The signing of the framework agreement between the U.S., Israel and Lebanon in Washington, D.C., on Friday. (Marco Rubio/X)

It’s Sunday, June 28, and forty-four years ago, as Israeli forces drove deep into Lebanon, U.S. special envoy Philip Habib arrived determined to take Defense Minister Ariel Sharon to task. Habib—who made little secret of his contempt for Sharon—believed he held the upper hand and pressed the case that Israel pull back and stop bending Lebanon’s fragile government toward Israel’s terms. Sharon sat back and let the American diplomat run through his lecture. When Habib finished, Sharon reportedly produced a card of his own: a secret document, quietly drawn up with a confidant of the Lebanese leadership, already sketching the outline of an accord—normalization, security arrangements and a phased Israeli withdrawal that would leave Israel holding outposts on Lebanese soil.

Sharon had bypassed the U.S. mediators entirely, having quietly negotiated his own full-blown peace agreement directly with Lebanese President Amin Gemayel through a private emissary. Habib’s trip was pointless.

This time, the agreement went through Washington.

On Friday, Israel announced a framework agreement with Lebanon, its first accord with the country since the short-lived 1983 treaty. The two sides commit to formally end their state of war and pursue normal relations through later negotiations. The engine is a reciprocal, sequenced process: Lebanon pledges the complete, verified disarmament of all non-state armed groups—Hezbollah is named—and the restoration of Lebanese Armed Forces control over all its territory, while, in exchange, the IDF redeploys zone by zone as disarmament is verified. Two initial “pilot zones” are agreed, with the rest left to a forthcoming Security Annex. Lebanon affirms Israel’s right to exist and that only the Lebanese state may authorize force on its soil; Israel disclaims any territorial ambitions.

In short: Lebanon sublets its own territory to Israel so Israel can evict the problematic tenant, Hezbollah, and hands the keys back once the premises are cleared—with normalization as the reward at the end of the eviction. On paper, it’s a phased withdrawal. In practice, it’s an admission that Israel stays in southern Lebanon until Hezbollah is gone. The price of that presence was paid again early this morning, when Captain David Hazut, 21, fell in a firefight with a Hezbollah operative in southern Lebanon. For the past four months, Iran has been demanding Israel withdraw from sovereign Lebanese soil; Lebanon’s own government has effectively answered, “You first.”

Even if the ultimate goal of normalization goes unmet, this is a genuine achievement for Israel because it upends the entire conception that has governed Lebanon until now. The old arrangement was simple: If Israel wanted to stay, the authority it had to consult was Washington, while Hezbollah took its marching orders from Tehran. The Lebanese government, meanwhile, oscillated between the roles of Hezbollah cutout and impotent failed state.

Now the United States has pulled the Lebanese government itself into the anti-Iran camp. And unlike Israel’s first treaty with Lebanon, this one is built to require America as a partner. Lebanon isn’t merely choosing a future without Hezbollah; it’s choosing a new Lebanon—rebuilt and bankrolled by the United States. Put plainly: It needs Trump to hold its spine straight for the confrontation with Hezbollah, and it needs Israel to do the dirty work to win that confrontation.

The agreement is a godsend for Netanyahu. Hezbollah won’t be eliminated by Election Day even if it’s pushed to the last possible day, but if the Israeli public reads southern Lebanon as a story of progress rather than an attritional swamp, he has a chance. Internationally, the framework isn’t about to get his face taken off the dartboard—but it has validated a strategy that drew enormous criticism. It turns out you don’t always need to know the “day after” before you launch an operation. As in Gaza, if you focus on degrading capabilities and keep your options open, opportunities may materialize on their own.

But let’s turn to the negatives.

The biggest risk is a simple reality: What Lebanon giveth, Lebanon can taketh away. The very existence of this second agreement is proof that the first, in 1983, didn’t hold. Back then, hopes of a full peace were dashed by the assassination of Israel’s intended intermediary, President-elect Bashir Gemayel; the agreement that did get signed was stripped back, then collapsed under a combination of internal Lebanese opposition and overwhelming regional pressure, above all from Syria. Within a year, Lebanon abandoned it, and it never took effect.

Hezbollah will do everything in its power to ensure that outcome, and it has several tools at hand. The first, and its favorite, is intimidation: President Joseph Aoun and other prominent figures backing the deal likely have targets on their backs. Hezbollah members of Lebanon’s Parliament have already declared that they will resist any effort at disarmament and labeled the LAF as incapable of forcing them to do so.

The second is mobilizing the street. Hezbollah’s supporters have already poured into Beirut to protest the framework, making good on the group’s threat to set the Lebanese “street” against any move toward implementation.

The third is delegitimization. Other Hezbollah figures have moved to brand the agreement unlawful and muddy its terms—parliamentary bloc leader Mohammad Raad calling it a “cover-up” for a permanent Israeli military presence, even though the text explicitly disclaims any Israeli territorial ambitions in Lebanon. The implicit, and sometimes explicit, threat behind all of Hezbollah’s actions is unmistakable: Cross us, and Lebanon returns to civil war.

Behind the group stands Iran, which has never respected Lebanon’s sovereign decisions and won’t start now. Tehran is already treating the framework as a pretext to stall nuclear negotiations, claiming it violates the Lebanon clause of the MoU. Which means it comes down, once again, to Trump—to whether he holds the line on his diplomatic revolution in Lebanon.

As we have experienced recently, history in this region is written and rewritten by the week, and there is every chance this agreement ends up where so many others have: abandoned, unenforced and simply a footnote to the next war. But should it hold, June 26 may be remembered as the date a broken country began the long climb back to being the Paris of the Middle East. For now, that possibility alone is more than Lebanon has had in decades.

All that’s left to say is: Good job, Marco Rubio.

U.S. Sailors conduct nighttime operations aboard USS George H.W. Bush while sailing the Arabian Sea. (CENTCOM/X)

Meanwhile, on Vance’s side of U.S. diplomacy: The U.S. conducted strikes across Iran overnight after the Islamic Republic attacked American positions in Bahrain. The trigger for this exchange of fire is a dispute over control of the strait.

During the blockade, as part of a covert freedom-of-navigation operation, the U.S. and Oman set up a southern shipping route hugging the Omani coast, away from Iran’s mine-infested waters. Now that the strait is officially open, they’ve built it out into a full shipping lane. Iran insists ships seek its permission and use a northern route that hugs the Iranian coast instead, and its Persian Gulf Strait Authority has declared that any vessel taking the “unauthorized” southern route forfeits its safe-passage guarantees. So when ships began using the Omani route, Iran’s IRGC started hitting them.

Hilariously, Tehran frames this not as breaking the ceasefire but as “ceasefire management,” which is like calling arson “aggressive thermal management.”

The escalation cycle continued from there. The U.S. struck Iranian missile and drone storage, radar and air-defense sites in retaliation, accusing Iran of violating the ceasefire; Iran then fired drones at U.S. positions in Bahrain and warned the Gulf states not to let their territory be used against it. Vance, to his credit, declared that “violence will be met with violence”—proving that an Iran hawk is simply an Iran dove who’s been mugged by reality.

The Iranians seem to be in the back half of a Greek tragedy, their hubris becoming their undoing. It’s unlikely they expected the U.S. to strike back at their provocations given its previous restraint, nor that they anticipated a maneuver in Lebanon that left them on the back foot. That doesn’t make their move in the strait illogical: Their entire leverage in this war has been the ability to threaten the strait, and they have repeatedly accepted U.S. strikes as the cost of asserting that control.

The U.S. has the better of the legal argument. Under the MoU, Iran’s obligation is to arrange “safe passage of commercial vessels”—not safe passage along a route of Iran’s choosing. The text commits Iran only to a future dialogue with Oman over the strait’s administration and binds any such arrangement to international law and the sovereign rights of all coastal states. Nowhere does it hand Iran a monopoly the United States must honor—despite what both parties’ recent conduct has implied.

It was probably a mistake on all our parts to believe that an agreement between the unpredictable Trump and a chronically dishonest regime would be assiduously observed by either side. The recent events in Lebanon and the strait prove the MoU wasn’t worth the digital paper it was printed on. The terms of treaties aren’t decided in hotels in Geneva, but by facts on the ground.

English Editor: Ari Tatarka

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Minister of Strategic Affairs Ron Dermer speaks at the Jewish News Syndicate conference in Jerusalem, on April 28, 2025. (Chaim Goldberg/Flash90)

It’s Friday, June 26, and the things written here run contrary to the overwhelming majority of texts about the agreement between the United States and Iran—both in their content and in their temperature. They are a cold, cool analysis, not fire and brimstone. They are based on a conversation with a highly knowledgeable source, deeply versed in Israel-US relations. You don’t have to accept them, but they’re worth reading. On days like these, it won’t hurt to take a deep breath and think.

It all begins with the US midterm elections, to be held in about four months. For Donald Trump they are especially decisive. If he loses the House to the Democrats—even if Republican control of the Senate is preserved—he’ll spend the last two years of his term under endless investigations and an impeachment attempt. There’s no doubt he’d be impeached, because in the House, unlike the Senate, only a simple majority is required. For Trump this would be his third impeachment. The fall of the regime in Iran or the removal of the uranium would help him partially, but a surge in energy prices means an almost certain loss in the elections.

The president of the United States had two decisive cards to play. The first: a ground operation to remove the uranium—but Trump believed that at the end of the road he could always get the material out via a deal. The second: destroying Iran’s energy facilities. That’s what he meant in April when he threatened to erase Iranian civilization. In Israel they used a different expression: in Tehran they’ll go back to lighting their homes with candles.

The problem, the source says, is that in this country there aren’t even ten people thinking about what a global energy crisis would mean. For Trump, this is the main thing on his mind. Would Iran be dramatically weakened by such a strike? Certainly. Would it definitely fall before the first week of November 2026? No responsible person can guarantee that. What this means is that the Iranian retaliatory strike would cause an energy crisis with oil at two hundred dollars a barrel, and from there, like a rapid chain of dominoes—inflation, loss of the House, impeachment.

The same goes for the blockade: even assuming it continues to weaken Iran, it means fuel in America reaches six dollars a gallon and inflation climbs further before the regime has even fallen.

So Trump is, in fact, fighting the Iranians with one hand tied—without the Kurdish invasion, without a ground operation, and without striking the energy infrastructure, at least until the elections.

And so the deal was born. This is not a nuclear agreement but a deal about Hormuz. And here, says the senior Israeli source, one must pay attention to something very significant regarding the clause that goes beyond Hormuz matters and into money: it’s a temporary easing of the sanctions on Iran, not their permanent removal.

What this means is that from the moment of signing, one hundred percent of the economic pressure on the United States comes off, but only a few percent of the economic pressure on Iran. There’s disagreement over what damage Iran suffered in the war—those who minimize it estimate three hundred billion dollars, those who maximize it, a trillion. Either way, the benefit to Iran is like filling an empty pool one cup at a time.

Senior figures in the Mossad expressed deep pessimism after the signing of the agreement about the chances of an uprising in Iran while the wind blows at the regime’s back. The senior source is more optimistic: “It’s worth remembering that even before this enormous damage, the masses went out into the streets with nothing to lose. What will Iran’s citizens do in another six months when they understand the harsh economic situation is here to stay? What will the regime do?”

In the past week people have been comparing Trump’s deal to Obama’s agreement. The former president even needled the current one, saying it’s worse. “It’s not just that Israel has poor messaging—the Americans do too,” the source replied. “The most important part is that the Iranians have now signed a commitment to freeze the nuclear program. That’s dramatic. In a situation of ‘no deal and no war,’ as, for example, after Operation ‘Lion’s Roar’ in June 2025, they kept advancing their nuclear program. Under Obama’s deal they could continue, with permission and authority, with many elements of the nuclear program.”

And as for Hormuz? For now everyone is finding workarounds. The weapon of closing the strait will only work for the Iranians if they use it and Trump does nothing. But what would happen, for example, if they closed the strait a month before the elections? One can only imagine the president’s reaction. Here is the fundamental clash of interests between Trump and Netanyahu: both face elections in the fall. The first needs an agreement to keep his chances of winning; the second needs to avoid an agreement for that very same purpose. Trump, unsurprisingly, chose himself.

Donald Trump signs a Memorandum of Understanding between the Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States at the Palace of Versailles. (White House)

The Lebanon issue remains. The main difference now compared to the situation twenty years ago, at the end of the Second Lebanon War, and a year and a half ago, at the end of the previous round, is that the IDF is deep inside the country. “Quiet will be answered with quiet” is not Israel’s desired conclusion for the long term, but it is for the short term, because of Hezbollah’s difficult condition and the complex situation of the US president.

“The Israelis have to understand that there is no scenario in which Israel alone dismantles Hezbollah without conquering all of Lebanon or Iran collapsing, and therefore, until further notice, the story is deterrence. You can create a situation in the coming months in which you’ve preserved the relationship with the US, let the agreement with Iran collapse on its own without giving an excuse, locked in the reality that no one fires into your territory, and the soldiers keep operating against military buildup in the new security zone. You need to wisely secure the American green light to act—not act nonstop and get cast as the neighborhood bully who has to be reined in.

“And in a broader view, the lesson of October 7 is to identify emerging threats not only in security but in policy, and to preempt them with initiatives. For initiative, you need room to maneuver. To say ‘we’ll stay forever in Lebanon or Syria’ means Israel is marked as the bad guy and the pressure will be on you—that’s the room the cabinet ministers must give the prime minister even in an election year.” A day after we spoke, the defense minister and the national security minister said exactly that.

“And another lesson: it’s never one and done, or in Hebrew, ‘one blast and we’re finished.’ After the Six-Day War the Messiah didn’t come, and after Yom Kippur the state didn’t end. We continue the struggle.”

And let’s look at the bigger picture, the source suggests before concluding. Two and a half years ago there was an existential threat to the state in the form of the nuclear program and the proxies. Now there isn’t. Moreover, Israel has shown the Iranians twice that it is prepared to strike them if it senses they’re advancing toward a nuclear weapon.

On the ballistic front—“a conventional-level threat,” as the chief of staff defined it last year—they had thousands of missiles and a monstrous production system. Now a thousand missiles remain and there’s no production system; it will take three to five years to restore it to its former state. Meanwhile, an innovation was revealed during the war: Iron Dome can intercept many of the missiles. What this means is that whereas the cost of a single interception was once measured in millions of dollars, now it’s only a hundred thousand. The production lines for the interceptors will be ramped up to a furious pace in these years. So there’s still time, and time works in favor of whoever uses it. “Is this a historic agreement? No. But it’s certainly not a catastrophe.”

A more troubling element, from Israel’s perspective, hid in the harsh statements of the president—and even more so of his vice president—against the state, its prime minister, and his cabinet ministers. “It’s not Trump’s strategy to distance himself from Israel. The relationship with Trump is 24/7 work. For years there were big crises that never became known because they were handled behind the scenes. The new thing this time is more the product of his decision to answer every unidentified call when there’s a journalist on the other end. Vance himself had to defend the agreement against the two main parties that opposed it, which are Israel and its supporters in the Republican Party. He chose rhetoric that doesn’t help him politically.

“Here’s one piece of advice for Israel: what would happen if, for once, we stayed silent? True, this week Trump also attacked Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, and she replied sharply. But Italy doesn’t have a two-front war on its head, and it can also count on the support of America’s Democrats. For us it’s nothing but a loss. Stay quiet, breathe, give it time. That’s what needs to be done.”

This is an excerpt from my weekly column in Israel Hayom

English Editor: Ari Tatarka

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This is a developing story. On to today’s articles.

Head of the Handala hacktivist collective Seyed Yahya Hosseini Panjak. (Abu Ali Express/Edited with Gemini)

For more than two years, a barefoot cartoon boy was the mascot of “Handala,” a self-described pro-Palestinian hacktivist collective that leaked the private photos of Israeli generals, wiped the servers of a Fortune 500 company, and broke into the personal inbox of the FBI director. The group insisted it was a grassroots resistance movement. It was not—and the IRGC has now confirmed that the man who actually ran it faced kinetic consequences for his digital warfare.

Seyed Yahya Hosseini Panjaki, who operated under the alias Yahya Hamidi, was killed in early March 2026 during the opening phase of Israel’s strikes on Iran. The Israeli military confirmed he died in a strike on the headquarters of Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS), part of a wave of precision operations against senior intelligence figures.

What was the leader of a grassroots hacktivist collective doing inside Iran’s intelligence nerve center? The answer is that he had never really been one. As Western intelligence had long suspected, “Handala” was a front for the MOIS. Cybersecurity firm Check Point named the underlying unit Void Manticore; others label it Banished Kitten, Storm-0842, Dune, Red Sandstorm, or TAG-145. The names differ, but they converge on the same entity: a state cyber-warfare unit embedded within Iran’s intelligence ministry.

Yesterday, for the first time, an IRGC-linked channel publicly tied Panjaki to the leadership of the hacking operation—a rare instance of Tehran acknowledging what Western intelligence had assessed for years. His death marks one of the most significant blows in years to Iran’s cyber-espionage apparatus and its overseas covert-operations network.

Handala surfaced in December 2023, just weeks after October 7, taking its name and imagery from the barefoot child drawn by Palestinian cartoonist Naji al-Ali in 1969, a symbol of the Palestinian national movement. Early posts cast the group as “a small fighter” aligned with Hamas before it pivoted to broader anti-Israel and anti-American messaging.

Its notoriety came from a relentless cadence of breaches and leaks designed to humiliate Iran’s enemies. In April 2026, it published what it said were more than 19,000 confidential images and videos pulled over years from the phone of former IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi—including imagery from undisclosed meetings abroad. Earlier leaks targeted former PM Naftali Bennett, former Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked, Netanyahu’s chief of staff Tzachi Braverman, and figures such as Benny Gantz and Natan Sharansky.

In March 2026, it claimed to have breached the personal Gmail of FBI Director Kash Patel. Washington, in response, offered up to $10 million for information on the group’s members. The most consequential operation, however, was a destructive wiper attack on Stryker Corporation, the Michigan-based Fortune 500 medical-device maker, which reportedly wiped devices across the company’s global footprint—described as the most significant wartime cyberattack ever carried out against the United States.

Panjaki’s reach went well beyond cyber, into the wider machinery of Iran’s “grey-zone” warfare; that murky space that is neither open war nor peace, where a state attacks its enemies but stays just below the line that would trigger a military or legal response.

In Iran’s case—and Panjaki’s specifically—that meant operations to assassinate Iranian dissidents living abroad, along with kidnappings and sabotage against regime opponents and Israeli targets around the world. His fingerprints are on a recent wave of Iranian plots that hire local criminal gangs to attack Jewish targets globally—schemes that have been broken up in Spain, the United Kingdom, Australia, and even Sweden. That outsourcing is a microcosm of the whole grey-zone game: by paying a hired crew to do the killing instead of using its own officers, Tehran can deny involvement, make the attack hard to trace back, and slow down any response.

Western countries often struggle to fight this ambiguous kind of warfare. Their systems are built to treat a problem as either a crime for the police or an act of war for the military, so an attack that is deliberately neither falls through the cracks while agencies argue over whose job it is to respond. Western states are also instinctively reluctant to play the same game, often seeing this kind of covert subterfuge as unethical or too provocative—which leaves Tehran free to inflict real harm while rarely paying a price for it.

Operations like Handala’s are not just data theft—they are influence operations, built to humiliate a target’s leadership, expose its secrets, and stir up internal strife. Leaked emails and images of Israeli officials, a wiped hospital network, or a fake rocket siren played into a kindergarten do real damage to public trust and national morale, yet each arrives wrapped in enough deniability that the victim state can rarely hit back as if it were an act of war. In Israel, Iranian influence operations have focused on the war itself—sowing distrust and demoralization, inciting violence against Arab citizens, and spreading general chaos. Internationally, they have pushed libels and anti-Israel content, contributing to Israel’s destruction in the public square.

Panjaki’s comeuppance seriously disrupted Iran’s hack-and-leak leadership and its overseas-operations network, but it did not end Handala, nor Iran’s broader grey-zone campaign. Israel and the West face a serious, lasting challenge from operatives like Panjaki—and the clearest lesson of his death is the one Tehran understands best. Grey-zone operations are acts of war, and as it has become increasingly clear, the only way to stop Iran’s malicious activity is to ensure it faces real, explosive consequences.

Ultra-Orthodox Jewish men block Highway 1 toward Tel Aviv during a protest against the imprisonment of yeshiva students who failed to comply with military recruitment orders, near Jerusalem, June 24, 2026. (Chaim Goldberg/Flash90)

What’s been happening over the past two weeks around Netanyahu and the Likud has a name in meteorology: a perfect storm. Fortunately for them, it’s occurring 120 days before the elections—a point by which no election campaign this century had ever started.

Trump’s agreement with Iran undercuts Netanyahu’s political reason for being. The blood price in Lebanon, despite the massive blows Hezbollah is absorbing, damages the arena where a total victory was achieved last year. The ultra-Orthodox road blockades and the weekly legislation in the Knesset repeatedly expose, to the undecided, the Achilles’ heel of the entire bloc. If this is the situation on election day, Netanyahu is in trouble.

One of the reasons the right usually does better at the ballot box than in the polls is the ultra-Orthodox vote. Take a sky-high turnout rate, multiply it by the highest birth rate in the Western world, and you’ve got another two seats. In the last elections the ultra-Orthodox parties won 17.5 seats, which became 18 due to Israel’s vote-counting system. In most polls today they get only 16 seats, so ostensibly there are another four easy seats here.

Unless the surprise works in reverse this time. Ultra-Orthodox politicians, journalists, and influencers point to the possibility that turnout will crash. The ultra-Orthodox public is bitterly disappointed with its elected officials, most of whom have been around since the last millennium. It blames them for the sanctions and the arrests and believes they failed badly in the outgoing term.

The legislative blitz described in the general press as ultra-Orthodox greed and hubris is more of a panicked dash by Shas and United Torah Judaism to prove to their voters that they’re doing something after all. That’s also why the flagship Agudat Yisrael organizations organized the massive disruptions on Israel’s roads, in cooperation with the fringe extremist Jerusalem Faction.

The ultra-Orthodox were far from the country’s most popular group even before they decided to add a few hours to everyone’s commute. Recent polling confirms that the protests have only deepened public hostility toward them. But to read that as a failure is to misunderstand the point of the disruption. It isn’t about winning sympathy; it’s about fervor—about showing a community that its leaders are not impotent, and are worth re-electing. Will it work? That remains to be seen.

Miriam Shani and Ofek Dotan at thier wedding on Tuesday.

Out of the bereavement of October 7, a powerful moment of comfort and renewal emerged earlier this week. Miriam Shani, the widow of the late Capt. Ori Shani, a hero of the October 7 battles, married Ofek Dotan, who had once been one of Ori’s commanders.

Under the wedding canopy, Ori’s father, Yehoshua—a prominent voice in the hostage debate—welcomed the marriage.

“After a period of pain and longing beyond words, we have merited to see a new light enter our lives,” he said.

“Ori is with us at every stage and accompanies us in every step, including today,” Ofek said. “Miriam and I are going to build a home together—a second floor on strong foundations planted deep in the ground. Thank you for the first floor. Thank you for everything.”

Ori, a platoon commander in the Golani Brigade, fell on October 7 while battling the Hamas invasion of the Kissufim outpost.

That morning, Ori and five of his soldiers were on a routine patrol of the border. When the invasion began, his unit tried to fight off the attackers but was badly outgunned. Ori’s brother, Yishai, recalled that Ori texted him that morning: “Pray for us, we have no ammo, no water.”

After more than eight hours of fighting near the border—during which they killed many Hamas terrorists—Ori and his team returned to the Kissufim outpost to resupply. As they did, mortar fire struck their position, killing Ori instantly.

After just a year and a half of marriage, his wife, Miriam, and their son, Roi, were left without a husband and father.

“What kind of world is this, where the wheel of life does not stop?” Ofek said. “A world where light and darkness are mixed together, where a rabbi becomes a student and a commander becomes a partner on the path. Circles close and open again without end.”

It’s a complicated world we are living in, but all of Israel wishes Miriam and Ofek an easy journey moving forward.

“I’ll say it impolitely: shut the f* up.”**

Pardon the profanity, but that’s my advice to Israel’s leaders going forward. If it wants to keep its operational freedom in Lebanon—and maybe return to striking Iran—that’s simply what it has to do.

Also: could Trump’s endorsement actually tank Netanyahu’s election chances? And could it hand Gadi Eisenkot the premiership? I get into all of this and more with Dan Senor on the latest episode of Call Me Back.

To listen to the episode click here.

English Editor: Ari Tatarka

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Thanks for reading It’s Noon in Israel! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Diplomats take part in direct Israel-Lebanon talks hosted at the US State Department in Washington on June 23, 2026. (Israeli Embassy)

It’s Wednesday, June 24, and there is a famous phrase: “If you want peace, prepare for war.” For Israel, the experience has been closer to “If you want peace, be at war.” While fighting still raged in Gaza, while Israel was striking Syria, and while another war with Iran loomed, peace with two of those countries looked genuinely within reach. Lebanon might finally be rid of Hezbollah; a newly independent Syria might normalize with Israel. Now that the fronts have gone relatively quiet, both of those options are off the table.

At the outset of yesterday’s talks—the fifth round between Lebanon and Israel—Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Leiter remarked that “we all got on the same train.”

“We sat in the same car and traveled to the same destination, with the United States serving as the locomotive. The train was heading in a very clear direction: full peace between the countries, Iran and its malign influence out of Lebanon, the disarmament of Hezbollah, and peace and security for Lebanon and Israel. Today, this train is in danger of derailing. I hope we can get it back on track,” Leiter said.

The truth is, it’s already a wreck. What began in April as a desperate Lebanese effort to stop Israel’s advance on Hezbollah has completely inverted. The supplicant now makes demands: President Joseph Aoun set the tone before talks even started—”we accept nothing less than an end to the Israeli occupation”—and Lebanon is reportedly now pressing for a complete Israeli withdrawal, with Hezbollah’s disarmament looking less and less like a precondition it is willing to accept.

The roads to peace have largely disintegrated because, instead of peace going forth from Jerusalem, it is being dictated by Washington. In late June 2025, the U.S. issued sweeping sanctions relief for the ex-al-Qaeda-led government in Syria, which, according to my sources, would have been a successful bargaining chip for normalization. Meanwhile, the U.S.’s recent forced peace with Iran has weakened the confidence of Hezbollah’s opposition, pushing the Lebanese to take the easy way out: demanding withdrawal with no plan to disarm the terror group. It is worth restating that the chances the LAF will disarm Hezbollah under current circumstances are somewhere between zero and never. This is the same army that was stopped at the door of a Hezbollah safe house by a group of women while the weapons were carried out the back. When Iran was actively being beaten by Israel and the U.S., and Hezbollah dragged Lebanon back into war on Iran’s behalf, the government ordered the army to act against the terror group. The chief of staff refused, afraid of mutiny in his ranks and renewed civil war; and out of fear that a mutinous general might turn generalissimo, the government backed down. That chief of staff is still in his job. The LAF are effectively scarecrows—meant to scare off Hezbollah, but more often used by the birds as a perch instead.

Egypt and Saudi Arabia are currently pushing a plan to integrate Hezbollah into the armed forces—which, apart from being unlikely, seems to require a complete Israeli withdrawal as a precondition. It’s unclear whether the plan is even being discussed in higher circles, but the question remains: Why are Egypt and Saudi Arabia effectively helping Iran?

Because, contrary to what some might assume, there are not two axes in the region but three. There is the anti-Iran axis, with Israel at its center; there is the Axis of Resistance, with Iran at its head; and then there is the go-along-to-get-along axis, which includes Egypt and Saudi Arabia. There is also the U.S. wildcard, which—as recent events attest—can jump between axes. To chart their course through this turbulent period, the Egyptians and Saudis can’t afford to let either axis gain absolute dominance, short of an outright victory that neither Israel nor Iran seems capable of winning. Absent a decisive shift, they want to strengthen their own bloc at the expense of the other two. In their eyes, a slightly chaotic Lebanon is better than an Israeli-dominated one.

Is Israel going to withdraw? Certainly not. To put it bluntly: Israel doesn’t trust the Lebanese government. It has never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

An unnamed senior official was quoted by Channel 13 as saying the IDF “captured territory in recent days for the purpose of negotiations, to then withdraw from them.” Israel is standing on the precipice of a slippery slope: first a partial withdrawal, then back to the yellow line, then the outposts, and finally Israel’s own border. At that point, Israel’s border no longer means the line where sovereign territories meet, but the range of Hezbollah’s missiles and drones. So, Israel is going to throw up barricades and fight for every inch of Lebanese territory.

Personally, I’ve got a suggestion for President Aoun: if you want to regain the south, start with the north and work your way down. Once you’ve reclaimed sovereignty in the Bekaa Valley and Dahiyeh, I’m sure Israel will be happy to hand you the land south of the Litani.

Let us suppose, for a moment, that the U.S. had demanded normalization from Syria as a precondition for sanctions relief, or that it had maintained overt pressure on Iran rather than opening negotiations. There is a real possibility that an Israeli embassy would now be under construction in Damascus—while, with no other option remaining and plenty of regional backing, Hezbollah was being driven out of Beirut. As the vice president has been fond of saying recently, the U.S.’s and Israel’s interests are not always aligned—but I believe that would be a region better for all involved.

Combo pictures, clockwise from top left: Ahmed Abu Eisha in civilian attire and in Palestinian Islamic Jihad uniform; Mohamed Nased Abu Huwaidi with press flak jacket and in Islamic Jihad uniform; Ahmed Abu al-Atta in football shirt and Palestinian Islamic Jihad uniform; Hussam al-Adlouni in civilian attire and in Hamas military wing uniform. (Pictures from Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad social media, Facebook and social media; used in accordance with Section 27a of the Copyright Law)

“At least 260 journalists have been killed since Israel’s war on Gaza began in October 2023,” claims the Committee to Protect Journalists, the International Federation of Journalists called it the “deadliest period in the history of journalism.” Yet, as Israel has long suspected, a number of these journalists held a second position.

According to a report in The Times of Israel, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad have in recent weeks published “martyr” lists and obituaries that claim as their own fighters several men who, until now, sat on the press-freedom ledgers as fallen journalists. It isn’t the first time the CPJ has found its list in need of editing. After being cited as a source for Nick Kristof’s dog rape libel last month, the organization quietly removed six names from its Gaza “journalist casualties” database. According to The Washington Free Beacon, those removed included a member of Hamas’ Jabalia Battalion, an Islamic Jihad operative, a commander in the Nasser Salah al-Din Brigades, and three additional militants.

In recent weeks, it has been required to remove eight other Palestinians from a list of media workers it alleges were killed by Israel after determining they had “participated in combat.” The list, which once included 276 names killed in the conflict, including Israelis and journalists from Yemen, Lebanon and Iran, now sits at 259, with others removed for various reasons unrelated to combat roles.

None of this is new. A study in late 2025 reviewed 266 media workers reported killed and found roughly 60 percent were either members of, or worked for outlets tied to, Hamas or Islamic Jihad. The Israeli military says captured documents put several Al Jazeera staff on militant payrolls.

Take Mohammed Nasser Abu Huwaidi, killed in December 2023 and mourned by UNESCO as another journalist felled in pursuit of his noble craft. This past March, Islamic Jihad added him to its roster of fighters. Or Ahmed Abu Eisha, billed as a reporter and killed in Nuseirat—for a channel that happens to be an Islamic Jihad mouthpiece.

Across the West, the credibility of the press is being eroded by what many call activist journalism. It appears that when it comes to activism for their cause, Gaza’s journalists are ahead of the curve.

Passengers at Ben Gurion Airport near Tel Aviv during the Iranian missile fire toward Israel, June 8, 2026. (Avshalom Sassoni/Flash90)

“The right doesn’t fly abroad that much—most of our voters don’t have the means for that”—these were the words spoken last month by Minister Dudi Amsalem of the Likud, in the context of the question of when to hold the elections. Only once in the country’s history were elections held in the July-August season, and that was during the massive economic crisis of 1984, when no one had any money, and if you flew abroad you had to pay the “Peace for Galilee” levy to help finance the war in Lebanon.

Is Amsalem right? It depends how you look at it. Most right-wing voters indeed do not intend to fly abroad this year. And yet, it’s a small majority. Forty-six percent do intend to take off from Ben Gurion Airport or from Haifa.

And yes, among opposition voters the rate reaches 60 percent. By and large, Israel’s economic situation has improved dramatically: Everyone is flying—Arabs and Jews alike. But right-wing voters vacation more within the country (53 percent) than center-left voters do (29 percent), and it seems this is more a matter of economic considerations than of patriotism levels.

Netanyahu’s decision to postpone the elections to the end of October did not stem from the fear that his voters would be abroad at the time of voting, but rather from an attempt to buy time—yet the implication is that the election campaign will be conducted when most Israelis have already returned from abroad and are paying attention. Unless some of them are planning one more little hop during the holidays, two weeks before the polls open.

This is an excerpt from my weekly column in Israel Hayom.

English Editor: Ari Tatarka

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Qatari Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani posts a photo alongside US Vice President JD Vance and Jared Kushner in Lucerne, captioned “work continues” amid the Iran-US negotiations in Switzerland. (@MBA_AlThani_/X)

It’s Tuesday, June 23, and I’m no professional, but I think I can spot the signs of a toxic relationship. Threats of violence. Desperately defending the partner’s behavior. Cutting you off from your friends. Draining your resources. Gaslighting. By most of these measures, Vice President JD Vance is in a toxic relationship with the Islamic Republic.

Coming out of the talks in Switzerland yesterday, Vance hailed a “good foundation” for ending the regional war. He claimed Iran had agreed to let the International Atomic Energy Agency back into the country—only for Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei to state flatly that Tehran had not negotiated on its nuclear program and had accepted no new commitments.

Then there's the intimidation. Even as it talked peace, Iran kept a hand on the region’s throat, threatening to shut the Strait of Hormuz in response to Israel’s actions. Trump answered threat with threat, warning Tehran it “won’t even make it back” to its own country if it closed the strait. And when Iran turned the same pressure on the talks themselves—threatening to storm out of the summit over insults from Trump—Vance ran interference, waving it off as mere “social media threats” and insisting all was fine because, after all, they’d kept talking late into the night.

Next comes the lopsided exchange. Yesterday, the US Treasury issued a general license letting Iran freely sell crude oil and petrochemicals through the 60-day negotiation period, while talks continued on releasing frozen assets—a potential economic windfall worth billions. And what did Washington get in return on the nuclear file? According to the Iranians, nothing. Vance even tried to pass off appeasement as boundary-setting, reportedly insisting the freed-up money could only go toward American wheat and soybeans. Iran didn’t bother to counter. Its officials simply made clear they’ll spend their money however they please.

Then there’s the isolation. Iran has maneuvered the US into a Lebanon “deconfliction” mechanism built around Washington, Qatar, Pakistan and Tehran—but not Israel, the country actually being shot at. On its face, that’s a loss for Israel. But Tehran may have overplayed its hand. Unlike Hezbollah, and contrary to Iran’s assumptions, Israel is not a U.S. puppet—and a seat at this table would have been more trap than prize. Inside the mechanism, Israel would face constant, hard-to-refuse pressure to stand down; outside it, those calls are far easier to ignore. An invitation would have forced Israel into an awkward bind: either sign on to a framework stacked against it, or openly reject Trump’s solution. By shutting Israel out, Iran inadvertently spared it that choice.

And throughout, Iran works to pin the blame on Israel, casting the closest U.S. ally as the saboteur out to wreck the deal. Vance seems to be falling for it, explaining away ceasefire violations as the work of rogue commanders: Hezbollah supposedly didn’t mean it.

On the ground, the story is far from Vance’s excuses. Iran is reportedly funneling IRGC officers into southern Lebanese towns to rebuild Hezbollah’s command structure, all while Israel is left blindfolded—forced to pass its messages secondhand through the United States.

As Netanyahu surely understands, when a friend is trapped in a toxic relationship, lecturing them about how awful their partner is rarely works; it only breeds resentment. The best you can do is hope they see it for themselves. And given how brazenly Iran is behaving, I’m growing optimistic that they will.

So all that’s left to say is: JD Vance, I hope you get help.

View of the Southern Israeli city of Eilat. September 9, 2025. (Yaniv Nadav/Flash90)

“The next October 7 will be in Eilat.” That, according to a Haaretz report, is what the head of Israel’s internal security service, David Zini, has been telling colleagues behind closed doors. The small city on the country’s isolated southern tip is vulnerable, the Shin Bet chief argues—not to Hamas or Hezbollah, but to Israel’s newest enemy, the Houthis.

Plenty of security officials are skeptical. One source told Haaretz that no one in the establishment even knows what intelligence Zini is relying on. And the geography invites doubt: Eilat sits wedged against the borders of Egypt and Jordan, some 1,200 miles from the Yemeni group’s main base of operations.

Still, the concerns deserve a hearing. The Jordanian frontier is Israel’s most porous, threaded with thousands of smuggling cases and repeated instances of human trafficking across vast, thinly watched desert. Jordan’s internal security is not world-class, and a few thousand fighters might conceivably slip into the kingdom’s south without Amman ever knowing. Just last month, Israeli forces foiled a jet-ski infiltration attempt from Jordan near Eilat—a reminder that the threat isn’t purely theoretical. Zini is now directing the agency’s intelligence units to focus on exactly this kind of scenario.

The groundwork predates him. Back in January, Maariv reported that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had convened a discussion on the military’s readiness for a multi-front war spanning Iran, Yemen, Lebanon and Gaza. Military Intelligence, the Mossad and other branches assembled target banks for each arena, though no priority was set among them.

Even then, Israel had flagged a “learning curve” underway among the Houthis. Despite their own internal strife and friction with Saudi Arabia, the group kept probing for ways to strike at Israel—from ballistic missiles to pushing ground forces toward its borders. Around the same time, the IDF ran a large-scale drill in the 80th Regional Brigade’s southern sector, gaming out enemy raids: Houthi fighters trying to seize outposts, infiltrate a tourist city, take hostages and carry out killings.

The Houthis, for their part, have been signaling intent. Borrowing a creative page from Hezbollah, they have built mock Israeli villages and released propaganda videos staging “conquest” operations against them.

Even if Zini’s concerns are ultimately unfounded, it’s worth appreciating this event as another manifestation of Israel’s October 8 mindset. As the mayor of Eilat said, “Since October 7, painful and important lessons have been learned so that the worst disaster in Israel’s history will not be repeated anywhere in the country.”

To put it quite simply, no enemy will be underestimated again.

Bill Ackman answering questions at ValueX BRK. (Screenshot used in accordance with Section 27a of the Copyright Law.)

“You hold the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange, and the pricing is rather high. How do you see it now?” billionaire investor Bill Ackman was asked recently. The answer is worth hearing.

“I’m very bullish on Israel economically. Think of it as Silicon Valley as a country—an incredible density of talent, IP, and raw IQ packed into a tiny place. You now have a generation of 24- to 28-year-olds who’ve come through a brutal war and developed real grit, plus a military that’s deeply sophisticated technologically. Every top venture firm has opened an office there.”

And there’s more.

“Israeli entrepreneurs used to sell early—take Google’s $100 or $200 million and walk. Now, after exits like Waze, they realize they can build big companies at home. I think you’ll see a trillion-dollar company come out of Israel before long—probably AI or cybersecurity—and that value gets amortized over a relatively small economy, which makes it one of the best in the world.”

Ackman has reason to be confident. He and his wife, Neri Oxman, bought roughly 5 percent of the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange in January 2024 at NIS 20.60 a share—a $25 million bet that was up about 300 percent by September 2025 and has since climbed past 500 percent, briefly worth more than eight times their entry price at the stock’s May 2026 peak. He isn’t done, either: in an interview with Globes last year, he claimed he wants to invest another $1 billion in Israeli companies.

His case for the purchase is simple:

“Owning a piece of the exchange is like owning a royalty on the success of capitalism in the country. That’s why I’m bullish—and I think it’s cheap.”

Cheap is a bold word for a stock that has risen more than sixfold. But that’s the whole wager: that a country the size of New Jersey is still in the early innings of building trillion-dollar companies, and now is still the time to get in on the ground floor.

English Editor: Ari Tatarka

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Qatari Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al-Thani leading Qatar's delegation in Geneva yesterday. (@MofaQatar/X)

It’s Monday, June 22, and Vice President JD Vance is hailing the Geneva talks as “historic,” pointing to the unprecedented level of face-to-face engagement between U.S. and Iranian leaders. Historic indeed—rarely have the two sides been close enough for Iran to spit directly in Washington’s face.

After eighteen hours of “intensive” talks, the second major round of U.S.–Iran negotiations in Geneva this year concluded with Tehran projecting absolute confidence and Washington walking away with little of substance to show for it.

Reports swirled yesterday that negotiations had already been derailed, after Trump warned the Iranians to restrain Hezbollah or be struck again, “harder.” In response, the Iranian delegation walked out, threatening to boycott the talks unless Trump issued an apology and Israel fully withdrew from southern Lebanon. Neither outcome materialized. Instead, mediators circumvented the roadblock by establishing a “High-Level Committee” for overseeing further technical discussions and a joint “de-confliction cell,” involving Lebanon, to monitor and halt military operations.

What does this mean for Israel? Iran’s maximalist posturing is driven by necessity: the regime must signal strength to an increasingly fractured hardline base at home while reassuring Hezbollah that it is not abandoning its most powerful ally and core deterrence asset. But the posturing is also engineered to pay off. Clause 13 of the MoU holds that talks on a final nuclear deal begin only once the U.S. implements clauses 1, 4, 5, 10, and 11—a ceasefire on all fronts including Lebanon, the lifting of the naval blockade, the reopening of Hormuz, oil-sanctions waivers, and the release of frozen assets. By design, then, the longer Tehran can keep Lebanon lodged as a roadblock, the more frozen assets it reclaims and the more oil it exports—all before conceding a thing on its program. Fittingly, Iran’s negotiating team focused solely on implementing these clauses; Iranian media noted that not one member of its “nuclear committee” even made the trip.

So while the optics are ambiguous, we shouldn’t assume the U.S. has abandoned the Israeli position in southern Lebanon. Given what Iran had to gain by making the maximalist demand, it was inevitable. Ultimately, Tehran may settle for a half-victory in Lebanon, halting Hezbollah’s active degradation rather than forcing a full withdrawal, in exchange for a fuller victory in the economic or nuclear arena.

Meanwhile, Trump’s idea of handing the fight against Hezbollah to Syria seems never to have reached the table. In a Fox News interview yesterday, he said he was “disappointed Israel can’t put Hezbollah away.” “They can’t do anything without knocking buildings down,” he added. Praising the Syrians as more “precise,” he went further: “I’m close to giving it over to Syria.”

Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa, May 2026. (@AH_AlSharaa/X)

Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa responded to the offer with a polite but firm no thank you, insisting Trump’s remarks had been “misunderstood.” Trump wasn’t proposing a Syrian invasion, al-Sharaa said, but pointing to Syria’s role in seeking “a safe and peaceful solution.” Credit to the former jihadist for the restraint—an American offer to march into Lebanon would have had either of his Assad predecessors salivating.

Given the flat rejection, we’re unlikely to see Syrian troops rolling into southern Lebanon, and it was an absurd prospect to begin with. But the image of ex–al-Qaeda fighters squaring off against Hezbollah is too entertaining to pass over. There is a historical irony in the prospect: Syria does hold the best record of disarming Lebanon’s militias. As the power broker behind the 1989 Taif Agreement that ended the civil war, Damascus oversaw the disbanding of nearly every armed faction in the country—every one except Hezbollah, which it intentionally spared, claiming it was not a militia but a “resistance force” justifiably fighting Israel. For a moment it seemed as though they would have to finish what they started over thirty years ago. The notion that the Syrian regime would be more “precise,” though, is the real joke: it’s true they won’t be flattening buildings—Israel destroyed their ability to do that with their air force in 2024—but the Alawites and Druze can attest to the regime’s idea of precision when it comes to minorities.

On the files beyond Lebanon, Iran again came away ahead—largely because so little was pinned down. U.S. negotiators pressed for firm guarantees on freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz. The current 60-day interim agreement lets commercial shipping pass through the chokepoint unimpeded, but current drafts leave a loophole: they do not explicitly bar Iran from imposing transit tolls in the future—a gap the U.S. is likely working to close.

In exchange for tentative commitments, Iran pursued its main goal: immediate, front-loaded financial relief ahead of any binding nuclear concessions. According to Iranian state media, the delegations drafted provisions for “temporary sanctions waivers for oil and petroleum derivatives”—a key concession that would let Tehran sell crude legally on the open market and unlock billions in frozen assets, such as those held in Qatari banks, to shore up its economy. The regime affiliated Fars News reported that Iran still expects the United States to imminently release $12 billion in Iranian assets, which it claimed includes a planned $500 million “test purchase” from Iranian assets in Qatar.

The most positive outcome from the U.S. perspective was agreement on a “roadmap” to a final deal within sixty days. Color me skeptical. A roadmap is a schedule, not a meeting of minds, and the two sides have spent this entire round proving they read the last text they agreed to completely differently. Layering a sixty-day clock over that gap doesn’t close it. It just guarantees we’ll be here again in sixty days, watching the same argument over interpretation play out against a deadline one side has no interest in meeting.

Leaving the negotiations, Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi hailed “major progress” and mediators called the talks “encouraging.” Washington offered its usual post-Iran refrain: vague, upbeat phrasing stretched thinly over an obvious lack of enthusiasm.

In Geneva, Vance opted to answer a question in the Jewish manner—with another question. “The question before us now is how much more can we accomplish together? Can we turn over a new leaf?” he told reporters. If you ask me, the answer is no: Iran is high on victory and in no mood to make any but the lightest of concessions. As the Iranians grow increasingly bold, the question is indeed whether the two sides can turn over a new leaf—not from war to peace, but from a dynamic in which Iran wins every negotiation to one in which the U.S. stops handing it the victory.

Hamas militants and ordinary Gazans on the Israeli side of the security fence on October 7. (Abed Rahim Khatib/Flash90)

“The only electrical appliance that Yahya Sinwar hangs around,” Gadi Eisenkot said during the war, “is a 25-watt light bulb, and even that is not certain.” The Hamas leader loathed cellular phones, conveyed his messages on notes or by faxes (!), a recipe for longevity and avoiding assassinations.

It was somewhat surprising, therefore, to discover that the arch-terrorist was shot to death by IDF soldiers while wearing a running watch, the kind that transmits, or can transmit, data on routes, speed in km/h, and other goldmines of intelligence. His belongings, like a change of underwear, a vest, and a uniform, appear in a rare, difficult, and essential exhibition to visit, called “Return to October” at the Intelligence Heritage Center, somewhere in central Israel. Meters away, they are now renovating the memorial center for the fallen of the intelligence community, including the fallen without a name, or picture, or circumstances of falling.

The dark rooms and tunnels where the exhibition is housed manage to recall the depth of the murderousness that burst like a tidal wave of evil into Israel’s borders. There are abduction videos there that have never been seen before. In the corner of one room stands a hoe, as if someone forgot it. And then the horrific clip is screened in which, with that same hoe, a Hamas murderer decapitates a Thai worker while he is still alive. There is unbearable documentation there of a lynch of IDF soldiers in one of the tanks that would become a symbol.

The time that has passed has a tendency to blur and repress the fact that what happened here was an attempted genocide that was simply halted in its tracks after a few hours thanks to the heroism of individuals and the delayed recovery of the Israel Defense Forces. The Nukhba terrorists were given abduction kits (zip ties, sedatives, equipment for live broadcasting), instructions for preparing toxic gases “for synagogues, schools, and homes” and standard-issue jihad manuals (fatwas and books explaining why there is an obligation to slaughter Jews). The center’s staff did not locate material ordering rape; this was apparently a spontaneous local initiative, for both men and women.

Gaza is today the quietest front; there are Israelis who probably tend again to underestimate the dimensions of the neighbors’ lust for murder and blood. The visit to the exhibition testifies to a satanic Nazi plan in its scope to kill Jews. The evidence regarding the Gazans themselves, who knew and enthusiastically encouraged Hamas, reminds us that they are the “and their helpers.” It is worth remembering that the only ones in the Middle East besides the Israelis who democratically elected their leadership are the Gazans, who continue to support them to this day. Like with Germany 1945, Gaza 2026 also needs to be treated in both ways: encouraging emigration and de-Nazification.

This is an excerpt from my weekly column in Israel Hayom.

English Editor: Ari Tatarka

If you enjoy the newsletter, you can show your support by becoming a paid subscriber—it really helps keep this going. I’m also offering a special monthly briefing for a small group of premium members. I’d love to have you join us—just click below to find out more.

Thanks for reading It’s Noon in Israel! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

IDF forces near Beufort Ridge in southern Leabnon. (IDF)

It’s Sunday, June 21, and two men could have flown to Geneva for this weekend’s peace talks. Only one would have been arrested on arrival—and it isn’t the one who massacred his own citizens. Despite Friday’s flare-up in Lebanon, an Iranian delegation led by Parliament Speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf and Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi has landed in Switzerland for talks with the United States. Qalibaf, his hands still wet with the blood of protesters, will be ushered in to meet Vice President JD Vance. Netanyahu, wanted by the ICC, stayed home.

According to CBS, first on the agenda is the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah. That placement is no accident: Iran’s stated purpose is to “demand the fulfillment of the [United States’] obligations,” according to Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei, arguing that Washington has failed to implement the MoU’s first clause—a ceasefire on all fronts, Lebanon included—and that nuclear negotiations cannot even begin until it does. In effect, Tehran is holding the entire process hostage to a Lebanon ceasefire it expects the U.S. to impose on Israel.

Beyond Qalibaf and Araqchi, the delegation includes Central Bank Governor Abdolnaser Hemmati and oil chief Hamid Bord, an inclusion that signals Iran intends to frontload the economic side of the deal: sanctions relief and the release of frozen assets, likely early in the 60-day window to blunt U.S. leverage on the nuclear file later. It’s worth remembering that neither Israel nor the terror group has a seat at the table—in part because, had Benjamin Netanyahu hitched a ride with Qalibaf, it’s the democratically elected leader who would have been arrested on the tarmac, while the speaker who presided over the massacre of his own citizens is ushered in to meet Vice President JD Vance.

On the ground in Lebanon, the IDF is pressing to seize the strategic Ali al-Taher Ridge and the subterranean network beneath it. The IDF assesses the complex to be the “nerve center” of Hezbollah’s Badr Division—the formation regarded as the organization’s primary force on the southern front—with dozens of operatives holed up underground as fighting plays out above and below the surface. The facility is of such vital importance that the organization reportedly planned to blow the Qaraoun Dam and flood the Litani River basin to halt an IDF advance toward it—even at the cost of a national disaster in southern Lebanon. This is a facility unlike anything Israeli soldiers have encountered elsewhere. Built over more than a decade with Iranian funding and planning and carved deep into the rocky terrain across multiple levels, it served as the command post from which Hezbollah directed its fight against IDF forces and its attacks on Israeli territory. The terrain is what makes the difference: unlike in Gaza, where tunnels could be dug back out of the sand, here the rock works against reconstruction—destroy the headquarters, and rebuilding it will be nearly impossible.

That operation has come at a steep price. Overnight Thursday into Friday, four soldiers from the 401st Brigade’s 52nd Battalion were killed when a Hezbollah anti-tank missile struck their tank and an explosive drone penetrated the vehicle and detonated inside. Among the fallen were the battalion commander, Lt. Col. Dor Gedalia Ben Simhon, along with Staff Sgts. Yoav Klein, Liav Kababia, and Nave Habshoosh.

The fighting only intensified from there. Pressing the operation forward, commando forces moved on the ridge overnight Friday into Saturday under a barrage of rockets, mortars, and explosive drones. Sgt. 1st Class Nir Ben Ari was killed in the assault, and 13 other soldiers were wounded, two of them seriously. The volume of incoming has been heavy: Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Yechiel Leiter reported Hezbollah fired 147 rockets, 20 drones, and nine anti-tank guided missiles at Israeli forces and into Israel over 24 hours. In response, the IDF unleashed waves of strikes across southern Lebanon through the night and into the morning, hitting dozens of Hezbollah sites and operatives—rocket launchers, weapons depots, and command centers—with Lebanese media reporting at least 27 killed. Netanyahu’s office put the two-day tally at more than 300 Hezbollah targets struck and more than 100 fighters killed.

Tehran seized on the strikes, declaring them a violation of its memorandum of understanding and announcing it was closing the Strait of Hormuz until Israel halts its operations in Lebanon. The move is better read as economic leverage rather than a literal blockade: Iran has worked throughout to keep oil prices high, and simply announcing a closure spooks shippers and lifts prices regardless of whether traffic actually stops. In fact, U.S. Central Command reported that 55 commercial ships had transited the strait; its spokesman flatly insisted “Iran does not control the Strait of Hormuz” and that “traffic continues to flow.” Iran, MoU grievance notwithstanding, still dispatched its senior delegation to Switzerland all the same.

By Saturday afternoon, against the backdrop of those Iranian threats and subsequent American pressure, the order came down for the IDF to stand down. A senior official in the Prime Minister’s Office and the IDF Spokesperson confirmed the military was halting its fire and remained committed to the ceasefire, though it would continue dismantling Hezbollah infrastructure inside its security zone, the Ali al-Taher Ridge included. Netanyahu, for his part, was unambiguous that Israel will remain in the security zone “as long as necessary to defend [Israel’s] northern border,” and his office warned the IDF would continue to strike “forcefully” if Hezbollah keeps firing.

As it stands, Israel has the facility besieged with dozens of Hezbollah forces still trapped inside—entrances surrounded, the rest under aerial overwatch.

In the Israeli memory of Lebanon, the imposing Beaufort Castle was termed the “monster on the mountain,” while the base on Ali al-Taher Ridge was given the relatively benign name of Pumpkin. Twenty years later, Pumpkin, it turns out, has grown a monster of its own—15 stories down.

Chairman of the “Together” party and former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett speaks during a press conference in Tel Aviv, June 15, 2026. (Avshalom Sassoni/Flash90)

Philippe Petit is a French tightrope walker who is remembered by many Jerusalemites for walking on a tightrope over the Valley of Hinnom in 1987. Roughly halfway through, while maintaining exemplary balance, a pigeon landed on the rope, threatening to tilt it and drop the acrobat into the ancient Jerusalem valley. In the end, he made it to the other side.

Thirty-nine years later, on a tightrope of his own toward the Prime Minister’s Office, is Naftali Bennett. It would be a mistake to blame his drop in the polls on the missteps of recent weeks. The pigeon — though he insists he’s a hawk — landed on his rope back in July. Its name is Gadi Eisenkot, the former IDF chief of staff who, like every decorated general before him, walked into politics carrying the centrist hopes of half the country.

For almost two years, even before he had a party, Bennett was the leading candidate in the polls for the premiership. This happened thanks to two groups: the vast majority of his supporters came from opposition voters. The smaller but electorally much more significant part is disappointed coalition voters. The potential right-wing supporters were the incentive for the left-wing supporters to come: they were the bargaining chip he brought to the change camp. The price was a deliberate blurring—like Ariel Sharon in his time, like Ehud Barak, like Gadi Eisenkot today—of positions on controversial issues. Bennett walked very high on the tightrope for a very long time, actually longer than any other candidate in the last generation. Bennett’s dive in the polls, therefore, feels as if it came too early, but actually, it comes very late.

Because the moment Eisenkot broke from Benny Gantz and struck out on his own, everything began to slip. The handful of mandates he took came straight off the left flank of what was already being called “Bennett 2026.” And Bennett faced the familiar danger—the one that finished previous centrists like Gantz, Isaac Herzog and Tzipi Livni—of watching his swing voters evaporate. So he drifted left: a sharper anti-Bibi line, music pitched to those voters, the disqualification of Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, and, at the peak of it, hiring Lior Chorev—a staunch anti-Netanyahu and anti-Trump public figure—and merging with Lapid. Petit turned his torso left to rebalance the frame.

But the result was that the balance from the right was disrupted. That small and significant segment of right-wing voters abandoned him. A poll commissioned last week sought to examine where the Bennett-Lapid bloc was leaking from. It examined what would have happened if the two had split. The result: Bennett would have received 15 mandates and Lapid would not pass the electoral threshold. The leakage is mostly from the left.

And therefore, the conclusion is that there is no point in continuing to walk on the tightrope, nor in trying to chase away the pigeon. This balancing act is over. Lapid, certainly the more successful campaigner of the pair, suggested this week in discussions to stop referring to Eisenkot or attacking him, and simply to offer something else. No voter will be won over by infighting within the bloc regarding suitability for the premiership. The same goes for the delicate—and pointless—balance between right and left.

The assets of the two over Eisenkot that will be increasingly emphasized are experience (not since the days of Sharon and Netanyahu have two prime ministers run on one list), detailed plans from day one in power, and mainly the claim that in such an era there is no time for experiments. They will not present a multiheaded leadership like in “Blue and White” but a team. In the 1980s, those of Philippe Petit, they called it a “hive” in Likud propaganda. Regardless, it also suits a party whose name is “Together.”

This is an excerpt from my weekly column in Israel Hayom.

English Editor: Ari Tatarka

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Donald Trump with Benjamin Netanyahu during a special plenum session in honor of President Trump at the Knesset, October 13, 2025. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

It’s Friday, June 19, and overnight Hezbollah has continued its campaign against IDF forces in southern Lebanon. A commander’s tank was struck by a drone or missile, killing four—among them the battal…

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Donald Trump attends UFC Freedom 250. (White House)

It’s Thursday, June 18, and the official terms of the U.S. Memorandum of Understanding are out—and it’s worse than anticipated. The official signing ceremony isn’t until Friday, but the agreement was already signed digitally last night during a dinner at the Palace of Versailles. Anyone familiar with th…

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A large Israeli flag at the Western Wall Plaza, Judaism's holiest prayer site, during the annual Jerusalem Day, in Jerusalem's Old City, 14 May 2026 (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

It’s Wednesday, June 16, and the bearded man in the black suit signaled the waitress and ordered coffee with milk, perhaps adding a “please.” Time passed; no coffee arrived. When the…

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Vice President JD Vance and Donald Trump shake hands during a formal ceremony in the U.S. Capitol. (JDVance/X)

It’s Tuesday, June 16, and “what we know is this agreement is going to make Israel safer, it’s going to make the entire region safer,” Vice President JD Vance told NBC News, adding that he “feels confident” Israel will join the U.S.-Iran deal “f…

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Donald Trump signing the Secure America Act in the Oval Office. (White House)

It’s Monday, June 15, and after Donald Trump declared the agreement finalized last night, I recalled a line from Henry Kissinger: “It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal.”

The details are yet to be confirmed, but here is what the deal appe…

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IAF fighters preparing for a sortie over Iran, June 2025. (IDF)

It’s Sunday, June 14, and exactly one year and a day ago, more than 200 Israeli fighter jets tore through Iranian skies, striking over 100 military and nuclear sites and eliminating more than 20 of the regime’s most senior commanders in the first hour. What followed was twelve days of relent…

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President Donald Trump signs the Secure America Act in the Oval Office. (White House)

It’s Friday, June 12, and in comedy nothing is more basic than the bait-and-switch: the audience builds expectation, the climax arrives, and at the last moment Lucy yanks the football and Charlie Brown crashes to the ground. It’s a comedy mainstay—and lately, it seems t…

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Donald Trump makes an announcement on coal in the White House, July 2026. (White House)

It’s Thursday, June 11, and Donald Trump appears to be changing tack. For the second night in a row, the U.S. military launched what it called “self-defense strikes” against Iran—strikes Trump seemed to imply were punishment for Iran taking “too long to make a deal.” …

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People take cover in a bomb shelter from incoming missiles fired from Iran in Tel Aviv, June 8, 2026. (Yehoshua Yosef/Flash90)

It’s Tuesday, June 9, and the fifth direct confrontation since 2024 between Israel and Iran has ended. As the dust settles, two words are on everyone’s mind: who won?

First, context.

To understand who won, we must first return to t…

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A man stands next to an Iranian missile from last night’s attack. (Chaim Godlberg/Flash90)

It’s Monday, June 8, and the masquerade is over. After last night’s direct Iranian strikes on Israel, the fundamental question driving the last two months of “ceasefire” has been shoved into the open: who controls the post-Epic Fury status quo—Iran or the United S…

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A deadly terror attack unfolded across multiple locations in Israel’s Sharon region this morning, leaving one person dead and at least five others wounded. The violence included a drive-by shooting at a gas station near Kochav Yair, where Magen David Adom paramedics trea…

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IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir visits the Western Wall in Jerusalem's Old City, 2025. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

It’s Friday, June 5, and Hezbollah has officially rejected the ceasefire. Two days after Jerusalem and Beirut agreed to a conditional pause, Hezbollah chief Naim Qassem dismissed the deal as a “surrender,” vowing to maintain fire on northern Isra…

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