In Case You Missed It RSS Feed

Families say the arrests came without explanation amid a sharp rise in the detention of Palestinian women and girls.

The pounding on the door came before dawn.

When Ahmed Safi awoke to the sound of Israeli soldiers storming his apartment building in Birzeit town, he assumed they were there for someone else.

The Palestinian father never imagined the raid would end with the arrest of his 20-year-old daughter, Sama, a psychology student at Birzeit University, north of Ramallah in the occupied West Bank....

According to the family, soldiers entered the building in the early hours of Tuesday morning, shouting orders as they moved through the premises.

They demanded the identity cards of Ahmed, his wife and their daughter before informing Sama that they had an arrest warrant for her....

The soldiers then ransacked Sama's room, confiscating her phone, laptop and personal belongings. They also seized photographs of her cousin, Ayser Safi, who was killed by Israeli forces in 2024.

Sama was then taken downstairs, handcuffed, blindfolded and placed in a military vehicle.

For her family, the arrest has been compounded by concerns over her health.

Sama suffers from Familial Mediterranean Fever (FMF), a chronic inflammatory disease that requires ongoing medication to prevent severe complications....

The family has since learned that Sama is being held at the Al-Maskubiya interrogation centre in Jerusalem. Her first court hearing is scheduled for next Tuesday. The charges are as yet unknown.

Sama was one of five women detained by Israeli forces this week, three of them current students at Birzeit University and one graduate of the institution.

Among those arrested were two members of the Palestinian women's national football team: Natalie Abu Diya, 20, and Rand Halawani, 20.

The other two were Julan Abu Awad and graduate Laila Nael Khalil....

Israeli forces carry out daily arrest raids across the occupied West Bank, detaining scores of Palestinians each week.

According to Palestinian prisoner rights groups, around 9,000 Palestinians are currently held in Israeli prisons, half of them without charge or trial.

Abdullah Zaghari, head of the Palestinian Prisoners' Club, said there had been a marked increase in the detention of girls and women, particularly university students....

He said many arrests were being carried out under allegations of "incitement", often linked to social media activity expressing opposition to the occupation or solidarity with Palestinians....

"These arrests are part of ongoing acts of revenge against the Palestinian people by the occupation."

President Trump and his partner in crime Netanyahoo have tried to draw Iran into a ceasefire trap.

It was hoped for that a bit by bit escalation, like Israeli bombing in Lebanon, would be left without a response by Iran.

Iran however did not fall for that scheme. It had been agreed that the ceasefire in the war on Iran includes Lebanon and other fronts between the imperialist and resistance parties. It is either a ceasefire for all or a ceasefire for none.

A week ago, when Netanyahoo threatened to bomb the Dahiyeh suburb of Beirut Iran stopped all further peace negotiations and threatened to response in kind.

Trump then allegedly shouted and cursed Netanyahoo for his Beirut bombing plans. But such alleged divergences of views between Washington and Tel Aviv have long be proven to be scams.

Yesterday, on Sunday afternoon local time, Israel dropped at least 10 bombs on Dahiyeh.

Iran's response followed shortly thereafter. Five waves of missiles were launched against air bases and other targets in northern Israel.

Trump, in an interview (archived) with the Financial Times and FOXnews, asked Israel to stay down. He claimed to "call the shots" on the issue...

A bit later Israel aircraft bombed targets in Iran with stand of missiles. Among the targets were oil installations at the Karun petrochemical complex. Other targets were radar stations.

Iran responded by launching missiles against two additional air bases in central Israel while missiles from Lebanon hit at Israeli oil installations in Haifa.

Ansarullah in Yemen joined in. It announced that all Israel related shipping will be blocked from the Red Sea and fired some of its own missiles against Israel proper.

Both sides of the conflict then concluded the fight. The skirmish is, for now, over.

Trump has several times claimed to restrict Netanyahoo, to hold him back or to order him to stand down. Israel has bombed anyway and, at least in its attacks on Iran, continued to rely on U.S. controlled air defenses and U.S. flight refueling tankers.

Trump's claims about ordering Israel to do this or that are obviously fake....

With the recent exchange of bombs and missiles Iran has demonstrated that it can not be lulled into a ceasefire trap.

It will keep the U.S. and Israel engaged until they agree to Iran's peace conditions.

Iran is threatening a full return to conflict over US and Israeli ceasefire violations.

Update 6/7/2026 6:15 PM: President Donald Trump said he will tell Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not to respond to the Iranian attack. "I am going to call Bibi right now and tell him not to retaliate. Each of them had their fun. Israel had its strike, and Iran had its strike. We don't need another one," the President told Axios.

Iran fired missiles at Israel in response to the IDF bombing Beirut.

"The Islamic Republic of Iran has repeatedly stated that it will not tolerate violations of the ceasefire and aggression against Lebanon. Tonight, the aggressors received their response," Mohsen Rezaee, the military adviser to Iran's supreme leader, wrote on X. "This response is a warning to stop their evil; any new action will be met with a more crushing response and heavier costs."

In remarks shortly after the missiles hit Israel, President Donald Trump told Fox News, "What I would suggest to Iran: You've shot your missiles, that's enough. Get back to the table and make a deal."

The head of Iran's negotiating team said that "direct confrontation" with the US and Israel could happen if ceasefire violations continue. Iran's Parliament Speaker and lead negotiator Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf said on Sunday that Iran "will not only halt the path of negotiations, but we will also be in direct confrontation with the enemy."

In a post on X, he pointed to US and Israeli violations of the truce as the reason for escalating the conflict....

The statement followed Israeli strikes on the Lebanese capital city. On Sunday, Israeli attacks on Beirut killed at least two people and injured 11. Iran previously threatened to respond to attacks on Beirut by attacking northern Israel.

Over the weekend, the US attacked Iran and seized one of its tankers in the Indian Ocean. Tehran responded by attacking Kuwait and Bahrain. Additionally, Iranian forces fired warning shots at American warships in the region.

Iran's Foreign Ministry has declared that the Islamic Republic's defensive strikes against military targets in the northern occupied territories were carried out within the framework of inherent self-defense under Article 51 of the UN Charter, following repeated ceasefire violations by the Zionist regime.

In a statement released on Monday, the ministry said the strikes came in response to Israel's persistent breaches of the April 8 ceasefire, including its collaboration with the US military in attacks on Iranian ships and targets in southern Iran over the past two weeks, as well as US‑backed maritime piracy against the Iranian nation.

Iran emphasized that the ceasefire in Lebanon is an inseparable part of the April 8 truce agreement, and that the United States bears direct responsibility for Israeli violations and any resulting escalation in the region.

The ministry warned that any malicious adventure by the Zionist regime against Lebanon or Iran will be met with a crushing and comprehensive response from Iran's brave armed forces....

The April 8 ceasefire was brokered by Pakistan after 40 days of intense US‑Israeli war on Iran.

Despite the truce, Israel has continued its aggression against Lebanon and Gaza, while the US has maintained a naval blockade of Iranian ports....

The latest Iranian strikes came after the Israeli regime committed a gross violation of the ceasefire by launching deadly attacks on the southern suburbs of Beirut on Sunday.

Iran had warned last week that it will target the occupied territories in case of an attack on Beirut and its surroundings.

IDF presents killing of Lebanese general as action against Hezbollah.

This week's "new ceasefire" between Israel and Lebanon continues to be highlighted by increasingly aggressive Israeli military attacks across Lebanon's south, with at least 10 more Lebanese killed today, including three members of the Lebanese military.

Given yesterday's Israeli claim that they have "no hostile intent" toward the Lebanese government, that particular attack is particularly difficult to explain, as the IDF attacked a Lebanese military vehicle and killed high-ranking officials, including a brigadier general and a captain. The general was identified as Brig. Gen. Wassem Sabra.

Though this is not the first time Israeli troops have attacked and killed members of the Lebanese military in the course of this war, Brig. Gen. Sabra is the highest ranked member to have been slain....

Notably, the IDF said the vehicle had been identified before they decided to attack it. The vehicle was along the road between Nabatieh and Kfar Tebnit. Lebanese President Joseph Aoun termed the killings a "flagrant violation of sovereignty and of international laws and norms."

An overnight strike on the village of Saksakiyeh killed at least six people and left four others wounded...

Rep. Khanna took the 'America First' approach against Section 224, but he was out-numbered by those who played down its dangers and implications.

A House committee summarily struck down an amendment to strip a measure from the massive annual defense policy bill that would provide Israel "a higher level of military-industrial integration" with the U.S. than Washington has "with any other country in the world."

Pro-Israel voices on the House Armed Services Committee argued that reports about Section 224 -- that Congress was trying to integrate U.S. and Israeli military systems as a way to entrench aid without proper oversight -- were disingenuous and wrong....

Not quite true, said the Quincy Institute's Ben Freeman, who broke the initial story of Section 224 for RS last week. "Members of Congress supporting the proposal laid out caricatures of critiques against Section 224. And when they did actually talk about the provision itself they spread half-truths and outright inaccuracies about how far this provision will go to integrate the U.S. and Israeli defense sectors."...

Critically, it would shift the annual $3.8 billion the U.S. now gives Israel (a 10-year memorandum of understanding soon up for renewal) to these programs and partnerships, i.e. "co-production" and other "fusion" deep inside Pentagon procurement and acquisitions process, where sunlight is rare and often fleeting. A perfect solution -- which is, by the way, endorsed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu -- given the dwindling American support for Israel's wars and U.S. military assistance for them.

In his remarks on Section 224, Khanna spoke vociferously against what he saw as a blank check at a time when a majority of Americans say they do not want to send more military aid to Israel....

Next steps: Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) says he will work with Khanna to strip the language from the final House NDAA. If the parade of voices that insist Israel must have this relationship with the U.S. military is any indication, it will be a hard road ahead.

The counterintelligence threat level was raised by the Defense Intelligence Agency in recent weeks after growing concerns that Israeli espionage had become more aggressive than usual, sources say.

The Pentagon is increasingly concerned about Israel ramping up its spying on the U.S., recently raising the counterintelligence threat level from America's top ally in the Middle East to the highest level, according to two U.S. officials and one former U.S. official.

The Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency in recent weeks issued the new counterintelligence threat assessment amid rising tensions between Israel and the U.S. over the way forward in the war with Iran, the officials said. They said the DIA posted an internal message, viewed by one of the current officials, that raised the level for Israel to "critical."

The designation stems from concerns within the Pentagon that Israel is making a particular effort to surveil top U.S. officials to get information on the Trump administration's internal deliberations and decision-making on the conflicts in the Middle East, the officials said.

The DIA assessment includes a seven-page document and features a chart, according to one of the current U.S. officials. The document says the assessment of Israel is that its ability to conduct human espionage and technical collection is at a "critical level," according to the official.

It also identifies a series of specific incidents that heightened U.S. concerns, the official said....

The Pentagon declined to comment....

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees all the U.S. intelligence agencies including the DIA, did not respond to a request for comment.

While it is commonplace for allies and adversaries across the globe to spy on each other, the current and former U.S. officials said Israel's recent efforts have gone well beyond what is typical and expected espionage....

According to current and former diplomats and former national security officials, Israel for years has had a reputation for aggressive espionage even against the U.S., its closest ally. It's a practice that has long raised concerns among national security and diplomatic officials, and U.S. intelligence officials closely monitor the issue, according to experts and the current and former U.S. officials....

In the 1980s, spying by Israel caused a rift with Washington, with U.S. Navy intelligence analyst Jonathan Pollard spending 30 years in prison after he was found to have sold suitcases of top-secret documents to Israel.

Israel's genocide in Gaza, now into its third year, would not have been possible without the support of the mainstream media. Western broadcasters, newspapers, and magazines have mangled the English language in support of a live-streamed campaign of erasure -- diluting and repackaging war crimes as retaliation and self-defence, while staying silent as Israel slaughtered their industry peers.

It matters, now and for the historical record, how Israel's war crimes have been reported. It's crucial to understand how the media sold the engineered famine in Gaza and its still unfolding devastation. That there was an avalanche of genocidal intent expressed even before genocide was carried out with uncompromising precision is necessary context. Legacy media systematically suppressed this information, giving cover to complicit politicians and preventing much of the public from connecting the dots about this incomprehensible reality until it was far too late.

A new data-driven book by US-based journalist Adam H. Johnson argues that the media's role in the genocide in Gaza must never be forgotten and that we must pursue accountability for its complicity.

In How to Sell A Genocide: The Media's Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza, published by Pluto Press, Johnson analyses over 12,000 articles and 5,000 TV clips across nine major US outlets, makes the underlying data publicly available, interviews journalists and sources from those newsrooms, and compares coverage of other contemporary conflicts to crystallise the media's central role in legitimising the destruction of Gaza.

Constitutionally protected speech critical of Israel may be considered incitement of violence.

Gabrielle Cuccia, a MAGA influencer and former chief Pentagon correspondent for One America News (OAN), was hired earlier this year to write a script for Vine & Fig Tree Institute (VFT), a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization "that combats antisemitism and hate."...

The individual who contacted me is publicly very Christian and widely perceived as America First. I was told the script would be used to create an AI-generated video on behalf of the White House, specifically for NSC and Sebastian Gorka.

Gorka, as I pointed out in an earlier post, is deputy assistant to the president and senior director for counterterrorism. He said speech critical of the White House and Israel may be considered "incitement of violence under government standards" and linked to Iran and Russia.

Cuccia was told VFT worked covertly with the Trump administration and was provided with a link to a Dropbox account. "Inside the Dropbox were 7 folders," she writes. "Through those documents, I learned more about what this organization actually does. Their reports monitor major conservative and 'dissident-right' accounts and frequently frame those accounts as vulnerable to, or participating in, foreign influence operations."

The reports contain information on Nick Fuentes, Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Ian Carroll, Jackson Hinkle, Dan Bilzerian, Mario Nawfal, Joe Kent, and others. "In another report, they argue that distrust surrounding Charlie Kirk's assassination was mostly due to Americans falling for Russian, Iranian, and Pakistani propaganda networks" Cuccia writes....

The Institute receives funding from the Open Society Foundations of George Soros and the conservative Charles Koch Foundation. In 2021, the NCRI was paid $335,000 by the anti-BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) Israel on Campus Coalition (funded in part by Hillel: The Foundation for Jewish Campus Life), which conducts self-described "psychological warfare" on pro-BDS students using Blend AI, a service that manages online ad campaigns....

Speaking at the Hudson Institute in 2025, Trump's deputy assistant to the president and National Security Council senior director for counterterrorism, Sebastian Gorka, characterized all criticism of Israel as antisemitism. Earlier this month, he said anti-Israel speech should be defined as incitement to violence. He added that anti-Israel activists and protestors are "fellow travelers" to Iran and Russia....

Earlier in the month, Gorka produced an online counter terrorism strategy paper, explains Jason Zaharis:

Sebastian Gorka, the unregistered British foreign agent and vicious Islamophobe, along with several unregistered foreign agents of Israel, were involved in the creation of a 16-page online "counterterrorism" strategy document for the Trump Administration. The report named several known dissidents such as Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens. However, what was most terrifying was their attempt to frame independent journalists as agents of Russia and Iran without any evidence to prove such ties. [...] The US regime is declaring war on the First Amendment to silence anti-war dissidents and critics of Israel by labeling them foreign agents, just like they did with Russiagate and the McCarthy era. If the facts you report as a journalist don't happen to serve the Greater Israel agenda or the military-industrial complex's profit schemes, then you're a terrorist who is working as an agent of the Kremlin and the IRGC.

Former influential MAGA supporters, including Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Alex Jones, and recently Megyn Kelly, have all renounced Trump over the Iran War, the Epstein files, the Charlie Kirk assassination, sex scandals, and the election promises he made and have thus far gone unfulfilled. The Iran War in particular has alienated younger voters, and Trump's economic policies have soured MAGA voters across the board.

Donald Trump, a vindictive megalomaniac, is using the authority of his office and the state to go after and harm critics, while allowing Zionists to undermine the constitutional rights of American citizens. Sebastian Gorka, an unregistered British foreign agent, with the assistance of VFT and other Zionist groups and individuals, is determined to criminalize all speech that points out the obvious: Israel is an outlaw criminal state guilty of crimes against humanity, genocide, rape, theft, and political manipulation of the United States, including the wholesale purchase of elected representatives.

A typical U.S. tactic against a strategic target is to 'boil the frog' by slowly increasing the temperature of the water it is sitting it. The conflict in Ukraine is an good example for this. Hits against Russia, directed by the CIA, are escalated bit by bit while Russia is reluctant to more severe deterrence measures.

The current war on Iran is another example. The U.S. is insisting on a ceasefire while trying to erode Iran's leverage with economic strangulation.

Iran's major weapon, the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, will need another month or two to fully unfold its intended effect on the U.S. and global economy. Meanwhile the U.S. is trying to tire Iran with fake diplomacy, economic measures (its blockade) and pinpoint strikes.

But Iran is well aware of this tactic. It has decided to avoid this ceasefire trap by continuous escalation...

Iran has decided to respond to this 'boiling-the-frog' tactic by increasing the cost for even the slightest U.S. attack. It is no longer responding in kind. Each U.S. strike is answered by hitting back stronger and against more targets....

Iran wants an agreement with the U.S. but is also expecting and prepared for a new round of war. For political reason President Trump is, for now, trying to avoid both, an agreement with Iran and renewed fighting. He continues to ignore Iran's escalation....

Trump is following the advice of Israeli lobbyists who are urging him (archived) to wait for now and to hit Iran later...

Iran is well aware of Trump's current dilemma. It is in its interest to keep the conflict hot and going rather than to let it cool down now only to flare up later....

So far Iran had only hit at U.S. ground assets in the Gulf region. Those attacks have caused severe damage but only few casualties. Until now Iran had avoided strikes on warships as such attacks tend to cause dead and wounded in higher numbers.

But to keep Trump engaged will require more serious measures....

The 'warning missiles' against U.S. warships are an escalation. But they are not sufficient to move Trump.

In a day or a two one one of the 'warning' missiles will likely (have to) reach its target.

Officials in Hezbollah and the IDF said that their forces are not engaging in the ceasefire that is backed by President Donald Trump....

IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir explained there was "no ceasefire for our forces" in Lebanon, adding that "we are working to maximize the freedom of action that has been granted to us."

Hezbollah Secretary General Sheik Naim Qassem said the truce was a "roadmap to genocide." "The result of the absurd, humiliating and shameful direct negotiations -- rejected in full by wide segments of the Lebanese people -- is the Washington Declaration," he explained. "Which draws the basic principles that America and Israel see for Lebanon's submission to the Greater Israel project."

The Hezbollah leader said that any ceasefire must include a complete end to Israeli attacks on Lebanon and the withdrawal of the IDF. "The ceasefire must be comprehensive -- no division between the south and the rest of Lebanon, and no freedom to kill for the Israeli enemy in Lebanon."...

Fighting between Hezbollah and the IDF continued on Thursday.

The bombing campaign has killed more than 200 people.

US Southern Command said on Wednesday that its forces bombed another alleged drug-running boat in the Eastern Pacific Ocean as the Trump administration continues the extra-judicial executions at sea....

The Pentagon has also never offered any evidence to back up its claims that the boats it's bombing are carrying drugs, and accounts from survivors and family members of victims of other strikes that were reported by Drop Site News suggest the US has targeted fishing boats that were not.

Besides being clearly illegal under both US and international law, the bombing campaign has also failed at stemming the flow of drugs to the US... Numbers from US Customs and Border Protection show that more cocaine has been seized at the border and other points of entry in the eight months after the bombing campaign began than was seized in the eight months prior.

According to a count from The Intercept, since the campaign began in September 2025, the US boat strikes have killed at least 207 people, all civilians, since they were operating civilian boats, were not engaged in combat, and posed no threat to US forces at the time of their killing.

Unwilling to finalize a peace deal with Iran and restrain Israel, the Trump administration attempts another illusory "ceasefire" in Lebanon.

Despite repeatedly claiming that a peace deal with Iran is at hand, President Donald Trump is unwilling to finalize one. An agreement would cement the failure of Trump's regime change war. It would also require recognizing Iran's sovereign rights, including having an economy free of crushing US sanctions. Trump would also have to halt his Israeli ally's continued attacks on southern Lebanon, which have killed more than 3,000 people and displaced more than 1.2 million since March. Israeli attacks on Gaza also continue daily, with no protest from Trump or his so-called "Board of Peace."

Having promised to make a "final determination" on an Iran deal last week, the Trump administration can only stall with more deception. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told Congress this week that "the war is over" even as US-Iran clashes continue and Gulf states absorb Iranian retaliation. Trump meanwhile feigned anger at his ally Benjamin Netanyahu for continuing his annihilation campaign in Lebanon, a clear Iranian red line for a lasting deal. On Monday, the White House fed Axios a story claiming Trump berated his Israeli counterpart "in an expletive-laden call." The Trump team is copying the playbook honed by their predecessors in the Biden administration, who planted a similar story in the same outlet at least 25 times, according to a tally from media critic Adam Johnson, to mask their support for Netanyahu's aggression.

Trump, like Biden before him, could simply tell Netanyahu to stop the bombing of Lebanon. Instead, every US action has been geared toward encouraging Israeli aggression....

For now, that common action is causing massive civilian destruction in southern Lebanon in the hopes of weakening support for Hezbollah and laying the ground for a civil war. As it has since its founding in 1948, Israel is also carrying out plans to steal as much territory as it can under the guise of security concerns. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich declared in March that the war on Lebanon "needs to end with a different reality entirely" not only with Hezbollah "but also with the change of Israel's borders." These new borders, he added, "must be the Litani [River]," about 15% of Lebanese territory. Hezbollah's resistance has made this impossible, so Israel has set the more modest goal of committing as much ethnic cleansing as it can....

Unless Trump can change course, he will remain stuck between a regime change war on Iran that he can't win and a peace deal with Iran that he won't make.

Two scientists with a U.S. government lab were charged with smuggling vials of a deactivated version of a deadly virus into the country from Africa on a "packed" Delta Air Lines flight, federal prosecutors said.

Vincent Munster, 53, and Claude Kwe, 38, both researchers with the National Institutes of Health at the Rocky Mountain Laboratory in Montana, are charged with conspiracy to smuggle the virus that causes mpox, formerly monkeypox, into the United States and lying to law enforcement, according to a criminal complaint unsealed on June 2 in U.S. District Court.

Federal officials said the researchers were found with the virus when they were stopped in January at the Detroit Metro Airport after deboarding Delta Flight 229 that originated from Congo Republic, where an outbreak of mpox was occurring....

According to a criminal complaint filed by the FBI on March 17, Munster, a citizen of the Netherlands, is chief of the virus ecology section at the Rocky Mountain Laboratory in Hamilton, Montana. Kwe, a citizen of Cameroon, is a research fellow in Munster's department.

They work at a Biosafety Level 4 lab, which prosecutors said employs "the highest level of biosafety precautions for scientific research of known and potential human pathogens." Their job duties include studying emerging viral pathogens, prosecutors said. The lab is one of approximately 15 such facilities in the United States, according to the charging documents filed March 17.

The lab types are the highest containment facilities worldwide, the NIH says, designed to study deadly airborne-transmitted pathogens with no known cures.

On Jan. 25, the two researchers arrived at the Detroit airport onboard the Delta flight from Paris. Their travel originated in Brazzaville, Congo Republic, where at the time there had been a known outbreak of mpox.

Munster and Kwe were inspected and interviewed by Customs and Border Protection officials upon their arrival, who saw the pair traveling with a large black plastic case. Prosecutors said both scientists falsely told CBP officers the black case contained diagnostics and testing equipment.

A subsequent investigation by CBP and FBI agents allegedly found 113 vials in Styrofoam coolers in the scientists' luggage. To date, the FBI has tested 20 of those vials − 17 of them contained deactivated mpox virus, one contained the chickenpox virus and two contained only human DNA, officials said....

Both are charged with conspiracy to smuggle the virus that causes mpox and lying to federal law enforcement.

America's dealmaker-in-chief has created an escalating geopolitical catastrophe.

First, the bad news: The Iran War shows no signs of ending soon. Tehran on Monday said it would suspend peace talks with the U.S. in protest of Israeli strikes in Gaza and Lebanon.

Now, the even worse news: The Iran War is linked to the Ukraine War in myriad disturbing ways, and the longer the former drags on, the more dangerous the latter becomes....

The most notable connection: Russia has helped Iran, a strategic partner, target U.S. assets in the Middle East -- payback for American support for Ukraine's own war effort. Judging by the surprising precision with which Tehran has targeted those assets, Moscow seems to have provided excellent intel....

As Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky, with increasing hysteria, has warned, Kiev is running dangerously low on air defense interceptors, and Washington hasn't responded to his call to provide more. One big reason why? The U.S. rapidly burned through its own stock of interceptors defending its assets and Mideast partners from Iranian attacks....

Donald Trump, America's dealmaker-in-chief, faces alarming and connected geopolitical crises. The peace deal he engineered in Gaza and the ceasefire he secured in Lebanon have broken down, as Israel escalates militarily to sabotage U.S.--Iran peace talks. With the Iran War unlikely to soon end in a negotiated settlement, expect Russia to remain 1) distrustful of U.S. diplomacy, 2) eager to aid Iran's war effort, and 3) tempted to escalate in Ukraine.

Israeli citizens wonder why the state won't return October 7 footage it confiscated from them. The mother of an Israeli victim says authorities deleted video of her son's death. Others complain "someone is hiding" the videos.

The Israeli government is still holding a massive trove of video documentation of the Oct. 7 attack captured by individuals and communities caught up in the fighting. One bereaved parent even accuses Israeli authorities of deleting a video of her son's last moments before returning his phone to her.

According to Israel's Channel 13, "all the cameras, memory cards and films that documented the atrocities were collected, but two and a half years later, these materials have not been returned to the communities and bereaved families who are desperate for information, and even feel that someone is hiding it from them."

Soon after Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad's attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, special units from the IDF, the Israeli intelligence agency Shin Bet and Israel's investigation unit Lahav 433 collected photo and video documentation of the violence, confiscating cell phones, individual cameras, kibbutz security cameras and more....

According to the head of the Kfar Aza kibbutz -- the site of a number of a series of atrocity hoaxes spun out in the early days after the attack -- community members cooperated with investigators at the time. Now, years after the events, these families are wondering why documentation of their loved ones' fates has yet to be returned to them.

Even Sabine Taasa, who was made an emblem of Israeli victimhood after her husband and one of her sons were killed on Oct. 7, is now clashing with Israeli authorities over footage of that day.

Taasa's 17-year-old son, Or, was killed on Zikim beach. According to Channel 13, Taasa says she saw a video her son filmed in the moments leading up to his death, but when authorities returned his phone to her, no such video remained. The outlet says this is not an isolated incident....

On October 7, the Israeli government issued Hannibal Directive orders which led Apache helicopter pilots and tank gunners to take aim at Israel's own citizens in the Gaza envelope, supposedly to prevent them from being taken hostage. Israeli Brig. Gen. Barak Hiram personally ordered a tank crew to shell a home in Kibbutz Be'eri, knowing it was filled with Israeli citizens who had been taken captive by Hamas fighters seeking to negotiate a way out of the standoff. A dozen Israelis were killed in the strike, leaving behind "a house full of corpses," according to the lone Israeli survivor. One Israeli tank gunner from an all-female unit similarly revealed that she was ordered to shell Israeli homes without knowing who was inside. An Israeli police investigation subsequently revealed that Israeli helicopters shelled the Nova Electronic Music festival on October 7.

Given Israel's track record of targeting its own citizens on October 7 and misleading the public about it, the Israeli state might be holding on to as much video as possible to ensure no further evidence of the Israeli army massacring its own citizens is made public.

On Wednesday, Rep. Marlin Stutzman (R-IN) introduced a bill in the House calling for a change in the US-Israel relationship that's based on a plan put forward by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Amid growing skepticism among Americans about the US-Israel relationship, Netanyahu has suggested that the US could eventually end its military aid to Israel and transition the relationship to a more partnership-based model that would further intertwine the US and Israeli militaries, making the special relationship even harder to unravel....

Under the current US-Israeli MOU, Israel receives at least $3.8 billion in military aid from the US each year, though it has received much more since October 7, 2023. The purpose of Netanyahu's plan is to remove public-facing military aid to reduce criticism of the US-Israel relationship and to make whatever aid and support Israel receives from the US under the new arrangement much less transparent.

Stutzman introduced the bill one week after meeting with Netanyahu in Jerusalem and also shared a letter the Israeli leader wrote to him endorsing the legislation. "I was glad to receive your proposed Congressional resolution endorsing my plan to shift the framework for US-Israel defense cooperation from aid to partnership," Netanyahu wrote.