Israel has signed nothing — not the roadmap, not the document on the force that would take the ground — and the sequence is running ahead of it regardless. Tehran spent the weekend attaching war reparations and an American withdrawal from the region to the price of reopening Hormuz, and the Revolutionary Guards said within hours that none of it turns on the Oman talks. In Mecca, Riyadh, Ankara and Islamabad signed a mutual-defense clause and published no text. Three days of paper, and not a line of it binds anybody to anything.

Flash Brief: The Day in 90 Seconds or Less

• Hormuz: Iran demands war reparations and an American withdrawal from the region before it reopens the strait. See The War Today.
• Gaza: Almost three years on, some four hundred of the October 7 attackers are still alive — the price of fighting around a civilian population. See The War Today.
• Lebanon: A second Hezbollah attack drone reaches Israeli troops, and Northern Command orders it unpublished. See The War Today.
• Judea and Samaria: Yinon Levi is charged over a route his excavator never should have cut, and the shot that followed a crowd and a hail of stones. See Inside Israel.
• Elections: Erdan and Edelstein launch a party without a name, and Segalovitz quits Yesh Atid for Ra'am. See Inside Israel.
• Mecca: Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan sign a mutual-defense clause with no published text, and the UAE stays out. See Israel and the World.
• Washington: The Senate passes Graham's sanctions bill, and the money to rebuild interceptor lines waits on the House. See Israel and the World.
• Canada: A federal survey has 95.7 percent of Jewish students witnessing Jew-hatred, and McGill faces 4,000 plaintiffs. See Israel and the World.
• Greece: Jerusalem tells Israelis to conceal Jewish identifiers before 36 protest locations open today. See Israel and the World.
• Home front: The cabinet moves a billion shekels into defense procurement, most of it out of tech investment. See Developments to Watch.

The Guards put a missile into an Emirati tanker while Muscat drafts a route, and Hamas is pressing Gazans to kill the militiamen the roadmap says it will have to disarm in any case. Israel's side of it rests on forces nobody has assembled — 150 Moroccans in tents six weeks out, and a shortlist Rome handed Washington to certify a disarmament Hezbollah refuses.

The War Today

Tehran Hardens Its Terms for Hormuz as Washington Counts Its Interceptors

Iran's Supreme National Security Council put out its terms for reopening the Strait of Hormuz on Saturday, and the list is the whole war. Washington must never threaten Iran again. It must permanently end hostilities against Iran and its allies in Lebanon, Gaza, Yemen and Iraq, lift the naval blockade of Iranian ports, pull its forces out of the region, lift sanctions, release frozen assets unconditionally, and compensate Iran in full for war damage. Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, the council's secretary and an IRGC commander, read it out. A committee of Iran's parliament is separately reviewing a bill to bar American and Israeli-linked ships from the strait outright. Fines run to a fifth of a ship's cargo.

Abbas Araghchi said the same day that Iran and Oman are very close on a temporary route through the water. The Revolutionary Guards said within hours that reopening Hormuz has nothing to do with the Oman talks and turns only on Iran's own conditions. An Iranian missile hit an ADNOC tanker crossing the strait early Saturday, the fourth Emirati vessel this week and the fifteenth since February. Those attacks have killed one crewman and hurt twenty. Abu Dhabi called it piracy.

Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, has been telling Vance, Ratcliffe and Rubio privately that Washington needs an off-ramp, and that airstrikes on their own won't get the administration what it says it wants. One Washington count puts the Patriot stockpile at roughly 2,200 interceptors before the war and under 827 at the end of July. THAAD is down from about 452 to under 278. On the military's own public accounting, nearly 700 American service members have been wounded on regional bases by drone and missile fire, most of them with brain injuries from blast. The Pentagon's spokesman called the bulk of one two-week stretch minor concussions.

Iran's own exports have stopped in the meantime. No tanker has loaded at Kharg Island since July 31, and nine in ten barrels Iran ships leave from there. CENTCOM has redirected 51 commercial vessels since it put the blockade back on July 14. Eight ships crossed Hormuz on Friday, against the 130 to 140 a day that ran before Iran closed the water on February 28. Mojtaba Khamenei, who inherited the leadership when an American strike killed his father that same day, has not been seen in public since — Iranian state media put out what it called a first video of him this weekend, undated, and didn't say where it was shot.

Almost Three Years On, Four Hundred of the October 7 Attackers Are Still Alive

Officers of the joint unit, Nili, laid out a list running to thousands of names, built out of the video the attackers filmed and posted themselves, run through facial recognition and then worked with interrogations and human sources. By security assessments roughly 400 of the Nukhba men who came through the fence are still alive and unarrested.

Nearly three years on, the men who did October 7 are living inside a civilian population, in a strip Israel has largely occupied, and Israel knows a great many of them by name and face. An army indifferent to who else was in the building would have closed that file long ago. This one has taken them one at a time, at the pace that intelligence and a spotter's line of sight allow, and four hundred is what that costs.

The last two went on August 2 — Abdallah Abu al-Tayf in the Deir al-Balah sector, and Salem Jamal Abu Labad, who led a Nukhba squad through Kibbutz Nir Oz. There have been operational openings since and nobody has taken them. The American roadmap's fourteen-day preparatory period requires Israel to stop targeted killings before demilitarization begins, and on August 4 the authority to approve one moved up from a regional commander to the chief of staff.

David Zini told the security cabinet the signature is a deception. Hamas agreed to the fifteen points without giving up the goal of destroying Israel, the head of military intelligence research, Brig. Gen. Ofir Mizrahi-Rozen, told the same room. Zini's own read is that Hamas is dragging its feet until Israel's October elections and will decide what to do after them. He called it a strategic ambush. Ministers came out agreed that Israel should take no step that could read as entering the fourteen days. Israel has still signed nothing — not the roadmap, and not the separate document on putting the multinational force into Gaza.

On the ground the sequence is running ahead of all of it. Netanyahu and Katz approved rehabilitation work in eastern Rafah two weeks ago without announcing it, inside the zone the IDF holds and near the Yellow Line that divides it from Hamas. The Prime Minister's Office says it's an Emirati temporary-housing project on ground already cleared of tunnels. The Board of Peace's first construction contract in Gaza is a 150-man outpost for Moroccan troops rotating in from a base in Israel, a hundred meters by a hundred and twenty, a mile from the Israeli border, with a quick extraction route designed in. Foreign forces aren't expected to arrive for another six weeks.

Hezbollah Flies a Drone at Israeli Troops and the Army Says Nothing

Hezbollah flew an explosive first-person-view drone at an Israeli force north of Beaufort Castle on Friday. Nobody was hurt, nothing was damaged, and the army did not report it. Rafi Milo, who runs Northern Command, gave the order not to publish, and the IDF confirmed the details only after a reporter asked. Another such drone hit an engineering vehicle on the Ali Taher ridge the week before, also without casualties. A soldier was moderately wounded by shrapnel in southern Lebanon on Saturday.

The investigation into the charge that killed Maj. (res.) Harel Birenstock z"l and Sgt. Maj. (res.) Tamir Vaknin z"l at Majdal Zoun on Wednesday has widened, because the blast was far stronger than a standard device. Majdal Zoun is a village Hezbollah pulled out of in March and Israeli troops have held since. The force had scanned the building, left it, carried on with its mission, and the charge went off when it came back past. The working assessment is still that the device was old. Northern Command won't rule out that Hezbollah operatives reached it and set it for men they could see.

In Rome the two delegations agreed a shortlist of countries that could send troops to verify Hezbollah's disarmament. France is vetoed and Washington picks from what's left. Hezbollah signed nothing and has agreed to give up nothing.

Inside Israel

Prosecutors Indict Yinon Levi and Katz Backs Off Firing Bluth

Prosecutors indicted Yinon Eliya Levi, 33, on Thursday. The Southern District Attorney's Office filed it in the Beersheba District Court — reckless homicide, armed trespassing, malicious damage. He faces twelve years.

The thing Levi actually did wrong takes one sentence. He was running earthworks last July on a new neighborhood for Carmel, in the South Hebron Hills, and at the end of the workday he told a 17-year-old excavator driver to cut a route that wasn't in the plan, across privately owned Palestinian land. That is a trespass and he should answer for it. What the indictment then has to carry is everything that happened after it — residents of Umm al-Khair coming out to stop the machine and film it, the driver striking one of them with the breaker, stones going at the excavator, and Levi drawing his pistol, walking clear of the crowd and firing one round parallel to the ground toward the village. It hit Awdah Hathaleen, an English teacher and father of three, twenty meters off in the courtyard of the community center with a camera in his hands.

Levi says he fired in self-defense, and that a bullet from another weapon killed Hathaleen. His lawyer calls the indictment a mistaken decision. In a letter Levi accused the prosecutors of giving de facto support for terrorism. Hathaleen's family says the charge is too light. Levi founded the Havat Meitarim outpost — one of the farms that have done more to hold open ground in the South Hebron Hills than any planning committee has, which is why Britain and the Biden administration went after him personally in 2024 and why the men who run those farms read this file as being about the farms.

Building where you have no permit is not, in this country, a Jewish specialty. European governments have spent years financing Palestinian construction across Area C without Israeli permits — structures put up precisely because they are facts on the ground, on the same legal footing as the route Levi's excavator cut. Nobody is indicted for those. And the state's own view of who is dangerous to whom is painted on a red sign at the entrance to every Area A: Israeli citizens may not enter, and it is a danger to your lives. That is Israel's assessment of what happens to a Jew who takes a wrong turn, posted by the government, in three languages, at the roadside.

The rest of the week ran through the same machinery. Police and soldiers went into Tuba on Wednesday, after Israelis burned houses there. They found the burned buildings and the graffiti, and they're looking for men who left before anyone arrived. The army condemned the arson and said it expects law enforcement to bring them in. On Saturday, footage from Idna near Hebron showed a soldier with his knee on a Palestinian's midsection, alongside two Israeli civilians. The IDF says the incident and the conduct of the force are under review. Four Palestinians were hurt at Wadi Rahim near Susya, one of them by gunfire that didn't come from the soldiers on the ground. Judea and Samaria District police went in under army escort to collect the evidence.

The friction runs both ways, and the army is losing men in it. A senior Central Command officer said on Friday that Israelis walk into Judea and Samaria on unapproved, uncoordinated hikes every week. Sometimes the brigade only hears about one afterwards. The hike near the village of Tal on July 24 was one it had caught wind of and couldn't get details on, because the organizers wouldn't give any. Maj. Yuval Ezra z"l and Capt. Binyahu Malat z"l were killed going in after those hikers came under attack.

Defense Minister Israel Katz took back the dismissal he announced on live television a week ago. He had named Maj. Gen. Dado Bar Kalifa the next head of Central Command while Avi Bluth was sitting in an operational meeting on dismantling terror infrastructure. On Wednesday Katz met the settlement-council heads and left Bluth in the job. Bluth has approved more new communities and farms in Judea and Samaria than any of his predecessors. Those same council heads call him the best general the movement has had, and Smotrich said it too in November. In April he stood in a hall full of them and said there is no symmetry between Palestinian terror and what he was about to describe — and then he described it. A Jew who burns a house with people inside it, or clubs a man over the head, has committed an act of terror. Somebody sprayed "Revenge" and "Avi, go home" on walls in Talfit and Jalud this week.

This morning the first families moved into Emek Dotan. It's the fifth community the Shomron Regional Council has put up in northern Samaria, and the first one there that never existed before the disengagement.

Erdan Runs on Universal Service as Segalovitz Resigns for Ra'am

Yoav Segalovitz handed the Knesset speaker his resignation letter on Sunday morning, seven years after entering the house for Yesh Atid. He's in talks to become the first Jew ever on the list of Mansour Abbas's Ra'am. Abbas says no reserved slots get decided before the party's primaries on August 22, and he denies reports that Ra'am will change its name to widen its appeal. Segalovitz has set his own price: Ra'am declaring for a Jewish and democratic state and for the values of the Declaration of Independence. He ran Lahav 433, the police's major-crime and anti-corruption unit, and was deputy public-security minister under Bennett and Lapid. The opposition is already talking about him as the man who would take Ben-Gvir's ministry.

Gilad Erdan launched his party on Thursday night with Yuli Edelstein, without a name on it and with the exemption at the center of it. Erdan was Israel's ambassador to the UN from 2020 to 2024. Edelstein is the former Knesset speaker the coalition stripped of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee for refusing to soften the conscription bill, and who quit Likud last month when his successor's version arrived with wide exemptions for full-time yeshiva students and a freeze on arresting evaders. Erdan is promising a Basic Law: Service — Israel's highest form of legislation, aimed straight back at the Basic Law: Torah Study this coalition spent the Knesset writing. Every citizen would serve, in the army or in national service. "It can't be that a Torah-observant young man from Bnei Brak doesn't get under the stretcher, while a Torah-observant young man from Ofra risks his life in Lebanon." He promised not to hand a sixty-first seat to a narrow government on either side, and ruled out sitting with Yair Golan. Likud's answer came from a party source: if Netanyahu had given Erdan a reserved slot, our values would have suited him fine.

The arithmetic underneath is why all of this is happening at once. The parties' own assessments put fifteen to twenty-five mandates' worth of right-wing voters unwilling to vote for Likud, Religious Zionism or Otzma Yehudit. The country moved right after the war, on security and on holding ground, and the estimates put more than seventy mandates on that side of those questions. The friendliest poll for the bloc's actual parties gives them sixty-two. Most give fewer. A week ago the open question was whether Tropper and Hendel would clear the threshold at all. One survey on Friday now has the coalition at forty-nine and the anti-Netanyahu bloc at a bare sixty-one without the Arab parties, who hold the other ten. Another puts Ra'am at a record six, on the Segalovitz link alone.

Closed Dossier: The Wrong Words — The Dossier's argument is that Israeli politics runs on independent axes at once, so a party can be maximal on sovereignty and still be punished on service — which is why Smotrich, who has approved more building in Judea and Samaria than anyone who has held the job, is fighting for four seats over a conscription vote.

Israel and the World

Riyadh Signs an Article 5 in Mecca Without Abu Dhabi

Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan signed a mutual-defense pact in Mecca on Friday. An armed attack on any one of them counts as an attack on all three. Mohammed bin Salman, Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Shehbaz Sharif signed it in person, with Pakistan's army chief Asim Munir at Sharif's side. They published no text. Hakan Fidan, Turkey's foreign minister, said the clause is technically the same as NATO's Article 5. The talks behind it ran two years and eight months. The alliance gets a committee of ministers and a permanent secretariat in Saudi Arabia, and what any of it obliges anyone to do is left to that committee's first meeting.

Fidan also said Egypt can join once technical matters are settled. The most important clause in the whole agreement, he said, is the one on defense industry and defense technology. Erdogan called the pact open to "other friendly nations" and said it targets no country. Riyadh's deputy minister for public diplomacy, Rayed Krimly, said it is neither a military axis nor a sectarian bloc and carries nothing nuclear. Then Pakistan's defense minister spoke. Khawaja Asif told Geo News on Saturday that Israel is "a product of the Balfour Declaration" and an "illegitimate state." All Muslim countries must build "a united military front" against it, he said, and the pact is the beginning of a process to unite the Islamic world. Nothing changes for him whichever way Israel's October 27 election goes. [Pakistan is a product of a British declaration announced in 1947. I'd expect a defense minister to know when his own country's paperwork was filed.]

The United Arab Emirates is not in it. Abu Dhabi did not sign Riyadh's Red Sea maritime coalition either. It also stayed away from the Amman session two days before Mecca, where a dozen Arab and Muslim foreign ministers accused Israel of altering the legal and demographic status of Jerusalem. Bahrain and Kuwait skipped Amman too. Bahrain then welcomed the Mecca pact as "a qualitative addition" to the Gulf states' own joint defense system. The signing was reportedly moved forward on Saudi intelligence about an attack being prepared by Iran-backed militias out of Iraq and Yemen. The Houthis answered inside a day. Mahdi al-Mashat said the blockade-for-blockade equation stands, and that anyone joining "Saudi aggression" is an aggressor "even if he disguises it under glittering headlines."

The Senate Passes Graham's Sanctions Bill While the Production Money Waits

The Senate passed the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act on Friday, 86 to 11, named for the South Carolina Republican who died last month. It sanctions Russian officials and carries the expanded Iran sanctions the White House had asked for. It also authorizes tariffs of up to 100 percent on the five biggest buyers of Russian crude and gas and the five biggest facilitators of sanctions evasion. The president alone decides when to lift them. Rand Paul was the only Republican against. The House does not come back from recess until August 31, and Gregory Meeks and Don Beyer have already named those tariff powers as their problem with the bill.

Deputy Defense Secretary Steve Feinberg gave the arms manufacturers a maximum of 21 days, in a memo sent Wednesday, to come back with plans for faster deliveries and higher output. He told them "years-long development cycles are not acceptable," and asked them to propose their own capital investment and show "skin in the game." The money to build those lines out is sitting in Congress. Roughly eight in ten THAAD interceptors and half the Patriots are already spent.

Two more bills went in on Friday. John Hickenlooper and a group of senators introduced a resolution to stop what he called "President Trump's illegal war with Iran" — American lives lost, gas and fertilizer prices up, stockpiles drained, "End this war. NOW." Jeanne Shaheen and James Lankford introduced a separate bill authorizing $200 million a year in security assistance for the Lebanese army, rising to $300 million, conditioned on what Beirut actually does about Hezbollah. Sanctions for the group's foreign financiers come attached. And the Treasury designated the Dubai exchange Shelbit, its founder Siavash Kayvanpour, and the Iran-based Aban Tether. Reuters had put Shelbit at the center of a $4 billion evasion operation a week earlier, moving crypto for Iran's central bank and into wallets linked to the Revolutionary Guards.

Ottawa's Campus Report Lands as a Judge Certifies 4,000 Jewish Plaintiffs

Nearly every Jewish student on a Canadian campus has watched Jew-hatred happen in the past year, according to a federal report Canada's own government paid for and released last week. The Metropolis Institute surveyed roughly 900 Jewish students at more than two dozen colleges and universities. Of those, 95.7 percent had witnessed at least one incident in twelve months, 22 percent had seen physical violence against Jews, and 70 percent said their school doesn't take any of it seriously. Faculty were named in 18 percent of the incidents and teaching assistants in another 7. One student described being marked zero on an assignment about Hamas's sexual violence against Jews on October 7 and told to write about the Israeli police instead. Another watched a friend in a kippah get chased out of a building by students shouting "there's a Jew ... let's get him." Jack Jedwab wrote the report. He called the pattern systemic, with no pretext attached to it.

The survey was commissioned for Canada's special envoy on antisemitism. Mark Carney's government abolished that post earlier this year, along with the Islamophobia envoy. In June it replaced both with a Ministerial Advisory Council on Rights, Equality and Inclusion, announced after Carney said the country was failing Jewish Canadians.

A Quebec judge certified a class action against McGill the same week. Judge Dominique Poulin's ruling covers every Jewish student registered at McGill since October 8, 2023. The plaintiffs' lawyers put that at as many as 4,000 people. The suit says the university never enforced its own rules on hate and harassment. She didn't weigh the merits. She held the case deserved to be heard, and B'nai Brith Canada is funding it.

And at the Edmonton Heritage Festival on Monday, a man got past the perimeter of the Israel Pavilion. He lunged at the back of the kitchen tent with a knife and struck it. A volunteer pulled him off and security took him down. Independent Jewish Voices Edmonton and Edmonton Jews Against Zionism had organized that afternoon's three-hour protest alongside a Palestinian student group, demanding the festival throw the pavilion out after 45 years in it. "All the Zionists are racists," the crowd chanted. Dancers waiting to go on were moved into a shelter tent, offered a shortened set or none at all, and danced.

Jerusalem Tells Israelis Across Greece to Conceal Jewish Identifiers

Israel's Foreign Ministry told Israelis in Greece this morning to stay away from crowds, conceal Israeli and Jewish identifiers, and stop posting where they are in real time. Anti-Israel demonstrations are set for 36 locations today under the slogan "not on our land, not in our name" — Athens and Thessaloniki in the evening, and the islands Israelis actually go to, Rhodes and Crete and Mykonos. The local BDS organization, a group calling itself March to Gaza Greece, and the Palestinian community in Greece put the day together on a Telegram channel of about 3,000 members. They want Greek-Israeli military cooperation ended and they want Greece to stop feeling like a friendly place for Israelis to take a holiday. One of the calls complains that IDF soldiers come to the islands to rest.

The harder case was Tuesday on Koh Phangan, where nobody was demonstrating about anything. A 62-year-old Israeli woman and her 23-year-old daughter parked a motorcycle and walked toward a waterfall. A man on another bike stopped and asked where they were from. The daughter said Israel. He told them he didn't like what Israel is doing in Gaza, they told him they were on holiday and didn't want the conversation, and he said he was against violence. Then he came back down the path and attacked. He beat the mother, bit her ear and kept striking her head until she lost consciousness. The daughter was beaten trying to pull him off, broke away and ran for the road, and he chased her until two French women came into view. Both needed surgery, the mother for bleeding in her head and for her ear after a boat transfer to Koh Samui. The suspect holds a French passport and was arrested later, over a separate assault.

Briefly Noted

Frontline & Security

• Jerusalem Post: Mossad chief Roman Gofman is removing the head of his Intelligence Directorate and the head of the Iran division, the two officers who drafted the plan to put Kurdish ground forces into Iran under Israeli and American air cover — shown to Trump, never run. The agency calls the departures mutual, and Gofman was Netanyahu's military secretary before he got the job.
• Ynet News: Iron Beam reached the IDF last December and still is not operational — one system handed over, no follow-on order from the Defense Ministry, and Rafael saying it needs more adjustment months after its chairman put the remaining work at a few days. The cheap answer to the drone problem has been in Israel's hands for eight months without intercepting anything.
• Arutz Sheva: The US Air Force is moving some of its aerial refueling aircraft off Ben-Gurion at Transportation Minister Miri Regev's request, to clear parking before the airport's busiest August since October 7 — 2.6 million passengers, about a hundred thousand a day. More American tankers are due in and will sit at military airfields instead.
• The JC: Prosecutors indicted a couple from Ashkelon on Thursday over months of surveillance work for Iranian intelligence paid in cryptocurrency — an Israeli who came from Ukraine four years ago and his Ukrainian partner, both arrested in July by the police and the Shin Bet.
• Ynet: The IDF shut down Givati's haredi Tomer company and folded its men into a secular company now fighting in Gaza. They enlisted in November 2024 on a promise they could keep their way of life, most of them cutting off their own families to do it, and the army closed the track under them.

Diplomacy & Geopolitics

• Algemeiner: Colombia's new government has promised Gideon Sa'ar it will withdraw its support for South Africa's genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, on top of the ambassadors and the embassy move already agreed. The ambassadors and the embassy cost Bogota nothing — pulling out of the case takes a party off South Africa's filing.
• JNS: Uganda's parliament voted Thursday to let Museveni send troops to Gaza with the international stabilization force, after Trump asked him through emissaries in July. Kampala has now authorized a contingent for a mission whose status-of-forces agreement is still unsigned.
• Jerusalem Post: Italy's Council of State ordered Rome's Fiumicino airport to strip out Rafael's counter-drone system and hand the job to the Italian firm ELT, after Defense Ministry experts classified the radar as military equipment that never had the import permits. The court sent the file to the Rome prosecutor to weigh criminal charges over the procurement.
• Times of Israel: Britain's Charity Commission opened a statutory inquiry into the Al-Khair Foundation, one of the UK's largest Muslim charities, after its director Mohammad Yousef Hasna was arrested on US charges of moving money and supplies to Hamas through what prosecutors call a sham humanitarian organization. The Commission's other live class inquiry is into eight British Jewish charities over money sent to communities in Judea and Samaria.
• JNS: The State Department named World Vision UK among the three faith-based partners sharing what it calls a historic $2 billion global health allocation, four years after an Israeli court convicted the charity's Gaza operations manager on charges of funnelling up to $50 million to Hamas. A 2019 Senate Finance Committee review called World Vision's vetting of its sub-grantees "borderline negligent."

Public Diplomacy & Media

• Jerusalem Post: Cyber analysts working for the World Zionist Organization found dozens of X accounts pushing Zohran Mamdani and City Hall content at up to 955 posts a day, 96 to 100 percent of them straight reshares, and say they are "100% sure" the IP addresses trace to City Hall's own infrastructure. Nobody has yet established who ran the accounts, or whether anyone in the mayor's office told them to.
• JNS: Teva asked a federal judge in Philadelphia to bar the health insurer suing it over price-fixing from telling jurors the company is Israeli, arguing in its filing that after almost three years of the Gaza war "anything connected with Israel has been subject to the highest levels of controversy."
• Jerusalem Post: John Fetterman went on Jon Stewart's podcast this week and refused to call Gaza a genocide, arguing the civilian deaths are terrible and collateral to killing Hamas's leadership, and said what the position costs him with Democratic voters: "I would rather have people know what I happen to believe." Stewart pressed the whole way and told him the Jewish community and Israel "are not the same thing, brother man."
• The JC: Andy Burnham gave a job in his government to Steve Witherden, the Labour MP who accused Israel of the "deliberate extermination of the people of Gaza," and to two more Socialist Campaign Group MPs in the same round of appointments.
• Times of Israel: Not one international act appears anywhere in the Israel Festival's Jerusalem program this year — a French tightrope cooperative gave up the opening slot over the political pressure of performing in Israel, and the Jerusalem troupe that took it instead drew 7,500 people to the Ben Hinnom Valley.

Am Yisrael

• The JC: Kemi Badenoch has made Joshua Bonehill-Paine an adviser on countering extremism for the Conservatives' Culture and Integration Commission, days after he quit as the party's candidate for a Somerset council seat. Luciana Berger, the Jewish MP he went to prison for harassing, called the appointment an insult and said Badenoch still has not accepted the party got it wrong.
• Walla: The Community Security Trust's half-year count has minors as the victims in 38 percent of Britain's violent antisemitic incidents where the age was known, nearly a third of the attackers minors, and eighteen cases of children attacking Jewish children.
• JNS: An Alameda County jury convicted David William Denton of arson for burning the mezuzah scroll on the door of Berkeley Hillel with a pocket torch while students were inside for Shabbat in February. Sentencing is September 3, against a three-year maximum.
• JTA: Ted Cruz, Elissa Slotkin, Brad Knott and Tom Suozzi introduced the Right to Worship Act on Thursday, a bipartisan bill putting a 100-foot buffer around houses of worship during services, mirroring a law recently enacted in New York.
• JNS: Haverford College settled the Deborah Project's suit for five Jewish students, its outgoing president writing to the campus that no Haverford professor may discriminate against anyone over a commitment to Judaism, Israel or Zionism.

Domestic & Law

• Ynet: Yariv Levin will tell the High Court this week that he is going ahead with the tender for the first head of Mahash — the unit June's law pulls out of the State Attorney's Office and places under his own ministry — because the law passed before the election was called, so the restraint on senior appointments during a campaign does not reach it. Baharav-Miara has joined the petitioners and wants an interim order stopping him.
• Ynet: Likud's own legal adviser, Ilan Bombach, asked the Tel Aviv District Court to hear the challenge to the party tribunal's district-slate ruling immediately, warning that the August 17 primary is in danger of cancellation without it, and the court left the hearing where it was. Netanyahu's eight reserved slots leave a fight over roughly sixteen realistic places.
• Times of Israel: The Central Elections Committee ordered Gadi Eisenkot to pull a campaign video built on AI-generated IDF soldiers, ruling that the uniform is intangible public property and that the footage manufactured a connection between him and the army.
• Jerusalem Post: July's Israeli Voice Index has 72% of Jewish Israelis and 58.5% of Arab Israelis saying the integrity of the October 27 election is in danger, and a majority of every political bloc agrees. Two thirds oppose the law that halted the arrest of deserters.
• JTA: The Jerusalem District Court has temporarily barred moving Nile crocodiles into the moat Itamar Ben-Gvir wants dug around the Ketziot wing that holds Nukhba prisoners, on a petition against Idit Silman's decision to reclassify the animals so security agencies could keep them — a decision her own ministry's legal adviser said she had no authority to take. The state answers by August 16.

Economy, Tech & Infrastructure

• Ynet News: Netanyahu wants another NIS 50 billion on the ten-year defense buildup — about NIS 400 billion now, and stretched past the decade — while the NIS 15 billion and NIS 25 billion promised a month ago still haven't reached the Defense Ministry. Tens of billions of it go to buying American weapons, a hedge against the next US assistance agreement.
• Arutz Sheva: The Defense Ministry ordered about $330 million of work from defense-tech start-ups in the first half of the year — roughly a billion shekels, double the same months of 2025 — out of the 322 companies it has brought under its oversight since the war began.
• Globes: Elbit opens a drone factory in Serbia in the second half of September and keeps control of it, 51 percent against the Serbian state arms firm's 49. Belgrade asked not to be named on the $1.63 billion package it bought last year, and it is cutting the ribbon in public now.
• Times of Israel: United comes back to Newark–Ben Gurion on September 8 with two flights a day, three days before Rosh Hashanah, while American has pushed its own return past the end of March. El Al and Arkia have had the American nonstop market to themselves since February, and they have charged for it.
• The JC: Fifty-three haredi entrepreneurs mentored by BizLabs — a Kemach Foundation and Jerusalem Development Authority program — have raised £46 million between them, and seven percent of their businesses closed inside the first year against the 94 percent the program was built to answer.

Culture, Religion & Society

• Ynet: Tel Aviv University researchers counting border crossings put 2025 at almost 91,000 Israelis out of the country for more than three months, against a decade average near 60,000. It counts anyone abroad past three months, so sabbaticals and long contracts sit in the total alongside the people who are actually going.
• Ynet: Roughly 2,000 Seret-Vizhnitz hasidim in Haifa have signed up with Likud and will vote in its August 17 primary, over a bus line and a girls' school their own MKs never got open. One of their men now sits on the Likud central committee.
• Times of Israel: Haredi men threw eggs at Jerusalem's Basimta cafe for the sixth Saturday running, and Yair Golan and Democrats MKs linked arms in front of it. Basimta is an official project of Jews for Jesus, and the man who runs it heads the group in Jerusalem.
• Arutz Sheva: Rabbis who agree on very little else — Shmuel Eliyahu, Dov Lior, Shlomo Aviner, Yaakov Medan — have put out a joint call through the Temple Mount Yeshiva for young religious men to enlist in the police unit posted on the Mount, so that more of the officers standing there keep Torah.
• Jerusalem Post: Nahariya's Byzantine church is open to visitors again, four months after a Hezbollah rocket hit it and the municipality set about repairing its 550 CE mosaic floor. The Persians destroyed the church in 614 and the floor is still there.

Developments to Watch

Northern Front (Lebanon / Syria)

• Israel steps back into a pilot zone — Lebanese channels report Israeli forces pushed out of Zotar al-Sharqiya on Friday night toward Zotar al-Gharbiya, the village Israel left under the agreement's pilot zones, and dug a new position a hundred meters short of it. The pilot zones are the only part of that agreement either side has performed, and they are the proof of concept a verification force is being assembled to extend.
• Israel asks Beirut about Ron Arad — Israel has reportedly answered Beirut's demand for the release of dozens of Lebanese prisoners, Hezbollah men among them, by asking what Lebanon knows about Ron Arad and the Lebanese Jews who vanished in the 1980s. Forty years of unanswered questions now sit on a table where the other side wants something, which is the only position from which they have ever been asked.

Gaza & Southern Theater

• A Nukhba man on a Shin Bet permit — A Nukhba man who came through the fence on October 7 was driving aid trucks inside Gaza on a permit the Shin Bet issued him, until troops took him at Kerem Shalom on Wednesday. Every phase after this one runs on permits from the same service — merchants, drivers, construction crews, and whoever the Emiratis hire in Rafah.
• Hamas turns on the militias' men — Gazans say Hamas is pushing them to kill the men serving in the Israeli-backed militias, and the calls started once the roadmap's second stage was announced. The roadmap disarms every armed group in the Strip, and Hamas is thinning the one it can reach without waiting for anybody's signature.

Regional Axis (Iran, Houthis, Militias)

• Yemen's truce breaks in Marib — Houthi missiles and drones killed at least 58 Yemeni government troops in Marib and Hadramawt, the deadliest attack since the 2022 truce, and the UN's envoy warns Yemen is heading back to full civil war. Riyadh is fighting this one through the Yemenis it pays, because a Saudi strike gets answered on Saudi refineries and Saudi airports.
• Iran restocks its shoulder-fired launchers — An Arabic-language report has Iran taking delivery of roughly three hundred shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles from Russia and China. Man-portable launchers are the one air-defense resupply neither supplier has to admit to, and they are pointed at the aircraft that would fly the next round.

Diplomatic & Legal

• A complaint follows a reservist to Vietnam — The Hind Rajab Foundation, whose product is a criminal complaint against whichever Israeli soldier it can locate abroad, says it has filed with Vietnamese authorities against a reservist on holiday there. Every previous filing landed in a Western legal system built to absorb it, and Vietnam has no such machinery.

Home Front & Politics

• The home-front emergency runs to September — The government is set to extend the nationwide special home-front status to September 8, on a security assessment that still puts a high likelihood on an attack reaching Israel. Five months in the extension is routine, and the assessment under it has not moved.
• A billion shekels out of tech — The cabinet moves a billion shekels into urgent defense procurement today, and most of it comes out of money set aside for investment in the technology sector. Israel is paying for the war it is in with the industry it was counting on to pay for the next one.

◇