Sunday, July 26 — Mitzpe Institute

Thirteen nights of American strikes stopped this week, and nothing Tehran did stopped them — Washington ran low on the interceptors it keeps across the region and blinked, handing the regime the one thing the campaign was meant to take from it: time to rebuild faster than the strikes can knock the bases down. Israel spends another week a spectator to the war aimed most squarely at it, its entry still waiting on a phone call, moving hard only where the lever is still in its hand: a brigade into Samaria, seven hundred new homes onto the hilltops before the shiva ends. The wars it cannot enforce are decided on other people's letterhead: a Gulf nuclear deal Jerusalem read about in the news, and a Hague warrant that outlived the prosecutor who signed it. And on the day the fast for every prior Jewish catastrophe ended, a man in a kippah was knifed outside his shul.

Flash Brief: The Day in 90 Seconds or Less

Iran strikes halted: Washington ends thirteen nights of strikes as its interceptor stocks run low, handing Tehran time to rebuild. See The War Today.
Saudi oil: Blocked at Hormuz, Iran turns the Houthis on Saudi tankers, opening a second chokepoint on global crude. See The War Today.
Samaria: A shooting near Havat Gilad kills two, triggering a brigade sweep and a blanket Palestinian worker ban. See The War Today.
Draft freeze: The attorney general asks the High Court to strike the haredi arrest-freeze law before Tuesday's hearing. See Inside Israel.
Likud primary: The party's own tribunal orders a primary as Eisenkot's new list opens a three-seat lead over Likud. See Inside Israel.
Sovereignty: Smotrich answers Friday's terror attack with 763 new homes and a Settlements Administration folded into Defense. See Inside Israel.
Saudi deal: Washington signs a civil-nuclear pact with Riyadh, then reverses by tweet to demand Abraham Accords recognition. See Israel and the World.
The Hague: The ICC's member states vote out chief prosecutor Karim Khan, though the Netanyahu warrant he signed survives him. See Israel and the World.
Mamdani: The arrest threat New York cannot enforce jumps to London and Maryland within forty-eight hours. See Israel and the World.
Casualty count: Two press watchdogs delete eight Gaza "journalist" names tied to Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and a Houthi broadcaster. See Israel and the World.
Tisha B'Av: A Jew is stabbed outside his Manhattan shul as the fast ends; the assailant shouted "Allahu Akbar." See Israel and the World.
Western courts: Manchester hands a jihadist a life term, closing the sentencing gap Europe's arrests kept missing. See Israel and the World.

The shape of the week is a state acting decisively wherever the lever is still in its hand and waiting wherever the decision has moved to someone else's. At home the coalition spends a majority it may not keep past October, entrenching the exemption and the hilltops against the government that follows, while its own tribunal reminds it that Likud is not one man's property. Beyond the water's edge the reverse holds: the deals and the warrants that shape how Israel is treated are written by other hands, and the diaspora absorbs what those hands set loose.

The War Today

Washington Halts the Iran Strikes as Its Interceptors Run Low

American strikes on Iran stopped after thirteen straight nights, and nothing Tehran did stopped them. Washington held back the "massive attack, bigger than ever" Trump threatened all week after concluding an extended war would drain the interceptor stocks CENTCOM keeps across the region, a fear that sharpened when an Iranian missile slipped the defenses and killed American soldiers in Jordan. Qatar and Oman pressed Tehran to soften. Iran still rejected an Iraqi-carried ceasefire as a "temporary deal" it did not want, and it reached only "some progress" with Oman on a voluntary Hormuz consortium it is insisting be made mandatory. The naval blockade holds, twelve vessels redirected and two disabled. Under the pause, satellite imagery shows Iran rebuilding bridges and missile bases at speed, its crews fielding cheaper pre-fueled missiles that launch off a truck before a warplane can find the launcher, and the centrifuges moved under Pickaxe Mountain last fall stay past the reach of every strike so far.

Assessment The halt hands Tehran the one thing thirteen nights were taking from it, which is time, and it arrives on Washington's own interceptor arithmetic. [A superpower rationing its own missiles is bargaining from the same shortage its enemy is counting on.] Iran spends the reprieve exactly as the reconstruction cycle would predict, pouring concrete over the missile bases faster than the strikes knock them down, while US intelligence now reads the successor named in Tehran as readier than his father to build the bomb the whole campaign was meant to foreclose. Israel went to its highest alert, staged dramatic preparations for an American strike, and fired nothing, its entry into the war it is most exposed to still waiting on a phone call from a president doing his own stockpile math.

Samaria Killings Bring a Brigade Sweep and a Blanket Worker Ban

The escalation in Judea and Samaria turned lethal. A shooting near Havat Gilad on Friday killed Maj. Yuval Ezra z"l, 27, and Chief Sgt. First Class (res.) Benayahu Melet z"l, 32, and wounded six others, after a group of Israeli civilians walked into the outskirts of the village of Tell and a Palestinian snatched Melet's rifle and opened fire. Days earlier a stabbing near Alon Moreh wounded Itamar Cohen, a founder of the region's agricultural farms, and on Saturday another assailant grabbed an off-duty soldier's weapon at the Susiya junction in the south Hebron hills. The army answered with a brigade operation in Tell, more than seventy arrests overnight, mapped demolition orders on the two attackers' homes, and a Sunday order barring Palestinian laborers from Jewish communities. As Melet was buried, hundreds of settlers rampaged through more than a dozen villages, burning homes and fields.

Blocked at Hormuz, Iran Turns the Houthis on Saudi Oil

With the American blockade sealing its own coast, Iran pushed the war onto Saudi Arabia's. The Houthis declared a naval blockade of the kingdom, struck two Saudi oil tankers in the Red Sea, and threatened to close Bab el-Mandeb, opening a second chokepoint on global crude a thousand miles from the one Iran is losing at Hormuz. The move came neither cheap nor unaided. Tehran flew IRGC commanders and missile and drone equipment into Yemen on July 13 to sharpen exactly this capability. The Saudi-led coalition answered with strikes on Hodeidah, Lloyd's war underwriters stopped covering Saudi-linked cargo in the Red Sea, crude pushed past 100 dollars, and Trump warned Tehran it would take "major military punishment" for whatever the Houthis fire at Saudi ships.

Inside Israel

Likud's Tribunal Orders a Primary as Eisenkot Opens a Lead

Likud's supreme tribunal ordered the party to hold a primary, warning that "Likud is not a party of one man and will lose its vitality if it becomes one." It refused to pre-authorize any cancellation, allowed an emergency-date change only as a last resort, and told the party to run an electronic vote before running none. The ruling opens the October 27 campaign with Likud polling twenty seats, its lowest since June 2025 and three behind Eisenkot's Yashar at twenty-three. Sharren Haskel then swore to the High Court that New Hope MKs were ordered to film their comptroller votes for Rabello, Netanyahu's former lawyer, and to show the footage to the prime minister. Her affidavit contradicts the Likud affidavits filed in the case the court had already voided over that same ballot-secrecy breach, and a watchdog is calling for a perjury probe. Netanyahu's office, meanwhile, produced an AI video of Eisenkot embracing Mansour Abbas, the young man in it resembling Eisenkot's fallen son. Herzog disclosed that the Shin Bet and elections chair Sohlberg had flagged internal and external threats to the vote itself. The vehicles keep multiplying around Likud: Haskel's Israel First, an Erdan-Edelstein liberal list carrying the enlistment fight, Yesh Atid's Ron Katz gone after fifteen years, and a Religious Zionism primary that left Smotrich his chardal core as two MKs walked over the exemption.

Baharav-Miara Asks the Court to Strike the Arrest Freeze Down

The attorney general submitted the state's opinion urging the High Court to overturn the law freezing the arrest of haredi draft evaders, calling it "an extreme and clear case of flawed and harmful legislation that does not meet legal standards" and a "selective and discriminatory criminal enforcement regime." The nine-justice panel that hears the petitions convenes Tuesday, seated with the five justices who wrote the conscription rulings the law was drafted to evade. Off the docket, the evasion is organizing. A haredi aid group circulated instructions telling yeshiva evaders to refuse all contact with induction offices, keep the door shut to military police, stay silent under arrest and wait for a lawyer, and dangled a coffee machine for anyone who reported a police visit and did not open up. A second group launched a membership card giving registered evaders up to fifty percent off at hundreds of businesses, built to price the state's sanctions down to nothing. Protesters massed at Habima Square under "no mandate for evasion," three days before the hearing. The serving side, meanwhile, reports for a third summer of rotations through Lebanon, Gaza, Syria and Judea and Samaria while the reserve system around it frays.

A Terror Attack Becomes 763 Homes as Katz Undercuts Central Command

Friday's terror shooting near Havat Gilad killed Maj. Yuval Ezra z"l and Benayahu Mellet z"l and set off a reprisal wave: a mosque torched overnight in Kusra, "Revenge for Benayahu" and a Star of David sprayed on the wall, and arson at Turmus Ayya and Jalud that drove a family from its Jalud home after a weeks-long siege. In a separate episode the same day, a group of Israeli hikers crossed uncoordinated into a Palestinian Authority village, and by Palestinian accounts four villagers were killed in the clash that followed. The cabinet's answer was construction. Smotrich accelerated the planned Shalem community beside the attack site, moved 763 homes to roughly triple Eli, whose neighborhoods carry the names of its fallen soldiers including his cousin, and folded the Settlements Administration formally into the Defense Ministry to make it harder for a successor to unwind. His bid for a new foothold in Area B, in breach of Oslo, was reportedly blocked by Sa'ar, Netanyahu and Katz. Katz himself leaked against Central Command chief Avi Bluth for cracking down too hard on Jewish violence and visited Tal Yinon Dardik, held over a zip-tie assault on a Palestinian in Khirbet Humsa, in his cell. In a rarity, police charged the Jerusalem man filmed attacking a CNN crew near Sinjil, and the IDF reprimanded the soldier who choked a CNN cameraman. Golan opened the Democrats' campaign putting "the blood of our soldiers" on Netanyahu's and Katz's hands.

Israel and the World

Washington Signs the Saudi Enrichment Deal, Then Bolts on Recognition

Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Saudi energy minister Abdulaziz bin Salman signed a civil-nuclear "123 agreement" in Washington on Wednesday. The thirty-year pact opens a path to a US-built uranium-enrichment plant on Saudi soil after a two-year study, carries none of the IAEA "gold standard" oversight the UAE accepted, and required no normalization with Israel. By Thursday morning Trump had reversed himself on Truth Social, calling the deal "totally subject to" Riyadh joining the Abraham Accords and promising "no enrichment of material." The condition blindsided his own negotiating team and the Saudis, and it posted minutes after a Fox News panel and a Wall Street Journal editorial faulted a deal that had dropped the recognition term Biden once demanded. Wright had announced the signing without clearing it with the president. Netanyahu's office called Saudi accession "a historic leap forward for peace," Riyadh has said nothing, and the prime minister flies to Washington Monday to meet Trump on Tuesday.

The Hague Ousts the Prosecutor Behind the Netanyahu Warrant

The International Criminal Court's Assembly of States Parties voted 82 of 125 in a secret ballot at UN headquarters on Friday to remove chief prosecutor Karim Khan, the first ouster of a sitting ICC prosecutor in the court's twenty-four years. Sixty-three votes were needed. Khan, who in 2024 sought arrest warrants against Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant, was barred from the room by US sanctions, denies the sexual-misconduct findings against him, and has vowed to challenge the decision through every available channel. His deputies run the office until a replacement is chosen. Danon called the vote a rejection of a prosecutor who "sought to scapegoat Israel," and it lands as Washington runs an announced campaign to "dismantle" the court and after it sanctioned eleven of the court's officials.

Mamdani Loses the Arrest and the Charge Jumps to London and Maryland

Within forty-eight hours, the charge Zohran Mamdani conceded he could not enforce had jumped the Atlantic. London's Sadiq Khan told Channel 4 that Netanyahu "is not welcome in London," and that he would press Prime Minister Burnham to enforce the November 2024 warrant. Maryland governor Wes Moore, whose state hosts the Andrews base where Netanyahu's plane touches Maryland soil, would not say whether Maryland would try. Mamdani had spent two minutes of his Tuesday-night video conceding that New York City has no legal authority to arrest Netanyahu when he lands for the General Assembly on September 8, and the other hundred seconds calling him "a war criminal" and "the architect of a horrific genocide." Posted from his official mayoral account, the clip cleared eighty-four million views on X within days and neared ninety. He urged Washington to join the ICC and serve the warrant, then told New Yorkers who wanted more to protest instead. He would not call October 7 a genocide, allowing only a "horrific war crime," and left Hamas out of the litany entirely. ADL's Greenblatt called the video "a dangerous dereliction of duty," the JCRC warned it endangered Jewish New Yorkers, and Trump waved the whole thing off.

The Manufactured Count Sheds Names Its Keepers Can No Longer Defend

The International Federation of Journalists quietly removed eight names from its roster of journalists killed in Gaza after evidence tied them to Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and a Houthi broadcaster. Five were confirmed operatives. A sixth was the brother of a Nasser Salah al-Din brigade commander. The federation, which claims to speak for six hundred thousand journalists, posted no correction to the outlets that had cited its figure — the same silent walk-back the Committee to Protect Journalists performed weeks earlier. The same week, the IDF published a file on twelve Gaza "footballers" (players, coaches, and a FIFA-listed referee) memorialized abroad as innocent athletes, naming each as a Hamas or Islamic Jihad operative and several as October 7 invaders. Reuters and Al Jazeera had run the innocent-athlete version. A French lawmaker had called for a minute's silence for the referee. And the IPC, the global famine monitor, issued its next number, 1.2 million Gazans in acute food insecurity, which COGAT rejected as flawed methodology assembled to serve Hamas and reached without ever contacting Israel.

Tisha B'Av Ends With a Jew Knifed Outside a Manhattan Shul

On Tisha B'Av — the fast the calendar reserves for mourning what has been done to the Jews — a man in a kippah, Moshe Yezhak Grunhaus, 50, was stabbed in the chest with a screwdriver as he left afternoon services on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Minutes before, the same assailant, Raul Morales, 51, had knifed a 57-year-old Asian man near Central Park West, shouting "Allahu Akbar" at both. Both are stable. Morales is charged with attempted murder as a hate crime. The mayor condemned the attack. Israel's foreign minister and UN ambassador answered that his months of incitement against the Jewish state built the climate the screwdriver arrived in. And the motive-laundering has already begun — a claim, so far single-sourced, that the attacker is mentally ill and may never face trial. It did not happen alone: over the same days a man was beaten near to death in Germany for wearing an Israeli-flag pin, and a father and his small son were set on in a London park by an attacker the police are still hunting.

The West's Courts Reach the Sentence Its Arrests Kept Missing

A Manchester court handed a life term, seventeen years minimum, to Mohammad Bashir, 31, the "committed jihadist" who scouted a Ministry of Defence site with Jihad al-Shamie weeks before al-Shamie rammed the gates of the Heaton Park synagogue on Yom Kippur and murdered Melvin Cravitz and Adrian Daulby z"l at prayer. The force that convicted Bashir off al-Shamie's phone had held that phone since two earlier arrests and, in its own word, "regrettably" never opened it before the killings. In France, anti-terror prosecutors took six suspects into custody over a weapons cache — a Kalashnikov, a loaded Beretta — found in a stolen car beside two Sarcelles synagogues on July 12. Had it landed, an Israeli analysis argues, it would have been Europe's deadliest antisemitic massacre since the war, and its method points at an Iranian proxy operation. Toronto laid terror charges on two more men, a Maine jury convicted a third of threatening to murder Jews, and Canada's own statisticians logged Jews, one percent of the country, absorbing one hate crime in six.

Assessment For weeks the arrests came faster and the sentences never caught up to them — a Zurich attacker with a year suspended, a man who killed a Jew in California with a year in county. Manchester breaks the run: a life term, seventeen-year floor, for a man who only helped plan the attack another carried out. That is the sentence the West kept failing to reach, and it still buys back nothing the front end gave away, because the same police held the killer's phone through two arrests and left it shut until he had murdered two men at their prayers. Sarcelles marks the other ceiling. France charges "Islamic extremism" where the method points at Tehran, naming the cell and stopping two arrests short of the state that trains it [the network always stands in the dock, the regime that runs it never does].

Briefly Noted

Frontline & Security

The JC: Mossad and the Shin Bet disclosed a thwarted Iranian plot that recruited European criminals to enter Israel, surveil senior officials, and kill them — the intelligence ministry subcontracting the murder to keep Tehran's fingerprints off it.
Times of Israel: Kozo Okamoto, the Japanese Red Army gunman who murdered 26 people for the PFLP at Lod airport in 1972, died at 78 in the Hezbollah-controlled quarter of Beirut — released in the 1985 Jibril prisoner swap and left to age out under the cause he killed for.
Jerusalem Post: Beirut airport's new security chief has shut Hezbollah- and Amal-linked staff out of the radar department that tracks Lebanese airspace, on the concern the group would tap the data — a rare case of a Lebanese institution denying Hezbollah something it wants.

Diplomacy & Geopolitics

Jerusalem Post: The State Department told Congress in a July 22 letter that Turkey meets none of the legal conditions to rejoin the F-35 program and can take no aircraft until it surrenders its S-400 systems. Congress's S-400 bar is the one lever Israel holds over a sale it otherwise has no seat to decide.
JNS: The State Department summoned Malaysia's ambassador after Kuala Lumpur expelled an American citizen it found also held Israeli citizenship, and Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim answered by vowing to deport any Israeli who enters the country. Eight House Democrats have joined Republicans in pressing Rubio to make the ban cost something — a rare bipartisan floor under a Jewish-state question.
Times of Israel: UNESCO's committee added Samaria's Sebastia — capital of the biblical Kingdom of Israel — to its heritage-in-danger list as a site "in Palestine" and over Israel's objection, having said nothing about the Beaufort fortress through years of Hezbollah military use. The listing writes the Jewish claim's erasure into a UN register, which is the point of filing it there.

Public Diplomacy & Media

Jerusalem Post: Israel is spending some $50 million on a US influence campaign — AI-generated texts from senders named "Emma" and "Sarah," conservative influencers, and former Trump manager Brad Parscale — surfacing days after JD Vance accused Israeli officials of manipulating American opinion to keep the Iran war going.
Algemeiner: Israel's earthquake-relief delegation came home from Venezuela after three weeks, leaving a national reconstruction plan and an unexpected thaw with a government that severed ties under Chavez in 2009 and has been among Israel's loudest Latin American antagonists since.
JNS: Washington state kept a congressional candidate's call to "globalize the intifada" in its official voter guide after King County stripped the same line from its local pamphlet, the secretary of state's office citing no legal authority to alter statements "printed as submitted."

Domestic & Law

Jerusalem Post: Netanyahu's lawyers pressed the attorney general to decide whether the prosecution will drop the Case 4000 bribery count, after the district court repeated — now with the prime minister's cross-examination on the record — that it still finds the charge hard to prove.
Times of Israel: The State Attorney moved to strip the citizenship of the two Arab-Israeli Cellcom employees convicted of handing Hamas the means to paralyze Israel's cellular networks in a future war, invoking the 2023 amendment that made wartime treason a ground for revocation.
Jerusalem Post: Defending its judicial-selection overhaul at the High Court, the Knesset argued that a less professional Supreme Court is a price worth paying for public trust and a more diverse bench — the trade it buys is a Judicial Selection Committee where the sitting justices no longer hold a veto over who joins the court.

Economy, Tech & Infrastructure

Globes: Greece's security cabinet approved a roughly $4 billion buy of Israeli air defense — Rafael's David's Sling, IAI's Barak MX and Rafael's Spyder — the largest arms-export deal in Israel's history, past the 2023 Arrow sale to Germany. A NATO member covering its Aegean flank against Turkey with an interceptor Israel almost never exports marks Jerusalem's deepest turn yet as a European security supplier.
Times of Israel: Amnon Shashua will step down as CEO of Mobileye after 27 years once a successor is named, staying on as chairman while he turns to humanoid robotics — the founder who built Israel's autonomous-driving industry stepping back just as the robotaxi race leaves the lab for the road.
Israel Hayom: The Finance Ministry cancelled the NIS 1.3 billion grant it promised Intel in 2023 after the chipmaker froze the Kiryat Gat expansion the money was conditioned on. The Treasury is weighing whether to route the freed billion into an AI-investment push where Israel has fallen behind, or pull it back to a deficit stretched by the defense budget.

Culture, Religion & Society

Israel Hayom: Mohammed was the most common name given to Israeli boys born in 2025, the top Jewish name landing only fourth. The ranking tracks how Arab parents converge on a single name while Jewish ones scatter across dozens — arithmetic that reliably gets read as demography.
JNS: Haim Yavin, the anchor who was Israeli television for four decades and announced the 1977 'mahapach' live on air, has died at 93 — remembered too for the 2005 documentary that recast the settlement enterprise as occupation.
Jerusalem Post: Hapoel Jerusalem pulled a free-advertising offer to Cafe Basimta, embraced across the city as a symbol of secular defiance, once it emerged the place is run by Jews for Jesus. The defiance held exactly as long as the missionaries went unnamed.

Developments to Watch

Judea & Samaria

Security officials brace for an uprising — Israeli security officials report a shift in Arab behavior across Judea and Samaria after the week's attacks, and warn the next stage could be a broad popular uprising. A cell gets arrested. A mood does not, and the manpower to contain an intifada is already committed to Gaza, Lebanon and Iran.

Gaza & Southern Theater

Israel hits Hamas's civil rulers — The IDF and Shin Bet keep striking a rebuilding Hamas, and reportedly killed the head of its northern Gaza police. The strike reached Hamas's governing layer, the men who would administer Gaza after the war. Israel means to deny it the return to civil rule it has been rebuilding toward.

Regional Axis (Iran, Houthis, Militias)

The Gulf enters the war — Bahrain and Kuwait reportedly struck Iranian drone and missile depots this month, their first blows against Tehran, with Emirati help. The Gulf states Iran has bombarded for weeks are hitting back. That gives Tehran cause to strike its own hosts, not only America's.
A bridge for every tanker — Trump has told Tehran he will destroy an Iranian bridge or power plant for every ship attacked at Hormuz. The IRGC stopped four more vessels in a single day. The threat arms an automatic strike the thirteen-night halt otherwise stood down.
Moscow's hand in the CIA strikes — US analysts are investigating whether Russia supplied the targeting and drone technology behind Iran's precise strikes on CIA facilities in the Gulf. Trump says he takes Putin at his word that Moscow is not arming Tehran. His analysts are checking the wreckage against it.
Tehran reaches for the plane — US officials say they identified a credible Iranian-proxy plot to down Air Force One as Trump left the Turkey summit. He switched aircraft. Tehran has put the man weighing its next punishment on its own target list, which rarely cools a decision.

Diplomatic & Legal

Iran turns on Europe's runways — Iran warned Bulgaria that hosting American tanker aircraft would make Sofia complicit, with the basing still awaiting a parliamentary vote. Britain has already pulled its diplomats from Tehran under the same pressure. Iran is now naming any European capital that refuels Washington a target.
An escort coalition takes shape — Washington and London are convening allies to weigh an international coalition to escort shipping through the Strait of Hormuz. An escorted convoy sets Western warships against the IRGC's shore batteries and its mined channel. That is the confrontation the blockade has so far only threatened.

Home Front & Politics

Netanyahu weighs a wartime coalition — With the country on its highest alert to enter the Iran war, Netanyahu is reported to be sounding out an emergency unity government. The October 27 campaign has only just opened. A wartime coalition would widen his mandate for the strike decision, and hand his rivals a reason to refuse.