What happened

A 10-day ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon took effect at midnight local time on Friday, though Hezbollah has not committed to the truce. President Donald Trump announced the ceasefire on Thursday after a flurry of diplomatic wrangling. The pause in fighting, if it holds, would remove one of the sticking points in U.S. peace talks with Iran, Hezbollah’s main backer.

Who said what

The State Department said Israel, as a “gesture of goodwill,” had agreed to pause “offensive operations” against Lebanese targets while reserving the “right to take all necessary measures in self-defense.” Lebanon was expected to take “meaningful steps” to prevent Hezbollah from attacking Israel.

Trump’s ceasefire pressure put Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “in an awkward position,” The New York Times said. His “goal to gut Hezbollah is far from fulfilled, and he was swiftly assailed by his allies and critics” for agreeing to the truce. Israel’s security cabinet “heard about Trump’s announcement several minutes into” an “urgent conference call” Netanyahu had convened “to discuss the ceasefire and vote on it,” Axios said.

Netanyahu said in a subsequent statement that Israeli forces would remain in a 6-mile-deep “security zone” spanning southern Lebanon, “and we are not leaving.” Hezbollah said “Israeli occupation of our land” gave them “the right to resist it,” and it will act “based on how developments unfold.”

What next?

The temporary truce “will bring immediate relief” to war-ravaged Lebanon, The Wall Street Journal said. But “without Hezbollah at the negotiating table,” peace is “on shaky ground.”

Confusion reigns over whether there will be further direct talks between Lebanon and Israel.

Galia Gamliel, a member of Israel’s security cabinet, announced that Benjamin Netanyahu would be speaking to Lebanon’s President Joseph Aoun today, following historic talks earlier this week.

However, a spokesperson for Aoun said they were “not aware of any call” taking place between Aoun and the Israeli prime minister. Aoun did confirm that a ceasefire is the “natural starting point for direct negotiations”, and called the withdrawal of Israeli troops from the country an “essential step towards consolidating” such a ceasefire.

As Israeli air strikes destroyed the last remaining bridge connecting southern Lebanon to the rest of the country, and civilians continue to flee their homes, diplomatic talks appear somewhat hopeless as Israel’s aims remain unclear.

What did the commentators say?

It is “hard to imagine much change resulting from the meeting” between Israeli and Lebanese officials in Washington on Tuesday, said The Economist. As things stand, Israel has an “overwhelming military advantage”, and Netanyahu has demanded Lebanon presents a “comprehensive plan for disarming Hezbollah” and “establishing diplomatic relations between the two countries”.

But the Lebanese government is “too weak” to disarm the militant group and has faced “thinly veiled threats of a violent coup” should it try. Even if Beirut were able to strive for “political consensus” in its “deeply fractured society”, it is “unlikely” Netanyahu would “give them the necessary time” to capitalise on it.

For most countries affected by war, ceasefires are a “welcome development”, but for Israel’s “maximalist” leaders, they are often “seen as getting in the way of efforts to finish the job”, said Mairav Zonszein in The New York Times. Just as the ceasefire was announced, the Israel Defense Forces hit 100 Lebanese targets in 10 minutes, killing 350 and wounding “well over 1,000, many of them civilians”. War, as seen in Gaza and now Lebanon, is “increasingly the state’s go-to response to geopolitical challenges – not just the strategy but the norm”.

Israelis’ problem is that their “definition of victory” is “framed by a distorted reality” that threats “can and must be eliminated through invasion and occupation”. The media rarely provides an insight into civilian casualties, and practically no one in the domestic political landscape is challenging the country’s tendency to “treat war as a tool of first resort in statecraft”. This could end badly for all sides involved: “when war becomes the norm, everyone loses”.

“Israel’s primary goal is simple: weaken Hezbollah,” said Daniel Byman from the Center for Strategic & International Studies. Its ongoing campaign against the group displays a “familiar but intensified strategic objective”: that of “mowing the grass”; so “not the elimination of Hezbollah, but its sustained degradation”.

Yet there are “enduring risks” with this strategy. Even a wounded Hezbollah can disrupt life in northern Israel and “escalate unpredictably”. “Ultimately, Israel appears to accept that the conflict with Hezbollah will persist as a recurring feature of the region’s security landscape.”

For Netanyahu himself, the “rhetoric about the war on Lebanon is simple”, said Ori Goldberg on Al Jazeera. He wants to be the leader who “emerged as clearly and absolutely triumphant” from the “longest war in Israeli history”.

After alienating much of the Western world – except for his closest ally Donald Trump – it seems removing Hezbollah is his “only remaining opportunity to claim victory” on the world stage and secure a legacy. In the region, and on the domestic front, tackling the “fictitious invasion” by Hezbollah is the “only political promise Netanyahu hopes he can fulfil for future voters” in the elections expected this autumn.

What next?

Though these talks should be welcomed, “significant hurdles remain”, said Bilal Y. Saab from Chatham House. Given the “deeply rooted” Hezbollah problem, both sides need to take “more concrete action”.

In order to preserve ties with the Lebanese government, Israel must “avoid further attacks on state infrastructure”, particularly in Beirut, to destroy Hezbollah’s “narrative of resistance”. The Lebanese government’s focus, however, is internal. It should consider “expelling Hezbollah ministers from the cabinet”, confiscate arms, “outlaw all of Hezbollah’s financial activities” and “arrest anyone endangering civil peace”.

There are hopes this would lead to a formal peace deal. “It’s a long and winding road, but there’s no better alternative.”

What happened

The U.S. on Tuesday hosted the first direct meeting between Israel and Lebanon since 1993. Israel, which is occupying southern Lebanon as it attacks Hezbollah, continued trading strikes with the Iran-backed militia during the meeting. Israeli attacks have killed at least 2,124 people in Lebanon in six weeks of war, including 168 children and 88 health workers, Lebanon’s health ministry said. Israel said 13 soldiers and at least two Israeli citizens have been killed.

Who said what

Tuesday’s two-hour Washington, D.C., meeting “concluded with encouraging words and talk of further meetings,” The New York Times said, but “no firm commitments and no change in Israel’s refusal to halt its punishing military campaign” in Lebanon. Israel’s U.S. ambassador, Yechiel Leiter, said he and his Lebanese counterpart, Nada Hamadeh Moawad, had agreed “that the evil of Hezbollah must be eradicated.” Moawad said she had “underscored the need to preserve our territorial integrity and state sovereignty” and “called for a ceasefire.”

The Lebanese government’s “capacity to confront Hezbollah” is “limited,” the BBC said. Hezbollah said it won’t abide by any agreements from the bilateral talks. “What does Lebanon have to offer on a negotiating table?” a Lebanese government official said to The Washington Post. “Nothing.”

The Israel-Lebanon talks are “a process, not an event,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters. “Hezbollah and Israel have always helped each other to destabilize the government of Lebanon,” U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said. “It’s time for Israel and Lebanon to be working together.”

What next?

The U.S. State Department said Israel and Lebanon “agreed to launch direct negotiations” at an unspecified “time and venue.”

After five weeks of war, Donald Trump has claimed “total and complete victory” over Iran. Tehran begs to differ. Agreeing to the conditional two-week ceasefire, Iranian officials said their country had dealt a “crushing historic defeat” to the US and Israel.

Meanwhile, commentators are pointing to real, quiet wins for both China and Pakistan, whose behind-the-scenes roles in pushing for the ceasefire have increased their global standing.

What did the commentators say?

Benjamin Netanyahu “looks set to be the biggest loser” of the conflict, said The Guardian’s senior international correspondent, Peter Beaumont. Pressuring Trump to agree to his decades-long goal of neutralising Iran has “turned out to be a bust”. The “political consensus” between Israel and the US is “visibly crumbling”, and there’s “domestic fallout” for Netanyahu in the run-up to an election.

Trump has also emerged as a “strategic loser”, said the South China Morning Post. Washington failed to achieve regime change in Tehran, and Iran retained control of the Strait of Hormuz, the conflict’s “most strategic asset”. Meanwhile, the US has used up “sophisticated air-defence missiles” intercepting “far cheaper Iranian drones and projectiles”. Iran’s nuclear programme has survived, along with the “stockpile of enriched uranium” from which it could “potentially produce a viable weapon”, said The Times’ Middle East correspondent, Samer Al-Atrush. That “will not be given up easily”.

Tehran’s blocking of the Strait of Hormuz was a “high-risk” strategy that “paid off”, said DW. It “secured a ceasefire without conceding defeat”, which it “can present as proof that it withstood the US and all its military might”. The Iranian regime “survived, and bought time to try to shape” the phase of negotiations “on more favourable terms”.

In the longer term, it is actually Beijing that most “stands to gain”. America has “moved many military assets to the Middle East to protect shipping”, which “leaves fewer resources for the Indo‑Pacific, where Washington and Beijing compete for influence”. China has also had the chance to present itself “as a responsible global actor”, with its power brokers widely credited with pushing Iran to agree to the ceasefire.

China is “shaping up to be the big winner”, said Roger Boyes, The Times’ diplomatic editor. Unlike the US, it expected Iran to seize the strait and “amassed large oil reserves”, making itself “more resilient” to an energy crisis. “As a significant exporter” of other goods, it was still initially “hit hard” by the strait’s closure but then the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps ordered that China-bound vessels could pass through “toll-free”.

Pakistan’s credentials have been burnished, too. Its role in brokering the ceasefire was “unexpected” but the Islamabad Accord is the country’s “most consequential diplomatic moment in a decade”, said former UN peacekeeper Anil Raman on NDTV. Capitalising on its good relations with both the US and Iran, Islamabad will “press hard to consolidate” this “return to global relevance”.

What next?

J.D. Vance is due to lead a US delegation in negotiations with Tehran in Pakistan this weekend. The White House said the ceasefire between the US and Iran has created an “opening for a diplomatic solution and long-term peace”.

But the specifics of the terms to be discussed “remain murky”, said the BBC, “as is the current state of shipping traffic” through the Strait of Hormuz. Iranian forces have warned that ships would be “destroyed” if they tried to sail through without permission.

What happened

Israel’s parliament on Monday gave final approval to legislation that makes death by hanging the default punishment for West Bank Palestinians convicted of murdering Israelis. The Knesset approved the bill 62-48 amid condemnation from human rights groups, Palestinians and several European governments.

Who said what

“From today, every terrorist will know, and the whole world will know, that whoever takes a life, the State of Israel will take their life,” far-right National Security Minister Ben-Gvir, the driving force behind the bill, told lawmakers. Capital punishment was already legal in Israel, but only two people have been executed in 78 years, most recently Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in 1962.

“In theory, Jewish Israelis could also be executed under the law,” the BBC said, but the law’s language precludes that in practice. “The intent is clearly for the law to apply to Palestinians and not to Jewish terrorism at all,” Yoav Sapir, the former head of Israel’s public defender’s office, told The New York Times.

What next?

The Association for Civil Rights in Israel has already asked the Supreme Court to annul the law. The court will likely strike it down over its discriminatory provisions, Sapir told the Times.

What happened

Pope Leo XIV on Sunday began his first Holy Week as pope by criticizing leaders who invoke Jesus to “justify war.” Christians throughout the Middle East are “suffering the consequences of an atrocious conflict,” including not being able to “live fully the rites of these holy days,” he said at a Palm Sunday Mass at the Vatican. Hours earlier, Israeli police had blocked the top Catholic leader in Jerusalem, Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, from celebrating Mass at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, drawing widespread criticism from Western leaders and diplomats.

Who said what

“This is our God: Jesus, King of Peace,” the pope told tens of thousands gathered in St Peter’s Square. “He does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them, saying: ‘Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen: your hands are full of blood.’” Pope Leo is “known for choosing his words carefully,” Reuters said, and while he did “not specifically name any world leaders,” he has been “ramping up criticism of the Iran war.”

“Leaders on all sides of the Iran war have used religion to justify their actions,” but “especially Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth,” The Associated Press said. The secretary’s “proselytizing Christian campaign” in the U.S. military has alarmed military, legal and religious experts, The Washington Post said, and the “war with Muslim-majority Iran has only made Hegseth’s approach more stark.” Last week at the Pentagon, Hegseth invoked the “mighty and powerful name of Jesus Christ” in a prayer to inflict “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.”

What next?

The Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem said in a statement that Israel’s “manifestly unreasonable” and “fundamentally flawed decision” to block Pizzaballa from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre marked the “first time in centuries” that Catholic prelates were prevented from celebrating Palm Sunday at the site where Christians believe Jesus was crucified and buried before his Easter resurrection. Israeli authorities said all religious buildings in Jerusalem’s Old City, home to some of the most sacred Christian, Muslim and Jewish sites, have been closed amid Iranian missile threats, and Pizzaballa was turned back for his own safety.

But “as criticism poured in from close allies, top Israeli leaders went into damage-control mode,” The Times of Israel said. Sunday night, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he had ordered the police to give Pizzaballa “full and immediate access” so he can “hold services as he wishes” during Christianity’s holiest week.

Israel and the US went into this war together, said Katy Balls in The Sunday Times. But as the conflict drags on, some members of Maga’s “isolationist wing” are starting to complain that Israel “led” the US into it, in pursuit of its own agenda.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio lent credence to that theory some weeks ago, when he said that the US had struck Iran because Washington “knew that there was going to be an Israeli action” that would prompt a retaliation. And only last week Tulsi Gabbard, the US intelligence chief, told Congress that Iran had abandoned its pursuit of nuclear weapons, undermining any claim that Iran posed an “imminent threat”.

Convenient claims

It is pretty clear that it posed no such threat, said Donald Macintyre in The Independent – and it is well known that Benjamin Netanyahu had been trying to persuade the US to join in such a war for 25 years: successive US presidents blocked it. But that doesn’t mean that Donald Trump was lured into a war by Israel, even if he sometimes finds it convenient to claim that the Israelis are acting without his knowledge.

For Netanyahu, this war is not just about destroying a hostile regime, said Emma Graham-Harrison in The Guardian. This autumn, he will face his first electoral test since the 7 October attacks. For the past two years, his poll ratings have been “stubbornly below levels that would return him to power”. Victory for Israel in this conflict – which has the support of 90% of Israelis – would do much to turn that around.

‘Draining support’

But in going to war with Iran, the PM is gambling with his country’s long-term security, said Gideon Rachman in the Financial Times. For decades, the single biggest guarantee of that security has been the “strong bipartisan support” Israel commands in the US. “But the Netanyahu government’s actions – first in Gaza and now in Iran – are draining that support away.”

If this war turns into a costly “quagmire”, it’s “entirely conceivable” that both the Democratic and Republican candidates in the 2028 presidential race will propose curtailing support for Israel – an outcome that would be a “strategic disaster for the Israelis”.

‘America’s airport problems need to be fixed now’

Chicago Tribune editorial board

The U.S. “cannot function with travelers stuck in security lines for three and four hours,” says the Chicago Tribune editorial board. TSA employees “cannot be expected to go weeks or months without paychecks they need to pay their bills,” and ICE agents “have a job to do other than looking inside travelers’ bags and checking identification, tasks for which they are not directly trained.” Americans “have the right to expect their government to take care of these things.”

Read more

‘Affordable housing is possible, if we stop ignoring the obvious’

Sam Raus at USA Today

American cities are “short on housing yet full of unused space,” says Sam Raus. With “nearly a quarter of the workforce going remote, and no amount of return-to-office mandates likely to change this trend, it’s time for cities to repurpose these empty buildings to meet the demands of the moment.” Turning “cubicles into apartment complexes for those who still live in cities would require state and local politicians approaching zoning policies, building codes and taxation with fresh eyes.”

Read more

‘Israel’s displacement of civilians in Lebanon is a possible war crime’

Nadia Hardman at Al Jazeera

Israel’s “attacks in Lebanon — and the threat of more to come — have caused more than a million people to flee their homes,” but the “laws of war stipulate that civilians cannot be forced to leave their homes unless imperative military reasons dictate,” says Nadia Hardman. The “evacuation must be temporary, and people must be allowed to return once the hostilities end. In short, war is not a license to expel people from their land.”

Read more

‘With Tina Fey as first host, “SNL UK” kicked off with familiar skits and very British humor’

Robert Lloyd at the Los Angeles Times

After “50 years of being practically synonymous with New York City, ‘Saturday Night Live’ has opened the door to London with ‘Saturday Night Live U.K.,’ following in the steps of ‘Law & Order U.K.’ and possibly nothing else,” says Robert Lloyd. Of “all the cities in the world that might conceivably replicate the spirit of the NBC original, the British capital, with its urban dynamism, media concentration and 20,000 comedians, feels like the obvious, and perhaps only, choice.”

Read more

The targeting of Iranian missiles at the Diego Garcia UK-US military base on Friday has sent alarm bells ringing in Europe. Diego Garcia is over 2,500 miles (4,000km) from Iran and, if a missile from Tehran can reach there, it could also reach Paris, Berlin or even London.

“Previously, we thought Iran’s missiles had a range of 2,000km (1,245 miles),” General Sir Richard Barrons, former commander of Joint Forces Command, told BBC Radio 4 on Saturday.

One of the missiles fell well short of its target and the other was shot down, said Defence Secretary John Healey. But “the launch, however unsuccessful” has “fuelled fears” about the range of Iran’s ballistic missile programme, said the BBC’s defence correspondent Jonathan Beale.

What did the commentators say?

Israel has claimed Iran is developing weapons capable of travelling 2,500 miles (4,000km). “We have been saying it,” the Israel Defence Forces posted on social media. “The Iranian terrorist regime poses a global threat. Now, with missiles that can reach London, Paris or Berlin.”

This could “put continental Europe and possibly even Britain under threat”, defence analysts told The Telegraph’s Paul Nuki. Every European capital “now lies within credible Iranian reach”, Ran Kochav, former commander of the Israeli air and missile force told the paper.

Yes, it’s “conceivable” that an Iranian rocket “could reach London”, Sidharth Kaushal, of the Royal United Services Institute think tank, told the BBC’s Beale. But “so what?” We’re talking about “a small number” of conventional missiles over “well-defended airspace”, and they are “quite inaccurate at very long ranges”. The risk to London is “pretty low”, research analyst Decker Eveleth of the CNA Corporation told Beale. A missile could travel the distance but it wouldn’t be “particularly aim-able”. It would also be spotted quickly. Using a network of satellites and powerful radars, the US Space Force can track the trajectory of “any missile fired across the globe”.

“Various sources” agreed that it was unlikely that missiles launched from Iran would be able to hit London, said Jamie Grierson in The Guardian. Britain is protected by Nato’s ballistic missile defence, a shield “designed to detect, track and intercept” weapons in flight, bolstered by two Aegis Ashore defence sites in Poland and Romania.

The UK government is “not aware of any assessment at all” that Iran is “even trying to target Europe, let alone that they could if they tried”, said Communities Secretary Steve Reed on the BBC’s “Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg”. And “even if they did, we have the necessary military capability” to defend ourselves. “The UK is not going to be dragged into this war.”

What next?

Britain has “very little in the way of” independent “ballistic missile defences”, said the BBC’s Beale: “a glaring gap” acknowledged by the government’s recent Strategic Defence Review. But it’s “unlikely” that Iran has “large numbers of intermediate or even long-range ballistic missiles”. The fact that it only fired two towards Diego Garcia “suggests its long-range missile capability is limited”. For now, “the threat seems remote”.

Even if it were able, Iran is unlikely to single out the UK for a missile attack, according to a recent paper from the European Centre for Counterterrorism and Intelligence Studies. More likely would be “precision strikes on Nato logistics hubs, and economic disruption” through attacks on Mediterranean ports or liquefied natural gas terminals in Italy, Greece and Romania.

“Nato does have what it takes to defend alliance territory, to defend our one billion inhabitants,” said Colonel Martin O’Donnell, spokesperson for Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe. Europeans “should rest easy at night”.

The Iran war is unlike any other conflict of the modern era, marked by shifting justifications, mysterious end goals and growing friction between the two primary aggressors, the U.S. and Israel. A new generation of large-scale artificial intelligence tools is further reshaping the way both countries approach and execute their military operations.

What did the commentators say?

The Pentagon is “leveraging a variety of advanced AI tools” in the war on Iran to help “sift through vast amounts of data in seconds,” said Admiral Brad Cooper, the chief of U.S. Central Command, in a video on social media. The tools allow military leadership to “cut through the noise” and make “smarter decisions faster than the enemy can react.”

Pentagon AI systems can offer targeting recommendations “much quicker in some ways than the speed of thought,” said Newcastle University lecturer Craig Jones to The Guardian. The “scale” and “speed” of AI military systems means the Pentagon can conduct “assassination-style strikes” while simultaneously “decapitating the regime’s ability to respond with all the aerial ballistic missiles” in a process that would have taken “days or weeks in historic wars.” Battlefield AI programs from the MAGA-aligned software company Palantir can “identify and prioritize targets, recommend weaponry” and account for “stockpiles and previous performance against similar targets,” said The Guardian. Palantir even has access to “automated reasoning to evaluate legal grounds for a strike.”

At the heart of the Pentagon’s shift to AI-animated warfare is Palantir’s Maven Smart System and its integrated use of Claude, the AI platform from software company — and occasional administration foil — Anthropic. While Claude had been used for “countering terror plots” and in the kidnapping of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, the past several weeks mark the “first time it has been used in major war operations,” The Washington Post said. Over the past year, the government has allowed the Maven/Claude system to “mature into a tool that is in daily use across most parts of the military.” Ours is now officially an “age of AI warfare,” said Paul Scharre, the executive vice president at the Center for a New American Security, to CNN. Given the sheer volume and volatility of battlefield data needing to be assessed, “AI is incredibly valuable.”

State-level AI warfare isn’t “confined to physical territory” either, said The New Arab. Iran has deployed “AI-generated disinformation,” as well as “manipulated images and videos designed to create false impressions of events on the ground.” American and Israeli forces have meanwhile launched AI systems of their own to “detect and counter manipulation attempts in real time,” creating a “multi-dimensional battlefield” wherein information control is as “strategically important as control of airspace.”

What next?

We are currently in the “early stages” of what AI is “going to do to transform warfare over the next several decades,” said Scharre, particularly in terms of the “cognitive speed and scale” at which armies operate, which could “accelerate” the “tempo of operations” on the battlefield. But as AI use expands across the military, so has a commensurate effort to “focus on the protections that should govern its use,” said NBC News. Although none of the lawmakers contacted by the outlet said that AI should be “completely removed from military use,” many expressed a sense that “more oversight is needed.”

This is the “next era” of warfare, said Queen Mary University professor David Leslie to The Guardian. But overreliance on AI in the military might ultimately lead to “cognitive off-loading,” in which the human tasked with overseeing a particular operation feels “detached from its consequences” since the responsibility to “think it through” was made by a computer.

As an “inflection point” in demonstrating how “modern technology could work with existing military systems,” said The New York Times, the AI-fueled war in Iran is likely to “speed the adoption of more technologies” with “legacy and modern systems to be melded together, along with more powerful AI” in the coming decade.

As the Iran war enters its third week, there is a divergence between how the United States and Israel conduct its operations against Tehran and what each nation hopes to accomplish. While President Donald Trump and his administration struggle to articulate an overarching goal for the war, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has pushed ahead with expanding the front lines of his army’s assault not only on Iran but across Lebanon and Syria as well. With little end to the fighting in sight, is this still a single war of unified purpose, two separate conflicts being fought concurrently or a bit of both?

What did the commentators say?

The war on Iran may have been launched by Israel and the U.S. “at the same time,” said CNN, but it’s “becoming clear” the two nations have “some differences in how they see the war proceeding.” The pair enjoys a “number of overlapping objectives,” said former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Daniel Shapiro to the outlet. But there remains “some divergence” between Israel and the U.S., which is only likely to increase “as time passes.”

The longer the conflict lasts, the more likely their “endgames and risk tolerance” may differ, said Axios. Trump, in particular, currently stands “more aligned” with the Israeli government’s “maximalist objectives” than many among his own staff. Israeli and American armed and intelligence services are “moving in concert,” although “their targets vary,” with the U.S. focused “almost exclusively” on military targets, while Israeli assassinations and other operations are “intended to lay the groundwork for regime change.”

Netanyahu may appear to be “flying high” after finding an American president “willing to go all the way” with his long-telegraphed war on Iran, but Israeli analysts are “increasingly aware of where the two countries’ strategies” may bifurcate, said The Economist. Netanyahu has been “blunt” about his nation’s wish for regime change in Tehran, even as Israeli leadership has come to feel that Trump’s goals rest “primarily on controlling the flow of oil from Iran.” Israel is “willing to use the war to inflict deeper damage” on Iranian state infrastructure, while Washington “shows little sign of a clear political endgame,” said Bloomberg. Netanyahu is thus “far more likely to favor a drawn-out campaign” than Trump, given the “growing economic and political pressure” the president faces domestically.

At the onset of this war, both Israel and the U.S. “stated their desire to lay the groundwork for regime change,” The New York Times said. But as the war goes on, Trump has acknowledged that a popular uprising “didn’t seem imminent.” Israel would “prefer” to extend their war “for as long as possible, potentially for weeks, to weaken the Iranians,” said Israeli policy analyst Ahron Bregman to Turkey’s Anadolu Agency. Trump, meanwhile, will “seek a way to end this war, especially as oil prices continue to rise.” His goals “did not include regime change,” said CIA Director John Ratcliffe at a House Intelligence Committee meeting.

It is within this context that Israel’s “related but separate agenda” of concurrent attacks on Hezbollah is taking place, said Shapiro to CNN. Netanyahu is waging an “ulterior campaign to try to do significantly more damage to Hezbollah” in the hopes of spurring a “diplomatic process” with, or within, the Lebanese government. Trump generally supports dismantling Hezbollah infrastructure, yet Israel’s operations in Lebanon are “not of the same level of priority for U.S. interests.”

What next?

For the time being, the Trump administration seems publicly comfortable with the U.S. and Israel’s parallel-and-diverging strategies in Iran. The Trump regime “holds the cards” and has “clear” objectives, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Thursday in a press conference. Israel is “pursuing objectives as well.”

Q: Why are we helping Israel prosecute this war if they're going to pursue their own objectives?HEGSETH: We hold the cards. We have objectives. Those objectives are clear. We have allies pursuing objectives as well.

— @atrupar.com (@atrupar.com.bsky.social) 2026-03-20T19:47:25.485Z

Netanyahu, for now, “appears to be operating on the assumption that Trump shares his goals,” said William Usher, a former CIA Middle East analyst, to Bloomberg. That may be true “regarding the total elimination of [Iran’s] nuclear program, but perhaps not much beyond that.”

Ryan Craig’s play “The Holy Rosenbergs”, first staged in 2011, examines the response of a Jewish family in north London to the 2008/09 war in Gaza.

Fifteen years on, said Sarah Hemming in the Financial Times, it feels “strongly resonant, yet curiously like a period piece”, given the horrifying human cost of the more recent conflict. The play is an Arthur Miller-like “collision of the political and personal”.

There are acknowledged echoes of “All My Sons” in the depiction of a family reeling from the loss of a son, a pilot killed fighting with the IDF, and in the suburban mother (Tracy-Ann Oberman) “who daren’t sit still for fear of falling apart”; and there are shades of Willy Loman in the character of the father (Nicholas Woodeson), who is desperate to save his ailing kosher catering company.

Matters come to a head when their daughter Ruth (Dorothea Myer-Bennett) arrives. A UN lawyer, she is investigating war crimes during the conflict. This has enraged members of their local community, which could be the last straw for her father’s firm.

This gripping play tackles “knotty ethical family dilemmas” as well as fraught geopolitical issues, said Clive Davis in The Times. Yet it also has a “wry humour”: “time and again, you find yourself laughing through the pain while admiring the finely wrought performances”.

It’s an “absorbing” production, but it is quite contrived, said David Jays in The Guardian. Set over one evening, this is “the sort of play where characters representing useful debating positions happen to pop in, carrying crucial reports in buff envelopes”.

The themes debated – including Israel’s right to exist and defend itself, and notions of individual and collective responsibility – remain pertinent and important, said Nick Curtis in London’s The Standard; and there is a “pleasing economy to the way the family is used as a microcosm for a state and a people”. But “the way argument is loaded into the play feels forced”. This is a serious (“and at times seriously funny”) attempt to show how events in Gaza affect Jews elsewhere, “but also a clumsy one”.

Menier Chocolate Factory, London SE1. Until 2 May

What happened

Israel on Wednesday struck Iran’s part of the massive South Pars/North Dome natural gas field it shares with Qatar, prompting two Iranian ballistic missile strikes on Qatar’s main energy hub, Ras Laffan Industrial City. Qatar condemned both Israel and Iran, while Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps warned other Gulf Arab neighbors that the U.S.-Israeli strikes on South Pars made their refineries and gas fields legitimate targets as well.

The attacks and counterstrikes, combined with Iran’s ongoing blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, sent oil and natural gas prices soaring on global markets. The U.S. and Qatar “knew nothing about this particular” Israeli attack, President Donald Trump said on social media, but if Iran strikes again, the U.S. “will massively blow up the entirety of the South Pars Gas Field.”

Who said what

“NO MORE ATTACKS WILL BE MADE BY ISRAEL” on South Pars “unless Iran unwisely decides to attack a very innocent, in this case, Qatar,” Trump said. His comments “seem to be an effort to de-escalate the situation,” but Trump “green-lit the Israeli strike,” Axios said, citing U.S. and Israeli officials. “While Qatar didn’t know about the Israeli strike in advance, Trump did,” having coordinated it with Israeli leaders.

“Trump approved of the strike” to “pressure Iran to unblock the Strait of Hormuz,” The Wall Street Journal said, citing U.S. officials. But Israel “struck at the crown jewel of Iran’s energy industry” to quash “an important source of revenue” for the country. While Israel hit oil tanks in Tehran earlier, striking South Pars was “orders of magnitude more alarming,” the Journal said. And Gulf Arab states, which had “aggressively lobbied the Trump administration” to prevent escalatory strikes on Iran’s energy infrastructure, were “furious about Israel’s attack and the U.S. failure to head it off.”

What next?

Iran’s ongoing ability to damage U.S. interests “evokes a decades-old pattern of unrealized expectations for American interventions” in the Middle East, The New York Times said. “Air power is the U.S. drug of choice — we love to believe that it can achieve big political effects and also big military effects,” Caitlin Talmadge, a Gulf security expert at MIT, said to the Times, but the “historical record doesn’t support that.” Trump is reportedly “considering deploying thousands of U.S. troops to the region,” Reuters said, as the Pentagon “prepares for possible next steps” against Iran.

When the US and Israel attacked Iran, many turned to China to see its response.

For decades, Beijing had been the Islamic Republic’s most important economic ally, maintaining close diplomatic ties with Tehran through years of Western sanctions and international isolation.

But China’s relatively muted response to the US-Israeli strikes, its lack of military intervention and calls for de-escalation on both sides, has led many to question whether leader Xi Jinping is a fair-weather friend – or whether there’s a bigger game afoot: its delicate truce with the US, and their battle for global supremacy.

What is the background between China and Iran?

China was once “an important supplier of arms to Iran” before joining UN sanctions in 2007, said The Wall Street Journal. US officials say Chinese companies continued to be “a critical supplier of goods with potential military applications”, such as motors for Iran’s Shahed drones.

When in 2002 George Bush declared Iran part of an “axis of evil”, Beijing “saw an opportunity”, said Richard Spencer in The Times. It “began signing multibillion-dollar oil and gas deals” with Iran, culminating in a 25-year economic cooperation agreement in 2021 that centred on the sale of Iranian oil to China, reportedly worth $400 billion.

About 90% of Iran’s crude exports are sold to China every year, at a steep discount. In return, Iran “kept Washington bogged down in the Middle East”, said Geoffrey Cain in The Spectator. Its regional proxies “added just enough chaos to stop Washington focusing on China”. That was “extraordinarily useful” and cost Beijing “almost nothing”.

In 2023, China helped Iran restore diplomatic relations with Saudi Arabia, among its other mediation efforts in the Middle East. It denounced what it called “unilateral” US sanctions and brought Iran into Beijing-backed diplomatic alliances. Beijing’s ties with Iran “blunted America’s efforts” to isolate Tehran, said Michael Schuman in The Atlantic. China has held regular joint military drills with Iran, and Chinese firms have even supplied chemicals used in Iran’s missile programme, according to Reuters.

How has China responded to the US-Israeli attacks?

Iran says China is helping in various ways, including with “military cooperation”. According to its foreign minister, China is a strategic partner in the war. But so far, China hasn’t provided any direct military support, or deployed any forces, or provided “new weapons assistance to any party involved”, said The Diplomat. It has “primarily engaged through diplomatic channels”.

China has expressed opposition to the US-Israeli strikes, emphasising that they could undermine regional stability. But that has been “notably more restrained” than after the strikes on Iran last year. Beijing has also criticised Iran’s retaliatory attacks on its Gulf neighbours, and its de facto blockade of the Strait of Hormuz.

But it is also not willing to assist the US. Trump has demanded that China send warships to the Gulf. In response, the Chinese foreign ministry said Beijing called on “all parties to immediately cease military operations”.

Why has China’s response been so muted?

For Xi Jinping, “a hard-nosed pragmatism is at play”, said CNN. Iran “ranks below his top priorities”, including China’s fragile détente and trade truce with the US, ahead of the upcoming summit with Donald Trump in Beijing. China “sees no benefit in heightening tension with the US over Iran,” said International Crisis Group analyst William Yang.

Iran’s “strategic importance” to China is far more limited than many assume, as trade and investment flows are “eclipsed” by those with Saudi Arabia and the UAE. China might even appreciate Washington’s resources being diverted from the Indo-Pacific. A sustained campaign could “deplete America’s weapons supplies”.

Trump this week announced that he is delaying the summit, as he pressures China to send warships to help reopen the Strait of Hormuz. But a delay could also be in China’s interests. “If the war drags on, added pressure on Washington could mean more leverage for China,” said The New York Times.

China also “gains diplomatically from the worldwide perception that America is an out-of-control bully”, said Spencer. It does not lose much “whatever happens to Iran” – except oil.

Despite its massive investment in renewables, China is heavily reliant on crude from the Gulf. And as much as 40% of its imports are shipped through the Strait of Hormuz.

China is better placed to weather the storm than most. It had “long braced for a Gulf oil supply shock”, stockpiling one of the world’s biggest oil reserves and diversifying its supply, said the BBC. Still, disruption is “putting its resilience to the test”.

What happened

Israel assassinated Ali Larijani, the head of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, and Gholamreza Soleimani, the commander of the feared Basij plainclothes militia, in overnight airstrikes Tuesday. Iran confirmed the deaths and vowed revenge, especially for the killing of Larijani, the country’s de facto leader since Israel killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in the opening hours of the Iran war.

President Donald Trump on Tuesday slammed U.S. allies for declining to send warships to free up the oil languishing on tankers as Iran blocks the Strait of Hormuz. But he also faced domestic dissent as his National Counterterrorism Center director, Joe Kent, resigned, saying in a letter posted to social media that Iran “posed no imminent threat to our nation” and he “cannot in good conscience” back Trump’s war.

Who said what

The deaths of Larijani and Soleimani were the “most damaging blow to the Iranian leadership” since Khamenei’s assassination, said The New York Times. It also “highlighted how heavily Israel is relying on targeted killings to achieve its war aims,” a strategy that “carries a risk of backfiring in unforeseeable ways.” Larijani’s death “will deprive the Iranian leadership of one of its most astute and powerful voices,” said CNN. But losing such an influential pragmatist “may make any negotiations to end the war more difficult,” prolonging the conflict.

Israel’s targeted killings of “thousands of regime members” has fueled a mounting “sense of disorder” in Iran, The Wall Street Journal said. In the short term, the “likely outcome” of Larijani’s death is “a more volatile situation: a harder military posture in the war and harsher repression at home,” said the BBC. But over time, “a system that continues to lose senior figures may find it increasingly difficult to function effectively.”

What next?

Kent’s “stunning defection” highlights how much Trump’s Iran war has “divided some of the most loyal corners of his administration,” Politico said. It also “raises questions” about the status of Kent’s boss, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, another “outspoken critic of U.S. wars in the Middle East.” Gabbard and other top U.S. intelligence chiefs are scheduled to testify before Congress this week on the Iran war and threats to the U.S.

Five key Western allies have “urged Israel not to pursue a ground offensive in Lebanon” after Tel Aviv launched a “significant military operation” in response to Hezbollah missiles, said Politico.

Israeli troops on the ground “could lead to a protracted conflict” with “devastating humanitarian consequences”, said the leaders of the UK, Canada, France, Germany and Italy in a statement. “The humanitarian situation in Lebanon, including ongoing mass displacement, is already deeply alarming.”

Despite a ceasefire agreed in November 2024, tensions between Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah have reignited, with reports of up to a million Lebanese citizens already affected by the renewed conflict.

What did the commentators say?

“Just how far the Israeli military intends to push into Lebanese territory – and for how long – remains unclear,” said Tom Ball in The Times. Troops are heading to al-Khiyam, a “strategically valuable” town just over the border and the “apex of several major routes leading deeper into Lebanese territory”. An Israel Defense Forces spokesperson said the operation is designed to establish “forward defence, which includes destroying terrorist infrastructure and eliminating terrorists”.

Israel’s “extended campaign” against Hezbollah is “likely to continue beyond the end of the war against Iran”, said James Shotter in the Financial Times. Israeli officials had said they expect the joint offensive with the US against Iran to last “weeks”, and the expectation is that the operation in Lebanon “would last at least as long”.

We are going to see a “major impact on the population” of Lebanon, Michael Young, from the Carnegie Middle East Center, told Time. Between 850,000 and one million civilians have been displaced in the Hezbollah-controlled south since the latest conflict began. Israel wants to “ensure that that area becomes uninhabitable”.

The conflict in Lebanon is the “price” international communities must pay for their “silence”, said Laure Stephan in Le Monde. Ever since the signing of the “theoretical truce” in late 2024, world leaders have been “implicitly accepting the rule of force over international law”. This “lopsided ceasefire”, which “Israel never respected”, is the “root of today’s war”.

Despite the “unprecedented efforts” of the US-backed Lebanese government to uproot Hezbollah, it has not made any tangible progress. In fact, “Hezbollah’s refusal to disarm has also weakened the authorities”.

Two “terrible experiments” are playing out simultaneously on the streets of Lebanon: “Israel’s theory of total war and Hezbollah’s theory of nihilistic power”, said Thanassis Cambanis, director of think tank Century International, in Foreign Policy. Like Iran against the US, Hezbollah won’t “slink away” from an existential fight. Even if it can’t maintain control of Lebanon, it can still “act as a spoiler”. “No amount of Israeli warfare will be able to eliminate Hezbollah by force.”

What next?

The French government has drafted a proposal to end the war in Lebanon, said Barak Ravid on Axios. The framework could “de-escalate the war, prevent a prolonged Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon” and “increase international pressure to disarm Hezbollah and open the door to a historic peace deal”. The Lebanese government has reportedly “accepted the plan as a basis for peace talks”, which are expected to take place in Paris.

President Emmanuel Macron is “ready to mediate a truce”, said Al Jazeera. Lebanese officials’ offer for direct negotiations with Israel could be seen as a “major concession in a country where ties with Israel, a longtime enemy, are a divisive issue”.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “finally found a president willing to buy into his Iran dream,” said Alon Pinkas in The New Republic. Eliminating Iran’s threat to Israel has been “the be-all and end-all of Netanyahu’s political identity,” and he clearly helped talk President Trump into a joint, all-out assault on Iran. The hawkish Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) also has boasted of playing a key role in helping Israel manipulate Trump into embracing a regime-change war contrary to his “America first” foreign policy. Graham, who golfs with Trump and knows his psyche, reminded the president of Iran’s 2024 attempt to assassinate him and urged him to take decisive action, saying that it would cement his legacy as a president even more consequential than Ronald Reagan. “If you can collapse this terrorist regime, that’s Berlin Wall stuff,” he told Trump. Graham even traveled to Israel, met with its intelligence agency, and coached Netanyahu on what to say to get Trump on board.

Don’t blame Israel for Trump’s decision, said Yair Rosenberg in The Atlantic. He’s the most powerful person on Earth, and the U.S. attack on Iran “is the responsibility of the man who ordered it.” Despite his isolationist rhetoric, Trump has shown “an abiding belief in military coercion as a solution to American problems” and has advocated attacking Iran and seizing its oil since 1980. Unfortunately, Secretary of State Marco Rubio fed into right-wing scapegoating of Israel by saying the U.S. knew Israel planned to attack and joined the bombing to defend its bases from Iranian retaliation. But Trump then denied that, insisting, “I might have forced Israel’s hand.”

Still, Israeli officials are worried about how this ends, said David Ignatius in The Washington Post. They reportedly are anxious about maintaining “good relations with the U.S.,” as Americans in both political parties voice concerns about the costs of a prolonged war. Support for Israel among young Americans, especially progressives, has already eroded. The risk of antisemitistic blowback is real, said Michael A. Cohen in MS.now. Blaming Israel for manipulating Trump into attacking Iran plays “into a millenniaold antisemitic trope” about all powerful Jews pulling the strings behind the scenes. Critics on both the Left and Right are already pointing fingers at Israel, with some portraying Netanyahu as Trump’s puppet master. “This is, as American Jews are prone to say, ‘bad for the Jews.” If the war drags on, casualties mount, and gas prices stay high, the need for a familiar scapegoat will grow. That could put “a target on the backs of American Jews.”

Donald Trump’s call for an international coalition to help reopen the Strait of Hormuz has been met with a muted response. Japan and Australia have definitively ruled out sending support and escort vessels, and Keir Starmer has said the UK “will not be drawn into the wider war”.

With the US-Israeli war against Iran now entering its third week, Tehran has effectively closed the waterway through which a fifth of all the world’s oil and gas passes. Trump first demanded the help of China, France, Japan, South Korea and the UK but he then extended the invitation on Truth Social to all “the Countries of the World that receive Oil through the Hormuz Strait”. Yet, despite threatening to cancel a planned trip to China unless Beijing offers support, and warning Nato that it faces a “very bad future” if it fails to come to Washington’s aid, his demands seem “to have fallen on deaf ears”, said Reuters.

What did the commentators say?

European governments in particular “have reacted cautiously to Trump’s persistent pressure to help him reopen the strait”, said Milena Wälde on Politico. Germany’s Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul said he was “very sceptical” that widening the EU’s naval mission to the Strait of Hormuz “would provide greater security”.

Even if Trump is able to secure an international coalition, his “biggest hurdle” in any attempt to reopen the strait will be “interoperability”: “that’s the ability of crews to work together or with different units and different doctrine when basic communication would be an issue”, maritime security expert Alexandru Hudisteanu told Al Jazeera. There is also the challenging geography of the strait, which is only 31 miles wide at its entrance and exit, and narrows to 20 miles at one point. It is a “very unforgiving” environment to sail through, especially with “wartime threats”, such as mines or “unmanned systems that could damage or destroy ships”.

With growing unease in the US about the war and its economic impact on ordinary citizens, Trump has been forced to change tack in recent days. Having launched his campaign with Israel without consulting other allies, he clearly now needs other countries “to join a war that not only hasn’t been won, but is spreading and escalating out of control – and that the US is arguably losing”, said The Independent’s editorial board.

What next?

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi has said that the strait is not open to vessels belonging to the US and its allies. But Tehran has “signalled it is considering allowing Chinese-linked ships through”, said The Telegraph – a move that would “spare Iran’s strategic ally the economic pain of the war, while doubling down on the impact felt by the West”.

EU foreign ministers are meeting in Brussels today to discuss ways of keeping the strait open. But any military assistance provided by European nations, including the UK, must come with “a say in US decision-making”, and a “demand that Operation Epic Fury be de-escalated before it becomes Operation Epic Disaster”, said The Independent. “This is a rare moment when medium-sized powers such as Britain, France and Japan can exercise some leverage on the White House; they must make full use of it.”

As the Iran war enters its second week, violence from the U.S. and Israel’s western assault and counterstrikes by Iranian forces and their allies threatens not only Iranian, Israeli and American targets but the broader region as a whole. While U.S. and Israeli forces have struggled with unclear and potentially conflicting orders, as well as questionable AI-influenced operations, Iranian forces have long been preparing for an attack of this sort in principle, if not in specific execution.

What did the commentators say?

With violence expanding across multiple fronts in the region, Iran is operating with a “complex strategy” designed to combine “military escalation, economic leverage, domestic mobilization and diplomatic signaling,” said Middle East Monitor. By resting on “several interconnected pillars,” Iran’s strategy is meant to address both military maneuvers and prevent the “broader objective” many officials believe animates this war: regime change.

Iran is “fighting for survival, and survival on its own terms,” said the BBC, with the nation’s leaders having been “preparing for this moment for years.” Although it would be “naive” to expect Iran to hope for a “straightforward battlefield victory,” the evidence instead suggests they have “built a strategy around deterrence and endurance.” Theirs is a calculus that “rests partly on the economics of war,” in which “prolonged conflict” forces the U.S. and Israeli militaries to expend “high-value assets” like missile defense systems to intercept “comparatively low-cost threats” like kamikaze drones.

During the Israel-Iran war of 2025, Tehran’s barrage against U.S. troops stationed at the Al Udeid airbase in Qatar was “prewarned and largely seen as a face-saving exercise,” said Al Jazeera. Now, Tehran has seemingly “revised its military strategy to a more aggressive one focused” on national survival.

The updates include repairing facilities damaged by previous air assaults and “fortifying” several nuclear facilities, using “concrete and large amounts of soil to bury key sites,” said CNN. Past conflicts have also highlighted “weaknesses in Iran’s command structures under pressure,” leading a “new authority, the Defense Council, to govern in times of war.”

Iran’s newly established Defense Council is led by Ali Larijani, the country’s “top national security official,” a “veteran politician” and a former commander in the Revolutionary Guard Corps, said The New York Times. Since the council’s creation in the wake of last year’s Israel-Iran war, Larijani, 67, has “effectively been running the country,” sidelining heart surgeon turned politician President Masoud Pezeshkian as someone who can’t be expected to “solve the multitude of problems in Iran.”

Iran is “definitely more powerful than before,” Larijani said in an interview in Doha before the Iran war began, according to the Times. Tehran has “prepared in the past seven, eight months” and “found our weaknesses and fixed them.”

In February, the Revolutionary Guard Corps moved to “revive its so-called mosaic defense strategy,” which gives field commanders the “autonomy to issue orders to their units,” making the country “more resilient to foreign attacks,” said The Wall Street Journal.

The RGC also established about “100 monitoring points” in Tehran to “block potential insurgents or foreign forces” in the days leading up to the U.S.-Israel assault to preemptively neuter any “disruptive antigovernment unrest,” said the Journal. While last year’s war with Israel highlighted Iran’s “military inferiority” and the “limits of regional militia allies” like Lebanon’s Hezbollah, it also gave Tehran an “opportunity to test and refine its war tactics.”

What next?

Iran’s military says it has amassed “enough supplies to continue their aerial drone and missile war” against U.S. and allied positions across the Middle East “for up to six months,” said the National Post. President Trump’s refusal to rule out a ground invasion has also pushed Iranian officials to address the prospect of foreign troops on Iranian soil. “We are waiting for them,” said Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi to NBC’s “Meet The Press” last week. Iranian forces are “confident that we can confront them, and that would be a big disaster for them.”

Ultimately, Iran’s planning and in-war actions rest on the belief that it can “absorb punishment longer than its adversaries are willing to sustain pain and costs,” said the BBC. Their “calculated escalation,” then, is to “endure, retaliate, avoid total collapse and wait for political fractures to emerge on the other side.”

What happened

Iran announced Monday morning that Mojtaba Khamenei has been chosen to succeed his father, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, as supreme leader in a “decisive vote” by the Assembly of Experts.

Elevating the younger Khamenei “cements hard-line theocratic rule” in Iran and “sends a strong message of defiance against President Donald Trump” as the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran enters its 10th day, The Washington Post said.

Oil prices rose above $100 a barrel Sunday for the first time since 2022, and stocks fell sharply in Asia ahead of expected losses when U.S. markets open. The Pentagon said a seventh U.S. service member died from wounds sustained in the war. Israel announced its first two military deaths of the war, and Saudi Arabia its first two civilian deaths. U.S. and Israeli strikes had killed at least 1,332 Iranian civilians as of Friday, according to Iran’s United Nations ambassador.

Who said what

A week into “Trump’s war on Iran, the most severe shock to energy markets since the 1970s is cascading through the world economy,” The Wall Street Journal said. Iranian attacks have shut down oil and gas production in Gulf Arab states and throttled shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, the “superhighway for about a fifth of global supplies of oil and liquefied natural gas.” Oil prices climbed above $119 a barrel Monday morning, and benchmark Brent crude “was on track for its biggest one-day gain ever in both percentage and ​absolute terms,” Reuters said.

Anything above the “psychologically important $100-a-barrel mark is going to increase pain for consumers, many of whom don’t support the war,” Axios said. It’s also a “political setback” for Trump. Higher “short term oil prices” are “a very small price to pay for U.S.A., and World, Safety and Peace,” Trump said on social media Sunday. “ONLY FOOLS WOULD THINK DIFFERENTLY!”

Iran’s new supreme leader “is believed to hold views that are even more hardline than his late father,” The Associated Press said. Khamenei, 56, “has been an influential figure in the shadows of power” and has “very close ties to the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps,” The New York Times said. But he is “something of a mystery even within Iran.”

What next?

A classified February report from the U.S. National Intelligence Council “found that even a large-scale assault” on Iran “would be unlikely to oust the Islamic republic’s entrenched military and clerical establishment,” the Post said. With “no obvious offramp in the escalating ⁠Middle East conflict,” IG market analyst Tony Sycamore said in a note, the “risk of more lasting economic damage continues to build by the day.”

The fog of war has settled thick over the United States and Israel’s ongoing assault on Iranian military targets and an expanding terrain of associated sites. With Washington’s strategic aims unclear and the disorder of the Trump regime confounding attempts to justify this latest bout of bellicosity, Iran’s strategy to end these attacks is coming into sharper relief.

Faced with superior military might and forced to scramble after last week’s surprise attack, Iran has turned to — and on — its Gulf State neighbors. Those countries are now a leverage point to reshape the contours of a war that thus far has had the Islamic Republic in a defensive crouch.

What did the commentators say?

Iran’s government has “for years” threatened to “blanket the Middle East with missile and drone fire” if it felt its existence was “threatened,” said PBS News. Now “the Islamic Republic is doing just that.”

Iran’s “basic strategy,” said PBS News, is to “instill fear about the dangers of a widening war,” prompting American allies to “apply enough pressure to halt their campaign.” Persian Gulf nations have long been a “bastion of calm in a deeply unstable region,” with “oil wealth and careful diplomacy” to keep “turmoil at arm’s length.” But with cities such as Dubai and Qatar’s Doha under bombardment, investors are recalibrating their “perception of the region’s stability,” said The Wall Street Journal.

The question facing Gulf leaders is essentially “how long do we keep sitting on our hands and absorb these relentless Iranian strikes?” said Middle East policy expert Hasan Alhasan to The New York Times. Do places like Qatar and Dubai “join a war that they did not start, whose goals are entirely unclear, and whose tempo and cadence they do not necessarily control?”

Gulf states may have hoped that the war would “remain confined to Israel and Iran,” leaving them and their oil shipping “relatively unaffected,” said Foreign Policy. But Iran “rejected that script,” bombarding the region in a way that suggests a “clear strategy.” The goal, in part, is to “quickly cause global economic pain” to build pressure for a cease-fire, evidenced by Iran’s closing of the Strait of Hormuz. Meanwhile, Saudi oil and Qatari liquified natural gas production remains effectively “shut down even without direct Iranian attacks.”

Iranian assaults have “increasingly targeted energy infrastructure,” leading to a “jump in gas prices” and raising alarm around the world, said Al Jazeera. Much of the Gulf’s oil production might have to be temporarily shut down, causing “long-term, knock-on effects,” said Thijs Van de Graaf, an energy fellow at the Brussels Institute for Geopolitics, to the outlet. “You do not turn on and off an oil well like flipping the switch of a light.”

Nor is Iran limiting its focus to energy production. Iranian drone strikes on Amazon Web Service facilities in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain signal a “new front for Iran’s retaliation against the U.S.” by “complicating Gulf ambitions to build multibillion-dollar AI facilities in the region,” said Financial Times. Data centers have emerged as “attractive targets to anyone seeking to disrupt a country,” said technology professor Vili Lehdonvirta to the BBC. Given the degree to which cloud and commercial AI software has become integrated into U.S. military operations, it’s “not entirely unexpected” that those “infrastructures” would be specifically targeted as “‘dual-use’ facilities.”

What next?

Although Iranian attacks may draw Gulf states into the widening regional conflagration, it “isn’t obvious” that those countries have much to add militarily compared to what Iran “already faces,” said Foreign Policy. Moreover, Iran sees pushing Gulf states into an “open alliance with a deeply unpopular Israel” — compared to “veiled tacit cooperation” — as a move with “significant regional and political benefits.”

Iran’s shift from missile-based assaults in the region to a combination of traditional munitions and drone bombardments suggests a “more lasting threat” than missiles alone, said the Times. Tehran has “proved it can produce drones quickly and cheaply,” suggesting a “healthy supply to target the Gulf for the foreseeable future.” The result, said PBS News, is a “grim math equation,” in which Iran has a “finite number of missiles and drones.” And American, Israeli and Gulf states have, in turn, a “limited number of interceptor missiles capable of downing the incoming fire.” As such, Gulf states are looking to both “acquire more weapons to intercept incoming fire,” plus “find ways to broker an end to the war.”

Donald Trump said his greatest concern about the US-Israeli strikes on Iran would be the emergence of a new leader “as bad as the previous person”.

At an Oval Office news conference, he described that outcome as the “worst case” scenario, but acknowledged that it “could happen”. Many experts believe that, whoever replaces the assassinated Ayatollah, the tenor of the Iranian regime will change little, if at all.

What did the commentators say?

Iran’s regime is “built to handle shocks” like the Ayatollah’s assassination, said Ali Hashem, of Royal Holloway University of London’s Centre for Islamic and West Asian Studies, on Foreign Policy. The supreme leader sits at the top of “a dense network of institutions”, including the Guardian Council, the Assembly of Experts, the Expediency Council and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. “When under pressure, its structure is designed to pull together rather than fall apart”. Iran’s constitution even “explicitly anticipates sudden leadership loss”, with a clear process for transfer of authority.

“So far, the coercive and administrative state apparatus” is standing solid and “can be expected to survive this crisis”, said Amin Saikal, a professor of Middle Eastern studies at Australian National University, on The Conversation.

Trump has taken a gamble by claiming he’d be “able to topple a bloodthirsty regime, which is fighting an existential war, without putting troops on the ground”, said historian Justin Vaïsse, founder of the Paris Peace Forum, in Le Monde. The US president hopes that “simply by providing an external shock to make it fall”, internal opposition forces will “take over and stabilise power”.

But “this scenario would need not just thousands, but hundreds of thousands or millions on the streets” from “a cross section of Iranian society”, Urban Coningham of the Royal United Services Institute told Channel 4 News. The protests would have to happen at a scale that the regime couldn’t suppress, causing “senior government figures to flee, leaving a vacuum of power in the country”.

As for Israel, “there is a question of how invested” it is in “ensuring that regime change in Iran is smooth”, said Simon Speakman Cordall on Al Jazeera. Most of Israel’s leaders privately “regard that as a kind of fairy tale”, former Israeli government adviser Daniel Levy told the broadcaster. They are “more interested in regime, and state, collapse”.

What next?

Mojtaba Khamenei, son of Ali Hosseinei Khamenei, has been widely tipped to be named his father’s successor. He’s “viewed within the regime as a capable and forceful leader”, and “is said to be close to” senior leaders in the Revolutionary Guard, according to a leaked US intelligence briefing quoted in the Daily Mail.

Should the regime fall, dissident-in-exile Reza Pahlavi, the oldest son of the country’s shah, has long been staking his claim to have the support of millions of Iranian people. His “pitch to the White House” is “MIGA: Make Iran Great Again”, said Gregory Svirnovskiy on Politico. He’s been telling US broadcasters that, as leader of Iran, he could bring “over a trillion dollars worth of impact and revenue to the American economy”.

As things stand now, Trump will probably “abandon his earlier calls for regime change” and try to strike a “Venezuela-scenario” deal with whomever replaces Khamenei, said Sharan Grewal on Brookings. “If so, then for Iran, all Trump’s attacks will really have done is to accelerate” their aged supreme leader’s “already looming death”.

What happened

President Donald Trump Monday said his military operation in Iran was projected to last “four to five weeks” but could “go far longer than that.” In the Trump administration’s first press conference on the war, Joint Chiefs Chair Gen. Dan Caine said the U.S. was sending more troops and fighter jets to the Middle East. Amid Iranian drone strikes that damaged the U.S. embassies in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, the State Department urged Americans to immediately leave 14 Middle East countries due to “serious safety risks.” The Pentagon said two more U.S. service members had been killed, bringing the U.S. death toll to six. Caine said he expected “additional losses.”

Who said what

In the 72 hours since the U.S. and Israel began bombing Iran, “the war has already consumed nearly the entire Middle East, reached the gates of Europe and raised new fears of attacks on American soil,” Axios said. With at least 11 countries now directly involved, the “sheer geographic scope of the war is staggering.”

“This is not Iraq,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said at Monday’s press conference. “This is not endless.” But the “intensity” of the strikes and counterstrikes and “the lack of any apparent exit plan set the stage for a prolonged conflict with far-reaching consequences,” The Associated Press said. “Places deemed safe havens in the Mideast like Dubai have seen incoming fire,” energy prices have “shot up” and, highlighting the “chaos of the conflict,” the Pentagon said Kuwait had “mistakenly shot down” three U.S. F-15 fighter jets.

In just over a year, Trump has “authorized military action in seven nations,” Tyler Pager said in a New York Times analysis. But authorizing war against Iran is the “biggest gamble of his presidency.” Trump and his aides have “come up with an astonishing array of different, even contradictory, rationales” for the war, Susan Glasser said at The New Yorker. So “perhaps the most urgent question thus far” is whether the U.S. can “win a war of its choosing when it cannot explain why it chose to fight or what, exactly, victory would mean?”

What next?

The U.S. and Israel are causing extensive damage in Iran, but Tehran’s “waves of missile and drone attacks” are testing America’s ability to defend U.S. bases, embassies and allies “across a huge swath of the Middle East,” said The Wall Street Journal. The “depth of Iran’s stockpiles,” including cheap drones, “point to one area where it could try to outlast the U.S., which is facing a shortage of munitions” for its missile defense systems.

War remains an endemic human tragedy, and movies have long been one of the best ways to demonstrate its horrors to those who have never experienced it. With great power tensions rising in the real world, there has never been a better time for audiences to watch these films — if only to remind themselves of why peace is preferable to conflict.

‘Black Hawk Down’ (2001)

With the U.S.-led 1992-1993 intervention in Somalia struggling to relieve the country’s famine due to state failure, Major General Garrison (Sam Shepard) greenlights an operation to capture the warlord Mohamed Aidid in Mogadishu using U.S. Army Rangers dropped from helicopters. The operation goes awry when one of the Black Hawk helicopters is brought down and its crew, including Durant (Ron Eldard), killed or besieged. With journalist Mark Bowden’s book as the “guarantor of a horrendous authenticity,” director Ridley Scott’s film uses “immense technical skill and spectacular photography” to produce a gripping war film that has nevertheless justifiably taken criticism for its context-free depiction of Somalia’s plight, said Philip Strick at Sight and Sound. (Prime Video)

‘Letters From Iwo Jima’ (2006)

Famously conservative icon Clint Eastwood seems like an unlikely choice to make a subtitled film that takes the Japanese view of one of World War II’s closing battles seriously. But that’s exactly what happens in his magnificent “Letters From Iwo Jima,” which depicts the early 1945 American invasion of the strategic island and its airfields, which are about 750 miles from mainland Japan.

Ken Watanabe is General Kuribayashi, who is tasked with defending the island from the impending American assault, and Kazunari Ninomiya plays Saigo, a soldier digging trenches on the beach until Kuribayashi shifts strategy and orders the construction of a network of tunnels and fortifications inland.

The film grapples movingly with how commanders and soldiers understood their predicament, including an unforgettable scene in which a number of soldiers commit suicide. Eastwood’s epic operates in a “poetic mode,” finding a place “where the limitations of a war movie start to vanish” and resulting in the “best of both worlds: an art house combat picture,” said Tim Brayton at Alternate Ending. (Prime Video)

‘The Hurt Locker’ (2008)

So far the definitive statement about America’s decade-long misadventure in Iraq is director Kathryn Bigelow’s deservedly lauded “The Hurt Locker.” Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner, in a career-making performance) is the team leader of an explosives disposal unit whose predecessor (Guy Pearce) gets obliterated by an IED in the film’s opening minutes.

James is a renegade constantly at odds with his rule-bound team, short-timers Sergeant J.T. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and Specialist Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty), who worry with some justification that James’ unorthodox, bespoke and often impulsive bomb-defusing tactics are going to get them all killed. A film that “doesn’t engage the politics of the war in Iraq per se,” it is a “totally immersive, off-the-charts high-anxiety experience from beginning to end,” said Amy Taubin at Film Comment. (Netflix)

‘Waltz with Bashir’ (2008)

Based on his experiences as a soldier during Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, director Ari Folman voices his character as he interviews fellow veterans of the conflict — most of whom play themselves. The gorgeous, haunting animation allows the filmmakers to precisely recreate the Lebanese battlefield and grapple with the events that led to the infamous massacre of Palestinian refugees at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camp outside of Beirut at the hands of Lebanese Christian extremists. Simultaneously a “history lesson, a combat picture, a piece of investigative journalism and an altogether amazing film,” the result is a “work of astonishing aesthetic integrity and searing moral power,” said A.O. Scott at The New York Times. (Prime Video)

‘Hacksaw Ridge’ (2016)

Desmond Doss (Andrew Garfield) is a religiously devout pacifist who get drafted in 1942 and becomes an army medic but refuses to carry a rifle or engage in combat, drawing intense scrutiny from his peers and superiors in director Mel Gibson’s engrossing film. Based on a true story, “Hacksaw Ridge” follows Doss from childhood through the war, culminating in his heroic rescue of 75 soldiers during the Battle of Okinawa.

Buoyed by a searing performance from Garfield, the film was nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards — a triumph for Gibson, whose life and career had been mired in controversy for years. The film, “though corny at times, treads close to madness and majesty alike, and nobody but Gibson could have made it,” said Anthony Lane at The New Yorker. (Disney+)

‘Dunkirk’ (2017)

A structurally daring look at the miraculous evacuation of some 400,000 British expeditionary forces from France who were pinned down by German forces early in the war, “Dunkirk” marked director Christopher Nolan’s departure from his familiar science fiction and fantasy territory. The film is told from three perspectives: Tommy (Fionn Whitehead) is an infantryman making his way to the beach for evacuation; George (Barry Keoghan) joins the crew of an unarmed civilian trawler that heroically volunteers to help transport the fleeing forces; and Farrier (Tom Hardy) is an Royal Air Force pilot helping provide cover for the evacuation.

Unlike many ultraviolent war movies of the contemporary era, Nolan’s film “does not revel in realistic depictions of wartime death, with all its blood and viscera,” said Brian Eggert at Deep Focus Review. Instead, it creates an “impressive tribute to the survivors and the grand-scale efforts of the British people” during one of the country’s finest hours. (BritBox)

‘1917’ (2019)

Director Sam Mendes’ World War I drama is composed of long, unbroken shots assembled together by cinematographer Roger Deakins to give the illusion of being a “oner.” Late in the war, British Lance Corporals Will Schofield (​​George MacKay) and Tom Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman) are ordered by General Erinmore (Colin Firth) to carry a message to a British battalion warning them not to fall into a deadly trap that the seemingly retreating Germans have set for them.

Like “Saving Private Ryan,” it is essentially a road narrative, in which Schofield and Blake see the carnage of war along with the audience. A “ghost train ride into a day-lit house of horror,” the film conveys the “nihilist elation that comes with the moment-by-moment experience of survival, fiercely holding on to life with every eardrum-splitting sniper shot,” said Peter Bradshaw at The Guardian. (Netflix)

‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ (2022)

Though it divided critics, director Edward Berger’s bold, bleak and propulsive adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s groundbreaking 1929 novel more than serves its purpose as a fierce statement against war. It opens cleverly with the journey of a German uniform, stripped from a dead infantryman and sent to be cleaned, repaired and rehomed onto Paul Baumer (Felix Kammerer), an idealistic volunteer pumped full of nationalist propaganda about adventure and brotherhood and thrust instead into an unceasing and pointless nightmare of trench warfare, deprivation, suffering and death. The “vast machinery of total war has rarely been depicted as viscerally or as coldly” as in Berger’s film, which “almost wades into horror territory, helped in no small part by the booming, anachronistic synths of Volker Bertelmann’s score,” said John Nugent at Empire. (Netflix)

‘Natural gas, renewables can help Democrats on energy affordability’

Mary Landrieu and Terry McAuliffe at The Hill

Americans are “facing a new energy reality: electric bills are rising and the risk of blackouts is growing as our power grid faces unprecedented demand,” say Mary Landrieu and Terry McAuliffe. This “moment presents an opportunity for Democratic leaders to reset the national energy conversation.” An “all-of-the-above energy approach that pairs renewable energy with dependable sources available 24/7 like natural gas is the most practical path forward to help decarbonize and cut costs, without sacrificing reliability.”

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‘Europe’s Israel policy faces a democratic test’

Majed al-Zeer at Al Jazeera

The “demand to suspend the EU-Israel Association Agreement is no longer confined to street demonstrations or activist circles,” says Majed al-Zeer. Over “more than two years of genocidal war, ethnic cleansing and the systematic destruction of civilian life in Gaza, solidarity across Europe has not dissipated.” It has “moved from protest slogans and street mobilization into a formal democratic instrument that demands institutional response.” The “call for suspension is rooted in broad and measurable public support.”

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‘What a 1921 Ford Model T can teach us about today’s tech’

Aaron Brown at The Minnesota Star Tribune

When the “Model T came on the scene in 1908, it famously changed everything,” says Aaron Brown. But “once underway, the driver must manipulate levers constantly as the vehicle sputters and spurts along the road,” and this “experience became the knowledge that developed today’s cars, which increasingly drive themselves.” It “helps explain why everything, and everyone, seems off these days. We’re unbound from our understanding of how the world works or how ‘progress’ benefits us.”

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‘People are leaving Congress because the job sucks’

Ed Kilgore at Intelligencer

There has been a “lot of buzz in Washington lately about the ‘exodus’ of members of Congress in the 2026 midterm-election cycle,” says Ed Kilgore. Anyone “familiar with the daily grind of congressional service, especially in the House, can tell you that in some cases members hang it up because the job sucks.” It “should not be surprising when anyone decides against making Congress a graveyard, particularly right now, when the institution’s power is at a historically low ebb.”

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‘Bad Bunny’s all-American Super Bowl halftime show’

Kelefa Sanneh at The New Yorker

Bad Bunny has “spent the past decade creating one of the most irresistible bodies of work in all of popular music,” and “put on what might have been the best halftime performance in Super Bowl history,” says Kelefa Sanneh. He is “just about as popular as it is possible for a musician to be.” People “could think of Bad Bunny’s triumphant set as a tribute to the power and capaciousness of American popular music — or as a pointed critique of it.”

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‘Depoliticize the National Guard’

Adam Kinzinger at Newsweek

The “military and National Guard are trusted precisely because they are professional, nonpartisan and committed to service — not political agendas. But today, that norm is under strain,” says former Rep. Adam Kinzinger. The Guard has been “redirected away from their communities for reasons that have little to do with public safety and everything to do with politics.” Politicizing the military “erodes public trust, undermines civilian control, dishonors service members and weakens one of America’s most respected institutions.”

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‘Wine against the New Prohibitionism’

N.C. Stevens at Slate

An “increasing push toward sobriety has flooded the market with nonalcoholic alternatives to traditional tipples,” and “some in the beverage alcohol industry have begun decrying what they view as a dastardly neo-temperance — even neo-Prohibitionist — movement,” says N.C. Stevens. But “where beer and spirits have largely opted for diversification into nonalcoholic renditions of their traditional offerings as a hedge against the surge in sobriety, wine is relying on its smooth and rounded voice to push back.”

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‘Is nixing aid to Israel a poison chalice?’

Kelley Beaucar Vlahos at The American Conservative

There is a “lot of talk about getting rid of the massive agreement that guarantees Israel billions of dollars in military aid each year,” says Kelley Beaucar Vlahos. But “while a debate over the annual package would be a most welcome one given the enormous sums of American taxpayer money that has flowed to Israel’s wars in recent years, it is important to keep an eye on what might be a bait and switch.”

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What happened

The Israeli government announced Monday it had recovered the remains of Ran Gvili, a 24-year-old police officer killed fighting Hamas militants during the Oct. 7, 2023, attack. The return of Gvili’s body marks the “first time since 2014 that there are no Israeli hostages,” living or dead, being held in the Gaza Strip, CNN said.

Who said what

“Completing the recovery of Israel’s fallen paves the way for the next phase” of President Donald Trump’s Gaza peace plan, The New York Times said. That includes opening the Rafah crossing between Egypt and Gaza, “allowing Palestinians who fled the enclave to return home for the first time.” Gvili’s family had “urged” the Israeli government to delay the second phase “until his remains were recovered and returned,” The Associated Press said.

Israel must now “complete the implementation of all the terms of the ceasefire agreement in full,” Hamas said in a statement, “without any reduction or delay.” The “next phase is disarming Hamas and demilitarizing the Gaza Strip,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Monday. He called the recovery of Gvili’s remains “an incredible achievement” for Israel and its soldiers. Hamas “worked very hard to get the body back” in collaboration with Israel, Trump told Axios. “Now we have to disarm Hamas like they promised.”

What next?

Israel said Monday it would reopen the Rafah crossing in the “next days,” but only for foot traffic. There is “a great deal of skepticism in Israel and the region that Hamas will peacefully disarm,” Axios said, and that “Netanyahu will show restraint and let the process play out.”

Iran’s supreme leader has blamed foreign actors for anti-government protests that rocked the regime and killed “several thousands” of people in recent weeks.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei accused the US and Israel of direct involvement in the violence, following a brutal crackdown on protesters by the government.

While his remarks largely reaffirmed Iran’s longstanding position, “what stood out”, said Al Jazeera, “was the scale of the alleged death toll”.

‘Wide disparity in death estimates’

Estimates of how many have died since unrest broke out across Iran on 28 December have “varied”, said The Times, from several hundred to more than 20,000.

The communications blackout “not only halted public information flows but has also placed serious constraints on the independent verification processes of human rights organisations”, the Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA), an Iranian outlet based in Washington, told the newspaper.

Relying on reports from the ground and contacting mortuaries and hospitals, HRANA’s most recent estimates put the number of confirmed fatalities at over 4,000, with 9,000 further fatalities under review. A separate report compiled by doctors inside Iran suggests that the number of civilians killed could be as high as 20,000.

The “wide disparity in estimates” from rights groups and independent news agencies “mostly comes down to methodology”, said The Wall Street Journal. But if the figures emerging from the current violence are “roughly accurate”, they exceed those from previous crackdowns including the killing of demonstrators in Cairo following a military coup in 2013, and the Tiananmen Square massacre in China in 1989.

‘Purely psychological warfare’

As the protests spread, and with Donald Trump threatening to intervene militarily if the killing continued, the regime had an “incentive to under-report the toll and its opposition to exaggerate it”, said The Times. A government official put the toll at 2,000 on 13 January.

There has been a noticeable shift in recent days as the immediate threat to the regime appears to have receded. On Sunday, an Iranian ‌official in the region told Reuters that the authorities ‍had verified that at least 5,000 people had been killed, including about 500 security personnel, blaming “terrorists and armed rioters” ⁠for the death of “innocent Iranians”.

Initially caught off guard, the regime at first sought to win over protesters by “acknowledging their demands and the hardships that they are facing”, Al Jazeera correspondent Resul Serdar Atas said, but authorities now argue the demonstrations were “hijacked by the violent protests who were receiving orders from the outside powers”.

At the same time, the regime’s propaganda machine has been “working to intimidate protesters and break their momentum”, reported ABC News. Among the few videos to have made it around the communications blackout and out of Iran are those showing long lines of body bags outside morgues in Tehran.

“This is purely psychological warfare to scare people”, said Saba Vasef, human rights journalist and scholar at the University of Sydney, “part of a systemic, deliberate, deterrence-based, state-sponsored terrorism”.

The reporting around the death toll in Iran has also revealed a double standard in the Western media, said Ahmad Ibsais, a first-generation Palestinian American, in an opinion piece for Al Jazeera. While estimates of those killed in Gaza were “repeatedly questioned” or caveated, those emerging from Iran, “in many cases based on estimates by diaspora organisations” such as the HRANA, “which have no ground access and no direct communication lines into the country, are being accepted as fact almost instantly”.

“This is not a failure of journalism alone, but a failure of moral consistency. Death is not measured by evidence, but by political utility.”

Vladimir Putin could sit alongside Tony Blair, Marco Rubio and Jared Kushner on Donald Trump’s Board of Peace. The Kremlin confirmed the Russian president had been invited to join the new body, which was formally launched last week and will be chaired by Trump himself.

Originally part of the US-brokered 20-point peace plan to end the war in Gaza, the Board of Peace will oversee the territory’s reconstruction, but recent developments suggest ambitions for the organisation go well beyond Gaza.

Who is on it?

With his characteristic effusiveness, the US president posted on Truth Social that the committee he has assembled was the “Greatest and Most Prestigious Board ever assembled at any time, any place”.

The founding executive board, headed by Trump himself, includes former UK prime minister Tony Blair, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, US special envoy Steve Witkoff, World Bank president Ajay Banga, and Trump’s son-in-law and close adviser, Jared Kushner.

The “exact structure” of the board “remains unclear and members are still being invited”, said the BBC. Invitations have also been sent to the leaders of “Argentina, Paraguay, Turkey, Egypt, Canada and Thailand”, said The Guardian. The White House and the Kremlin have both confirmed that an invitation has been extended to the Russian president, a gesture that lends “considerable weight to long-standing suspicions that Trump leans heavily in Putin’s favour in his approach to the Ukraine conflict”.

As chair, Trump will decide who is invited to join, giving him an effective veto. Member states will be limited to three-year terms on the Board of Peace, but those that contribute more than $1 billion in the first year can become permanent members, said Bloomberg.

How will it work in Gaza?

The Bulgarian former UN Middle East envoy Nickolay Mladenov will serve as the executive board’s high representative for Gaza. A 15-member Palestinian technocratic committee, the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG), has also been set up, tasked with running day-to-day affairs on the ground in the devastated enclave. Major General Jasper Jeffers, the former head of US special forces, has been appointed to lead an International Stabilization Force (ISF), a multinational peacekeeping unit that will be responsible for security across the territory.

Yet another committee, the Gaza Executive Board, will work with Mladenov, the NCAG and the ISF. The board is “designed to provide regional and international coordination”, said Middle East Eye, although it is “unclear what responsibilities the board or its members would have”.

What else could it do?

According to a draft of its charter, the board will seek to “solidify peace in the Middle East” and, at the same time, “embark on a bold new approach to resolving global conflict”, said The Guardian.

Notably, there is no mention of Gaza in the charter itself, adding to “speculation that the group may have a broader mandate to cover other conflicts and could even be aimed at creating a US-dominated alternative to the United Nations Security Council”, said The New York Times.

US officials had already “floated the idea of allowing the board to mediate in other hotspots such as Ukraine and Venezuela”, said the Financial Times, and the wording of the charter “appears to give credence to diplomats’ fears that the Trump administration is seeking ways to sideline the UN”.

“It’s just very confused as an idea,” said a senior European official. “What does ‘membership’ mean? Is it an alliance or a body for mediation between adversaries?”

The investigation into a widely decried ban on Israeli football fans from a match in Birmingham last year has become a search for someone to blame.

The West Midlands Police (WMP) classified the Maccabi Tel Aviv fixture against local team Aston Villa in November as “high risk”, due to violence after a previous Maccabi Tel Aviv match in Amsterdam. On that basis, the Birmingham Safety Advisory Group (which police are part of) barred Maccabi fans from attending, provoking widespread accusations of antisemitism – including by Keir Starmer. It has since emerged that the WMP’s report referenced a Maccabi match against West Ham that never took place, apparently due to an artificial intelligence hallucination.

Chief Constable Craig Guildford twice told the Home Affairs Select Committee that the WMP doesn’t use AI. He insisted the match had been identified through a Google search. But today he wrote to the committee apologising, and admitted the inclusion of the match “arose as a result” of an officer using the AI tool Microsoft Copilot. MPs are calling for Guildford’s resignation.

What did the commentators say?

“Despite denials at two separate hearings, it turns out they did use AI to produce their dodgy ‘intelligence’ dossier,” Conservative MP Nick Timothy, who has repeatedly criticised Guildford since the ban, posted on X.

This admission is “hugely embarrassing” for Guildford, said the BBC’s UK correspondent Daniel Sandford. But that is not his “biggest problem”. The WMP is accused of “mishandling intelligence” and then “doubling down” on the decision.

Behind that is the accusation that the safety advisory group “pandered to anti-Israeli and pro-Palestinian voices within the community”, said the BBC’s Midlands correspondent Phil Mackie. That has “created a huge political headache” for both WMP and Birmingham City Council.

Each revelation “proves more damning” than the last, said The Wall Street Journal. They “confirm what many suspected” last October: WMP were “more afraid of local Islamists than they were of Israeli fans”. “In other words, British police gave local Islamists an antisemitic heckler’s veto.”

“Central to the WMP case” is what Dutch police told them, said The Guardian. The WMP says this is what “led them to believe Maccabi fans had been perpetrators of violence” after the Ajax match in 2024. But Dutch police appeared to contradict the WMP’s claim. Indeed, most of the victims of the violence were Maccabi fans.

The “narrative” spun by WMP – that the Israeli fans were too dangerous to host – “has slowly been unravelling”, said The Spectator’s assistant editor Madeline Grant. Hilariously, a phrase which kept coming up during the WMP officers’ evidence to the HAC was “an absence of intelligence”. “Of the truth of that there could be no doubt.” They “make Inspector Clouseau look like Poirot, Marple and Holmes rolled into one”.

“Something is rotten” in the WMP, said The Telegraph. Senior officers “misled the public” and “produced false intelligence in order to demonise Israeli fans, while disguising the real reason for the ban: fear of Islamist intimidation and a potential riot”.

A “secret dossier” proves the police “covered up threats against Israeli players” by “Asian youths looking for a fight”. The team were “constantly in danger of mob violence”. Police even consulted Green Lane Mosque before the match – “notorious for hosting radical preachers”. Guildford’s position “now looks unsustainable”.

Birmingham’s SAG also warrants scrutiny, said The Times. It includes several councillors who have “publicly opposed Israel’s participation in sports”. More broadly, the situation “gives an illuminating and depressing insight into how power is wielded in Britain today”. Guildford should admit the ban was “the result not of real intelligence but intense lobbying”. He “failed to discharge his duty with due impartiality and should resign”. “If not, the home secretary must show him the red card.”

What next?

Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, who ordered the policing inspectorate to investigate the WMP’s handling, is considering the findings of the first part of their inquiry and delivered a statement to the House of Commons today, saying she no longer has confidence in Guildford.

Guildford, however, is “digging in” and will refuse to quit, according to The Times. “He wants due process, he won’t accept it,” a source told the paper. “He’s lawyering up.” Only Simon Foster, the West Midlands police and crime commissioner (who appointed Guildford), has the power to sack him – and Foster claims MPs on the home affairs select committee are “biased against Guildford”.

A hugely controversial Israeli settlement project, with a bypass road that closes off the occupied West Bank to Palestinians, has cleared planning hurdles and is out for tender.

Thousands of homes are to be built in the E1 area east of Jerusalem, in a move that will effectively divide the West Bank. And, in doing so, it will “bury the idea of a Palestinian state”, said Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich.

What is E1?

First proposed in the 1990s but, until now, frozen by pressure from the US, E1 covers the tract of desert between East Jerusalem and the large Israeli settlement of Ma’aleh Adumim. “It would be the last link in a chain of building projects that will slice the West Bank in half, and sever it” from East Jerusalem, which “Palestinians hope one day will be the capital of their independent state”, said The Telegraph.

The public tender proposes 3,401 housing units and a dual-use bypass road that is “designed as a sealed transit corridor for Palestinian vehicles”, said The Guardian. This provides Israel “with a pretext to bar Palestinians from existing roads in the planned settlement area”. Israeli politicians have named the planned bypass “sovereignty road”; its opponents call it “apartheid road”.

The Israelis could remove the settlement in the future, “as it did with its ones in Gaza in 2005”, but that seems very unlikely, given current “strong support for the settlements among Israel’s government and even some opposition parties”, said The Associated Press.

Is it legal?

The Palestinian authorities, and much of the international community, have repeatedly called all Israeli settlements illegal, but this has not stopped their rapid expansion in the West Bank since Israel seized control of the territory in 1967.

The West Bank is split into three areas: A, B and C. The Palestinian Authority has nominal control over the small, scattered A and B zones, while Area C, where E1 is located, covers about 60% of the total territory and is controlled by Israel. Although it is “fundamental to the contiguity of the West Bank and the viability of Palestine and its economy”, according to a 2015 UN Special Coordinator’s report, Area C has become increasingly dotted with Israeli infrastructure and settlements, many of them surrounding main Palestinian population centres.

Area C, and E1, fall outside the Green Line, which distinguishes Israel from Palestine in the eyes of the international community. This means that, although Israel has military and civil control of the area, granted by the Oslo Accords in the 1990s, it is not sovereign Israeli territory.

Despite the International Court of Justice repeatedly ruling that Israel’s settlements should be withdrawn, “there is no sign of that happening”, said Reuters. And “by linking up with other Israel-controlled areas”, the E1 settlement “would go still further”.

Why is it so contentious?

The E1 “triangle of land” between Jerusalem, the major West Bank cities of Ramallah, in the north, and Bethlehem, in the south “is critical for the development and prosperity of a future Palestinian state”, said The Guardian.

A settlement there would forcibly displace existing Palestinian and Bedouin communities and, by dividing the West Bank in half, prevent the establishment of a contiguous Palestinian state. It is “intended to create irreversible facts on the ground leading to a one-state reality”, said the anti-settlement monitoring group Peace Now.

For Israeli hardliners, this is very much the point. Smotrich has said E1 will practically “erase” the idea of Palestinian state. It “consolidates the Jewish people’s hold on the heart of the land of Israel” and “every settlement, every neighbourhood, every housing unit is another nail in the coffin of” the “two-state delusion”.

That is the “real concern right now”, said The Independent when a number of countries, including the UK, formally recognised the Palestinian state last year. “Without concrete action”, recognising statehood is ultimately “pointless, as there won’t be anything left to be a state”.

‘In recognizing Somaliland, Israel sets a dangerous precedent’

Dahir Hassan Abdi at The Hill

Israel’s “recognition of Somaliland — the northwest Somali region — as an independent country has marked a deliberate break with longstanding international practice,” says Dahir Hassan Abdi. It “left Israel isolated as the only U.N. member state to recognize a territory the international community still treats as part” of Somalia. Somaliland is “under strain from the war in Yemen,” and “any political shock along this stretch of coast risks adding yet another layer of instability to an already fragile corridor.”

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‘Grok’s “weapons of abuse”’

The Washington Post editorial board

The U.K. is “responding directly to sexualized and violent imagery being generated by Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok,” and Musk has made a “colossal error by allowing the chatbot to create and circulate these explicit images,” says The Washington Post editorial board. Unlike so “many areas of artificial intelligence development and information sharing, the lines here are not blurry.” Using “photos of real girls to create sexualized imagery is child exploitation,” and Musk’s “choice threatens the whole industry.”

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‘Subsidies are not health care reform’

Tony LoSasso and Kosali Simon at Newsweek

Not “all ACA-subsidized enrollees are being impacted the same way,” say Tony LoSasso and Kosali Simon. Medicaid “eligibility remains unchanged, and lower-income exchange enrollees are continuing to receive substantial subsidies under the original ACA rules,” so the “families facing the greatest economic hardship remain largely insulated from this change.” The ACA change “does not automatically translate into widespread coverage losses,” though “none of this is to deny that rising premiums impose real financial strain.”

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‘The “Donroe” Doctrine is dangerous’

Katrina vanden Heuvel and John Nichols at The Nation

Trump’s attack on Venezuela represents a “European king of old,” say Katrina vanden Heuvel and John Nichols. His move “represents a brazen violation of international law that destabilizes global security and seizes Congress’ exclusive authority to declare war.” Military force is “justified only in response to a clear, credible and imminent threat to the security of the U.S. or its treaty allies.” Venezuela, whatever its “internal dysfunctions or its connections to drug trafficking, poses no such threat.”

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In the decades since residents in Somalia’s northwest region broke away from the East African nation during its 1991 civil war, Somaliland, as the area is known, has existed largely in geopolitical stasis. It has enjoyed relative stability and transfers of power despite no global recognition — until now.

On Friday, the Israeli government became the first United Nations member nation to officially recognize Somaliland as an “independent and sovereign state,” pledging in a press release to “immediately expand its relations” with the nascent African nation through “extensive cooperation in the fields of agriculture, health, technology and economy.” Israel is still internationally ostracized over its war in Gaza, and by recognizing Somaliland, the country risks antagonizing its regional neighbors and the global community.

How did Israel and Somaliland get to this point?

Ties between the government of Israel and authorities in Somaliland “emerged” during the former’s search for countries “willing to take in Gazans it was looking to move out of the Strip during the war,” said the Times of Israel. Also central to Israel’s “motivation for deepening ties with Somaliland” is Somaliland’s “proximity to Yemen.” Access to Somaliland ground and airspace could be used to “conduct strikes and surveil the Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen.” Israel’s upgraded relations are a “breakthrough” in Somaliland’s “quest for international recognition,” The Guardian said. Somaliland officials hope Israel’s move will “break decades of diplomatic isolation” and “encourage other countries to follow suit,” said DW.

In its announcement, Israel framed its decision as “in the spirit of the Abraham Accords,” the Trump administration-led normalization effort between Israel and various Arab and Muslim states in the region. Somaliland President Abdirahman Abdullahi has similarly expressed hopes that his nation will join the accords in the near future.

Who is and isn’t happy and why?

While both Israeli and Somaliland officials have spent the days since their announcement celebrating their newfound relationship, the global community wasted little time broadly condemning the agreement. Any effort to “undermine the unity, sovereignty, and territorial integrity of Somalia” not only runs counter to the AU at large, but “risks setting a dangerous precedent with far-reaching implications for peace and stability across the continent,” said African Union Chairperson H.E. Mahmoud Ali Youssouf in a statement that did not mention Israel.

The European Union’s diplomatic arm reiterated the “importance of respecting” a united Somalia in a brief statement. It also called for “meaningful dialogue” to resolve the intra-Somali conflict.

News of the upgraded relationship between Israel and Somaliland was welcomed, however, by some countries, including Taiwan, which hailed the “like-minded democratic partners sharing the values of democracy, freedom and rule of law” in a statement. In return, the Chinese government, which claims authority over Taiwan, decried Israel’s violation of Somalia’s integrity. And while Israel’s move has been widely condemned across the Arab and Muslim world, the United Arab Emirates, an Abraham Accords signatory, “notably did not condemn” the upgraded relationship, said Israel’s YNet news. “This was not coincidental,” as the UAE has recently been “developing ties” with Somaliland as well.

What next?

Although Israel is “rushing to attach great importance” to its diplomatic decision as a crucial step in any military action against Yemen, as the “bridesmaid of relations between Somaliland and Israel,” the UAE is in “no hurry to renew the war against the Houthis,” said Haaretz. A “possible result” is an Israeli military presence in the area, but one that is “constrained by the United Arab Emirates’ policies and its regional commitments to its neighbors.”

Somaliland officials hope Israel’s recognition will set the stage for a more impactful agreement with the Trump administration. However, President Donald Trump has “sounded unimpressed by the Muslim-majority state offering to join the Abraham Accords,” said the New York Post. “Just say, ‘No, comma, not at this —” Trump began explaining when the paper asked if he would support Somaliland recognition, before correcting himself. “Just say, ‘No.’”

Following “two days of whirlwind diplomacy” at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, Donald Trump has insisted he is “making progress towards ending two destructive conflicts in eastern Europe and the Middle East”, said John Bowden on The Independent.

The US president met his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, on Sunday in his Palm Beach “Winter White House” and then Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu yesterday.

What did the commentators say?

The details of Trump’s “supposed gains” in both discussions “remain unclear” beyond his own assertions, and “there is little evidence to support the idea that either the war in Ukraine or the horrific conditions in Gaza will abate any time soon”, said Bowden.

The president remains “evasive” about how he plans to “force various parties” in Ukraine and the Middle East to “get fully on board with his peacemaking agenda” beyond “vague threats and coercion”.

Zelenskyy said the 20-point peace plan for Ukraine is 90% agreed, while Trump said a security guarantee for the country is “close to 95%” completed. But there are “still a few main sticking points”, said the BBC, including how much territory Kyiv will be asked to hand to Moscow, the future of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant and plans to turn part of the Donbas region into a demilitarised economic zone.

In reality, talking between Zelenskyy and Vladimir Putin “has not even begun”, said Ben Hall in the Financial Times. Both are “locked in another titanic if less murderous struggle: the battle for Donald Trump’s mind”. Neither side wants to be “seen as the obstacle to peace and then punished for being so”.

Netanyahu is a man who “knows how to talk to President Trump”, said Lara Spirit in The Times. After awarding the US president the Israel Prize, the state’s highest cultural honour, and thanking him for his help on behalf of Israelis, he will “probably be walking away from Florida largely happy with what he heard”. Trump “praised” him and “issued statements of support” on the Gaza ceasefire, Iran’s nuclear capabilities and the Israeli leader’s “hopes of securing a presidential pardon”.

He “got what he came for” on Gaza, said Mark Stone on Sky News, although there were some “intriguing divergences” between him and Trump on Syria and the West Bank. After two “December days in Palm Beach” I have “sunburn and whiplash”. While “the sunburn is my fault”, Trump’s “head-spinning” style of diplomacy is “to blame for the whiplash”.

What next?

With US midterm elections due next year, Trump will need to focus on “the economy and the cost of living” rather than “foreign conflicts”, said Stone.

The president “knows that”, and so do “America’s adversaries and its troublesome allies”. The question is what they will “gamble on in 2026”, knowing that Trump “may not care – or may simply go along with it”. The rest of us should “buckle up”.

What happened

Israel’s Cabinet has approved 19 new Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank, far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said Sunday. The decision — approved Dec. 11 but classified until now, according to Smotrich’s office — brings the number of Jewish West Bank settlements approved by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s current government to 69, a nearly 50% increase since 2022.

Who said what

The settlements are “widely considered illegal under international law,” The Associated Press said, and Israel’s “construction binge” in the West Bank “further threatens the possibility” of a two-state solution. Smotrich’s stated goal is “blocking the establishment of a Palestinian state,” the BBC said, and surging violence in the West Bank is “heightening fears that settlement expansion could entrench Israel’s occupation.”

The “unrelenting violent campaign” by Israeli settlers includes “brutal harassment, beatings, even killings,” The New York Times said, while the Israeli military “forces Palestinians to evacuate or orders the destruction of their homes once settlers drive them to flee.” Israel’s military said Sunday it is reviewing the shooting death Saturday of a 16-year-old boy “suspected of hurling a block” at soldiers in the West Bank town of Qabatiya. Video of the incident showed an Israeli soldier shooting the youth at “point blank range,” CNN said, and “nothing appears to be thrown from the alley the Palestinian teenager comes from.”

What next?

The “Israeli onslaught has all but vanquished a free Palestinian existence in the West Bank,” the Times said, and the “desperation among Palestinian villagers and farmers as they watch the takeover of their lands at a pace never seen before” is exacerbated by “fear that the changes are already becoming irreversible.”

Police in London and Manchester will take a “more assertive” approach to protesters who call for intifada, according to a joint statement from the two forces following antisemitic attacks in Australia and in the UK. Officers have arrested two people for racially aggravated public order offences after they allegedly chanted “globalise the intifada” at a pro-Palestinian protest in London.

What is an intifada?

Intifada is an Arabic word derived from a verb meaning “to shake off”. It’s used to describe “two major uprisings” against the Israeli presence in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1987-1993 and 2000-2005, said the Institute for Middle East Understanding.

Both periods of intifada saw Palestinians participate in peaceful protest and acts of civil disobedience, but were also marked by violent clashes with the Israeli security forces and deadly terrorist attacks within Israel. More than 1,000 Israelis and about 5,000 Palestinians died in such incidents between the start of the first intifada in 1987 and the 2005 Sharm El Sheikh summit that brought the second intifada to an end.

How did ‘globalise the intifada’ become a rallying cry?

“Globalise the intifada” is a slogan that has been used to advocate for international support of Palestinian resistance against Israeli military occupation of Palestinian territories.

First popularised at solidarity rallies around the world during the second intifada, it has become a common rallying cry at pro-Palestine demonstrations since Israel launched its military operations in Gaza following the 7 October attacks.

The global intifada is the “‘shaking off’ of colonial dynamics of racism, violence, dehumanisation and division”, said Chloe Skinner for the Institute of Development Studies. The violence in Gaza and the West Bank is rooted in “global systems of power”, and so the struggle against them must be “globalised”.

Why do some people consider it antisemitic? 

As the “most prominent expressions” of intifada have involved “violence”, said the American Jewish Committee, “globalising the intifada” is often understood to mean “encouraging violence” against Israelis and Jews more broadly, even if the “intent of the person saying this phrase may be different”.

It’s “helpful to possess a lexicon of what is typically intended” behind the “vocabularies” used in support of the Palestinian cause, said David Frum in The Atlantic. “Globalise the intifada means shooting or bombing people in Sydney, London, Paris, Toronto, Los Angeles and New York City”, as well as in Israel.

The BBC recently corrected an article on its website that defined intifada as “largely unarmed and popular”. After complaints, the corporation amended the article, saying that the word intifada was regarded by some as a “call for violence against Jewish people”.

But Palestine Solidarity Campaign director Ben Jamal said the Met Police and Greater Manchester Police joint statement marked “another low in the political repression of protest for Palestinian rights”. Intifada is about “uprising against injustice”, he said, and the “implication” that language used to “support the liberation of the Palestinian people” is “only open to interpretation” by pro-Israel groups is “deeply problematic”.

Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu has blamed his Australian counterpart Anthony Albanese for failing to counter the spread of antisemitism that culminated in Sunday’s deadly mass shooting at Bondi Beach.

At least 15 people were killed and more than 40 injured when two gunmen opened fire at a Hanukkah celebration in the Sydney suburb.

“Your government did nothing to stop the spread of antisemitism in Australia,” Netanyahu said, addressing Albanese, as he claimed the Australian government had “let the disease spread”.

What did the commentators say?

It is “highly contestable” to claim the Australian PM could have prevented this attack, said the Australian Financial Review’s political editor Phillip Coorey. But the government has “spent two years falling short” of recommendations to tackle anti-Jewish hate, even those made by “its own handpicked envoy, Jillian Segal”.

That, along with a “palpable lack of moral clarity” when it came to condemning the 7 October attacks on Israel and a “lack of visible leadership” at a time of growing opposition to Israel’s war in Gaza, has left the government “exposed” to claims it has not done enough to counter antisemitism.

“Elements of the Australian media” have also “made their own contribution to this atmosphere”, said Alexander Downer in The Australian. “Much of the reporting coming out of the Middle East was deeply hostile to Israel”, and the national broadcaster, the ABC, has “frequently taken at face value claims made by Hamas, a terrorist organisation”.

These factors have, according to representatives of the Australian Jewish community, created a “permissive environment, where the warning signs were clear and too often left unchecked”, said the ABC. In recent years there have been “hateful symbols displayed at otherwise peaceful demonstrations and a pattern of targeted attacks on Jewish institutions”, in a nation that is home to the largest proportion of Holocaust survivors outside Israel.

There is also evidence that external agents are exacerbating the hostility. In August, Australia severed diplomatic ties with Iran, whom it accused of paying for arson attacks against a synagogue in Melbourne and a kosher cafe in Sydney.

Danny Citrinowicz, an Iran expert at Israel’s Institute of National Security Studies in Israel, told The Telegraph it was “too early to jump to conclusions” about Tehran’s potential involvement in Sunday’s shooting. “They are definitely suspects and high on the priority list,” he said, adding that “Al-Qaeda and IS have also been active in Australia”.

What next?

Albanese has repeatedly vowed to eradicate the “scourge” of antisemitism, and has already suggested an imminent tightening of existing firearms legislation. “But it all sounds so hollow,” said Coorey in the Australian Financial Review, especially in the aftermath of one of Australia’s worst-ever terror attacks. “The Jewish community and its supporters aren’t listening. They stopped listening long ago. Now, they’re openly hostile.”

Australia must also grapple more broadly with the implications of the Bondi attack, said Downer in The Australian. They have long viewed their country “as a model of liberalism” where discrimination is “anathema”. “This self-image of Australia has now been shattered.”

What will it take for the ultra-Orthodox community to play its part in Israel’s survival? Despite 7 October 2023; despite the “near-existential” threat Israel faces across a variety of fronts; despite the “attendant acute military manpower crisis” and the enormous sacrifices experienced by so many Israeli families in the Gaza war – despite all this, the Haredi community remains adamant that young ultra-Orthodox men should be exempt from Israel’s compulsory military service.

It’s pure moral cowardice, said David M. Weinberg in The Jerusalem Post. Nothing in the Torah forbids serving in war. Yet now, in a cynical bid to win back the support of his erstwhile Haredi government partners, Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party has introduced a bill that essentially entrenches the community’s “draft evasion”.

Exemptions have become ‘institutionalised’

“The roots of this issue go back to the founding of the state,” said Eric R. Mandel in the same paper, “when David Ben-Gurion exempted approximately 400 Torah scholars from military service.” Back then, Haredim were far fewer in number, and Israel’s first prime minister believed their small and insular world would soon enough fade from existence. “Instead, the opposite occurred.” Driven by one of the highest birth rates in the developed world, Haredim today make up about 13% of Israelis; by 2065 it’s estimated they’ll reach 25%.

And over the decades, their exemption from Israeli life has become “institutionalised”, producing a class of citizens who neither serve in the army nor participate in the workforce, yet still enjoy hefty state subsidies. That imbalance had already created serious tensions within Israeli society; but post-7 October and the ensuing war in Gaza, what was once a cultural issue has now become Israel’s “greatest internal security threat”.

A turning point in all this came in June 2024, said Sam Sokol in The Times of Israel (Jerusalem), when the supreme court called a halt to the all-too-blatant pro-Haredi discrimination and ruled that the government must start conscription immediately. After the ruling, religious “yeshiva” schools harbouring draft dodgers saw their budgets slashed, and draft refusers lost access to state benefits.

But Netanyahu’s coalition has long been dependent on two ultra-Orthodox parties, Shas and United Torah Judaism (UTJ), said Haaretz (Tel Aviv). So even though the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) are short 10,000 soldiers, or between 12 and 15 battalions, in the wake of the Gaza war, Netanyahu’s government, in direct violation of the supreme court’s ruling, has repeatedly called up reservists in their 30s and 40s – men with families – instead of recruiting from the 80,000 or so eligible 18- to 24-year-olds from the ultra-Orthodox community.

New bill ‘chock-full of loopholes’

Likud’s new bill is an attempt to put this inflammatory issue to bed, said Shalom Yerushalmi in The Times of Israel: Netanyahu is parading it as a “historic achievement”, claiming it will force thousands of Haredi men into uniform. In reality, “not a single battalion, never mind a division, will come of it”. And that’s because it’s “chock-full of loopholes”, said Sam Sokol. Criminal sanctions on draft dodgers are only due to come into effect in 2027; not only full-time “yeshiva” students, but anyone who’s studied in a “yeshiva” for two years between ages 14 to 18 will be considered ultra-Orthodox, and granted yearly deferments from enlistment.

The only recruitment likely to rise in number given those incentives is that of applicants to “yeshivas”. The bill has caused turmoil in Israel, said Ravit Hecht in Haaretz, and even within Bibi’s coalition. But the PM won’t mind. Having given the appearance of coming up with a solution, he can now sit on the bill while the nation argues it out. In short, he has resorted to “his time-tested tactic of playing for time” ahead of the 2026 elections. It’s classic Netanyahu, said Sima Kadmon on Ynet (Rishon LeZion): throw “a chunk of meat into the arena”, make us fight among ourselves and, in so doing, crucially, make us forget all about “his own failures”.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been dogged for years by criminal corruption charges. Now he is asking President Isaac Herzog to short-circuit the legal process by giving him a pardon before the court hands down a verdict.

Netanyahu’s pardon application did not “include an admission of guilt” to allegations of bribery, fraud and breach of trust, said CNN. Instead, the request is part of an effort to “heal the rifts, achieve national unity and restore public trust in the state’s institutions,” the prime minister said in a one-page letter. Opposition leaders have been withering in their response. “Only someone guilty asks for a pardon,” said Yair Golan, the head of Israel’s Democrats party, on X. But right-wing leaders supported Netanyahu’s plea. A pardon is “critical for the security of the state,” said Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir in a statement.

The request “immediately hijacked the Israeli political conversation,” said The New York Times. But some opposition figures suggested they would support a pardon for Netanyahu on one condition. Former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said on X that clemency is possible for his rival if it is conditioned upon Netanyahu’s “respectful retirement from political life.”

What did the commentators say?

Netanyahu has committed a “staggering act of hypocrisy,” said Dan Perry at Forward. The promise to heal Israel’s national divide is “jaw-dropping,” given how Netanyahu launched a “demonization campaign against the courts” following his 2019 indictment. That spawned a fierce nationwide battle over the future of the Israeli Supreme Court. Netanyahu “now plays peacemaker” after poisoning the nation’s trust in its institutions. A pardon should come only with a “full personal admission of guilt — spoken aloud by Netanyahu himself.”

Herzog is facing a “political, national and leadership decision” unlike any other, Shalom Yerushalmi said at The Times of Israel. Israel’s president is unlikely to make a decision that “would tear the public apart rather than unite it” by granting the “most problematic pardon in Israel’s history.” But Herzog is likely to seek a “middle ground,” either by putting conditions on the pardon or by encouraging Netanyahu to return to plea-bargain discussions. There is no chance, though, that Netanyahu will heal the nation. “No one can change this prime minister at the age of 76.”

What next?

Herzog’s office is weighing an “extraordinary step with significant implications,” said The Jerusalem Post. The issue is “shaking many people in the country,” the president said in a statement, adding that he would move only in the “best interests of the State of Israel and Israeli society."

Israeli society is watching. Roughly 400 retired police officers asked Herzog to reject Netanyahu’s request, said The Times of Israel. A pardon might “ignite severe violence in Israeli society,” they said in a petition. Netanyahu is looking outside his country for support. The prime minister asked President Donald Trump to push again for his pardon, said Axios. That may not be forthcoming. Trump has “done all he can do," said a U.S. official to the outlet.

‘Why Big Oil is panicking over accountability’

David Bookbinder at The Hill

Consumers “shouldn’t have to pay twice for the damage done by multinational oil and gas companies — once through the harm their products cause to our health and our planet, and again when those same companies use lawsuits filed by local communities as an excuse to hike prices,” says David Bookbinder. The “oil and gas industry doesn’t like anyone saying plainly that their product causes harm — that they have built a business model on avoiding accountability.”

Read more

‘The illusion of Western peacemaking’

Puhiza Shemsedini at Al Jazeera

It is “hard to understand how one can tell a group of young women whose family members were displaced, raped, tortured, or killed during the war that the problem has to be separated from the people,” says Puhiza Shemsedini. It is “easy for foreign facilitators to do so because at the end of a peacemaking workshop, they would take a cab to the airport, fly home and leave behind the survivors still struggling with a transition from war to peace.”

Read more

‘Why the shadowy money side of cryptocurrency appeals so much to Trump’

Philip Bump at MS NOW

Under this “White House, crypto is to income generation what the presidential pardon power is to justice, something bounded almost exclusively by lines that President Trump himself draws,” says Philip Bump. It’s “unsurprising that the two have been so often intertwined.” There’s a “lot of money to be made in the hustle-friendly cryptocurrency world,” and the “boundaries of the law have never really served as red lines for the creators of Trump University, the Trump Foundation and the Trump Organization.”

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‘On Israel, Trump should echo Reagan’

Anik Joshi at The American Conservative

President Donald Trump has to “stand up to the Israeli government,” and he “should take a lesson on how to do so from none other than President Ronald Reagan.” There was a “time when he held a firm line against the Israeli government,” and there are “lessons aplenty here for the current administration.” It is “unlikely there will be appreciation in all quarters for this, but ultimately these decisions are to be made by the superior partner in the relationship.”

Read more

What do the numbers show? 

That antisemitism is surging. According to FBI data, there were 2,086 anti-Jewish hate-crime incidents in 2024—up 4% from 2023 and the highest number since records began in 1991. While Jews make up only about 2% of the population, 17% of all reported hate crimes last year were against Jews. But the FBI data doesn’t capture the full scale of the spike in antisemitism, because it includes only crimes reported to authorities. The Anti-Defamation League recorded more than 9,000 incidents of harassment, vandalism, and assault in 2024—the highest number since it began tracking data in 1979. And a report published by the organization last month found that 57% of Jewish Americans believe antisemitism is a now normal part of Jewish life in the U.S. For decades, most antisemitic incidents in the U.S. stemmed from old conspiracies and tropes, such as a 2019 attack on a California synagogue by a gunman who believed Jews controlled the news media. But since Oct. 7, 2023—when Hamas attacked Israel and sparked the Gaza war—a larger share of perpetrators has cited Israel or Zionism. “For antisemites,” said Oren Segal of the ADL, “the Israel issue has been a convenient tactic to pile onto the Jewish community.” 

Did antisemitism increase significantly after Oct. 7? 

In the three months after Hamas’ attack, antisemitic incidents were up 361% compared with the same period a year earlier, according to the ADL. The organization counted 3,291 incidents in that period, including bomb threats against synagogues, swastikas spraypainted onto Jewish schools, and 56 physical assaults. The violence seemed to intensify this year. In April, a man set fire to Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s residence as Shapiro, who is Jewish, and his family slept inside. The attacker said he was motivated by Shapiro’s support of Israel. The next month, two young Israeli embassy aides were shot dead as they left an event at the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C.; the alleged gunman told police, “I did it for Palestine.” Eleven days later in Boulder, Colo., a man shouting “free Palestine” threw Molotov cocktails at demonstrators calling for the release of Israeli hostages in Gaza. An 82-year-old woman later died of her wounds. “People like me made arguments for years about how you should be able to criticize Israel and not be seen as antisemitic,” said Joel Rubin, a deputy assistant secretary of state under President Barack Obama. “That’s collapsed, and attacks on Zionism now target Jews.” 

What’s behind the spike in attacks? 

Some experts argue that antisemitism on the Left is being driven by ideas about “settler colonialism,” an academic theory that divides the world into foreign colonizers and Indigenous peoples, oppressors and the oppressed. Under this theory, Jews “are not a historically oppressed people” with historical ties to Israel, said Harvard Law School professor Noah Feldman, but instead are imperialists “and even white supremacists” who have stolen Palestinian land. Under such an ideology, violence against any “oppressor” can be justified. Some researchers argue that criticism of Israel is too often conflated with antisemitism by the ADL and others, and note that antisemitism was rising in the U.S. before 2023. “To lump as antisemitic all people who don’t believe in Zionism is just wrong,” said Kevin Rachlin of the Nexus Project, a nonprofit that combats antisemitism. Still, he adds that antisemitism has “unequivocally” increased in the U.S. since 2023. And that bigotry is gaining traction on the Right as well as the Left. 

What’s happening on the Right? 

A growing number of “America First” figures are embracing old antisemitic tropes. Nick Fuentes, a 27-year-old white supremacist influencer, has blamed “organized Jewry” for sowing division in the U.S. and claimed American Jews put Israel’s interests “before the interests of their home country.” Conservative writer Rod Dreher said he was told by a Washington insider that “30% to 40%” of young GOP staffers in D.C. are Fuentes fans. Candace Owens, one of the nation’s most popular podcasters, claims the U.S. has a “Zionist occupied government” and has dismissed accounts of the torturous experiments conducted by Nazi scientists on Jewish and other prisoners during World War II as “bizarre propaganda.” Tucker Carlson, the top right-wing podcaster in the U.S., has hosted Fuentes on his show as well as Nazi apologist blogger and Holocaust denier Darryl Cooper, whom Carlson called the “most important popular historian working in the United States today.” 

Are many Americans receptive to these messages? 

Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, who formerly employed Owens at his Daily Wire site and is a frequent target of antisemites online, said there’s a ready audience for anti-Jewish conspiracies among young people who feel the economy is against them. They are told their troubles “can be solved by externalizing those problems onto a different group,” said Shapiro, who adds that social media algorithms incentivize such conspiratorialism. “You get a lot more likes and clicks if you are promoting an anti-Israel, anti-Jewish agenda than if you are doing the opposite.” Research shows that antisemitism is blooming on the major social media platforms, most of which have dialed back content moderation in recent months. An Israeli study found a 41% increase in antisemitic posts on TikTok from 2020 to 2021, a 912% increase in antisemitic comments, and a 1,375% increase in antisemitic usernames. Another study, by the Center for Countering Digital Hate and the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, identified nearly 679,600 antisemitic posts on Elon Musk’s X platform over 11 months that garnered a combined 193 million views, despite being in violation of X’s own antisemitism policies. “Antisemitic conspiracy theories and hate that were once fringe have been wholly normalized,” said Amy Spitalnick, head of the JCPA. And they’re “thriving in plain sight.”

Israeli President Isaac Herzog this week condemned the latest outbreak of settler-instigated violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, decrying a recent arson attack near the city of Tulkarm as “shocking and serious” in some of his most high-profile public statements on the longstanding trend to date. Herzog’s comments come during the seasonal olive harvest that brings Palestinian farmers into their neighboring fields, often setting the stage for attacks from groups of Israeli settlers. According to United Nations monitors, settler violence against Palestinians has reached a record high, with some 1,500 incidents recorded this year.

‘Act decisively to eradicate the phenomenon’

While the olive harvest has always been a time for heightened settler violence against Palestinians, this year’s “situation on the ground is out of control,” said Anton Goodman, Partnership Director of Rabbis for Human Rights, to the Haaretz podcast. The group, which monitors rights abuses in the occupied territories, has never seen “such a peak moment of violence” impacting “so many communities” in the West Bank as they have this season, said Goodman. In the latest of such instances, “dozens” of Israeli settlers attacked the Deir Sharaf Bedouin village and Al-Juneidi dairy factory near Tulkarm on Tuesday, “brandishing clubs and setting fire to parked vehicles,” said CNN.

This attack “crosses a red line,” Herzog said on X, urging Israeli officials to “act decisively to eradicate the phenomenon.” In doing so, he offered a “rare and powerful voice” to the ordinarily “muted criticism by top Israeli officials of the settler violence,” said The Associated Press. Rights groups have long criticized the Israeli government’s alleged tendency to “turn a blind eye to the violence,” including by dispatching Israeli Defense Force soldiers to incidents, only for them to “frequently leave without detaining the assailants or arrest only Palestinians,” said The New York Times.

Bad apples ‘tarnish a law-abiding public’

Within the Israeli Defense Forces, the uptick in West Bank violence against Palestinians has been pinned on “fringe anarchist teenagers” who need “intervention from welfare and education institutions,” said a briefing from IDF Central Command obtained by Haaretz. Those responsible are a “criminal minority tarnishing a law-abiding public” whose actions “violate our values, cross a red line and divert forces’ attention from their mission,” said IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir on Wednesday during a training exercise in the West Bank. That mission is “protecting settlements and carrying out offensive operations.”

Speaking in “closed discussions,” IDF Maj. Gen. Avi Bluth, who leads the country’s central command, has “demanded expanded legal powers” to “tackle the growing wave of settler violence,” said YNet News. The ask comes amid “mounting pressure from field commanders” to reinstate “administrative detention orders for Jewish extremists” that were canceled one year ago. The extremists’ goal, said left-wing Israeli Knesset member Gilad Kariv, is to “ignite a third intifada” that will draw in the IDF in a way “reminiscent of the operation in Gaza.”

Noting that military officials are “already speaking openly about this danger,” Kariv said on X that the violence against West Bank Palestinians is not “isolated pogroms” but are the “initial stages of implementing the nationalist right’s plan.”

Iraq’s election has been closely watched from way beyond its borders, as the young democracy finds itself in a power struggle between the US, Israel and Iran.

The parliamentary vote, the seventh since the US-led invasion toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003, ended last night. Although marred domestically by voter disillusionment, the vote could have far wider implications. Israel and the US are increasingly pressuring Iraq to dismantle the powerful Iran-backed groups that hold sway there. Meanwhile, as Iran’s influence “wanes” across the Middle East, its network of proxies decimated by Israel, it hopes to “preserve its power in Iraq”, said Al Jazeera. Iraq is its only close ally that has, since the war in Gaza began, “remained out of Israel’s crosshairs”.

What is the backdrop?

After the US-led 2003 invasion, Iraq suffered years of bloody civil war, sectarian conflict and the rise of Islamist extremist groups. The country adopted a power-sharing agreement: the prime minister is always a Shia Muslim, the speaker of Parliament a Sunni Muslim, and the president (a largely ceremonial role) is a Kurd.

Elections were still often mired in political violence and clashes between supporters of different blocs. But under the tenure of Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, Iraq has become relatively stable. He came to power in 2022 with the backing of a group of pro-Iran parties, but sought to “balance Iraq’s relations with Tehran and Washington”, said The Independent.

Now, he is struggling to maintain that balance, as tensions grow between the US and Iran. Israel is also threatening strikes, amid fears of another deadly war with Iran.

What does Iran have to do with Iraq?

Iraq represents a “vital sphere of influence” for Iran, which has been severely weakened by Israeli strikes, Western sanctions and the Trump administration, said the Middle East Council on Global Affairs.

In Iraq, a coalition of Iran-aligned militias known as the Popular Mobilisation Forces (PMF) dominates parliament. The PMF “forms part of a region-wide network of Iran-aligned armed groups” across the Middle East, including Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis. This network is “central to the survival” of Iran.

But since Israel declared war on Gaza in 2023, it has “wiped out” Hezbollah’s leadership in Lebanon and “decimated its rank and file”, as well as “decapitating” the Houthi government in Yemen. In Syria, the regime of key Iran ally Bashar al-Assad has been toppled. Israel’s campaign “could now turn to the PMF” in Iraq, especially if there is a “sequel” to its 12-day war with Iran in June. Against that backdrop, this election “could not be more critical to maintaining Iraq’s status as the lung through which Iran breathes”.

Where does the US come in?

The US still “holds significant sway” in Iraq, said Al Jazeera. Its forces are deployed across the country and are regular targets for pro-Iran groups. The PMF, for example, has a long track record of attacks on US bases in the country.

Washington designates these as “terrorist groups” and is pressuring Baghdad to disarm them. US envoy Mark Savaya recently called for Iraq to be freed “from Iran and its proxies’ ‘malign’ interference”.

How do Iraqis feel?

Voter turnout has been dropping steadily over the past decade, hitting a record low of 41% in the last election in 2021. Citizens have become disillusioned with high unemployment, poor infrastructure and endemic corruption, erupting into mass anti-government protests in 2019.

The popular Sadrist Movement, led by Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, won the largest number of seats in 2021 but withdrew after failed negotiations over forming a government. He boycotted this election. Pollsters and analysts predicted a record-low turnout after widespread allegations of vote buying. But actually, turnout was reportedly over 55% of the country’s 21 million registered voters. Still, few believe these elections will bring meaningful change. The growing young electorate sees the elections as a “vehicle for established parties to divide up Iraq’s oil wealth”, said Reuters.

What’s going to happen?

Sudani’s bloc is forecast to win the most seats but fall short of a majority. That could mean months of negotiations between Shia and Sunni Muslims. Given the “fragmentation” and divisions within those blocs, Kurdish parties could “play kingmakers”, said Al Jazeera.

However, Sudani is “seen as unlikely to remain prime minister”, said Chatham House. The outcome of this “bargaining could test Iraq’s stability” and shake its “fragile equilibrium”.

“Iraq has so far avoided the worst of the regional upheaval caused by the Gaza war”, said Reuters. But if the next government fails to break Tehran’s grip and dismantle the Iran-backed militant groups, it will face both US and Israeli “wrath”.

What happened

Israeli authorities on Monday detained the military’s former top lawyer, accusing her of “serious criminal offenses” tied to the leak of a video that appears to show Israeli soldiers sexually assaulting a Palestinian detainee at the notorious Sde Teiman detention center. Maj. Gen. Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi resigned as advocate general of the Israel Defense Forces on Friday, saying she had authorized the release of the video last year to “counter false propaganda” against army prosecutors.

Who said what

Five IDF reservists were charged with severely beating the Gaza detainee and sodomizing him with a knife, leaving him with life-threatening injuries. By leaking footage of the assault to an Israeli news station, Tomer-Yerushalmi “aimed to expose the seriousness of the allegations her office was investigating,” The Associated Press said. “Instead, it triggered fierce criticism from Israel’s hard-line political leaders.”

Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz on Friday accused Tomer-Yerushalmi of spreading “blood libels against IDF troops.” On Sunday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the “incident” in Sde Teiman was “perhaps the most severe public relations attack” Israel had ever experienced. “As Israel’s right-wing establishment has tried to paint Tomer-Yerushalmi as a traitor for impugning Israeli soldiers,” The Washington Post said, “human rights advocates pointed out that she had failed to respond to other abuse allegations against the military.”

What next?

A judge in Tel Aviv ruled that Tomer-Yerushalmi remain in detention until at least Wednesday on charges including obstruction of justice, fraud and abuse of office. “The fury over the leaked video reveals the depth of polarization in Israel,” the AP said, “and at least for the moment, keeps the media and the public focused on the leak and not the allegations of abuse.”

Tucker Carlson’s recent interview with Nick Fuentes, the Holocaust-denying white nationalist, has exposed a rupture on the right. The divide is between conservatives who would allow once-fringe views in the GOP coalition and those who reject Fuentes’ overt antisemitism.

The Carlson-Fuentes chat was “one of the most dangerous interviews ever in MAGA media,” Will Sommer said at The Bulwark. The country must overcome the challenge of “organized Jewry in America,” Fuentes told the former Fox News host. Such incendiary claims are a “catastrophe for more traditional conservative media figures,” Sommer said, and have drawn rebukes from Breitbart’s Joel Pollak, The Daily Wire’s Andrew Klavan and writer Rod Dreher. (On Monday, conservative influencer Ben Shapiro posted a podcast episode titled “Tucker Carlson Sabotages America.”) By giving Fuentes a platform, Carlson “just accelerated the right’s already prominent tilt toward authoritarianism and hate.”

Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts threw in his lot with Carlson on Thursday, said Politico. Fuentes’ views may be abhorrent “but canceling him is not the answer, either,” Roberts said in a video posted to X. The interview was not an isolated moment, coming after a “string of antisemitic incidents on the right” that included the revelation of racist comments on a Young Republicans group text, said Politico. The trend has “broadly divided” the Republican Party. Antisemitism is “rising on the right in a way I have never seen,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said recently.

Mainstreaming antisemitism

“The Groypers are at the gate,” Peter Laffin said at The Washington Examiner, using a term for Fuentes’ racist followers. Heritage’s Roberts compounded the problem with his public statement, which lent “credence to Fuentes’ and Carlson’s alt-right fever dream.” Groypers are threatening to take over the right and the “conservative movement, led by Roberts, is waving the white flag.”

Jewish conservatives “believe that Tucker Carlson is the most dangerous man in America to Jews,” conservative writer Rod Dreher said at his newsletter. That is because Carlson is the “most important mainstreamer of antisemitism on the right.” President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance could curtail the trend “by forthrightly denouncing it.” For conservatives and Christians, it is “time to find your courage” and push back now.

Fuentes is “shaping up to be the year’s major conservative breakout star” and is “clearly steering the right toward a wholesale embrace of bigotry,” Robby Soave said at Reason. The problem for his conservative critics is “their side is clearly losing.” Refusing to engage with him will not work, however. That would simply make his arguments “seem powerful, hypnotic and ultimately more appealing.”

Hostile toward Israel

Carlson, Fuentes and other influencers are trying to make the GOP “hostile toward Israel and the Jewish people,” National Review said in an editorial. But a version of America that is run by “anti-Israel zealots” is not one “any conservative should want to live in.”

The divide between Fuentes and conservatives is “narrower than it has ever been,” Ali Breland said at The Atlantic. His entry into the MAGA mainstream means his visions for a reactionary party “are closer than ever to being realized.”

Israel has said it is still committed to the ceasefire agreement with Hamas despite conducting a series of air strikes in Gaza overnight that reportedly killed more than 100 people.

Both sides have accused each other of violating the US-brokered deal, with Israel claiming yesterday’s strikes were in response to the killing of an Israeli soldier last week and for Hamas’ failure to hand over the remains of all dead hostages.

As the fragile ceasefire begins to fray less than a month after it was signed, Donald Trump has been quick to jump in and defend his signature diplomatic achievement, saying “nothing is going to jeopardise” the peace plan.

What did the commentators say?

Having been “tested and challenged” in recent days, the “fragile ceasefire remains in place”, for now at least, said Sky News’ Middle East correspondent Adam Parsons.

There are likely to be “three factors at play here”. Firstly, Israel “felt it had to respond to a series of provocations”. At the same time, while Hamas have condemned Israeli air strikes, “they are distancing themselves from the attack on the Israeli soldiers” and trying to calm anger around a failure to return the bodies of hostages. To the surprise of many, the Islamist group has been keen to “make amends, to soothe doubts and to try to stay on a path that, long term” allows it to “still have a part to play in Gaza’s future”.

But it is the third factor – the reaction of the US – that is “perhaps the most decisive”. Trump, his Vice President J. D. Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, have all spoken out against a return to hostilities in the last week, with the latter reiterating the message that “there is no plan B”.

But it is starting to feel that the ceasefire, hailed by Washington as a turning point for the region, is “more like a loophole than a real promise”, said Middle East Monitor. It was “never about peace in the first place” but “literally a hostage swap disguised as diplomacy”. In practice, it has “functioned as a calculated break, a short interval that allowed Israel to regroup, re-arm and resume its mass killing campaign with the full backing of the US”.

The Israeli government has “gone to lengths to undermine the peace process”, said Jonah Valdez in The Intercept. Aside from the attacks on Palestinians it continues to limit the amount of humanitarian aid to enter Gaza. It has overseen an increase in settler violence in the West Bank, and last week the Knesset even passed a symbolic vote on full annexation despite protestation from the US.

“They are trying to push the Palestinians to react,” said Ramy Abdu, chair of Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor, a watchdog that has tracked Israel’s targeting of civilians in Gaza. “This is their strategy, they want Palestinians to do anything to react just to complete their mission.”

What next?

While recent incidents on both sides “reflect the current troubled state of the ceasefire”, said Jonathan Spyer, director of research at the Middle East Forum, in The Spectator, they “probably do not presage its imminent collapse”.

This is “because neither side has an interest at the present time in a full return to hostilities”. Hamas’ main aim was to prevent Israeli troops from occupying Gaza City, a move that “threatened the organisation’s continued existence as a governing structure”. It needs to maintain the support of key allies Turkey and Qatar, who pressured the group into accepting the terms of the ceasefire and who “in turn want to stay on the right side of the US administration”.

Israel, meanwhile, wants a “period of rest and recuperation for its exhausted soldiers and similarly has an interest in staying on the right side of the Trump administration”.

A “durable peace is still possible”, said The New York Times, but “speed is of the essence”. The “linchpin” will be “the creation and deployment of an international force” which would “create conditions to realise other aspects of the plan: filling the growing security vacuum in Gaza, allowing for Palestinian self-governance and ensuring that Israel will not be threatened”.

So far only Indonesia has pledged troops, with the paper reporting that Washington is struggling to recruit other countries.

In the end, it might be the “brutally simple” arithmetic in Gaza that scuppers peace in the long term, said The Critic. “A ceasefire there may be” but Hamas will never “abide by any agreement to commit suicide politically as the price of a transitional political arrangement in Gaza”. For its part, “Israel, or those in its ascendancy, is not any time soon going to run the experiment of accepting a Palestinian state”.

In the days after the ceasefire began on Friday, tens of thousands of displaced Gazans set out for their homes in the north of the Strip, many of them on foot and carrying little more than the clothes on their backs, said Nedal Hamdouna and Bel Trew in The Independent.

Flanking their route, on the coastal road, were the ashen remains of bombed-out buildings and piles of twisted metal, while “mangled skylines” loomed all around. “Your body shivers from the scale of the destruction,” said Mahmoud Al-Kafarneh, 37. Having been living for so long in a tent, he said he was looking forward to seeing familiar places; but would he find them?

Neighbourhoods levelled

Elsewhere, returning Gazans found only skeletal ruins where their homes had been – and nothing they recognised. Even if the ceasefire holds, Gazans face a very hard future, said Jim Armitage in The Times.

According to the latest UN data from satellite images, 92% of housing units in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed. As Israel stepped up its offensive in September, it levelled entire neighbourhoods in Gaza City. Gazans – 90% of whom are displaced – desperately need basic infrastructure. Work needs to start now, to provide water, sewerage, temporary shelters.

The cost of rebuilding

Next comes the task of clearing an estimated 50 million tonnes of rubble, so that makeshift clinics and schools can be set up in modular buildings. Then, once a reconstruction plan for Gaza has been agreed, the rebuilding can start. (This is expected to cost $53bn, and will require careful processes to be put in place, to stop the money being lost to corruption or funnelled to Hamas.)

But with unexploded ordnance mixed in with the rubble, human remains beneath it, and armed Hamas terrorists in their tunnels, even the first step in this process is likely to be fraught with difficulty and very slow.

Many Gazans are acutely malnourished, or sick, said The Guardian. They don’t have time on their side. Yet this week, it wasn’t clear even how much food aid was arriving. Aid agencies were told that 600 trucks a day would be allowed in, but by Wednesday, only a fraction of that number had got through.

‘America needs a mass movement — now’

David Brooks at The Atlantic

“For the United States, the question of the decade is: Why hasn’t a resistance movement materialized here?” says David Brooks. “Left unopposed, global populism of the sort Trumpism represents could dominate for a generation.” But for the “most part, a miasma of passivity seems to have swept over the anti-Trump ranks. Institution after institution cuts deals” with the administration and only “in private” will business leaders “complain about the damage Trump is doing.” In time, “submission becomes a habit too.”

Read more

‘The Gaza ceasefire won’t win back young Americans for Israel’

Andreas Kluth at Bloomberg

Trump has brokered a “ceasefire that could, possibly, mark the beginnings of peace between Israelis and Palestinians,” says Andreas Kluth. But “something has shifted in the U.S. too, as recent polls show.” Half of Americans “think that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza” and 59% have an “unfavorable opinion of the Israeli government.” The “most salient split is no longer between Democrats and Republicans” but rather “between the young and old.” The young are “angry at Israel.”

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‘Are we about to enter an age of leisure? Don’t bet on it.’

Sarah O'Connor at Financial Times

“Some investors are betting” that AI will “reduce the length of the work week and give people more free time,” says Sarah O’Connor. But it is “highly uncertain” that AI will “deliver a substantial boost to economic productivity,” or that “economic gains will be widely distributed.” Workers may not “‘cash in’ those proceeds in the form of extra leisure” anyway, as U.S. workers “seem to have abandoned the pursuit of shorter working hours since the 1970s.”

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‘The psychology of fear, and why some people love being scared on Halloween’

Jennifer Borresen and Karina Zaiets at USA Today

“When we get scared, along with a rush of adrenaline we also get a release of endorphins and dopamine,” say Jennifer Borresen and Karina Zaiets. This “can result in a pleasure-filled sense of euphoria.” Of course, to “enjoy a scary situation, we have to know we’re in a safe environment.” Fear also “creates distraction, allowing us to relax from things that usually preoccupy our minds.” Haunted houses “first emerged during the Great Depression as parents made up ways to distract youngsters.”

Read more

What happened

As the war in Gaza passed the two-year mark last week, President Trump’s all-out push to end the conflict gained momentum, with negotiators from Israel and Hamas meeting with mediators in Egypt to consider his 20-point peace proposal. The plan calls for Hamas to release its remaining Israeli hostages in exchange for Palestinian prisoners; for the terrorist group to disarm; and for Israeli forces to pull back and allow for a temporary authority to administer the Gaza Strip. Trump leaned heavily on both sides to come to an agreement, reportedly urging Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in private to stop being so “f---ing negative” and “take the win,” and openly warning Hamas that it faced “complete obliteration” if it rejects the plan. He sent Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, his son-in-law and informal adviser, to oversee the talks, which also include mediators from Egypt, Qatar, and Turkey.

Israel chose not to hold an official ceremony to commemorate the second anniversary of the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks because it fell on a Jewish holiday. But thousands gathered unofficially in communities near Gaza, where Hamas had overwhelmed Israeli defenses, killing some 1,200 people and taking 251 hostage. Across the border, thousands of Palestinians—already grappling with a hunger crisis, mass displacement, and Israeli air strikes—fled another Israeli offensive on Gaza City. “Our families have died, our homes are gone,” said Sanaa Adwan, a displaced woman in Khan Younis. “We pray to God that this war will end as soon as possible.”

What the editorials said

“President Trump will deserve credit” if the deal ends the fighting—and it must, said The Boston Globe. The conflict must end to free Evyatar David, an Israeli hostage forced by Hamas captors to dig his own grave. It must end so the severely burned Palestinian teen Rahaf Al-Dalou, in Boston for treatment, can return home. But Gaza needs “a political and diplomatic solution” that will “hold the peace, not just end the war.” Can Trump commit to the long-term nation building that will be required?

One point must be nonnegotiable, said The Wall Street Journal: “the speedy release of all hostages.” Hamas said “yes, but” to Trump’s plan, asking to water down the proposals that it be disarmed and excluded from a Gazan government, but the president pretended to hear only the “yes.” That was by design. If Trump can get the group to step one, which is hostage release, he will not only end the agony of many Israeli families. He will also rob the terrorists of “most of their leverage to determine how the rest of the proposal is implemented.”

What the columnists said

This has been “the longest, most violent war between Israel and Hamas in history,” said Daniel DePetris in the Chicago Tribune. Since the Oct. 7 assault, more than 1,150 Israeli soldiers have been killed, while Gaza authorities say Israel’s relentless strikes have killed some 67,000 Palestinians—some of them dying while waiting in line for food aid meant to relieve the widespread famine. Millions of people have been displaced. My home still stands, barely, said Gaza resident Ghada Abdulfattah in The New York Times, but it’s one of the few. Some 90% of this enclave of 2 million people has been bombed to ruins, and nearly everyone has an injured relative. “Gaza feels like a city of amputees.”

The war has also profoundly transformed Israel, said Constantin Schreiber in Politico, leaving it “struggling with its identity, its democracy, and its place in the world.” Traumatized by Hamas’ vicious slaughter of their children, Israelis mostly backed Netanyahu’s overwhelming military response as he not only obliterated most of Hamas but also severely weakened other enemies, like Iran and Lebanon’s Hezbollah. But while Israelis feel safer, many fear their country is growing “more Orthodox, more militaristic, and less democratic.” And as ever more Western nations accuse them of genocide and recognize Palestinian statehood, they are “increasingly disconnecting from the West.”

Left to himself, Netanyahu would not end the fighting now, said Yair Rosenberg in The Atlantic. His far-right coalition partners want to empty Gaza of Palestinians, and until recently he thought he had an ally in Trump. But he went too far last month when he ordered the bombing of Hamas officials who were meeting in Qatar to discuss a U.S. proposal. Trump was angry, and he has now “successfully bullied” Netanyahu to the negotiating table. To get an inked deal, “he’ll need to do more of that.”

There were tears and cheers on both sides of the Gaza-Israel border yesterday as 20 living Israeli hostages and almost 2,000 Palestinian detainees were released in a prisoner swap. The trade, phase one of a prospective peace deal between Hamas and Israel, was only the latest chapter in a long history of asymmetrical prisoner swaps between Israel and its enemies.

‘Losing dignity’ 

In 1983, six Israeli prisoners held by the Palestine Liberation Organization were released in exchange for a “whopping 4,700 Arabs”, said The Times of Israel. Two years later, Israel agreed to release 1,150 Palestinian prisoners, including “notorious murderers”, in exchange for three captured soldiers.

In 2008, a swap was agreed for the return of Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, who were taken during a month-long war between Israel and Hezbollah. There had been fears that the two Israeli hostages were dead, but it wasn’t until the day of the swap that their fate was confirmed, when Hezbollah handed over two coffins. Israel returned five living prisoners, including Samir Kantar, who was serving a life sentence for a 1979 attack that killed a four-year-old girl and her father, as well as the bodies of 199 militants. In that exchange, it was felt that Israel had lost “a bit of its dignity”, said Der Spiegel.

In 2011, an Israeli soldier hostage, Gilad Shalit, was exchanged for 1,027 Palestinian prisoners as part of an agreement between Hamas and Israel, and in 2023, a temporary truce saw Israel release 240 prisoners while Hamas freed 105 hostages taken in the 7 October attack.

‘Strength and weakness’

Israel’s “readiness to do a deal” on terms of “extraordinary asymmetry” is a “strength” in that it “reassures the country’s conscript troops and their families that everything possible will be done to secure their return if they’re captured”, said the BBC. But it’s also a “weakness” because it “advertises” the “high price which can be extracted from Israel” for any captive.

The asymmetry of prisoner swaps is one of the reasons for Israel’s contentious “Hannibal Directive”, which allows the Israeli military to use any force necessary to prevent its soldiers from being taken hostage in the first place. This includes “action that will lead to those captives’ deaths”, said Al Jazeera.

It’s believed that the Hannibal Directive was deployed during the 7 October attacks. According to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, a message sent to Israeli troops about five hours after the attacks began, when Hamas militants were fleeing with their captives, stressed that “not a single vehicle can return to Gaza”.

An inquiry by a UN-backed commission confirmed at least one instance in which an Israeli tank “applied the Hannibal Directive by shooting at a vehicle” believed to be carrying abducted Israeli soldiers, as well as two other occasions in which the directive was “likely applied”, resulting in the deaths of as many as 14 civilians. Israel said internal investigations into what happened on 7 October are under way.