Netanyahu turned the Board of Peace's 15-point roadmap down yesterday, twice. To which a US official answered that Washington has no problem with that — as long as Israel goes on restraining its attacks in Gaza. Of course, it has been restraining them since the beginning — to say nothing of the further restraint the past week or so. Tehran has put an end to the Gaza and Lebanon operations on its list of conditions for reopening Hormuz. Beirut won't come to the September round until the earthworks stop. Three negotiations, no Israelis in any of the rooms. And all three impact Israel.

Flash Brief: The Day in 90 Seconds or Less

• Gaza: Netanyahu rejects the 15-point roadmap Israel never signed, and Washington says it doesn't mind. See The War Today.
• Iran: Trump drops the strike for the blockade, and Tehran attaches the whole war to Hormuz. See The War Today.
• Lebanon: Israel shells the Ali Taher ridge while Beirut conditions September's round on the earthworks stopping. See The War Today.
• Elections: Gafni won't promise Netanyahu his seats, and neither bloc reaches sixty-one in last night's poll. See Inside Israel.
• Arab parties: Tibi breaks the Joint List over ninth place while Abbas prepares to seat a Jewish candidate. See Inside Israel.
• Syria: Russia's bases at Hmeimim and Tartus become "joint training" centers, and Damascus takes the pier. See Israel and the World.
• Mecca pact: Pakistan's defense minister points the new mutual-defense clause at Israel, and Ankara and Islamabad walk it back. See Israel and the World.
• OCHA: The UN's "settler violence" dashboard counts an attack on a Jewish shepherd, and 1,361 Temple Mount visits. See Israel and the World.
• London: Washington sanctions the Brotherhood's secretary-general, and Britain leaves him living beside two Jewish schools. See Israel and the World.
• Lone soldiers: Diaspora enlistment through Garin Tzabar runs a third above October 7, and France twentyfold. See Israel and the World.

Israel's own operations have become what other people trade with. Washington will live with the rejection while the strikes stay stopped, Tehran wrote an end to the Gaza and Lebanon operations into its conditions for reopening Hormuz, and Beirut wants the bulldozers off the ridge before it names a September date. Enforcement is the one thing Israel is still doing on its own, and it is what all three of them want it to stop.

The War Today

Netanyahu Rejects the Gaza Roadmap and Washington Says It Doesn't Mind

"Israel rejects the 15-point document." Netanyahu said it twice at yesterday's cabinet meeting. The document is the roadmap of the Board of Peace, the body Trump chairs over postwar Gaza, published on 30 July. It sequences Hamas's disarmament against a phased Israeli pullback, and it opens the second stage of the ceasefire that has held in Gaza since last October under Trump's 20-point plan and Security Council Resolution 2803. Hamas "accepted" it. Israel never signed it. No withdrawal until Hamas is disarmed, he said. Disarmed means "the heavy weapons, the less heavy weapons, all the weapons," and "real disarmament, not fictitious disarmament." As long as he is prime minister there is no Palestinian state, in Gaza or in Judea and Samaria. "Neither Fatahstan nor Hamastan."

Zamir passed the hold-fire order down last Monday evening on the political echelon's instruction, and there hasn't been a targeted killing since. Officers in Gaza say the approval for a strike now climbs to the chief of staff even when troops spot armed men beyond the Yellow Line. "We send it up and wait for approval," one of them said. "Now it is quiet, there is nothing." The army has started a gradual pullback to the original Yellow Line, which covers about 53 percent of the Strip, from the roughly 70 percent it holds today. The Shin Bet is now vetting the Gazan workers who will do the building on the unannounced rehabilitation east of Rafah.

A Nukhba man who came over the fence on October 7 applied for a permit to move private-sector goods, got one from the Shin Bet, drove a truck to the Gaza side of Kerem Shalom on Wednesday, and was arrested. A week earlier he'd have been killed. The joint IDF-Shin Bet unit that has spent three years running the killers' own footage through facial recognition has identified roughly 5,000 men. About 2,800 are confirmed dead. Another 300 sit in custody waiting on military tribunals nobody has set up yet.

Netanyahu told Kushner last week he'd give the plan a chance. A US official put Washington's position without much decoration: "We understand Bibi's political needs. We have no problem with it as long as he continues to do what we ask, especially regarding restraining attacks in Gaza." Trump's only public answer to the rejection was to repost a Hillary Clinton column arguing there is no alternative to his plan. Nickolay Mladenov, the Board of Peace's high representative for Gaza, spent last night on Israeli television telling Israelis the tunnels will take more than a decade to clear, that nobody is asking Israel to withdraw before verified steps on the ground, and that personal weapons under the plan don't mean Kalashnikovs at all. Meanwhile the Prime Minister's Office sends Washington a violations file every day. In the 24 hours to Sunday the army logged 14 of them, 11 classed as developing threats to Israeli troops, plus two weapons transfers and a charge planted near the Yellow Line, against 95 unclassified violations in all.

Trump Trades the Strike for the Blockade as Iran Hardens on Hormuz

"We are low-keying it." Trump said yesterday that Washington is "only semi-negotiating" with Tehran and is "just watching Iran with its huge inflation and the fact they have no money." The regime can't pay its soldiers, he said, oil is back near $75 a barrel from over $100, and the whole thing is a chess game — "it always works out." He made no new threat. He didn't complain that Iran is holding up the announcement on reopening the strait. American officials say he was leaning toward resuming major combat operations a week ago and was talked out of it. He has privately floated declaring victory and extending the ceasefire indefinitely with no nuclear deal at all, provided Hormuz opens and fuel prices hold. Mike Waltz put the logic plainly: Tehran fears the Treasury secretary more than the defense secretary, because "they'll absorb the bombings." Since the blockade of Iran's ports resumed on 14 July, CENTCOM has redirected 55 commercial vessels, disabled two and boarded two. It waved more than 30 through carrying aid.

Tehran hardened yesterday. Araghchi says the deal with Oman on new shipping lanes, replacing the ones drawn in 1968, is in its "final stages" — while denying there are talks with Washington at all, only messages passed through intermediaries. The strait opens when six conditions are met: Washington changes its conduct, ends operations against Iran and its allies in Lebanon, Gaza, Yemen and Iraq, lifts sanctions, pulls American forces back from around Iran, pays compensation for war damage, and releases frozen Iranian assets. The IRGC says the reopening is "completely separate" from the Oman track, and calls the strait "a theater of war for us and not just a waterway." Amoli Larijani says sovereignty over Hormuz belongs to Iran and the water is not going back to what it was. The Majlis national security committee passed the outline of a Hormuz bill without a dissenting vote. Iran hit an ADNOC tanker on Saturday, the fourth Emirati hull this week, and a second ship burned off Khasab. Overnight a tanker caught fire on the southern Omani route the US Navy escorts. Washington answered none of it.

Mohsen Rezaei has replaced Zolghadr as secretary of the Supreme National Security Council. He commanded the IRGC through most of the Iran-Iraq war, and Interpol wants him for the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish center in Buenos Aires that killed 85 people. He is the second man in the job since Israel killed Ali Larijani in March. Mojtaba Khamenei, wounded in the strike that killed his father on the first day of the war and not seen in public since, reportedly named Rezaei his own representative on the council. State media say Khamenei met Pezeshkian in late July, and the Basij has promised footage of him out among crowds at some point.

Netanyahu told the cabinet Tehran has hit countries across the region and has held off Israel because it knows what would come back at it. Underneath that, the IDF is reported to be preparing for the possibility of resuming strikes on Iran on its own, without American approval or support, if the American war ends. Brad Cooper came to Israel and met Zamir.

Closed Dossier: The Permission Layer — The Dossier argues the war's real product is a permission layer — Israel holds the full capability, Washington holds the decision to use it — and an IDF preparing an Iran strike it would have to run without American approval or support is that arrangement being tested from underneath.

Israel Presses the Ali Taher Ridge While Beirut Stalls the Next Round

Beirut won't come to the eighth round of American-brokered talks, set for early September, unless Israel meets its terms first: a full ceasefire, and an end to the demolition and earthworks the IDF is running in the south. That comes through Lebanese outlets close to the delegation and to Hezbollah. The delegation came home from Rome last week with no date for the next round and no Israeli commitment to stop or narrow operations. Israel and Washington both refused to open a third pilot zone before the first two show progress. Both demanded Hezbollah come off the Ali Taher ridge above Nabatieh.

All of it hangs off the June Israel-Lebanon-US framework, which ties Israel's pullback to Hezbollah's verified disarmament. Israel is said to have struck Italy off the list of countries that could certify that disarmament, after Spain and France. It reportedly objects to any European force inheriting UNIFIL's mandate in the south, and has floated Switzerland instead. Bern is said to be willing in principle.

A Hezbollah explosive drone came down near Israeli troops on Ali Taher on Friday and did no damage. Overnight Lebanese sources counted more than fifty artillery shells onto the ridge, and Lebanese channels report the army has tried to advance on it several times with robotic vehicles. Netanyahu told the cabinet Israel has "acted forcefully in Lebanon in recent days, eliminating terrorists, including in the Ali Taher Ridge." He wouldn't say more than that. Last week the 55th Brigade and Yahalom, under the 91st Division, took apart an underground shaft in the security zone and pulled Kalashnikovs, missiles, anti-tank launchers, artillery weapons and RPG rounds out of it. Engineers were still bringing down buildings at Zotar al-Sharqiya. And the army now believes, close to certainly, that the charge that killed Maj. (res.) Harel Birenstock z"l and Sgt. Maj. (res.) Tamir Vaknin z"l at Majdal Zoun was planted before the ceasefire and simply missed. Units had been walking through that building for weeks.

Israel opened the March campaign on Hezbollah's banks before its rockets. Jets took out more than a dozen branches of Al-Qard Al-Hassan, then the money changers Iran used to move funds and the gas stations that generated the group's revenue. Run with Washington and, increasingly, with Beirut's own government, that campaign has put Hezbollah into its worst financial squeeze in years. Salaries for tens of thousands of fighters are still mostly being paid. The compensation payments to the displaced have stopped and the social services are being cut. Before the war the State Department put Iran's transfers at around $700 million a year against a budget of roughly a billion.

Inside Israel

Bluth Answers the Court by Barring Dardik from Judea and Samaria

Central Command chief Maj. Gen. Avi Bluth replaced the house-arrest order on Tal Yinon Dardik today with one barring him from Judea and Samaria altogether, except for Modi'in Illit, where he reports to the police station twice a day. Dardik is the Israeli from the Kfar Tarfon outpost whom the Shin Bet asked Bluth to restrict in June, after prosecutors decided they could not build a chargeable file on the March raid at Khirbet Humsa. He has been in the Russian Compound since early July for refusing to comply, and he is under indictment for that refusal. The Jerusalem District Court threw out Bluth's appeal yesterday morning and gave him until Tuesday to write workable terms, and it upheld everything else. Judge Avraham Rubin called the order "justified, proportionate and reasonable," found Dardik dangerous to the security of the area, and left standing the finding that he belongs in full house arrest. What the court struck was the address. Dardik's mother-in-law had refused to have him in her house.

Families move back into Ganim on Thursday, twenty-one years after the Disengagement emptied it, with a branch of the Bnei David academy in Eli opening alongside them. Ganim is one of the four northern Samaria communities uprooted in 2005, and the nineteen-community plan Katz and Smotrich took to the cabinet last year is what is rebuilding it. Gush Etzion puts up Mitzpe Darga in the coming months, the first community in the middle of the Judean Desert, six kilometers from the Dead Sea.

Gafni Will Not Promise Netanyahu His Seats and Neither Bloc Reaches Sixty-One

Moshe Gafni chairs Degel HaTorah inside United Torah Judaism and has delivered its seats to Netanyahu in coalition after coalition. Asked at the Or Yisrael yeshiva last night whether he would answer the old question the old way, he said he wouldn't. "Unlike previous times, this time I'm not saying in advance that I'm going with Netanyahu." Asked what the alternative is, given where Lapid, Gantz, Eisenkot, Liberman and Bennett stand on conscription, he said that after not believing Netanyahu he'd suggest not believing the others either. He also declined to rule out running Degel HaTorah separately from Agudat Yisrael. On its own, Agudah might not clear the threshold.

Kan's poll last night put Likud at 24 and Gadi Eisenkot's Yashar at 23, with the anti-Netanyahu parties on 56, Netanyahu's on 53 and the Arab parties holding the other 11. Neither of the new parties built to take right-wing votes off Likud on conscription clears the threshold in it, not Gilad Erdan and Yuli Edelstein's, launched last week, and not Chili Tropper and Yoaz Hendel's. Benny Gantz's Blue and White doesn't either. Likud called Erdan and Edelstein "disgruntled fake right-wingers" working to steal votes for a left-wing government under Eisenkot, and Erdan's people answered that the ones stealing right-wing votes are the ones perpetuating draft evasion. Erdan says Likud offered him a reserved slot in recent days and he turned it down. Likud says no offer was made, directly or indirectly.

Likud also cannot hold its own primary on schedule. The Tel Aviv District Court heard a petition today against the party tribunal's ruling that voided the district clause, the one letting sitting MKs compete for the districts' reserved slots instead of running in the national primary, and the judge looked likely to reverse the tribunal. That means re-registration, which means the primary due next Monday almost certainly slips. The petition came from MK Afif Abed, disqualified from the Galilee district by the tribunal's ruling, and Likud's own legal adviser Ilan Bombach joined his side and asked for a decision the same day. Avichai Boaron gave Edelstein and Dan Illouz twenty-four hours to resign their seats or be moved against as defectors, and Illouz said he'd resign today or tomorrow.

Tibi Breaks the Joint List as Ra'am Prepares to Seat Segalovitz

Ahmad Tibi's Ta'al rejected the slate on Sunday and froze the talks. The reconciliation committee, public figures and lawyers the three parties had empowered a week earlier to settle the order for them, put Hadash's new chairman Yousef Jabareen first and Tibi second, then left Ta'al with nothing until ninth. Ta'al had asked for sixth or seventh. One of its members called the proposal a stab in the back and the committee biased. Hadash and Balad both accepted it and asked for the three leaderships to convene and declare the list. Two committee members resigned instead, and when the Committee of Arab Local Authority Heads offered to mediate, Hadash refused that too.

Mansour Abbas told Channel 12 in July that Ra'am would run alone, and he is assembling something different. Yoav Segalovitz, the Yesh Atid MK who ran the crime fight in the Arab sector as deputy internal security minister under Bennett and Lapid, left Yesh Atid on Thursday and handed the Knesset speaker his resignation on Sunday, ahead of joining Ra'am, and a group of former senior security officials has since gone to Abbas offering to come with him. Abbas has until August 22 to get the changes through Ra'am's own primaries: separating the party from the Shura Council and the Islamic Movement, two reserved slots for a Jewish candidate and a Christian one, and a change to women's representation. Segalovitz wants a declared national-service framework for Arab citizens, and acceptance of the Declaration of Independence and of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state. Kan's poll has Ra'am at six, Hadash-Ta'al at five and Balad short of the threshold it missed last time by about 16,700 votes.

Israel and the World

Russia's Syrian Bases Become "Joint Training" Centers

Syria's foreign ministry said yesterday it had reached a memorandum of understanding with Moscow over Hmeimim and Tartus, the air base and naval base on the Syrian coast that are Russia's only official military bases outside the former Soviet Union and the ones it kept after Bashar al-Assad fell. Eighteen months of negotiating produced this: the military facilities at both sites become "joint training and qualification" centers, with three months to finish the transition.

What Damascus actually takes is the commercial half. Its civil aviation authority has already taken over Latakia's international airport next door to Hmeimim and says it will rebuild it, and its ports authority takes Pier No. 4 at Tartus and the warehouses behind it — the berth Moscow was trying last month to turn into a commercial logistics hub of its own. Foreign Minister Asaad al-Shaibani toured both sites the same afternoon. Russia has said nothing at all.

Ahmed al-Sharaa, who commanded al-Qaeda's Nusra Front until 2016 and took Damascus in December 2024, has been to see Putin in Moscow twice since. Assad is still there, and nobody has extradited him.

Pakistan Points the Mecca Pact at Israel, Ankara Walks It Back

Pakistan's government spent yesterday walking back its own defense minister. Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar called the Mecca pact "purely defensive in character," aimed at no country, open to anyone willing to respect its principles and settle disputes peacefully, consistent with Article 51 of the UN Charter — and said it cancels and replaces nothing anyone has already signed. Turkey's Hakan Fidan, who had spent Saturday calling the arrangement technically equivalent to NATO's Article 5, said it isn't aimed at Tehran and that Egypt could join and make it four.

What they were answering was Khawaja Asif, who had called for "a united military front" against Israel and hung it on the Palestinian question. Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan signed on Friday; the operative line is that an armed attack on any one of the three counts as an attack on all three, and it doesn't mention Israel anywhere. Iran's foreign ministry claimed the whole thing proves the region has worked out that security bought through the United States is no longer on offer.

Netanyahu called Narendra Modi last Thursday, the day before the signing, and the two reviewed what Modi's post afterward called the India-Israel Special Strategic Partnership.

OCHA Counts the Attack on a Jewish Shepherd as "Settler Violence"

OCHA's own definition files a Palestinian attack on an Israeli and an Israeli attack on a Palestinian under one heading. The UN humanitarian office's Settler-Related Violence Dashboard is the count Western governments and wire desks reach for when they want a number on Judea and Samaria. It logs violence, intimidation or property damage carried out by "settlers," committed against "settlers," or involving any other Israeli civilian there. The agency says it doesn't always confirm the details before publishing, and that an incident can be put down to "settlers" on the circumstances alone, with nobody identified and no police finding behind it. It logged roughly 1,800 incidents for 2025.

The Press Service of Israel spent months setting OCHA's entries against Israeli military communications, police records and field documentation for January through May, and published the review this morning. On January 27 in Masafer Yatta, OCHA logged a hundred-strong "settler" rampage across four Palestinian communities. Military radio traffic from that night has Palestinians from Halawa stoning a Jewish shepherd, injuring him and driving off his flock. Soldiers went out later and recovered the sheep.

On March 21 near Beit Imrin, OCHA recorded the death of 18-year-old Yehuda Sherman as a collision between a Palestinian car and the all-terrain vehicle he was riding. The Shin Bet says the driver admitted under questioning that he chased the vehicle down and accelerated into it. At Qalandiya on May 11, OCHA reported that Israeli forces shot and killed a Palestinian man. The Border Police say he got out of a car and opened fire on them with a scoped M-16.

The Kohelet Policy Forum went through the database itself in June and found that 98 to 99 percent of what sits on it involves confrontations with Israeli security forces — soldiers and police, on a dashboard named for settlers. Of 1,704 entries logged in eastern Jerusalem, 1,361 are Jews visiting the Temple Mount. Another 1,613 in Judea and Samaria are Israelis hiking or touring.

The European Union sanctioned Regavim and its director general Meir Deutsch over "extremist settler activity," citing the group's lobbying for the demolition of an EU-funded Palestinian school near Bethlehem that an Israeli court had ordered torn down in 2023. Asked whether OCHA's data fed the designations, an EU spokesman said the discussions are confidential. OCHA didn't answer at all. Neither did B'Tselem, the Palestinian Center for Human Rights or Breaking the Silence.

Washington Sanctions the Brotherhood's Secretary-General and Britain Leaves Him in Willesden

The US Treasury names Mahmoud Al-Abyari as Secretary-General of the Muslim Brotherhood and has him under sanctions. He lives in Willesden, north-west London, a few minutes' walk from a busy synagogue and two Jewish primary schools. He is 74, an Egyptian-Austrian dual national, and he has been in Britain for decades. Washington says he raised and transferred money to Hamas, and it names two Turkish charities he fundraised for, Filistin Vakfi and Hayat Yolu, both already banned in the United States for doing the same thing. It designated the Egyptian Brotherhood a Specially Designated Global Terrorist in January.

His three-bedroom house is worth about £1.2 million. The Nile Valley Trust bought it in 2004 for £360,000, and the Trust's address in nearby Cricklewood has been named again and again as a base for the exiled Egyptian Brotherhood's senior figures, and by some accounts as its British headquarters.

David Cameron ordered a review of the Brotherhood in 2015, run by John Jenkins, the former ambassador in Riyadh, and Charles Farr, who ran counter-terrorism at the Home Office. It found the Brotherhood "prepared to countenance violence — including, from time to time, terrorism — where gradualism is ineffective." The government read that and declined to proscribe.

Diaspora Enlistment Is Up a Third, and France Twentyfold

About 300 young Jews from 34 countries arrive in Israel this summer to enlist through Garin Tzabar, the Israeli Scouts program that takes in lone soldiers — the ones who serve with no family in the country. The movement's own figures put sign-ups a third higher than they were before October 7. Since 2022 the number of religious participants has risen 85 percent, and the number coming from France has gone up twentyfold. Eighty-five percent of graduates stay in Israel when the service ends, and about a third of their families make the move after them.

They are enlisting into an army holding lines in Gaza and in south Lebanon and five months into the war with Iran. The IDF's July-August intake carries more than 2,500 immigrant recruits from 78 countries, 449 of them lone soldiers, led by Russia at 512, the United States at 489 and Ukraine at 410.

Briefly Noted

Frontline & Security

• Ynet News: The IDF has dug about 80 percent of the "New East" line along the Syrian border — four-meter trenches and earth berms running from Majdal Shams to the southern tripoint — and the Golan Brigade holds nine company outposts on the far side of it. Northern Command says it no longer sizes a threat by which organization it belongs to, only by what it can do.
• Jerusalem Post: The armed Bedouin clans that have been fighting Hamas's military wing in Gaza are now helping the army secure ground west of the Yellow Line and find weapons and tunnels, and the Board of Peace wants them disarmed the day after. Israeli security officials would rather keep them inside the Yellow Line under the army's protection, and are holding the question as leverage against Hamas and the board both.
• Israel Hayom: Syria's interior ministry says it arrested seven men of an ISIS cell at Khan Arnabeh in Quneitra, near the Israeli border, its commander a veteran of the network run by a senior ISIS figure killed in Daraa in 2022.
• Arutz Sheva: Houthi missiles and drones hit the Yemeni port of Mocha, killing at least seven and wounding 30 to 35 by the Yemeni military's count, and the Houthis say they were shooting at weapons depots and Saudi troop concentrations.

Diplomacy & Geopolitics

• Jerusalem Post: The Shaheen–Lankford Lebanon aid bill turns out to condition its money on breaking up the Captagon trade as well as on disarming Hezbollah and cutting off the Iranian funding. The Lebanese courts that would have to enforce any of that have been letting Hezbollah men off with symbolic fines.
• Times of Israel: Rebeca Grynspan, a Costa Rican economist whose parents were Holocaust refugees and who has family in Israel, leads the Security Council's first straw poll to succeed Guterres at ten encourage votes to one discourage, and would be the first woman and the first Jew to run the UN. She runs UNCTAD, which has spent the Gaza war publishing reports critical of Israel.
• JNS: Britain's Charity Commission describes the eight British Jewish charities it has under class inquiry as "charities operating in illegal Israeli settlements in Palestine." The words are the Commission's Stephen Roake, which makes the contested legal characterization the regulator's own description of the bodies it is investigating.

Public Diplomacy & Media

• Walla: The University of Minnesota is paying Raz Segal about $250,000 over the Holocaust and genocide studies directorship it pulled five days after offering it, after a freedom-of-information request turned up donors warning that fundraising would stop completely if the man who called Gaza a "textbook case of genocide" got the center.
• Ynet: L'Express had 60 officers from 25 European intelligence services grade one another — MI6 first, France's DGSE second, Germany down at fifth — and never measured Israel at all, though the reporter who ran the survey puts the Mossad second or third globally and says the pagers operation repaired whatever October 7 cost its name. Europe's governments are legislating against Israel while their own services still rate it an ally with no substitute in the region.
• Times of Israel: Bandcamp pulled Boy George's Nova tribute "We Will Dance Again," so the song is now available nowhere but social media.

Am Yisrael

• Jewish Insider: Minnesota Democrats pick a Senate nominee tomorrow, and Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan — who calls AIPAC part of "a band of super villains" now trying to "buy this election" — has acknowledged that she met the group privately last year to work on "building that relationship." Rep. Angie Craig, the one with the pro-Israel record, has stopped taking money from AIPAC's political arm.
• JNS: Toronto police charged two more people with wilful promotion of hatred over the antisemitic signs carried at a March 15 anti-Israel march, which brings the number charged over that one afternoon to eight. Whether any of it reaches a sentence is what Canada has yet to show.

Domestic & Law

• Times of Israel: Israel Hayom reports, on two anonymous security officials, that Netanyahu's advisers Jonatan Urich, Yisrael Einhorn and Eli Feldstein handed Qatar Israel's classified concerns about Egyptian deployments in Sinai, and that Doha fed them back to Israeli reporters to knock Cairo out of the hostage talks. Urich calls it a total lie from political rivals in an election season, and Einhorn's lawyer denies it outright.
• Ynet: Yariv Levin and his director-general Itamar Donnenfeld will make prosecutors bidding for senior State Attorney's Office posts take screening tests and an occupational assessment for the first time, and Donnenfeld has frozen the tenders — head of the High Court Petitions Department among them — until the pilot covers them. The prosecutors' union has sued at the labour court, which now decides who runs the tenders the prosecution has spent years being accused of tilting toward its own.
• Walla: Gali Baharav-Miara told the court that the 1970 compensation law recognizes only people who were physically at the scene, so the state has rejected all roughly 450 claims from Israelis who listened to their families being murdered down a phone line on October 7. About 78,000 October 7 victims are recognized, most of them for psychological injury, and the 121 Association wants the Knesset to write the phone calls into the law.
• Israel Hayom: An INSS study at Eyal Zamir's half-term puts trust in the chief of staff at 69% in May, against about 30% for Israel Katz and 30% to 40% for Netanyahu. The researchers expect the politicization to sharpen through the campaign, because almost nothing Zamir decides now reads to the public as a professional decision.

Economy, Tech & Infrastructure

• Globes: The Bank of Israel says it was never brought into the decision behind the NIS 400 billion, thirteen-year defense procurement plan Netanyahu has told Finance, Justice and Defense to breach the budget framework for, and that a defense rise that size has to come with a decision on how to pay for it. Passing it means recalling a Knesset that has already dissolved to vote a new budget.
• Jerusalem Post: Netanyahu, Housing Minister Haim Katz and Smotrich announced a reservist housing package on Sunday — 20,000 housing solutions across 2026 and 2027, a bigger reservist share of the discount-apartment lottery that 25,354 of them entered and 4,734 won last round, and no land-value payment for a reservist who builds. That is on top of the NIS 25 billion Netanyahu says has already gone to reservists and their families.
• Times of Israel: KKL-JNF's board approved NIS 859 million, about $285 million, for northern Israel over three years — NIS 362 million of it for municipal infrastructure, and some of it for buying apartments to house teachers in the Galilee and the border communities.

Culture, Religion & Society

• Israel Hayom: Keshet 12's Dancing with the Stars opened a routine on Saturday night with the recording of Yuval Raphael's call to her father from the shelter she survived on October 7, and the judges gave it a perfect forty. The anger came down on the production for clearing it, and the question running through the responses was whether Raphael and her father had been asked at all.
• Israel Hayom: Tzomet Sfarim told publishers on Sunday that it will stock only titles it has cleared in advance, and that they must declare whether a book was paid for by its author. Most Israeli houses, the big ones included, now take tens of thousands of shekels from writers who want to be published, some with no selection at all — the chain is applying a screen the publishers themselves gave up.

Developments to Watch

Northern Front (Lebanon / Syria)

• Weapons for Lebanon stopped at Tartus — Syrian internal security says it seized rifles, RPG rounds and ammunition at Tartus, bound for Lebanon. It is the first time Damascus has shown itself closing the coastal resupply route Israel is taking apart from the other end.

Gaza & Southern Theater

• The stabilization force surveys the ground — The technocratic committee the roadmap would put over Gaza is reported to be preparing a site visit to assess conditions for deploying the international force, with parallel talks on temporary housing for hundreds of thousands of Gazans. None of that waits on Israel's signature.

Regional Axis (Iran, Houthis, Militias)

• Jizan burns two days after Mecca — Saudi Arabia confirmed a fire at an Aramco refinery in Jizan on Sunday without naming a cause, and the Houthis claimed the drone that did it. Riyadh signed its mutual-defense pact on Friday and took a hit on Saudi soil on Sunday, with Washington's advice against a wide Yemen operation still the last word on record. LIKELY TO ESCALATE
• An American drone down at Bab al-Mandab — An MQ-9 came down in Djibouti after the US embassy there reported an aircraft in distress, on a leg from Omani airspace across the Houthis' front. Nobody has claimed it and nobody has ruled out Houthi fire, which is a finding Washington will have to make in public.
• The Gulf pays for Hormuz by air — Kuwait, the UAE, Bahrain, Qatar and Saudi Arabia have spent five months flying in food that used to come by ship, and their residents are paying the difference. Every week the strait stays shut raises the pressure on Tehran's neighbors to settle it on Tehran's terms.
• A campaign against the Basij by name — A group calling itself Ashtara Zero Day published video of a Basij member tortured to death and warned that it holds the names and addresses of Basij members and informants. The Guards and the police are still arguing in public over whether to call it terrorism, and that is the call that starts the sweep.

Diplomatic & Legal

• Sign it, then break it — The censor cleared a report today that officials of one regional state advised another to show tactical flexibility, sign an agreement with Israel, and violate it when ready to fight. Neither state is named. The report does not say whether the advice was taken, or that any agreement now on the table is part of it — and Israel's read of a neighbor's intent is exactly what October 7 cost it.

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