Tuesday, August 04, 2026

08/03 Links Pt1: How a UN study shatters the Gaza starvation narrative; The Warning Netanyahu Got Before the War; B'Tselem report ‘demonizes Israel by rebranding terrorists as minors’

From Ian:

Does Israel want peace?
While Israel never lost the hope of peace, it understood that it would not come about merely through slogans, chants, campfires, or peace symbols.

Among Israel’s neighbours, rallies all too often called for the murder of Jews and the destruction of the Jewish state. Survivors of Nazism, jihadism, and communism knew such words could become reality. They had seen it before.

Israelis, therefore, had no appetite for the catastrophic illusions that led Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister, to declare after Munich in 1938: “I believe it is peace for our time…” Genuine peace partners

Nor were Israelis ready to risk being sacrificed on the altar of geopolitical expediency, otherwise known as appeasement, as happened so shamefully to Czechoslovakia.

Israelis needed no sanctimonious lectures from afar about the virtues of peace. They understood those virtues better than most. What they needed were genuine peace partners.

Anwar Sadat had once been a bitter foe of Israel and had sympathies for Nazi Germany during the Second World War. Yet he came to understand that Egypt’s future prosperity depended on making peace rather than pursuing Israel’s destruction.

It worked. Paired with Menachem Begin, Israel’s first Right-of-centre prime minister, and with the help of the United States, they achieved the seemingly impossible in 1979 – peace.

To get there, Begin agreed to a full withdrawal from the Sinai Peninsula, three times the size of Israel itself, and from the strategic depth it represented.

It worked again in 1994, this time with Jordan, while Yitzhak Rabin was Israel’s leader. As with Sadat, King Hussein convinced Israel he was sincere about peace, understood Israel’s security concerns in a country the size of Wales, and grieved for the loss of innocent lives – Arab and Israeli alike. Another peace treaty, more Israeli concessions, and no Israeli second thoughts.

A third breakthrough came in 2020, when Israel had to choose between partial annexation of disputed West Bank territory and a normalisation agreement with the United Arab Emirates. The Right-of-centre Israeli government chose the latter.

The decision has paid dividends ever since. In addition, there was the unilateral Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, which could have led to peaceful coexistence, but instead was seized by Hamas to create a new launching pad for its war to the death with the Jewish state.

Anyone visiting Israel and speaking with people going about their daily lives would be hard-pressed to find an Israeli who welcomes decades of army reserve duty, rejoices as their children enter life-and-death military service, looks forward to 3am dashes to bomb shelters while carrying toddlers or helping elderly relatives, or relaxes on a bus while wondering whether a nearby package contains groceries or nail bombs.

Of course, the big question is whether peace with the Palestinians is possible. Hopefully, one day it will be. It requires, though, not just a territorial negotiation, but something bigger.

Can the Palestinians convincingly accept that Israel, whatever its final borders, is there to stay, that Jews are indigenous to the region, and that living alongside Israel, not replacing it, must be the outcome?

Neither the late Yasser Arafat nor Mahmoud Abbas, by their actions, has shown the courage and sincerity of Anwar Sadat or King Hussein. Will the next Palestinian leader? Only time will tell.

Meanwhile, Israel continues to pray fervently for peace, while never forgetting that it lives in a part of the world where, as Shimon Peres, the late Israeli president and Nobel laureate, liked to remind visitors: “In the Middle East, either you’re at the dinner table or you’re on the dinner menu.”
Nadav Eyal: Exclusive: The Warning Netanyahu Got Before the War
An in-depth look at Roaring Lion — the war aim Israel never made public, the intelligence assessment that failure could push Iran toward the bomb, and what the Mossad told the Kurds

It is impossible to think about Israel’s plan to bring down the Islamic Republic without first thinking about its sheer presumption. Grinding a regime down over years — sanctions, influence operations, the slow seeding of fear and confusion — is one thing. Recruiting Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the former Iranian president and Holocaust denier, as an asset and installing him in power is another. So is launching a full-scale Kurdish invasion. This is the kind of project superpowers fail at. Israel tried it, and poured an enormous effort into the attempt.

Over the past weeks, The New York Times and Haaretz have published a great deal about that effort. What follows adds to the record on the most ambitious regional objective Israel has ever pursued: regime change in a country of roughly 100 million people, a regional power — attempted in wartime, and in coordination with the only superpower, the United States.

In the presentation the Mossad gave the Israeli cabinet on the eve of the operation, regime change was projected to take “one to three years.” That was a reasonable hedge; the Islamic Revolution did not happen in a day either. The ministers heard a different tune. “We understood,” one of them told me, “that we were going for regime change in a fast, sweeping move — killing the current leader, a Kurdish invasion, Ahmadinejad as our agent, protesters in the streets.”

Begin with a distinction
Again and again this has been described as “a Mossad operation.” The Mossad — Israel’s foreign intelligence service — was without question the animating force, the planner, the one pushing. But this was an operation of the State of Israel, ordered by its cabinet. It grew out of a conviction that had taken root at the political level and was then imposed on the security establishment: there would be no solution to the Iranian nuclear crisis, and no end to the friction with Iran, without a change of regime in Tehran. The 12-day war of June 2025 had created an opening, and Donald Trump was in the White House. Israel had to try, because the window might close. The cost of inaction, even weighed against the risk of failure, was higher than the cost of action.

Those words were said explicitly by Benjamin Netanyahu to the American president. The doctrine is his.

None of this is interpretation. The war aims of Operation Roaring Lion were never officially published. After conversations with a double-digit number of sources, military and political, the central objective can be reconstructed:
To deeply degrade or remove the threats Iran poses to Israel by creating the military conditions for a change of regime in Iran. Those may not be the exact words. But “creating the conditions for regime change” was the bottom line.

The phrasing was a compromise, negotiated in part with the IDF. From the first moment, the army said it did not know how to produce regime change on its own. For the General Staff, the main effort was strategic damage to Iran — the erosion of capability over time. Support for the Mossad was, as the army understood it, a secondary effort.

Why “creating the conditions” rather than “toppling the regime”? One defense official offered me a guess: the IDF knew this was a complicated objective, possibly an impossible one. It did not want to be dragged into a war with an aim so absolute that it could run forever — far past the number of interceptors in Israel’s magazines.

And yet the cabinet voted for an objective that was, in practice, an attempt at regime change. An objective that large — Megalomanic, some would say — dictates the allocation of resources and carries severe regional consequences. Put another way: the nuclear program and the ballistic missiles mattered, but they were not the holy grail, and they were not the message of the new war that followed. Where Rising Lion, the June 2025 campaign, prioritized the nuclear project — and did in fact halt enrichment — Roaring Lion was meant to be the war that ended all wars. With Iran, at least.
Andrew Fox: Hamas’s ‘disarmament’ deal is not what it seems
Western powers continue to misunderstand Hamas. They treat it as a stack of rifles with a political office attached. But it’s far more than an armed force. It ruled Gaza for almost two decades and infested its civil machinery. It shaped schooling through the education bureaucracy. The health sector operated under its government, while Hamas-run courts enforced its authority. Municipal employees and emergency committees kept its presence visible when formal ministries broke down. Collecting the weapons of Hamas and other factions removes an immediate threat of armed force, but it leaves Hamas’s human infrastructure in place.

The proposed handover to the National Committee exposes the danger. Hamas has sought to carry over 40,000 civil servants and security personnel into the new technocratic order. Roughly 10,000 belong to the Hamas-run police. A new nameplate on a ministry changes little if the same officials control salaries and local permits, with loyal policemen on the streets. Hamas can surrender the administrative title while retaining its governance networks.

Hamas’s behaviour during the ‘ceasefire’ does not bode well for the Board of Peace plan. Hamas gunmen reappeared as Israeli forces withdrew last year, crushing local rivals. The movement then resumed enforcing order with extreme brutality. Its remaining bureaucracy collected revenue and paid loyalists. Israel now says Hamas continues to recruit and rebuild. Every month of quiet exposes the superficial appearance of calm, even as renewed Hamas coercion demands another violent confrontation.

Verification of Hamas’s surrendering of weapons is going to be nigh-on impossible. No audited inventory exists for an arsenal dispersed across ruins and private buildings. Inspectors must prove the absence of hidden rifles and explosives across a dense urban landscape designed to frustrate surveillance. Hamas can hand over expendable weapons and reveal tunnels Israel already knows about, while continuing to conceal those Israel is unaware of. The commanders who remember how to rebuild can remain underground or melt into civilian employment. A weapons store controlled by a fragile administration remains a future armoury.

Hamas’s leaders are unusually candid about their objectives. Political bureau member Bassem Naim said the agreement preserved ‘our strategic project’. He praised the ‘Al-Aqsa Flood’, Hamas’s codename for the 7 October pogrom, and called for other arenas to advance the ‘liberation’ project.

The Board of Peace’s roadmap therefore offers Hamas an opportunity. Surrender enough metal to secure Israeli withdrawal, then protect the organisation embedded within Gaza’s new administration. Rearmament can wait until scrutiny fades. The weapons left inside Gaza will be waiting, too.
Lee Smith: The President of PEACE
So, if Trump can’t win the war, or won’t, he can win a peace by pocketing Hamas’ nonconcessions to pad his résumé as a dealmaker—indeed, a “PRESIDENT OF PEACE,” as U.N. Ambassador Mike Waltz described the commander in chief now determined, like the loser presidents who preceded him, to waste American time, prestige, and money on “a credible political path that achieves self-determination and Statehood” for a Palestinian terror enclave.

The Hamas deal, like the administration’s arrangement with Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon and Trump’s repeated and unrealized threats against Iran, is evidence that the president is in danger of losing the plot, if he hasn’t already.

The White House includes the cease-fires between Israel and Hamas and between Israel and Iran as two of the eight peace deals Trump has arranged since taking office. Some of those deals are holding up, like the one between Armenia and Azerbaijan, and some aren’t, like the agreement struck between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. But none of that really matters to most Americans, nor should it. We go to the polls every four years to vote not for the candidate most likely to win cease-fires for foreigners, but rather for the one who will advance our prosperity by imposing our peace.

Rome imposed its peace on rivals, and on those who might someday cause trouble, to bring wealth and glory to Rome. Caesar Augustus turned Rome from brick to marble, but the architecture of the Pax Romana was made of steel and blood. They make a desert and call it peace, said one victim of Rome’s devastations to serve Roman interests. Our version of peace has been much gentler, but the purpose of the 80-year Pax Americana is the same: to make things better for Americans, regardless of what that might mean for foreigners.

Trump seemed to grasp this most fundamental concept of statesmanship more clearly than his most recent predecessors, from Bill Clinton through Joe Biden. He seemed to understand what peace, outside of the clichés promoted at beauty pageants, really means. “Peace through strength” is how he formulated the true nature of peace, or the only kind of peace that can matter to Americans: America’s peace.

One of the pillars of the postwar order is the Strait of Hormuz, through which the free flow of oil stabilizes international energy markets. Of late, administration validators have argued that the strait is becoming less strategically important with the construction of Saudi and UAE pipelines that bypass the strait and reach the Red Sea directly. But as those who can read a map or even a newspaper understand, the Red Sea is also vulnerable to Iran via its Red Sea proxy, the Houthis.

The strait is still crucial to America and its allies. And losing it to Iran would mean a strategic defeat for the United States, one significantly more consequential than losing in Iraq and Afghanistan. But White House messaging tells adversaries and allies alike that the Pax Americana is a broken reed. Sure, the Americans once protected the strait against a nuclear superpower—for decades—but under Trump, America’s patrimony is up for grabs.

Leaks from Trump officials that plans to take the Strait by force are complicated by the lack of interceptors tell American adversaries little about our stockpiles they haven’t already counted. Rather, they indicate that, since a massively funded military has many other ways to ensure victory against an obscurantist third-world regime like Iran’s, the president is looking for excuses to fail to win. When the administration publicly frets over the possible targeting of desalination plants in the Arab Gulf states, it is indicating that it doesn’t truly understand the stakes and sacrifices involved in stopping Iran’s nuclear weapons program. And when Trump reasons, as he did in a Truth Social post Saturday, that he is once again walking back his plans to strike Iran for “the future benefit of the WORLD and, likewise, the survival of a successful and prosperous Iran,” he is saying that America’s peace, now and for future generations, is not his priority.

Trump can’t say how these ghoulish puppet shows with Iran and its proxies augment America’s wealth and glory because they don’t. Rather, they make America complicit with monsters. They put us in the same room as Hamas, whose cruelty, Trump said less than a year ago, “struck to the core of humanity itself.” He vowed then that America stands with Israel under the motto “Never again,” but now he’s leaning on a wartime ally to play along with phony deals he’s struck with Hamas and Hezbollah that deter Israel while shielding the terrorists on its borders. These aren’t the acts of a president of peace, never mind a commander in chief who understands the nature of America’s peace and the character of our adversaries who want to break it.


How a United Nations study shatters the Gaza starvation narrative
Anewly released UN-led nutrition survey of Gaza's children completely shatters the narrative promoted by advocacy organisations that continue to claim that its population – and children, in particular – is being deliberately starved. Equally important, it also deals a final blow to the highly controversial "famine" designation issued one year ago by the Famine Review Committee of the UN-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) system.

The survey, carried out under the coordination of the Nutrition Cluster – the UNICEF-led body that runs Gaza’s nutrition-surveillance system – measured the children’s weight, height and mid-upper-arm circumference. The data were then used to calculate the weight-for-height z-score, or WHZ – the standard indicator used by the World Health Organisation and other bodies to compare levels of acute malnutrition across populations and over time.

Contrary to the prevailing narrative, the survey found that acute malnutrition measured by WHZ ranged from merely 0.2 to 0.8 per cent across Gaza’s regions. For comparison, Gaza’s pre-war rate was 0.8 per cent – an already relatively low rate comparable to those seen in developed countries and well below those reported in nearby countries such as Egypt (2.9 per cent) or Jordan (2.0 per cent). In other words, the measured level of acute malnutrition is not only well below critical levels – it is exceptionally low by both regional and even Western standards.

The new findings don’t just completely debunk the latest iteration of the relentless narrative claiming Israel isn’t allowing enough food into Gaza – they also undermine the key argument used to justify the original famine declaration, which advocacy groups still cite as their evidentiary anchor.

To formally declare a Phase 5 "Famine", as the IPC did in August 2025, one required key condition is that at least 30 per cent of children under the age of five show acute malnutrition as measured by WHZ. Since WHZ data were not available for Gaza when famine was declared last year, the IPC relied instead on the more readily available mid-upper-arm circumference (MUAC) measurement. It further argued, on the basis of earlier global comparisons between the two indicators, that WHZ generally identifies roughly twice as many cases of acute malnutrition as MUAC, and hence that a much lower MUAC prevalence of 15 per cent could supposedly be treated as equivalent to the 30 per cent WHZ famine threshold.

As I wrote at the time in the Jewish Chronicle, this assumption was questionable even before any new data came out. The approximately 2-to-1 relationship between the two indicators invoked by the IPC was derived largely from comparisons involving countries in Africa, where WHZ frequently produces substantially higher malnutrition estimates than MUAC. However, evidence from the Middle East suggested that this relationship did not generally hold in the region. Moreover, some limited earlier data from Gaza itself indicated that it might actually be reversed there, with MUAC rates higher than WHZ rates rather than lower. In other words, there was no justification for treating a 15 per cent MUAC figure as “equivalent” to the 30 per cent WHZ famine threshold.

The new Nutrition Cluster survey now supplies the conclusive local comparison between the two malnutrition indicators and shows that the IPC’s central assumption was indeed wrong: WHZ rates in Gaza are not twice the MUAC rates – in fact, in this survey, they are consistently lower than MUAC rates in every area measured.

The 2-to-1 ratio on which the IPC relied to justify its controversial 15 per cent “famine” threshold simply does not hold. And once that assumption collapses, so does the statistical basis for concluding that Gaza had crossed the catastrophic malnutrition threshold – a claim that was key to the August 2025 famine classification.
When Everything is Genocide: How the American Public Has Diluted the Meaning of the Term
Since the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war following Hamas's October 7, 2023, attack, accusations that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza have become increasingly common in political discourse, media coverage, and international institutions. Although the legal definition of genocide requires proof of a specific intent to destroy a protected national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, public debate increasingly appears to apply the term more broadly to armed conflicts involving large-scale civilian casualties.

A nationally representative sample of American adults evaluated whether the term genocide applied to Israel's military campaign in Gaza, the Holocaust, the treatment of Native Americans, the Allied bombing of Germany during World War II, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Vietnam War, Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and Islamist violence against Black Christians in Africa.

The findings indicate that many respondents apply the term genocide well beyond its accepted legal meaning. While the Holocaust remained the clearest and most universally recognized example of genocide, substantial numbers of respondents also characterized numerous military campaigns involving large-scale civilian casualties as genocide, including conflicts in which the U.S. was a participant.

Younger respondents and those identifying as Democrats were significantly more likely than older respondents and Republicans to characterize both Israel's actions and other military conflicts as genocide. These differences extended beyond attitudes toward Israel, suggesting broader generational and political differences in how the concept itself is understood.

The findings suggest that the public meaning of genocide has undergone a process of conceptual expansion that effectively downgrades its legal and historical distinctiveness. Increasingly, the term appears to function as a general expression of moral condemnation for wars involving extensive civilian casualties rather than as the legally defined crime requiring proof of specific intent. We can more accurately term this process of conceptual expansion as "conceptual dilution": a situation in which a concept with a precise legal or professional definition expands within public discourse to encompass situations not included in its original meaning. This is what appears to have happened with the term genocide.
US Supreme Court won’t halt $655 million judgment against Palestinians over terror attacks
US Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor declines to halt $655.5 million in damages that Palestinian authorities were ordered to pay plaintiffs in a US civil lawsuit concerning terror attacks that killed and injured Americans in Israel from 2002 to 2004, during the Second Initifada.

Sotomayor denied a request by the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority and the Palestine Liberation Organization to put on hold the judgment while they appeal a lower court’s decision to revive the case years after it had been dismissed.

The lawsuit was brought on behalf of Americans killed or injured in shooting and bombing attacks in the Jerusalem area.

The Supreme Court last year upheld a federal law that allowed claims like those brought by the plaintiffs in the case.

Sotomayor does not explain her decision and does not refer the case to the entire court. Sotomayor handles emergency matters for cases arising from New York and certain other states.

The Manhattan-based 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals reinstated the judgment in March following the Supreme Court’s 9-0 decision in June 2025 to uphold the 2019 law, called the Promoting Security and Justice for Victims of Terrorism Act.

The Palestinian organizations said that enforcing the judgment in the case will cause severe financial harm and destabilize government services in the West Bank, where the PA is already cash-strapped, harming people who live there and jeopardizing regional security.

They said in a written filing that the plaintiffs intend to seek payment from indirect Palestinian tax revenue collected by Israel, a key source of funding for Palestinian government operations. Security, sanitation and school services in the West Bank “are hanging by a thread,” they wrote.

The plaintiffs, in winning the judgment in New York federal court in 2015, alleged that the Palestinian entities were responsible for the incidents from 2002 to 2004.


Erdogan's Courtship of President Trump
Trump's remarks were seen as a rebuke to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is — quite rightly — opposed to F-35 sales to Turkey on the grounds that it could ultimately prove a direct threat to Israel's security, as well as to Cyprus and Greece, which Erdogan has repeatedly threatened.

Turkey was suspended from the multinational F-35 program during Trump's first term in 2019, after acquiring Russia's S-400 air defence system. The purchase of the S-400 also prompted US sanctions against Turkey's defence industry, imposed in 2020.

Although Turkey tested the S-400 following its delivery and has not returned it to Russia, the Turkish government claims that the system is in storage and has hinted that it could possibly be moved to another country for safekeeping. What could possibly go wrong?

Trump has even praised Erdogan for the role he has played in Syria, where his support for Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa, an Islamist former al-Qaeda terrorist now presenting himself to the world as a "moderate," was crucial to Sharaa's overthrowing the Assad regime in December 2024.

Meanwhile the terrorists who make up Sharaa's regime have reportedly "gotten their hands on a modern military" and have been persecuting Christians, Alawites, Kurds and Druze.

Trump's willingness to engage with Erdogan overlooks numerous troubling issues which, far from indicating that Ankara can be treated as a reliable ally of Washington, show that, under Erdogan's leadership, Turkey's policy is generally aimed at undermining American efforts to bring peace to the region.

While the US, together with a number of key regional allies such as Jordan, has worked hard to persuade Hamas's terrorist leadership to disarm (a key demand in Trump's 20-point peace plan to end the Gaza war), Erdogan and his Islamist allies in Qatar have tried to dissuade Hamas from disarming.

The Trump administration's goals of disarming Hamas completely and ending its involvement in Gaza have, in fact, been constantly undermined by Erdogan. He has supported numerous counter-proposals, such as the suggestions that Hamas give up its weapons to the Palestinian Authority (PA) or that the weapons be transferred to some kind of "secure storage" under supposed oversight.

Both proposals, which have been rejected by Israel, were seemingly designed with the aim of preserving Hamas' rule in Gaza.

Reports that "Turkey was prepared to provide Iran with aerial military support if Kurdish militias had invaded the country during the Israeli-US war on Iran" have laid bare the extent of Erdogan's unmistakable double dealing on the Iran issue.

Trump might believe that Erdogan could prove to be a useful ally in terms of helping to achieve the Trump administration's objectives in the Middle East and beyond. The reality, however, is that, in terms of his overall attitude towards the US and its objectives in the region, the Turkish leader deserves to be treated more as an enemy than an ally.
Turkey accuses Netanyahu of undermining Gaza peace efforts
Turkey on Sunday accused Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government of having no intention of achieving peace with the Palestinians, following Israel's latest military strikes in the Gaza Strip.

In a statement published by the Turkish Foreign Ministry, Ankara said the latest attacks demonstrated that the Israeli government was continuing policies that undermine efforts to reach a peaceful resolution to the conflict.

"Netanyahu's sole objective is to displace Palestinians from their homeland and prevent the establishment of peace and stability in the region," the ministry said.

The ministry further alleged that Netanyahu continues to take steps that weaken the region's fragile balance and obstruct mediation initiatives led by several countries, particularly the US.

"It has become imperative for the international community to adopt a more determined, consistent and robust stance against Netanyahu's expansionist and militarist approach, which seeks to turn the entire Middle East into a zone of conflict," the statement said.

Calling on countries that support "peace and stability in Palestine and across the wider Middle East," the ministry urged the international community to act with a shared sense of responsibility and uphold international law and humanitarian values.
Trump accuses Iran of being ‘unbelievably duplicitous’ over peace talks denial
Donald Trump has accused Iran of being “unbelievably duplicitous” in denying talks aimed at ending the conflict were being held.

The US president said Tehran had “begged” for negotiations and whether they admitted it or not discussions were taking place to reach “a solution” to the current stand-off.

He also dismissed Iran’s claims to control the strategic Strait of Hormuz waterway as “their usual blather”.

The president made the comments on his Truth Social platform after he said on Sunday he had halted US forces from carrying out “the biggest attack since World War II” to allow for further diplomatic efforts.

He said talks would be held with Iran on Monday, but this was subsequently denied by Tehran.

In response, Mr Trump posted: “Iranian Leadership is unbelievably duplicitous!

“They ask for a meeting, some would say ‘beg’, talks begin, with more scheduled in the immediate future, and they say, openly and proudly, that they’re not having any discussions, that nothing is being talked about, and they’re only dealing with ‘Oman’.

“They then go on to give their usual blather in saying, the Strait of Hormuz will be operated powerfully by them, when it is already completely controlled by the United States Navy and our ‘Blockade’ or, as some say, ‘The United States Wall of Steel!’

“Nothing gets through to Iran, unless we want it to, and nothing will get through, unless a Deal, or Total Surrender, is accomplished.

“Whether Iran wants to admit it or not, we are, in fact, talking of a solution to a problem that they have caused, for decades.”

The president’s latest broadside comes after he said on Sunday the emerging deal would include reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, a vital oil and gas supply route, and would tackle concerns over Iran’s disputed nuclear plans.

Only the day before, Mr Trump said he was “losing faith” in talks with Iran and warned the US military “will be hitting them very hard”.


US CENTCOM appears to have dropped 900kg bomb on civilian house in southern Iran - report
The US military struck Qeshm Island in southern Iran with a large-scale bomb on Thursday night that allegedly hit a family home, according to a New York Times report on Friday.

Iranian officials claimed that the strike had hit a family home, killing a couple and their two-year-old son. The other two children survived the strike, the officials added.

A NYT analysis of videos and satellite imagery found that the weapon used was likely to be a 2,000-pound (roughly 900kg) bomb, one of the largest conventional bombs used by the US military.

Weapons experts examined the size of the crater and munitions fragments found on Qeshm Island after the strike, and determined that the Mark-84 bomb may have been used. The NYT added that the strike's location and timing were consistent with when and where US forces were operating.

A US official told The Jerusalem Post that the scale of the US strikes on Iran on Thursday was "about twice the size of the previous night," adding that the strikes were "wide, extensive, and impactful."


Iran hangs two accused of spying for Israel as wartime executions ramp up
Iran on Monday executed two men convicted of spying for Israel, the judiciary said, the latest in a wave of hangings over alleged espionage.

Since the start of the war with Israel and the United States in February, Tehran has ramped up executions, with many of the convicts accused of spying for Israeli intelligence.

“Omid Behzad and Pouria Safvat were hanged this morning for transmitting the coordinates of sensitive military and security sites to Mossad agents,” said Mizan, the media outlet for Iran’s judiciary, referring to Israel’s foreign intelligence service.

It did not specify when the pair were arrested or when they went on trial, but said they were convicted of “espionage and collaboration with the Zionist regime.”

“They helped the intelligence services achieve their objectives by providing them with information on military and security centers during the war,” Mizan added.

One of the executed individuals was accused of passing coordinates to the administrator of a Telegram channel that the IRGC charges was linked to Israel’s Mossad spy agency, according to Mizan.

The second person, described by Mizan as “one of [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu’s soldiers,” was said to have sent information to the Mossad as well as to Iran International, a leading news outlet for dissidents in exile that Tehran accuses of also being an intelligence front.


Herzog: Hamas must disarm before next phase of Trump’s Gaza plan
The Hamas terrorist group must be fully disarmed before the second phase of U.S. President Donald Trump’s Gaza peace plan can commence, Israeli President Isaac Herzog said on Monday.

“I see a lot of positive elements in the efforts of the Board of Peace, under the auspices of President Trump and his leadership,” Herzog said as he received the diplomatic credentials of several ambassadors.

The Israeli head of state said the plan’s implementation would depend on “the clear caveat and undertaking that Hamas must be disarmed,” adding, “I hope Hamas will be disarmed fully.”

This, he continued, “is clearly the basis of moving forward to the next phase by bringing in the government of technocrats,” referring to the U.S.-backed National Committee for the Administration of Gaza.

“The efforts of the Americans, the Board of Peace, President Trump, and CEO of the Board of Peace Nickolay Mladenov can bring a certain vision of hope, also to the people of Gaza and to the people of Israel,” said Herzog.

“I sincerely hope and pray that we will find ways to move forward with our Palestinian neighbors on all fronts, to have a dialogue with our Palestinian neighbors,” he added.

Israel has conveyed “comments and concerns” to the White House after U.S. President Donald Trump last week announced an agreement to implement Hamas’s disarmament under the peace plan, an Israeli official told JNS on Monday.

Doron Spielman, a spokesman for the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office, told JNS that “the version that has been made public does not reflect Israel’s positions.”

“Over the past eight months, according to Israeli intelligence, Hamas has used the ceasefire to rearm, recruit thousands of additional terrorists, rebuild its military infrastructure, and prepare for further Oct. 7-style massacres,” he said, in reference to the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, massacre of 1,200 people in the Jewish state.


IDF kills PIJ commander involved in Oct. 7, holding Rom Braslavski hostage
The IDF has killed a Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) terrorist, Mahmoud Fatair, a commander in the PIJ's Central Gaza Brigade who infiltrated Israel on October 7 and took part in holding Rom Braslavski hostage, the military confirmed on Monday.

According to the statement, the IDF conducted strikes in the Deir al-Balah area in Gaza over the weekend, targeting and killing Fatair.

More recently, the Fatair had reportedly attempted to advance terror attacks against IDF troops and Israeli civilians.

In November 2023, as part of the sixth phase of the hostage release agreement, Fatair was documented wearing the Islamic Jihad uniform while participating in the hostage handover ceremony of numerous hostages, including Amit Shani, Ofir Engel, Moran Stela Yanai, Itay Regev, Liam Or-Nassar, Raz Ben Ami, Rantin Phaiboon, Gong Sae Lao, Seekena Jakkapan, and Saegkaew Charoemchai.

Braslavski responds to Fatair’s killing
Following the IDF’s announcement, Braslavski posted a video to his X/Twitter account in response to the news of Fatair’s killing.

Speaking in Arabic, Braslavski addressed living Hamas and PIJ terrorists who participated in the October 7th attacks and the Gaza hostage crisis.

"The IDF has killed another one who destroyed my soul.” Braslavski said.

“You did whatever you wanted, but now you are dying one after the other – and there will be none of you left," He added.

“The people of Israel live.”


New IAM investigation claims B'Tselem report ‘demonizes Israel by rebranding terrorists as minors’
The Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem published a report in late June 2026 titled Unshielded Childhood, which cataloged and analyzed the deaths of 54 Palestinian minors killed by Israeli forces in the West Bank during 2025. The report immediately circulated widely through global media outlets, framing the fatalities as an unprovoked pattern of systemic state violence.

However, a meticulous, case-by-case counter-investigation conducted over 100 hours by Joseph Cohen and the Israel Advocacy Movement (IAM) “reveals that the report fundamentally distorts reality by rebranding active combatants and terrorists as innocent children.”

IAM’s investigation relied on four rigorous data points to verify the true identity and circumstances of each casualty: official shaheed (“martyr”) posters published by militant groups; real-time Telegram communications between militants and locals; open-source news footage; and official statements or records from the Israeli military and police.

While B’Tselem’s June 2026 publication categorized roughly 60% of the deceased as uninvolved or undetermined, the counteranalysis uncovered a vastly different statistical breakdown for 2025. Around 20% of individuals in B'Tselem dataset tied to terrorist orgs.

According to the findings, at least 20% of the individuals included in B’Tselem’s dataset were militants, many of whom belonged to the terrorist group Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), while terror groups Hamas and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) issued martyr posters claiming the remaining individuals as affiliated with them.

Furthermore, according to the report, approximately 78% were actively participating in hostilities against Israeli security forces or civilians, such as gunfights, car rammings, and hurling improvised explosive devices, firebombs, or heavy concrete blocks.

The investigation demonstrated that 63% of the casualties were aged 15 or older, and only two were female.

The IAM investigation pointed to several examples to challenge B’Tselem’s findings.

In the case of Rida Bani Odeh, B’Tselem highlighted the 17-year-old by providing a sentimental quote describing him as an “innocent boy with a tender heart who had all the beautiful qualities.”

The IAM report, on the other hand, emphasized his status as a prominent PIJ member by providing a martyr picture of him holding a gun distributed by the PIJ. Bani Odeh was killed alongside other armed operatives during a firefight.
I Debunked The Biggest Lie Told About Israel Last Year



John Anderson: How China Is Using Iran | Michael Doran
Geopolitical expert Michael Doran argues that Middle East stability depends on the U.S. winning its long war with Iran. He warns the “rabid dog” regime remains a paused but persistent danger.

Doran also unpacks how China is using the Middle East as a laboratory to test how America defends against missiles and drones before any move on Taiwan. He warns that anti-ship ballistic missiles supplied to Iran and the Houthis exist for one purpose: sinking American aircraft carriers.

Michael Doran is a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute and director of its Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East. A former George W. Bush administration National Security Council director, he is the author of Ike's Gamble and a leading voice on Iran, Israel and U.S. strategy.

0:00 – Introduction
1:33 – Can the US actually win its war with Iran?
3:27 – The "rabid dog" regime and Iran's nuclear programme
6:58 – October 7 and the failure of the Obama–Biden strategy
9:05 – Eisenhower, Suez and the roots of US Middle East policy
10:34 – The religion behind America's distancing from Israel
15:32 – The West's naivety and self-loathing
24:53 – The 1930s, Churchill and the crisis of leadership
27:28 – Energy policy and the breakdown of trust
30:37 – China, Xi and the missile revolution
34:14 – The nightmare scenario Trump disrupted
37:54 – The Middle East as China's laboratory
41:38 – China's weaknesses and the new face of warfare
48:05 – Energy, military power and the Western alliance
55:28 – Anti-Semitism, the money trail and the war for the West


Commentary Podcast: Tehran TACO
Jewish Insider's Josh Kraushaar joins us on this busy news Monday to discuss Trump's latest walkback of an attack on Iranian infrastructure, the collapse of the Reflecting Pool vandalism prosecution, the worrisome midterm poll numbers and the rise of increasingly radical left wing candidates, and another global wave of antisemitic incidents. Plus, John recommends City of Angels at the Ogunquit Playhouse in Ogunquit, Maine.




Keep your $3.8 billion in US aid
The American left has discovered a number: $3.8 billion.

They repeat it with the solemnity of a catechism. The United States gives Israel $3.8 billion a year, they say, and therefore Israel’s military is an American project, Israel is an American dependency, and every Israeli military action is something Americans are personally paying for.

The argument is not merely tendentious. It is numerically illiterate.

Under the current US-Israel memorandum of understanding, Washington provides Israel with approximately $3.3 billion annually in Foreign Military Financing and another $500 million for cooperative missile-defense programs. The agreement covers 2019 through 2028 and totals $38 billion over 10 years. Much of the military financing must be spent on American defense products, meaning that a substantial portion of the money returns to US defense manufacturers.

That is a serious commitment. Americans are entitled to debate it. But describing it as though the United States pays for Israel’s military is a childish distortion.

According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Israel’s military expenditure reached approximately $46.5 billion in 2024. Later reporting based on SIPRI data placed 2025 Israeli military spending at approximately $48.3 billion. Israel’s Knesset approved a record 2026 defense budget of roughly $45 billion in March 2026, amid the war with Iran.

Against those figures, the American contribution is not “Israel’s military budget.” It is one component of a much larger Israeli defense effort – roughly eight percent of Israel’s spending in each of the past three years, 2024 through 2026.

Israel is not a passive recipient waiting for Washington to purchase its security. It devotes an extraordinary share of its own national resources to defense. Israelis serve in the military, pay taxes, endure reserve duty, fund domestic defense industries, absorb the economic consequences of war, and send their children into combat. Israel also develops and exports military technology of enormous value to other countries.





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Elder of Ziyon - حـكـيـم صـهـيـون



This blog may be a labor of love for me, but it takes a lot of effort, time and money. For 20 years and 40,000 articles I have been providing accurate, original news that would have remained unnoticed. I've written hundreds of scoops and sometimes my reporting ends up making a real difference. I appreciate any donations you can give to keep this blog going.

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