Ask a different authority and you get a different answer. An envoy told the Security Council he had certified a breakthrough his own counterparty had emptied days earlier.

Flash Brief: The Day in 90 Seconds or Less

• Gaza: Israel pushes the strike approval back down to Southern Command, and the Board of Peace's envoy objects publicly. See The War Today.
• Lebanon: Aoun calls negotiation Lebanon's only route while Israeli aircraft take apart the Ali al-Taher ridge. See The War Today.
• Iran: The chief of naval operations pulls a carrier out of the Pacific to hold the Gulf. See The War Today.
• Eisenkot: The poll leader rules out a Palestinian state, and rules against the E1 tender in the same interview. See Inside Israel.
• Britain: Burnham prepares a full trade ban on Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria before Labour's conference. See Israel and the World.
• Palestine Action: Treasury designates the group a terrorist entity months before Britain's Supreme Court hears its appeal. See Israel and the World.
• The UN: Guterres says the special rapporteurs have gone out of control on Israel, and refuses the bias charge. See Israel and the World.
• Campus: Departmental events booking a boycott activist accuse Israel of genocide forty times more often than the rest. See Israel and the World.
• High Holidays: Washington tells nearly every mission to ask host governments for guards on the walk to shul. See Israel and the World.
• Aliyah: More than 2,200 North Americans arrive between June and September, close to 480 of them families. See Israel and the World.

Two of the three theaters in The War Today turn on whose reading of an agreement governs, and in Gaza and on the Ali al-Taher ridge it is whoever is already in the field. The third is the American Navy paying for a decision nobody intends to take before November. Abroad the bloc could not get twenty-seven signatures onto a single statement, and the national laws keep arriving anyway.

The War Today

Southern Command Gets the Trigger Back While Mladenov Faults Israel

Israel has pushed the approval for a strike in Gaza back down a level. A few weeks ago every one of them needed Eyal Zamir, the chief of staff, in person. The political echelon and the Board of Peace had asked for that, so nothing the air force did would step on Nickolay Mladenov's diplomacy while Jared Kushner was in the region. Kushner came and went, the political contacts didn't mature, and the commander of Southern Command can sign for a strike again. The genuinely sensitive ones still go up.

This week it took Hazem Mousa on Sunday and Razek Abu Shahma on Monday, both in Khan Yunis, both among the men who came through at Re'im when the war started — and Abu Shahma had been Yahya Sinwar's bodyguard. The IDF and the Shin Bet say the two had gone back to rebuilding the organization and were working up attacks on soldiers and civilians. On Tuesday the target was a structure in Jabalya fifty metres from the Yellow Line, seventy from Kamal Adwan Hospital and a hundred and seventy from a school, an ambush position with a weapons store inside it and men inside planning to use both. Southern Command holds sixty-three to sixty-four percent of the Strip, two divisions, sixteen battalions and about forty outposts in it, and says it stays deployed under the agreement while keeping its freedom of action.

Mladenov, the Board of Peace's envoy for Gaza, spent Wednesday at the Security Council calling all of that a mistake. "These strikes do not change the status quo that produced 7 October 2023," he said. "They preserve it." He called Hamas's acceptance of the disarmament roadmap a historic breakthrough, the first time the factions have agreed to hand over their weapons and their government, and he was careful to say Israel isn't being asked to sign that roadmap at all — only to honour the twenty-point plan it accepted last September, the one October's ceasefire runs on. Then he told the Council he has yet to hear an alternative. Two days earlier Hamas's spokesman Osama Hamdan had taken the breakthrough apart: nobody said a word about handing over weapons, the heavy ones go to a Palestinian committee supervised by the factions handing them over, nobody outside Palestinian hands touches any of it, and not one bullet leaves Gaza. The Americans have floated pulling the firing pins as the guns change hands, or melting them outright. Israel wants them out of the Strip and into hands it picks.

Aoun Calls Negotiation the Only Route as Israel Levels Ali al-Taher

Two waves of Israeli aircraft went into the Ali al-Taher ridge above Nabatieh before dawn, and through the night the strikes ran across Mansouri in the Tyre district, Zawtar al-Sharqiya, Mayfadoun, Srebbine and Yater. Under the ridge sits more than a kilometre of Hezbollah tunnel — a command post and weapons stores — with several dozen of the group's men believed to be sealed inside, and Hezbollah says it has been reaching them by drone and through freshly dug shafts. Golani, under the 36th Division, has taken apart more than four hundred sites in the security zone these past weeks and pulled out anti-tank missiles, surface-to-air missiles, charges, Kalashnikovs and mortars.

Joseph Aoun spent the same day at Baabda telling a delegation of Maronites that talking to Israel is neither easy nor quick, that there are obstacles, and that it beats a war by a distance. Lebanon wants the south back, its army on its own borders, its prisoners home, the displaced returned and the ruins rebuilt. None of that, the president said, can be had by fighting, as has now become clear, so there is no choice but to negotiate. He added that his government is at war with parties that refuse to accept the logic of the state, which in Lebanon is not a sentence anybody has to decode.

Michel Issa, Washington's ambassador in Beirut, said he is watching the ridge for the next two days and that the pilot zones are making progress. The June Israel–Lebanon–United States framework ties Israel's pullback to a Hezbollah disarmament somebody has to verify, and two months on nobody has been appointed to do it. Lebanon's army commander Rodolphe Haykal spent three days of this week in Italy with the Italian defence chief on what happens when UNIFIL's mandate expires in December, and Antonio Tajani, Italy's foreign minister, said publicly that he had pressed Haykal to get on with disarming Hezbollah and that Lebanon can count on Rome.

Caudle Pulls a Carrier Off China to Pay for the Iran War

Adm. Daryl Caudle, the American chief of naval operations, told reporters at Norfolk on Wednesday that CENTCOM is pressing him for what it needs to run major combat operations, and that the hulls are coming out of the Pacific. The USS Theodore Roosevelt is being taken from the Pacific fleet to pick up the Middle East rotation. Asked whether that is a problem, Caudle said the fact that they're short on carriers in Pacific Command because they keep moving them into Central Command, yeah, of course it does. He said Pacific Command has described that risk up its own chain to the chairman and to the Secretary of War, and the administration has heard it and decided it is worth paying.

The Roosevelt and five thousand crew sail within weeks for seven months at least and are preparing for longer. The Abraham Lincoln, which the George Washington relieved last week, had been at sea more than 250 days without a port call, with a sailor overboard and supplies running thin on a hundred-thousand-ton ship, and she puts into Thailand in the coming days. Caudle would rather run seven-month deployments and says he opposes extensions, but by his own account the enemy gets a say.

The Iran war opened when Tehran shut the Strait of Hormuz at the end of February and it has not ended. A tanker took an unidentified projectile in the strait near Khasab before dawn and caught fire, and the crew is accounted for. Trump told Glenn Beck the Navy took out twenty-two Iranian boats overnight, and told Al Jazeera the same day that it was twenty. He said a very big victory is close and that he is not in a hurry to go back to talks. He also said he doesn't believe Mojtaba Khamenei, in whose name Iran's decrees now issue, is dead, and described him as very seriously wounded down his whole left side.

NBC put the damage Iranian missiles and drones did to American intelligence sites and hardware in the billions, with Congress appropriating to repair it — a CIA station in Riyadh, and radar and surveillance equipment across the Gulf. CSIS's July count had about sixty-five percent of Patriot interceptors expended between February and July, and THAAD stocks at least thirty-eight percent below where they started. Zamir spent Sunday in Tel Aviv with Kenneth Wilsbach, the US Air Force chief of staff, and Omer Tishler, who runs the Israeli Air Force, going through what the joint campaign taught. And Israel is buying the navy it found out it didn't have: five missile ships on order, sea drones accelerated, and Elbit selling mine-clearing hulls into a market the strait created.

Inside Israel

Eisenkot Rules Out a Palestinian State and Rules Against the E1 Tender

Gadi Eisenkot has led most polling for the Knesset Israel elects on 27 October without ever publishing a diplomatic position, and today he published one. Two states after October 7 is "simply delusional," he said in his first interview laying out where he stands, and the two-state framework is "a bitter mistake." Arab-Palestinian terror against Jews here is old and rooted, he argued, and dated the first murder to 1851. His sister lives in Yakir, in Samaria. He backs Israeli communities in Area C.

Then he was asked about E1, the corridor between Jerusalem and Maale Adumim where the Housing Ministry has 1,234 units on the market and bids closing on 19 October. "Not now. This is a mistake that costs us an international price." Netanyahu opposed the plan for years, Eisenkot said, and gave in to coalition pressure after October 7. The rest of that answer is the part nobody in the coalition touched. Netanyahu handed the police to Itamar Ben-Gvir and the civil administration of Judea and Samaria to Bezalel Smotrich. The army lost its authority in the sector, Eisenkot said, and has to get it back. He wrapped what he called settler violence into the charge as well, and said the two ministers are wrecking Israel's national interest.

Smotrich answered. "The awl is out of the bag. The concessions of an Eisenkot-Liberman-Golan government started before they came to power." Anyone who opposes building at E1 supports a Palestinian state, he added, even if he lies to you and dresses it up as something else. Maale Adumim's mayor, Guy Yifrach, said Eisenkot is trying to bury Rabin's own idea of a strategic corridor holding Jerusalem from the east, and is outflanking Rabin and Barak from the left. Ofer Winter got a shove of his own. Eisenkot told Channel 13 he would not offer Winter defense in a future government, because Winter never sat in the army's strategic leadership, and Winter sent reporters a video: "I have no intention of being part of your government, and I will do everything to ensure it does not come to fruition."

Israel and the World

Burnham Readies a Settlement Trade Ban and Israel Starts Expelling Europeans

Andy Burnham, five weeks into Downing Street, is preparing a full British ban on trade with Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria. He wants it out before Labour's September conference, so it doesn't swallow his first one as leader. Sanctions on individual Israeli ministers and residents are being weighed alongside it, and Britain already bars Israel's national-security and finance ministers, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich. What moved it was last week's tender at E1 — seven residential compounds, 1,234 homes, on the ground between Jerusalem and Ma'ale Adumim. A third of Labour's Commons benches, 140 MPs, have signed a letter pushing him further.

Burnham's own officials have warned him the ban will be hard to police. Bank Hapoalim and Teva operate in eastern Jerusalem, banks over-comply with anything shaped like a boycott, and Israel sells Britain around $2 billion of goods a year. He is not the first. The Dutch law commencing on 22 September bans importing, selling and buying goods from those communities, carries up to six years in prison, and reaches any arrangement built to route around it. Spain has already restricted the trade. Belgium and Ireland are sitting on the same draft.

Foreign Minister Gideon Sa'ar answered the Dutch by throwing their representatives out of the International Gaza Support Center at Kiryat Gat, the American-run headquarters for the Gaza ceasefire. Officers from some fifty countries work there alongside the IDF. Spain lost its seat there in April. Britain, Germany and Italy are now under discussion, and whether the Board of Peace has to approve any of it is contested — Israel's position is that it decides who stays on its territory. Ljubljana went the other way. Janez Jansa's government, in office since June, vetoed a statement on E1 that all twenty-seven EU members were meant to sign, and Czechia vetoed it too. The bloc's foreign-policy chief Kaja Kallas had to issue the criticism in her own name on Sunday. A week of calls from Sa'ar also got a line about Israel prosecuting its own offenders written into the text. Israel is expected to open its first embassy in Slovenia next month.

Treasury Cuts Palestine Action Off the Financial System Before Britain's Court Rules

The Treasury's sanctions office designated Palestine Action a Specially Designated Global Terrorist yesterday. The listing freezes its American assets, bars Americans from transacting with it, exposes any bank handling its money to secondary sanctions, and keeps its foreign supporters out of the country. It is the listing that carries Hamas and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Washington's stated ground is material support for an act of terrorism, plus the group's habit of posting its break-ins to encourage copies elsewhere, in the United States and along the Mexican border. No American counterterrorism sanction had ever landed on a British left-wing group before.

Two more went down with it. Masar Badil was designated as a transnational front for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, running through the Samidoun prisoner-solidarity network on shared executive committees and shared fundraising. Two of its officials went with it, Zaid Abdulnasser in Germany and Rawa Alsagheer in Brazil. Samidoun was itself sanctioned in 2024. The third is Autistici/Inventati, an Italian outfit that hosts websites and runs encrypted mail and chat for far-left cells and for Hamas, Hezbollah and the Guard.

Britain proscribed Palestine Action in July 2025, after activists broke into RAF Brize Norton and damaged two aircraft. Membership or support carries up to fourteen years. The group had been working through Israel-linked defense manufacturers in Britain, Elbit Systems UK above all, alongside Thales and Instro Precision. Four of them were jailed in June over a 2024 raid on an Elbit site near Bristol that did more than a million pounds of damage. One hit a policewoman twice across the back with a sledgehammer and fractured her spine. The Court of Appeal upheld the proscription in June as justified and proportionate. Roughly three thousand people have been arrested in Britain for holding placards in the group's support, and co-founder Huda Ammori's appeal reaches the Supreme Court in early November.

Guterres Concedes the Rapporteurs and Disowns Them in the Same Sentence

Antonio Guterres told the Financial Times on Tuesday that many of the UN's independent special rapporteurs have gone "totally out of control" on Israel — from the point of view of the Secretariat he runs. He refused the wider charge anyway. "I totally refuse the idea of bias," the Secretary-General said. "On the contrary, I think we have been on the right side of history." Danny Danon, Israel's ambassador to the UN, wanted to know who let them go out of control in the first place. "It happened on his watch."

The rapporteurs sit outside the Secretariat by design. Nobody at the UN employs them and nobody there pays them. The Human Rights Council appoints them, and the UN gives them the title and the podium that goes with it. Francesca Albanese, who holds the mandate covering the "Palestinian territories," has likened Israel and Israelis to Nazi Germany and said the United States is in thrall to the Jewish lobby. Several Western governments called that antisemitic. Washington sanctioned her and blocked her assets inside its jurisdiction in July 2025, and Guterres has reportedly called her horrible in private and left her exactly where she is.

Boycott Activists Carried the Genocide Charge Onto the American Campus

The AMCHA Initiative, which documents Jew-hate on American campuses, went through 278 recordings of events that academic departments, centers and institutes sponsored on 51 US campuses during the 2024-25 school year, at schools Hillel International lists as popular with Jewish students. Ninety-three of those events put a speaker on the bill who had promoted the boycott campaign against Israel before October 7, 2023. Eighty-five percent of those events accused Israel of genocide. Of the events with no boycott activist on the bill, two percent did.

That is a ratio of forty to one, and the sponsorship runs the same way. An event with a boycott-supporting speaker was nine times more likely to come from an academic unit whose own director had signed on to the campaign, 56 percent against six. Across the 83 events that carried the accusation the median was seven accusations apiece, and one event ran it fifty-three times. Thirteen days after October 7, Middle East studies departments at six universities, Harvard, Brown and Georgetown among them, co-organized an online teach-in called "Gaza in Context," where speakers reached for genocidal intent and the realities of genocide in real time. The report's own title is When Political Advocacy Acquires Academic Authority.

The word turned up on Instagram last Friday. Mark Ruffalo told twenty million followers to look at how a former Oracle chief executive "revels in what we now have come to see as a genocide, which was built on an apartheid system of oppression powered by Oracle" — inside a fight over Paramount's bid for Warner Bros. Discovery. On Tuesday a Hollywood industry group calling itself the Brigade, whose members include Haim Saban, Lawrence Bender, Teddy Schwarzman and Matti Leshem, said in a statement that he was using antisemitic tropes.

Washington Asks the World for Guards on the Walk to Shul

The State Department has told nearly all of its diplomatic missions to press their host governments for police, counterterrorism units or soldiers on synagogues and holiday events before the High Holidays. The cable tells diplomats to take it to the highest level of government they can reach. The cable does not stop at the buildings. It asks for the residential streets too — congregants walk predictable routes at predictable hours in clothing that identifies them. It asks host governments to open security briefings and coordination channels with Jewish institutions, community security bodies and Jewish-owned businesses.

Rosh Hashanah begins at sundown on Friday 11 September, runs straight into Shabbat, and ends after dark on Sunday night. The cable asks governments to work out some way of delivering a warning about a sudden threat across those days, when observant Jews are not using phones. A similar one went out before Pesach. The State Department has not confirmed it, and Yehuda Kaploun, its special envoy on antisemitism, declined to discuss it.

In a federal court in New York, Mohammad Al-Saadi filed on Tuesday for prisoner-of-war status under the Third Geneva Convention. Al-Saadi is a dual Iraqi and Iranian citizen. The government calls him a commander of Kata'ib Hezbollah, Iran's Iraqi proxy, and charges him with plotting to bomb synagogues in the United States and with carrying out attacks in Europe. His motion argues that the United States is in an international armed conflict and that the government's own pleadings put him in the chain of command of an adversary militia. His job, on that reading, was coordinating its response to American and Israeli strikes. His lawyer says the filing admits nothing about membership, and could not name a defendant who has ever won the claim.

2,200 North Americans Make Aliyah Across a Single Summer

Close to a hundred new immigrants from North America came through Ben Gurion inside half an hour this morning. About 150 will have landed by tonight, across six separate flights. More than 1,100 arrived from the United States and Canada during August — one of the biggest months Nefesh B'Nefesh has recorded since it started flying these planes in 2002.

More than 2,200 olim will have come between June and September, roughly 480 of them families, on close to a hundred group charters. About 2,700 have arrived from North America since January, and the organization expects the year to finish past 4,000.

Field Dossier: The Wrong Map — The Dossier's argument is that five indicators split American Jewry into three separate populations while the institutional class keeps funding the aggregate, which is why a summer that took close to 480 families out of specific communities does not show up anywhere in the allocation.

Briefly Noted

Frontline & Security

• Jerusalem Post: The IDF amended its account yesterday: the Palestinian Authority policemen who stopped an Israeli reservist on the Beitunia bypass put their roadblock up in Area C, where they are not permitted to operate at all, and arrested him on their own initiative. The army's first version had them coming to his rescue.

Diplomacy & Geopolitics

• Jewish Insider: Forty-five of the Senate's forty-seven Democrats signed the letter Adam Schiff and Chuck Schumer sent Netanyahu demanding he crack down on "settler violence" in Judea and Samaria, and the only two who would not sign it are Bernie Sanders and John Fetterman, from opposite ends of the caucus on Israel. Israeli police opened 967 investigations into Israeli offenders last year and brought 61 indictments.
• JNS: Brussels drafted its condemnation of the E1 tender to go out in the name of all twenty-seven member states, and it went out under Kaja Kallas's name alone after Slovenia would not sign. Janez Jansa's government took office in June and scrapped the sanctions his predecessor had put on Israel, down to the ban on Netanyahu setting foot in the country.

Public Diplomacy & Media

• J. The Jewish News of Northern California: Fourteen Sephardic and Mizrahi organizations wrote to New York Magazine on Monday about its "Habibi City" package, which makes belonging to the city's Middle Eastern scene a matter of political creed — Palestinian rights, Gaza as genocide — and so lets a Mizrahi Jew in only if she disavows the country that took her family in. The magazine put out a statement this week keeping "genocide" in its pages, and editor-in-chief David Haskell offered the signatories a meeting in September.

Am Yisrael

• Walla: Basel police say Saturday's "Death to Zionism" rally cannot be authorized in any form — the organizers called it for Theaterplatz, the square beside the hall where Herzl opened the First Zionist Congress 129 years to the day. The poster puts Hamas's inverted red targeting triangle above an Israeli tank, and more than 350 people have gone to the Basel prosecutor over it, members of both chambers of the Swiss parliament among them.
• Jewish News UK: Britain's Independent Office for Police Conduct opened a gross-misconduct investigation into Craig Guildford, who ran West Midlands Police when it kept Maccabi Tel Aviv's fans out of Villa Park, and into three more officers. The briefing behind the ban carried eight errors, including a Maccabi game against West Ham that never happened, and a staff member is said to have pulled the material out of Microsoft Copilot.

Domestic & Law

• Ynet: Eyal Zamir fired his Military Advocate General over the Sde Teiman leak, then ruled that Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi keeps a full retiring officer's package minus the increments that are his to grant. Accountant General Michal Abadi-Boiangiu froze it, called the money already paid a recoverable advance, and did not move when Zamir wrote that the call was his alone.
• Jerusalem Post: An Israeli citizen abroad whose passport has expired could enter on a foreign one only until 30 September — four weeks short of the election — and the Population Authority has now pushed that to 31 December at Gilad Kariv's request. Israel runs no general absentee ballot, so voting on 27 October means getting on a plane. [Though if you don't live in Israel, should you really be voting in its elections?]

Economy, Tech & Infrastructure

• Jewish Insider: The Iran war has taken 96 percent of Qatar's LNG exports with it — about $24 billion, or five months of government revenue — and Doha's economy is headed for an 8.6 percent contraction this year, the steepest in the Gulf. Qatar has cut department budgets by up to 30 percent and its overseas aid by 85 percent.
• JNS: Israel opened the tender yesterday on a desalination plant at Emek Hefer that would produce 400 million cubic meters of water a year, about 40 percent of what Israeli households and industry use, on a 25-year private concession with an option to build a 300-megawatt gas plant next door to power it. It could also feed the proposed Prosperity Blue arrangement — up to 200 million cubic meters a year to Jordan in exchange for Jordanian renewable electricity, with the UAE a partner.

Culture, Religion & Society

• Israel Hayom: The separation signs came down on Shlomo HaMelech and Ezra in Bnei Brak after a month of public argument, and overnight they went back up, this time with a route to every wedding hall in the area and a phone number to call for the men's and women's paths. The municipality's answer last month was that the city rabbis put them up and that all it did was widen the sidewalks for the crowds.

Developments to Watch

Northern Front (Lebanon / Syria)

• What the Kurds were paid to dissolve — A Kurdish source told al-Akhbar this morning that Mazloum Abdi disbanded the SDF against a guarantee of four brigades inside al-Sharaa's army, with 1,500 YPJ fighters going to an internal-security counterterror unit around al-Hasakah and a legislative decree promised on Kurdish as a second language. He also says the trust between the two sides still needs time to build, and the SDF has already stood itself down, so that trust now only has to run one way.

Regional Axis (Iran, Houthis, Militias)

• Qatar's prime minister lands in Tehran today — Doha says Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani is going in to talk about the strait and about building an environment that allows dialogue, after Pakistani and Omani envoys ran the same errand and came back with nothing. The Revolutionary Guards said again yesterday that Hormuz opens when Washington accepts Tehran's terms and not before, so the mediation is aimed at the part of the regime that does not decide this.
• Iran's emergency fuel reserve reaches its red line — Iranian state television has given up denying the queues at the petrol stations and is now reporting them itself, explaining them as a reaction to rumours that the fuel is about to run out. The opposition's Iran International puts the strategic reserve weeks from empty, with the government wanting to keep drawing it down and the Revolutionary Guards arguing to stop, and the Guards are the ones who would have to police the queues.
• Tehran names three broadcasters as military targets — Armed forces spokesman Abolfazl Shekarchi put BBC Persian, Iran International and Radio Farda on Iran's military target list and called them "soldiers of Zionism and America." The Foxtrot network took a few hundred dollars to kill a man in Stockholm in February, so acting on a list like this one costs the Guards almost nothing.

Diplomatic & Legal

• Ratcliffe carried Hormuz into Moscow — The CIA director went to warn Russia off attacking a NATO member, and used the room to tell Russian intelligence that more American sanctions land unless the strait reopens and that Moscow should stop sharing weapons and air-defence technology with Iran. He advised them not to overreact when those sanctions arrive, and Bessent's campaign against Iran's trading partners has now reached a government that can veto anything the Security Council writes.
• Two House Democrats go after the Board of Peace's money — Gregory Meeks and Jamie Raskin wrote to Rubio calling the Board an opaque, pseudo-governmental organization Congress never authorized, and demanding to know who controls its J.P. Morgan account and who audits it. The State Department has already pulled back a $50 million transfer under that scrutiny while Morocco and the UAE moved more than $100 million in, so the body Mladenov speaks for is funded by everyone except the country that chairs it.

Home Front & Politics

• Degel HaTorah and Agudat Yisrael open talks on splitting up — The two halves of United Torah Judaism met last night for the first time on whether to run together at all after 38 years, with Degel demanding five of the first eight places and Uri Maklev put ahead of Meir Porush. Lists close on 8 September and the threshold takes four seats to clear, so a split would put two haredi lists on that line in the year two new haredi parties launched against both of them.
• Malware on two phones at Eisenkot's headquarters — Yashar has been sweeping its senior staff's phones for weeks and found listening software on two of them, Channel 12 reported, The campaign filed no police complaint and put a private security firm on daily scans instead.
• Kroizer asks the Elections Committee to disqualify Ra'am — Mansour Abbas wrote in Arabic that Israel's Jewish character is a reality imposed on his community and that Arab parties have been compelled to accept it in practice, and Yitzhak Kroizer went to the Central Elections Committee yesterday asking it to bar him and his party. Abbas and Yoav Segalovitz present his number two slot at a joint press conference on Saturday night, so the party that would hand the anti-Netanyahu camp its majority walks into that announcement carrying a disqualification petition.
• Draft evaders are clearing Ben Gurion for Uman — Army Radio filmed a young man under an exit ban walking through passport control, and found that the cross-check reaches Israeli carriers and not foreign ones, so a foreign airline issues the boarding pass without anyone knowing what it is issuing. The Population Authority says it knows of no such cases, and the Rosh Hashanah flights to Ukraine are going out now.

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