Wednesday, August 05, 2026

08/04 Links Pt1: Iran’s Most Powerful Weapon Is Time—Here’s How To Turn It Against Them; The Not-So-Special Relationship; Piers Morgan to Hamas spokesman: Why kidnap a baby?

From Ian:

Gen. David Deptula: Iran’s Most Powerful Weapon Is Time—Here’s How To Turn It Against Them
Destruction Is Not the Same as Leverage
American airpower can inflict devastating damage on Iran’s military establishment, but that does not constitute a strategy. To be productive, military effects must be connected to a defined political purpose.

If Iran believes it only needs to survive until the American political environment changes, then retaliatory strikes alone can be waited out. To be effective, the U.S. must convince Tehran that waiting will make its position progressively worse—not better.

This requires persistent military pressure against the regime’s ability to attack and regenerate. The United States should continue attacking the production, storage, command-and-control, and launch architecture supporting Iran’s missile, drone, and maritime operations. Electrical-power infrastructure that directly and effectively supports those military capabilities constitute a lawful military objective when targeted in accordance with the principles of distinction, proportionality, and feasible precautions, and provide a highly leveraged means of neutralizing them consistent with the law of armed conflict. Maritime restrictions should be sustained and enforced consistently, with clearly defined humanitarian provisions and consequences for violations.

Most importantly, military pressure must be integrated with a sustained economic campaign directed at the revenue streams that finance the regime and its military reconstruction.

Iran’s petroleum trade remains its central economic lifeline. Tehran depends on front companies, financial intermediaries, foreign refineries, ship-to-ship transfers, and a shadow fleet to disguise the origin and destination of its exports.

The Treasury and State Departments have already taken significant action against these networks. Recent Treasury measures target vessels, companies, financial intermediaries, and procurement networks supporting Iranian petroleum sales, missile production, and unmanned aircraft programs. Those actions provide a strong foundation for a campaign that connects economic pressure directly to military and diplomatic objectives.

Washington should continue systematically inhibiting the banks, insurers, port operators, brokers, refiners, and shipping networks that enable Iranian revenue. This forces foreign companies and governments to choose: access to the American financial system or assist in Iran’s sanctions-evasion economy. It must be clear you cannot do both.

Enforcement matters more than announcements. A sanctioned tanker that continues delivering oil represents unrealized leverage. Closing the gap between designation and enforcement is essential to maximizing pressure and strategic effect.

The Long Game Is the Path to a Durable Win
President Trump has long emphasized speed, deadlines, and measurable results. That approach can create valuable urgency and prevent bureaucratic drift. Iran, however, is attempting to turn that preference for rapid results to its advantage by arguing an agreement must be reached within a narrow political window.

The administration should resist and decouple the midterm election calendar from Iranian negotiations.

A 100-day benchmark can be a useful management and communications milestone, but it is insufficient for compelling a revolutionary regime to turn its back on decades spent absorbing sanctions, suppressing domestic opposition, and waging war through proxies and asymmetric means.

For President Trump to secure a durable victory, the United States must be prepared to play the long game. This does not mean accepting an endless war. It means establishing conditions under which Iran’s choices are steadily reduced while America’s are preserved.

The administration can reinforce its position by making clear that economic and military pressure will continue beyond the midterm elections. It should expand interceptor and counter-drone production on an emergency basis, build regional stockpiles, strengthen partner defenses, and shift the cost-exchange ratio in America’s favor. It should continue degrading Iran’s capacity to manufacture and employ offensive weapons while tightening enforcement against the regime’s oil, shipping, and financial networks.

The objective should not be destruction for its own sake or an agreement that trades substantial economic relief for temporary or unverifiable promises.

The objective should be to change Iran’s strategic calculation.

Iran must come to believe that each additional month of resistance will carry increasing cost, resulting in less revenue, fewer military options, greater isolation, diminished military capability, and a weaker negotiating position. At the same time, the United States should make clear that a verifiable agreement remains available if Iran abandons the behavior that created the crisis.

This combination—relentless pressure and a credible diplomatic solution—offers the best prospect for achieving the administration’s objectives.

The decisive question is not whether the Pentagon has a secret technological breakthrough waiting in the wings. It is whether the United States has the strategic patience, economic discipline, and political determination to ensure that Iran cannot simply outlast it.

If Washington demonstrates that determination, time will cease to be Iran’s most powerful weapon and become America’s. (h/t MtTB)
The Not-So-Special Relationship
Benjamin Netanyahu placed two bets on Israel’s alliance with the United States.
One bet was on Donald Trump. The two leaders’ past feuds and the American’s erratic temperament looked like minor points compared to Trump’s record as the president who recognized Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights and Jerusalem and ordered the airstrike that killed Iran’s terror chief, Qassem Soleimani.

From his first term, Trump broke with many of the dysfunctional norms that had governed U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East for decades. Washington’s bipartisan foreign policy establishment had approached the region’s conflicts as a management problem. Their goal was to lower the intensity of conflict by engineering a rough equilibrium that would prevent any party, including Israel, from getting too strong. Attempts to balance the interests of existential foes were supposed to produce stability. Instead, they ensured the periodic reeruption of war between actors like Israel and Hamas who proved unwilling to adopt the norms of Western bureaucrats.

Trump initially rejected this path by enforcing clearer lines between friends and enemies. His approach was to pick winners and take tributes, rather than to work through State Department offices and NGOs to build complex subdivisions of imperial administration.

Siding with Trump promised Israel not only greater external support, but a freer hand to pursue its own war aims after Oct. 7. In return, Netanyahu offered something that he believed Trump wanted: a powerful ally to project power in the Middle East on behalf of U.S. interests. If Netanyahu’s first bet paid off, Israel stood to be promoted from first among American client states to U.S.-backed regional hegemon in the Middle East.

The problem for Israel was not necessarily that Trump decided to end the war with the Iranian regime still in power. Rather, it was that he was bribing the Iranians by bartering with Israel’s vital security interests.

At the same time as he was drawing closer to Trump, Bibi placed a second bet to make Israel less dependent on Washington. In January, he vowed to wean Israel off U.S. military aid over the next decade (the aid Israel receives comes in the form of credits that it’s required to spend on U.S. weapons companies). Last December, Netanyahu told a graduating class of the Air Force Academy that he had approved an investment equal to $108 billion over the next decade to build up Israel’s domestic munitions industry. “I don’t know if a country can be completely independent but we will strive to ensure our arms are produced as much as possible in Israel,” he told the new pilots. His goal was “to build an independent arms industry for the State of Israel and reduce the dependency on any party, including allies.” When U.S. officials tried to dictate Israel’s war plans, for instance by demanding that the Israeli army not enter the Hamas stronghold of Rafah, Netanyahu proved that he was willing to defy Washington.

When Israel and the U.S. launched their joint war against Iran in February, it looked initially like both wagers were paying off. Israel was demonstrating its independent capabilities while acting in concert with the global superpower to defeat a common enemy. The American and Israeli militaries operated with an unprecedented level of cooperation. Pilots from the two countries flew side by side to strike precoordinated target packages. Intelligence-sharing, planning, and rehearsals took place in joint command centers.

But we know how this story ends. After enduring the devastation of their top leadership and military infrastructure, the Iranians brought the war to a halt by shutting down maritime traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. Fearing the costs of a prolonged closure and unwilling to risk the escalation necessary to reopen the strait by force, Trump offered the Iranians a deal. Effectively, the U.S. would pay Iran a ransom. In return Trump would extricate America from a broadly unpopular war before the midterm elections. By the terms of the deal, hundreds of billions of dollars would be released to Iran. The U.S. made other promises to restore Iran’s military capacity and deterrence, including a pledge to force Israel to call off its operations against Iran’s Lebanese terror proxy, Hezbollah. In return the Iranians would reopen the strait. At a later date, American and Iranian officials would reconvene to negotiate terms of a broader agreement.

Instead of neutralizing the Iranian threat and crowning Israel the dominant power in the Middle East, the first of Netanyahu’s gambles went bust. With Iran on the ropes, Trump’s deal revived the regime’s fortunes. The agreement was loose enough that its terms could easily be nullified or rewritten, but its immediate impact was a win for Tehran. For the Arab leaders who pay careful attention to even subtle power shifts in the region and had endured Iranian missile barrages during the war, the message was clear. American security guarantees were provisional at best. The Iranian regime, whose survival had been in question, was reestablishing its claim to be the region’s dominant actor.

Yet this outcome is less surprising than the furious allegations about Trump’s betrayal suggest. Trump, who once decried the weakness of bribing terror states, calculated that it was now in his interest to do so and simply reversed course, albeit with the implicit understanding that he might abruptly reverse again at some future date. There was a clear precedent for both his personal inconsistency and the substance of his policy. He was reverting to the standard U.S. approach to the region, which aims to manage conflicts within a concert of powers.

The problem for Israel was not necessarily that Trump decided to end the war with the Iranian regime still in power. Rather, it was that he was bribing the Iranians by bartering with Israel’s vital security interests—namely the freedom to aggressively deter Hezbollah.

The point was made clearly when Trump told a reporter at the Financial Times that Netanyahu “won’t have any choice” and would be forced to accept whatever deal Trump made because “I call all the shots.” In other comments, Trump accused the Israeli leader of nearly sinking the deal by carrying out counterattacks inside Lebanon. Bibi, whom Trump had once praised, was now attacked as a bloodthirsty warmonger; an obstacle to peace just as Democrats had always accused him of being.

Simply put: Bibi’s two wagers proved incompatible. Taken as far as it could go—to joint operations aimed at toppling the regime in Iran—the bet on Trump stopped short of Israel’s strategic goals. Moreover, it did so in its final act by threatening Israel’s freedom to act as a sovereign power in defense of vital interests on its own borders.

That leaves the bet on independence as Israel’s path moving forward.
Washington Post Claims Support for Israel Is Dangerous to America
On August 1, 2026, the Washington Post reported that Gen. Alexus Grynkewich, the head of U.S. European Command, had warned the Pentagon that he lacked enough naval forces to keep defending Israel against ballistic missiles.

He said that without another Aegis-equipped destroyer, he might eventually have to choose between defending Israel and defending the American "homeland."

This followed a May Post report titled "U.S. Bears Brunt of Israel's Missile Defense, Pentagon Assessments Show."

It said the U.S. had consumed a substantial share of its most advanced interceptors while defending Israel from Iran - more, he said, than Israel itself had expended.

Omitted from the report was that American missile-defense systems in and around Israel were not protecting only Israeli civilians and military installations.

They were also protecting American aircraft, crews, fuel, munitions, communications nodes, and support personnel operating from or through Israeli bases during the campaign against Iran.

The dozens of KC-46 and KC-135 refueling tankers at Ben-Gurion airport and Uvda and Ramon airbases, together with their crews and fuel infrastructure, enabled American combat aircraft to reach Iranian targets and return.

Any Iranian ballistic-missile attack on the Israeli airfields supporting those operations threatened American combat power directly. The U.S. was defending a joint military operation, including exposed U.S. assets.


‘Act of historical revisionism’: Jewish leader Alex Ryvchin accuses NSW Police of rewriting Opera House protest
A leading Jewish community figure has accused NSW Police of engaging in an “act of historical revisionism” by downplaying the 2023 Sydney Opera House protest held two days after the October 7 Hamas attacks.

Executive Council of Australian Jewry co-CEO Alex Ryvchin said evidence given to the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion ignored the lasting impact the October 9, 2023 rally had on Australia's Jewish community.

The criticism follows Acting Deputy Commissioner Peter McKenna's evidence that the protest had been reduced to “seconds or minutes on a news grab” and had been made to appear “more significant” than it was.

Mr Ryvchin said that the assessment failed to recognise what unfolded outside the Opera House and the consequences that followed.

“It's disappointing and I'm not sure why the deputy commissioner is embarking on this path,” he told News24 host Chris Kenny on Tuesday.

“We saw some horrific scenes there at the Opera House ... we saw flares being lit and directed at police; we heard the notorious chants directed towards the Jewish community.

“And to say that it was just seconds and has somehow been exaggerated ... we saw what happened in Bondi - within seconds you can do immense damage.

"Within 20 seconds, 11 people were murdered.

“I hope he (deputy commissioner) reconsiders what he's saying because it serves to downplay the severity of it and its implications.”

NSW Jewish Board of Deputies president David Ossip told the inquiry police had effectively handed control of the city to protesters by advising Jews to stay away.

Mr Ryvchin said the significance of that night extended well beyond the protest itself.

“That moment was a critical moment in the history of this country, which culminated in Bondi," he said.


NSW Premier Chris Minns blasts pro-Palestine group's 'disappointing' interrogation of Jewish leader at antisemitism royal commission
NSW Premier Chris Minns has condemned the interrogation of Australian Jewish leader David Ossip over Israel’s alleged conduct in Gaza during the royal commission into antisemitism.

His remarks come as Senator James Paterson demanded the Royal Commission issue an apology to Mr Ossip for “facilitating antisemitism”, but Commissioner Virginia Bell has defended the line of questioning from the Palestinian advocacy groups on the basis of “procedural fairness”.

Mr Ossip, the president of the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies, gave testimony on Tuesday about the Jewish community being advised to stay away from Sydney’s CBD on the evening of 9 October, 2023, when a pro-Palestinian rally descended on the Opera House.

The Royal Commission, established following the Bondi terror attack, gave leave to lawyers representing two Palestinian activist groups – the Palestine Action Group and the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network - to put questions to Mr Ossip about alleged Palestinian casualty figures, comments made by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a United Nations report and the so-called “context” for Hamas’ 7 October attacks on Israel.

Mr Minns told News24 that this line of questioning was “disappointing”.

“David Ossip showed real courage in coming forward to give evidence about antisemitism in Australia and the impact on the Jewish community,” Mr Minns said.

“The idea that the focus shifted from antisemitism in Australia to testing a witness on foreign policy by the lawyers representing the Palestine Action Group and the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network is disappointing and doesn't reflect the purpose of these hearings.”

Liberal Senator James Paterson has called on the Royal Commission to apologise to Mr Ossip.

“The Royal Commission is supposed to combat antisemitism, not facilitate it,” he said.

“Cross-examining an Australian Jew about the actions of the Israeli government is an abuse of the process.

“It should not happen again and David Ossip deserves an apology.”

Mr Minns announced a state-based Royal Commission a week after the Bondi terror attacks, in which 15 people were killed while celebrating the first night of Chanukah.

The state-based inquiry was later superseded by a federal Royal Commission, announced by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on January 8 of this year following mounting public pressure.

Michael Britvan, whose daughter Matilda was the youngest victim of the Bondi massacre, has also condemned the Royal Commission for giving the floor to lawyers acting for pro-Palestinian groups.

He told The Australian he struggled to understand why they were able to “use the royal commission to ask questions that shift the focus away from the antisemitism that led to it.”

Executive Council of Australian Jewry co-chief executive Alex Ryvchin said the pro-Palestinian groups tried to use the royal commission to prosecute the actions of a country they loathe.

“They normalised egregious lies of genocide and child-killing which in turn positions anti-Jewish actions as noble and courageous,” he told The Australian.

“They should be answering for their abominable actions, not asking the questions.”


Not ‘helpful’ to discuss Turkey occupying Cyprus, UN says after JNS asks why Guterres singles out Israeli action in Syria
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres appeared to treat Israel unfairly and to adopt an inconsistent approach to the way he talks about Cyprus and Syria.

Over the weekend, the global body head, whose second and final term is winding down, stated that Israel is violating Syrian sovereignty, and, in a separate statement, neglected to mention that Turkey occupies large parts of Cyprus when he discussed the latter.

Guterres “continues to apply a blatant double standard toward Israel,” Danny Danon, Israeli ambassador to the United Nations in New York, told JNS.

“When Israel is involved, he is quick to condemn, accuse and demand immediate action,” the envoy said. “Yet when it comes to Turkey’s decades-long occupation of Northern Cyprus, in clear contradiction to U.N. resolutions, the tone suddenly shifts.”

During a visit to Syria, Guterres wrote on July 25 that “Syria’s sovereignty, independence, unity and territorial integrity must be fully respected.”

“Violations by Israel of the 1974 Disengagement of Forces Agreement are unacceptable and must stop,” he added.

The United Nations considers the Golan Heights, which Israel liberated from Syria in a defensive effort during the 1967 Six-Day War, to be occupied by the Jewish state.

Israel annexed the strategic mountainous area in 1981, but only Washington recognizes that designation. U.S. Donald Trump backed Israeli sovereignty over the Golan in 2019.

Israel and Syria signed the 1974 Disengagement of Forces Agreement after a period of attrition following the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

It established a buffer zone, mandated prisoner exchanges and created the U.N. Disengagement Observer Force, known as UNDOF, to monitor the ceasefire.
EXCLUSIVE: Federal Probe Reveals How Hamas Bullies and Coerces Gaza Aid Groups, Diverts American Aid Dollars to Their War Effort
Hamas officials routinely bullied and intimidated employees of U.S.-funded NGOs operating in Gaza in order to control their operations, according to a confidential probe by American investigators that was obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. The probe reveals that Hamas threatened to sic its fearsome police force on aid workers and even tried to access the NGOs' private employee data as the terror group moved to establish outposts at hospitals and redirect aid to meet its needs.

The June investigatory report by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) inspector general's office, an independent law enforcement entity separate from the largely defunct USAID, provides definitive proof that Hamas is interfering in aid operations and threatening workers on the ground. In one case, Hamas Ministry of Interior personnel "attempted to obtain employee data" from a U.S.-funded NGO and, in another, ordered a humanitarian group "to provide material support to some specific families that they had identified." In the second case, Hamas officials warned that failure to comply with their order would result in "the police" shutting down the group's aid operation.

Hamas's police force is instrumental in repression—maintaining political control and crushing dissent—inside Gaza. The Free Beacon previously reported that the Hamas police installed makeshift torture chambers at Gaza hospitals.

The June 24 report, which was privately transmitted to Congress and obtained exclusively by the Free Beacon, describes a situation on the ground in Gaza that Hamas and its international allies have vehemently denied for years: Aid operations are subject to strict oversight by Hamas personnel who are often stationed at sensitive humanitarian sites, such as hospitals and aid depots. The USAID inspector general obtained clear evidence of "interference by Hamas operating as the de facto authority" during the course of its investigation into the group's activities.

The USAID inspector general, as part of this probe, instructed nine NGOs late last year to produce a list "with the dates and descriptions of attempts by Hamas to interfere with staffing or other operational decisions." It also asked the nonprofits to list all "interactions with Hamas," including with Hamas elements in the Gaza Health Ministry, which Hamas controls. Six of the nonprofits provided all of the information requested, while three made clear that they had not received U.S. funding. By contrast, the United Nations is stonewalling the same investigation into its staffers' ties to Hamas, with at least six U.N. agencies failing to provide the USAID inspector general with identical information about staffing and interactions with Hamas, the Free Beacon first reported on Thursday.


A Gaza Stabilization Force Could End Up Stabilizing Hamas
The International Stabilization Force for Gaza is supposed to support demilitarization, assist vetted Palestinian police, secure humanitarian aid, and eventually help enable further Israeli withdrawals based on verified progress. Yet the central question remains unanswered: Who will compel Hamas to disarm, and what will happen when it refuses?

Hamas has controlled Gaza since 2007. For nearly two decades, it has prevented meaningful political alternatives from developing and crushed potential challengers. There is no reason to assume that, after retaining its coercive power through a devastating war, it will voluntarily allow a technocratic committee or a new police force to take away its real authority.

Hamas will seek to retain what truly determines who rules: weapons, tunnels, operatives, intelligence networks, intimidation and the ability to veto decisions by force. Transferring civilian responsibility is not necessarily a transfer of power. It may simply improve the Hamas model as it continues to rule from behind the scenes.

After the 2014 Gaza war, Israel, the Palestinian Authority and the UN established the Gaza Reconstruction Mechanism to facilitate rebuilding while tracking construction materials and preventing dual-use supplies from reaching Hamas. As head of the Operations Branch of COGAT (Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories) at the time, I dealt with this mechanism daily.

I saw how Hamas learned to exploit it. Needs were inflated during data entry and approval, allowing quantities greater than those actually required to be authorized. High-quality materials entering from Israel were diverted to the black market and terrorist infrastructure. International organizations produced databases, tables and monitoring procedures. Hamas produced a different reality. The mechanism functioned administratively but failed to achieve its security purpose.

The experience of UNIFIL in Southern Lebanon provides an additional warning. On paper, the UN force was supposed to help create an area free of weapons and armed forces other than those of the Lebanese state. In practice, Hizbullah spent years building military infrastructure within UNIFIL's area of operations and, in some cases, close to its positions.

Will contributing countries risk their soldiers to dismantle Hamas's military power? Or will they report a "temporary difficulty" and refer the matter to a coordination mechanism? If so, this will not be a demilitarization force. It will become a Hamas-preservation force. A stabilization force can be useful only if it enters Gaza to dismantle Hamas's military power, not to learn how to live alongside it.
Khaled Abu Toameh: A Dangerous Deal: Trump's Board of Peace and Hamas
The original goal of Trump's peace plan was not to relocate Hamas's arsenal. It was to eliminate it permanently.

Weapons stored in warehouses remain weapons that function. Explosives stored today can be easily recovered tomorrow. Rocket factories that are preserved can resume production. Tunnels that are mapped rather than destroyed can be used again.

The issue has never been where Hamas keeps its weapons. The issue has always been Hamas having access them.

Transferring weapons from one Palestinian group to another is not demilitarization.

Even more disturbing is the new deal's assertion that "no weapons shall be transferred or handed to Israel or non-Palestinian parties."

Equally disturbing is the new roadmap's conditioning of disarmament on an Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip....

Why should a terrorist organization that carried out the October 7, 2023 massacre in Israel be allowed to dictate the conditions of its own disarmament? No country fighting ISIS or al-Qaeda would first withdraw its forces and only then hope terrorists voluntarily surrender their weapons. Hamas should not be negotiating the terms of its defeat. It should be compelled to unconditionally surrender and disarm.

This is the same Ghazi Hamad [senior Hamas official] who publicly vowed that Hamas would repeat the October 7 massacre time and again until Israel is eliminated: "The Al-Aqsa Flood [the name Hamas uses to describe the October 7 massacre] is just the first time, and there will be a second, a third, a fourth, because we have the determination, the resolve, and the capabilities to fight."

Anyone who thinks that the newly established NCAG will somehow confront Hamas and impose its authority over the terrorist organization is living under an illusion.

The far more likely scenario is that Hamas will continue to call the shots from behind the scenes while allowing another Palestinian body to assume responsibility for governance, civil service salaries, reconstruction, and collecting international aid.

This would essentially replicate the Hezbollah model in Lebanon, where a heavily-armed Iran-backed terrorist militia coexists with a formal government while retaining independent military power and ultimate political influence.

Within hours of the announcement of the roadmap, Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps dismissed the plan outright, declaring... that "the resistance" (Hamas) would remain steadfast until what it called the "final victory" over Israel.

Iran understands Hamas better than anyone else because it has financed, armed and trained the terrorist organization for decades. If the Iranian regime is openly rejecting the prospect of Hamas's disarmament, why should anyone else believe that Hamas intends to honor the agreement?


Hamas holds mass funeral for 112 people it says were killed in IDF strike at start of Gaza war
Hamas authorities on Tuesday held a mass funeral for 112 people they said were pulled out of the rubble of a series of residential buildings apparently hit in an Israeli strike in the opening days of the war, after launching an effort to find hundreds of people still missing.

The display of mourning came as the US-backed Board of Peace sought to seal the second phase of US President Donald Trump’s Gaza peace deal, which would see Hamas disarm and Israel stage withdrawals in the Strip.

While Israel has balked at demands it halt strikes against terror targets during this phase, the military acknowledged on Tuesday that it had tightened attack regulations, and officials said that at the moment, strikes could only be carried out with the express consent of IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir.

Hundreds of people gathered as the bodies wrapped in Palestinian flags were laid in rows near the destroyed buildings before being carried on stretchers through a narrow street for burial in a nearby cemetery. A sign was adorned with portraits of the dead — men, women and children.

“This day is mixed with grief, and it has reopened our wounds three years after this massacre,” said Taysir Al-Hassayna, a member of one of the two clans that Hamas said were affected by the strike.

“It has brought sorrow back to our children and women,” he said. “But our consolation is that we believe they are martyrs with God.”

The November 2023 strike had hit a residential compound belonging to the Hassayna and Abu Sharia clans in Gaza City’s southern Sabra neighborhood, according to Hamas’s civil defense agency.

The IDF said at the time that it struck some 300 targets across the Gaza Strip. It has not commented specifically on the alleged strike and death toll in Sabra. The military did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Reuters on its account of the incident.

Hamas-affiliated media in the Strip described the mass burial Tuesday as the war’s largest, and said it was the result of a body recovery effort launched on July 14.


The AI Revolution in Warfare
Artificial intelligence is not replacing people or commanders. Instead, AI is fundamentally changing how commanders think, decide, and fight. Modern warfare has become a dynamic system that generates unprecedented volumes of information at a speed and complexity far beyond the processing capacity of the human mind. The challenge is understanding it before it loses its operational value. In modern warfare, the force that sees first, understands first, decides first, and acts first will increasingly hold the decisive advantage.

At every moment, headquarters receives an uninterrupted flow of information from hundreds of sources. The challenge is to understand it faster. The primary contribution of AI is not decision-making but cognitive augmentation. By reducing cognitive overload and compressing decision time, AI enables commanders to focus on the uniquely human aspects of command.

AI continuously filters information, fuses multiple intelligence sources, detects operational patterns, prioritizes threats, classifies targets, builds a dynamic Common Operational Picture (COP), and generates courses of action for human consideration. The commander's decision is now based upon a richer, more accurate, more current, and more comprehensive understanding of the operational environment.

It allows commanders to dedicate their attention to the functions that remain inherently human: understanding operational context, balancing competing priorities, assessing risk, managing uncertainty, exercising mission command, and applying professional military judgement.

At the tactical level, AI is already making decisions, increasingly supporting autonomous execution under human command. An unmanned interceptor engaging a swarm of UAVs cannot transmit every decision back to the command center. AI can navigate without GPS, operate under degraded communications, track targets, identify objects, select routes, intercept threats, and cooperate with other unmanned systems. Capabilities of this kind are already emerging in Ukraine, Israel, and several advanced Western militaries.

The machine does not replace human judgement. It executes human intent at a speed that human operators alone can no longer achieve.
MirYam Institute: BRIEFING: DISARMING HAMAS & ACRONYMS WITHOUT MEANING
In this lively situational briefing, I sit down with John Spencer, Senior Analyst at The MirYam Institute.

Returning from fact-finding trips to Gaza and southern Lebanon, John outlines his reasons for optimism and for concern regarding the "Board of Peace" proposal for Hamas disarmament, highlighting the importance of US verification, civil governance, and phased decommissioning.

I counter with resolute pushback rooted in Israeli security realities and priorities —dismissing unproven acronyms, rejecting Palestinian statehood, and arguing against the fallacy of Jihadist groups disarming.
Together, we debate international stabilization forces, Saudi normalization demands, Egyptian culpability for October 7th, and requirements for long-term regional security.

Piers Morgan to Hamas spokesman: Why kidnap a baby?
British broadcaster Piers Morgan sharply challenged Hamas spokesman Ghaza Hamad during an interview on “Piers Morgan Uncensored” on Monday, accusing the terror group of crossing “every moral, ethical and humanity line” in its Oct. 7, 2023, assault on Israel.

Morgan pressed Hamad over the killing of civilians and the taking of hostages, asking why Hamas would kidnap a baby and describing the group’s actions as “utter barbarism.” Hamad repeatedly rejected Morgan’s characterization, denied that Hamas had targeted civilians and said any deaths were unintentional mistakes.

The exchange grew combative as Hamad argued that Hamas is fighting an occupation (Israel completely withdrew from the Gaza Strip in 2005 and Hamas ruled the territory since 2007) and said the terrorist group had no instructions to kill women and children. Morgan responded that the Oct. 7 attack, which killed more than 1,200 people in Israel, mostly civilians, alongside the kidnapping of 251 hostages, amounted to a terrorist assault with no justification.





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