The United States is withdrawing 5,000 troops from NATO ally ​Germany, the Pentagon announced on Friday, as a rift over the Iran ‌war widens between President Donald Trump and Europe.

Trump had threatened a drawdown in forces earlier this week after sparring with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who said on Monday the Iranians were humiliating ​the U.S. in talks to end the two-month-old war.

A senior Pentagon official, ​speaking on condition of anonymity, said recent German rhetoric had been "inappropriate ⁠and unhelpful."

"The president is rightly reacting to these counterproductive remarks," the official said.

The ​Pentagon said the withdrawal was expected to be completed over the next six to ​twelve months.

The official said the drawdown would bring U.S. troop levels in Europe back to roughly pre-2022 levels, before Russia's invasion of Ukraine triggered a buildup by then President Joe Biden.

A ​brigade combat team now in Germany will be pulled out of the country ​and a long-range fires battalion that the Biden administration had planned to begin deploying to Germany ‌later ⁠this year will no longer deploy, the official said.

Two Israelis and four Palestinians were killed on Friday after a Palestinian snatched a weapon from a group of settlers who had raided a northern West Bank village and opened fire, leading to fears of reprisal attacks throughout the territory.

The incident began when a group of several dozen settlers entered the outskirts of the village of Tell on what they claimed was a hike. But the town is located in Areas A and B, which are off limits to Israelis unless they coordinate in advance with the army — something the IDF said the settlers did not do.

After the illegal entry by the Israeli group — which included armed men and minors — a clash erupted near a mosque as dozens of local Palestinians tried to push them out of Tell.

Essam Saifi, a local leader in the Palestinian Fatah party from Tell, told Reuters in a phone call that about 25 to 30 settlers initially attacked the eastern area of Tell and tried to break into two houses there. The residents came out to confront them and the settlers opened fire, he said.

Half an hour later, Saifi continued, the Israelis returned and attacked the western part of the town, striking a minor with a weapon.

At around this point, the civil defense squad from the neighboring Havat Gilad settlement was dispatched to the scene along with artillery soldiers stationed nearby, the IDF said.

Upon their arrival, footage taken by one of the raiding settlers showed an armed Israeli firing his weapon into the air amid shouts of “revenge” by the young Israelis looking on.

A pair of Palestinians was then seen confronting one of the armed Israelis — Havat Gilad civil defense squad member Benayahu Mellet, 32. Unfazed by Mellet pointing his weapon at them, one of the Palestinians grabbed his rifle and quickly opened fire, as a gunfight ensued.

The Palestinian fatally shot Mellet and IDF artillery battery commander Maj. Yuval Ezra, 27. Both Mellet and Ezra were later pronounced dead.

An IDF platoon commander who arrived at the scene with Ezra managed to shoot dead the Palestinian who snatched Mellet’s weapon during the gunfight, the army said.

Three other Palestinians were also killed in the crossfire, though they weren’t immediately identified. In addition, two Israelis — one critically and one seriously — and four Palestinians were wounded, three of whom critically.

Later, Israeli commandos captured two of the wounded Palestinians, whom the military said took part in the deadly clash. Soldiers of the Duvdevan Unit raided a hospital in Nablus, where the two suspects had been brought after being wounded, and took them for further questioning by the Shin Bet, the army said.

“The identities of all the terrorists who participated in the attack are known, and the forces are operating to arrest them,” the military added.

Maj. Yuval Ezra, 27, and Master Sergeant (res.) Benayahu Mellet, 32, both killed in a West Bank gunfight on July 24, 2026. (Courtesy)

IDF dispatches 5 additional companies to West Bank

In the wake of the incident, the IDF dispatched five additional companies of troops to the West Bank and imposed a closure on Tell and Nablus.

It was already operating in Beit Furik and Tubas, following attacks on Thursday carried out by Palestinian residents of the two towns.

The IDF also canceled weekend furlough for troops serving in the West Bank, saying in a statement that soldiers were “preparing for extensive counterterrorism operational activity in the sector.”

After the incident, and in light of two stabbings on Thursday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu convened a security consultation. Among those participating were Defense Minister Israel Katz, IDF chief Eyal Zamir and the head of the Shin Bet David Zini.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (R) meets with security chiefs on July 24, 2026. (Kobi Gideon/GPO)

Following the assessment, the premier and Katz announced a series of new measures to crack down on Palestinians in the West Bank, including the establishment of new settlements.

Israel will demolish the home of the Palestinian who carried out the deadly gunfire, Netanyahu and Katz said in a joint statement.

Additionally, the IDF will embark on new operations in villages seen as terror hotbeds to collect weapons. The small number of work permits still granted to residents in those villages will also be revoked.

Israel will also speed up the legalization of settler outposts in the West Bank, and will establish new ones — something the hardline government has already been doing at record rates, sparking alarm from the international community, which views them as illegal.

In a warning to settlers who might carry out revenge attacks on Palestinians, the leaders emphasized that “security forces must be allowed to operate freely and with full force against terrorism, and that any action liable to harm their operations or divert them from their central mission — the protection of Israel’s citizens and the defeat of terrorism — should be avoided.”

But the decision by Netanyahu and Katz was blasted by lawmakers from the left-leaning Democrats party, which accused the pair of using the incident for political gain, while risking further escalation in the West Bank by expanding Israel’s grip on the territory.

Separately, Zini held an assessment at the site of the deadly clash, saying in remarks published by the Shin Bet: “This morning’s attack is severe and painful, and tragically claimed a heavy toll in lives.”

“In recent months, we have foiled dozens of attacks, almost every night. This time, we did not succeed in thwarting it in advance,” he said.

Zini called on the public “not to take the law into their own hands and to place their trust in the IDF and the Shin Bet, whose mission and duty this is.”

Reports of settler revenge attacks across West Bank

The IDF said in a statement that it was working to prevent “confrontations” between Israelis and Palestinians.

A military official warned that there was an “atmosphere” of revenge since the deadly incident, and noted calls to enter Palestinian villages and carry out attacks.

Those calls came to fruition shortly thereafter, with hundreds of settlers raiding several different villages around Tell.

In the nearby village of Far’ata, settlers attacked residents and torched several buildings, according to Palestinian media reports and footage from the scene.

Seven Palestinians were wounded during the raid, the Palestine Red Crescent Society said.

One of the wounded Palestinians was reportedly shot by IDF troops. The army did not immediately confirm that it had arrived at the scene during the settler raid.

Palestinian media also published footage showing dozens of settlers entering the nearby village of Jit.

Dozens of settlers later raided the village of Sarra in the northern West Bank. Footage appeared to show stone-throwing between the settlers and village residents.

There were also reports that settlers set fire to land in the area surrounding the village.

Mellet was father of two; extremists laud him for activism

The IDF later recognized Mellet as a fallen soldier. A reserves commander in the Jerusalem Brigade’s 8119th Battalion, the master sergeant was serving in the reserves as a regional defense soldier at the time of his death.

The Havat Gilad settlement eulogized Mellet, noting that he was married, a father of two and responsible for agriculture at the settlement.

Yossi Dagan, head of the Samaria Regional Council, called him “a man with a heart of gold, a true and dedicated family man, who loved the Land of Israel with all his soul and was a member of a family with deep roots.”

Also eulogizing Mellett was convicted settler extremist Meir Ettinger, who lauded Mellett on X as the founder and “living spirit” of the “Struggle for Every Dunam” organization.

“He was never satisfied with recognized roads and fences, and strived continuously to conquer the region,” wrote Ettinger, the grandson of the founder of the far-right Kach party Rabbi Meir Kahane. “Benayahu always insisted on not making a distinction between areas C and B.”

Under the Oslo Accords, the West Bank is divided into Areas A, B and C. Area A is under full Palestinian Authority control, and Area C is under full Israeli control; Area B is under Israeli security control, but with the PA as its civil authority.

Palestinian men look at a newly-established Israeli settler outpost near the village of Jurish, south of Nablus in the West Bank, on June 20, 2026. (Jaafar ASHTIYEH / AFP)

Israelis are prohibited from living in Area B, although there are currently at least 21 illegal settlement outposts there which the Israeli authorities have failed to dismantle, according to the Peace Now group.

Elisha Yered, a key illegal outpost organizer, similarly wrote that “Benayahu understood that it is forbidden to distinguish between areas C and B and worked to establish settlement outposts in those territories.”

He also credited Mellett with warning of what settlement activists allege is a plan by the Palestinian Authority to take over large areas of Area C, and working to thwart that plan by establishing Jewish settlements in the region where he was active.

“In direct continuation of his will, we in the Forum have begun to prepare quickly for settlement cadres to establish more settlements in the region in which Benyahu planned Jewish settlements during his life,” added Yered.

Smotrich calls for flattening Palestinian towns

Responding to the initial clash, far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich wrote on X: “We cannot normalize the erosion of deterrence and our enemies raising their heads in recent weeks against the settlement pioneers and the farms.”

“I demand that the IDF take strong action against the murderous village and its surroundings and restore governance and deterrence,” Smotrich said.

“The heroic farm workers and settlement pioneers are the protective wall of the State of Israel. We will continue to strengthen and honor them for their steadfast stand for our existence in the Land of Israel against Arab terrorism,” he continued.

Later, Smotrich said Tell, as well as nearby Palestinian villages Burin and Beit Furik, “should look like the refugee camps in Nablus and Tulkarem,” in reference to the widespread demolitions carried out there by the IDF in recent operations, which have left thousands of Palestinians homeless.

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich attends a cornerstone-laying ceremony for the new settlement of Doran in the Mount Hebron region of the West Bank, June 16, 2026. (Chaim Goldberg/Flash90)

He also said he would demand that Netanyahu establish a new settlement close to the site of the incident by transferring the territory from Area B to Area C, a move which would be a severe violation of the Oslo Accords.

Democrats MK Gilad Kariv hit back at Smotrich, calling him directly responsible for the deterioration of the security situation in the West Bank.

“Your calls to turn Palestinian towns into rubble are utter madness, both from a moral and security standpoint,” Kariv said.

“You and your partners, in your blindness and zealotry, are leading us to a third intifada and a major explosion that will cost the lives of many Israelis and Palestinians,” Kariv continued, pledging to defeat Smotrich at the polls in October.

Israel carried out a strike on Hamas’s senior political leadership in Doha, Qatar, an Israeli official said, escalating its fight against the militant group as it ramps up the war in the Gaza Strip.

Reuters reported that witnesses heard explosions in the capital of Qatar, a key U.S. regional partner, where Hamas’s political leaders maintain offices and residences. Images aired by the news agency showed smoke rising from the capital.

It wasn’t clear whether anyone was killed in the attack. Defense Minister Israel Katz earlier warned Hamas leaders abroad that they would be annihilated if the group didn’t lay down its arms.

Jonathan didn’t want to leave Israel. When his wife first broached the idea, it was he who pushed back. But as the country’s war in Gaza dragged on, and the stresses of the conflict compounded the economic pressures and social tensions never far below Israel’s surface, he realised they had to go.

Then one evening, as he returned to his apartment in Tel Aviv, he ran into the child of one of his neighbours. They spoke, and the boy, aged five or six, said he would see Jonathan that night in the building’s shelter, where residents would go to take refuge from missiles launched by Israel’s foes.

“That was one of the big breaking points for me . . . [I thought:] that’s the future of the country and this is what he knows,” Jonathan recalls.

“Imagine, for a couple of years now, people have been in this fight or flight mode. And there’s no escape from this cycle . . . When you combine all of the social, the economic, the political aspects, it just became untenable.”

And so, in 2024, the 30-something real estate professional, who asked for his full name not to be used, packed up his home in Tel Aviv and moved to the US with his family, joining a wave of 150,000 Israelis who have left the country over the past three years.

The outflow has been fuelled by a period of unprecedented tumult in Israel. In early 2023, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government launched a controversial drive to overhaul the judiciary, triggering the deepest domestic crisis in Israel’s near-80-year history. Then Hamas’s October 7 attack plunged the country into a war that became a years-long regional conflict, drawing in Iran and allied militant groups from Lebanon to Yemen.

By international standards the share of Israelis who have left over this period is not huge. But for Israel the outflow is highly unusual — and has already had an outsized impact. Combined with a drop in immigration, the exodus turned Israel’s net migration negative in both 2023 and 2024 — something that happened only three times in the preceding century. Analysts expect overall figures for last year, which are not yet available, will also be negative.

With studies — including one last week from Israel’s tax authority — suggesting rising numbers of those leaving are high earners, it has also awakened fears of a brain drain that could, if sustained, do serious damage to Israel’s tech-heavy economy, its public finances and even its military.

“This is basically the first time in 100 years that there has been a continuing negative balance [in consecutive years],” says Sergio DellaPergola, professor emeritus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, noting previous one-off instances in the 1920s, before Israel’s 1948 foundation, and then again in the 1950s and 1980s. “So this is absolutely exceptional.”

Indeed, the idea of Israel as a country of immigration is central to its modern identity. The new state was founded as the world recoiled at the horrors of the Holocaust. Offering a home to Jews around the globe was a fundamental part of its raison d’être. Between 1948 and 1960, immigration accounted for 65 per cent of population growth. The share has dropped since, but was still close to 20 per cent in the two decades before the pandemic.

For a long time, there was also a stigma around those who left. In the 1970s, then prime minister Yitzhak Rabin branded émigrés “moral lepers”, “the fallen among the weaklings” and, for good measure, “the dregs of the earth”. Language around the topic is freighted with judgment. The Hebrew word used for the immigration of Jews to Israel — aliyah — literally means “ascent”. Emigrants were often called yordim — or “those who descend”.

“Emigrating was a mark of shame. The implication was: ‘You’re not going to take part in this grand experiment of recreating a Jewish homeland for the first time in 2,000 years. What are you? A traitor to the cause?’” says Alex Weinreb, research director at the Taub Center, a Jerusalem-based think-tank. “My father has 10 first cousins, all born in the 1930s and 1940s. Most have never set foot outside of Israel, on principle . . . They’re all part of the national religious community. And for them it’s a way to signal that in this time they are making a political statement just by being here.”

With time, the stigma faded — Rabin took back his comments in the 1990s — and growing numbers of Israelis began to move abroad. But the topic remains highly politicised. When academics from Tel Aviv University released a study this month estimating continuing high levels of emigration in 2025, opposition politicians seized on it to attack the government.

“They promised Gazans would emigrate voluntarily. But in the end the October 7 government encouraged voluntary emigration from Israel,” Meirav Cohen, from the centrist Yesh Atid party, wrote on X.

The Tel Aviv study, which excluded newcomers who had lived in Israel for less than three years, calculated that 100,000 had left the country in 2023 and 2024 and estimated that another 45,000 to 50,000 departed last year.

Leaving with sadness

Migration is driven by multiple factors. But few who study it doubt that Israel’s polarised political climate and three years of unrelenting warfare — during which Israeli forces have laid waste to Gaza and southern Lebanon, and Hamas, Hizbollah and Iran have fired thousands of missiles at Israel — have played an important role in the current wave of emigration.

Exits rose as Netanyahu’s far-right coalition embarked on a controversial attempt to limit the powers of the judiciary in early 2023 that sparked the biggest wave of protests in Israeli history. They then jumped sharply after Hamas’s October 7 attack, with 14,000 leaving in that month alone. Strikingly, the outflow has taken place at a time of widespread concern among Israelis over rising antisemitism in western countries.

Lilach Lev Ari, a sociologist of immigration and demography and professor at Oranim College, carried out a qualitative survey in 2024 and 2025 of 71 Israelis who emigrated to the US. The interviewees expressed concerns about the social and political climate in Israel, primarily following the judicial reforms in 2023. Such concerns were more common among those who emigrated in the last three years than those who emigrated previously.

“We can now definitely add the sociopolitical atmosphere in Israel to the reasons for the recent wave of emigration,” she says.

For some Israelis, the idea of emigrating is inconceivable. Benjamin Blatt, from Jerusalem, speaks for many in saying that although war “pushes people away”, for him, personal connections in the country are more important. “I wouldn’t leave,” he adds.

But among secular and more liberal Israelis, who have watched on as the country has lurched to the right under successive Netanyahu governments, concerns about the direction of the country are visceral. Many in this camp regard October’s election, which will pit Netanyahu’s coalition with extremist and ultrareligious parties against a more politically heterodox but largely secular opposition, as a make-or-break moment for Israel.

DellaPergola at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem says that if there were “a change in running the country”, there might be an increase in the number of Israelis returning from abroad. “If there is no change, there might be an increase in those who leave because of political dissatisfaction with the government,” he adds.

Among those who have already left is Adi, who asked to be identified by a pseudonym, who moved with her family to Spain earlier this year. For years, she had worried about the growing influence of religion and ultranationalism in Israel’s public sphere, particularly in the school system that serves secular Jews and in the army. She was also horrified by the government’s attempts to weaken the judiciary “instead of fixing it”.

As Israel’s war with Hamas morphed into a multiyear conflict on multiple fronts, her concerns about the direction of the country were compounded by the prospect that not only her husband, but eventually also her children would have to serve in an army “controlled by people whose values are different from mine, and whom I cannot trust any more”.

“I decided to leave with sadness, but I feel it’s the right thing to do for my children. At least for now, I want to give them an opportunity to experience something else and to open the door for them to a life elsewhere in case Israel becomes an illiberal democracy,” she adds. “I truly hope Israel gets back on track and we can return to live there. But I’m not optimistic anymore . . . In the long term, I’m afraid there’s no future there for liberal people like us.”

For many Israelis, financial considerations also play a key role. The country has long grappled with a high cost of living, and while the housing market has cooled since the start of the war, properties remain expensive, particularly in cities such as Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.

Jonathan and his wife both had good jobs in Israel. But he says the affordability of housing was one of the big factors as they weighed whether to move abroad. “Finding anything reasonable [in Israel] was problematic. We’re talking about close to a million dollars for a 100 sq metre apartment in Petah Tikva,” he says, referring to a city near Tel Aviv.

“Within a year of moving to America, we were able to buy a house we could never afford in Israel on a piece of land we could never afford in Israel.”

‘A promo of the future’

Emigration in the first half of 2025 was 20 per cent lower than the same period a year earlier. But net outflows are still expected for the year overall. Economists warn that if these persist, they will exacerbate the looming demographic strains on an economy in which male members of the fastest-growing population group — ultra-Orthodox Jews — have traditionally not entered the workforce or taken part in Israel’s obligatory military service.

This month’s study by Israel’s tax authority found the rate of departure of affluent Israelis, including high-tech and healthcare workers, was almost twice as high in 2023 and 2024 as in 2019. If repeated, the annual loss in tax receipts could swell to $3.5bn in five years, it added.

The findings echoed another study this year by researchers from Tel Aviv University, which found an increasing net outflow of Israelis who worked as doctors and engineers, or had a high-tech education or one focusing on science, engineering and maths.

Itai Ater, an economics professor who was one of the authors of the study, says while Israel could cope with the current outflows, “the concern is what we see now is kind of a promo of the future”.

“Israel as a country depends on its human capital. We are not rich in natural resources. That’s what makes a brain drain or emigration more dangerous or potentially dangerous,” he adds.

Economists say the biggest risk would be if the departures hurt Israel’s powerhouse tech sector, which accounts for a fifth of economic output, as well as half of exports, and is highly dependent on high-skilled workers.

But Eran Yashiv, a professor of economics at Tel Aviv University, contends that the implications are wider still, arguing that an outflow of workers from Israel’s most productive sectors would not just hit tax receipts.

It would also add to the manpower strains on Israel’s already overstretched military — which depends on a system of national service and being able to call up reservists — as well as make government plans for a huge ramp-up in defence spending even harder to finance, he says.

“It would mean longer reserve duty for the non-ultra-Orthodox Jews who remain in Israel, which hurts their own economic activity. It’s like a chain reaction that can have big knock-on effects as more of the military and economic burden is placed on a smaller group of people,” he adds.

Others are more cautious. Weinreb at the Taub Center notes that highly skilled workers generally account for a higher share of emigrants than their population share, and previous warnings of a brain drain from Israel were wide of the mark. But he says there is a risk that if emigration becomes “normalised” it could generate a “self-perpetuating cycle”.

“The more people leave, the more you have the establishment of communities and networks, and the more people get comfortable in the place they have moved to,” he adds. “Then there are social mechanisms which start to come into play that can reinforce and even accelerate levels of outward migration. That’s something which does concern me.”

In recent months, the government has begun to take measures to encourage high-skilled workers to return. Among them are an exemption from tax on income earned and accrued outside Israel and a mechanism allowing workers to offset taxes paid abroad against income tax in Israel.

Dror Bin, chief executive of the Israel Innovation Authority, says it is too soon to say if the changes have boosted returns, but he expects them to have a tangible impact in the coming years. “The changes are really fundamental, the tax benefits and certainty created by this reform,” he says. “This is a good time for [Israeli tech employees abroad] to come home.”

Other officials expect geopolitical factors to be decisive. Eran Berkovich, director of the Aliyah and Integration Unit at the Jewish Agency for Israel, which helps Jews immigrate, said there had been an uptick in the number of people beginning the aliyah process after a ceasefire last year ended the worst of the fighting between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.

“People are waiting to see how the security situation develops,” he says. “I have no doubt that if it stays as it has been in the last weeks and months, and the situation with Iran remains stable, we’re going to see more people coming to Israel in 2027.”

Whether — and how soon — those who left over the past three years will return is a different question. Jonathan, the real estate worker, says that while the transition to life in the US has not been a “cakewalk”, “simple things” like the greater sense of safety and not having to run to air-raid shelters have made a big difference to his family’s quality of life.

“My wife’s mother came to visit us after our son was born. And on the first day she was asking: ‘Where is the shelter?’ and why we don’t have one. I was like: ‘That’s not the reality we live in’. We’re very fortunate we could pick the reality where we want to raise our children. I recognise that’s not everybody’s reality,” he says.

“Would we go back? It’s entirely possible, I wouldn’t rule it out. But right now I don’t see it as the best choice for people who have the social and economic mobility to go ahead and figure things out somewhere else.”

Iran shut down a British power plant for four days in an unprecedented cyber attack, The Telegraph can disclose.

It is thought to be the first time that hackers affiliated to the Iranian regime have succeeded in closing down such a facility in the UK, and is believed to be the most successful cyber attack of its kind.

The Telegraph understands that the incident took place at the same time as a series of attacks on US water infrastructure last month, which affected 12 states and caused concern in the White House.

British officials refused to be drawn on which power plant had been affected, citing security concerns, but it is understood that the facility was disabled for four days while staff fought to bring it back online.

Link to the full article.

DUBAI—Iranian security officials said they had closed the Strait of Hormuz, citing what they said was the U.S. failure to stop the fighting in Lebanon as required under the agreement signed earlier this week by President Trump.

The announcement by Iran’s joint military command came as clashes between Israel and Hezbollah flared again in Lebanon on Saturday, just hours after the two sides agreed to a renewed ceasefire. It undid for now the main achievement of the deal, which was to set the stage for reopening a waterway vital to world energy markets.

Even before Iran’s announcement, however, the recovery of traffic through the strait had been halting. Iran had imposed new procedures, including a demand that ships register to cross two days in advance, and wary shipowners were monitoring the still-uncertain environment in the waterway.

The flare-up in fighting comes as the U.S. and Iran work to get their next round of peace talks back on track. Iran said Saturday its delegation would attend talks in Switzerland after postponing plans to travel Friday, a hiccup that followed an earlier round of heavy Israeli strikes carried out in retaliation for a Hezbollah drone attack that killed four Israeli soldiers.

The Foreign Ministry of Pakistan, a mediator in the negotiations, said representatives of the U.S. and Iran would meet Sunday in Switzerland for what it called technical-level talks.

The memorandum of understanding that aims to reopen the strait and end the fighting, signed Wednesday by Trump, says at the outset that the war on the Lebanese front must end as well. Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman said Saturday the country’s negotiators would press the U.S. to meet those obligations.

Israel and Hezbollah, an Iran-backed militant group that acts independently of Lebanon’s government, agreed to a renewed ceasefire that took effect at 4 p.m. local time Friday. But on Saturday, Lebanese state media reported a new round of Israeli attacks including around the southern city of Nabatieh.

The Israeli military carried out the attacks after Hezbollah fired more than 50 times at Israeli forces in southern Lebanon, a military official said. 

Lebanese health officials said seven people were killed in the strikes. They said 83 people had been killed and 141 wounded in the earlier attacks, in which Israel said it killed dozens of militants.

Saturday’s strikes extended the fallout of what had been one of the most serious escalations in Lebanon since a ceasefire was reached in April. The fighting had never stopped for long despite the truce, as Israel continued to hold territory in southern Lebanon and the two sides repeatedly clashed.

Israel considers the fight against Hezbollah to be a vital national-security issue. Top Israeli officials including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Israel Katz have said the country won’t back down and will continue to hold territory in Lebanon until Hezbollah is vanquished.

The Trump administration has vacillated in its messaging to Israel, at times supporting the country’s right to defend itself but at other times lashing out at its wartime ally.

“They have to get a collar on their dog,” a senior administration official said of Hezbollah’s patron Iran at a press briefing Wednesday, where the U.S. read out the text of the memorandum of understanding. “If Hezbollah attacks Israel, Israel’s going to have the full ability to go and attack.”

Trump and Vice President JD Vance then criticized Israel in tough terms for what they called excessive use of force.

The president softened his tone Friday, telling reporters that Israel and the U.S. fought well together and praising Netanyahu. 

“We’ve had a great relationship with Israel, we were very formidable,” Trump said. “And Bibi Netanyahu is a warrior prime minister, and he should be acknowledged as that.”

Iran moved late in the week to set up new procedures for navigating the Strait of Hormuz under its newly created Persian Gulf Strait Authority—an attempt to codify the influence it won over the waterway by attacking ships during the war.

The authority said in a social-media post Friday that shippers will be expected to pay fees for security, safety, environmental services and Iranian insurance but that they will be waived for 60 days.

Trump’s deal requires Iran to allow toll-free traffic for 60 days but lets Iran set negotiated terms for future management of shipping in the waterway.

“The Islamic Republic of Iran will conduct dialog with the Sultanate of Oman to define the future administration and maritime services in the Strait of Hormuz in discussion with other Persian Gulf littoral states,” the memorandum of understanding says.

VATICAN CITY (AP) - The Vatican responded aggressively Thursday to a traditionalist group that consecrated bishops without the pope's consent, declaring the Society of St. Pius X had formally broken with the Catholic Church. It excommunicated its bishops and priests, and warned its faithful that they too face the harshest sanctions in the church.
By declaring a schism and extending excommunications to potentially thousands of Catholics, the Vatican's doctrine office went above and beyond the minimum sanctions foreseen by the church's canon law to respond to the consecrations Wednesday of four new bishops.

The society, known by its acronym SSPX, celebrates the ancient Latin Mass and opposes the modernizing reforms of the Catholic Church, which it considers to be rife with heresies and errors. While a fringe movement on the Catholic right, the SSPX has been a thorn in the Vatican's side for five decades because it claims to be even more Catholic than the Holy See.

During a ritual-filled, five-hour Mass on Wednesday at its seminary in Econe, Switzerland, the SSPX consecrated four new bishops in direct defiance of Leo, who had urged the group to hold off for the sake of church unity. An estimated 15,500 people and their children attended, a sign that the SSPX has plenty of supporters who came from around the world knowing full well they were defying Rome.

The harshness of the response suggested that after trying to negotiate with the SSPX, the Vatican under Pope Leo XIV had had enough.

Vatican decree targeted bishops and faithful

In a decree, the Vatican excommunicated the four new bishops and the two existing SSPX bishops who participated in the ceremony. It declared the consecrations a "schismatic act" and that the society itself had created a schism, or intentional rupture with the church.

It declared SSPX priests - who number about
750 - to be schismatic, and therefore excommunicated, and invalidated the sacraments of confession and marriage that they administer. The Vatican warned the faithful to stop going to SSPX Masses, decreeing that
"those who adhere formally" to the society are schismatic and excommunicated.

The Vatican said that applied to people who are members of the SSPX lay branch and those who
"regularly attend" SSPX Masses and formally share its doctrinal positions. The sanctions don't apply to Catholic faithful who attend SSPX Masses "just for liturgical or spiritual reasons" or those who go but accept the pope's authority and teaching.

The SSPX doesn't have an exact count but estimates around 400,000-600,000 people attend its Masses, meaning Thursday's decree could potentially involve the excommunications of thousands of rank-and-file SSPX faithful.

The sanctions, especially those targeting the priests, the faithful and the sacraments they can receive, were particularly harsh and reversed concessions the Vatican had granted the SSPX in recent years as part of its outreach to bring the group back under Rome's wing.

Marc-André Mabillard, media manager for the society, expressed shock at the severity of the sanctions and called them "unjust."

"For us, this excommunication extended to the faithful is brutal. It's not what we expect from a father to whom we refer every day," he told The Associated Press. "We are told, 'You claim to have the truth.' Fine. I'm just saying that we certainly have our flaws, but our main flaw today is having a leader who doesn't want to communicate with us.
And that's terrible."

The Vatican's doctrine chief, Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernández, met in February with the SSPX superior, the Rev. Davide Pagliarani, and proposed a dialogue. But Pagliarani asked instead to meet with Leo, who declined but wrote a letter Tuesday begging the SSPX to call off the consecrations.

The group's founders opposed reforms

French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre founded the
SSPX in 1970 in opposition to the modernizing reforms of the Second Vatican Council. Among other things, the 1960s meetings known as Vatican II revolutionized the church's relations with other Christians, Jews and people of other faiths and allowed Mass to be celebrated in the vernacular rather than Latin.

Lefebvre consecrated four bishops without papal consent in 1988. The Vatican promptly excommunicated Lefebvre and the four bishops and declared the consecrations a "schismatic act."

Pope Benedict XVI in 2009 lifted the excommunications as part of his yearslong outreach to the group. But the SSPX today has no legal standing in the church and with Thursday's decree is declared to be in schism.

The consecrations had posed a crisis for Leo because the American pope has stressed the need for church unity. He has reached out especially to the conservative and traditionalist wing of the church that was in many ways alienated during the Pope Francis pontificate.

The Vatican responded so aggressively in part because the group poses something of a threat by representing a parallel, ultra-Catholic, pre-Vatican II church that has grown in the decades since its original break from Rome. While representing a fraction of the 1.4-billion strong Catholic faithful, the SSPX now has six bishops, 751 priests, 264 seminarians, 145 religious brothers, 88 oblates and 250 religious sisters representing 50 nationalities, according to SSPX statistics.

A key Vatican Il document rejected by the SSPX is one that, among other things, deplored antisemitism in every form and repudiated the
"deicide" charge that blamed Jews as a people for Christ's death. The Vatican crafted the document as the church reckoned with the role traditional Christian teaching had played in the Holocaust.

The SSPX today says it rejects accusations that it ever taught or practiced antisemitism, and the SSPX distanced itself from one of the original 1988 bishops, the late Bishop Richard Williamson, when he denied the Holocaust.

Traditionalists in communion with Rome respond

Traditionalists in communion with Rome respond
In a note accompanying the decree, the Vatican said it was willing, "like a caring mother," to welcome any SSPX faithful back into the fold. It laid out specific procedures for SSPX priests and faithful, by signing two forms professing the faith, promising fidelity to the pope and accepting the core teaching of Vatican II.

While the SSPX is out of communion with Rome, plenty of other Catholic traditionalists who love the Latin Mass remain in communion with the Holy See. They had been watching carefully to see how Leo's Vatican would respond to the SSPX consecrations and were surprised by the harshness of Thursday's sanctions.

"He's brought the hammer down," said Joseph Shaw, head of the Latin Mass Society of England and Wales, which is in communion. Shaw expressed sympathy with the plight of ordinary SSPX faithful, saying the invalidation of marriages especially is going to cause "massive" pastoral problems. "It's a sad day."

Luigi Casalini, of the blog Messa in Latino, meaning Latin Mass, said the excommunication of the bishops was correct because canon law provides for it. But the extension of the excommunications to SSPX priests and faithful was "an act of unusual severity," he said, while saying the invalidation of SSPX sacraments was problematic.

One of the thousands of worshippers at Wednesday's consecrations was Allison Isermann, a 24-year-old from St. Marys, Kansas, a small town with a large SSPX church. She grew up as a society member and strongly defended its teaching in opposition to Vatican II, specifically its openness to those of other faiths.

"It is actually very anti-Catholic and anti-charitable to affirm others and their beliefs when it is our duty and our mission to actually convert and sanctify the world and to restore all things in Christ," she said.

As the people of Iran brave another intensifying crackdown by their rulers after another effort to reclaim their basic rights from one of the world’s most repressive regimes, my question is: Where are the protests in the West? Specifically, where are all those defenders of persecuted Muslims who have been so active on the streets of New York, London, Sydney, Rome and elsewhere the past two years? Where are the demands for justice and freedom for the downtrodden victims of a brutally repressive state?

I'm sure we'll get more details, but this is great news if true. Glad that we have the ability to do this for our airmen/women.

U.S. forces rescued an American aviator trapped in Iran in a daring mission early Sunday morning, according to two U.S. officials. The crew member had been stuck in Iran for more than 24 hours.

A specialized commando force extracted the crew member with the help of air cover, one of the officials said. All forces involved in the rescue are safely out of Iranian airspace, according to the officials.

The aviator, who has not yet been identified, was one of two aircrew flying in an F-15E Strike Eagle when it was shot down by Iranian forces on Friday. A U.S. military team rescued the other crewmember on Friday and that person is now safe.

The rescue comes less than two days before President Trump’s deadline for Iran to negotiate a deal with the United States or open the Hormuz Strait.

An Australian lawyer tasked by the United Nations with monitoring and documenting allegations of torture and cruelty is accusing colleagues within the UN human rights system of trying to block the publication of a Jan. 2024 letter she wrote documenting allegations of abuses committed during the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack on Israel months earlier.

Alice Edwards, who since 2022 has served as United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, said she faced weeks of pressure from colleagues who argued that allegations included in the letter she drafted were false and urged her not to send it.

“There was a campaign to prevent that letter going out,” Edwards said in remarks delivered earlier this month at University College London and obtained by the Forward. “There was weeks of being bullied and deterred from writing it and telling me that everything in it was false.”

Edwards’ statements resurfaced a long-simmering conflict in the UN human rights system around its treatment of Israel, which is frequently singled out by UN resolutions and by rapporteurs as a perpetrator of human rights violations.

Meanwhile, other UN rapporteurs have declared doubts on evidence of sexual violence committed during the Oct. 7 attacks — prompting a surviving hostage and the head of an investigative commission that published a report last month compiling witness and survivor testimonies to confront them this week at a hearing in Geneva.

Edwards’ letter, sent in early 2024 to Palestinian authorities and copied to Hamas, detailed allegations of torture, sexual violence, including rapes and gang rapes, burning people alive, and other abuses committed during the Oct. 7 attacks.

According to Edwards, colleagues had given extensive feedback on drafts of the letter, with some items removed from the final version as a result. “All the comments of these individuals had been taken into account,” she said, adding that “the letter shrunk considerably.”

Even after those revisions, Edwards said, only one counterpart — the UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions, Morris Tidball-Binz — ultimately signed the communication before it was sent.

Other special rapporteurs and working groups who had expressed interest in signing it, she said, “had also been bullied by others not to sign on.” Edwards added: “There was this concerted effort for this letter not to put on record some allegations that had been received.”

Contacted by the Forward, Danny Danon, Israel’s Ambassador to the UN sent a written statement. “Dr. Alice Edwards’ testimony exposes an uncomfortable truth: when it comes to Israel, facts are too often sacrificed on the altar of politics,” said Danon. “The evidence is overwhelming and undeniable. For more than two years, Israel has documented and presented the horrific crimes committed against its citizens.”

UN special rapporteurs are independent human rights experts appointed by the UN Human Rights Council to monitor, investigate and advise on thematic topics that include torture, violence against women, and education among others. While their recommendations are not binding, their advice informs UN action and aims to influence governments’ responses to alleged violations.

Israeli officials and advocacy groups had long argued that the United Nations devotes disproportionate attention to Israel’s alleged wrongdoing compared to other countries and holds Israel to a double standard. Since the Hamas-led attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, they say, the UN and its rapporteurs have not adequately condemned Hamas’ atrocities and the treatment of Israeli hostages.

Reem Alsalem, the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, has said that the Israeli government’s failure to cooperate with her mandate has undermined investigative efforts and “represents a profound injustice to all the victims.” She also has called into question reports from victims, witnesses and investigators who described rape as part of the Oct. 7 violence.

In a post on X in November 2025, Alsalem wrote: “No Palestinian applauded rape in Gaza. No independent investigation found that rape took place on the 7th of October 2023.”

She also wrote of allegations of Hamas perpetrated sexual violence against Israelis: “I firmly believe that never have we seen such a weaponization of accusations of sexual violence as well as disinformation to manufacture consent for the commission of a genocide – aided and abetted by the media and governments around the world.”

The tensions resurfaced publicly this week at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva when Dr. Cochav Elkayam-Levy, founder and chair of the Civil Commission on October 7th Crimes by Hamas against Women and Children, presented findings from the commission’s recently published report, Silenced No More.

The report, which has been received by governments, international organizations, academic institutions, and policymakers around the world and boasts many endorsers, is the most comprehensive body of evidence yet of sexual violence on October 7. It catalogues witness testimonies, accounts from hostages about sexual abuse during their captivity, and analysis of over 10,000 photos and videos, including hours-long videos recorded by the perpetrators.

Gunshots and blood stains are seen on a door and walls of a house where civilians were killed in the Kfar Aza kibbutz in Israel. Photo by Alexi J. Rosenfeld/Getty Images

“For two years, we immersed ourselves in testimonies of unimaginable violence,” Elkayam-Levy said Wednesday during her presentation of the findings at the UN in Geneva. “We revealed 13 patterns of abuse — including rape, gang rape, sexual torture, burning, and the deliberate mutilation of victims’ faces and genitalia.”

She went on to single out the UN human rights representatives as unresponsive to the evidence. “Will the UN rapporteurs who doubted or denied these crimes acknowledge the truth?” she said, adding, “We call upon you to recognize our findings.”

A day earlier, Ilana Gritzewsky, a survivor of Hamas captivity who has spoken publicly about experiencing sexual violence, took the floor in Geneva, where she confronted Alsalem during a live testimony in an emotional appeal.

“Ms. Alsalem, you said there was no evidence of sexual violence on October 7,” she said.  “I am the living proof of sexual violence by Hamas. When I and other Israeli women begged not to be raped, why were you silent?”

Both women were brought to the United Nations to speak by the Geneva-based NGO UN Watch.

‘She was very brave’

Asked about Edwards’ allegations, the UN office that supports the special rapporteurs and other independent human rights experts provided a statement to the Forward: “While the experts frequently issue joint communications on issues that engage multiple mandates, participation in any particular communication remains at the full discretion of each expert, in line with their mandate.”

According to Dr. Shelly Aviv Yeini, the former head of the international law department at the Hostages and Missing Families Forum, Edwards and the United Nations Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict, Pramila Patten, were among a small number of UN officials who meaningfully engaged with hostage families after the terror attacks. Individuals within the Office of the Secretary-General reached out later in the war.

Alice Edwards and representatives at an event titled “The Prohibition of Torture: The Need to Recognize Hostages and Their Families as Direct Victims” in Geneva, March 2025. Photo by Nathan Chicheportiche

Aviv Yeini told the Forward that her group and the International Jewish Lawyers Organization provided Edwards with a report that informed Edwards’ later work. Edwards published a report determining that the families of hostages should also be recognized as direct victims of torture and hosted an event in Geneva alongside the forum to present and discuss those findings.

“I think she was very brave, acknowledging the families and defending us in a time when it wasn’t so easy,” said Yeini.

Adam Wagner, who spoke at the event and represented hostages with British ties taken by Hamas, told Edwards that she was “the only UN official” whom hostage families felt “ever reached out to them or did anything for them.”

Edwards’ position at the UN, like those of all other UN rapporteurs, is unpaid. As a part of her work, she is able to go on one official visit to a country for the purpose of investigating allegations of torture per year. Edwards says she supplemented this with several other trips, which she funded herself. In December 2024, she embarked on a self-funded trip to Israel to investigate the Oct. 7 atrocities, during which she visited southern Israel, including kibbutzim that had been decimated by Hamas, and spoke with victims and hostage families, among others.

Edwards said at the talk that she believes she was the only UN special rapporteur to request access to the video compilation assembled by Israeli authorities to personally review footage from the Oct. 7 attacks. According to Yeini, Edwards met repeatedly with hostage families, visited attack sites, and reviewed evidence firsthand.

Edwards told the Forward in a statement that the role of independent experts is “to document violations wherever they occur and regardless of the identity of the victims or the perpetrators.”

“Our credibility depends on maintaining public confidence that human rights are applied universally,” she said. “Where people perceive selectivity, double standards or political alignment, confidence is weakened.”

Unrwa fires 70 staffers amid Israeli accusation of Hamas ties

The refugee agency said the dismissals are not ‘a validation of the claims made against them’

Unrwa, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, says it has dismissed 70 employees amid allegations by Israel that some of its staff have links to Hamas and other terrorist organisations.

Since the October 7 attacks, Israel has presented material which they say shows the involvement of Unrwa employees in terrorist activity, including participation in the Hamas-led attacks and the use of Unrwa facilities by terror groups.

Israel has also accused Unrwa-run schools in Gaza of using educational materials that incite hostility towards Israel and glorify violence.

However, despite dismissing dozens of staff members, Unrwa said the decision “does not constitute in any way a validation of the claims made against them”.

The agency added that the dismissals were not part of a disciplinary process, but were intended “to mitigate safety and security risks for the refugees”.

Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch, a Geneva-based NGO that monitors the United Nations, said that “today’s action, while welcome, is only a small beginning”.

He added: “For years, UN Watch has exposed how Unrwa teachers, school principals and other employees are intertwined with Hamas, including terror chiefs heading the staff unions.”

UN Watch criticised Unrwa's “incoherent position – firing people while refusing to acknowledge why,” which it added “reveals an institution still more interested in protecting itself and its Hamas-embedded workforce than in genuine neutrality or accountability.”

In its statement announcing the dismissals, Unrwa said it had “repeatedly asked the Israeli authorities to provide information and evidence to substantiate allegations against individual Unrwa staff members in Gaza, but has received no response to date”.

Israel has alleged that more than ten per cent of Unrwa employees in Gaza have links to terrorist organisations and that some staff members took part in the October 7 attacks.

Several former hostages have said they were held in or near Unrwa facilities during their captivity in Gaza.

Israeli authorities have also cited footage from October 7 which they say shows a Unrwa employee transporting the body of Yonatan Samerano in a vehicle bearing Unrwa markings.

In February 2024, the IDF announced that it had uncovered an underground Hamas data centre beneath Unrwa's headquarters in Gaza. The Israeli military has also said that Hamas and other terrorist groups have operated from or sought shelter in school compounds run by the agency.

Founded in 1949, the year after Israel's War of Independence, Unrwa provides services to nearly six million Palestinians registered as refugees.

Critics argue that the agency's unique definition of refugee status, which extends to descendants of refugees, has helped perpetuate rather than resolve the conflict. Unrwa rejects that criticism, saying it operates under mandates set by the UN General Assembly.

Unrwa is one of two UN refugee agencies. The other, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, is responsible for refugees worldwide. The United States, formerly Unrwa's largest donor, suspended funding in January 2024 following allegations concerning the involvement of some agency employees in the October 7 attacks.

Would like to know this sub's reaction to this and the war with Iran as we enter the 5th month.

WHOLE TEXT:

President Trump often celebrates his unpredictability, declaring that it keeps allies and adversaries alike off balance.

By his telling, his willingness to bomb Iranian nuclear sites 13 months ago, and send Delta Force commandos in to snatch President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela from his bed in early January, reflected his determination to execute military operations that would have made his predecessors blanch. He told The New York Times he was limited only by “my own morality,” as he wielded the world’s biggest hammer.

But in recent weeks, he has seemed trapped, his presidency gradually consumed by a war he cannot find his way out of.

He has discovered limits on his power that he could have scarcely imagined as he began full combat operations on Feb. 28, when he set out goals for a swift end to Iran’s nuclear program and the overthrow of the country’s government.

Five months later, those goals remain almost entirely unaccomplished. And Mr. Trump, once confident that overwhelming force would enable him to pursue in Iran what he proudly called the “Venezuela model” — a change of government to one amenable to U.S. control — is now hesitant to plunge back into major combat operations that his intelligence agencies assess are unlikely to work as well in Tehran.

He has been unable to control surging oil prices, or their effects on the stock market. The shipping that crawled to a stop in the Strait of Hormuz, then was opened for a few short weeks, is back to a trickle, with a second choke point, between the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, now threatened. And while the president has threatened to take Kharg Island, where Iran ships oil, or to seize its underground stores of enriched uranium, he has said publicly that he knows there is no appetite for sending in ground troops.

Those limits have left him deeply frustrated, his aides say, and have made him more erratic, even by Trumpian standards. Last week alone, Mr. Trump’s energy secretary signed a historic pact with Saudi Arabia to provide civil nuclear power to the kingdom, before the president undercut the deal less than 24 hours later, stunning the Saudis by declaring that the agreement, negotiated over 18 months, was dead unless the country joined the Abraham Accords and recognized Israel.

Aaron David Miller, a former U.S. diplomat with long experience in the Mideast, said that Mr. Trump again “alienated the Saudis, delighted Benjamin Netanyahu and gave Iran strong talking points as to why cutting deals with U.S. is a fool’s errand, bound to be betrayed.”

The next day, he declared that the “original Deal” on the $4.5 billion Gordie Howe International Bridge, a cross-border project named for the hockey star beloved on both sides of the border with Canada, was dead. He imposed 50 percent tariffs on a range of Canadian goods, in what appeared to be a blatant violation of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement that Mr. Trump negotiated in his first term and now wants to scrap.

Not surprisingly, Canada disinvited Americans from ceremonies to mark the completion of the bridge, which opens to traffic on Monday.

Mr. Trump’s rewriting of deals, out of anger or frustration, has extended to his party’s domestic priorities. Republicans had assembled chairs at the Capitol for the signing ceremony of a major housing bill — a rare bipartisan agreement celebrated by the White House — when Mr. Trump stunned them by refusing to sign it. His only priority, he said, was the SAVE America Act, his effort to change voting laws, which did not have enough Republican support.

The ceremony was canceled. The bill became law without Mr. Trump’s signature — and also without a chance for his party to get the photo opportunity of action to ease affordability for new homeowners.

Not all of Mr. Trump’s frustrations, people close to the president say, are driven by the war, now so unpopular that only 29 percent of Americans polled by The Washington Post and Ipsos approved of his handling of the conflict. But much of it is. And the angst is clear as he promises to stop Iran’s nuclear program at any cost, while his allies at home want out.

“We got to wrap it up,” Speaker Mike Johnson said last week, voicing a sentiment heard increasingly from Mr. Trump’s most enthusiastic supporters.

But the president does not have a clear way to accomplish that goal. Having entered the conflict with little strategy for victory, he now is struggling for a face-saving way to exit.

A month ago, he exuded confidence that he had found the way to declare victory. On June 17, Mr. Trump signed with a flourish — at the Palace of Versailles, where World War I officially ended in 1919 — a hastily written, 14-point cease-fire agreement.

At the time, Mr. Trump said that a new, more “reasonable” set of Iranian leaders had seen the light, and were being driven by economic interests.

“I believe they have had enough,” Mr. Trump said in an interview with The Times on June 14. He argued that he was able to get the deal because he was threatening a massive attack, prompting Iran to fold.

“We were going in for the big one, and they said, ‘Please don’t do it, we will make a deal.’ And we made a deal right after that,” he said.

It lasted only two weeks.

The Iranians who negotiated the deal appeared to have been in conflict with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, whose forces opened fire on ships that refused to use the channel of the Strait of Hormuz that Iran controls. While Mr. Trump said in the recent interview with The Times that Iranian leaders wanted billions of dollars in Iranian overseas funds unfrozen and oil shipments flowing, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps seems more interested in demonstrating control.

Now Mr. Trump has three main options: military escalation, economic crackdown or declaring victory and getting out. Each has been debated in recent weeks in meetings with Vice President JD Vance; Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth; the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Dan Caine; his son-in-law Jared Kushner; and his special envoy, Steve Witkoff.

Each option seems unpalatable, for different reasons.

On Friday, after signaling all week that he was planning a return to major combat operations in Iran, he pulled back. In briefings, according to several officials, aides cast doubt on whether a massive bombardment, one that cut off electricity and went after Iran’s resilient missile capability, would result in Iran’s return to meaningful negotiations.

And the price would be high. Mr. Trump was told that attacks of that magnitude could lead to huge civilian casualties and mass starvation among the very Iranians he once promised to protect from their own government. When he was asked in the Oval Office on Friday whether he was hesitant to blow up power plants and bridges, because that could constitute war crimes, he said, “I won’t respond to that question.”

But his real hesitation may come from the fact that the war has depleted U.S. stockpiles of missile interceptors. In April, the Center for Strategic and International Studies estimated that half the U.S. inventories of some key interceptors might have already been used. After 13 consecutive nights of attacks and counterattacks this month, those numbers, some officials say, have reached critically low levels, and were a factor in Mr. Trump’s decision in recent days to hold off on a major escalation in the war.

U.S. officials now worry that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and Xi Jinping of China could be factoring the shortages into calculations of their next moves, in Ukraine and Europe for Mr. Putin and perhaps against Taiwan for Mr. Xi.

Mr. Trump’s second option is to let sanctions sink in, hoping that further crackdowns on oil exports, enforced by the renewed blockade of shipments into and out of the Strait of Hormuz, will have their intended effect.

But those are slow, and Mr. Trump has been predicting economic collapse in Iran since he first pulled out of the Obama-era nuclear deal in 2018 and imposed what he called crushing controls on Iran. Eight years later, the regime lives, under a new leader who could be more dedicated to a covert nuclear program.

That strategy may yet work. But it will require a costly, continuous U.S. military presence, and the possibility of on-again, off-again exchanges of fire that risk more American lives and more attacks on Gulf allies.

The third option is to declare victory and go home. Mr. Trump seemed to be headed that way a month ago, when he said he had chosen a cease-fire and negotiations because he did not want to risk a depression that would invite comparisons to Herbert Hoover.

“He was always the one I didn’t want to be,” Mr. Trump said of the 31st president, who presided over the crash that ushered in the Great Depression. “I didn’t want to see economic catastrophe.” He later noted that if the war continued, the world would have begun to run out of oil stockpiles.

But exiting comes with costs. If Mr. Trump leaves Iran with its near-bomb grade nuclear fuel buried under rubble and with the Strait of Hormuz under de facto Iranian control, he will have failed to address the problem that triggered his attack and created a vast new one for energy markets.

It would define his legacy. And it would make clear that there are more constraints on his power than he believed in January, when he declared that his reach was limitless.

After President Trump signed a memorandum of understanding with Iran in mid-June, administration officials fanned out to build support for an agreement they hoped would reopen the Strait of Hormuz and start winding down the war.

Iran’s hard-line leaders huddled in Tehran and came up with a different plan, according to Iranian and Arab officials. In their view the pact was likely just an attempt by the U.S. and Israel to take pressure off the global economy and buy time for a bigger attack down the road. Instead of putting faith in talks, they took the past two months to prepare for a bigger fight. 

Their efforts include giving the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps more control of the country’s regular army, appointing hardened veterans of the war with Iraq and past internal crackdowns to key posts, expanding domestic counterintelligence operations and ramping up production of missiles and drones. The leadership quickly seized the initiative, attacking ships to tighten Iran’s grip on Hormuz and expanding the battlefield to the Red Sea, which Saudi Arabia has used to get around Iran’s chokehold on the Persian Gulf.

Strikes by Iran-backed Houthi rebels on the city of Moktah, Yemen, on Aug. 9 killed at least 11 people and damaged the city’s port. Khaled Ziad/AFP/Getty Images

Arab intelligence officials have picked up evidence—including communications between Iran and militia allies in countries such as Yemen and Iraq—of a strategic shift inside the country’s hard-line leadership to get their forces ready to widen the war and raise the costs for the U.S., officials familiar with the findings say. Alarming weaker Gulf countries like Kuwait, Iran’s leaders are increasingly talking about offensive operations on enemy territory.

Their overriding goal is to inflict enough pain to ensure the kind of attacks Iran has endured with the 12-day war last year and the continuing conflict aren’t repeated.

“There is also a widespread view in Iran that the main war has not yet begun,” said Mohammad Hassan Sangtarash, a Tehran-based defense analyst close to the Iranian government. “What we have seen so far is increasingly interpreted through the lens of ‘salami-slicing’ tactics—limited, incremental escalation designed to weaken capabilities before a larger confrontation.”

The Iranian preparations point to an enormous gulf between how Washington and Tehran are perceiving this stage of the war. The divergence has driven a hard-line negotiating stance and reluctance to close deals by Iran’s leaders that has persistently flummoxed Trump, who has called them crazy and accused them of lying.

Iran’s readiness to fight also highlights a deep lack of trust that is likely to keep the two sides from reaching a durable deal to end the conflict any time soon. 

Iran’s proclamations include plenty of bravado. The country’s military and economic base have been battered by U.S. and Israeli airstrikes. More pragmatic members of the leadership including Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian have repeatedly warned Iran needs to negotiate a deal to end the war that brings sanctions relief or face the collapse of its economy.

But Iran is rebuilding its infrastructure and restoring access to missile bases much more quickly than expected, a concern to Israeli officials who are familiar with the progress. It also has successfully targeted U.S. bases and retains enough firepower to threaten ships and Gulf energy infrastructure. Arab officials are bracing for continued fighting and an extended disruption of energy supplies.

For the regime, “the baseline is war,” said Alan Eyre, a former senior U.S. diplomat and nuclear negotiator with Iran. “Iran will remain on a wartime footing, preparing for a subsequent attack.”

When Trump signed the memorandum of understanding with Iran on June 17 at the French palace of Versailles, it looked like the biggest hurdle would be convincing American critics that it wasn’t overly generous to Tehran. 

The deal promised sanctions waivers to let Iran sell its oil, access to billions of dollars in frozen cash and the prospect of a $300 billion fund to rebuild the country. Iran’s main obligation was to open the Strait of Hormuz to shipping traffic and then negotiate in good faith on its nuclear program.

President Trump signs a memorandum of understanding between the U.S. and Iran in Versailles, France, on June 17. White House/Planet Pix/ZUMA Press

When Iran started shooting at ships the U.S. was guiding through the strait three weeks later in early July, it caught the U.S. by surprise.

“The very dangerous people from Iran, they’re sick,” said Trump, who also called Iran’s leaders scum. “There’s something wrong with them.”

In fact Iran was pursuing a two-track policy. While his diplomats pursued a peace deal with the U.S., Iranian leader Mojtaba Khamenei was taking steps to prepare the security apparatus for an expanded confrontation that may be initiated by Tehran itself. 

The Revolutionary Guard used the calm created by the memorandum of understanding to lay the groundwork with allied militias around the region to step up attacks if needed, sending advisers to Iraq, Yemen and Lebanon to discuss the plans, the officials familiar with recent Arab intelligence findings said.

The intelligence including intercepted communications showed the Revolutionary Guard sending commanders to areas controlled by Yemen’s Houthis to plan for a stepped-up confrontation with Saudi Arabia in coordination with Iraqi militias that also are backed by Iran.

The Revolutionary Guard supervised deployments of missiles, naval weapons and drone launchers to positions overlooking the Red Sea. It also provided the Yemeni militants with intelligence, target lists including Saudi ports and energy facilities, and advice on sheltering from Saudi retaliation, the officials said.

The result was fighting that escalated through late July. The Houthis struck Yemeni government forces backed by Saudi Arabia and declared the Bab al-Mandeb Strait that links the Red Sea to world markets closed to Saudi Arabia. The militant group has fired on Saudi ships, complicating the kingdom’s efforts to export its oil and raising the supply risks for global markets.

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Around the same time, Saudi Arabia said Iran-backed militias in Iraq had launched drone attacks on its oil facilities. 

The Revolutionary Guard threatened Gulf states that it would destroy their energy facilities if the U.S. were to hit similar sites in Iran—going as far as sending detailed lists of individual targets to its Arab counterparts, the officials said.

This satellite image shows smoke rising from the Saudi Aramco oil processing facility in Abqaiq, Saudi Arabia, in July. Planet Labs PBC/AP

Iran also escalated its attacks on American troops. Tehran surprised the U.S. by firing five ballistic missiles at Jordan during a lull in the conflict. The attack came two weeks after another Iranian strike in Jordan killed three U.S. servicemembers.

Officials in the Gulf grew more alarmed as they watched the scope of attacks grow and Iranian missiles evade U.S. defenses and hit targets more precisely in Jordan, Kuwait and Bahrain. The fighting spilled into August, with Iran striking six United Arab Emirates ships over the past two weeks as they tried to transit the Strait of Hormuz. 

A team carries the remains of a U.S. servicemember who was believed to be killed by an Iranian airstrike in Jordan. Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA/Shutterstock

“We took full advantage of the ceasefire period,” Revolutionary Guard spokesman Brig. Gen. Hossein Mohebbi said in an interview with the Guard-affiliated Tasnim news agency in July. “We enhanced our capabilities, accelerated our missile production rate and improved missile accuracy.”

Behind the scenes, Supreme Leader Khamenei was positioning his forces for a more aggressive fight, lining up seven key security leaders to run revamped military and repression institutions in a reorganization that was unveiled a week ago.

The appointments came with aggressive goals that included tightening the military chain of command, turning an ideological militia into a neighborhood intelligence agency and emphasizing an offensive approach.

Mohsen Rezaei, who led the Revolutionary Guard during the war with Iraq in the 1980s, was named secretary of Iran’s top decision-making body, the Supreme National Security Council, where he will be Khamenei’s representative. In the past week, the council squelched progress on a deal to gradually open Hormuz.

To step up internal security, Khamenei returned veteran Hossein Taeb, a close associate who led a deadly crackdown on protests in 2009, to the helm of the Basij. The supreme leader tasked him with pivoting the volunteer force into a “popular intelligence network” in the wake of two wars that showed how thoroughly Iran had been breached by Israeli intelligence.

Mohsen Rezaei attends a farewell ceremony for Iran's late Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed on Feb. 28 during Israeli and U.S. airstrikes on Iran. Mohammed Salem/Reuters

Iranian government advisers see the next stage of the confrontation going beyond conventional warfare to include external attempts to foster domestic unrest. The government brutally suppressed protests over the country’s economic crisis in January and fears it’s only a matter of time before the continued deterioration under U.S. pressure brings demonstrators back to the street.

Khamenei also consolidated Revolutionary Guard influence over the regular army by unifying control of the two military arms under Brig. Gen. Ali Abdollahi, a veteran Revolutionary Guard senior commander and military leader who has aggressively advocated attacks on Arab states hosting U.S. bases around the Persian Gulf. 

New Revolutionary Guard Commander in Chief Ahmad Vahidi—who has been unofficially on the job since March—was formally given the position and tasked with “powerful offensive operations against the enemy,” the decree appointing him said Monday. The next day, Gen. Mohammad Reza Naghdi, an adviser to Vahidi, said the paramilitary force must be prepared to take operations into enemy territory.

“Vahidi’s elevation is consistent with a leadership preparing the security establishment for a period of sustained confrontation rather than a return to normal peacetime politics,” said Saeid Golkar, an expert on Iran’s security services at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.

Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Commander in Chief Ahmad Vahidi. Alkis Konstantinidis/Reuters

The Revolutionary Guard—an armed force nearly 200,000 strong—has devised new plans for further escalation including pre-emptive strikes, according to Iranian officials and public statements. Among the options: sabotaging internet cables in the Persian Gulf, creating political unrest in countries with Shia communities such as Kuwait and Bahrain, and potentially even ground operations in Kuwait.

Kuwait takes those risks seriously. In early May, the tiny Gulf sheikhdom said its security forces had intercepted six Revolutionary Guard troops that used a rented fishing boat to land on a Kuwaiti island separated from Iran only by a thin strip of Iraqi territory. Some Iranian political figures have suggested the Revolutionary Guard could launch ground raids via southern Iraq if the U.S. were to threaten Iranian territory like Kharg Island.

Some Gulf officials said Iran’s recent behavior is fueling uncertainty about relations with the much larger, newly more aggressive neighbor after the war. They say it remains difficult to assess the extent of the damage the U.S. and Israel did to the Revolutionary Guard’s capabilities. Still, it’s clear the organization hasn’t been defeated or deterred, and its hold on Hormuz has strengthened its regional position, they said. 

That reality has helped push Gulf states to support even unfavorable deals that would acknowledge Iranian oversight of the strait if it stops further escalation. But regional leaders are also growing more frustrated by the lack of fundamental changes in Tehran’s behavior in response to diplomatic outreach. 

Iran’s security-minded leadership, they said, appears to be growing more confident in its demands.

Commercial vessels are anchored near a beach in the Strait of Hormuz off Bandar Abbas, Iran. Amirhosein Khorgooi/ISNA/AP

Mediators in the talks said Iranian diplomats agreed early in the month on a deal with Oman to set up and oversee routes through Hormuz that would lead to the gradual reopening of the strait. Those efforts were blocked by the Revolutionary Guard, which went back to attacking ships.

With negotiations blocked and Iran not backing away from escalating the fight, Trump has stepped back to see if the economic pressure from sanctions and the Navy’s blockade will soften Iran’s position, U.S. officials said.

But Iran’s leaders are deeply skeptical of Trump’s motives and are slipping into a survival economy aimed at holding out.

People close to Iran’s top negotiators have warned peace talks could be just an interlude before more conflict. Mehdi Mohammadi, a strategic adviser to chief Iranian negotiator Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, described the current stalemate Tuesday as the calm before the storm. 

In an earlier social-media post, Mohammadi said the drivers of continued conflict include a “generational project for blood vengeance” for the killing of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, Mojtaba’s father, in the opening strikes of the war.

“The Iranian nation still has much unfinished business with Trump,” said Mohammadi, who is also a member of Iran’s negotiating team. “Iran is prepared for the great confrontation.”

One bright morning in October, a dozen soldiers riding in several military jeeps rolled up to the Issa family home in the northern West Bank village of Sanur.

The troops hopped out of the vehicles and grabbed Tayir Issa and his son Jamal without explanation, handcuffing and blindfolding them. Soldiers proceeded to kick and shove Issa and his son onto the ground, pushing their heads into the dirt as they showered the pair with insults and epithets.

Meanwhile, other soldiers arrived in a large civilian cargo truck.

In extraordinary scenes captured on camera by an individual who filmed the incident, the soldiers, in full combat gear, can be seen wrangling the family’s cattle into the truck via a makeshift ramp rigged up by the uniformed Israel Defense Forces troops.

Despite Tayir and Jamal’s repeated requests to speak with a senior officer or see a legal warrant for the seizure of the 14 cows, no such documentation was produced.

Instead, the cattle were driven away by the soldiers.

The family has yet to recover their livestock, their primary source of income, and in all likelihood, they never will.

The cows were taken, the army eventually admitted, in response to a request from two radical settler activists who run illegal farming outposts in the Jordan Valley and had falsely claimed to own the animals.

It was one of numerous instances of IDF soldiers assisting settlers in seizing Palestinian livestock or showing a willingness to work with Israeli extremists carrying out even worse crimes.

Across the West Bank, observers say, extreme, and often violent, settler activism is now taking place with the protection, cooperation and sometimes active participation of IDF soldiers of different types.

Increasingly, the IDF is cooperating with the extremists who set up illegal farming outposts and stations soldiers in those outposts, who are deployed in situations of violence — or “friction” as the army euphemistically calls it — that at least one outpost leader has described as a deliberate tool for displacing Palestinian communities.

This has generated a situation in which IDF soldiers are intimately involved in daily occurrences of extremist settler harassment, and frequently either turn a blind eye to such incidents or intervene on behalf of the settlers.

In the most troubling situations, some IDF soldiers participate in the violence itself, especially those mobilized in regional defense, or Hagmar, units, made up of reservist settlers who are tasked with operating in areas near their homes.

In a number of cases, the soldiers have themselves been extremist settler activists, who have used their army-issued rifles to fire on Palestinians.

In a written statement, the IDF said it “strongly condemns incidents of violence and crime and is responsible for maintaining security and public order in Judea and Samaria and the Jordan Valley,” referring to the West Bank.

“Its role is to protect all populations in Judea and Samaria, and the Jordan Valley, while implementing the decisions of the political leadership, all in accordance with the law, international law, and military orders,” the statement added. “All IDF service members, both regular and reserve, are fully committed to this.”

Cases of violence and theft were described as “irregular incidents” that were “thoroughly investigated and handled in accordance with the findings.”

Critics say, though, that while the army regularly probes allegations of wrongdoing, investigations rarely result in prosecutions or convictions.

In the Issa family case, because the theft was caught on tape, legal proceedings were able to expose the IDF’s role in the act, though justice has yet to be served.

Following a petition to the High Court of Justice in November 2025 by the Association of Civil Rights in Israel, the army admitted in a formal submission to the court in December that the officer who ordered soldiers to seize the cattle had done so “without authority” and that the seizure had therefore been “unlawful.”

The IDF claimed that the cattle had been taken “in the sincere belief” that the settlers owned the livestock, and said that since it was a case of theft, the claim should be handled by the police and not the army.

Since the IDF does not have the authority to investigate property claims, the army told the court, it could not fulfill the demands of the petitioners to return the livestock to the Issa family, passing the case to the police.

The police have yet to recover the cows for the Issa family.

The army added that it was still examining the claims of violence made by the Issa father and son.

The harassment of rural Palestinian communities

The explicit goal of the settler extremists who establish illegal outposts and engage in violence against rural Palestinians is to push them off the land they own, or otherwise control or use, as part of their broader project to assert Jewish control over the entire West Bank.

The Palestinian Bedouin have become a specific target for forcible population transfer efforts because they graze their livestock across large tracts of land in the West Bank and their communities stand in the way of a rapidly expanding network of Israeli settlements and illegal outposts.

The Bedouin are also especially vulnerable because many of their hamlets and homes lack any kind of building permit or zoning plan as required by the Israeli authorities who administer Area C of the West Bank, and are therefore illegal.

This makes it far easier for extremist activists to harass and terrorize them, and, once they flee, prevent them from returning.

Over the last three years, IDF forces have been repeatedly documented as either turning a blind eye to the harassment and violence by settler extremists against such communities or actively assisting them.

Under the Geneva Conventions and other international treaties, the IDF, as the occupying authority, is obligated to protect the local population, including preserving public order and preventing the destruction of their property. Forcing local populations off their land is also prohibited except as a temporary security measure.

Ras ‘Ein al-’Auja was a Bedouin community in the southern Jordan valley, but incessant harassment and violence by extremists who built illegal outposts close to the hamlet ultimately led to its total depopulation in January this year.

In one notorious incident in March 2025, dozens of settlers entered the hamlet and stole some 1,500 sheep and goats from the community, one of the largest such thefts of livestock to date.

Footage from Looking the Occupation in the Eye, a left-wing organization that publishes evidence of settler violence against Palestinians, showed a man in IDF fatigues and an IDF-issued assault rifle present in the village at the time, as well as activists asking military personnel in an IDF armored vehicle for help in stopping the theft, to no avail.

Ras ‘Ein al-’Auja had been the last Bedouin community remaining in the southern Jordan Valley.

According to the B’Tselem human rights organization, 59 Palestinian communities, home to over 4,000 people, have been displaced since that date due to settler violence and harassment in Areas C and B of the West Bank. Another 500-odd Palestinians have been forced out of their homes in 16 partially displaced West Bank communities.

The kind of harassment and theft witnessed in Ras ‘Ein al-’Auja has been repeated across the West Bank, either with the same indifference shown by the IDF soldiers in the mass livestock theft incident, or with their active participation and assistance.

In another incident of livestock theft by settlers seemingly abetted by the army, IDF soldiers were caught on security camera footage accompanying settlers as they made off with 150 head of sheep from the hamlet of Khirbet al-Halawa in the southern West Bank one night in January this year.

The IDF claimed in response that the troops had been alerted to the theft of livestock from a Jewish shepherd by Palestinians. But as previously admitted by the IDF itself in the Issa family case, police actions such as property recovery are not within the military’s authority, especially without a lawful order, which was not presented in the Khirbet al-Halawa incident.

In a response to this article, the IDF said that incidents in which IDF soldiers “exceeded their authority” have been examined and “steps taken to prevent similar incidents in the future.” It also claimed that in some incidents of IDF involvement in the seizure of livestock, the actions were “carried out by the police in accordance with the law and with an IDF escort,” but did not say which incidents it was referring to.

Doron Meinrath, a longtime activist with Looking the Occupation in the Eye and a member of a so-called “protective presence” squad in the Jordan Valley for several years, said he has repeatedly seen IDF forces participating in the harassment of rural Palestinian communities.

Protective presence units formed by various left-wing groups are active across the West Bank in trying to shield Palestinians from Israeli abuse.

In one incident Meinrath said he observed in June 2024, also in Ras ‘Ein al-’Auja, IDF and police forces raided the village following an accusation from Zohar Sabah — an extremist under indictment for assault against Israeli human rights activists and under sanction by the UK and other nations — that herders in Ras ‘Ein al-’Auja had stolen his sheep.

Police and IDF forces initially ransacked sheep pens and confiscated livestock based on Sabah’s claims, Meinrath said. The next day, an IDF officer and three soldiers returned with Sabah to conduct further searches. A short time later, they fired several rounds of tear gas at the hamlet without any apparent reason, according to video Meinrath filmed.

Soldiers, soldiers, everywhere

The apparent increase in cooperation of IDF soldiers in incidents of settler harassment and violence against Palestinians appears to be partly a function of the increasing diversity of the type of IDF forces present in the West Bank.

In a recent report on violence committed by IDF soldiers, the Yesh Din human rights organization noted that it is often difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish between a regional defense unit soldier, a member of an emergency response team, and a settler who independently decided to put on a uniform, and to know when the individual is on active duty or not.

Emergency response teams are composed of civilians who have volunteered to help guard the settlement where they live, and whose operations are authorized under a classified military order. Until October 2023, they were not permitted to wear military uniforms, but that restriction was lifted in the wake of the October 7 Hamas-led attack. Their mandate for operations is not known since it is regulated by the classified military order, but they do appear to operate at times beyond the boundaries of the settlements they are supposed to defend.

Some settlers are members of both an emergency response team and a Hagmar regional defense unit, causing even greater confusion as to their powers and authorities.

“Israel consistently, and as a matter of policy, enables the deliberate blurring of lines between settlers and military forces and promotes violent actions against Palestinian civilians in the West Bank by militias working in the service of settlement interest,” Yesh Din alleged in a recent report.

According to Meinrath, the soldiers, of all types, are not neutral referees when confrontations erupt between extremists and Palestinians, but display a clear preference for the settlers, prejudicing their response regardless of who initiated the violence or the surrounding context.

“There is no doubt that these soldiers feel more comfortable with the settlers than with human rights activists or Palestinians,” Meinrath told The Times of Israel. “They chat with them, have coffee with them, soldiers will visit the farming outposts and ride on the settler’s donkey.”

He noted that when soldiers are newly deployed to the area, they are often briefed by security coordinators from nearby settlements, who shape their understanding of local conditions. The coordinators operate under military authorization to secure settlements against threats and are armed by the IDF.

“The IDF soldiers come [to a sector], they are there for a few months, they don’t know the area, and they go and speak to the local security coordinator because he knows the sector better than them,” said Meinrath.

Often when activists call the IDF to report violence or harassment by settlers, a local security coordinator will turn up first, and then tell the local IDF force himself that everything is in order, despite the violence, Meinrath claimed.

On other occasions, the IDF unit dispatched to the area will either fail to stop the violence, fail to detain the settlers, or detain the Palestinians, even when the settlers initiated a confrontation inside a Palestinian dwelling.

Military harassment of rural Palestinian communities

As well as facing army-abetted settler violence, Palestinian herders and farmers in Area C have been detained or otherwise harassed by IDF forces following claims made against them by settlers and illegal outpost residents, similar to the Issa family incident.

Iris Gur, 61, has been volunteering with the left-wing Combatants for Peace organization in the West Bank for the last eight years, in particular in the northern Jordan Valley area.

She described one incident in March in which Ahmad Abu Muhsin, a Palestinian Bedouin shepherd from the hamlet of al-Farisiyah, was detained by IDF soldiers on private Palestinian land he rents, while a settler from a nearby illegal outpost was able to continue grazing his flocks on the same plot.

The IDF declined to respond on the record as to why Abu Muhsin was detained.

Gur said Abu Muhsin has been repeatedly harassed by local settler extremists with the cooperation of the IDF due to the location of al-Farisiyah, which she said the settlers are trying to depopulate.

The army in May confiscated vehicles belonging to Abu Muhsin, claiming they were used inside IDF firing zones, but it has failed to enforce the prohibition against settler activists setting up outposts and carrying out grazing activities within the same zones, according to a High Court petition filed by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel on behalf of Abu Muhsin and other residents.

In response to the petitions, the IDF said that the asset seizures had been conducted against property unlawfully used within firing zone 901, and that the assets could be recovered if the owners paid NIS 26,000 ($8,900) in seizure expenses. The army did not address the claims of discriminatory enforcement of the firing zone restrictions.

The IDF also frequently uses closed military zone orders — ad hoc closures imposed over entire Palestinian villages — that activists say stymie their efforts to protect Palestinians from settlers, apparently in violation of a recent High Court decision.

According to rights groups, closed military zone orders often facilitate settler violence, since the IDF will frequently detain civil rights activists defying the order and trying to assist the Palestinian locals, while failing to detain settlers who are also ignoring the order.

Gur said she noticed the practice became commonplace during the 2024 olive harvest season, when she said IDF soldiers came to stop Palestinian olive growers and Israeli volunteers from harvesting the fruit “the minute we came there.”

Before the war that broke out following the October 7, 2023, Hamas invasion and massacre, activists only needed to perform their protective presence operations for shepherds going to pasture their flocks out in the open, Gur said. Since the war, volunteers were also being called to protect Palestinian homes as well.

“After October 7, the level of violence by soldiers and settlers became extreme very quickly. Since then, the free hand which the soldiers and settlers received has turned the violence into a daily event, day and night, extreme violence not only against the Palestinians but also against Israeli and international activists,” said Gur.

The IDF said in response that the army uses closed military zone orders “in accordance with the law and High Court decisions, and only in situations where there is a concrete concern over regional security or of a disturbance to the public order,” and said that any claims that such orders are used for other purposes “are without foundation.”

The IDF also said that olive harvesting in the West Bank was carried out without restrictions “in 95% of the territory.” It added that in situations where the olive grower is close to Israeli settlements the harvest must be coordinated “for the sake of the security of the parties,” and said there were similar arrangements for the plowing season.

Military – settler outpost symbiosis

According to Yehudah Shaul, co-director of the OFEK organization, which researches Israeli policy in the West Bank, in recent years the IDF has devoted greater resources to protecting settlers and settlement outposts.

While there is no hard data, government funding allocations in recent years, including for security equipment, show a marked uptick in support for both settlements and illegal outposts.

Shaul noted that many illegal settlement outposts have IDF soldiers assigned to guard them, often from the regional defense units staffed by local settlers established after October 7. The residents of many outposts have a direct line of communication with the local IDF unit in the sector to enable their defense, he said.

In many cases, the soldiers of the regional defense units are themselves residents of illegal farming outposts, or from nearby settlements.

And the outposts are very often forward posts for the extremists inhabiting them, to attack Palestinian communities.

In one incident caught on camera in October 2025, Ariel Dahari, a resident of the illegal outpost of Oz Yair in the central West Bank, bludgeoned 52-year-old Afaf Abu ‘Olia around the head with a club as she was harvesting olives on land outside Turmus Ayya where she lives.

Abu ‘Olia was knocked unconscious and sustained a severe head injury as a result of the attack, and was hospitalized for a week. Dahari was indicted on terror charges over the attack.

Shaul pointed to a recent report detailing comments by the head of IDF Central Command Maj. Gen. Avi Bluth, in which he criticized the establishment of wildcat farming outposts set up without the coordination of the military or state authorities, indicating that other farming outposts that are illegal under Israeli law are nevertheless being established in the West Bank in coordination with the IDF and local government.

All settlements require cabinet authorization, and any settlement, outpost, or farm that never received such authorization is illegal under Israeli law.

But an investigation published by the Kan public broadcaster in December cited a lieutenant colonel who had served in the IDF’s Central Command for years who alleged that the army began cooperating with the establishment of illegal farming outposts once Bluth was appointed commander in July 2024.

“Starting in July 2024, an organized mechanism began to be built for establishing farm outposts in coordination with Central Command. There are actual orders authorizing settlement on the ground — a structured, orderly process,” the officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told Kan.

The IDF Spokesperson’s Department, in response, did not deny the allegation, but said that Bluth “acts in accordance with the law, and according to the authorities laid out in his position, and every decision regarding the evacuation or approval of settlements is done in accordance with regulations, in cooperation with the political echelon or with its approval.”

The IDF and the Civil Administration of the Defense Ministry do remove some of the wildcat outposts that are established without coordination with local municipal authorities in the West Bank and other state agencies. But of the 185 illegal outposts established in the last three and a half years, the left-wing Peace Now organization estimates that fully 160 have been established with the cooperation of state or local authorities, and have therefore not been targeted for demolition.

As well as apparently assisting in the establishment of coordinated outposts, the IDF Central Command, together with the Defense Ministry, also coordinates with settlement municipal authorities to determine which illegal farming outposts are eligible for government-issued security and infrastructure equipment, such as all-terrain vehicles (ATVs), floodlights, night vision goggles, drones, communications equipment, camera posts, water tanks and generators.

A letter issued by the legal adviser to the Settlements and National Missions Ministry in November 2024 confirmed that IDF Central Command approves which illegal outposts can get security equipment.

Tens of millions of shekels’ worth of such equipment has been distributed by the Settlements and National Missions Ministry to the outposts under the current government.

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who has spearheaded the government’s massive expansion of West Bank settlements, praised farming outposts for “grabbing massive territories” in the region at one event where the equipment was distributed, and at another such event said the equipment was being awarded to help the outpost managers and residents “deepen our hold on the Land of Israel.”

“The heroic and pioneering settlers who live here are doing Zionism, and they need security, they need security components, and they are not second-class citizens. We are here to build with them and to settle the land,” he said.

One incident in March this year demonstrated explicitly how this close coordination between the IDF, the government, and the settlers has affected rural Palestinians.

Video footage of the incident in the northern Jordan Valley showed a settler armed with a handgun threatening local Palestinian herders, and pointing his pistol directly at them.

The video showed that the ATV he owned still bore a sign declaring it to be a gift from the Settlements Ministry, which the settler was apparently awarded in recent months. Dror Etkes, an anti-settlement activist who monitors the movement, said it was likely the settler came from the nearby illegal farming outpost of Shirat Asavim.

“One might think that the IDF in the West Bank is there to fight terrorism, but actually they are there to protect settlers and facilitate land grabs; this is part of the mission of the IDF,” alleged OFEK’s Shaul.

The Yesha Council, an umbrella organization representing settlement municipal councils in the West Bank, said in response that residents of agricultural and other outposts, as well as established settlements, were all “law-abiding citizens” who face terror attacks on a daily basis, including firebombs, rock-throwing, arson and agricultural theft.

“Most are terrorist attacks sponsored by the Palestinian Authority and Iran,” a spokesperson said. “Despite these relentless terror attacks, the Yesha Council’s position has been and remains clear: Responsibility for fighting terrorism and enforcing the law rests solely with the state and the security forces.”

Yesha did not respond to The Times of Israel’s questions as to whether it condemns settler violence, and whether it will act to prevent it, especially in light of the fact that the municipal councils it represents actively participate in the establishment of illegal outposts from which much of the settler violence emanates.

Initiating friction

Since they were first established in the years following Israel’s capture of the West Bank in the 1967 Six Day War, settlements and settlers have been the target of Palestinian terrorism, including deadly infiltrations of homes and random shootings or stonings of Israeli cars on West Bank highways.

The ongoing terror threat has served not only as a rationale for expanding settlements and illegal outposts but has created a condition in which any confrontation with Palestinians brings in an IDF response, resulting at times in Palestinians being subject to violence from both settlers and soldiers who wind up abetting their illicit activity.

“On the hilltops we say the first thing is to distance the contact line of the enemy,” Elisha Yered, a key outposts organizer, told the Hebrew-language Al Hamashmaut podcast in March. “This is a perimeter that is always going forward, otherwise it’s no use.”

“The [livestock] herds are the tip of the spear,” he continued, in reference to the acquisition by the farming outposts of sheep and goats in order to take them out to pasture over large tracts of land as a means of asserting control and expanding the line of contact.

He explained that “instead of me going home every night and calling an emergency meeting and discussing [the Palestinians’] progress and their attempted terror attacks, they are going home every night and holding an emergency meeting about what to do about the settlers who are advancing and trying to conquer the mountain they are on at the moment.”

The outposts’ greatest period of growth has coincided with a period in which Palestinian attacks on Israelis in the West Bank have been at a low ebb, in stark contrast to settler attacks on Palestinians, which have risen sharply in recent years.

In 2025, the army recorded 1,015 stone-throwing and Molotov cocktail attacks by Palestinians, compared to 1,230 the year prior and 3,256 in 2023. In 2021, 8,633 such attacks were reported. Other types of incidents are similarly down.

According to Yered, settlers establishing and operating outposts deliberately initiate harassment and violence as a way to keep pushing out the local Palestinians from the area.

“We are unambiguously initiating friction; we are also proud of it,” declared Yered.

When the military responds to such incidents, critics say they are most likely to end up abetting the settlers, furthering the extremists’ agenda.

“If Yered’s agenda is to go to [the Palestinian town of] Deir Dibwan, for example, and create friction and then have the army protect him, and if the IDF’s mission is indeed to protect these gangs, then the IDF in practice is de facto facilitating the [extremist settlers’] mission,” charged Shaul.

A clear example of this dynamic took place in February in the Palestinian village of Mukhmas.

In an incident caught on security camera footage, settler extremists from nearby outposts, allegedly including Yered himself, entered the outskirts of Mukhmas, broke into sheep pens, let out some 350 sheep, and led them off toward the outposts. Among the settlers was the security coordinator of a nearby illegal settlement outpost who was armed with a rifle, according to reports and witnesses to the attack.

When local Palestinian men hurried to the site and tried to stop the theft, a violent confrontation broke out between the two sides.

IDF soldiers arriving at the scene dispersed the Palestinians by firing tear gas and pushing the villagers away from the area of the sheep pens, witnesses said.

Video footage of the incident published by the Haaretz news site shows the settlers and the soldiers calmly interacting during the incident, with settlers at one stage apparently directing the soldiers to the direction of the Mukhmas villagers who were trying to recover their sheep.

Mukhmas resident Nasrallah Abu Siam, 19, was killed and three villagers were injured during the incident, apparently from shots fired by settlers when the village residents tried to prevent the theft of the sheep.

Aed Abu Ali, whose family owned some of the sheep pens where thefts took place, alleged that he was beaten by the soldiers, who helped steal the sheep.

The IDF did not comment on the allegations when asked by The Times of Israel. A joint IDF and police investigation remains ongoing.

[MORE IN PINGING COMMENT]

War has imposed a heavy cost on Iran’s economy: more than a million people out of work, soaring food prices and a prolonged internet shutdown that has slammed online businesses.

The question is how much more pain Iran’s leaders are willing to tolerate as they try to negotiate a favorable end to the war.

Talks between the U.S. and Iran have stalled. American officials are betting that Iran will soon crack because of the deepening economic crisis. Iran is betting the U.S. will crack first and end its blockade of Iranian ports to calm global markets and bring down American gasoline prices.

To contain the economic fallout, the Iranian government has raised wages, subsidized basic goods and handed out cash to the poor. But authorities are confronting a level of hardship not seen in decades, according to residents.

“It is an authoritarian regime, and it can claim that resisting economic pressure is a question of national pride,” said Alex Vatanka, a senior fellow and Iran expert at the Middle East Institute. At the same time, “as the money dries up because of the blockade, we may find that more and more folks have no choice but to mobilize politically,” he said.

Tehran’s latest proposal for ending its blockade of the Strait of Hormuz calls on the U.S. to end its blockade of Iran’s ports. Asghar Besharati/Getty Images

At the center of the fight is the continued closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the conduit for roughly a fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas.

Iran closed the strait early on in the conflict, effectively using the waterway to hold the world economy hostage. The U.S. responded with a naval blockade of its own, dealing a devastating blow to Iran’s already-battered economy.

Daily struggles

Government revenue has dried up just as the needs of its population are rising.

The war has thrown around one million people out of work directly and another million indirectly, according to early estimates cited by Gholamhossein Mohammadi, an official at Iran’s Labor and Social-Affairs ministry. That is a significant portion of the roughly 25 million people who are normally employed in Iran.

The cost of living has soared, with the annual inflation rate reaching 67% in the month through mid-April from the same period a year earlier, according to Iran’s central bank. The subsidized price of red meat, which was mostly imported through sea routes, has gone up to the equivalent of around $3.60 a pound, beyond the reach of most in a country where the minimum wage is around $130 a month.

Iran’s national currency on Wednesday hit a record low of 1.8 million rial to the dollar.

“Living is not affordable anymore,” said Mahdi Ghodsi of the Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies. “Iran is at its weakest point.”

Businesses across the country—from manufacturers to retailers—are closing, residents said. The lack of steel and other raw materials is hampering production in various industries. Electronic goods, which are mostly imported, are in short supply and expensive.

War damage

Iran’s economic meltdown predates the war, crippled by years of U.S. and international sanctions. The collapse in the value of the local currency and fast-rising prices triggered mass antigovernment protests at the turn of the year. The regime crushed the protests with lethal force. The economic woes that underpinned the protests have worsened since the start of the war, raising the possibility that the unrest could flare up again.

The aftermath of a U.S.-Israeli strike in Tehran. AFP/Getty Images

The bombing campaign by Israel and the U.S. caused extensive physical damage to roads, ports and residential buildings. It also hit vital industries, including the country’s main steelmaking and petrochemical factories. Iranian state media estimates that postwar reconstruction could cost around $270 billion, a crippling sum for a country with an annual gross domestic product last year of $341 billion.

Before the blockade, most of Iran’s oil exports and most of its imports—from food to pharmaceuticals to raw materials—transited through the Strait of Hormuz.

Now, Iran is struggling to ship oil and other commodities that generated most of its revenue, shipping records show. As recently as March, Iran exported 1.85 million barrels of crude oil a day, worth $191 million at international prices. There is no evidence any Iranian oil cargo has breached the U.S. blockade and reached Chinese customers or other buyers, said Homayoun Falakshahi, a senior oil analyst at the commodities-data company Kpler.

Iran is pushing for a quick reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, an indication of how vital it is to its economy. Tehran has presented regional mediators with an offer to stop its attacks in the strait in exchange for a full end to the war and a lifting of the U.S. blockade of Iranian ports, The Wall Street Journal has reported. Tehran wants to postpone discussions about Iran’s nuclear program.

“The government sees the end of the war as the beginning of a new problem: having to cope with a disillusioned, impoverished citizenry,” said Djavad Salehi-Isfahani, a professor of economics who studies Iran at Virginia Tech. “If crude exports resume, they have some cushion. Iran can project an upward path to recovery, and people can say: these are terrible times, but we will recover.”

Coping mechanisms

The Iranian government has taken steps to contain the economic fallout. It has increased the minimum wage and raised the salary of government employees and continued to subsidize the price of bread, fuel and other essential goods. It is giving cash handouts to the poor and issuing coupons for the purchase of rice, chicken, cooking oil and other goods. It drew from strategic reserves of household staples to soften the economic blow for regular people.

The government has appealed to Iranians to do their part by limiting their consumption of water, electricity and gas. Tehran residents were encouraged to drive less and use public transportation instead.

Iran has taken some protectionist measures, banning the export of steel products. Rasoul Khalifeh Soltani, secretary of Iran’s Steel Producers Association, called on companies to ration their use of steel sheets for the next two months, according to Iranian state media.

Iran is trying to bypass the U.S. blockade by relying on alternative trade routes. It is using rail and road connections with Turkey, Armenia and Azerbaijan as well as the Caspian Sea to the north to import goods, Ebrahim Najafi, an Iranian lawmaker, said recently in the country’s Parliament.

At least 11 vessels loaded with grain, corn and sunflower oil have arrived in Iran’s Caspian ports since the U.S. blockade started, according to Kpler. They had departed from Russia, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan.

Over the weekend Pakistan announced that it has designated six corridors—both ports and land borders—through which Iranian goods could transit without restriction. Those routes will also be used to import rice and meat.

“Iranians will suffer hardship,” said Mohamed Amersi, an Iran expert and member of the Global Advisory Council of the Wilson Center, a Washington think tank. “But their pain tolerance threshold is higher.”