| DAILY ALERT |
Sunday, July 5, 2026 |
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News Resources - North America, Europe, and Asia:
"The Islamic Republic of Iran will not allow any American interference in the Strait of Hormuz," parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf said Friday. (Mehr News-Iran) See also Hard-Line Newspaper Says Trump Must Be Handed Over to Iran's Judicial Authorities for Trial Hossein Shariatmadari, the managing editor of Kayhan, funded by Iran's Supreme Leader, wrote on June 28 that Iran's first demand in negotiations should be "to insist on handing Trump over to the Islamic Republic for trial in Iran's judicial authorities." He also wrote that Iran's negotiating team should refuse to accept Trump or his representatives in future talks. He added that "the effort to avenge the Supreme Leader must take place on American soil." (Iran International) U.S. Ambassador to the UN Mike Waltz told the UN Security Council on Thursday: "Three months ago through Resolution 2817 led by the Kingdom of Bahrain, this Council stood with our friends in the Gulf without opposition, as their hospitals, as their airports, energy infrastructure, resorts were under blistering fire from Iranian drones and missiles....I visited some of the locations that the Iranians have hit....It was deliberate, it was well planned, it was malicious." "I visited the Bahraini Petroleum Company, where I saw where Iran very precisely targeted the fire suppression lines first. They then targeted first responders, so that they could not respond. They targeted a site literally in the middle of a neighborhood. Fortunately, the drone didn't explode. It would have potentially killed two to three thousand families in a massive, massive explosion." "They even aimed at chemical storage areas, again, where direct strikes could have killed thousands of innocent people in what Iran, I'm sure their representative today, will call neighbors and colleagues. That's not how you treat neighbors in my neighborhood, where I come from." "Meanwhile, they've stopped every ship from transiting the Straits of Hormuz, and it didn't matter if the ship was carrying fertilizers to farmers in Africa, aid to Sudan, fuel to Japan, whether they were involved in this conflict or not....Iran sought to punish the world, all of us, all of you.... Iran cannot and we cannot allow it to hold the world's economy hostage....Iran still hasn't shown the world a basic level of decency and respect." (U.S. Mission to the UN) Recent reporting indicates that Saudi Arabia refused to let U.S. warplanes take off from Saudi bases at the height of the Strait of Hormuz crisis in early May. Dr. Michael Makovsky, President and CEO of the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA), told Fox News Thursday that during a recent visit to Israel for meetings with senior military and intelligence leadership, "We went to Ovda Air Base [in southern Israel and]...heard from the Israeli and American commanders there [about] what incredible cooperation there was [in the war]." Ovda was built after the Camp David Accords to U.S. specifications. "There were over 4,000 American sorties from Ovda [against Iran] and something like 6,000 American military personnel stationed there. America brought defensive weaponry but didn't need it because Israel has a very sophisticated air defense capability....And, unlike the Saudis, the Israelis give America complete freedom of action." (Fox News) News Resources - Israel and the Mideast:
Israel's ambassador to U.S. Yechiel Leiter said Thursday that the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) is sidelining Shiite troops and officers who are unwilling to confront Hizbullah, reflecting a growing readiness in Beirut to act under the new framework agreement with Israel. Leiter said the LAF are more capable of confronting Hizbullah than they sometimes appear. "There has to first be will. There are elements within the LAF that didn't have the will to confront Hizbullah, because you have about 25% to 30% of the army which is Shia, and of the Shia Muslims you have anywhere between 30% and 50% support for Hizbullah." "The solidification of the government now has moved those elements within the army to the side. So there's a greater will because of the degrading of Iran, and the degrading of Hizbullah and the fall of Assad. They were always intimidated by Assad, which was a long arm of Iran sitting on their border. Now, Assad has been toppled, thanks in no small measure to Israel. By degrading Hizbullah, Assad didn't have a proxy to defend him either." "We came to our senior partner here in the United States and we said...you're already funding, to a large extent, the Lebanese Armed Forces. If you fund them a little bit more, but now make it progress-based, performance-based, not timelines; that's another piece of magic we put into this agreement. The focus of this agreement is the dismantlement of Hizbullah. It's not the withdrawal of Israel....Hizbullah is dismantled, Israel withdraws, and we have full peace." Leiter said Israel would not leave its current security zone until all of southern Lebanon south of the Litani River is under Lebanese army control. Moreover, Hizbullah's tunnel infrastructure in southern Lebanon must also be destroyed. "These are the tunnels that Hizbullah built with tens of millions of dollars that are aimed to do two things: Number one, provide them cover so that they can come out of the tunnels, shoot missiles into our northern towns, and run back in and we can't get them. The other one is to use these tunnels to penetrate Israel by foot like the Nukhba did in Gaza and actually attack our citizens." (Ynet News) After 1,000 days of war, nothing remains of the densely populated Jabalia refugee camp north of Gaza City. The area looks desolate and quiet like the surface of the moon. Engineering drills search for tunnels below ground, with D9 bulldozers operating above. In all the territory controlled by Israel, which makes up 2/3 of the territory, nothing remains. Rafah was wiped off the face of the earth, as was most of Khan Yunis. 92% of the tunnels in this part of the territory have been completely destroyed; the rest will be destroyed soon. Reports of a resurgence inside Hamas-controlled Gaza should be taken with a massive grain of salt. Hamas is failing to genuinely rearm after its smuggling routes in the air, on land, at sea, and underground were choked off. 362 smuggling tunnels from Egypt were destroyed in Rafah. Training is conducted in hiding, reconstruction materials aren't arriving, and the newly dug tunnels in the sand are barely shored up with whatever is available: sheet metal, wood scraps. "Make no mistake," says a very senior army officer, "of all the enemies we have faced, they are the most cruel, the most hateful toward us, and the most uninhibited." This is exactly the reason why it was forbidden to stop and "fight another day." Without this level of destruction and without isolating them from their patrons, Gaza would have recovered rapidly. (Israel Hayom) Venezuela's interim president Delcy Rodriguez publicly thanked Israel for dispatching a team of disaster specialists following the country's devastating earthquakes. She praised the professionalism of the Israeli experts and said the team reached Venezuela after coordination through the country's Jewish community. The humanitarian mission comes despite the absence of diplomatic relations between Israel and Venezuela. (i24News) See also Israeli Drones Aid Mexican Rescue Teams in Venezuela - Anna Ahronheim Mexico City's Topos Azteca search and rescue brigade has been using Israeli unmanned aerial systems to access areas still too dangerous for humans to enter in search of victims buried under the rubble in Venezuela's La Guaira earthquake sites. (Jerusalem Post) The Prime Minister's Office disputed a report by the New York Times that U.S. officials believed Israel might be "plotting to kill Iran's top negotiators" during U.S.-Iran ceasefire negotiations. The Prime Minister's Office posted on X on Friday: "As usual, the New York Times' latest story about Israel and the Iranian negotiators is fake news. A complete fabrication of reality." (Ha'aretz) Global Commentary and Think-Tank Analysis:
Iran After surviving months of strikes by two of the world's most potent militaries, the Iranian regime has emerged emboldened, officials and experts said, and remains ruthless. Iran "might be weaker when it comes to its economic situation, its industries, some of its strategic capabilities," said Raz Zimmt, head of Iran research at the Institute for National Security Studies in Israel. "But the bottom line is that we are facing a new, bolder, self-confident Iran." Nearly all of those now in high-ranking positions spent formative years as lieutenants in security agencies or military units responsible for crackdowns on domestic protests, arming proxy militias including Hizbullah and Hamas, and rising through the ranks of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, secretary of the Supreme National Security Council of Iran, is a former Revolutionary Guard commander with deep ties to the Quds force that trains allied militias. Ahmad Vahidi, the Revolutionary Guard's new commander in chief, backed the violent crackdown against women's rights protests in 2022. Mohsen Rezaei, the new military adviser to the supreme leader, is an ardent advocate of escalation in response to any U.S. and Israeli attacks. "They are brimming with confidence," said a European official in regular contact with Iranian officials. "They not only survived, they rediscovered the Strait of Hormuz as a big lever, and they really think that they can dictate terms." (Washington Post) Israeli Security A middle-ranking IDF officer said, "the army is not the same army it was" on Oct. 7. "The way we look today at an emerging threat, our approach toward the enemy is different. Today, there is no such thing as no response." Against the backdrop of Oct. 7, the most central move made by the IDF with the political leadership's backing has been maneuvering deep inside enemy territory, establishing itself there and creating a broad security belt and strategic depth for the State of Israel. No more defense along the border line. "Today we believe in the threat, much more than we believed then." The lessons learned since Oct. 7 have brought about a revolution in the IDF's defense concept, one that abandons static positioning on Israeli soil in favor of operational dynamism. The IDF no longer relies only on a narrow contact line between the fence and the Israeli community, but clearly distinguishes between "security zones" - areas whose purpose is airtight protection of the communities and prevention of enemy infiltration - and "holding zones" - areas in enemy territory where a continuous operational presence of IDF soldiers is maintained to prevent infiltration and help enable a rapid transition to attack. Defense Minister Israel Katz has described a mindset shift, moving from passive defense that waits for an event to active defense designed to prevent the extreme scenario from materializing in the first place. In Katz's view, that is not going to change in the coming years and the IDF must adapt. In addition, response times of forces in the air, on land and sea have changed beyond recognition. (Jerusalem Post) Every territorial withdrawal Israel has undertaken - whether in the Sinai following the 1956 Suez crisis, and pursuant to the 1979 Israel-Egypt Peace Treaty, in Syria in the 1974 Israel-Syria Disengagement Agreement, in southern Lebanon in the late 1980s, and in Gaza in 2005 - has been accompanied by security and demilitarization arrangements, monitored and supervised in order to prevent hostile forces from embedding themselves along Israel's borders. Yet these various security and demilitarization arrangements, dependent on foreign forces and UN approval, proved to be totally inadequate to prevent violations of the demilitarization requirements. As long as a real and immediate danger continues to exist along Israel's borders, and as long as Israel's security continues to face ongoing threats from neighboring territory, Israel is fully justified in insisting on security zones and demilitarized areas under its monitoring and supervision. Insistence by Israel on such ongoing presence and supervision is a prerequisite for any hope of regional stabilization and an essential requirement to ensure Israel's justified and proven right to ensure its security in accordance with its internationally acknowledged rights to defend itself and its people. The writer, former Legal Adviser and Deputy Director-General of Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, heads the international law program at the Jerusalem Center. (Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs) Strategic depth provides adequate reaction time between sensing a threat and acting on it. And it provides sufficient land area to deploy and array friendly forces before committing them to combat. Without the high ground of Judea, Samaria, and the Golan Heights, Israel is incredibly narrow - too narrow to permit the swift internal deployment of overwhelming combat power against any compelling external threat. The U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff reached this conclusion in the late 1960s and their judgment has only been reinforced by the technological developments of the intervening half-century. Once-adequate strategic depth is no longer adequate. The Israeli border is less than 30 km. from the Litani River in Lebanon. In the 23 years between the Israeli withdrawal from the southern Lebanon security zone and the Oct. 7 war, the area south of the river became saturated with Hizbullah missiles, artillery, mortars, anti-tank guided missiles, rockets, and drones. Every weapon was emplaced for one purpose: to kill Israeli civilians. Re-securing this area as a buffer is therefore imperative. The same logic applies on the Syrian side of the Golan Heights. During a 28-year career, the writer served as Deputy Director of Operations, Readiness, and Mobilization at U.S. Army Headquarters. (Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs) Micha Popper, 78, professor emeritus in psychology at the University of Haifa, said, after the Hamas attack on Oct. 7, "We were going crazy, thinking: What can we do? So we drove down to [Kibbutz] Kfar Azza [a few days later]. This was during the early days. Everything was in ruins, they had just removed the bodies. We started to clean the refrigerators in the dining hall, to work in the fields - we helped physically with whatever we could, and we were in contact with the army personnel who were in charge of the work there. We decided to go anywhere where help was needed." "I saw that there are masses of people here who simply couldn't stand by. That wherever there is a problem, they are there. It floored me....Everything worked excellently, without the need for meetings, through spontaneous activity that was carried out by talented, take-charge people who came up with ideas of their own." "And they did it masterfully, with the aid of other skillful individuals: locating missing people; establishing schools and daycare for the people evacuated from their homes; farming; providing psychological assistance to and employment for the evacuees; helping businesses." "Israelis are problem solvers. Give them a problem and they'll know how to handle it. And then there is the ability to improvise, implement and be creative. That has to do with our history, with survivability. And then there is familyhood, which is part of the willingness to step in and carry the burden together." "There was a woman who understood algorithms, data, and she suggested an idea to locate missing persons with the aid of photographs taken by the [Hamas] terrorists, who filmed everything with their body cameras. To look for all sorts of signs - like a stain on a shirt. She brought in a high-tech person and a few other people, and together they created things that don't exist anywhere in the world. After three days it was already up and running. The Israel Security Agency called; they wanted what the group had invented." "There were plenty of initiatives like that, of people with vision, creativity and knowhow in their fields. No one waited for anyone. I saw people coming in private cars to transport equipment to wherever it was needed. I saw CEOs, well-known people who had already retired, companies that donated money. It was like they were all on steroids; people didn't sleep. Having so many go-getters is something you don't see anywhere in the world." (Ha'aretz) Hamas The Trump Administration is making a big mistake by engaging in negotiations with Hamas - as well as Iran. These negotiations legitimize them as political actors and, for Hamas, only strengthen their standing among Palestinians. Reports that senior U.S. officials have been holding direct meetings with Hamas representatives come only days after Hamas successfully crushed anti-Hamas demonstrations in Gaza on June 26. Instead of debating whether Hamas should disarm, negotiators now appear to be debating how much of its military capability it should be allowed to keep. That is exactly how terrorist organizations manipulate diplomacy. The latest Hamas delegation to Cairo arrived not to announce its surrender but to present new demands. In short, Hamas, while remaining fully armed, continues to dictate conditions. It is the behavior of a movement convinced that time is on its side. Instead of legitimizing terrorist groups that openly seek Israel's and America's destruction, the U.S. should insist on the full implementation of its own peace plans - each with a firm deadline - beginning with Hamas's unconditional disarmament and removal from power. (Gatestone Institute) Hizbullah In Lebanon, the U.S. has run two contradictory diplomatic instruments at once, letting the weaker one absorb the enemy's hopes while the stronger one quietly sets the terms. Within nine days, the U.S. put its name to two texts pointing in opposite directions. The first is the Memorandum of Understanding signed by the U.S. and Iran on June 17. Its 14 points explicitly include a demand for the immediate end of hostilities in Lebanon and the restoration of Lebanese sovereignty. Iran's regime intended this as a deed of eviction: Israel out of southern Lebanon, Hizbullah preserved, the situation frozen in the Islamist militia's favor. A memorandum of understanding is, in diplomatic practice, a statement of intent. It binds no one. It announces a direction and leaves the obligations for later. What Iran could not foresee was that the second document, the Trilateral Framework Agreement signed by the U.S., Lebanon and Israel on June 26, would gut the first without ever formally repudiating it. The Trilateral Framework signed in Washington is not a memorandum. It is an implementation accord. Hizbullah is to be disarmed and its infrastructure dismantled; only upon verified disarmament does Israel progressively redeploy. A Military Coordination Group, facilitated by the U.S., will supervise the mechanism. Hizbullah is not a party to any of it. The Washington framework carries a verification schedule, a coordination body, and an American signature on the operational page. The MoU was the consolation Iran was permitted to believe and has no mechanism behind it at all. Iran negotiated the MoU and believed it had won the war. It discovered that the Trilateral Framework, the only binding document, the one with mechanisms, was written to ensure the opposite. The framework can be enforced, or it can be evaded. What can no longer be claimed is that the U.S. agreed to Iran's terms. The writer is a French reporter, novelist and documentary filmmaker. (Gatestone Institute) The path to the implementation of the framework agreement between Israel and Lebanon appears long and fraught with obstacles, and there is no certainty that it can be successfully implemented. Hizbullah refuses to accept the terms or relinquish its weapons, autonomous status, and ties to Iran. It may, as in the past, attempt to target Lebanese leaders involved in negotiations with Israel. Although Hizbullah is currently weaker than before, it still retains the capacity to disrupt the implementation process, including continued military activity against IDF forces operating in Lebanon. The Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) remain at a disadvantage vis-a-vis Hizbullah, even in its current weakened state. Past experience has demonstrated that the Lebanese army lacks both the will and the capability to confront Hizbullah. To date, it has avoided violent clashes with Hizbullah and has at times even cooperated with it. In order to meet the demands placed upon it by the agreement, comprehensive reforms, significant strengthening, and a shift in its strategic posture vis-a-vis Hizbullah will be required. The agreement could also face potential disruption by Iran, which has already demonstrated its willingness to risk the collapse of the ceasefire in order to preserve its position in Lebanon and ensure Hizbullah's survival. For Israel, the agreement reflects recognition of the State of Israel by the Lebanese government and points to the possibility of a future transformation in bilateral relations with Lebanon. It also partly offsets the negative implications of the Memorandum of Understanding signed between Iran and the U.S., which acknowledged Iranian involvement in Lebanon. The framework also renders unnecessary the involvement of the states that were supposed to oversee the ceasefire alongside the U.S. - Iran, Pakistan, and Qatar. The writer, a senior researcher at INSS, served for 26 years in the IDF and 12 years in Israel's National Security Council. (Institute for National Security Studies-Tel Aviv University) See also Assessing the Israel-Lebanon Framework Agreement - Robert Satloff (Washington Institute for Near East Policy) Turkey Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan told CNN Turk on Thursday that Israel has become a "burden that humanity can no longer bear" and called on the international community to impose sanctions on Jerusalem. Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa'ar responded on X, calling Fidan's remarks "textbook incitement to genocide." Sa'ar called on "the civilized world and Turkey's NATO allies" to "unequivocally condemn this explicit call for the erasure of Israel." (i24News) Asked recently whether Ankara might get the F-35, President Trump replied: Turkish President Erdogan "is a strong member of NATO. I'm going to probably do something that's going to make him very happy." America's premier fighter jet should be a nonstarter for Ankara as long as it owns a Russian S-400 missile-defense system. The first Trump Administration was right to boot Turkey from the F-35 program when it bought the S-400 in 2019. Allowing the two systems to work together could give Moscow valuable intelligence and would amount to letting Vladimir Putin conduct target practice on the Free World's pilots. The F-35's stealth technology and sensors are a core reason the U.S. and Israel owned the skies over Iran and the stakes of cracking the F-35's tech are especially acute. The U.S. should not be handing its prime adversary a potential cheat code on the West's best military aircraft technology. (Wall Street Journal) Observations: How Morocco's Religious Rehabilitation Model Could Help Gaza - Salma Annasse (Washington Institute for Near East Policy)
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