Israeli missile and suicide drone company UVision Air and US defense technology company Mistral have won another contract from the US Army to supply Hero 120 suicide drones. The order is worth $50 million. The Hero 120 has a maximum range of about 40 to 60 kilometers and its duration of operation is about an hour. The loitering munition (LM) can be equipped with various types of warheads, including those designed to hit armored vehicles and personnel.

This is a follow-up deal to a huge, multi-year contract that was signed in October 2025, for the supply of suicide drones for $982 million. UVision has its own US subsidiary, but the advantage of Mistral, which is based in Maryland, is its specialization in the integration of security systems and technologies in the US.

UVision has a range of collaborations with various companies, and is very well-known in its field on an international level. Among other things, the company is collaborating with German firm Rheinmetall, and has developed a model for launching suicide drones from a container. The innovative launch platform is important news for the field for several reasons. First and foremost, it allows the use of loitering munitions as part of swarm attacks, in which a large number of drones are used simultaneously. Additional advantages of launching from a container are the possibility of using different platforms and the ability to camouflage the launch system.

The Hero family of LMs are specifically designed to provide front-line forces (including Special Forces) with long-range independent fire capability. With advanced datalink and real-time intelligence for situational awareness, the remote operator is able to maintain ‘eyes’ on the target even at far distances, allowing for accurate strike capabilities in complex operational environments. The operator can maneuver the drone or abort the mission if necessary.

The system can carry out missions from start to finish or be transferred to ground forces to increase the efficiency of the troops.

UVision has various models in the Hero family, including the Hero 30 for infantry operations, and the Hero 120 for precision strikes on armored targets or fixed targets. 

The HERO 120 offers tactical units a lightweight, high-precision loitering munition capable of engaging targets in complex environments. It is designed to deliver real-time intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities alongside lethal strike options. Its modular payload, jam-resistant navigation, and low acoustic signature make it ideal for both conventional and asymmetric warfare.

The company also has the Hero 400 for medium-to-long range strikes on fortified positions. The Hero 1250 carries a 50 kilogram warhead, has a range of more than 200 kilometers and an operation duration of up to 10 hours.

This post was originally published on here. 

DAMASCUS – An Israeli drone struck a car near Beit Jinn on August 22, injuring a Syrian man identified in local reports as Ammar Saeed Hamada, as Israel pressed military operations in southern Syria that it says are needed to stop attacks on its territory.

The Israeli military described Hamada as a terrorist in the advanced stages of preparing an attack who posed an immediate threat to its soldiers, but did not publicly provide evidence supporting that characterization.

A local security source quoted by the Syrian news organization Enab Baladi said Hamada was conducting private business rather than carrying out a military mission. Syrian media reported that the strike severely injured his hand.

The Foreign Ministry in Damascus condemned the attack as a violation of Syrian sovereignty. The conflicting accounts could not be independently reconciled.

Hamada is a cousin of Muhammad Hamada and Ali Qasim Hamada, two men detained during an Israeli operation in Beit Jinn in November. Ali was later released, while Muhammad remains in custody.

Clashes leave dozens dead and wounded

During that operation, Israeli forces sought men the military identified as members of Jamaa al-Islamiyya, a Sunni Islamist organization. Syrian state media said 13 Syrians were killed after gunfire erupted. The Israeli military reported that six of its soldiers were wounded.

Syrian security sources have described the Hamadas as former affiliates of the Fourth Division, which was commanded by Maher Assad, the younger brother of ousted Syrian President Bashar Assad.

The August 22 strike followed two reported village raids in three days. Shortly after midnight on August 19, about 100 Israeli soldiers entered Jubata al-Khashab in Quneitra province and searched the homes of three brothers, according to residents interviewed by The Media Line.

The force left roughly two hours later with two of the men’s sons. Qutaiba Suliman, 26, was released that morning, while Moath Suliman, approximately 32, remains in custody.

Hassan Ahmed, 42, a farmer in the village, said soldiers arrived in about a dozen vehicles, ransacked the homes and beat one of the detainees. He also alleged that Israeli forces had confiscated approximately 150 mobile phones from residents without returning them. The Media Line could not independently verify those allegations.

“I cannot access my land because the Israeli army had previously bulldozed it completely,” Ahmed said.

The Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA) reported that the detainees were taken to an Israeli position outside the village. The Israeli military did not respond to questions from The Media Line about the raid, the detainees, or construction in the area.

Syrian state broadcaster Alikhbaria reported that an Israeli shell and flares started a fire in fields south of Jubata al-Khashab on August 20. The fire reportedly burned between the ceasefire line and Sofa 53, the local name for a military road Israel has been building through Quneitra since 2022 alongside a berm and trench.

The military operations are unfolding alongside renewed efforts to revive stalled diplomacy. The governments of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa have been engaged in US-mediated talks intended to establish new security arrangements, but neither side has announced an agreement.

Axios reported that Syrian Foreign Minister Asaad al-Shaibani and Mossad Director Roman Gofman met on August 23 following Israel’s August 18 attack on the Abu al-Duhur airbase, which, according to Syrian state media, damaged the runway and storage facilities. Axios cited three sources with knowledge of the meeting, two of whom said it took place in Jordan.

Syria later confirmed that a delegation led by al-Shaibani, including the heads of General Intelligence and Military Intelligence, had met a high-level Israeli delegation in Jordan under US mediation. SANA said the talks addressed ways to halt Israeli attacks, arrests and targeted operations and revive negotiations over a security agreement. The Israeli Prime Minister’s Office declined to comment, and Israel has not officially confirmed Gofman’s participation.

Al-Shaibani told Reuters on August 23 that negotiations, which stalled during the recent Iran war, could resume soon under US pressure. He said the sides had previously agreed on central elements of a possible arrangement, including demilitarized zones with a United Nations presence, but accused Israel of lacking the political will to carry it out.

Damascus is seeking an Israeli withdrawal from Syrian territory and an end to Israeli attacks as confidence-building measures. Israel says any agreement must prevent hostile armed groups and foreign forces from establishing positions near its border.

The Israeli Prime Minister’s Office said Syria had been close to violating a security understanding by permitting Turkish troops to deploy at the base. Netanyahu said Israel had warned both Damascus and Ankara against such a deployment.

Al-Shaibani acknowledged that Turkish officers had visited the base as part of military training and cooperation, but denied that Damascus planned to establish a permanent Turkish base or station Turkish troops there. Turkey’s Defense Ministry separately denied that a Turkish military delegation had visited the site before or during the Israeli attack.

US special envoy for Syria Tom Barrack called the strike an “unnecessary escalation.” Washington is working to create a deconfliction and information-sharing mechanism among Israel, Syria and Turkey to reduce the danger of an accidental confrontation.

Ahmad Al-Kinani, a political and security analyst in Damascus, said the raids demonstrated that Israel was exercising direct control in the south rather than relying on the proposed US-backed mechanism.

“Israel is now exercising direct security control over the southern region, carrying out direct assassinations and field executions without any coordination or reference to the joint contact point,” he said.

“Israel is operating according to a security agenda tailored specifically to the south, targeting anyone suspected of being prepared to execute military activities against it,” Al-Kinani added.

His description of “field executions” could not be independently substantiated. The Israeli military says its operations in southern Syria are intended to stop immediate threats, locate weapons and prevent armed groups from establishing themselves in the region. In an August 24, 2025, statement, the military said its forces had arrested suspects, found weapons and acted “to thwart attempts of terrorists to establish themselves in the region, in order to ensure the safety of Israeli civilians.”

Abdullah Hamad, a Syrian security analyst, said the incursions could give Israel leverage in negotiations while complicating Damascus’ attempt to strengthen relations with Arab governments and major powers.

Netanyahu has said any agreement would require the demilitarization of Syrian territory from Damascus south to the existing buffer area, including the approaches to Mount Hermon. Such a zone could extend approximately 30 miles and reach close to the Syrian capital, substantially farther east than the area of separation established in 1974.

Israel says its forces must remain in southern Syria to prevent armed groups from approaching its border and describes their presence as a forward defense for Israeli communities.

Netanyahu ordered Israeli troops into the buffer zone on December 8, 2024, saying the 1974 disengagement agreement had collapsed after Syrian forces abandoned their positions during the fall of Assad’s government.

That agreement established a demilitarized area of separation between Israeli and Syrian forces, monitored by the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF), along with adjoining areas where military deployments are restricted. Israel has established positions inside and beyond that area since Assad’s fall.

Israel captured the Golan Heights from Syria in 1967 and applied Israeli law there in 1981, a step widely treated internationally as annexation. Most countries do not recognize Israeli sovereignty over the territory, although the US did so in 2019.

Residents say Israeli engineering work is changing how they move through the region. Crews reopened an old track north of Wadi al-Raqad on July 22 and extended it toward al-Qulla, a former observation post opposite Ma’ariya, according to residents. The track was resurfaced on August 3 and now reaches the watercourse.

Residents believe the military plans to connect it with roads on the other side, but Israeli authorities have not announced their intentions for the site.

Villagers also said bulldozers destroyed another road on August 8, severing al-Samdaniyah al-Gharbiyah’s route to Khan Arnabeh.

Peacekeepers document construction, pass observations to UN

A Syrian liaison who works with UNDOF and whose name is being withheld for safety reasons told The Media Line that peacekeepers had documented the construction and passed their observations through mission headquarters to the UN in New York.

The liaison also said UNDOF had recorded detentions in Abidin and Jubata al-Khashab and sought the detainees’ release. Israeli authorities largely rejected a request to put detainees in contact with their families, he said.

The liaison spoke in a personal capacity. UNDOF did not respond to The Media Line’s request for official confirmation.

The contest over roads has become a contest over movement. Residents in the Yarmouk Basin blocked routes with stones after Israeli vehicles entered Abidin in late June. SANA reported that Israeli artillery and helicopters fired toward the area after the vehicles withdrew.

Families fled temporarily and returned within days, according to Muwaffaq Mahmoud, who heads the Abidin and Ma’ariya municipality. Anadolu Agency later reported that the Israeli military dropped leaflets telling residents to stop blocking the roads.

Ismail al-Hassan, a 60-year-old farmer in Abidin, said UNDOF representatives met village elders and the mukhtar around August 1. He said the representatives asked residents to remove the stones and promised to help reduce friction with Israeli troops.

The number of incursions initially declined, al-Hassan said. At dawn on August 17, approximately 100 Israeli soldiers in 12 vehicles entered Abidin and detained four men, according to his account. He alleged that troops also uprooted olive trees.

Two stonecutters were later released. Kamal Youssef al-Qasim, 41, a member of the Syrian Defense Ministry’s 40th Division, and motorcycle mechanic Ruslan Adel al-Hassan, 40, remained in custody.

Al-Hassan said al-Qasim was detained at home and denied that armed men were operating in the village. The 1974 agreement prohibits Syrian military forces inside the area of separation.

Sijil, a Syrian organization that documents Israeli activity and shares information with government bodies, counted 65 incursions into Quneitra during July and another 52 in the first 18 days of August. Manager Hamza Ghadban told The Media Line that the organization had documented 147 detentions since January 1, with 49 people still held.

The Media Line could not independently confirm those figures.

SANA reported that Israeli forces detained another Syrian near al-Rafid on August 23. The Israeli military did not immediately issue a public response to that account, which The Media Line could not independently verify.

Restrictions on movement have also affected medical treatment and farming. Quneitra Health Director Omar al-Ahmad dispatched mobile clinics to al-Hamidiyah and al-Samdaniyah al-Gharbiyah in May, saying Israeli restrictions had made the villages difficult to reach. UNDOF announced a mechanism with the Syrian Arab Red Crescent in July to facilitate mobile medical services.

Israeli forces operate a prefabricated medical point at Hader, a Druze village near Mount Hermon. Ahmed said it primarily serves Hader residents, while people from neighboring Sunni villages tend to avoid it because of Israeli patrols and strained relations with the Druze community.

Friend Ships, a Christian relief organization based in Lake Charles, Louisiana, operates another clinic behind the mosque in al-Hamidiyah. Its website says a doctor and three nurses treat 25 to 30 patients daily and provide medicine without charge. The group also operates a clothing tent and children’s playground with support from Israeli organizations.

Residents said foreign staff reach the clinic through the Israeli barrier. Hassan Ahmed, the Jubata al-Khashab farmer, said he received treatment and free medicine there last year.

For farmers working near Israeli positions, access increasingly depends on temporary UN identification cards intended to prevent confrontations with patrols.

Khaled Abdul Rahman al-Hassan, who has farmed outside al-Rafid for 15 years, said Israeli troops had previously interrogated and beaten him and fired nearby during planting and harvesting seasons. This spring, he received a card bearing UNDOF’s name through the village mukhtar.

When an Israeli patrol later stopped him, a soldier requested proof of ownership, checked the card against military records and returned it, al-Hassan said.

“They simply told me not to stay out past sunset, and the patrol left right away,” he said.

The card permits him to work between 6 a.m. and 5 p.m. through the end of the harvest. The Syrian liaison said approximately 20 to 25 farmers hold similar documents and are permitted to work only on their own land.

Israeli security researchers argue that the raids are intended to prevent Hezbollah, Iran-linked networks and Sunni armed groups from establishing infrastructure near the border. The Alma Research and Education Center has published research alleging that Hezbollah and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps recruited among Shiite families in Quneitra.

Alma founder Lt.-Col. (res.) Sarit Zehavi told The Media Line that Israeli forces carry out arrests and weapons seizures against Sunni and Shiite groups because Damascus has not made dismantling such networks a sufficient priority.

The Israeli military has previously announced several arrests and weapons seizures in southern Syria, including the detention of an alleged Iran-operated cell in July 2025 and operations involving suspected weapons traffickers the following month. It did not tell The Media Line what, if anything, its forces had found during the latest raids described by residents.

Syrian authorities announced an operation against a Quneitra cell allegedly linked to Hezbollah in April and another against an Islamic State cell in Khan Arnabeh in August. Six of the nine suspects arrested in the latter operation were released days later.

“It is choosing between a bad option and a bad option,” Zehavi said. “The alternative is not to be there and taking the chance that terrorist attacks will happen and will be executed against our communities on the Israeli side of the border.”

Zehavi said Israel could consider withdrawing if it regarded the government in Damascus as both sovereign and nonhostile – conditions she believes have not yet been met.

Nir Boms, chair of the Syria Research Forum at Tel Aviv University’s Moshe Dayan Center, said Israel should make greater use of diplomacy.

“I would rather see an attempt to create a security mechanism with the Syrians, and some more de-escalation – because all of this kinetics in the north and in the south further alienates elements in Syria that then go directly against us,” Boms said.

For villagers, the struggle over borders and security is encountered on roads and farmland.

“I have never seen gunmen in al-Rafid,” said al-Hassan, the farmer carrying one of the temporary UN cards, “other than Israeli army patrols entering the town.”

Wirtschafter reported from Istanbul.

This post was originally published on here. 

The Strait of Hormuz has exposed an uncomfortable truth about modern warfare: a military can destroy much of an adversary’s force, achieve overwhelming air superiority and strike thousands of targets, yet still fail to control the geography that gives the adversary strategic leverage.

Since the war with Iran began in late February, the United States and Israel have applied extraordinary military power. According to US government figures, Operation Epic Fury involved more than 10,000 sorties and strikes on more than 13,000 targets, including command-and-control nodes, air defenses, missile forces, drone infrastructure and naval assets. Washington later claimed that roughly 150 Iranian vessels had been destroyed. Even allowing for uncertainty in those assessments, the scale of the kinetic achievement is clear.

Yet by mid-August, months after the opening strikes, one of the war’s most important strategic questions remained unresolved: who actually controls the Strait of Hormuz? Last Friday, only two commercial vessels were observed transiting the strait during the day, compared with more than 130 a day before the war. Commercial vessels were still being attacked, and the United States remained compelled to maintain substantial naval and air power in the area. Airpower did not fail; it largely did what it was designed to do. The problem was that what remained after the strikes was a different kind of military problem.

Hormuz connects the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Oman and the Indian Ocean. At its narrowest point, it is roughly 21 miles, or 34 kilometers, wide, but the effective maneuver space for large commercial vessels is much smaller: two shipping lanes approximately two miles wide. Before the war, roughly 20 million barrels of oil passed through the strait every day, alongside a major share of global LNG trade. Yet its military importance comes from its geometry. Iran controls the northern coastline, while Bandar Abbas, Qeshm, Larak, Hormuz Island and the Tunbs form a network of observation points, launch sites, concealed bases and staging areas overlooking a compressed maritime environment. For Tehran, Hormuz is not merely a waterway. It is a geographic weapon system.

Iran spent decades building a force designed to exploit that geography. It never tried to match the United States carrier for carrier or destroyer for destroyer. Instead, it built a system for sea denial. Sea control means being able to use an area while preventing an adversary from using it; sea denial requires much less. It is enough to make an opponent’s use dangerous, expensive and unpredictable. Iran does not need to sink an American aircraft carrier to succeed. It does not even need to physically close Hormuz. It only needs to make tanker owners, insurers and captains ask whether the risk is worth it.

Its force structure follows from that logic: naval mines, fast attack craft, mobile coastal anti-ship missiles, one-way attack drones, surveillance networks, small submarines and unmanned systems operating above, on and beneath the surface. None is decisive alone. The difficulty emerges when all of them exist simultaneously, dispersed across coastline, islands, tunnels and mobile positions. The adversary does not need to be everywhere; it needs to make you believe it could be anywhere.

A single mine not found can affect commercial traffic more than dozens already destroyed. One mobile launcher whose position is unknown can turn large areas of coastline into potential firing zones. This is asymmetric warfare at its most effective: turning inexpensive, distributed and difficult-to-find systems into an enduring problem for a technologically superior force.

Here lies the central paradox of the campaign. The United States and Israel proved they could destroy ships, missile batteries, radars, command centers and production sites at scale. But Hormuz exposed the boundary between destroying military capability and controlling operational space. After the initial campaign, the United States still had to launch a separate effort to restore freedom of navigation. Mine-clearance operations began in April, and in early May Project Freedom was launched to maintain safe passage for commercial shipping. More than 15,000 US service members were reportedly involved, supported by destroyers, helicopters and more than 100 manned and unmanned aircraft providing round-the-clock coverage. Meanwhile, more than 1,500 commercial vessels were waiting inside the Gulf, unable or unwilling to leave.

After one of the region’s most intensive air campaigns, more than 15,000 personnel and hundreds of platforms were still needed to secure passage through a relatively narrow body of water. Not because the United States lacked power, but because the mission had changed. Destruction is episodic. Control is persistent. A strike happens at a moment in time; control must exist every moment.

It is tempting to conclude that the West simply underestimated Iran. That is only partly true. The United States knew about these threats; they had appeared for years in intelligence assessments, war games, and CENTCOM planning. The deeper problem is conceptual: Western force design remains far better optimized for finding and destroying targets than for persistently understanding and controlling complex terrain. Modern militaries excel at the kill chain – detect, classify, decide, strike. Hormuz requires something broader: sense, understand, predict, persist, act, verify and repeat, thousands of times, every hour, for weeks or months.

Iran’s objective was never necessarily to survive as a conventional navy. It was to survive as a network. Networks regenerate, relocate and hide. A launcher on an island can be destroyed, but another can appear tomorrow. A shipping lane can be cleared of mines, but new mines can be laid at night. The question therefore eventually becomes not only how to destroy another launcher, but who controls the terrain that allows it to return. The United States has understandably avoided seizing strategic islands or parts of the Iranian coast because such operations carry major risks and escalation. But the cost of occupying terrain does not make the military problem created by that terrain disappear.

Geography still matters.

The answer is not a return to mass armies. Hormuz points toward a different force architecture. In environments that demand continuous presence across dangerous and contested spaces, humans should no longer perform every surveillance, patrol, detection and response mission. The persistent layer of the battlefield should increasingly be held by distributed networks of unmanned systems in the air, on the surface, underwater and on land.

But adding unmanned platforms is not enough. Hundreds of drones streaming more video into a command center merely move the bottleneck from the battlefield to the operator. The real challenge is to build systems capable of understanding the terrain they observe: connecting sensors, identifying abnormal behavior, detecting change, distinguishing civilian activity from emerging threats, reacquiring mobile launchers and operating when communications are degraded or denied.

This is the difference between automation, autonomy and cognition. In such an architecture, unmanned systems should increasingly own persistence – the continuous, dangerous and exhausting layer of military operations. Humans should be preserved for missions where human presence remains indispensable: strategic decisions, judgment under ambiguity, interaction with populations, seizure of critical infrastructure and, when necessary, physical control of terrain. Machines should own the persistence; humans should own the consequence.

Hormuz is an almost perfect laboratory for this model. A cognitive unmanned network could persistently monitor islands, coastlines, shipping lanes and the subsurface domain, detect and isolate threats as they emerge, and create the operational envelope within which manned forces enter only when a mission requires physical seizure or control of a critical point. Large-scale autonomy and manned ground forces are not alternatives. They are complementary: the first creates persistence; the second creates physical control.

The lesson of Hormuz is not that airpower failed. It is that airpower can succeed spectacularly and the strategic problem can still survive. Iran demonstrated how a conventionally weaker state can combine geography, inexpensive systems, and persistent uncertainty to generate global leverage. Future campaigns will therefore require militaries to move beyond a force architecture optimized mainly to destroy faster and toward one capable of understanding and holding continuously.

A military can destroy a navy, strike thousands of targets, and achieve overwhelming superiority in the air. But after the smoke clears, the most important strategic question may still be remarkably simple: who holds the ground? Hormuz is not an exception to the wars of the future. It may be their preview.

Ryan Gity authored Israel’s National Artificial Intelligence Strategy and served as a member of the team appointed by the Prime Minister to formulate Israel’s new defense force-building concept and future IDF budget framework. He is the CEO of G2, a deep-tech AI company focused on cognitive systems and physical AI.

This post was originally published on here. 

Lebanese security officials believe that the extensive Israeli strikes in southern Lebanon in recent days are not merely localized operations but are intended to lay the groundwork for a broader military campaign, Asharq al-Awsat reported on Monday.

According to the report, the IDF has focused its strikes on strategic ridgelines overlooking villages and towns in the area, as well as on a transportation route leading deeper into Lebanese territory. The reported aim is to isolate key areas and prevent the movement of personnel between them.

Sources in Beirut said that strikes on homes, infrastructure, and roads in these areas were intended to create a buffer zone and separate Hezbollah strongholds from their surroundings, as part of preparations for the possibility that the fighting could expand.

Alongside reports about Israeli activity on the ground, Lebanese news outlet Elnashra reported growing concern in Beirut over the possibility of a significant security escalation.

According to an analysis published by the outlet, Lebanese officials believe the military developments are also being influenced by Israel’s approaching election campaign. In their assessment, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu could adopt a tougher stance and use more forceful military measures to demonstrate security achievements to the Israeli public.

Israel politics focused on external threats, including Iran, Hezbollah, Turkey

Lebanese reports said the political campaign in Israel is focusing heavily on highlighting external threats from Iran, Hezbollah, and Turkey. Lebanese commentators argue that this reduces Israel’s willingness to reach compromises.

Political and security officials in Beirut believe this approach is also reflected in Israel taking a harder line in diplomatic contacts and applying increasing military pressure to improve its negotiating position.

At the same time, Lebanese reports point to a continuing stalemate in negotiating channels between the two countries. Lebanese sources claim that Israel is in no hurry to achieve a diplomatic breakthrough and instead prefers to maintain military pressure.

US involvement in the talks, meanwhile, is focused primarily on preventing a complete collapse of communication channels and trying to stop the situation from deteriorating into a full-scale confrontation, according to the Lebanese reports.

The assessments from Beirut therefore link developments along the Israel-Lebanon front with the diplomatic impasse, arguing that the strikes are part of a broader effort to reshape conditions on the ground while maintaining pressure in negotiations. Lebanese officials and commentators cited in the reports have expressed concern that the combination of military activity, hardened negotiating positions, and domestic political considerations in Israel could increase the risk of further escalation.

This post was originally published on here. 

The petitioners behind the High Court’s freeze on disputed government funding have now asked the court to release a series of urgent transfers for local authorities and communities in the North and South, while keeping coalition and sectoral funding blocked.

The request, filed by Hiddush and Democrats MK Naama Lazimi, marks the latest turn in a dispute over hundreds of millions of shekels approved by the Knesset Finance Committee during the election recess.

The Knesset pushed back on Monday, arguing that the petitioners’ own willingness to distinguish between urgent and other funding undermines their original claim that the August 4 Finance Committee meeting at which the transfers were approved was unlawful. It again asked the court to dismiss the petition and lift the freeze altogether.

Funding of 78 million shekels remains blocked

For now, most of the disputed funding remains blocked.

Civil emergency expenditures were excluded when Justice Alex Stein first froze the transfers on August 5, and on Friday the High Court separately released the full NIS 78 million transfer for the Religious Services Ministry. The remaining Education Ministry and National Missions Ministry transfers remain frozen unless the court decides otherwise.

The petitioners are now asking to narrow that freeze further.

This post was originally published on here. 

Israel’s strike on the Abu al-Duhur military airbase in northwestern Syria has pushed an increasingly difficult Israeli-Turkish relationship into one of its most sensitive arenas yet, raising the prospect that Syria could become not only a point of competition between the two regional powers, but also the place where their respective security red lines overlap. 

The Israeli strike on August 18 targeted the airbase in Idlib province amid Israeli concerns that Turkey could expand its military presence there. Turkey and Syria have not publicly confirmed reports that Ankara was preparing the type of deployment described by Israel. 

Israel warned against any expansion of Turkey’s military footprint in southern Syria following an airstrike on the Abu al-Duhur airbase, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu saying such a move would threaten Israeli security and alter the existing regional balance.

Syrian Foreign Minister Asaad al-Shaibani rejected claims that Turkey intended to establish a military base at Abu al-Duhur, saying the site was being restored for use by the Syrian Air Force.

US Ambassador to Turkey and Special Envoy for Syria and Iraq, Tom Barrack, publicly criticized the attack as an unnecessary escalation and said Washington is working on a deconfliction mechanism involving Israel, Turkey, and Syria. 

Contradiction facing Syria’s future exposed

The episode has exposed a contradiction now shaping Syria’s postwar position. Turkey wants a stable and increasingly functional Syrian state closely tied to Ankara. Israel, meanwhile, wants to ensure that a stronger Syrian central government – and particularly deeper Turkish military involvement – does not restrict its freedom of action over Syrian airspace or create new security threats along its northern front. 

For Syria, the immediate priority appears to be avoiding being turned once again into the battlefield where regional powers settle their disputes. 

Al-Shaibani said on Aug. 23 that Damascus expects security negotiations with Israel to resume soon despite the latest escalation. Syria is seeking an end to Israeli strikes and an Israeli withdrawal from Syrian territory as part of a possible security arrangement, while maintaining its growing defense relationship with Turkey. 

The diplomatic channel therefore remains open even as military friction increases. 

Professor Kobi Michael, a senior researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) and the Misgav Institute for National Security and Zionist Strategy, described the situation as already constituting direct friction between Israel and Turkey, although he stressed that neither government appears to want that competition to develop into war. 

“First of all, unfortunately, this is a direct friction or collision between Israel and Turkey. Both sides do not wish to have such direct friction between them, certainly not currently,” Michael told The Media Line. 

From the Israeli perspective, Michael said, the central concern is not simply Turkish political influence in Damascus but the possibility of Turkish military infrastructure eventually restricting Israeli operations in Syrian airspace. 

“Israel cannot accept Turkish military deployment in Syria because Israel must preserve full freedom of action, particularly aerial freedom of movement over Syria. We have not finished with Iran yet,” he said. 

The Iranian dimension is central to Israel’s calculations. Syria has for years served as a corridor through which Israel has conducted operations against Iranian and Iran-linked targets, while Syrian airspace also forms part of the wider geographic route toward Iran. 

Michael argued that this makes the potential installation of Turkish radar or air-defense capabilities particularly sensitive. 

“Once the Turks are able to deploy in Syria, at airbases or elsewhere, they could establish air-defense missiles, radars or other systems that would complicate the situation for the Israeli Air Force,” Michael said. 

“If, for example, Israel had to reach Iran and the Turks tried to intercept an Israeli jet, Israel would attack those batteries – the Turkish batteries. That would be a direct military clash between Israel and Turkey,” he added. 

That remains a hypothetical scenario, and Ankara’s response to the Abu al-Duhur strike has so far remained relatively restrained. 

Barın Kayaoglu, chair and assistant professor of American Studies at the Institute for Area Studies at the Social Sciences University of Ankara, said Turkey has given little indication that it wants to transform the current dispute into an open confrontation. 

Turkey seems uninterested in escalation, shows restraint

“Regarding de-escalation, we’ll see. The Americans, particularly Ambassador Tom Barrack, have said they will work on it. Turkey is clearly not interested in escalating, as can be seen from its toned-down reaction. Whether that also interests Israel, we’ll see,” Kayaoglu told The Media Line. 

That restraint is noteworthy because the Israeli-Turkish dispute is increasingly less about bilateral relations alone and more about the kind of Syrian state that will emerge from the country’s political transition. 

For Ankara, a unified Syrian state offers the possibility of greater border stability, the consolidation of a friendly government in Damascus, and the expansion of Turkish political, economic, and security influence. For Israel, however, the strengthening of Damascus could gradually reduce the permissive military environment Israel has operated in since the fall of the Assad government. 

Kayaoglu argued that this longer-term change is part of what is driving Israeli concern. 

“Netanyahu is using Turkey and President Erdogan as an election tool,” he said. “In the long term, Israelis worry that Turkey will help Syria hold together and that Syria will cease to be a player they can easily bully or simply fly over on the way to Iran.”  

The argument that electoral politics may be influencing Israeli rhetoric has also entered the diplomatic debate. Barrack has suggested that the timing and nature of the Abu al-Duhur strike could have been influenced by Israel’s approaching elections, although Israeli officials have rejected his characterization of the events and defended the strike as based on legitimate security concerns.  

Michael, while taking a sharply different view of Turkey’s intentions, also criticized the way the Israeli government publicly handled the confrontation. 

“I think Israel was wrong when it made this public and began with unnecessary declarations, mainly by the defense minister, fighting with the Turks through tweets and the media,” he said. “I think this is a problem.”  

His wider assessment of Turkish policy, however, is considerably more skeptical than Kayaoglu’s. 

Michael sees Ankara’s expanding role in Syria alongside its activities elsewhere in the region as part of a broader effort to increase Turkish regional power. 

“They have hegemonic aspirations in the broader Middle East, and they see Israel as the main obstacle to the realization of those aspirations,” he said. “They want a weak Israel; they do not want a strong Israel.”  

It is precisely this difference in perception that makes Syria dangerous. 

From Ankara’s perspective, helping Damascus rebuild functioning state institutions and security capabilities is part of the effort to stabilize a neighboring country after years of fragmentation. From the Israeli security perspective presented by Michael, the same process risks creating a Turkish-supported military architecture directly to Israel’s northeast. 

Damascus, meanwhile, is attempting to avoid choosing exclusively between the two sides. 

President Ahmed al-Sharaa has previously said Syria is working toward a security agreement with Israel that could eventually open the way to something broader, while insisting such an arrangement would not mean abandoning Syrian claims to the Golan Heights.  

Michael said those negotiations remain significant but argued that Turkey’s influence inevitably constrains Damascus’ room for maneuver. 

“I think all of them, together with the Americans, are now working on a deconfliction mechanism,” he said. “This is an American interest, an Israeli interest, and mainly a Syrian interest, because all of them have an interest in bringing things down.”  

But he added that deeper Turkish military, political, and economic involvement would make Syria increasingly dependent on Ankara. 

Kayaoglu sees the equation differently. For him, the pressure on Damascus may eventually come not from Turkish involvement but from continued Israeli action inside Syrian territory. 

“Syria’s preference will be to maintain domestic order,” he said. “But if Israel continues making a mockery of Syrian sovereignty, Damascus will be forced to join the Mecca Pact.”  

That possibility introduces another layer into the regional competition. 

Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan signed the Mecca Joint Defense Agreement on August 7, establishing a framework under which an armed attack against one member is to be regarded as an attack against all three. The governments have described the agreement as defensive and have stressed that it is not directed against any particular country. 

Michael questioned how far that collective-defense language would translate into actual military commitments. “The importance of this alliance, or this pact, is more symbolic than operational,” he said, pointing to existing regional security crises in which Turkey and Pakistan have not automatically intervened militarily on Saudi Arabia’s behalf. 

“The idea of the alliance was supposed to be something similar to Article 5 of NATO: if one member is attacked, it is considered as though all members were attacked, and they come to defend the attacked member. This is not the situation today, and I doubt it will become the situation in the future,” Michael said. 

Kayaoglu similarly cautioned against reading the agreement as a replacement for Turkey’s existing Western security commitments. 

“Do not take seriously anyone who says Turkey will leave NATO for the Mecca pact,” he said. “It won’t happen unless NATO somehow ceases to exist.”  

The more immediate significance of the pact may therefore be political rather than the creation of an alternative NATO-style military command. It gives Ankara, Riyadh and Islamabad an additional framework for coordinating defense policy at a moment when regional states are seeking greater strategic autonomy. 

For Syria, joining such an arrangement remains hypothetical. But even the possibility illustrates how continued Israeli-Turkish friction could push Damascus further into emerging regional security structures, rather than leaving Syria as a neutral space between its neighbors. 

For now, however, the clearest signals from all three capitals point toward containment rather than direct confrontation.

This post was originally published on here. 

Turkey is a “rival and not an enemy” to Israel, security officials said on Sunday, warning that the situation could change amid the ongoing shifts in the Middle East.

According to assessments within the security establishment, Turkey seeks to strengthen a Sunni axis that is, among other things, anti-Israel.

The officials rejected Syrian and Turkish denials, saying warnings were issued before the strike but ignored by the parties involved. Therefore, under close scrutiny and following recommendations from Israeli intelligence and the Israeli Air Force, including pressure from IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Eyal Zamir, the decision was made to carry out the strike in order to send a message while clearly avoiding harm to people.

Security officials clarified that Israel’s commitment after October 7 is to identify threats and eliminate them at their earliest stages. This commitment is reflected in the context of the Syrian-Turkish process, where the security establishment continues to monitor developments and ensure that it does not change form or attempt to advance through other means.

Israel monitoring Lebanon-Syria dynamics

Security officials also said that Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa is known to have deep hatred toward Hezbollah and the Iranians. According to assessments, the day is not far off when he will demand a price and seek revenge from them for the killing of his forces during the Syrian civil war under ousted president Bashar Assad, despite his statements expressing moderation and a desire for peace.

Therefore, the officials said that Israel is also monitoring the dynamics between Lebanon and Syria to ensure that certain geographic areas do not become lawless zones that could threaten Israel in the future.

Meanwhile, security officials hinted that Turkey is working to reach Israel’s border not only through Syrian territory but also through additional routes, such as the Gaza Strip.

The security establishment is monitoring these efforts in order to prevent them. Some of the activity is being carried out through diplomatic channels, with mediation from the US and other allies.

Israel-Syria talks halted after strike on military air base

Meanwhile, Syrian Foreign Minister Asaad al-Shaibani said Sunday morning that following the strike in Syria, talks with Israel had been halted and no date had been set for their renewal. In an interview with Reuters, al-Shaibani said Damascus’ priority is to stop Israeli strikes and that steps are needed to build trust toward that goal.

The Syrian foreign minister also said that in the days following Assad’s fall in 2024, “Israel tried to maintain its security through brute force and it did not succeed.” He added that the US is attempting to pressure Israel to return to the dialogue table, saying, “It is very difficult to bet on Israel, but Syria had very high hopes of building stable relations with its neighbors.”

Al-Shaibani claimed that at the beginning of the year, the sides had “agreed on paper on almost everything” regarding a security agreement that would include several security zones in Syrian territory near the Israeli border. These included a buffer zone where only the UN would be present, as well as other areas where Syrian forces would be deployed at varying levels of strength. However, he added that “we have not seen that Israel has the genuine desire to reach an agreement.”

This post was originally published on here. 

Controversy is growing about the extent to which Iran is smuggling weapons to Hezbollah through Syria, with defense sources, probably connected to Defense Minister Israel Katz, leaking that the issue is heating up, while the IDF has said that there is no major change taking place.

A spokesman for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that a report by Channel 12 based on the anonymous defense sources did not come from them, but advocated that it correctly sized up the increasingly problematic situation.

Following Ahmad al-Sharaa taking power in Syria in December 2024, he cracked down on smuggling weapons through his territory to Hezbollah, given that he is Sunni and had been fighting Hezbollah for around a decade. 

While al-Sharaa’s relations with Israel have been cold to date, his cracking down on Iranian smuggling to Hezbollah has been a significant fringe benefit for Israel in keeping the Lebanese terror group from rearming.

This latest leak comes as there is a lively public debate about whether Israel will need to withdraw from part of its buffer zone in Syria and whether the IDF will need to carry out fewer military actions in Syria – all of this following a controversial Israeli attack on a Syrian airport in recent days.

Critics say Netanyahu creating unnecessary tensions with Syria, Turkey

Critics of Netanyahu say that he, and possibly then the defense sources leaking the latest report, are trying to unnecessarily create tension and fear related to Syria and Turkey for electoral purposes.

Netanyahu, Katz, and some IDF sources have said that the recent attack was necessary to prevent Turkey from encroaching on IDF freedom of military action in Syria.

Adding in the idea that smuggling from Iran to Hezbollah through Syria is a returning and growing problem would support the narrative that Israel must continue to act aggressively in Syria and that the recent attack, which led to a public fight with the US which wants Jerusalem to make more concessions to al-Sharaa as part of efforts to bring him deeper into the Western sphere of influence, was necessary and not political.

The fact that the IDF and the anonymous defense sources seem to disagree on that issue leaves a hazy picture of how large a problem increased weapons smuggling is.

No sources debate that Syria cannot hermetically seal off Iranian smuggling to Hezbollah, but IDF sources say that there has not been any spike in that smuggling recently compared to nearly the last two years under al-Sharaa.

This post was originally published on here. 

The planned Gush Dan metro trains will be highly automated, driverless, and run every minute and a half, even during peak hours. 

The metro system will be technically capable of operating on weekends. Eliminating drivers would reduce the extent of Shabbat violations involved in running the network, although security and operations personnel would still be required on Fridays and Saturdays.

An NTA official stressed, however, that weekend service is only a technical possibility and that the decision will ultimately be made by the political leadership.

Operating driverless trains will eliminate the need to recruit around 1,000 metro drivers, a significant challenge amid the shortage of public transportation drivers, and will reduce operating costs by approximately NIS 150 million per year.

Due to the high levels of automation, every team competing in the tender for the trains, systems, and operations of the metro project must also include an Israeli company specializing in cyber and information security.

NTA publishes prequalifications for companies competing for tender

The NTA Metropolitan Mass Transit System company (NTA) published on Monday morning the prequalification (PQ) process for companies that will compete in the tender for the project.

This comes after a similar stage for the construction of the tunnels and underground stations, Infra 1, in which 20 groups comprising 33 infrastructure companies from Israel and around the world submitted bids for tenders worth approximately NIS 65 billion.

The project is now moving to its next stage: from infrastructure construction (Infra 2) to the systems that will operate the metro. NTA is planning two tenders, one for the M1 line, which will run from the Sharon region to Rehovot, and another combining the M2 line, from Holon to Petah Tikva, and the M3 line, a ring line from Herzliya to Ben-Gurion Airport.

NTA, which oversees the light rail and metro projects, is drawing lessons from previous projects: trains and operating systems will no longer struggle to communicate with one another. Instead, a single tender will be issued to a group of companies that will jointly provide the trains, signaling and control systems, electricity and energy systems, underground station systems, and finishing works.

The tenders will also include integration between all systems, as well as network operation and maintenance services. Each group will be required to combine foreign and Israeli companies.

Gush Dan metro network to handle over 600 million trips annually 

The metro network in the Gush Dan metropolitan area will include three lines totaling about 150 kilometers, 109 underground stations, and connections between 24 local authorities in the Tel Aviv metropolitan area, from Rehovot to Kfar Saba. The system is expected to handle more than 600 million passenger trips annually, and together with the light rail network, more than 800 million trips each year.

The project’s cost is estimated at approximately NIS 175 billion, but it is expected to provide an alternative to worsening traffic congestion in Gush Dan, allowing people to live farther from workplaces in less expensive housing while still reaching them quickly.

At least officially, Chinese companies will not be barred from participating. At the end of the year, NTA will begin publishing the infrastructure tenders, and in another year it will publish the tender for the trains and systems.

After a series of delays and warnings from the State Comptroller, NTA says the project is progressing according to the timeline set last year, which is expected to lead to a gradual commercial launch between 2037 and 2045.

This post was originally published on here. 

Palestinian prisoner Basel Al-Asmar was allegedly able to father twins after his sperm was smuggled out of Nafha Prison, according to his wife and Palestinian media reports.

Sanabel Al-Ra’i announced the birth of the twins, a boy and a girl, at a hospital in Qalqilya following an alleged smuggling operation celebrated across Hamas-affiliated media. The conception reportedly took multiple attempts over a two-year period, the nephew of Asmar told Palestinian media.

The Jerusalem Post is unable to confirm the paternity of the twins.

Asmar is serving a life sentence and additional years for his role in the murder of former Tourism Minister Rehavam Ze’evi at Jerusalem’s Hyatt hotel on October 17, 2001, and for his membership in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).

Ra’i and Asmar met in prison when Ra’i was visiting her brother, Shaher Al-Ra’i, a PFLP member suspected of being responsible for the killing of two Israeli hikers, though he was never convicted, according to the Hamas-affiliated Shehab News Agency. The pair later married by proxy.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Sana Aljamal (@sana_aljamal82)

Over 100 children fathered by Palestinian prisoners via smuggling since 2012

Notably, only a year ago, the Palestinian Prisoners’ Media Office complained that Asmar was suffering from poor health, claiming he was being denied medical treatment, and that his family was being prevented from visiting him out of fear of retributive attacks from authorities.

Asmar and Ra’i would not be the first to have conceived despite detention. According to Palestinian media reports, over 100 children have been fathered by detained Palestinian prisoners through sperm smuggling operations since 2012.

Convicted terrorist Ahmed Shamali fathered quadruplets in 2023 after his sperm was smuggled out of Israeli detention. At the time, Israel Hayom reported that National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir was outraged by the news, though the conception occurred before he assumed his role.

Ben-Gvir has been approached for comment.

Commissioner Kobi Yaakobi set policy of no contact

The Israel Prison Service told the Post that there was no scientific evidence to confirm that Asmar fathered the twins and that sperm smuggling operations have not been possible since before October 7, 2023.

“In response to reports regarding the smuggling of sperm from the prison of the murderer of the late Minister Rehavam Ze’evi and the birth of his children, and given that the report has no scientific verification, we emphasize that the smuggling referred to in the reports took place before October 7, 2023, prior to Israel Prison Service Commissioner Kobi Yaakobi taking office,” IPS told the Post.  

“Since October 7, 2023, and the Commissioner’s assumption of office, the organization’s policy has changed completely, and there is no contact between prisoners and the outside world.” 

This post was originally published on here. 

New episodes every Sunday-Thursday. 

For more news, analysis, and the latest updates, head to jpost.com.

Headlines edited by Shir Perets and Lara Sukster Mosheyof.

Hosted and produced by Gadi Zaig.

This post was originally published on here. 

Alexandra Edmondson and James McIntosh will be married in a park near Bondi Beach on November 20, 2026. Their love story began less than a year earlier, on December 14, 2025, in the middle of a terror attack that took the lives of 15 people.

Edmondson and McIntosh had just completed an eight-week course on water safety and resuscitation techniques. They had become friends during the program and planned to attend the Bondi Surf Club Christmas party together that fateful Sunday.

As the friends walked toward the beachfront, they heard what sounded like gunshots. McIntosh immediately covered Edmondson and hid with her as he tried to get his bearings and understand what was happening.

“We were hiding in this spot, and then it became apparent the gunshots were moving,” Edmondson recalled in an interview with The Jerusalem Post. “Jimmy decided he needed to get his visual on the actual shooters, as we were not sure if they were coming toward us.”

McIntosh moved to get a better view of the shooter, while Edmondson headed toward the surf club as shots were still being fired. Eventually, the shooting stopped, and both, trained in first aid, headed out to help the injured.

At first, each was assisting someone else. Then they came together to help a man who had been shot in the leg. Edmondson recalled that he was in tremendous pain, but because his life was not in immediate danger, it would be a while before he could get to the hospital. They worked together to move him to the paramedics, where he could be triaged. After helping others, Edmondson and McIntosh ultimately drove him to the hospital themselves.

It was one of the most traumatic days in recent Australian history, including for Edmondson and McIntosh. They spent it together, and when it was finally over and the man they had helped was safely at the hospital, they tried to return to collect Edmondson’s belongings from the surf club.

Everything was blocked off, so she had to find another way to get into her house. Her wallet and phone remained at the scene, and it would be days before she could retrieve them. McIntosh stayed with her, helped make sure she connected with people who might be worried about her whereabouts and made sure she got home safely.

“We were always just friends,” Edmondson told the Post.

But in the days following the attack, the two found themselves together at a number of events, and slowly they began to realize there might be something more between them. One afternoon, they were at the grocery store together, and the tension was palpable. They both wanted to connect, but it did not seem like the right time or place in the aftermath of the Bondi attack. After a few flirtatious exchanges, however, McIntosh finally asked to kiss Edmondson. The rest is history.

Looking back, Edmondson said perhaps she should have known. Here was a man whose first instinct when the Bondi attack began was to grab her, hide her and protect her. He was someone who stayed calm under pressure and put his own safety at risk to help others.

“I realized how deep his love and care for his community really was,” Edmondson said. “In the days after Bondi, everyone was so raw and really just wore your heart on your sleeve.”

But their relationship with each other was not the only connection that began to form. In the days after the attack, Edmondson and McIntosh also grew closer to the Jewish community.

Edmondson told the Post that she had not realized how frightening it could be to live as a Jew in Australia, and she wanted to stand with the Jewish people.

“No one deserves to be scared, and I had no idea because I had been so ignorant about what was going on,” Edmondson said.

In the days that followed the Bondi attack, she and McIntosh spent time at the park and attended a ceremony for first responders at the local Central Synagogue. Rabbi Levi Wolff shared the couple’s story, and Edmondson said the community was extraordinarily supportive and enthusiastic.

The couple eventually asked Wolff to marry them. Their wedding will be the first non-Jewish wedding he has officiated at Bondi Beach.

“One of the saddest results of Bondi was that no one felt safe at the beach anymore,” Edmondson said. “So we thought one thing that would be impactful would be bringing back to that space some beauty.”

They chose a small grassy area near the beach for the ceremony, where they will tie the knot.

“I want the Jewish people to know I fully support them,” Edmondson said, adding that she deeply respects the Jewish values she has learned about over the past year and wants to begin her marriage rooted in that value system.

The Jerusalem Post’s first-ever Australia Summit will take place in Sydney on November 19, the day before the couple’s wedding. Attendees will have the opportunity to meet Edmondson and McIntosh and hear their story firsthand. The summit will be preceded by an invitation-only gala at Central Synagogue.

To learn more about the Australia Summit or becoming a conference partner, visit the conference website at www.jpost.com/australia2026 or contact conferencep@jpost.com.

This post was originally published on here. 

The Altalena ship was located intact on the seafloor 78 years after being sunk following an altercation between the IDF and the Irgun in 1948, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and the Heritage Ministry announced on Monday.

The Heritage Ministry said the ship was found at a depth of 503 meters, some 20 kilometers off Israel’s west coast.

The Altalena arrived in Israel with new immigrants, weapons to fight in the Independence War, and fighters from the Irgun, a paramilitary force that operated before the independence and was absorbed into the IDF.

Although it was technically dissolved after the declaration of independence in June 1948, the Irgun kept operating separately from the IDF until September of that year.

The Altalena Affair started after a disagreement between the then Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and the then Irgun leader Menachem Begin, who were fighting over how to divide the weapons inside the ship.

The discussion ended with the IDF shelling the Altalena, which destroyed the ship and left it heavily damaged and abandoned. During the fighting, 19 people were killed: 16 Irgun fighters and three IDF soldiers.

The ship was then abandoned in Frishman Beach in Tel Aviv, while it was towed 15 miles out and sank in 1949, in an effort to clear the area.

Discovery of Altalena is ‘defining moment,’ Heritage Minister says

“Tonight we are closing a historical circle on one of the most painful and formative events in the history of Israeli society,” Ben-Gvir said.

“We have been dealing with this issue secretly for many years, and today – the fruits of the intelligence and operational effort have borne exciting fruit for the sake of historical truth, the memory of the fallen, and unity with Israel.”

“The discovery of the Altalena is a defining moment for our national memory,” Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu stated. “We worked on this operation out of a deep-seated mission to reveal the historical truth and make the story of the ship’s heroes accessible to future generations.”

This post was originally published on here. 

An IDF officer was moderately injured in a friendly fire incident at the military engineering school in the Arava area, the military confirmed on Monday.

The officer was evacuated to receive medical attention at the hospital, and his family was notified.

The IDF stated that the military had launched an investigation into the event.

IDF soldier killed in friendly fire in Gaza Strip

In February, St.-Sgt. Ofri Yafe, 21, was killed in a friendly fire incident in the Gaza Strip, the IDF announced.

Yafe was a fighter in the Paratroopers Reconnaissance Unit and was originally from Kibbutz Megiddo in northern Israel.

According to media reports, Yafe was hit by friendly fire during a nighttime operation by paratrooper forces in the Khan Yunis area. He was reportedly critically wounded and was taken to receive medical treatment before he was pronounced dead.

This post was originally published on here. 

Dutch broadcaster AVROTROS will not participate in the 2027 Eurovision Song Contest, it announced on Monday, citing the ongoing conflict in Gaza and a “lack of neutrality” within the EBU.

According to AVROTROS Director-General Taco Zimmerman, “The Eurovision Song Contest was originally created to bring people and countries together. It is undeniable that international conflicts are increasingly affecting the Contest, undermining its neutral character.”

The broadcaster noted that it had returned the responsibility for Dutch participation in the Eurovision to the NPO, an umbrella organization which handles the Dutch public broadcasting system, and that the NPO would determine whether another state broadcaster would take over the role of broadcasting the Eurovision.

Dutch broadcaster demands clear framework for participation assessment

AVROTROS added that it needed a clear framework to assess which countries involved in military conflicts would be allowed to participate in the competition.

“As a public broadcaster, we remain committed to our values,” Zimmerman stated. “They guide us in everything we do, even when that means stepping away from an event that is very close to our hearts. That is painful as we would have very much liked to be part of the Contest again next year.”

AVROTROS was among the countries that withdrew from the 2026 Eurovision competition due to Israel’s participation, alongside Spain, Ireland, Iceland, and Slovenia.

This is a developing story.

This post was originally published on here. 

A Hungarian Gripen fighter jet crashed near the town of Szolnok on Monday, with the pilot successfully having ejected from the plane, Prime Minister Peter Magyar said in a Facebook post.

The cause of the accident remains unclear, and Magyar said there were no injuries or casualties. He added that no civilian infrastructure was harmed.

This is a developing story.

This post was originally published on here. 

A 14-year-old from central Israel is suspected of extorting two peers through threats, demanding money and clothing items in exchange for “protection,” police stated on Sunday.

According to the allegations, he contacted the other children via TikTok and threatened physical harm if they did not give him what he wanted.

Police received several complaints regarding the minor earlier this month, and an investigation by the Youth Division at the Tel Aviv South police station revealed that two minors had paid him portions of the requested amounts on several occasions; however, the suspect allegedly continued to demand further payments.

In one text message, he wrote to a victim: “Listen, today you only brought 700. Tomorrow bring me another 250 shekels, and we’ll settle this, and if anyone bothers you, call me.”

In another message, he wrote: “You don’t give the money to anyone else; you only give it to me.”

Money, clothes, and ‘protection’

According to the indictment, the demands were not limited to cash. The message exchanges also included demands for items of clothing.

“Just bring it tomorrow – I’ll give you the shirt, you bring 260 shekels, and that’s it. And if anyone bothers you, call me,” read one message. Later, the suspect allegedly wrote: “I’ll give you the shirt back; we don’t like it.”

The messages were discovered after the parents of one of the minors noticed the messages on their son’s phone. After reading the texts, they took him to the police station to file a complaint. During the investigation, detectives identified a second minor who was allegedly extorted in a similar manner.

On August 19, the 14-year-old was arrested and taken in for questioning. His remand was extended periodically by the Tel Aviv Juvenile Magistrate’s Court.

Today, the Youth Prosecutions Unit of the Tel Aviv District filed a prosecutor’s statement against the suspect, and an indictment is expected to be submitted against him in the coming days.

This post was originally published on here. 

Former minister and MK Maj.-Gen. (res.) Elazar Stern joined Gadi Eisenkot’s Yashar, the party announced on Monday.

“Elazar dedicated decades to Israel’s security and public service and has extensive experience as a minister, member of the Knesset, and IDF major-general. Over the years, he led a consistent struggle for universal service, the people’s army model and statesmanship, and worked to connect different parts of Israeli society from a Jewish, democratic and Zionist perspective,” Eisenkot stated.

Earlier this month, Stern announced his resignation from Yesh Atid, where he had been a member since 2015, and initially said he would resign from the Knesset entirely.

This is a developing story.

This post was originally published on here. 

While Amazon goes from strength to strength worldwide, the US giant has struggled to gain a foothold in Israel in terms of online retail sales. Shop Analytics data in June 2026 shows that the three Chinese platforms AliExpress, Temu and Shein accounted for about 75% of Israelis’ online orders, while Amazon only had a 6% market share.

E-commerce expert and ECommunity CEO Nir Zigdon says, “It’s interesting, because in other countries Amazon is a very significant player, and here it hasn’t been able to create the same traction.

And it’s not because it hasn’t tried. In April 2019, Amazon reached out to Israeli sellers and invited them to join the Local Delivery program.

The idea was to allow suppliers to present products to Israelis through Amazon and deliver them from inventory already in the country within five business days. But there was a critical difference from the model that Americans are familiar with: Amazon did not set up its own logistics center here, and sellers were required to handle inventory and delivery themselves.

Zigdon points out that Marketplace works well when it gives a supplier something that is difficult for them to achieve on their own – a huge target clientele, exceptional logistics, and trust that justifies a higher price.

‘The Israeli consumer is in a very small and crowded market’

But in a small market, when the same importer can sell on its own website, and the consumer can compare prices in seconds, any additional commission may become a disadvantage.

“The Israeli consumer is in a very small and crowded market,” explains Zigdon.

“If the same importer sells a product for NIS 1,000, and then on Marketplace has to add to the price because of the commissions, a problem arises. Maybe the customer is exposed to the product on Marketplace, but in the end they go to buy directly from the seller.”

Compared with Amazon’s partial experience in Israel, in recent years, it is AliExpress’s investment in a local presence that stands out. Parcel Home, a logistics arm that delivers packages from AliExpress, launched operations in Israel in 2024 and operated about 45 distribution points as of April 2026.

At the same time, AliExpress operates local warehouses that, in some cases, allow shipping times to be shortened to 7-10 days and has added the option to pre-select a preferred pickup point near your home.

“The thing that hinders e-commerce the most is presence in the field and advertising,” says Zigdon. “This is perhaps one of the reasons why it doesn’t work for Amazon in Israel like it does in other markets.”

Local marketplace trial failed

In December 2023, the marketplace activities of Azrieli, Melisron, and Shufersal were closed within a week.

Azrieli had invested in Azrieli.com over the years and recorded losses of about NIS 300 million. Melisron’s investment in Groo’s activity reached about NIS 100 million. Industry sources told “Globes” at the time that to maintain a trading arena, large investments are needed in traffic, advertising, customer service, technology, and logistics, and in the local market it is difficult to reach a turnover that justifies all this.

A marketplace is not just a site with many products. It is a business of economies of scale. More buyers bring more sellers, more sellers bring more selection, and selection brings more buyers, and then you can charge the sellers commissions, logistics services, and advertising.

In the US, Amazon is deep into this cycle. In Israel, anyone starting from scratch must finance it.

The KSP chain provides an interesting example. In June, it was the leading Israeli site in the Shop Analytics index, with 18% of orders on the top 20 local sites.

According to Zigdon, “KSP is very successful even though it is a retailer that buys and sells. It has become a multi-brand, and that is something that Israelis love. It also does a lot of parallel imports to really break the prices. Maybe the Israeli market has no place for a general marketplace in the classic model.”

This conclusion also ties in with Shop Analytics data. In May, the three leading Israeli sites were KSP, SuperPharm, and Shufersal – three players that started with specific retail operations and only later expanded their offerings to other categories.

This post was originally published on here. 

Hamas remains the main obstacle to further improving the situation in the Gaza Strip, a senior official from the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) said on Sunday.

“The organization interferes with humanitarian operations, exploits civilian infrastructure, influences distribution mechanisms, and continues its repeated attempts to smuggle prohibited items under the guise of humanitarian aid,” the official said.

Since the beginning of the ceasefire in the Gaza Strip in October 2025, the IDF has continued to facilitate the entry of humanitarian aid and goods into the Gaza Strip, in coordination with the UN and international organizations.

According to a COGAT analysis, the volume of aid entering the Gaza Strip significantly exceeds humanitarian needs as defined by UN agencies, international organizations, and assessments conducted throughout the war.

The COGAT official clarified that despite the analysis, “Israel will continue to work together with its international partners to improve the humanitarian response, while preventing its exploitation by Hamas at the expense of the residents of the Gaza Strip.”

According to the data, more than two million tons of food have entered the Gaza Strip since the beginning of the ceasefire, including meat, poultry, eggs, dairy products, fruits, and vegetables.

The data also shows that around 600 trucks enter the Gaza Strip every day, with 70% to 80% carrying food, while food prices have dropped by about 72%.

Currently, 41 bakeries run by international organizations operate in the Gaza Strip, producing more than three million pita breads per day, in addition to dozens of local bakeries.

Sixty liters of water per person enter Gaza each day, COGAT data shows

The data also showed that, on average, more than 70,000 cubic meters of water are supplied to the Gaza Strip each day, equivalent to more than 60 liters per person per day.

Around 250 water trucks operate daily, serving approximately 2,800 distribution points throughout the Gaza Strip.

In addition, more than 74,000 tons of hygiene and sanitation supplies have entered the Gaza Strip, alongside garbage disposal equipment and water purification tablets.

As noted, four water pipelines are currently operational in the Gaza Strip, three of which supply water from Israel. They operate alongside desalination facilities and dozens of water wells throughout the Strip.

Advanced medical equipment transferred to Gaza Strip

More than 21,000 tons of medical equipment have entered the Gaza Strip since the beginning of the ceasefire. According to COGAT data, hospital bed occupancy has increased by more than 50%. In coordination with international organizations, advanced medical equipment has been transferred into the Strip, including X-ray machines, generators, and oxygen tanks.

In northern Gaza, eight permanent hospitals, four field hospitals, and four medical centers are operating regularly. In the southern Gaza Strip, two permanent hospitals and eight field hospitals are operating.

This post was originally published on here. 

A seven-year-old girl received a life-saving liver transplant last month from a fallen IDF soldier, Sergeant First Class Shahar Gamla, who was killed while deployed in Lebanon.

Gamla was critically wounded by an explosive drone in Lebanon and passed away from his injuries in June. 

After his death, Gamla’s family made the decision to donate his organs, ultimately saving a total of six lives, including that of young Bel Finkelstein, who was born with a rare genetic congenital syndrome and had been waiting desperately on the organ transplant list for six months.

The procedure took place at Rambam Health Care Campus, where a lobe of Shahar’s liver was harvested and immediately transported to Clalit-Schneider. There, a surgical team performed an intensive, hours-long transplant operation. 

Following the successful surgery, Finkelstein was transferred to the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit, where she received care until her recent discharge home. 

‘A noble and extraordinary act’

Before leaving the hospital, Gamla’s family visited both her and her parents at Clalit-Schneider.

“I have no words to adequately thank Shahar’s precious parents, who, from the absolute depths of their bereavement, chose to grant life to my daughter,” said Yana, Bel Finkelstein’s mother. “It is such a noble and extraordinary act.”

Dr. Michael Gurevich, Head of the Liver Transplantation Unit at Clalit-Schneider, commented, “This is an extraordinarily complex and difficult emotional situation, even for us in the operating room. It is hard to put into words the thoughts and feelings during an event like this.”

“I am profoundly grateful to the family for their noble decision to donate his organs. The realization that this soldier saved lives both in his duty and in his passing weighs heavily on our hearts. We are deeply thankful for the privilege granted to us to save human lives.” He added.

This post was originally published on here. 

Central Elections Committee chairman and Supreme Court Deputy President Noam Sohlberg on Monday morning rejected a petition seeking to prevent National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir from attending and speaking at a police event over concerns that his participation would amount to prohibited election campaigning.

The event at hand is an appreciation event for Israel Police volunteers and members of police emergency squads. It is officially planned to mark 50 years of the police volunteer system. 

Attorney-General Gali Baharav-Miara supported the petition’s request to bar Ben-Gvir from the event, arguing that his participation, even without speaking, raised a serious concern that the police-funded event would effectively become election campaigning.

Because of the tight timetable, Sohlberg issued the decision without his full reasoning, which he said would be published separately as soon as possible.

The petition was filed by NGO Voting for Israel, and sought, primarily, to prevent the minister from speaking or participating in the evening. Alternatively, it asked Sohlberg to prevent the event from taking place altogether. 

Sworn affidavit not to engage in campaigning during the event

Ben-Gvir committed in a sworn affidavit not to engage in election campaigning during the event, Sohlberg noted.

“It goes without saying that no one is permitted to engage in election campaigning – verbally, visually or in any other manner – at this event,” Sohlberg wrote.

Sohlberg also recommended that the speeches be provided to legal advisers for review ahead of the event, although he did not make that a condition of Ben-Gvir’s participation.

This post was originally published on here. 

Since October 7, 2023, Israel has been rapidly replacing its Palestinian labor force with foreign workers. 250,000 foreign workers are already in Israel, and their number is set to rise to 330,000.

Many unseen challenges lie behind these numbers, the most substantial of which is the question of the housing that employers are obligated to provide for their foreign employees.

The law stipulates a detailed definition of suitable housing, and some companies are renting entire buildings and converting them into homes. But evidence of crowding and poor conditions is increasing, and the government’s solutions are mostly on paper.

“It’s like an Israeli going on relocation,” says Yoki Moshonov, CEO of Ovedly, a company that provides services to foreign workers in Israel.

“Here they get five or six times the average salary than in their countries of origin. They come to Israel for just one purpose – to earn money for their families. They send 80% of their salary to their families, make no trouble, and are regarded as excellent workers. The employers I work with tell me, ‘They don’t take sick leave, don’t smoke, get to work on time – what did you bring me? I never imagined they would be so good.'”

Highest number of foreign workers in Israel, ever

Israel now has 250,000 legal and illegal foreign workers, the highest number ever, according to Israel Population and Immigration Authority figures, with more to come.

After October 7, 2023, Israel decided to close its border crossings in Judea and Samaria with the Palestinian Authority and barred the entry of Palestinian workers into Israel.

An estimated 150,000 Palestinian workers were regularly entering Israel before the war, of whom 92,000 were working legally, many of them in the construction industry.

Only 20,000 Palestinian workers currently work in Israel, primarily in essential enterprises and communities beyond the Green Line.

The situation required action to fill the gap. Israel began importing unprecedented numbers of foreign workers – initially via bilateral agreements (agreements between Israel and other countries for importing labor to Israel) and later also “private imports” directly from foreign countries through authorized companies.

In May 2024, the government for the first time established a new ceiling for foreign workers in the Israeli economy – 3.3% of the population in Israel. This currently amounts to just over 330,000 foreign workers.

Keep in mind that the stay of every foreign worker in Israel lasts for five years and three months, and that many of them have arrived only in the past two years.

To this should be added the remaining unused quota and the plan to import 50,000 more foreign workers for the retail and services sector spearheaded by Economy and Industry Minister Nir Barkat.

Population and Immigration Authority figures show that 26.5% of all current legal and illegal foreign workers are from Thailand, 21.7% from India, 11.8% from China, 11.2% from Sri Lanka, 9.5% from the Philippines, 8.9% from Uzbekistan, 4.4% from Moldova, and 1.7% from Nepal.

According to every indication, the current government has no plans to bring Palestinian workers back to Israel, certainly not in the previous numbers, and intends to rely mainly on foreign workers from other countries.

In contrast to the Palestinian workers, however (many of whom return home every day), the foreign workers come to Israel for a prolonged stay and require the same services as anyone else: proper housing, health and welfare services, etc.

Since the state is bringing these workers, it is also responsible for their living conditions, above all housing.

The current situation, including Israel’s severe housing crisis, entails a trap. How can Israel find real estate solutions and provide services for all the 330,000 workers expected to arrive?

’15 People sleeping in two beds’

The situation is already difficult.

The foreign workers regulations state explicitly what constitutes appropriate housing for a foreign worker: a sleeping area of at least four square meters per worker, bedding, a separate wardrobe or separate compartment in a wardrobe with a lock, electrical heating and ventilation, kitchenware and tableware, a refrigerator, bathrooms and showers, water, electricity, laundry arrangements, and fire extinguishers.

Every employer has the legal obligation to provide such accommodation to every foreign worker during the entire period of their employment and for seven days after their employment ends.

These requirements, however, are not always observed in practice. “In our inspections, we find violations in every single industry,” says Population and Immigration Authority Investigation and Intelligence Department senior head Shimon Zigzag.

“There are extreme cases, for example, workers housed in a cold storage room, housing on a waste site, workers who light a fire in the house to keep warm because they have no electricity or gas, and workers living without authorization on a construction site or on the premises of an enterprise.”

Zigzag states that unfortunately, he has seen no improvement in the situation over the years. “I want to stress that most employers follow the rules, but those who do not fail to realize that housing is a very serious matter. In some cases, the employers are completely preoccupied with preventing the imminent collapse of their businesses and dealing with debts and loans. The last thing that interests them is a broken door handle or a malfunctioning toilet. These things gradually accumulate and become unbearable.”

The workers themselves describe tough conditions.

“My experience in Israel is very different from what I expected. There is often a wide gap between what was promised and the actual conditions,” a foreign worker from India says.

“The promises about employment and housing were not kept. The bathroom in my current living quarters doesn’t even have a door. Heavy trucks unload soil nearby, and dust enters the cooking area, which does not even have a water faucet. Four people are living in a corridor-like room that has little ventilation. I’m not asking for luxury housing, but making the existing buildings more livable wouldn’t even cost very much.”

Another worker says, “We sleep in two double beds placed in a small room. There are 12-15 people in the apartment, which has two bathrooms. The main problem is the frequent replacement of the rooms because the work is not continuous.

“They ask us to change apartments every week. It’s hard for me to bear this again and again, and I get no clear answers when I complain. Anyone who complains about anything either gets no more work or his room is changed frequently.”

Complaining about the difficulty in combating these problems with the currently available means, Zigzag says, “The rate at which the foreign workers are arriving is unprecedented, but it is all taking place on the basis of the same number of positions in the Foreign Workers Administration and before that in the Enforcement Administration.

“This number has not increased in accordance with the rise in the number of foreign workers, even though the cabinet decision included the providing additional positions. We’ve been talking about increasing the number of positions for two and a half years already. As of now, the number is still the same: 160 or 170 positions. If more people were working here, we could accomplish more.”

Yonatan Primo, CEO of the Central Bureau for Foreign Workers (a private company), claims that the situation is not so bad. “Relatively speaking, Israel is a very good country for foreign workers. The laws do a good job of defining the obligation to provide suitable housing. I’ve met foreign workers who tell me that their home in their country of origin isn’t as good as the apartment that they were given here.”

‘The market is becoming large and more complex’

Private companies are making strenuous efforts to overcome the housing problem to keep the workers in Israel. Explaining his modus operandi, Primo says, “The employer maps where he needs foreign workers and how many of them in each branch. We get the table and start searching for housing for these workers according to it, so that it will be ready for them even before they arrive in Israel.”

“We know ahead of time from which country the workers are coming, so we do our best to have workers of the same origin working at the same place in each apartment,” Primo adds.

“It’s important that they both have a culture in common and be doing the same kind of work. The law doesn’t require anything like this, but we discovered over time that it is very significant. When the workers don’t speak the same language, roommates have misunderstandings. If they don’t work in the same place, the differences in pay can create friction.”

Nathalie (Shimon) Weinstein, CEO at personnel corporation LDM Global Hire, which employs foreign workers in the construction and renovation sector, adds, “Every worker is a complete world. As soon as he reaches Israel, he must be given a few days of grace to get used to the surroundings, people, food, and culture. Arriving in a foreign country isn’t easy.”

Where housing is concerned, Weinstein says, “Living quarters are selected according to one main criterion – where the people are going to work. We strive to house them as close as possible to their workplace.”

“Proximity to the workplace is the really important thing,” Moshonov adds, “particularly in retail and services. Some restaurants are open until three in the morning. They work on weekends when there’s no public transport. The living quarters have to be 15 or 20 minutes at the most by bicycle from the workplace, or at least in an area with reasonable public transport.”

Eliran Aharonov, CEO of Living, which provides housing solutions for foreign workers, says that the facilities operated by his company are usually hostels or residential buildings converted to housing for foreign workers.

“A single site with several apartments together provides a concentrated housing solution. In many cases, large companies outline their needs in advance: how many workers there will be, what the apartments will look like, what should be in each apartment, and what services are needed for the compound. We adapt the solution to these needs while complying with the standards,” he explains.

“We have all sorts of housing options,” Moshonov says.

“For example, there’s a building that we’re renting in Petah Tikva with almost 200 foreign workers – a converted retirement home. The character of the rooms and the general structure are very suitable for us. There’s a central kitchen, a dining room, firefighting approvals, emergency exits, etc.

“Finding such buildings is a real challenge. In other cases, we house the workers in ordinary apartments. We have a whole array of operations workers searching for apartments through both real estate agents and search platforms like Yad2.”

“For many years, this sector was very widely dispersed,” Moshonov adds. “Searching for workers, apartments, services, and suppliers – it was all done by telephone, WhatsApp groups, bulletin boards, and databases and needed a lot of time and resources.

“This market is becoming larger and more complex – these methods are no longer any good. You need infrastructure to connect the worker, the employer, the personnel agency, the apartment, and the services that they need. There are private ventures like this now, such as the Baclick portal, which concentrates all of the necessary services in one place.”

The solutions being furthered by the state – and their status

While efforts are being made in the field to provide private solutions, it appears that the state is dragging its feet in the creation of the legal and physical infrastructure. There are plenty of ideas and plans, but as of now, no real major solution is materializing.

In view of the large number of foreign workers who had entered, with more expected to follow, a special directors-general committee on the subject of foreign workers in Israel was formed in May 2024.

This committee, however, is not dealing with the subject of housing for foreign workers; it is setting quotas, dictating sectors in which foreign workers can be employed, etc. As far as the state is concerned, providing housing for foreign workers is the employer’s responsibility.

Meanwhile, the Construction and Housing Ministry is working on preparations for housing foreign workers in existing buildings with an emphasis on rental housing.

The Israel Land Authority is planning a survey to locate relevant sites for temporary housing for foreign workers. The Planning Administration is also preparing a planning mechanism that will provide a temporary solution for the housing needs of future foreign workers. As of now, however, these are just ideas on paper.

The Knesset has discussed an initiative being promoted by Economy and Industry Ministry Director General Moti Gamish for the establishment of giant residential complexes for foreign workers that can house several thousand workers. Gamish also proposed a pilot program for constructing one such complex for 5,000 foreign workers in the Ne’ot Hovav Industrial Zone.

No real progress has been achieved since the last debate on the subject in April 2026, however. With the elections now approaching, it appears that legislation on the matter will have to wait for the next Knesset.

Aharonov, one of the sponsors of the idea, emphasizes that there will be no alternative to the construction of large residential complexes for foreign workers. “As the number of foreign workers in Israel rises, they must be provided with organized and well-defined housing solutions. The state will have to play a role in promoting and building such complexes,” he says.

Moshonov explains that despite all the ideas, legislation in this area is far in the future. “Even if a law had been passed, it would be put into action only three or four years from now at best. By then, the market will be swamped with foreign workers, and as of now, there is no solution from any government agency involved in this. The state enacted laws and regulations to make up for the shortage in personnel, but no proper housing solution has been devised. The state refrained from investing resources in such a solution in the past and is still doing so today.”

One measure that the government has approved, is in the framework of National Outline Plan 35, which defines principles for construction, development, and preservation in Israel, is the regulation of housing for foreign workers in agriculture.

Under Amendment 5A of the Outline Plan, housing for foreign workers in the sector “should be part of the community and social fabric.” This amendment is designed to expedite the construction of such complexes for foreign workers – but so far only in the agricultural sector.

What about accompanying services for the foreign workers? Every worker arriving in Israel is entitled to health insurance in case of medical need, but the Health Ministry says that no special preparations in the health system for absorbing the masses of foreign workers whose arrival was initiated by the state are necessary.

“According to the information in the hands of the Health Ministry, there is no indication that the employment of foreign workers in Israel is generating an exceptional burden on the health and welfare system,” a Health Ministry spokeswoman stated.

“It should be kept in mind that there are already hundreds of thousands of foreign workers in Israel. By law, an employer of a foreign worker is obligated to arrange medical health insurance for him during the period of his employment before the worker’s arrival in Israel is approved.”

This post was originally published on here. 

The US Southern Command said on Monday it carried out a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel operating in the eastern Pacific, killing two on board.

“Confirmed intelligence revealed the vessel’s active involvement in narco-trafficking. The operation killed two narco-terrorists,” SOUTHCOM said in a post on X/Twitter.

“This operation is a clear and decisive reminder that SOUTHCOM is taking the fight directly to the cartels.”

On August 23, under #SOUTHCOM Commander Gen. Francis L. Donovan’s direction, Joint Task Force Western Hemisphere executed a lethal kinetic strike on a low-profile vessel… pic.twitter.com/aIw1qn36gd

— U.S. Southern Command (@Southcom) August 24, 2026

This is a developing story.

This post was originally published on here. 

Suspected insurgents set fire to government buildings, shops, cars and utility poles in more than 70 locations across four of Thailand’s southernmost provinces over the weekend, injuring at least three people in a coordinated series of arson attacks, authorities said.

More than 7,800 people have been killed in provinces bordering Malaysia since 2004, when the latest round of a long-running insurgency led mainly by the Barisan Revolusi Nasional (BRN) flared.

Here are more details provided by Thai officials:

There were at least 78 incidents across four provinces: 40 in Narathiwat, 21 in Yala, 15 in Pattani and two in Songkhla. No group has claimed responsibility.

Most of the attacks took place on Saturday evening across Pattani, Yala, Narathiwat and parts of Songkhla, with some more on Sunday.

Ethnic tensions as Muslims, Malay seek independence via insurgency

A rail line was hit by explosives in Narathiwat, prompting the suspension of services in that section.

Authorities have imposed a curfew in Narathiwat, and at a meeting on Sunday, Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul asked the security forces to ensure public safety.

Thailand’s predominantly Muslim and ethnic Malay deep south has faced a decades-long insurgency seeking greater autonomy or independence.

The region was part of the independent Malay sultanate of Patani before its incorporation into Thailand was formalized in 1909.

Attacks come as Thailand attempts peace talks with separatist group

The attacks come as Thailand seeks to revive peace talks with the BRN, the main separatist group fighting in the region.
Chief negotiator Thanut Suvarnananda told Reuters this month that Bangkok wanted to move beyond trading concessions for reduced violence and address political grievances, including governance.

Malaysian-facilitated peace talks have repeatedly stalled since they began in 2013.

Lieutenant General Norathip Poinok, who commands the Thai army in the southern region, told local media on Monday that authorities had received intelligence nearly two months ago warning of attacks on government buildings, shops and power infrastructure.

Norathip described the attacks as retaliation for crackdowns on insurgents and illicit businesses, including drug and contraband trafficking, that fund militant groups.

This post was originally published on here. 

Eight Palestinian residents of the West Bank were found illegally living in an apartment in Beersheba during a police enforcement operation last week, prompting Southern District Police Commander Haim Bublil to sign an administrative order closing the property for 30 days.

On August 16, Beersheba police officers arrived at the divided apartment as part of an enforcement operation and found the eight residents, who had been staying in Israel without permits, inside.

Police arrested the residents and transported them to the Beersheba police station for questioning. 

Attempted illegal crossing at Tarkumiya

Earlier this month, police uncovered another case involving individuals without permits when five Palestinian residents were found inside a vehicle that had been stopped for inspection at the Tarkumiya Crossing. 

The vehicle was halted due to the suspicions of the officers stationed at the crossing. 

Authorities reportedly discovered two of the suspects hiding in the trunk of the vehicle. The driver, a resident of Petah Tikva in his 30s, was arrested on suspicion of transporting them while his driver’s license was suspended. 

According to police, the five individuals were attempting to enter Israel without the necessary permits. 

Police arrested both the driver and the five residents and took them in for further questioning at the police station.

This post was originally published on here. 

Miki Peled, the legendary producer and founder of the Festigal show, passed away at the age of 87, it was announced Monday morning.

Peled, considered one of the pillars of Israel’s entertainment industry, left behind a remarkable legacy that shaped the childhoods of generations across the country.

Peled was born in Romania in 1939 and immigrated to Israel with his family in 1948. In 1981, he founded and produced the first Festigal show in Haifa, which over the years became a leading cultural institution and an undisputed symbol of the Hanukkah holiday in Israel.

Alongside Festigal, he led dozens of major performances and cultural events throughout his decades of activity, working with many of Israel’s leading artists and creators, an effort that earned him a lifetime achievement award from ACUM, Israel’s music and copyright organization.

Friends, partners, and colleagues described him as a mentor and visionary with a big heart, who knew how to identify talent at the beginning of artists’ careers and provide them with a real platform and opportunity to break through.

‘A person who knew how to dream’

Yaron Peled, his son and creative partner, said: “Miki was much more than a producer. He was a person who knew how to dream, identify talent, give people an opportunity, and above all make people believe they could.”

Peled is survived by his wife Tami, children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, alongside generations of artists and performers who viewed him as a guiding figure.

His funeral will take place Tuesday at 4:00 p.m. at Kiryat Shaul Cemetery in Tel Aviv, where family members, those who cherished his memory, and leading figures from Israel’s cultural world will gather to bid him farewell.

This post was originally published on here. 

Iranian state-affiliated TV Channel 3 has released a video threatening US President Donald Trump‘s son, Barron Trump, detailing specific surveillance against him and offering a $10 million reward for his death, Iran International reported on Monday.

The Jerusalem Post could not locate the original video on Channel 3’s platforms.

The video, however, was linked on X/Twitter by anti-regime London-based journalist Niyak Ghorbani, and showed various locations Barron had been at specific points in the past, including Trump Tower and his school campus.

At all these locations, the video highlighted elements of Barron’s security detail, including claiming that Secret Service agents disguised themselves as students in his school in order to blend into his surroundings.

The video also claimed to have found Barron’s online Xbox, Discord, and FIFA video game accounts, as well as those of his classmates, with two of them being named as Liam Carter and Bo Louden.

While Liam Carter appeared to be a fake profile, Louden, a conservative media influencer, is a known friend of Barron’s. 

“Millions of FIFA players against Trump are waiting to receive a ten-million-dollar prize from us,” the video concluded.

Previous video threatened US First Lady Melania Trump

The video was styled similarly to a previous video put out by the regime threatening US First Lady Melania Trump last month.

That video called on “freedom fighters” to target the shops the first lady frequents. It claimed to share “information from several anonymous security networks,” showing schemes of how Melania’s security operates and the places that she usually goes in New York.

It also claimed that the first lady’s weakness is “her love for fashion,” saying that she frequents top New York fashion stores that could be attacked by “freedom fighters.”

The video ended saying: “This is just the beginning! Barron Trump, wait for us!”

This post was originally published on here. 

Waking up to see the golden walls of the Old City of Jerusalem is something the Jewish people have dreamed about for generations. Luckily, I was fortunate enough to be able to do so at the City of David guest resorts last week. 

The resort, which is steps away from the Western Wall, is directly next to the City of David archaeological site. However, City of David has now expanded its reach in the area to offer more than just fascinating historical tours. There is a hanging bridge, plenty of nearby parks, a light show, and Israel’s longest zip line. 

I was able to go zip lining with a companion of mine, and found it to be magical. We began at Trotner Park, and walked along the Armon Hanatziv Promenade until we reached Mitzpe David. 

We were fitted for harnesses and helmets, and waited a few short minutes before our ride of a lifetime. 

Soaring above the pine forests, you can see the entire Jerusalem skyline laid out at your feet. If I’d kept my phone on me, I certainly would have taken pictures of the breathtaking views. 

I’d recommend the Mitzpe David Zip Line for families with children with boundless energy, or any thrill-seekers in general. It was 731 meters of pure fun!

Facilities were well maintained, comfortable, and spacious

After all of that adventure, my companion and I were excited to take a breather in our room at the City of David Guest Resort. 

The overall facilities were well maintained, comfortable, and spacious. It’s perfect for families with young children or couples who just want a little bit of extra space.

My room was great. I found that it was tastefully decorated with touches that felt biblical and modern at the same time. I also enjoyed the pristine bathroom, which featured a spacious shower with excellent water pressure. The room also had comfortable furniture, a mini fridge, tea and coffee service, and a great view of the courtyard and the ancient walls beyond. 

The gated courtyard in the facility was gorgeous and featured well-maintained landscaping. I thought that the trailing grapevines and the fig and olive trees scattered around the property gave it an authentic touch. The courtyard made me feel like I could slow down, sit back, and just enjoy all of the beauty the Holy City has to offer.

After a bit of a rest, my companion and I enjoyed a short bus ride to dinner and drinks near Shuk Mahaneh Yehuda. We wandered around the area, trying several places that were new to us, and enjoyed being tourists in our own country. 

After all of that, I ended my day of adventures in Jerusalem in a comfortable, spacious bed with luxurious sheets.

The premier location in terms of Old City access

It cannot be emphasized enough that this resort does one thing better than any other hotel in Jerusalem: its access to the Old City.

Not only is the resort directly next to the archaeological wonders of the ancient City of David tour, but it is also just minutes away from the Dung Gate entrance to the Old City.

The next morning, my companion and I were able to start our second day of adventures without the hassle of navigating public transportation.

We got an early start to the day and left the resort at around 10 a.m., just as several tour groups began flooding into the property to see the archaeological sites. The resort’s proximity to the heart of Jerusalem let us take our time to walk through the Old City unhurried, happy, and well-rested. 

If you’re looking to take a step back in time while still enjoying all of the comforts of the modern day, the City of David Guest Resort is the place for you.■

The writer was a guest of the hotel.

This post was originally published on here. 

As the Fab Four put it over six decades ago now, money can’t buy you love. The Mop Tops from Liverpool got that right. Love is, as we all know, the great sustainer in life.

Even so, there is that incisive observation by 20th-century British-American Pulitzer Prize laureate poet W.H. Auden: “Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.”

Add to that a reference made by Rachel Verliebter to Hungarian-born ethnographer, historian, anthropologist, and rabbi Raphael Patai, who, she says, “notes that among the primordial elements, none stirs the human imagination as deeply as the liquid element – water.”

Verliebter proffered that nod to Patai in her curator textual accompaniment to the “Sea of Wisdom: Woman and Water” art exhibition, which recently ran at the Schocken Library on Balfour Street, right opposite the sprawling – long unused – official residence of our prime minister.

She should know. Verliebter clearly has all the requisite academic credentials for making an informed statement about the connection between spiritual spheres and H2O. And let us not forget that still waters generally run deep.

“My aim, in my role as curator, was to devise an exhibition that reflects my doctoral research work, which is about the phenomenology of water in Jewish mysticism,” she informs me.

That sounds like heady stuff, and fertile ground for displaying works that feed off multiple, expansive, and rich strata of thought, aesthetics, and creative intent.

No limits to longing

The exhibits resonated the breadth of aspects of the confluence between the life-giving liquid and spiritual realms and, in particular, how water features in Kabbalistic thought.

Altea Steinherz took a somewhat left-field line in plumbing the philosophical theme, and strayed into exploratory chemical territory.

“This is the YInMn blue that was developed, by accident, by Oregon State University,” she tells me, as we view one of her contributions to the show, an eye-catching watercolor called The Limits of Your Longing.

The shade in question is the first new inorganic blue pigment found in over 200 years, the result of heating yttrium, indium, and manganese oxides – the name of the hue derives from the chemical component appellative openers – to around 1,200 °C.

The discovery spoke to Steinherz and fired her imagination.

“I read about this, and it just blew my mind,” she exclaims. “I thought I must get hold of this blue, because I want to paint shamayim hadashim [new heavens].”

In Kabbalistic and Jewish philosophical circles, that relates to the continuous, ongoing renewal of reality by the Divine rather than simply forgetting or erasing past suffering.

Suffering, in that line of thought, is understood as a temporary deficiency or a correction (tikkun) of our desire to receive, which transforms into absolute pleasure once aligned with the Creator.

Steinherz was keen to incorporate that in her oeuvre and spread the good word. “There is this color that is going to make us forget our suffering. The verse says when there is the creation of the new heavens, we’re going to forget all the suffering.”

That is as fine a concept as one could possibly latch on to, particularly in these post-Oct. 7, post-COVID-19, and – dipping into a more distant, yet ever-present, cataclysmic passage of time – post-Holocaust times.

The Limits of Your Longing makes for arresting and compelling viewing. The wavy ellipsoid seems to shimmer and merrily oscillate as it sort of hangs there, in a white void, pregnant with possibilities and brimming with latent promise.

The shape came from an illustrious source.

“In the Vatican loggias there are the Raphael paintings,” Steinherz cites from one of the world’s most celebrated sets of works. “There’s the figure of the creation of the heaven. There’s a floating thing behind the head, so I took the form from there to depict this.”

Then there’s the unique hue, which opened up exciting opportunities for visual probing.

“In the history of art, blue is the great white whale, the great blue whale,” she laughs. “There is almost no blue. This is a big deal in the art world, and I am very excited about it.”

New room for maneuver

The Limits of Your Longing is well named, and suggests an paradoxical field of exploration and personal growth.

“There’s the infinity [suggested by the form of the painting’s motif] and all of the concepts that I am trying to represent, about desire,” Steinherz expounds.

There are existential creative dynamics afoot, which anyone who has ever been to the seaside will have witnessed. “Essentially there is the spiritual idea of the separation of the waters and this continuous moving up and down of the waves, which we see when we go to the beach.”

Sublimation is the name of the game. “There are the lower waters trying to move up [heavenward].” That suggests a striving for reunification with celestial fluids, after being split during Creation.

It also makes perfect sense if we consider that the Hebrew word for heaven or sky incorporates the word for water – “mayim” as part of “shamayim.”

The curator brings us back to the core theme of the exhibition, and the raison d’être behind the showing.

“What is the history of water, in a Jewish context?” she poses. “We wanted to home in on the myths from the Kabbalah, and to imbue them with a visual form.”

Verliebter meanders betwixt elements and physical entities, citing a leading man of pertinent thought.

“There was a French phenomenologist called Gaston Bachelard who wrote a wonderful book called The Psychoanalysis of Fire, and also about the appearance of water in dreams, in the 1940s and 1950s. He talks about reverie, dreams, related to material substance.”

Water water everywhere

The leapfrogging between the tactile and the abstract continues.

“He says there is imagination pertaining to form, and material imagination. He says philosophy always related to imagination more in the context of form.

“He looks towards poetry and literature, primarily [books like 19th-century Herman Melville’s epic novel] Moby Dick and [Melville’s contemporary American poet-author] Edgar Alan Poe, and how they write about water. And there is Shakespeare and [his depiction of] Ophelia [in Hamlet, who drowns]. These dream personifications are always very sad. Water is the sad element.”

“Sea of Wisdom: Woman and Water” was designed to take us through some of those philosophical and corporeal tracts. The accent is very much on the primary – in a definitive and temporal sense – source of human life.

“I tried to craft a visual walk through the material imagination in Jewish mysticism,” Verliebter sets out her exhibition’s, and, hence, the visitor’s experiential, line of thought.

I raise the point that imagination and material occupy polar existential positions.

“Bachelard fuses them and says that our original imagination is connected to milk, mother’s milk, and our nutrition,” she says. The contrasting-complementary plot thickens. “Our nutrition comes from water, and milk, whereby our unconscious imagination is initially fueled by material.

“Bachelard contemplates Western poetry.” That was a curatorial launching pad. “I took that thinking into Jewish mysticism.”

Creating from something, not nothing

The exhibition pries into the ethereal and hidden biblical layers.

“There is great mystery in Genesis,” Verliebter contends as we view Giordana Musani’s fetching richly hued rotund Sacred Flow acrylic painting.

“Rashi studies that mystery in a striking way. He writes about God hovering above the water. That means, according to Rashi, that the water was not [divinely] created. That is a scandal. Water is evidence that the Creation was not about creating something from nothing. It was bringing something from something that already existed, from something material. That means that, from Genesis, water is primordial matter.” That is quite a revelation, and serves to underscore the centrality of water as a source of all life, and the universal relevance of the exhibition theme.

Iris Ahuva Pykovski addresses the oxymoronic cross-elemental admixture in her A Fiery Stream oil painting. “This work, and the others in this part of the exhibition, dream the moment before the division [between water and land in the Creation],” Verliebter explains.

Any separation definitively implies a sense of longing that goes with distancing from a previously unified body. The aforementioned aquatic sadness returns to the fore. “Kabbalah talks about this being the birth of longing. There it says that the upper and lower waters separate with weeping. This spawns tears, cosmic tears, tears of the sea.”

That doesn’t sound too gentle or user-friendly. It suggests that violence and force were integral to the Creation.

Verliebter is tuned into that, and points to a highly evocative bronze statuette by British-born Daniel Baharier called After the Flood.

“This is influenced by [20th-century Dada-surrealist German painter-sculptor] Max Ernst. It portrays the destruction, the [biblical] flood, the attack on the matrix, the attack on women on Oct. 7. This is the young girl who lost her hands, whom the paramedic couldn’t save.”

The Baharier sculpture spells out the corporeal and emotional scene in aesthetic words of one syllable. He crafted a handless figure in a stark, supplicatory pose which grabs you by the heartstrings and duly yanks.

“Daniel aimed to commemorate the girl and the attempt to save her,” Verliebter explains.

Violence at the source

There are broad pertinent implications.

“I placed this work here, in the context of the weeping waters of Creation in Jewish mysticism, not only because of the primeval violence there [on Oct. 7]. In the [Jewish] myth it is something that is happening now; it is something that happened at the Nova festival. It is something that takes place in the constant violence against women and mothers. I positioned it there because there is violence at the source.”

“Sea of Wisdom: Woman and Water” is not only about wrongdoing and nefarious acts committed against women across the ages. Ester Schneider’s Calathea Ornata – aka Praying Plant – is a gorgeous watercolor creation on kozo paper held up by a skeletal wooden frame.

“I put it in the Bauhaus window bay so the light could shine through it,” Verliebter explains someone superfluously, as we observe the foliage and floral arrangement against the late morning solar-illuminated backdrop.

Jewish mysticism emerges, once again, through the alluring, clearly delineated shapes. “You can see the very feminine forms here. You can see ovaries and breasts. For me, this is reminiscent of the American modernist Georgia O’Keeffe.”

That is not hard to get. Femininity pervades O’Keeffe’s vast eclectic oeuvre, and her use of color and form was widely interpreted as metaphorical representations of the female body. Interestingly, O’Keeffe, who died in 1986 at the age of 98, publicly rejected that notion.

Going with the light flow

We return to biblical narratives and mystical climes, as Verliebter references the river that flowed through the Garden of Eden.

“According to the Book of Zohar, this nahar (river) in Aramaic is called nahara, which is very similar to nehora – light.” The latter term, in Jewish mysticism contexts, often implies spiritual clarity, too. Hence the curatorial logistics. “The light that comes in through this Bauhaus niche lights the work up, the nahara.” Neat.

In pictorial terms Pykovski’s A Mist Rose Up oil painting offers the most succinct portrayal of the exhibition narrative – women, creation, and female sagacity.

“This connects with the amniotic fluids and individualization – the female, maternal ability of self-birth, or rebirth.”

There is a psychological flow to the work, which features a female figure suspended in thin air, back arched and arm outstretched in a heavenward beseeching gesture, with towering mountains reflected in the crystal clear waters of a lake. There is a doe on one bank, and an echo of the woman’s acrobatic posture appears in red on a rock below her, possibly a fiery complement to the largely aquatic surroundings.

“The Doe of the Dawn is connected to femininity and the childbirth waters, and the pain of the birth of the new dawn,” Verliebter adds.

There is an intriguing personal storyline to the work. “That comes from Iris Ahuva’s return to Israel from the Himalayas and her process of becoming religiously observant. There are all sorts of issues about self-birth.”

The figure’s suspended position also hints at the interim period of Pykovski’s road to Jewish spiritual awakening.

The red swirl references yet another biblical slot. “That is the lily of the valley [mentioned in the Song of Songs] which we also see in the work by Yifat Bezalel.” The aquatic spiritual ambiance is, indeed, front and center in Bezalel’s Thirteen Petals charcoal drawing.

The curator’s exhibition notes close with a comforting curative Bachelard quote: “Water carries us. Water rocks us. Water puts us to sleep. Water gives us back our mother.”

For more information about the Schocken Library: schocken-jts.org.il

This post was originally published on here. 

Australia in December became the world’s first country to ban social media for children under 16, blocking them from platforms including TikTok, YouTube and Meta’s Instagram and Facebook.

What are other countries and companies doing to regulate access to social media amid mounting concerns over the impact of social media on children’s health and safety?

Australia

A landmark law forced major social media platforms to block minors under 16 from December 10, 2025, one of the world’s toughest regulations targeting major tech platforms.

Companies that fail to comply could face penalties of up to Australian $49.5 million ($34.9 million).

Britain

Britain plans to approve a ban on social media for under-16s by Christmas, with the measure set to take effect around Spring 2027, ex-prime minister Keir Starmer said on June 15.

Big tech firms operating in Britain must stop children circulating nude images on their phones, or they will face legislation forcing them to do so, Starmer said on June 8.

Under the plans, firms like Apple and Google would have to build or activate technical solutions on smartphones and tablets to detect and block nude images for children. Adults would still be able to take, share, or view nude content through an age verification process.

China

China’s cyberspace regulator has put in place a so-called “minor mode” program that requires device-level restrictions and app-specific rules to restrict screen time depending on age.

Denmark

Denmark said in November it would ban social media for children under 15, while parents could provide access to certain platforms to kids down to the age of 13.

France

France’s top court on August 14 blocked a bill banning social media access for under-15s, saying it infringed upon freedom of expression.

France’s parliament had approved the ban in July amid growing concerns about online bullying and mental health risks.

Germany

Minors aged 13 to 16 are allowed to use social media only if their parents provide consent. Child protection advocates say controls are insufficient.

Greece

Greece is “very close” to announcing a social media ban for children under 15, a senior government source told Reuters on February 3.

India

India’s chief economic adviser called for age restrictions on social media platforms in January, describing them as “predatory” in how they keep users engaged online, two days after tourist state Goa said it was weighing restrictions akin to Australia’s.

Italy

Children under 14 need parental consent to sign up for social media accounts, while no consent is required above that age.

Malaysia

Malaysia has begun barring those under 16 from registering accounts on social media platforms, its communications regulator said on June 1.

New Zealand

New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon is proposing a ban on children under 16 using social media, with fines of up to 10% of a platform’s global revenue for non-compliance.

The proposed legislation would require social media platforms to take reasonable steps to verify users’ ages, including by utilizing existing account information, facial technology, and digital identity documents.

Norway

The Norwegian government in 2024 proposed raising the age at which children can consent to the terms required to use social media to 15 from 13, although parents would still be permitted to sign off on their behalf if they are under the age limit.

The government has also begun work on legislation to set an absolute minimum age limit of 15 for social media use.

Poland

Poland’s ruling party is preparing new legislation to ban social media for children under 15 and to hold platforms responsible for age verification, it said on February 27.

Slovenia

Slovenia is drafting a law that would prohibit children under 15 from accessing social media, Deputy Prime Minister Matej Arcon said on February 6.

Spain

Spain will push ahead with new rules to make social networks and AI safer despite intense lobbying from the tech industry, Digital Transformation Minister Oscar Lopez told Reuters in May.

Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez had said in February that Spain would ban access to social media for minors under 16, with platforms required to implement age verification systems.

Sweden

Sweden should introduce a minimum age of 15 for the use of social media, a government-appointed commission recommended on June 2.

A ban can be formulated in a way that the platforms would be responsible for age verification, investigator Lisa Englund Krafft told a news conference with Social Affairs and Public Health Minister Jakob Forssmed.

Turkey

Turkey’s parliament on April 24 passed legislation banning the use of social media by children under 15 and introducing new rules for digital platforms, including game software companies.

United Arab Emirates

The United Arab Emirates on June 18 approved a resolution setting the minimum age for social media use at 15, the government’s media office said, making it the first Arab country to introduce such a measure.

The resolution prohibits children under 15 from creating or using personal social media accounts and restricts their access to the platforms’ full features.

United States

US legislation aimed at forcing social media companies to do more to protect children and teenagers cleared a key political hurdle after Republican Senator Ted Cruz said on May 12 he would support the bill.

Cruz said at an event in Washington that he would back the Kids Online Safety Act, which would require social media companies to “exercise reasonable care” in designing features that contribute to harm to minors, according to the bill.

The legislation is separate from the long-standing Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, which prevents companies from collecting personal data from children under 13 without parental consent. Several states have passed laws requiring parental consent for minors to access social media, but they have faced court challenges on free speech grounds.

EU Legislation

On May 12, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said the European Union would seek stronger protections for children from harmful social media features.

Von der Leyen said the Commission would target “addictive and harmful design practices” in its Digital Fairness Act, a planned law due to be proposed later this year, while an expert panel prepares advice on how to proceed.

The European Parliament in November agreed on a resolution calling for an EU-wide ban on access for children under 16 to online platforms, video-sharing sites and AI companions without parental consent and an outright ban for those younger than 13.

Tech Industry

Social media platforms including TikTok, Facebook and Snapchat say people need to be at least 13 to sign up.

Child protection advocates say the controls are insufficient, and official data in several European countries shows huge numbers of children under 13 have social media accounts.

This post was originally published on here. 

In an unusual turn of events, Israel’s decision to carry out an airstrike in northern Syria may have helped spur the US to action in terms of helping Syria and Israel come to some kind of accommodation and agreement.

Israel has long used military power as a way to send messages and also wring concessions. This has led to the Trump administration helping to get a ceasefire and hostage deal in Gaza and also get a ceasefire in Lebanon. Now the warnings of a crisis in Syria between Israel and Turkey, two key US allies, may help lead to some kind of positive outcome.

A lot depends on whether Jerusalem is willing to climb down from some of its rhetoric. It also will depend on what the US can help arrange. This isn’t the first time the US helped bring Syria and Israel to the table. There was a trilateral meeting in January.

Now Syrian state media is portraying Israel-Syria engagement as potentially heading in the right direction.

Syria doesn’t trust Israel, Foreign Minister says as negotiations continue

Syrian state media said on August 21 that “Foreign Minister, Asaad Hassan al-Shaibani, said Syria expects negotiations with Israel over a security agreement to resume soon, stressing that Damascus’ immediate priority is to halt Israeli attacks and establish confidence-building measures.”

The report noted that “in an interview with Reuters broadcast Sunday, al-Shaibani said Damascus hopes a security agreement would ultimately lead to an Israeli withdrawal from the Syrian territory, calling for a ‘historic opportunity’ to be seized while diplomacy remains open to any path capable of achieving political progress.”

He pointed to the fact that there wasn’t a follow-up from the January meeting. “The negotiations were frozen after the Iranian-Israeli war, and we hope they will resume in the near future so that we can complete this process,” al-Shaibani said.

“We do not trust Israel at present. We deal with it through our interactions, but there is currently no trust,” he noted. “Contacts were suspended following the Israeli attack on Abu al-Duhur military airbase in Idlib province last Tuesday,” the report said.

This illustrates that there are limits to how effective military force will be for Israel. The strategist Clausewitz argued that military operations and politics are entwined. One cannot solely pursue diplomacy or war.

SANA noted that “Al-Shaibani said communication was necessary, particularly with a party that constantly threatens Syria’s security, but stressed that Damascus had no interest in contacts that produced no results.”

The Syrian diplomat said, “Israel has repeatedly tried to preserve its security through hard power, and it has not succeeded…The door is open, and I believe negotiations will resume soon.” Syria believes the US can help get to the proverbial “yes.”

Shaibani said, regarding whether he is optimistic, that it is “very difficult to bet on Israel.” Nevertheless, Syria wants stability. His messaging is clear. The door is open to a positive future. “He stressed that Syria was extending its hand toward understandings, peace and diplomacy and wanted the region to be stable.

Damascus, he said, had no objection to Israel asking that its security concerns be taken into consideration, but Israel must likewise respect Syria’s security concerns and sovereignty,” SANA noted.

Lastly, “on the proposed security agreement, al-Shaibani made clear that the Syrian and Israeli sides had agreed on almost everything on paper, including several points, foremost among them an end to Israeli attacks on Syria and non-interference in its internal affairs.”

“Syria’s focus now is on stopping the attacks before anything else, even before the security agreement,” the Foreign Minister said. “The issues of peace and the Golan could be opened later. We have now taken a step backward.”

Talk of a new mechanism linked to talks in Jordan, that would help de-conflict, is key. “We want it to be a mechanism to stop the attacks and pave the way for reaching a security agreement culminating in Israel’s withdrawal from Syria,” he added.

“Al-Shaibani went on to say that Israel attacked Abu al-Duhur military airbase even after Syria had conveyed a message that the facility would not become a Turkish base,” SANA noted.

Jordan hosted Syria talks in the past

In addition, Syrian state media confirmed reports of a meeting in Jordan. “a high-level Syrian delegation headed by Foreign Minister Asaad Hassan al-Shaibani and including the heads of the General Intelligence and Military Intelligence services held a meeting Sunday with a high-level Israeli delegation under US mediation and hosted by Jordan, a diplomatic source at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Expatriates told SANA.”

The report went on to note that “discussions focused on establishing practical mechanisms to halt Israeli attacks, arrests and targeting operations, and reviving negotiations with the aim of reaching a security agreement that could serve as the basis for a more comprehensive future agreement.”

Lastly, “according to the source, the meeting focused on practical steps to de-escalate tensions while exploring ways to return to negotiations, with Syria stressing that any security arrangements must respect its sovereignty, territorial integrity and sovereign rights.”

It’s worth noting that the Trump administration has turned to Jordan before regarding Syria. Back in 2017, during the first Trump administration, the US, Russia and Jordan agreed to put in place a ceasefire across south-western Syria. That ceasefire collapsed in 2018.

However, at the time it showed how Jordan could play an important role. Jordan has also carried out airstrikes against drug smugglers in southern Syria in recent years.

In 2018 Jordan took in the White Helmets after Israel helped facilitate their evacuation from southern Syria via the Golan. This shows how Jordan continues to play a pragmatic role. Jordan has ties with Israel. Also it supports the new Syrian government.

It is also a friend of the US and UK and a key friend of Gulf Arab states. As such, Amman and the US appear to be paving the way for better engagement between Israel and Syria, potentially calming tensions.  

This post was originally published on here. 

Iraq’s new prime minister Ali al-Zaidi was supposed to rein in the Iranian-backed militias in Iraq. For years the militias have carried out hundreds of attacks on US forces, kidnapped journalists and researchers, assassinated Iraqis, attacked the Kurdistan Region and attacked embassies and consulates.

The militias killed Americans in Jordan and targeted Israel. Most of the powerful Iranian-backed militias in Iraq are sanctioned by the US as terrorist groups.

Now Iraq appears to be backtracking on the deadline for placing militia weapons under the control of the state. Iraq had initially indicated it would rein in the militias by September 30, when US troops who went to Iraq to back Baghdad against ISIS, are supposed to leave. There are not very many US troops in Iraq these days. Most are in the Kurdistan Region of northern Iraq.

Now Iraq is indicating that it actually wants to wait until the US leaves, to disarm the militias. This bait and switch on timing shows how Iraq will slow play its obligations.

“Iraq will begin gradually consolidating weapons held by armed factions under state control after the international coalition’s scheduled departure on September 30, Iraq’s national security advisor said Sunday, calling the move a ‘strategic Iraqi decision’ and stressing that the process will be carried out through dialogue as opposed to armed confrontation,” Rudaw media reported on August 23.

Sep. 30 set as deadline to consolidate arms

Iran’s IRGC Quds Force head Esmail Qaani was recently in Baghdad. In addition, Iran’s speaker of parliament Mohammed Bagher Qalibaf was also recently in Iraq. They went to Iraq to showcase Iran’s power in Baghdad. Like the mafia collecting protection money, they were making Baghdad an offer it can’t refuse.

National Security Advisor Qasim al-Araji, speaking to the state-run Iraqi News Agency (INA), said, “After September 30, the process of restricting weapons to the state will begin gradually.”

Rudaw added that “Araji said the government was serious about ‘severing’ ties between political parties and Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) brigades, adding that ongoing dialogues to complete the disengagement process were producing positive results as Baghdad seeks to ‘strengthen trust.’”

Rudaw added that “the Iraqi government had previously set September 30, as the deadline for armed factions to hand over their weapons to the state.” Now, “Araji said all political forces agree that weapons should be controlled exclusively by the state and ‘The decision of war and peace is exclusively in the hands of the Iraqi state.’”

“The weapons of the factions will become a force for the state and will not be handed over to any external party,” he claimed. It’s clear Baghdad is moving toward a kind of bait and switch. It may pretend that the militias already have weapons under state control because most of the militias are technically part of the state-backed PMF paramilitary organization.

“Baghdad has faced resistance from some Iran-aligned factions, which have linked disarmament to the departure of US and other foreign forces from Iraq, with Kata’ib Hezbollah, in a statement on Tuesday, going so far as to demand the departure of Turkish troops from northern Iraq and the dissolution of the Peshmerga forces as preconditions to complying with the government’s disarmament mandate,” Rudaw added in its report.

Iraq’s latest move is meant to focus on the US leaving and kick the can down the road in terms of actually confronting the militias. The prime minister is meanwhile hinting he will only serve on term. It’s not clear if the militias think they can simply wait out the prime minister. What comes next is unclear.

The US is focused on the Iran conflict and many other issues. It’s unclear if the White House has the time and regional political capital to get Baghdad to disarm the militias now. The US Envoy to Iraq and Syria, US Ambassador Tom Barrack could also play a helpful role. He is now focused on Syria in the wake of Israeli airstrikes there. As such, Baghdad may hope it can quietly push the date past September 30 and hope no one notices.

Many PMF militias have US sanctions due to attacks on US interests

The Iran-backed militias have become one of the most powerful armed terrorist threats in Iraq. Some have their origins to the 1980s, when Iraqi Shi’ite groups backed by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) fought Saddam Hussein’s regime. After 2003, these groups expanded rapidly, and many later became part of the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) during the war against ISIS.

Several of the most prominent militias have been designated by the US as terrorist organizations. These include Kata’ib Hezbollah (KH), Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq (AAH), Harakat al-Nujaba (HAN), Kata’ib Sayyid al-Shuhada (KSS), Harakat Ansar Allah al-Awfiya (HAAA), and Kata’ib Imam Ali (KIA).

Most are designated as both Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs) and Specially Designated Global Terrorists (SDGTs) because of attacks on US and Coalition forces. The US killed the leader of Kataib Hezbollah, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, in a drone strike in January 2020. He was riding with IRGC Quds Force head Qasem Soleimani. Soleimani, the target of the drone strike, was also killed.

This illustrates how the Iranian-backed militias in Iraq are Iranian proxies. Disarming them will be difficult, as is the case with Hamas and Hezbollah. However, it is essential for peace and stability in the region. The militias recently attacked Saudi Arabia, for instance. 

This post was originally published on here. 

The number 26 came up before policy did. A Channel 13 poll had put Yashar on 26 seats, ahead of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud at 23, placing a party founded in 2025 in contention to become the largest faction in the Israeli parliament. Orit Farkash-Hacohen did not describe the result as a shock.

“I see it as a very natural process,” the Israeli parliamentarian and Yashar candidate told The Media Line.

“It’s not as if we are being overwhelmed by that. On the contrary.”

Other recent polls have differed on the size of the advantage, but most of the six surveys reviewed for this article placed Yashar ahead of Likud. The party ranged from 22 to 26 seats, while Likud ranged from 21 to 23.

Polling has elevated Yashar’s standing in the political landscape. The party is now being asked not simply why voters are turning to the former Israel Defense Forces (IDF) chief of staff, but what an Eisenkot government would actually do on the economy, military service, public spending, and the recovery of regions still dealing with the effects of the years since October 7.

Eisenkot’s personal appeal is not a new phenomenon in Israeli politics

Israeli parliamentarian Farkash-Hacohen, who served as tourism and strategic affairs minister and later as technology and innovation minister, said Yashar has already begun preparing for a possible move into office. The party is working on plans for its first months in government, she said, drawing on former ministers and senior public officials as well as younger members of the team.

“We are focused on preparing the plans for the first 100 days of, hopefully, a new government,” Farkash-Hacohen said, describing a cabinet whose ministers would be expected to work for the public rather than concentrate on “their own political survival.”

That governing pitch is closely tied to Eisenkot’s personal appeal. Farkash-Hacohen said she sees voters looking for an alternative not only to Prime Minister Netanyahu’s policies but also to his political style. Playing on the Hebrew meaning of the party’s name, she said Israelis “want something yashar” meaning leadership associated with integrity and public service.

Speaking with The Media Line, political scientist and educator Jack Drassinower, who specializes in Israeli politics, said the emphasis on Eisenkot himself is hardly unusual in Israel. He argued that Israeli elections have increasingly centered on party leaders rather than fine ideological distinctions, and that Eisenkot’s military background gives him an advantage at a time when security remains central to voters.

“If you ask the voter what the important issues are when going to vote, the military element is still the most important,” Drassinower said. He believes security has become an even greater priority since October 7.

Farkash-Hacohen said the first domestic task of an Eisenkot government would be to reduce the divisions that deepened in Israeli society before and after the October 7 attacks.

She accused the current government of using polarization as a political instrument and said Yashar would seek to govern beyond the constituencies that brought it to power.

“The biggest challenge for us as a leadership is to bring back the unity of Israeli society,” she said. “The people of Israel are very united, and we’re a very resilient and special kind of people. We hold each other, especially in times of challenge.”

The next issue she raised was service. Yashar wants to broaden military or national service among populations that have historically had exemptions, particularly ultra-Orthodox and Arab Israelis. Farkash-Hacohen said national service in hospitals, schools, and other institutions could be part of the model for those who do not serve in the military.

“Our mission is to bring about a strategic change in which both these populations will also contribute and take part in the very big burden that now rests on the shoulders of not all of Israeli society,” she said. “It will be a very challenging and ambitious task that we are committed to pushing forward.”

Drassinower identified conscription as one of the areas where Eisenkot has found room to distinguish himself from the current coalition without closing every door for future political negotiations.

He noted that Eisenkot has supported a much broader obligation to serve while also acknowledging that full ultra-Orthodox enlistment cannot happen immediately and that some limited exemptions could remain.

The economic platform has received less public attention, something Drassinower considers a weakness in the party’s definition so far. “If you ask me what Eisenkot’s economic position is, I couldn’t tell you,” he said, adding that the lack of emphasis may also allow Yashar to attract voters who disagree with one another on economic and religion-and-state questions.

Farkash-Hacohen, whose own background includes senior economic and regulatory positions, gave a detailed account of where she wants the party to go. The starting point, she said, is the cost of a larger long-term defense burden.

“The next decade will be very challenging economically,” she said. Israel, in her view, will have to spend more on security than it did before October 7, leaving less room for a government to avoid decisions about which programs deserve public money. “It requires us as a government, first of all, to be very clear on our priorities and how we manage the Israeli taxpayers’ money.”

Yashar would close ministries it regards as unnecessary and reduce government spending tied to coalition politics, she said. Farkash-Hacohen argued that state resources should increasingly favor Israelis who work and serve, and said the party would review subsidies that it believes discourage participation in the workforce.

The cost of living would require a different set of measures. Farkash-Hacohen singled out groceries and cosmetics as markets where concentrated corporate power and exclusive import agreements limit competition.

She said a Yashar government would seek to remove barriers to competitors, challenge exclusive import arrangements and, where necessary, force dominant groups to give up some of their market power.

Housing would be harder. “I don’t think that we will have magic solutions,” she said. Instead, she tied housing to transportation, infrastructure and the ability of people to live farther from the country’s most expensive population centers without losing access to jobs.

Better transportation, she argued, could expand the realistic housing market rather than treating the shortage as a problem that can be solved solely by construction policy.”

A future government led by Yashar would have it work cut out, expert says

Farkash-Hacohen is also working on infrastructure planning tied to energy security, artificial intelligence, and quantum technology.

A separate initiative is aimed at Israelis who have left the country in recent years, particularly physicians, engineers, researchers, and high-tech workers. She described the proposal as an “in-location” program, a play on relocation, and said she studied comparable efforts abroad to bring highly skilled citizens back.

“We have prepared a very specific program,” she said. But incentives alone, she added, may not determine whether people return. “From what we see, many of these people will be back once the leadership and the government will be changed.”

Winning enough seats to implement any of those programs would be only the first political obstacle. Israel’s parliamentary system requires a majority of 61 lawmakers to sustain a government, and Drassinower said Eisenkot’s position among voters is stronger at the moment than his authority over the parties he may eventually need as partners.

His problem, Drassinower said, “is not the larger number of votes” but reaching 61. Potential partners include leaders with their own ambitions and parties with significant ideological differences. Drassinower said that remains a vulnerability for an opposition camp whose members can agree on replacing the current government without necessarily agreeing on what comes afterward.

Farkash-Hacohen said Yashar believes a future coalition can operate around several common principles: Israel as a Jewish and democratic state, respect for the Declaration of Independence, and broader sharing of national responsibilities.

She listed education, the cost of living, military service, democratic institutions, and the rule of law as issues that would give a new government more than enough work without allowing every ideological disagreement to dominate its agenda.

Drassinower was more cautious. The experience of the previous change of government, he said, showed the danger of leaving disputes unresolved simply because partners agree that a different prime minister should be in office. “The points of disagreement were not touched,” he said of that coalition. “They were simply put under the rug.”

He sees another distinction between polling well and exercising power. “The problem, as we know, is not only to form a government, but to govern,” he said.

Yashar says northern Israel would be an early priority for the party. It released a reconstruction plan last week for communities that endured prolonged evacuation and economic disruption after October 7. Farkash-Hacohen said improved shelter would come first, followed by incentives designed not merely to bring residents back but to persuade young families to build their futures there.

“The first and foremost priority would be to perform and execute very expedited sheltering,” she said, arguing that residents need a higher standard of personal security before long-term development promises can mean much.

Yashar also proposes additional education and tax incentives, investment in tourism, agriculture, and energy projects, and special treatment for Kiryat Shmona, including added tax benefits and development initiatives.

Farkash-Hacohen said the northern plan would also depend on restoring residents’ confidence in the government’s ability to deliver on its commitments. That is a standard Yashar would have to meet if the poll numbers eventually translate into seats and those seats form a government.

The aim, she said, is “to rebuild the trust of the people of the north with their government.” 

This post was originally published on here. 

An Israeli gazelle fawn who was being illegally held in the West Bank was rescued on Saturday night, the Israel Nature and Parks Authority (INPA) said.

Following intelligence guidance from the Border Police Coast District Central Unit, a joint operation was carried out by detectives from the Border Police Coast District Central Unit, Judea and Samaria Border Police fighters, and INPA inspectors from the Nature Reserves Unit in the Civil Administration.

A search was conducted in the West Bank village of A-Ram, during which the forces found an Israeli gazelle fawn, a protected animal. It is illegal to own or hunt the gazelles.

The fawn was transferred to INPA inspectors and received further treatment at the Wildlife Hospital at the Ramat Gan Safari.

A 48-year-old Kafr Aqab resident was detained and taken for further questioning by the INPA on suspicion of committing offenses including the trade, possession, and hunting of a protected species.

Border Police rescued gazelle rescued from Jenin

On August 12, Border Police rescued a different gazelle fawn that had been illegally caught and kept in a basement near Jenin.

The police stated that, overnight Border Police officers, accompanied by supervisors from the INPA, infiltrated the area in order to locate the gazelle.

The gazelle was found in the basement of a private residence in the area, the police said.

One suspect was detained for questioning, and security forces intend to file an indictment against them on suspicion of hunting and holding a wild animal illegally.

The police also said that the gazelle was taken to be checked over by a veterinarian, and is expected to be transferred to a safari in Ramat Gan.

Tzvi Jasper contributed to this report

This post was originally published on here. 

Israel knows the devastating effects that incitement and political violence can wreak on the fabric of a taut society. It can tear it in two.

One only has to look back to November 4, 1995, when prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, the target of vicious incitement campaigns over his support of the Oslo Accords, was gunned down by far-right ultranationalist Yigal Amir. Israel has not been the same ever since.

Although the country has not experienced another political assassination, the specter remains always just under the surface. Security for elected officials was heightened, and warnings from Israel’s security services about the threat of political violence have accompanied every election campaign since that dark day in November 1995.

That’s why the decision, as reported by N12 on Saturday night, by Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) chief David Zini not to provide Yashar Party head Gadi Eisenkot with a security detail is so perplexing and worrisome.

Eisenkot has emerged as Benjamin Netanyahu’s leading challenger in the October 27 poll. The decision was reportedly made despite regular threats directed at Eisenkot on social media and warnings from the defense sector that Iran and other hostile actors may attempt to target current and former senior officials.

Eisenkot’s campaign field director wrote to Zini and other security officials in June saying the Yashar leader had been forced to hire a private security firm because he was not receiving state protection.

According to the N12 report, Zini’s representatives told Eisenkot’s staff that while the Shin Bet would not provide him with a security detail, the agency would assign a liaison and gather intelligence if concerns emerged about an exceptionally serious incident. However, the request for permanent protection was denied.

Netanyahu, Lapid, leading candidates in 2022 election, both received full security detail

In the last election campaign in 2022, both leading candidates, Yair Lapid and Netanyahu, were provided with full security details – Lapid as sitting prime minister and Netanyahu as a former leader as part of the lifelong package for past heads of government.

Following Zini’s decision, Eisenkot’s campaign submitted its objections in writing to the Shin Bet, Israel Police, and the attorney-general, warning that physical threats against the former IDF chief of staff were escalating, and he called for the decision to be reversed.

“The atmosphere on the Israeli street, as well as on social media, is becoming increasingly heated, and threats are emerging and multiplying,” the letter said.

Just last week, N12  reported that Zini was considering providing Eisenkot with an armed detail amid indications that Iran was increasing efforts to harm Israeli leaders as elections drew close.

The decision not to grant Eisenkot state protection during the campaign is playing with fire. One only has to scroll on social media or watch one of the TV news talk shows to see that the level of vitriol on all sides of the political fence is reaching alarming proportions.

Zini’s decision politically motivated?

The suggestion has been raised by the Eisenkot team that Zini’s decision was politically motivated. The letter sent by his team in protest alleged that the government, the Ministerial Committee on Shin Bet Affairs, and the committee’s chairman “are failing to fulfill their personal responsibility for political and ulterior motives and are avoiding carrying out their duties.”

Eisenkot’s campaign further alleged that a consideration in denying the security detail was a desire to avoid images of Eisenkot looking “prime ministerial” by appearing in public surrounded by security personnel – images which could boost his stature in the public eye.

Although that sounds somewhat conspiratorial, it’s worth noting that the chairman of the Ministerial Committee on Shin Bet Affairs is Netanyahu, and its members consist of Defense Minister Israel Katz, Justice Minister Yair Levin, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, and Education Minister Yoav Kisch.

Zini has already faced claims that he’s a Netanyahu appointee who has pledged allegiance to the prime minister. Now is the time to smother those charges and demonstrate that the decisions of the Shin Bet are being made with solely professional considerations in mind, and not according to political alliances.

Granting Gadi Eisenkot a state security detail leading up to the October 27 election is the surest way to clear the air. And more importantly, doing so will help ensure that another devastating national tragedy has less of a chance of taking place.

This post was originally published on here. 

UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham will visit Ukraine on Monday on his first overseas trip since taking office, and will announce British support to help Kyiv improve its domestic production of long-range missiles.

Burnham will be in Ukraine to co-chair a meeting of the so-called Coalition of the Willing, a group of countries backing Ukraine, on Monday when he is also due to meet Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

He is set to announce that Britain has agreed to allow European missile manufacturer MBDA to release classified information on British-made components used in the SCALP long-range cruise missile, according to his office.

That will help enable France and Ukraine to establish local assembly lines for the missile, which shares British and French technology, according to Downing Street.

“Ukraine’s security is our security,” Burnham said in a statement, adding that Britain would stand by Ukraine “for as long as it takes.”

Britain has been one of Ukraine’s strongest supporters since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, providing military support, economic aid and diplomatic backing.

Britain was the first country to announce plans to supply Ukraine with Western-made battle tanks and long-range cruise missiles following the invasion and has pledged more than £25 billion so far in military and civilian support.

Reassurance of UK support for Ukraine

Moscow warned London last week of “consequences” for supplying drones to Kyiv, accusing Britain of deepening its involvement in the war following a report ​that British-made drones had been used for long-range strikes against Russia ​for the first time.

Burnham is expected to use his visit to reassure Ukraine and its allies that Britain would continue to play a leading role in efforts to strengthen Ukraine’s security under his government.

The push to expand Ukraine’s domestic missile production comes as Ukraine increasingly relies on long-range drones and strike weapons to target Russian oil refineries and logistics facilities far behind the front lines.

The visit comes weeks after Zelensky traveled to Britain in late July as Burnham’s first international guest, following the Labour leader’s election as prime minister a week earlier.

This post was originally published on here. 

Greece has moved a Patriot air defense battery to Crete following threats by senior Iranian officials against US bases in Europe, Greek newspaper Kathimerini reported on Sunday.

The battery, personnel and equptment were moved overnight and are expected to be deployed near the Souda military base. Greece’s Defense Ministry and armed forces remain on heightened alert as officials assess the potential threat to critical infrastructure and military facilities as tensions rise with Iran, Kathimerini added.

The report explained that allied intelligence was concerned that Iran still has a significant number of ballistic missiles, with a reported range of over 2,000 km which would place parts of southeastern Europe, including Greece, within range.

The Patriot defense system was deployed in March to protect against ballistic missile threats. 

Kathimerini added that Athens is in contact with the US and Israel over potential threats to military bases in Greece and Cyprus.

Tehran considering attacking US bases in Europe if conflict escalates

Sources close to the regime in Tehran warned that Iran may attack US military targets in Europe if US President Donald Trump escalated the conflict.

The Financial Times reported that Tehran was seriously examining the options available to it to raise the stakes in the conflict, with many at the top of the regime seeing the renewal of the full-scale military confrontation as only a matter of time

Two sources familiar with the details told the Financial Times that Iranian forces already conducted situational assessments regarding the possibility of attacking American assets in southeastern European countries.

A prominent example of this is Bulgaria, which only last month approved the use of the Bessemer air base for US military refueling aircraft. Another source added that Cyprus, where a British air base was attacked by a drone last March, is also on the list of potential targets for retaliatory action in the event of a renewed American attack

This post was originally published on here. 

Rafi Rom, an Israeli who has lived in Athens for 12 years, claims he was removed from a social event in the city on Saturday night after organizers learned that he was Israeli and Jewish.

According to Rom, security guards told him he had to leave because he allegedly posed a “security risk,” despite the fact that he had not done anything unusual and was not told what specifically constituted that risk.

The incident took place at an event hosted by Nomad Hub Greece, a community that organizes gatherings for digital nomads, remote workers, foreign residents, and travelers. Rom said he had attended events hosted by the community in the past.

The event was held at the 21 Grams rooftop bar in Avissinias Square in central Athens. It was advertised as an international social gathering open to the public, with free entry through advance registration, music, and views of the Acropolis. According to the event listing, 76 people had confirmed their attendance.

“When I arrived, there were already 50 or 60 people there,” Rom told Walla. “I entered, ordered a beer, and started talking with people. I introduced myself as Jewish and Israeli.”

Security guards removed Rom from the event, calling him a ‘security risk.’

Rom said that among those at the event was someone he knew from previous gatherings, a Lebanese Christian man, who he believes was likely one of the hosts.

“I saw him talking with the security personnel,” he said.

Rom said that several minutes later, while he was standing alone and away from other attendees, security guards approached him.

“They told me that the event organizer wanted me to leave the place because I was a ‘security risk.’ I was shocked. I asked why and what exactly I had done, but they just repeated the claim that I posed some kind of threat,” he said.

Rom said that until that point, he had not confronted anyone, caused a disturbance, or been told that his behavior was inappropriate. He said the only thing that happened before he was removed was that he introduced himself to other attendees as Israeli and Jewish.

“It is clear to me that the only reason is my background. What security risk do I pose? It is important that people know this happened. This incident shook me,” he said.

Rom said he struggled to process the situation while it was happening.

“During the event I was probably in shock, and the fact is that I did not pull out my phone to document it and I did not even protest loudly. I did protest, but politely, maybe too politely.”

He said that only after leaving the venue did he begin to understand the significance of what had happened.

“I was left with a very painful feeling of insult and humiliation. I have lived in Athens for 12 years, and I never expected to be removed from a social event that presents itself as open to people from around the world, simply because I am Israeli.”

Rom said he does not intend to attend events hosted by the same organizer in the future.

“Clearly, I personally will no longer attend events by that host. It is important to warn others as well.”

He said the incident left him especially hurt because the gathering was presented as an international event open to people from around the world.

As of publication, Walla has not received a response from the event organizers or venue representatives regarding his claims.

This post was originally published on here. 

The US ambassador to Turkey and special envoy to Syria and Iraq, Tom Barrack appeared to reverse his previous comments on the status of the Golan Heights in recent days, backing the US recognition of the area as Israeli territory in a statement to the Associated Press on Sunday.

“United States policy on the Golan was set by President Trump in 2019 and is unchanged,” he said, contradicting his claim in an interview with Mario Nawfal on Friday where he stated that Israel occupies the Golan Heights.

“They still occupy the Golan against the UN resolutions, against all of the international order, which has said the Golan is Syria’s,” Barrack said then, despite the US having recognized the area as Israeli for almost a decade.

The interview took place against the backdrop of Israel’s strike on the Abu al-Duhur military airfield in Idlib last week. Israel claimed that Turkish troops were ready to deploy at the base, a claim that Turkey denied.

Syrian negotiations primarily on Israeli withdrawal from areas besides Golan

Israel conquered the Golan Heights in the Six-Day War, annexing the area by law in 1981. UN Security Council resolution 497, passed only days later, rejected the annexation as “null and void.”

In 2019, Trump recognized the Golan Heights as Israeli, as a part of pro-Israel moves including the recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and moving the US embassy there.

Syria never rescinded its claim to the Golan Heights, and after Ahmed al-Sharaa took power in December of 2024, the question the area’s status entered the spotlight once again.

During negotiations between Israel and Syrian officials in Jordan on Sunday, the Syrian delegation asked to separate negotiations over the Golan Heights, appearing to prioritize the matter of Israel’s withdrawal from areas captured after December 2024.

Barrack said strike on Syria may have been political

Barrack condemned Israel’s strikes on the Idlib airbase, calling them “serious and worrisome.”

In Friday’s interview, Barrack suggested that Israel may have intended to provoke a faceoff with Turkey through its strike. Barrack also said the strike could have had political motives, with Israeli elections scheduled for October.

Following the attack, Barrack said the US would work to establish a deconfliction mechanism between Israel, Turkey, and Syria, insisting that increased communication would be necessary to prevent violence.

“Syria has demonstrated itself to be a responsible and stable sovereign neighbor, and a carefully structured de-escalation arrangement would contribute significantly to greater calm and predictability across the region,” Barrack told The Jerusalem Post.

Amichai Stein and Reuters contributed to this report.

This post was originally published on here. 

Civil Administration forces rescued three Israeli Jews in recent hours after they entered Palestinian Authority areas on Sunday night.

The incidents occurred near Bethlehem, Jericho, and Ramallah, which fall under the West Bank’s Area A. Israelis are generally prohibited from entering Area A.

Earlier Sunday, the Civil Administration received a report about an armed Israeli Jew who was spotted near the village of Ein Arik, located in the Binyamin area. Officers from the Binyamin Coordination and Liaison Administration worked to rescue him through coordination channels, and he was transferred to an IDF team.

At the same time, the Civil Administration received a report about an Israeli Jewish woman who was seen walking through the city of Jericho in the Jordan Valley area, putting herself at risk.

Officers from the Jordan Valley Coordination and Liaison Administration acted quickly to rescue her. An initial investigation found that she had intentionally entered the Palestinian city.

Woman was taken to Hebron by force earlier in August

In Bethlehem, an Israeli man who appeared to be suffering from mental distress was seen wandering the streets of the city. Local residents passed the information to security forces, and he was quickly handed over to them.

All three incidents were transferred for further handling by the Judea and Samaria District Police. The security establishment reiterated that entering Area A, which is under the control of the Palestinian Authority, is life threatening and prohibited by law.

In a separate incident earlier this month, a woman in her 20’s living in central Israel who had been forcibly taken to Hebron was located and rescued by authorities.

Israeli police, IDF troops and Palestinian Authority police were involved in the rescue operation.

The woman had been taken to the West Bank city by her relatives, who were detained and will be transferred to the Tel Aviv district for further investigation, police said, adding that the woman was in good health at time of rescue.

Jerusalem Post Staff contributed to this report.

This post was originally published on here.