"We look at what is actually happening, less at statements and declarations." That is Trump's Board of Peace, telling Israeli reporters that Netanyahu's rejection of the 15-point roadmap describes nothing Israel is doing — the targeted killings stopped, the roadmap being implemented by a government whose public position is that it refuses it. Israel's own defense officials and political echelon spent yesterday calling each other liars over who stopped the shooting. Washington has taken the Iran strike off the table until after November, and Jerusalem apparently is fine with it.

Flash Brief: The Day in 90 Seconds or Less

• Gaza: Trump's Board of Peace says Israel is implementing the 15-point roadmap its government publicly refuses. See The War Today.
• Iran: Trump drops further strikes for sanctions and the naval blockade until after the November midterms. See The War Today.
• Lebanon: Hezbollah's clinics and food parcels are back inside the one village Israel has handed over. See The War Today.
• Likud: Netanyahu reserves eleven of the top twenty-nine places six days before his party's primary. See Inside Israel.
• Rambam: Katz sends the IDF into a hospital's clinical file, and Israel's doctors close ranks. See Inside Israel.
• Colombia: Bogota recognizes Israeli sovereignty on the Golan and walks out of the Hague Group. See Israel and the World.
• Syria: The IAEA takes al-Kibar's leftover yellowcake off Damascus, on a schedule Jerusalem does not set. See Israel and the World.
• Carlson: Hunter Biden certifies Tucker Carlson's charge that "the Israelis" handed him the laptop story. See Israel and the World.
• Britain: The Palestine Solidarity Campaign triples its income and puts 1,468 councilors on a divestment pledge. See Israel and the World.
• Haverford: A settlement writes Zionism into the college's anti-discrimination rules, binding every professor it employs. See Israel and the World.

What is left to fight over is discretion: which names stay on a target list, and how many places 140,000 Likud members get to fill.

The War Today

Board of Peace Says Israel Is Implementing the Plan It Rejected

Senior officials on Trump's Board of Peace spent yesterday telling Israeli reporters that Netanyahu's rejection doesn't describe anything Israel is actually doing. "We look at what is actually happening, less at statements and declarations," they said. Targeted killings in Gaza have stopped and the ceasefire is holding. By their account the IDF is standing on the original Yellow Line at 53 percent of the Strip, with no posts or forces past it, and Israel is implementing the Board's 15-point roadmap while its public statements reject it. That roadmap is the one Hamas accepted on 30 July and Israel never signed. It is a separate document from the 20-point plan Israel did sign last October under Security Council Resolution 2803.

Underneath that, the army and the political echelon spent the day contradicting each other about who stopped the shooting. Defense officials said openings to kill Hamas military-wing operatives had been missed over the past week on government policy. Senior political officials called that "a complete lie" and said the army never brought a single targeted killing up for approval. Around 500 terrorists have been killed in strikes since the truce took effect. The pressure that ended them ran from Hamas's leadership in Qatar and Turkey through Doha, Cairo, Riyadh and Ankara to the Board of Peace, and from the Board to the White House. Israel has told Washington it will negotiate a formal halt to the targeted killings, with one carve-out: the men who carried out the October 7 attack stay on the list.

Trump Swaps the Bombs for the Blockade Until After November

Trump has settled the Iran war onto sanctions and the naval blockade, and another round of strikes is off the table for now. His aides walked him through what the economy is already doing to Tehran, and he told them he'd rather not order more. Iran is "broke, totally broke," he said yesterday, isn't paying its soldiers, and is running inflation of 300 percent — "309 as of last night." He also said the Navy has 100 percent control of the Strait of Hormuz, has mine-swept the whole of it, and is running a blockade that doesn't fail. Six ships crossed the strait yesterday, against a ten-day average of eleven and the 130 to 140 a day that ran before Iran closed the water on February 28.

The pause runs past the American midterms on November 8 and probably some way beyond, with a fresh assessment after that, possibly opposite whatever government Israel has by then. Hormuz is the one carve-out. Washington will let Tehran and Muscat land whatever arrangement they can reach on their own. One condition: no ship pays Iran a transit fee, and any that does can expect American sanctions. Tehran's foreign ministry answered that nothing passes while the war runs, and that the American blockade is itself a continuation of the war.

Israeli officials say the arrangement suits them. The blockade holds, the sanctions bite, and one of them put the difference plainly: "Our goals are not the same. We want to bring down the regime, and what will bring it down is the economy." The thing they worry about is the man running it, who "is unpredictable and tends to change his mind." Zamir told a senior operational forum that the negotiations now open in every arena are a product of what the army did to open them. The IDF, he said, is on immediate readiness to go back to high-intensity fighting. Brad Cooper sat in that room and told the officers the American commitment to Israel is high and enduring.

In Tehran, six senior military appointments went out in a single day, under decrees issued in Mojtaba Khamenei's name. He has not been seen in public since the strike that killed his father on the war's first day. Ali Abdollahi takes the general staff, empty five and a half months since Israel killed Abd al-Rahim Mousavi, and his decree instructs him to finish merging that staff with Khatam al-Anbiya headquarters into one command. Ahmad Vahidi is formally at the head of the IRGC and Ali Ozmaei at its navy, both already doing the work. And Hossein Taeb has the Basij, four years after he was pushed out of the intelligence organization he built for failing to stop Israel killing Iranian scientists and commanders on Iranian soil.

Hezbollah's Welfare Arm Is Working Inside the Zone Israel Handed Over

Zawtar al-Gharbiya in south Lebanon is the one village Israel has handed back under the June Israel-Lebanon-US framework, the deal that ties Israel's pullback to Hezbollah's verified disarmament. The Lebanese army took it over on 21 July. Hezbollah's Islamic Health Organization was operating there within days. Since then the Wataawanou association has stood up a temporary center in the village, dated to 29 July. It hosts the village council and hands out water, food rations and medical care to residents coming home. Hezbollah's own Al-Manar put the work down to cooperation with the party's social-work sector. The association's head, Afif Shuman, has been identified as a Hezbollah operative, and he has said the group does "support the resistance." A licensed Lebanese payments company suspended the association's account last year when it couldn't document where the money came from or where it was going.

The enforcement ran through the night and into this morning. An Israeli drone struck a vehicle in the Al-Jamaat neighborhood of Nabatieh. Engineers set off a large controlled demolition at Zotar al-Sharqiya. Israel and Washington both want Hezbollah off the Ali Taher ridge above Nabatieh before any third zone opens.

Inside Israel

Netanyahu Locks 11 of Likud's Top 29 Before the Primary

Netanyahu announced just after one in the morning that Foreign Minister Gideon Sa'ar, Defense Minister Israel Katz and Likud Central Committee chairman Haim Katz will all get guaranteed places on the party's Knesset list. The wording puts the three alongside the eight slots the Likud convention already handed him — positions 3, 5, 9, 11, 15, 18, 26 and 29. That makes eleven of the first twenty-nine names his to pick. The party has not said why the three were not simply taken out of the eight. About ten realistic places are left for the roughly 140,000 members voting on August 17. The secretariat is asked to ratify it today, and party figures put the odds low. That body is built mostly out of sitting MKs, who lose a place for every name added, plus dozens of members close to David Bitan.

Israel Katz's place was settled nine days ago and kept quiet. The request went to the Likud tribunal from the party's legal adviser Ilan Bombach and its acting director-general David Sharan. It asked the tribunal to let the prime minister seat the defense minister wherever he saw fit, "given an exceptional security situation that cannot be detailed at this stage." The tribunal granted it under Article 124 of the Likud constitution, the clause that lets the leadership place a candidate when the good of the movement requires it. Katz in 2022, asked the same question in a studio: "I oppose reserved slots inside the Likud list... all of us should stand for election." Likud figures give a different reason for this one. He refused to move anyone else's reservation through the secretariat until he had one of his own. Tali Gotliv is running on the national list with nothing reserved, and senior figures in the party say Netanyahu wants her kept out of the top ten. She called it "a disgraceful step that mocks Likud voters."

The Tel Aviv District Court threw out MK Afif Abed's petition against the party tribunal's ruling barring sitting ministers and MKs from competing for the four district slots — 27, 28, 30 and 31. Likud itself had joined the petition. Abed says he will appeal. So the primary keeps its August 17 date, and twelve of the first thirty-six names will be people who have never sat in the Knesset: Netanyahu's eight and four district newcomers.

The first of the eight went to Oren Dobronsky, an investor from the panel of Israel's "Shark Tank." He spent Monday evening apologizing to Donald Trump. In June he wrote that Trump had not invited Israel to the table for the Iran talks and had not even shown it the text of the agreement: "What kind of morally corrupt piece of shit treats an ally like that?" Last year he wrote that Qatar is a "mediator" like Mengele was a doctor. On Facebook Monday night: "President Trump is the greatest friend that Israel ever had in the White House." Likud presented him as one of the founders of Israeli hi-tech.

Dan Illouz filed his resignation from the Knesset this morning, days after leaving Likud for Yisrael Beiteinu over the bill writing the yeshiva exemption from conscription into a Basic Law. Had he gone earlier, the next name on Likud's list would have entered in time to vote for the exemption bills, and that name is haredi. Likud seats its first haredi MK now instead.

Emek Dotan Takes Its First Families, and Smotrich Claims the Record

Emek Dotan took its first families on Sunday. It sits next to Arraba, and it is one of two new communities — the other is Noa, north of Qabatiya. In February the cabinet let the Civil Administration enforce environment, water and archaeology rules inside Areas A and B — about forty percent of Judea and Samaria, put under Palestinian civil control by an interim agreement signed in September 1995, on a clock that had permanent status settled by 1999. It was temporary by its own terms, it ran out, and thirty years on nothing it left behind has a claim on where Israel builds. In June the Higher Planning Council took planning and building powers over the Israeli communities and the holy sites in the middle of Hebron away from the Palestinian municipality. The clearance revenues Israel collects for the Palestinian Authority run to around 11 billion shekels a year, historically more than sixty percent of its budget. None has moved since June 2025.

Near Qusra, south of Nablus, an offshoot of the Tel Talpiot outpost went up in front of three Palestinian houses over the weekend, and soldiers were filmed praying alongside the Israelis there and left without moving them. The army says commanders are investigating those soldiers and that it is preparing to clear the offshoot. Israel's security services counted 660 incidents of nationalist crime in the first half of this year against 405 in the first half of 2025, and about a hundred more in July.

Bezalel Smotrich, the minister inside the Defense Ministry who runs the settlement file, claimed every line of that record. He was answering Peace Now, a radical organization working against Israel's interests, whose report catalogues a year of Israeli administrative moves in Areas A and B in the form a foreign government or a court can act on. "The report is the Israeli government's report card," he said. "What they call eroding Oslo, we call correcting the injustice of thirty years of abandonment. What they call de facto annexation, we call building Israel's security belt." He is proud of the settlement revolution he led, he said, and "this is only the beginning." Peace Now calls Israel's seizure orders the first use since Oslo of a military instrument inside Area A for a civilian purpose rather than a temporary security one, and counts twenty-three outposts put up in Area B in two and a half years.

Israel's Doctors Close Ranks Behind Rambam's Arab Staff

David Shechterman's brother was one of four reservists wounded in south Lebanon and taken to Rambam in Haifa. Over the weekend Shechterman posted that an Arabic-speaking shift had put the family out of the ward, locked the doors and handled his brother roughly. Rambam looked into the complaint and rejected it. Israel Katz instructed the IDF to examine it anyway. If any staff member turned out to have treated the wounded fighters improperly, he said, it would not be allowed to pass.

Ahmad Tibi spoke to the ward staff. He says a kippah-wearing Jewish doctor was on that shift too, and that the wounded man said he was given food and drink and thanked the nurse who looked after him. Then the medical bodies went. The Israeli Surgical Association called the attempt to recast an unexamined clinical event in terms of Jews against Arabs "improper, dangerous and racist." The hospital directors' association asked to keep the health system out of it. Hagai Levine, who chairs the public-health physicians, called the claims born on social media "a dangerous blood libel aimed at dismantling from within the only system that still functions as an island of sanity and equality in Israel." Ichilov's director Eli Sprecher wrote to his own staff that nobody there would be harmed over their origin, religion or identity.

Field Dossier: Inside the Minority — The Dossier builds the case that Israel's minorities live, serve and fight their battles inside the state's own institutions, and a hospital ward where the Arab and Jewish staff worked the same shift, defended at once by every Israeli medical body, is that case under fire from inside.

Israel and the World

Bogota Recognizes Israeli Sovereignty on the Golan and Leaves the Hague Group

Colombia recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights yesterday, the second country ever to do it after the United States in 2019. Abelardo de la Espriella was sworn in as president on Friday in Cali, and the recognition came three days later. Gideon Sa'ar was at the inauguration and had met him in Barranquilla the day before. Bogota grounded it in Israel's security: threats along every border for decades, sharply worse in recent years, October 7 as the demonstration. Continued Israeli control of the plateau, the statement says, is an essential part of Israel's national defense. Israel took the Golan from Syria in 1967 and extended Israeli law to it in 1981.

The Golan came with a list. Full restoration of relations and ambassadors appointed immediately, the Colombian embassy moving from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, visa requirements dropped both ways, the free-trade agreement revived, and withdrawal from South Africa's genocide case at the International Court of Justice and from the Hague Group. On his first day de la Espriella also recognized Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara and withdrew Colombia's recognition of the Sahrawi republic. Gustavo Petro, the former M-19 guerrilla who preceded him, cut relations with Israel in 2024 over the war in Gaza, halted coal exports, joined the ICJ case, and last October expelled the remaining Israeli diplomats and moved to terminate the trade agreement.

Washington Talks Israel Down and Hands Syria's Yellowcake to the IAEA

The International Atomic Energy Agency will remove nuclear material the Assad regime left behind at a secret Syrian facility, under an agreement it signed with Damascus three weeks ago after months of American brokering. Israeli and American officials call the place Site 99. It holds yellowcake and other leftovers from al-Kibar, the reactor Israel bombed in Deir Ezzor in 2007. The material can't make a warhead, but it can make a dirty bomb — which is why Jerusalem has watched the site for two years and why the IDF bombed its entrances shut when Assad fell in December 2024.

Israel told the Trump administration the material could not stay, and warned it would strike the site a second time if Damascus reached for it. A few weeks ago Israeli surveillance picked up movement there, and Jerusalem read Ahmed al-Sharaa's government as going back on the understandings, with Turkish help. Washington asked Israel to hold off and brought in the agency. Syrian officials, told what was sitting on their own territory, said they hadn't known. An American official says Israel was never close to acting. The yellowcake has not moved, and Washington hopes to have it out before the end of the year.

Hunter Biden Certifies Carlson's Israel Charge as Not Antisemitic

Tucker Carlson claimed that "the Israelis" brought him the story that Hunter Biden's laptop held material showing the abuse of minors, and that he sent one of his producers to meet a man he says has ties to Netanyahu. "They were behind it," he said. He offered no evidence for any of it. Carlson put the former intelligence officials who pinned the laptop on Russia down to fear — "there was so much pressure not to criticize Israel in any way that they just said, 'It's the Russians, it's the Russians'" — and said he knew all of it while he was at Fox and kept quiet. "I was part of the problem too, but I knew."

Hunter Biden, the former president's son and the man whose laptop became the weapon used against his family through the 2020 campaign, spent the hour clearing Carlson. "I know 100 percent you're not antisemitic." He then called Netanyahu "evil incarnate," and said that if saying so is antisemitic, "I don't know what to tell people anymore." Carlson called the antisemitism charge "such an obvious lie."

Five Times the Money Put Britain's Palestine Campaign Inside Local Government

The Palestine Solidarity Campaign, which organizes Britain's national marches for Gaza, filed an income of £3,838,259 for the financial year ending last August. Two years earlier it took £773,886 and ran a deficit on it. It now spends £2.39 million a year on campaigning alone, three times what it used to raise.

PSC says it has pushed at least 34 councils into motions to divest from Israeli-linked companies since June 2024, and that 1,468 councilors have signed its pledge to divest their pension funds and stand up to Israel over "crimes of genocide and apartheid." Its internal strategy paper puts the target as "maximizing pressure on MPs and holding them accountable" through lobbying and protests at MPs' constituency offices.

Hackney's vote to begin ending its twinning with Haifa and to pull its pension money out of "complicit" companies followed PSC lobbying. Kamal Hawwash, elected in Birmingham in May as the city's first councillor of Palestinian origin, used to run PSC as its director. Lewisham's new mayor, Liam Shrivastava, spoke at a PSC rally telling voters that "Palestine is firmly on the ballot this Thursday."

Haverford Settles and Writes Zionists Into Its Own Anti-Discrimination Rules

Haverford College confirmed on Friday that it has settled with the Deborah Project, which sued the Pennsylvania liberal-arts school in May 2024 on behalf of five Jewish students and Jews for Haverford, a group of professors, parents, alumni and students. The plaintiffs alleged that faculty had used antizionism as a cover for hating Jews.

Wendy Raymond, the outgoing president, wrote to the whole college that Jews, Israelis and Zionists are welcome and have equal access to every program and activity Haverford runs. "Harassing, excluding or seeking to silence Jewish community members on the basis of their beliefs, their commitment to Jewish observance or any other element of their Jewish identity, including Zionism, is anathema to the college's core principles," she wrote, and said the commitment binds classrooms, offices and student-run organizations, and covers faculty, staff and administrators as well as students. "No Haverford professor may discriminate against any student, or any other member of the Haverford community, on the basis of that person's commitment to Judaism, Israel or Zionism."

Lori Lowenthal Marcus, who ran the case for the Deborah Project, said the students had spent years hiding their Jewish identity on a small campus to avoid being shunned, and that a written commitment from the president is what takes that off their heads.

Briefly Noted

Frontline & Security

• Jerusalem Post: The IDF's Arabic spokesman told Gazans yesterday to get rid of any old-issue banknotes they're still holding, because Hamas is paying its own field operatives in notes that will shortly be worth nothing while the leadership keeps the new ones.
• JNS: Mike Huckabee, the American ambassador, says Iran's ballistic missiles went from a 2,000-kilometer reach to over 4,100 in a year, and that covers London, Paris, Berlin and Rome. Tehran fired one about that far in March, at the American and British base on Diego Garcia, and missed.

Diplomacy & Geopolitics

• Jerusalem Post: A Houthi drone hit the Aramco refinery at Jizan on Sunday, 48 hours after Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan signed a mutual-defense pact in Mecca, and neither Ankara nor Islamabad said a word. Fidan, who calls the collective-defense clause technically comparable to NATO's Article 5, also says it obliges the others only to consult on the nature and scale of any assistance.
• Ynet: Turkey's parliament voted 468 to 88 for conditional amnesty for thousands of PKK fighters, and the law takes effect only once Ankara certifies the group has fully disarmed. Erdogan gets the pro-Kurdish DEM party out of it, and its votes could hand him the snap election that lets him run again past the two terms the constitution allows.
• Jerusalem Post: Amnesty's 42-page report against the India-Israel weapons trade counts 2,596 arms shipments out of India since October 7, and argues from that count that much of Israel's supply chain moved there once Washington began slowing deliveries.
• JNS: A federal judge refused to throw out the Antiterrorism Act suit Taylor Force's father brought against the Palestinian Authority and the PLO, ruling that a publicized promise to pay a killer's family can plausibly count as substantial assistance to the murder itself. Whether the attackers knew about the money and acted on it now goes to discovery, and Ramallah answers the complaint by September 15.

Public Diplomacy & Media

• Times of Israel: Bernie Sanders wrote Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries and DNC chair Ken Martin asking them to bar super PAC money from Democratic primaries, naming the $32 million AIPAC spent and lost trying to stop Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan. He cited reports that AIPAC is now weighing money for Mike Rogers, the Republican El-Sayed meets in November — a general-election spend the rule Sanders is asking for would not touch.
• Jewish Insider: Megan Romer, a national co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America, told The New Yorker she would have joined the October 8 rally in Times Square, called October 7 "largely inevitable," and, asked what was on the table at Camp David, said she would have to go look it up. The DSA's candidates have been taking congressional primaries off establishment Democrats for months.
• Algemeiner: CNN sourced its coverage of last week's mass funeral in Gaza City to Mahmoud Bassal under the title "Gaza Civil Defense Spokesperson" and left out that the agency answers to Hamas's Interior Ministry, and the AP ran the same funeral with no source named at all. The AP's caption puts the 2023 strike the funeral was for at more than 300 dead and never says where the number came from.
• Ynet News: Yoseph Haddad went one-against-ten with pro-Palestinian activists for a Los Angeles podcast, and Dennis Faitosa — who ran and lost a Republican congressional primary in California — called him a "baby killer" over his Golani service, grabbed him in the studio, and, by Haddad's account, waited outside to jump him from behind in the parking lot.

Am Yisrael

• JTA: Around 200 rabbis and Jewish figures handed Michigan Democratic chair Curtis Hertel Jr. a petition asking him to say publicly that anyone who harasses Jews at the August 29 state convention will be arrested and prosecuted. They are asking because Dana Nessel, the highest-ranking Jewish official in the state, has already said she is not going.
• JNS: Kasem Noubani pleaded guilty to two felony hate-crime charges over the masked attack on two Jewish students at DePaul and drew 300 days in jail and two years' probation. Chicago's Jewish organizations are asking what a hate-crime conviction is for if that is what it produces.
• Algemeiner: Nearly 50 flights left Ben-Gurion for Greece on Sunday, into a nationwide BDS "day of rage" that ran at dozens of locations across the country, islands included, under banners reading "Zionists not welcome here." So far no major incident against Israelis or Jews has been reported.
• The JC: Nefesh B'Nefesh marked its 100,000th North American olah on Sunday — six-year-old Emilia Douglas, who came from New York to Jerusalem with her family and got her welcome from Herzog at the President's Residence. Her mother's line for why they went is "We're leading, not leaving."

Domestic & Law

• Ynet: Entering the Knesset on October 27 will take about 171,000 votes if turnout matches 2022 and 195,000 if it reaches 80 percent, the Taub Center finds, against roughly 155,000 last time — three-quarters of a million voters have been added to the roll since. Benny Gantz is polling under that line and so is Erdan and Edelstein's new party, and the votes that fell short of it in 2022 came to 420,000, worth ten seats.
• Jerusalem Post: Einav Zangauker, whose son Matan came home in the last group of living hostages, says Yair Golan promised her a slot just under the Democrats' sitting MKs back in February, had her skip the primary and keep quiet about it, and then reserved nobody a place at all. Golan says he is deeply sorry and that he left the list to the 113,000 members who voted in it.
• JNS: Religious Zionism put up its own road signs across northern Samaria on Sunday, pointing drivers to Mevo Dotan, Emek Dotan, Homesh and Sa-Nur, after a mob tried to lynch an Israeli mother and son who took a wrong turn into Jenin last week.

Economy, Tech & Infrastructure

• Israel Hayom: Against the NIS 400 billion buildup nobody has funded, the army can find NIS 50 billion in internal savings, mostly reserve days, and NIS 50 billion from defense exports — which still leaves NIS 150 billion of its NIS 260 billion consensus tranche to be committed by 2030 with no source named. The other NIS 100 billion it hands to whoever forms the next government.
• Times of Israel: Elbit opens a combat-drone plant outside Belgrade in mid-September, holding 51 percent of it with Serbia's state arms maker taking the rest, a year after signing Belgrade to a $1.64 billion five-year deal for rocket artillery and unmanned systems.
• Jerusalem Post: Netanyahu launched a National Artificial Intelligence Program on Sunday with the directorate's head, Brig.-Gen. (res.) Erez Eskel, saying the point is to make Israel a "global superpower" in AI the way it became one in cyber. The national quantum computer that went out to tender this month is one of the program's named components.
• Israel Hayom: Delta is set to resume its daily Tel Aviv–New York flight on September 7 barring an escalation, and United returns to Ben Gurion the next day with two Newark flights a day. American Airlines is not coming back until the end of March 2027.

Culture, Religion & Society

• Israel Hayom: Sagui Dekel-Chen sang nine songs on the lawn at Nir Oz last night — the ones he composed in his head across 498 days in Hamas captivity, with no way to write them down, and recorded into a phone in a hospital side room two days after he came home. He told the crowd he isn't a singer, he's a father who sings.
• JNS: Hebrew University and Sheba researchers counted 2,289 food-aid charities in Israel, turning over NIS 6.18 billion a year on 170,000 volunteers, and found the state paying 13% of it. In 2024 the National Insurance Institute put 2.8 million Israelis, more than a million of them children, in households that could not afford enough food.

Developments to Watch

Northern Front (Lebanon / Syria)

• Ras al-Ain returns suspended — Armed men attacked the first 2,500 Kurds going home to Ras al-Ain yesterday, Damascus suspended the rest of the convoys, and Kobani went under curfew after protesters pulled the Syrian flag off a security headquarters. The returns are what January's deal folding the SDF into the Syrian state actually promised, and Mazloum Abdi is asking his own people for restraint with a second convoy still due.
• Russia gives up the Syrian coast — Damascus announced Sunday that Russia hands civil administration of Hmeimim airport and Tartus's fourth pier to the Syrian state inside three months, and turns the military facilities into joint training centers. Israel has flown against a Russian deconfliction line over that coast since 2015, and nobody has said who answers the phone once it comes down.

Gaza & Southern Theater

• Uganda votes troops into the stabilization force — Uganda's parliament approved sending soldiers to Gaza under the international stabilization force, over opposition members who said the motion ambushed them and arrived with no risk assessment. Ugandan MPs asked who answers for their soldiers in a place where Israel still strikes, and every troop contributor has to settle that before the force exists.

Regional Axis (Iran, Houthis, Militias)

• Rezaei takes the security council — Mojtaba Khamenei made Mohsen Rezaei his representative on the Supreme National Security Council, and Pezeshkian then named him its secretary, replacing Mohammad-Bagher Zolghadr, whose resignation the president had refused to accept. Rezaei ran the Revolutionary Guards for sixteen years, and his arrival pushes Qalibaf, who led the American contacts and defended the June ceasefire, off the Hormuz decision.
• Mocha hit for a second day — The Houthis struck the government-held port of Mocha again overnight, in a spiral that began when a Saudi strike closed Sanaa's runway to an Iranian airliner carrying a Houthi delegation. Hans Grundberg counts seven dead and thirty wounded at Mocha and puts Yemen closer to full war than at any point since the April 2022 truce, and the Houthis had a non-Iranian airline on offer and took the fight instead. LIKELY TO ESCALATE
• Tehran's plot on the president — Trump left Ankara last month in a catering truck and flew to Britain on a small C-32A, with Air Force One going up as a decoy and reporters still aboard it, after Iran threatened to kill him. An attempt on a president's life is the one item no mediator can trade away, and it reaches the public record while Trump is demanding reparations from Tehran.

Diplomatic & Legal

• Israel calls the Mecca pact anti-Israel — A senior Israeli official said yesterday that the Saudi-Turkish-Pakistani agreement is an alliance aimed at Israel, and that Egypt joining it would not surprise him. His answer is Greece, Cyprus, India and the Emirates, and the 400-billion-shekel buildup nobody has funded.

Home Front & Politics

• Soroka waits on an Ebola result — A man who came back from the Democratic Republic of Congo with a fever is in strict isolation at Soroka, and the Health Ministry expects laboratory results within the day. June's two suspicions, at Rambam and Sheba, both came back clean, and the ministry has opened the contact investigation on this one without waiting for the lab.

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