| DAILY ALERT |
Thursday, September 24, 2026 |
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News Resources - North America, Europe, and Asia:
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Wednesday: "The southern lane of the [Hormuz] straits is open. Every day more and more barrels of oil are flowing through there. And they're open, thanks to the efforts of the United States military that's both defending shipping and has removed mines....I'm happy to see that the Saudis were able to restart the East-West pipeline again, which is critical for their economy and also critical for the global economy." If the Iranians "continue to insist on the desire for a nuclear weapon, their support for proxies in the region - they're the world's leading sponsor of terrorism - then we're going to have big problems with them." "I think the Iranians misread our system. I think the Iranians are under this illusion that Democrats are going to win in November, and the President will no longer be able to do things against them....The legislative branch is a very important branch of government. I served in it for 14 years, so I understand its powers, but also understand its limitations." "When it comes to the national security of our country, when it comes to the imposition of both sanctions and the use of military force, the President has extraordinary powers. Every president does." "The Iranian issue is not a political issue. It is the fact that for generations now - for almost 50 years - every American president...agrees that Iran can never have a nuclear weapon. But ultimately, no one ever does anything about it...and he's doing something about it. And it comes at a price and at a cost...but the cost of not doing something about it is substantially higher, especially for future generations." (U.S. State Department) When Iran shut down the Strait of Hormuz at the start of the war, many feared that prices would skyrocket, cratering the world economy. Instead, nearly seven months on, oil is expensive but not exorbitant. That's because Saudi Arabia and other Gulf producers quickly found alternative routes and reached for unused pipeline capacity. When Iran and its allies targeted those, the oil exporters and the U.S. military found other workarounds for the workarounds. With oil now at around $100 a barrel - higher than before the war but not as bad as feared - Iran has diminished leverage, while a U.S. naval blockade and tightened sanctions smother its economy. (AP-ABC News) News Resources - Israel and the Mideast:
American citizen and IDF reservist Neria Leiter, 38, the son of Israel's Ambassador to the U.S. Yechiel Leiter, was seriously wounded in a Palestinian car-ramming attack at the Maccabim checkpoint on Wednesday. In 2023, one of Leiter's other sons, Maj. (res.) Moshe Yedidya, was killed in Gaza. The attacker, who was killed by IDF troops at the scene, was Muhammad Mahmoud Suleiman, 29. (Jerusalem Post) Hamas finance department chief Muhammad Abu Alwan was killed Wednesday in an Israeli airstrike in the Khan Yunis area of Gaza. Abu Alwan was responsible for the transfer of more than 1 billion shekels to finance Hamas activities during the war, the IDF said Thursday. In recent months he had worked to restore Hamas's capabilities in violation of the ceasefire agreement. (Ynet News) A tunnel at least 25 meters deep that was still under excavation was uncovered by Israel Police and Border Police in the Palestinian city of Qalqilya on Wednesday. Parts of the city are located adjacent to Israel. The start of another excavation was found nearby, along with weapons and ammunition. (Jerusalem Post) Israel's newest submarine, INS Drakon, has entered Israeli territorial waters, 14 years after construction began. On Thursday, the submarine will be formally welcomed at the Haifa Naval Base. Its arrival was delayed by several months after Norway and Denmark barred the submarine from entering their territorial waters during sea trials, despite the fact that it was sailing under a German flag. It is the sixth submarine in the Dolphin AIP series to enter service and its classified capabilities are considered "game-changing." Three future Dakar-class submarines are currently under construction in Germany. For comparison, Turkey operates 14 submarines, with four more under construction, and 17 frigates and corvettes. (Israel Hayom) Colombia has withdrawn from South Africa's genocide case against Israel in the International Court of Justice, the court announced Tuesday. Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa'ar on Friday thanked new Colombian President Abelardo De la Espriella for the "withdrawal from South Africa's false and malicious lawsuit against Israel at the ICJ, which was made during the antisemitic Petro era." Israeli Ambassador to Colombia Vivien Aisen said Colombia chose "the right side of history" and made "a brave and responsible decision that we deeply appreciate." (Jerusalem Post) Global Commentary and Think-Tank Analysis:
Iran President Trump told the UN General Assembly on Tuesday: "They're waiting to see how I do in the midterm election. What they don't realize is that I'm not running....When it comes to Iran, [the election] doesn't even enter my mind." Continuing the war through or past the midterms means at least six more weeks of blockading Iran's ports. The U.S. election is supposed to be the regime's decisive leverage, forcing Mr. Trump to quit the fight before Iran can no longer bear the pressure. Iran's state-run media emphasize the regime's desire to defeat Mr. Trump in the midterms. But even after the elections, he will have two years left in office, with no political threat hanging over his head. What will stop him from prosecuting the war with less restraint, especially as the U.S. escorts more oil through the Strait of Hormuz? (Wall Street Journal) Israeli Security A film that won an award at the Venice Film Festival claims that the IDF uses artificial intelligence (AI) to direct fire and indiscriminately harm innocent people. It is therefore important to explain the actual role of artificial intelligence in military intelligence systems and to clarify why the claims presented in such a biased manner do not reflect the way these systems are actually operated. Artificial intelligence is an extremely important tool that can accelerate the process of identifying an enemy and developing potential targets. However, it is important to understand that the only entity that makes a decision concerning life and death is a human being. Military orders and procedures explicitly prohibit relying exclusively on AI applications in situations involving human life without human involvement. The system is providing recommendations, not making the decision. The identification of a target must be supported by at least two separate indicators from independent sources, and the final decision must be made by a human authority. The writer served as National Security Advisor to Prime Minister Netanyahu and as head of Israel's National Security Council. (Jerusalem Post) Gaza I know what it is like to be collateral damage. That's what I was. Hamas kidnapped me from the Nova music festival on Oct. 7 and held me in Gaza for 505 days. One of my captors told me his mother had received a phone call from the Israel Defense Forces warning her to leave her home because an Israeli strike might put her in danger. Israel called to make sure she wasn't killed accidentally. There I was - kidnapped, starved and tortured by her son - while my army was trying to keep his mother alive. Warnings, evacuations and decisions not to strike saved Palestinian lives. Israel also paid a price for these careful decisions. They gave Hamas time. They exposed Israeli soldiers to greater danger. And they left hostages like me waiting longer. If Israel had cared less about collateral damage, perhaps I would have come home sooner. Fewer Israeli soldiers might have died. Fewer hostages might have died. But more Palestinians would have. The film that received a standing ovation in Venice sees the suffering in Gaza, but not what brought the war there: Hamas's planning, the murder of families on Oct. 7, the people dragged from their homes and a music festival. Fighting to free me, and to protect Israelis from the people who did this, is treated as morally suspect. A society's ability to defend itself must depend on the moral clarity to know that it has the right to do so. There must never be another Oct. 7. We have the right to ensure there isn't. And we shouldn't be ashamed of it. (Wall Street Journal) Before Oct. 7, a Hamas minister delivered daily sermons at his local mosque. He continuously preached about the beauty and blessings of war, insisting that "there is no peace with the Jews." This scenario was replicated across Gaza's more than 1,000 mosques; sermon scripts were drafted by the Hamas-run Ministry of Endowments and distributed to preachers before they took the pulpit. Dismantling the infrastructure of radicalism and countering ideological mobilization in mosques and schools is no less vital than disarmament. In fact, it is the fundamental prerequisite for ensuring that violence does not reignite the moment the rubble is cleared. For decades, the educational and religious systems were exploited to steer collective consciousness exclusively toward armed conflict. Thus, an urgent need has emerged to restore the mosque's original role as a place of worship and a hub for enlightened thought, promoting values of tolerance and coexistence. Disarming Hamas without ridding educational and religious institutions of their radical ideas will keep the door to conflict wide open. Gaza's future will be determined inside classrooms and atop pulpits, where a consciousness is forged that will either repeat past mistakes or lay the foundation for a generation committed to peace, development, and investment in the future. The writer is a Palestinian lawyer, co-founder of the We Want to Live movement in Gaza, and a former political prisoner held by Hamas. (Jewish Chronicle-UK) Reuters ran a story on Monday under the headline, "Gaza students return to in-person schooling for the first time in three years." The most troubling omission in the article is its complete silence about what is being taught in these reopened schools, who is doing the teaching, and who is deciding what goes into the curriculum. For the hundreds of thousands of children returning to school to have a better future than the one Hamas has condemned them to, rebuilding the same educational system, using the same textbooks, employing the same teachers, and transmitting the same messages would simply rebuild the ideological foundations for the next Oct. 7. Whoever educates the children shapes the future. For Gaza ever to have a chance, it must free itself from an educational culture that demonizes Jews, denies Israel's legitimacy, and presents violence and "martyrdom" as heroic. Gaza needs terror-free schools that teach tolerance. It needs textbooks that do not erase Israel, teachers who are not affiliated with terrorist organizations, and classrooms where children are taught how to build a future rather than sacrifice themselves trying to destroy someone else's. Hamas can lose its tunnels, rockets and weapons yet retain enormous influence if it continues to educate the next generation according to the worldview that produced Oct. 7. Gaza's children are returning to a school system that has not undergone any fundamental ideological transformation since Oct. 7. This will not give them - or Gaza - a different future. (Jerusalem Post) Israel and the West Shareholders of the New York Times filed a lawsuit on Wednesday arguing that the paper has failed to meet its obligation: to tell readers the truth and correct itself in a timely fashion when it doesn't. The suit, filed by the State Board of Administration of Florida (SBA) and the National Center for Public Policy Research (NCPPR), asks a judge to force the Times board of directors to hand over internal records the company has refused to produce for four months, the majority of which pertain to the paper's coverage of the Israel-Hamas war. The suit includes the testimony from a whistleblower, a former Times employee who is Jewish and spent nearly a decade on the paper's video desk. According to the suit, the whistleblower raised concerns about antisemitism and anti-Israel bias at least 15 separate times between 2019 and her March 2026 departure, using every channel the company makes available to employees. In the immediate aftermath of Hamas's Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, staffers on the video desk spent weeks searching for evidence that Hamas did not use the tunnels beneath al-Shifa Hospital, even after the Israeli military released its own footage of the tunnels in November 2023. Since Oct. 7, the Times has been plagued by allegations of anti-Israel bias in its coverage. In one of numerous examples, a Sep. 15, 2026, Times article referred to Sharif Labad, who was killed in a drone strike, as "a Civil Defense rescue service worker," and made no mention of the fact that the Israel Defense Forces identified him as a member of the Hamas Nukhba force who invaded Israel on Oct. 7. (Free Press) Those who would revel in Israel's demise are claiming victimhood on every front and denying attacks on us in the same breath. The New York Times had to print a retraction to its own coverage of Israel. When reporting on the "NAZA" documentary - the latest salvo in the never-ending blood libel campaign against Israel - the Times wrote, "Israelis still largely view themselves as the victims of Oct. 7," insinuating that Israelis are not the victims. The retraction read, "Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article included a statement that...inadvertently suggested that Israelis' experience as terror victims was a matter of perception." For the past three years we've been told that the trauma we experienced didn't occur and that Israel is the true aggressor in the region. No matter how often or loudly our detractors repeat this notion, it doesn't make it true. Now those who hate us not only tell us that we aren't victims but the aggressors when battling our enemies, but they claim that those who have incessantly harassed us are actually the victims. (Los Angeles Jewish Journal) Jeremy Musighi, an independent researcher, recently released a study analyzing 14.7 million news articles published across 65 languages over the last decade. He found that, in 2024, news outlets published "more than twice as many stories about Israel as about all 48 countries of sub-Saharan Africa combined." "On American cable news, Israel was the most-mentioned country - ahead of Iran, Russia, Ukraine, China. On the BBC's news channel, 1 in every 17 broadcast minutes mentioned Israel." In 2019, long before the war in Gaza, "1 of every 112 news articles on Earth - from all the world's outlets minus Israel's - was primarily about Israel. 1.8 million international articles mentioned it." (Los Angeles Times) There have been hundreds of demonstrations in Toronto after the terrorist attacks on Israel in Oct. 2023. But what about Hamas? Where was the concern, if not the appropriate horror, over the vicious, inhumane attacks perpetrated against innocent people with such glee that they were recorded and broadcast to the world with sickening pride? Hamas showed pride in killing Jewish babies, pride in raping Jewish women and killing as many Jews of all ages as they could. Have any of those shouting "Free Palestine" suggested that the elimination of Hamas might free Palestinians from the grinding life they have been subjected to under a terrorist organization that hides its murderers among Gaza's hospitals, schools, and general population? Ask yourself, "Why am I not just as angry about the people who terrorize and murder, and plan to go on murdering, just because they have a generational, visceral hatred of Jews? Why am I not speaking out about that with equal passion and frequency?" If all your energy is expended saying you just want peace and safety for Palestinian moms and their children, but Hamas never enters the conversation, maybe in the back of your mind, in a dark place you don't want to acknowledge, you just don't like the Jews. (Toronto Sun-Canada) Every annual UN Week comes with the certainty of abuse for Israel. The hatefest is already in full swing. Tuesday saw accusations of genocide, the lie du jour. Then, in criticizing Israel, France's Emmanuel Macron said, "Hamas was never forceful in the West Bank." On Sunday, a Hamas terrorist there murdered an Israeli father of six. Were Israel to exit the West Bank, Hamas would quickly take over. Since 2015, the General Assembly has adopted 187 condemnatory resolutions against Israel, per UN Watch data, "more than twice the number adopted against Russia, China, Iran, Syria, North Korea, Myanmar, Qatar, Pakistan, Cuba, and Venezuela combined." The votes become building blocks of a permanent bureaucracy that supplies anti-Israel findings to be echoed by UN humanitarian and other agencies. The findings are then used by governments and courts to blacklist and sanction Israel. Only Israel is subject by rule to a Human Rights Council agenda item at every regular session, plus an "open-ended Commission of Inquiry and a uniquely indefinite Special Rapporteur mandate." That's on top of the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, Division for Palestinian Rights, Information System on the Question of Palestine, and UNRWA, the forever refugee agency for Palestinians. The question is why the U.S. and other democracies finance this discrimination, which undermines the ability of all to fight terrorism. (Wall Street Journal) See also The UN's Anti-Israel Ecosystem - Dr. Adi Schwartz and Asher Fredman (Misgav Institute for National Security and Zionist Strategy) The 25 minutes of applause for "NAZA" (collateral damage) at the Venice Film Festival reflects the depth of the antisemitic sickness taking root across the Western world. Official and unofficial spokespeople have been marshaling facts, data, their experience from military service and other evidence to refute this blood libel and repair the serious damage it has caused. But it is equally important to recognize the underlying psychological landscape from which this phenomenon emerges. The classic historical blood libel was never a matter of facts, explanations or evidence. It reflected a permanent state of mind, an identity narrative, and a deep-seated consciousness. That is why blood libels persisted, lying dormant until the next outbreak. The current antisemitic film is another link in the chain of blood libels. The Jews have been replaced by the State of Israel, which is now blamed for almost every evil in our world. Antisemitism toward Israel is reflected in the unique demands placed upon it to meet standards that no other country is required to meet. That is why accusations of genocide and demonstrations against Israel began the day after the Oct. 7 massacre, before Israel had undertaken any military action. The writer is dean of the School of Communication at Bar-Ilan University. (Israel Hayom) Ireland and Israel will face off in a men's soccer match in Hungary on Sunday. The game was supposed to be played in Ireland, but such is the hostility there that it must take place at a neutral venue instead. A second match will take place in Serbia rather than Israel the following Sunday. The Football Association of Ireland doesn't want to play at all. It wants the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) to boot Israel from the organization. Only Turkey and Norway share the Irish position. In the days after the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, no Israeli flags flew in solidarity outside public buildings anywhere in Ireland. Many politicians began displaying the Palestinian colors instead. The hostility of official Ireland stands out in Europe. Before Israel closed its embassy in Dublin last year, Israeli diplomats would quietly tell you that they regarded Ireland as the worst diplomatic posting in Europe. There are almost no politicians they can ever work with, and that was before the Gaza war. There are no friendly media. Why is Ireland so anti-Israel? Irish history explains most of it. Ireland was occupied by Britain for centuries and most Irish people liken the Palestinians to themselves, and particularly to the Catholics of Northern Ireland. They liken Israel to Britain. This startles a lot of Israelis. Surely if anyone was like the dispossessed Irish, it was the Jews. During the early days of the struggle for a Jewish state, leading figures such as future Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir took heart from Ireland's successful fight for independence from Britain. Shamir's nom de guerre was "Michael," after Michael Collins, one of the leaders of the old Irish Republican Army. (Wall Street Journal) Observations: Why Did It Take a Massacre of Jews to Lift the Lid on Anti-Jewish Hostility? - Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch (Tablet) Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch, a leading voice in the U.S. Reform community, is senior rabbi of the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in Manhattan. Here are additional excerpts from his Yom Kippur sermon on Monday:
See also Video: From Time Immemorial: Responding to Antisemitism - Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch (Stephen Wise Free Synagogue) |
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