against judges, who ruled that Sephardi Chief Rabbi David Yosef stepped outside his official role by branding the High Court an enemy of Judaism over an order it issued on Shabbat sending police to protect an anti-government protest. Ber answers that guarding Shabbat in the public sphere is what the Chief Rabbinate has done since its founding, and cites a line of Chief Rabbis from Rav Kook onward.
Jerusalem Post: Judea and Samaria Border Police and the Civil Administration's Archaeology Unit raided a suspected smuggler's home in the Jordan Valley and seized thousands of looted antiquities, some four hundred coins among them, running from the Persian period through the Byzantine and including Hasmonean issue.

Developments to Watch

Northern Front (Lebanon / Syria)

An American channel to Hezbollah — A podcast on the Hezbollah-aligned Al Mayadeen claims Trump pre-authorized his ambassador in Beirut, Michel Issa, to contact Hezbollah whenever he judges it useful, and nobody in Washington or Beirut has confirmed it. True or not, the claim does work in Lebanon: a group facing disarmament at Rome next week gains more from Beirut believing Washington will talk to it than from the conversation itself.

Regional Axis (Iran, Houthis, Militias)

The Guards threaten the helpers next — Iran's Revolutionary Guards vowed that "the aggressor will be punished the same day" and warned that any state helping it will take a hard answer of its own unless it corrects its behavior. Iranian-aligned channels spent last night circulating footage they say shows HIMARS rounds fired from Kuwaiti soil toward Abadan, which is the predicate a strike on a Gulf host would need. LIKELY TO ESCALATE
Iraq's militias set a date — The Iran-aligned militias hit in Iraq gave their own government until August 9 to answer for the strikes and postponed their retaliation until the Arbaeen pilgrimage ends. Baghdad spent the day demanding evidence that anything was ever fired at Saudi Arabia from Iraqi soil, so the government holding the ultimatum is denying the case for the strike that produced it.
Tehran's hardliners cry soft coup — The regime's radical press accuses Pezeshkian and his senior diplomats of running a soft coup while Mojtaba Khamenei, the successor Iranians have yet to see, stays out of sight. Washington and the Pakistani mediators are bargaining over Hormuz with a government whose own hardliners contest its authority to bargain.
Pickaxe Mountain sits off the target list — Iran is reportedly hiding centrifuges under Pickaxe Mountain, and a source tells the Jerusalem Post the nuclear program was never destroyed. Everything Washington is weighing aims at the missile array and the strait, and enrichment is the capability neither target set reaches.

Diplomatic & Legal

Riyadh's Red Sea coalition is due today — Two people familiar with the deliberations say Saudi Arabia will announce an international coalition against the Houthis in the Red Sea today, built from roughly fifty invitations and without an American commitment of troops. The Houthis denied charging transit fees and said passage is free for every flag but Saudi Arabia's, so the coalition is forming around a blockade of one member.
Prince Khalid carries a message to Washington — Saudi Arabia's defense minister was in Washington on Wednesday, hours after the joint strikes in Iraq, to deliver a message from Mohammed bin Salman, and a Saudi political source says normalization with Israel has not come off the table. Riyadh fired its first public shots of this war on Tuesday night and was at the table in Washington by Wednesday, normalization still undelivered and still on offer.

Home Front & Politics

Eisenkot campaigns without armed guards — Eisenkot's campaign director told the Shin Bet and the police that the former chief of staff is under threat and that the private guards hired for him after recent incidents carry no weapons. A government he is running against decides whether an opposition candidate gets a state detail, three months out from the election.