Katz stood on the Beaufort ridge yesterday and told the soldiers the army is not leaving Lebanon, Syria or Gaza, and Washington's answer came back within hours. The Ganim families set their caravans down this morning on ground the state emptied twenty-one years ago.

Flash Brief: The Day in 90 Seconds or Less

• Lebanon: Katz tells the Beaufort garrison the army is not leaving, and Washington objects within hours. See The War Today.
• Hormuz: Trump calls the blockade a wall of steel, and Tehran keeps the strait shut. See The War Today.
• Ganim: Caravans go up on the northern Samaria hill the state emptied twenty-one years ago. See Inside Israel.
• Draft: One arrest closes Route 4, and the Jerusalem Faction hands out yellow patches. See Inside Israel.
• Mecca pact: Erdogan wants the defense clause widened, and Riyadh blocks Egypt from getting in. See Israel and the World.
• Ankara: The Secret Service acts on Israel's missile warning, and officials then brief against the intelligence. See Israel and the World.
• London: Tehran orders British-Iranian dissidents onto anti-Israel marches, with a jailed relative as the lever. See Israel and the World.
• New York: A magazine lists Zionism beside xenophobia. See Israel and the World.
• Campus: The ADL puts the American campus problem inside the syllabus and the faculty senate. See Israel and the World.
• School boards: New Jewish groups organize at city halls and statehouses, outside the tax-exempt institutions. See Israel and the World.

Washington's rebuke went out with no name on it, and Beirut, which calls the demolitions a violation of international law, has spent a year declining to search the houses that would end them. The American story runs the other way. There the fight is over a magazine's terms of admission and a school board's harassment policy, and the institutions holding the community's money have been bringing statements to it.

The War Today

Katz Orders a Long Stay in South Lebanon and Washington Objects

Defense Minister Israel Katz stood on the Beaufort ridge yesterday with the deputy chief of staff, Tamir Yadai, and the head of Northern Command, Rafi Milo, and told the soldiers there that Israel isn't leaving. "Under no circumstances will we withdraw from the security zones — not in Lebanon, not in Syria and not in Gaza." He said he'd instructed the army to prepare for a long-term presence, that the IDF now holds ground from the coastline in the west to the approaches to Mount Hermon in the east, and that it is taking down the underground works and all the outposts in the area. Golani's reconnaissance unit is finishing close to fifty days on the Beaufort, where it says it destroyed more than three hundred Hezbollah sites.

All of it sits under the June Israel-Lebanon-US framework, which ties Israel's pullback to Hezbollah's verified disarmament. "A permanent military presence in south Lebanon is not consistent with the commitments made in the framework or the long-term peace and security of both states," a State Department official said, adding that the United States fully supports Lebanon's territorial integrity and that the framework runs a conditions-based path tied to verified disarmament. Lebanon's prime minister, Nawaf Salam, called the demolitions systematic destruction and a violation of international law.

The verification question moved yesterday too. Israel and Lebanon are considering four countries out of last week's Rome round — Britain, Italy, Switzerland and Indonesia — to define the mechanism or put troops into the inspections that would certify a village clear of Hezbollah's men and weapons. Israel wants those inspections to reach inside private homes. The Lebanese army has spent a year refusing that, and says it would need a warrant for each house. Overnight the air force struck Mansouri twice and Deir Siryan once.

Zamir Signs the First Gaza Airstrike in Over a Week

The air force killed the commander of a Hamas cell in Beit Lahiya in northern Gaza yesterday afternoon, the first Israeli airstrike in the Strip in more than a week. The army says he was planning attacks on troops. It went up to the chief of staff, Eyal Zamir, for his signature. An immediate threat can still be engaged where it stands. Anything else climbs to Zamir and to the ministers above him.

The ceasefire has held in Gaza since last October, built on Trump's 20-point plan and Security Council Resolution 2803. Israel accepted that one. The Board of Peace's separate 15-point roadmap of 30 July — the one Hamas accepted and Israel never signed — is what the halt in targeted killings is being traded against. American officials said the administration was disappointed by Netanyahu's rejection of that document and came round once it saw that Israel had stopped striking and was working to the plan on the ground anyway. One of them named the trade. "We recognize the complexities arising from the elections in Israel, and we're of course going to give Bibi room to try to navigate this. They need to give us some room in terms of stopping the targeted killings."

The army put its own numbers out yesterday afternoon. 790 targets struck in the Gaza sector since the truce took effect, 514 terrorists killed and about 150 wounded, and a Yellow Line that has moved outward since it was drawn. "There is no policy of the IDF lacking motivation to strike," military sources said. "There are clear directives from the political echelon as part of the negotiations." Hamas has spent the ceasefire tightening its hold on the people it governs. A joint IDF and Shin Bet assessment published yesterday says it has stepped up interrogations and torture of Gazan civilians since the ceasefire began, run out of hospitals, schools, mosques and government buildings, against ordinary residents summoned for questioning and not only against its political opponents, sparing neither women nor minors.

Hormuz Stays Shut

Trump wrote yesterday that the United States has total control of the Strait of Hormuz and will keep it, that the naval blockade is "a wall of steel," and that Iran has no navy, no air force, unpaid soldiers and 300 percent inflation. Hormuz remains blocked, the body Tehran set up in May to run the strait said, and won't reopen until Iran's conditions are accepted. Traffic is running in single figures a day against the 130 to 140 that crossed before Iran closed the water on 28 February and opened the war that is still going. CENTCOM says it has turned back 55 commercial vessels trying to break the blockade, disabled three and boarded two.

Israel's own read went to the security cabinet about a week ago. "The blockade of Iran is highly effective," Eyal Zamir told the ministers. "The economic crisis there is getting worse." Iran's ports and sea routes carry nearly everything its economy imports and exports, and the foreign-currency shortage that follows makes fuel, food and industrial materials harder to pay for even when they come overland. Estimates put the contraction at 5.6 percent this year, the sharpest since 1988, the year the war with Iraq ended.

Tehran says there's nothing to extend. Anadolu reported from Pakistani government sources that Iran and the United States had agreed to extend the 60-day window in June's interim deal, and a senior Iranian official's answer was that no window ever opened, because Washington broke the agreement 48 hours after it was reached and walked out days later. On the one thing being worked through mediators, an American return to that agreement with a timetable attached, there has been no progress at all. Mohammad Reza Naqdi, supreme adviser to the IRGC commander-in-chief, told PBS that Iran has spent five months learning how to fight America and has found the American military "weaker than what we perceived."

Inside Israel

Ganim Goes Back Up Twenty-One Years After the State Emptied It

The families of the Ganim garin moved onto the hill this morning and set down the caravans. It is twenty-one years since the Disengagement emptied the four communities of northern Samaria. A branch of the Bnei David academy in Eli, the pre-military yeshiva known for sending the army its combat officers, opened alongside them. Homesh and Sa-Nur are already back. Kadim goes up next, and that finishes northern Samaria.

Smotrich, who drove the cabinet decision regularizing dozens of communities, said eleven new ones go up this summer and that northern Samaria goes from four to eighteen. Yossi Dagan, who heads the Samaria Regional Council, walked the families into their houses and called it a historical correction. Moriah Maslati, who moved in this morning, said the day was a homecoming. Smotrich then named what he thinks is at stake: a government of Eisenkot, Liberman and Golan would evacuate the new communities and take the country back to Oslo.

Yellow Stars on Route 4 After the First Draft Arrest in Three Weeks

The Jerusalem Faction put its people across Route 4 beside Bnei Brak in Wednesday's rush hour, after Military Police picked up a yeshiva student who had ignored his call-up. They were waiting outside a police station where he'd been questioned about something else, and drove him from there to a military prison. Protesters sat down in both directions and handed out yellow patches with the word haredi on them. They chanted that they would die before they enlisted, that they'd go to prison and not to the army, and that the army is worse than death. Police declared the demonstration illegal before moving in. In Givat Shmuel a crowd closed around a soldier and officers had to walk him out.

One demonstrator told Ynet that the Zionist state is trying to destroy the world of Torah, "no less than the Germans." Another said Jews were murdered in the Crusades rather than convert, and that "it is better to die at the hands of a Nazi than to be in the army and become secular." Disgraceful. Avigdor Liberman said a government of draft-evaders would never condemn it, and Naftali Bennett said the pictures are what the coalition sold its reservists for.

Israel and the World

Erdogan Wants the Mecca Pact Bigger and Riyadh Blocks Egypt

Erdogan said Wednesday he wants the mutual-defense agreement Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan signed in Mecca on 7 August — an armed attack on any one of them counts as an attack on all three — opened to the rest of the region. "Our vision for it is not limited to the three countries," he told the Saudi-owned Asharq Al-Awsat. He named nobody he wanted in. Hakan Fidan had already named the candidate on Saturday: Turkey expects Egypt "in the next stage," with only "a few technical issues" left to clear. Fidan lands in Cairo tomorrow.

Riyadh is the problem. Three Saudi sources told Middle East Eye that the kingdom blocked Egypt's entry — one of them a former adviser to the monarchy, saying the refusal holds "at least for now" — and all three put it down to frustration with Sisi's government and a judgment that Cairo no longer brings what it used to. Egypt hasn't said a word about the pact since it was signed. Cairo also has its own reasons to stay clear. A binding clause would put it crosswise with the UAE, which underwrites its economy and has its own quarrel with Riyadh, crosswise with India the next time India and Pakistan go at each other, and across the peace treaty it signed with Israel.

Pakistan's ambassador to Moscow told Al Mayadeen that Islamabad has no objection to Egypt joining — or to Iran.

Washington Acted on Israel's Iran Warning, Then Briefed Against It

CIA analysts told the Trump administration they had low confidence in the Israeli intelligence behind last month's decoy flight — the warning that Iranian operatives in Turkey were preparing to fire a shoulder-launched missile at Air Force One as Trump left the NATO summit in Ankara. "Israeli-derived, not US-generated, and viewed as low confidence," one US official said of it. Another was plainer about why the Secret Service moved the president anyway: the service has had three near misses with him, "so they're not taking any chances. They did what they had to do."

The Americans couldn't close the file in either direction. Investigators reportedly found no evidence that the men under suspicion had a missile or a launcher, Turkish officials said they found no evidence of a threat at all, and the intelligence Washington gathered on its own in the hours after the Israeli warning settled nothing. Trump went out of camera range into a catering truck and flew home on a military aircraft. Rubio was briefed and rode the plane the press had watched the president board. A former US official gave the Washington Post the second charge in the story: the episode "fit a broader pattern of Israeli intelligence reporting that some officials see as designed as much to shape presidential decision-making as to inform it."

Tehran Blackmails British Iranians Into Attending London's Anti-Israel Protests

Officers from the IRGC Intelligence Organisation and Iran's Ministry of Intelligence have been telephoning Iranian dissidents in Britain and ordering them to turn up at anti-Israel demonstrations in London. The lever is a relative sitting in an Iranian jail. Four British-Iranian nationals described the calls to the JC. One man's sister, arrested in January for protesting against the regime, was put on a WhatsApp call to him from custody. A handler took the phone. He could help her, the handler said, by attending "anti-war, anti-Netanyahu and pro-resistance" protests, and he named the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and the Stop the War Coalition. A woman got the same offer through her parents: her brother, jailed since May with no history of activism, in exchange for her and her husband attending a named rally. Both complied. Both relatives are still inside.

The handlers wanted proof. Each was told to post photographs of himself at the protest on his own accounts, and to clear the anti-regime material off them first. Iranian state television has run footage from the London marches, some of it showing protesters holding pictures of Ali Khamenei. One of the women who complied described standing in the crowd and feeling as though she were back in Iran at a state-backed rally. A third man, ordered to a demonstration outside RAF Fairford to press for an end to American use of the base in the war with Iran, refused. None of the four reported any of it to the police.

The Iranian embassy in London has meanwhile opened a campaign it calls Jaan Fada — sacrifice for Iran. It asks Iranians in Britain to register their names and say how they are prepared to confront "the invaders." The Home Office says attempts to intimidate people in the UK will never be tolerated.

New York Magazine Files Zionism Under Bigotry as Federations Fire Their Consultant

New York Magazine gave six articles to the city's Southwest Asian and North African communities under the title "Habibi City." The cover essay dates the scene's arrival to October 7 — protests led to friendships, friendships led to dinners, and out of that came the artists and chefs and designers the issue celebrates. It sets out the beliefs that come with belonging, among them that what happened in Gaza after October 7 "constitutes genocide." Then it closes on what the community still contends with: xenophobia, anti-Muslim bigotry, and Zionism. AIPAC answered that the first two are prejudices aimed at people for who they are, and that Zionism is the Jewish people's movement for self-determination in its own homeland.

The companion piece on the city's restaurants describes Israeli cooking as mostly Palestinian and "ethnic," carried in by Jewish immigrants. Former staff at Kfar and Laser Wolf are quoted calling them a safe space for Zionism, one of them saying he had realized all their work was propaganda. The Palestinian restaurant Ayat comes off well, menu included, and that menu carries a tourist map with the whole of Israel captioned "Discover Palestine." A consultant who worked on the food piece called it a hit job on Jewish and Israeli chefs dressed up as a story about food. Abraham Hamra, a Syrian-born New York lawyer, said writing more than 120,000 New York Jews with roots in Arab countries out of their own region was exclusion disguised as inclusion. Jordana Horn, who used to write for the magazine, cancelled her subscription and said why.

The Jewish Federations of North America spent last week ending the contract of the consultant it had hired to run Project Halo, its program helping federation leaders counter antisemitism and anti-Zionism. Matthew Berger's slide at the Young Leadership Cabinet retreat in Minneapolis recommended showcasing diversity, focusing on the common enemy, and avoiding "Zionism." An attendee passed the slide to JNS, and JNS published it on 5 August. JFNA first defended the presentation and called itself proudly Zionist. Berger's contract ended within hours of the story circulating. JFNA's own February poll found 37 percent of American Jews calling themselves Zionists and 88 percent saying Israel has the right to exist as a Jewish, democratic state.

Field Dossier: The Wrong Map — The Dossier reads five indicators to argue there is no single American Jewry to address and the institutional class is still funding the aggregate — which is the room JFNA was standing in when its own poll put 88 percent behind Israel's right to exist, 37 percent behind the word Zionist, and its answer was to end one consultant's contract and keep his advice.

Campus Antisemitism Moved From the Encampment to the Syllabus

The Anti-Defamation League published two reports yesterday putting the American campus problem inside the classroom and the faculty senate. "The Faculty Factor" maps how organized faculty groups — Faculty & Staff for Justice in Palestine, the American Association of University Professors — have shielded anti-Israel student groups from discipline since the 2024 encampments. The companion report reads the coursework: a Yale seminar description calling Israel a "settler-colonial structure of occupation and violence," a Princeton course on "Gender, Reproduction and Genocide" whose readings date Israel's "genocidal project" to 1948. A Berkeley history course assigned Ghassan Kanafani, who spoke for the PFLP, alongside material on the hijacker Leila Khaled. In some courses students could earn extra credit for turning up at an anti-Israel rally.

A University of California, Irvine professor is reported to have called the October 7 massacre "a gift from Allah to the world" and "a golden opportunity." An Israeli student at Columbia who had served in a combat role was allegedly called "one of the murderers" by his professor. In a survey of 209 Jewish faculty last year, 73 percent said they had watched faculty, administrators or staff do something antisemitic in front of them. The ADL opened a confidential channel for classroom reports alongside the two documents.

Jewish Organizing Leaves Congress for the School Board and the Statehouse

A new set of American Jewish political groups is organizing at the level of school boards, city councils and state legislatures, with checkbooks and door-knocking. Stefanie Clarke, a political strategist in Colorado, co-founded the Colorado Jewish Action Alliance. In San Francisco the Jewish Community Relations Council spun off its own advocacy arm, Bay Area Jewish Action, as a separate entity, and first-time activists have started similar groups in Atlanta, Denver and Pittsburgh. Almost all of them were founded after October 7, when American city halls turned into a front in a war thousands of miles away and officials elected on bike lanes found themselves pressed to take a position on it. Tax-exempt communal institutions are barred from any of this, which is why the new groups sit outside them. Tyler Gregory, who runs the San Francisco JCRC and the new arm, said officials who stand with Jews now face "an increasingly unhinged and violent-prone mob," and that "we need to be able to do more than just verbally say thank you."

The Boulder Valley school board met Tuesday night in front of a packed room, over a federal civil-rights complaint the ADL filed in June on behalf of a Jewish middle-schooler at Southern Hills. The complaint describes two years of it — slurs, a game the other children called "Jew touch tag," and an occasion when a charging cord went around the boy's neck and he was dragged backward. Superintendent Rob Anderson apologized to the family in public, said the district had lacked the systems to respond, and committed to a response team and an oversight council. Several speakers asked the board not to adopt the IHRA working definition, the non-binding text an institution adopts to name what counts as antisemitic inside its own procedures, on the argument that it would chill speech about Israel.

Briefly Noted

Frontline & Security

• Jerusalem Post: Decrees issued this week in Mojtaba Khamenei's name formally hand the IRGC to Ahmad Vahidi, who helped plan Hezbollah's 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, and make Mohsen Rezaei — wanted by Interpol over the same attack, which killed 85 — the Supreme Leader's representative on the National Security Council.
• The JC: Former Mossad chief Yossi Cohen told a forum in Safed that Israeli operatives toured Iran's underground enrichment plant at Fordow "many times" before the Americans bombed it, and declined to say when or with whom.
• Israel Hayom: Iraq's prime minister Ali al-Zaidi has given the Iran-backed Shiite militias until 30 September to hand their weapons to the state or be disarmed by force, and Quds Force commander Esmail Qaani has told Iraqi officials that disarmament would be a knife in the Iranian regime's back.

Diplomacy & Geopolitics

• Times of Israel: Nickolay Mladenov, the Board of Peace's Gaza envoy, says nobody agreed to cover $400 million of Hamas's debt — the Gaza disarmament roadmap earmarks that money for contractors who did real work and severance for Hamas civil servants the new technocratic government does not hire. Israel has not signed that roadmap, so Jerusalem gets no vote on where the money lands.
• Israel Hayom: Lebanese Forces MP Ghada Ayoub says the general amnesty Lebanon's parliament passed yesterday gives Lebanese who took refuge in Israel the right to come home — as long as they took no part in military activity.

Public Diplomacy & Media

• Times of Israel: The European Broadcasting Union rewrote its Eurovision rules on Wednesday so that a winner whose country or "immediate region" is materially affected by armed conflict or a "sensitive geopolitical situation" is no longer eligible to host the following year. Israel came second in 2025 and second again in 2026.
• The JC: Green voters, the most permissive bloc in YouGov's survey of British attitudes to immigrants from 23 countries, came out about as hostile as Reform voters the moment the immigrants were Israeli.
• Times of Israel: In Connecticut's first district, where Luke Bronin unseated 14-term incumbent John Larson, the two candidates who ran on calling Gaza a genocide finished third and fourth. Between them Bronin and Larson took close to 90 percent of the vote.

Am Yisrael

• JNS: The World Jewish Congress went back to 754 antisemitic posts European Jews had reported to the platforms and found 613 of them still up — flagged content came down at 19.5 percent, against 18.2 percent for posts nobody reported at all. Of the 232 posts carrying direct calls to harm Jews, 151 are still there.
• JNS: The parents of Malki Roth z"l, the 15-year-old American murdered at Sbarro in 2001, sued Ahlam Tamimi in Washington federal court on Tuesday — twenty-five years after Tamimi picked the restaurant, hid the bomb in a guitar case and walked the bomber from Ramallah into Jerusalem. Israel gave her sixteen life terms, then handed her back in the Shalit exchange, and Jordan has refused to extradite her since 2017, so the family is going after her assets instead.
• Jerusalem Post: Dan Bilzerian goes into Tuesday's Republican primary in Florida's 6th District against Randy Fine on a campaign account that has posted Holocaust denial, called for purging "Israel from every city, county, district and state in America," and reposted "It's not red against blue… It's us against the Jew."

Domestic & Law

• Times of Israel: The High Court ruled 2-1 that State Attorney Amit Aisman may run the criminal investigation into the leak of the Sde Teiman video, rejecting Justice Minister Yariv Levin's argument that Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara cannot supervise a case her own office reviewed and recommended against opening.
• Ynet: Netanyahu has spent the week in one-on-one meetings with Likud MKs before Monday's primary, offering Eliyahu Revivo the ambassadorship to the UAE and diplomatic posts to others on an assessment that more than half his faction will not win a realistic slot — an associate says nobody was offered anything.
• Jerusalem Post: Ir Amim and two neighborhood associations petitioned the Jerusalem District Court to void an approved Ohr Somayach yeshiva and dormitory for students from abroad on a state-owned acre in Nahalat Shimon, arguing eastern Jerusalem needs the ground for classrooms.

Economy, Tech & Infrastructure

• Jerusalem Post: Anthropic is in talks to buy Decart, the Israeli company whose software squeezes more work out of the same chips, at about $6 billion — early talks, and it may not happen. Decart was worth close to $4 billion in May, when Nvidia came into a $300 million round.
• Times of Israel: Team8 raised $365 million to seed Israeli AI startups in cybersecurity and software infrastructure, with Walmart and Cisco among the investors. One of its companies has already sold — Palo Alto Networks bought Koi Security for around $400 million earlier this year.

Culture, Religion & Society

• Walla: Tiberias has started paving a "kosher sidewalk" along the inland shoulder of the coast road, so the crowds heading down to the tombs of Rabbi Meir Baal HaNes and the Rambam don't have to look at the mixed beach that opened at the city's southern entrance. Local rabbis had already put the whole coastal route off limits and sent people around the Poriya ridge instead — thirty kilometers in place of four and a half.

Developments to Watch

Northern Front (Lebanon / Syria)

• Al-Akhbar prints Aoun's line on Hezbollah — The editor of Al-Akhbar, Hezbollah's own newspaper, claims on his front page that Lebanon's president told Trump in Washington that Hezbollah is a cancer curable only by complete eradication. Hezbollah does not put a sentence like that on a front page by accident, and every Lebanese politician deciding whether to stand behind Aoun now knows what he says when he is in Washington.

Gaza & Southern Theater

• The violations mechanism is already running — The Board of Peace's chief executive says a mechanism for monitoring violations in Gaza began operating in recent days, and that every violation will be addressed. Israel has not signed the roadmap it enforces and has already refused Qatari and Turkish monitors, so the first finding arrives against a country that never agreed to be measured.

Regional Axis (Iran, Houthis, Militias)

• The Americans leave Iraq on the deadline day — US officials say the withdrawal from Iraq finishes by 30 September, the date Ali al-Zaidi has given the Iran-backed militias to hand their weapons to the state. Baghdad has to take rifles off Qaani's people while the last American presence in the country packs up.
• Taeb has the Basij back — Tehran has handed the Basij back to Hossein Taeb, who commanded it through the 2009 crackdown and then ran the Revolutionary Guards' intelligence organization, and Pezeshkian has congratulated him on it. A group publishing the names and addresses of Basij members is already at work, and Tehran's answer to it is the man who put 2009 down.
• Aden closes the truce door — Rashad al-Alimi says Yemen's presidential council wants no new truce with the Houthis and will settle for nothing short of a state that holds the monopoly on weapons. A Houthi politburo member has already named what Ansar Allah would hit if Riyadh goes in: Saudi oil fields, power stations, desalination plants and airports.
• Emirati government jets into Tehran — A United Arab Emirates government VIP aircraft is reported to have landed in Iran twice in two days, back in the air inside an hour each time, and nobody has said what for. Half an hour on the ground is a courier's schedule, and Abu Dhabi has been paying for a closed strait by air freight since February.

Diplomatic & Legal

• Hamas declares for the November ballot — Hamas says it will contest the Palestinian Legislative Council elections Abbas has decreed for 28 November, and that it expects to win them. Hamas last won a Palestinian legislative election in 2006, and it is entering this one while its own disarmament is what the mediators are negotiating.
• London's September package — Middle East Eye says Burnham's government will announce a set of new measures on Israel in September, a ban on goods from the communities in Judea and Samaria among them, and London has announced nothing. Gideon Sa'ar and Ed Miliband took their first call this week, and what Miliband asked for on it was Hamas disarming and an Israeli withdrawal.

Home Front & Politics

• Lavi goes back at the Sde Teiman ruling — MK Boaron and the Lavi organization will ask for a further hearing before an expanded panel, arguing that two judges over a dissent cannot settle who supervises the investigation into the Sde Teiman leak. Until a panel takes that up, Amit Aisman keeps the file.

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