(Abu Ali Express)

It’s Wednesday, August 12, and Israel may never have had a better month diplomatically. Back in June, if Vice President JD Vance is to be believed, Israel had a single ally left in the world. Yet in the space of a few weeks it seems to have found several new ones, above all in South America.

Few leaders, Donald Trump included, can out-philosemite Argentina’s Javier Milei, the self-declared “most Zionist president in the world”—he has given even Isaac Herzog a run for his money. But Milei now has competition on his own continent.

Over the past month, Colombia’s new president, Abelardo de la Espriella, has moved to reverse wholesale the hostile posture of his predecessor, the leftist Gustavo Petro, who had severed ties with Israel and halted Israeli arms imports over the war in Gaza. In July and August 2026, Bogotá ordered the full restoration of diplomatic relations, pledged to move Colombia’s embassy to Jerusalem, and withdrew from South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice. Then, on Monday, Colombia became only the second country in the world, after the United States, to recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights.

Venezuela, improbably, has moved in the same direction. On Tuesday, the two countries announced they had agreed to renew consular relations, 17 years after severing all diplomatic ties in 2009 under Hugo Chávez. The thaw followed Israel’s dispatch of an aid delegation—led by the Foreign Ministry and the IDF’s Home Front Command—after the double earthquake that killed thousands in Venezuela in late June.

Vance’s advice about not alienating Israel’s most important ally still holds. His claim that it was Israel’s only one is aging rather less well. As Milei would put it: ¡Viva la libertad, carajo! (“Long live freedom, goddamnit!”)

IDF forces operating at Beaufort Castle in southern Lebanon. (IDF)

Not far from the medieval ruins of Beaufort Castle, Israel’s war in southern Lebanon has taken on a pre-modern character. Nearly two months since the ceasefire, dozens of Hezbollah operatives are besieged inside a fortified underground compound on the Ali Taher ridge. Hezbollah is desperately trying to resupply the fortress while Israel is steadily tightening the noose.

How have these fighters survived underground for so long? Because this is not the makeshift dirt warren of the Viet Cong, or even the concrete-lined tunnels of Gaza. The Ali Taher compound is a military fortress that, by the IDF chief of staff’s account, Hezbollah spent 20 years building into the ridge. More than a kilometer of command bunkers and combat tunnels runs beneath the summit, cut largely from solid rock that shrugs off everything short of a bunker-buster. Built with Iranian help as the nerve center of Hezbollah’s Badr division—the formation responsible for the sector north of the Litani—it was engineered to run a war: a command-and-control hub, fire-control arrays for rockets and missiles, sleeping quarters, showers, and everything else needed to keep men underground for months.

Israel decided it would not fight its way into the tunnels. Instead it sealed the exits, took the heights, and settled in to wait. Israel has recently struck the compound’s water tanks and cut its power lines; Hezbollah has tried flying replacements in by drone at night—before being spotted and dispatched by IDF forces. Now, Lebanese sources say, the group is going even more pre-modern, digging fresh tunnels around the ridge to reach its trapped men another way, racing hunger and thirst.

The fortress is on the verge of falling, it seems, whether it is Crusaders fighting jihadists or the IDF against much the same—in the end, hunger wins.

English Editor: Ari Tatarka

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Donald Trump and Syrain President Ahmed Al Shaara at the NATO summit, July 8 2026. (White House)

It’s Tuesday, August 11, and with Israeli help, the Trump administration has reached a deal to denuclearize an Islamist nation: Syria. According to Axios’ Barak Ravid, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) will soon remove nuclear material stored at a clandestine site in the country.

But first, context.

Before and after photo of the Syrian reactor released by the U.S. government.

It was 2007, a simpler time, when disabling a nuclear program and deterring a genocidal dictator from rebuilding it took a single resolute strike. Israel showed the evidence of a secret reactor to the Bush administration, hoping for support. At the time when the Bush administration feared the phrase “weapons of mass destruction” the way today’s administrations fear “boots on the ground,” Israel went it alone. It destroyed the reactor in Operation Out of the Box, and in the aftermath the United States, Israel, and Syria all officially pretended nothing had happened. Syria denied the reactor had ever existed—even after IAEA inspectors found evidence of undeclared nuclear material and declared the country in noncompliance with the NPT.

Bring us to the late days of 2024 when the Assad regime collapsed, Israel—suspicious of the ex-jihadist government that replaced it—set about crippling Syria’s military. A country it wouldn’t trust with fighter jets it certainly wouldn’t trust with nuclear material, so it kept the old reactor site under watch.

According to the report, that monitoring picked up movement around the site a few weeks ago—enough to suspect the new government was reneging on understandings and trying to reach the nuclear material. Israel wasn’t going to let that stand. It told the Trump administration it would strike the site again if the material wasn’t removed, or if there were any sign Damascus was trying to get to it.

Syria’s new government, for its part, is eager to clear away the sensitive files it inherited from Assad—the nuclear and chemical weapons programs chief among them—that could sabotage its bid to rehabilitate the country’s international standing. The ultimatum handed it the perfect opportunity to look responsible, especially set against other Islamist states in the region.

“Syria is seeking a security agreement with Israel,” President Ahmad al-Sharaa told Al Jazeera on July 26, adding that a successful deal could “pave the way for comprehensive peace without compromising Syria’s right to the Golan Heights.” Any such agreement would depend on a denuclearized Syria.

This is a major achievement for the prospects of peace in the region. But nuclear dust still lingers in hands far more dangerous than an ex-jihadist’s—and it should be clear to Trump by now that agreements won’t be enough to get it out of their hands.

Defense Minister Israel Katz attends a plenum session and a vote on a bill to freeze arrests of haredi draft evaders at the assembly hall of the Knesset, July 14, 2026. (Chaim Goldberg/Flash90)

Among the great campaign slogans, there are such standouts as Clinton’s “It’s the economy, stupid!,” Trump’s “Make America Great Again,” and Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz’s “Boom Boom Boom.” For the upcoming Likud primaries, Katz has already workshopped other options such as “Finally, a Right-Wing Defense Minister” and the bizarre “What a graceful smile.”

I don’t have to spell out why the defense minister advertising his success with clips of explosions and an AI song repeating “Boom Boom Boom” reflects badly on the IDF and Israel as a whole. Though I wouldn’t go as far as Avigdor Liberman in claims he needs a Boom Boom to the head, some blunt force trauma was likely involved in his recent decision-making.

As of this morning, Katz has already received a guaranteed spot in the top 10 of the list for the upcoming elections. Likud claimed that ensuring his guarantee allows him to focus on defense rather than campaigning—though it is more so because his campaigning is damaging Likud’s defense.

Katz is suffering from a confidence deficit—his own, and Bibi’s in him. His desperate plays for popularity so far—the AI campaign ads, skipping security cabinet meetings to attend the family bar mitzvahs of Likud activists, firing the Central Command commander on live television—have all fed the Israeli media cycle, but not the way he or Bibi hoped. Being a clown is fine; making Likud look like a circus is not.

Squeaky wheels get grease. Publicly exploding defense ministers get guaranteed slots. Also receiving a spot are Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar—who was promised his when he joined Likud in 2024—and Likud Central Committee chair Haim Katz. Though none of this comes out of Netanyahu’s eight-slot budget.

With the three additional spots, 11 of the first 29 places on the ruling party's slate will go to hand-picked candidates rather than to the roughly 140,000 members who vote in the August 17, 2026 primary. Another slice is set aside for up-and-comers from the party's own ranks. The result is a tidy division of labor: one-third of the list is elected, one-third is reserved for stars from the outside, and the last third is reserved for problems from the inside.

Yesterday I spoke with the UK’s Channel 4 about the future of the Gaza Strip. It got a bit heated, but it was still a great interview—check it out.

English Editor: Ari Tatarka

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Nickolay Mladenov, the high representative for the International Board of Peace overseeing the Israel-Hamas ceasefire, arrives to a press conference for the foreign media in Jerusalem, May 13, 2026. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

It’s Monday, August 10 and within hours of Benjamin Netanyahu announcing that Israel rejects the 15-point roadmap, Nickolay Mladenov—Director General of the Board of Peace, the Trump-led body meant to oversee postwar Gaza—sat down with me to explain why Israel should want the very thing Bibi had just rejected.

His entire case reduces to one word: verification. Nobody is required to do anything, he insists, “last of all Israel,” before verified steps on the ground. The IDF sits at the yellow line agreed under the comprehensive plan; the Board’s ask is only that it hold there and not fire across unless troops face a real threat. The line moves back only after individual sectors are cleared and their weapons certified, stored, and rendered unusable. If the next stage’s commitments go unmet, “the process stops.”

Why store the weapons in warehouses inside Gaza, where Hamas is “always one wall away from rearming”? Because they will be rendered unusable, he says, by the Board’s National Committee for the Administration of Gaza with backing from the international force. More a reassurance than an answer.

Who destroys the tunnels? Contractors, but at this rate it will take more than a decade, and, he adds, this is precisely why Israel needs the Board of Peace: together it will go faster.

Masked militants of the Islamic Jihad group inspect an Islamic Jihad site that was targeted in an Israeli air strike in Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip on February 25, 2020. (Fadi Fahd/Flash90)

What counts as the “personal arms” Gazans may keep—might that quietly include the Kalashnikovs that actually govern the Strip? No, he says; the framework covers everything, heavy weapons to personal ones. He acknowledges that Gaza is ruled from the barrel of a Kalashnikov—which is why, he insists, those rifles and every other weapon must pass to civilian authority.

And Turkey and Qatar—the two governments Israelis least want inside Gaza? Without Egypt, Turkey, and Qatar, he says flatly, Hamas would never have agreed to the roadmap at all; their role was critical. Told that letting them help dismantle Hamas is the fox guarding the henhouse, he answers: “If I have to speak to the devil, I will speak to the devil”—to make sure no second October 7 ever occurs. The verification mechanism, he stresses, is American-led, backed by the ISF and, on paper, by Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, and Morocco.

Pressed on whether Hamas will really disarm itself—whether the whole thing is too good to be true—he offers the tell. “I’m not building any of this on the basis of trust. And none of us are.” Clear-eyed about the risks, he says, and building on verification instead. If it doesn’t work, the process stops.

Mladenov’s offer is difficult. On the one hand, Israel isn’t being asked to withdraw from anywhere at the moment; it only has to stop firing—unless it sees Hamas rearming. On the other, a withdrawal will eventually come before Hamas is entirely disarmed.

The Americans are stunned by one thing. How can a plan this good—by their lights—draw the opposition of the entire Israeli political system, without exception? It’s one of the rare questions on which Netanyahu, Bennett, Lieberman, Eisenkot, and even Yair Golan answer in chorus. Their reason is the same: in 79 days Israel votes. Nobody wants to run as a Hamas sympathizer and a signer of pullouts—even when no pullout would come before the election. Some of them privately suspect this is the best deal Israel is going to get. But compromise is a post-election pastime.

My take: In contrast to the entire political establishment, I support this plan. It won’t dismantle Hamas—nothing will, not completely. But if it nets a third of the tunnels and half the Kalashnikovs, I’ll take it. Will 100,000 Kalashnikovs be handed in? Of course not. But 40,000 collected and another 300 kilometers of tunnel mapped is not nothing—and the next round, which everyone knows is coming, gets fought on considerably more favorable terms.

Arab League General Authority holding a conference on Islamophobia, August 2026. (@arableague_gs/X)

“I do not regard this agreement as any more than the agreement signed between our Prophet Muhammad and the Quraysh,” Yasser Arafat reassured a mosque in Johannesburg. Those present understood the reference: Muhammad honored the truce with the Jewish Quraysh tribe only until he was strong enough, then slaughtered them and conquered Mecca. Little did Arafat know he was being recorded.

It was May 1994, days before Israel withdrew from Jericho as a further gesture of peace, and Israeli radio ran the tape on an endless loop. As with any inflammatory line dressed in scripture, the speech sparked endless Talmudic debate over the meaning of the Hudaybiyyah agreement—its seventh-century context, its traditional commentaries, its modern readings. As with “Amalek” after October 7, the journalists turned theologian: as sure they could parse a politician’s intentions from scripture as the devout are of parsing God’s from the same verses.

The intentions of a more recent interlocutor appear clearer. After months of censorship, I have been permitted to reveal that declassified discussions among regional actors, weighing a possible agreement with Israel, floated a tactical accommodation: reach a deal, and make it temporary. One Arab state put it to the other plainly—sign with Israel now, and open a war when it suits you. Most troubling for Israel, the official dispensing this advice had been among those carrying the hopes of peace—a faith, it seems, misplaced. The identities of the states cannot be given, owing to censorship restrictions.

In the end, no agreement came of it, duplicitous or otherwise.

The conversation is unsettling, but it is not a mandate to write off every future agreement as a ceasefire en route to Israel’s destruction. States, as de Gaulle had it, have no friends—only interests. Agreements have netted Israel near-term gains even with the most extreme Islamists; Hamas returning all the hostages the freshest example. Like Arafat’s speech, the report is a reminder that Israel cannot run blindly into the arms of a smiling Islamist. But like Trump, they are always to be taken seriously—not always literally.

English Editor: Ari Tatarka

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Interception of an Iranian missile attack on Israel as it seen from the Jerusalem Mountains, June 14, 2025. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

It’s Sunday, August 9, and “I will fight tooth and nail, if necessary,” Netanyahu declared when President Biden imposed a weapons embargo on him. But what, exactly, will the United States fight with? Even without an embargo, its own arsenals are approaching the red line fast. The commander of United States European Command warned the Pentagon that there aren’t enough resources to defend against the coming confrontation with Iran while protecting both Israel and American forces—they will have to choose. Reuters reported that the U.S. Army has nearly exhausted its entire stock of precision missiles. In Israel, it was reported that the bunker-buster bombs of the kind dropped on Fordow last year are also nearly gone after a single night of strikes, making an attack on Pickaxe Mountain difficult.

And all this after just a few weeks of fighting a failing Middle Eastern dictatorship—torn from within and teetering on economic collapse. What happens if Russia stages a provocation somewhere else in Europe? Or if China decides to push forces toward Taiwan? The state of the U.S. military brings to mind the IDF on the eve of October 7: an imposing image that, in practice, delivered failure after failure, draw after draw. Its only clear victory since the end of the Cold War was over Saddam Hussein, a quarter of a century ago.

The whole world is now watching Trump. Will he end the war with Iran still controlling the Strait of Hormuz, the regime still standing, and its army merely licking its wounds?

Two absurdities. The first: the American—and especially Republican—trauma of a ground operation and a bloody quagmire is the very thing that has kept the Iranians alive. Almost any ground operation—to seize uranium, take Kharg Island, or capture senior officials—would likely have triggered a dramatic upheaval of the regime. The second: it is precisely the fear of a dramatic collapse in American standing that stops Trump from ending this conflict the way Washington ended Afghanistan, Iraq, and Vietnam. Walter Russell Mead, a prominent American conservative commentator, proposed years ago that the United States finish off Iran—the small, weak, estranged son of the Sino-Russian-Korean axis, and the only one that doesn’t yet have nuclear weapons. The message, he wrote shortly after October 7, would land well in every capital that loves evil—even if the message is that the United States can no longer win.

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

El Al plane takes off at the Ben Gurion International Airport, outside of Tel Aviv, August 4, 2026. (Yossi Aloni/Flash90)

It’s called Fly&Vote, an initiative of the AID Coalition—a group that grew out of the 2023 anti-judicial-reform protests. With Israel’s Knesset election set for October the coalition is helping expatriate Israelis get home for one thing: to vote. In recent days, social media has filled with screenshots of the tickets. Israeli law offers no shortcut—absentee voting is reserved for diplomats, soldiers posted overseas, and representatives of national institutions. Everyone else has to show up in person.

A little perspective, for anyone swept up in the euphoria or the hysteria over the “fly a leftist home on election day” initiative: one seat equals roughly 41,000 votes. An El Al Dreamliner seats about 330. An airlift of 125 planes equals a single seat.

The more fundamental question is whether the center-left has anywhere left to grow in turnout. The rule that holds worldwide is that as income and education rise, so does voter participation. The one exception is Israel’s Haredi community—poor, with very low rates of high-school and university completion, yet with extraordinary turnout.

So the volatile variable in Israeli elections is turnout in two camps: the Likud periphery and the Arabs. In the 2022 election, Likud turnout rose 5 percent over the previous round, and that alone drove almost all of the change. That’s why Netanyahu tends to build his campaign around getting people to the polls, and his rivals around persuasion. He has plenty of voters—just dormant ones—while theirs are switched on, but too few. Even in 2022, when they were complacent, demoralized, and low on energy, they still turned out in droves.

If the change bloc has a million shekels, it’s better off spending it on persuading the bloc-switchers, or on suppressing Haredi turnout. But it has far, far more than that—as the mysterious anti-government ads in the weekend papers of the religious-Zionist press suggest, along with the Haredi consultants quietly working to soften the ground. So there’s still budget left over to encourage people to vote from home.

Isn’t the opposition’s push to bring out voters just an attempt to wring one more drop from an empty oil bottle? Well—yes. But that drop matters. In Tel Aviv, turnout fell 3.4 percent in the last election compared with 2019. In Givatayim it dropped 2.6 percent, in Herzliya 2.3 percent. In other words, turnout is sliding in the central cities—which are also center-left cities. That’s worth roughly one net seat. In ordinary times, not worth the effort. In an election already crowned “fateful in the history of the state,” it’s a seat that could decide everything.

English Editor: Ari Tatarka

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Incoming Mossad Director Maj. Gen. Roman Gofman arrives to a Defense and Foreign Affairs Committee meeting at the Knesset, February 5, 2026. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

It’s Friday, August 7, and Yitzchak Rabin once remarked that the future Mossad Chief Meir Dagan had “the unique capacity to invent antiterrorist operations that look like movie thrillers.” But what happens when the movie doesn’t have a happy ending?

Presumably, consequences for the writers.

Current Mossad Director Roman Gofman has removed the two officials most closely associated with the agency’s plan to topple the Iranian regime. One had run the Mossad’s intelligence directorate since December; the other headed the Iran division. This follows the ouster of the deputy director last month, who was similarly linked to the operation.

Their plan centered on Iran’s minority populations, built on the theory that armed pressure at the periphery would revive the mass protest movement at the center and finish the job. Removing the architects of this strategy amounts to acknowledging the obvious: the plan failed.

It appeared to start successfully. Israel conducted strikes on Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps positions along Iran’s border with Iraq, timed to open a corridor for Kurdish fighters to cross into Iranian Kurdistan and push toward northwestern cities. Thousands of young Kurds were expected to join them. They were slated to advance eastward while armed militias from other minority groups struck Iranian territory from all directions, pushing toward Tehran. The U.S. had armed these proxy forces, but the plan unraveled when Fox News reported the attack was imminent. Turkish President Erdogan phoned Trump and, in a furious call, talked him out of U.S. backing for the operation.

A pivot to military capability targets, several ceasefires, countless threats and reversals later, we are left with the Supreme Leader still alive and kicking, though only on one leg.

The Mossad doesn’t work like the military; it functions in a fantasy world of exploding pagers and drone factories in enemy countries. That makes attributing operational blame difficult, especially for a plan that was edited during execution. Still, this was the Mossad’s most ambitious plan in its 76-year history, and its greatest failure. Inevitably, heads had to roll.

Security sources noted the departures were made by mutual agreement, with both officials reassigned to other roles within the Mossad. This lateral transfer rather than an outright dismissal is a manifestation of the central paradox of an organization tasked with literal creative destruction: how to hold planners accountable for overpromising without stifling out-of-the-box thinking. As former Director David Barnea recently argued in defense of the plan, “every Mossad operation is unprecedented and seems lunatic.”

Still, Mossad insiders allege that the transfer of the two officials is intended to prevent one of the rolling heads from being Netanyahu’s. But that will be for the voters to decide come October.

The dismissals are also part of a larger organizational shift inside the Mossad, which is facing significant internal resistance. Gofman is the first outsider to be appointed head of the agency since Dagan in 2002 and is attempting a similar internal reform; unsurprisingly, an organization founded on secrecy with a notorious and somewhat deserved ego is not a fan of people outside the family taking the reins. According to Dagan, 300 people quit after his appointment—so far, Gofman has only fired three, and only those with whom he reportedly had little to no chemistry.

Ultimately, Dagan was one of the most successful directors the Mossad has ever had, running it longer than anyone else in history except the legendary Isser Harel. That’s because he got results. Gofman’s tenure will be measured in exactly the same way.

Yellow Line markers being installed in Gaza. (IDF)

A few hundred concrete blocks painted yellow now sit at the center of a debate that will shape—no exaggeration—the entire Middle East. On the day the hostages came home, ten months ago, the IDF held 52 percent of the Gaza Strip. Since then, it has expanded to 70 percent. Gazans wake up to find the yellow line closer than it was, sometimes forcing them to evacuate again to stay out of the field of fire.

Israel touts its expanding control of the Strip, though in reality there’s no advance of forces or new positions—only the widening of our troops’ firing line against approaching threats. The gap between the original lines and the current ones is what the fight over Gaza’s future now turns on. In principle, Israel doesn’t believe Hamas will disarm (or surrender its weapons to be melted down—a new American idea). It has no interest in a photo-op with the U.S. president, as long as it isn’t asked to withdraw.

The Americans tell Israel: four hundred feet between you and them—what’s that? Pull the concrete blocks back a little, and we’ll use it to push Hamas into the next stage. Worst case, a few hours of crane work and you’re back where you started. In Jerusalem, they resist, fearing a return to the withdrawals-first pattern that paved the whole road to October 7. And in the background there’s another, political worry: with less than three months to the election, any withdrawal or agreement hurts Likud and the coalition. Ben-Gvir will howl from the right; Lieberman, Bennett, and Eisenkot from the left.

The Americans were caught off guard when Israel dug in against a withdrawal they considered purely tactical. Israel reminded them of the electoral calendar—and of the fact that Netanyahu has no great desire to concede now and collect the reward, if ever, only when it’s already too late. So, the thinking goes, let’s turn to the opposition leaders and have them publicly back the deal struck at the White House. For some reason, Lieberman, Bennett, Eisenkot, and Golan have yet to step in front of the cameras to call for an Israeli withdrawal and embrace Netanyahu. Surprising.

A round of primaries was held in the United States this week, and in a striking number of them, Gaza was front and center. Israel has a supreme interest in putting the issue to rest and beginning to recover in global public opinion—not, heaven forbid, by leaving Hamas in place, but through temporary tactical maneuvering that lets the Americans and their regional allies keep isolating the terrorist group that still, barely, controls the ruins of the city.

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

English Editor: Ari Tatarka

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Israeli Minister of Homeland Security Gilad Erdan delivers a speach at the Likud Party election rally in Or-Yehuda, February 13, 2020. (Gili Yaari / Flash90)

It’s Thursday, August 6, and former UN ambassador Gilad Erdan launches his new right-wing party tonight, alongside fellow Likud refugee Yuli Edelstein. Will this be enough to tip the scales in the coming election?

Like divided border cities during the Cold War, in the twilight zone called the “Unity Bloc,” the “Third Bloc,” the “National Right,” or any other name, foreign powers are scheming.

Because with all due respect to the campaign so far, the fate of the elections will be determined by the question of who, if anyone, can squeeze four or five mandates out of this not very juicy lemon. Take, for example, the Channel 12 poll from this week: Chili Tropper and Yoaz Hendel’s joint party cross the blocking threshold, and bring the Gadi Eisenkot bloc to 60 mandates, on the verge of forming a stable government for four years. On the other hand, if those four mandates go to Erdan and Edelstein, or Ofer Winter, who do not rule out Netanyahu, it means that Eisenkot has no majority to form a government even with Arab abstention. Ten thousand votes that moved from here to there—and the result will be completely different.

To everyone’s surprise, Eisenkot is meanwhile showing higher competence. The scenario now is ideal from his perspective, one in which right voters move directly to a party that will recommend him for forming the government and will join him, for all intents and purposes, and to prevent elections. Tropper, aware of the danger of being lumped in with the bloc of Yair Golan and Yair Lapid, has been explaining lately that although his final destination will be Eisenkot, he does not rule out coupling with another party just before the candidate slates close and riding it to the Unity Government station.

Netanyahu, meanwhile, only rules people out: he does not trust Winter and does not speak with Gilad Erdan. Channel 14 treats the former Likud minister with the same coldness it reserves for Yair Lapid and Yair Golan. This is not some sophisticated scheme to peel Erdan away from Netanyahu—it is the very reason Erdan is not trying to make his way back through Likud in the first place. Likud, for its part, would be glad to see Benny Gantz clear the electoral threshold, rightly guessing that he would sooner hand the premiership to Tali Gottlieb than to Eisenkot, who abandoned him and left him to drown.

If the Bennett-Eisenkot contest was the semifinal, what is unfolding now is the Oceania qualifiers for a spot in the intercontinental playoff on the road to the World Cup: a crowd of tiny national teams competing for half a berth. The Erdan-Edelstein announcement of a new party was meant to drag everyone else underwater by force. Once they have all swallowed water and started to thrash, an instant before blacking out for good, the strongest one will surface. Gantz is counting on his money to draw the others in; Tropper, on his poll numbers. Erdan’s weapon is having no alternative—he has burned his ships in Likud. Tropper has a home port to return to and Gantz has a pension to fall back on after long years of service, but Erdan’s message to all of them is: I am staying to the end, and whoever wants to survive is welcome to join me.

Smoke rises from southern Lebanon during an Israeli military operation, August 5, 2026. (Ayal Margolin/Flash90)

Two soldiers were killed and four seriously wounded by an explosive device in the southern Lebanese town of Majdal Zoun. The blast pushed the military to resume strikes on Hezbollah and strained the truce talks underway in Rome. The question is whether it was intentional.

According to an initial probe, the troops had entered a building to demolish Hezbollah infrastructure when the structure exploded. It remains unclear whether the bomb was planted before the ceasefire, and whether it was triggered automatically or manually. Israel branded the blast a blatant violation of the fragile truce and launched its first strikes since August 1. That, in turn, brought the Rome negotiations to an early close, with Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Yechiel Leiter, accusing the Lebanese delegation of repeatedly leaking false information and asking the American mediators to pause the talks.

If the explosion was meant to blow up the negotiations, it worked. That is not to say the framework has gone the way of the MoU: a U.S. official insisted the sessions had been productive, and for now this looks like a flare-up rather than a rupture. The fundamental interests of Lebanon and Israel still largely align. But if the blast was deliberate—and worse, if it was planned in Tehran—we should expect more flare-ups and more casualties.

The distance between the Lebanese and Iranian fronts has fluctuated wildly over the past few years. Israel needs it as wide as possible; Iran needs it gone. What holds the two battlefields apart right now is the Lebanese state itself—lending Israel legitimacy to operate in the country’s south while stripping Hezbollah of its cover as the defender of Lebanon. Iran wants that barrier removed at all costs; Israel, however feeble the partner, has every reason to keep it standing.

What should Israel do in Gaza? Does the Lebanese state have a chance of disarming Hezbollah? What is next in Trump’s Iran strategy? Last night I joined Dana Loesch to discuss all this and more.

Israeli chess champion Boris Gelfand recieves a gift from MK Danny Danon as he attends an Abosrption and Immigration committee meeting in the Israeli parliament, June 06, 2012. (Miriam Alster/FLASH90)

Grandmaster Boris Gelfand is the first Israeli chess player ever to be elected a member of the World Chess Hall of Fame, joining just 61 other inductees in St. Louis. The World Chess Hall of Fame brings together the most prominent figures in the chess world, those who have made an exceptional contribution to the game’s development. Its members include world champions, both men and women, historians, and promoters of the sport of chess.

Gelfand, who immigrated to Israel from Belarus in 1998, is widely regarded as one of the greatest chess players in the country’s history. He remains the only Israeli to have won an Olympic chess title, taking gold at the 1990 Chess Olympiad playing for the Soviet Union team. Later in his career, he became the only Israeli to win the Chess World Cup, taking the title in 2009. Two years later, he won the Candidates Tournament and qualified for a match for the world championship.

The defining moment of his career came in 2012, when he challenged Indian world champion Viswanathan Anand for the title. Gelfand fought Anand to a 6-6 draw, with Anand retaining the crown only after winning the rapid tiebreaker.

For more than two decades, Gelfand was the leader of Israel’s national chess team and played a central role in its greatest achievements, among them the silver medal at the World Chess Olympiad in 2008 and the bronze medal in 2010.

Gelfand’s name will henceforth stand alongside the greats of chess, among them Emanuel Lasker, Mikhail Tal, Bobby Fischer, Garry Kasparov and Judit Polgár, potential Hungarian president and strongest female chess player in history.

English Editor: Ari Tatarka

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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attends an event of the Netzah Yehuda Association at the Western Wall, September 11, 2025. (Chaim Goldberg/Flash90)

It’s Wednesday, August 5, and in a recent interview with Polymarket, I sat down to break down the odds, numbers, and political dynamics shaping Israel’s upcoming election.

Q. Benjamin Netanyahu has dissolved parliament ahead of the October 27 election. Polymarket has Netanyahu, the ultimate political survivor, at just one-in-three to be prime minister after the election. Does that surprise you?

Unlike in the U.S. or U.K., an Israeli election might end in a draw. It can also end in a rotation government, one figure serving as prime minister for two years and another for the next two. Or in an outright majority.

Here’s the thing. Netanyahu, as the incumbent, can enjoy a hung parliament. If there is no clear winner, he stays in office in what we call a transition government. So any chance of a draw adds chances for Netanyahu, the only outcome that can come of it. And if a rotation government is possible, that also increases Netanyahu’s odds, as he’s the leader of the right wing.

I look at Polymarket every day, and I’m quite surprised by Netanyahu’s low chances, and by the very low chances given to Avigdor Lieberman.

In Israel, the decision on the next prime minister is in the hands of the parliament, not the people. It is neither a beauty contest nor a popularity contest. In 2021, Naftali Bennett became prime minister with 5 percent of the popular vote. The lesson is that in Israel, kingmakers can become the kings themselves.

Q. How could Lieberman become prime minister?

Gadi Eisenkot is the front-runner in the opposition, leading every poll since April or May.

But Lieberman can make his way to the prime minister’s office, because he is not a natural part of the opposition. He is a settler living in a settlement. He is not exposed to pressure from center-left news outlets. His political base is Russian immigrants. He is a maverick.

Second: he is 68, so he knows this is his last round. And third, he’s a kingmaker. He belongs to the right on diplomacy and the Palestinian question, but to the opposition on domestic issues, liberalism, the economy. So he can come to Eisenkot the day after the election and say, “I’m one of only three people in Israel ever to serve as defense minister, treasury minister, and minister of foreign affairs. Give me the chance to be prime minister first.” What can Eisenkot do? The only guy you have to convince after the election, if not the voters, is Lieberman himself.

So I think Lieberman is heavily underrated and written off. He is somewhere around 4 percent, 4.7 percent on Polymarket. I would give him something like 20 percent.

Also: we have two types of polls. In the mainstream media, Netanyahu is heading toward his worst defeat in 20 years, 51-52 seats for his bloc out of 120. But according to Channel 14 and Channel 24, more affiliated with the right wing, he is heading toward the best victory of his career. Statistics cannot explain that gap. Margins explain 3 percent or 4 percent, not 12 percent or 13 percent.

And I want to give you the magic number: 55. We have 10 Arab Knesset members who do not take part in coalitions: They do not sympathize with the Zionist state, and the Zionist parties do not want them. Post-October 7, there is almost no legitimacy, especially in the center, to base a coalition on non-Zionist, sometimes anti-Zionist, Arab parties. So if Netanyahu gets 55 seats, he does not lose to Eisenkot in terms of Zionist seats.

The average of the polls has Netanyahu around 52 and a half, and we know the shy voter phenomenon, the inability to really poll right-wing voters, from the U.S., U.K. and Israel. So even trusting the mainstream polls, Netanyahu is two and a half seats short of ending this election without Eisenkot being able to form a stable coalition. That leaves two options: a new election, meaning Netanyahu stays prime minister, or a rotation government, in which Netanyahu most likely goes first.

Remember: 61 seats are enough for a victory speech, but 59 does not force you to concede. That’s what Americans fail to understand about Israeli politics. One can get away with 52, 53, 55, 57 seats. The sitting prime minister deserves a premium simply for sitting as prime minister.

So I would give Netanyahu 45 percent, Eisenkot 35 percent, and Lieberman 20 percent. Netanyahu is still under 50 percent because of some 100 consecutive very bad polls. Eisenkot is still the one with the best chances in the center-left. But Lieberman is there, and Netanyahu has a higher chance than on Polymarket now.

Q. As we record this, the U.S. headlines say “Netanyahu visits DC amid tensions with Donald Trump.” Are they really tense? Or is this a media invention?

Tension did exist. But as a general rule, the relationship is always better than meets the eye in the press. It is based on four to seven people from the two sides of the pond: Netanyahu, Ron Dermer, Trump, Jared Kushner, Steve Witkoff, and maybe Susie Wiles. Seven out of seven belong to the right, while most of the media covers it from a center-left point of view. That means lack of information, and a natural bias toward saying the situation is worse.

The relationship has cooled a bit since March, for two reasons. The war was less successful than hoped, and this administration has become more closed, with decisions taken by fewer people, so it’s harder for the Israelis to penetrate. But I would not write off Netanyahu’s chances to talk Trump into something.

Click here to read the full transcript and dive deeper into our discussion on Iran.

Israeli and Lebanese flags at the South Lebanon Army (SLA) Memorial near Metula following the signing of an agreement between Israel and Lebanon, June 28, 2026. (Ayal Margolin/FLASH90)

The most recent time Trump declared a ceasefire at the last minute before a major strike, the dominant feeling recalled Bill Murray’s character in Groundhog Day. But Iran isn’t the only country trapped in one long time loop.

Negotiators are gathering in Rome for the seventh round of U.S.-brokered Israel-Lebanon talks to discuss moving forward with Hezbollah disarmament. We have been here before. In 2024, after Israeli operations decimated Hezbollah’s leadership, there was a real window of opportunity. The systematic searches of homes, the clearing of tunnels, the confiscation of weapons—all with IDF help—were to be finished in 2025. Had everything gone to schedule, Israel would have withdrawn from Lebanon entirely by the start of this year.

Instead, over two years of the “disarmament process,” the LAF raided exactly two tunnel sites—one of them confirmed to have been emptied beforehand—a remarkable feat given that Hezbollah’s infrastructure plan was labeled “Land of Tunnels.” Mostly, the LAF ran a quick scan, declared the area clear, and looked the other way while Hezbollah rebuilt behind them. That is when the soldiers show up at all. On any given day, 4,000 of the 8,000 deployed to the south were and continue to be missing, busy working second jobs as taxi drivers because military salaries cannot feed their families.

The newest round of negotiations assumes the Lebanese state is serious about disarming Hezbollah. The ground reality shows the opposite. The army still cannot search homes for weapons, blocked by a judiciary allied with Hezbollah, while its own officers continue to coordinate with the group.

Lebanon cannot do this alone. It is time for the United States to hunt Hezbollah the way it hunted ISIS. Remove compromised LAF officers immediately—political backlash be damned. Bypass the judiciary and authorize home searches by executive order. Pay soldiers reliably, a relatively small cost of $500 million to $1 billion annually for five to 10 years. Embed American advisers at battalion level to watch officer behavior and enforce compliance. Provide the air support, artillery, and intelligence to hunt Hezbollah down. Operation Inherent Resolve took three to four years in Iraq. By the end of it, the caliphate was rubble. It is one of the few military campaigns the U.S. in the Middle East that achieved its strategic objectives. The truth is that, however bad Iraq was then, it was more institutionally intact than Lebanon is now. The Rome timeline of 18 months is fantasy.

We may be trapped in an endless cycle with Iran, but it does not have to be so in Lebanon. Israel’s attempt to decapitate the octopus in one fell swoop has failed—but severing one of its tentacles will still cause enormous pain. And nothing would make the regime look weaker than watching its crown jewel crushed once and for all.

Mosaic patterns from the Jewish Temple. (Temple Mount Sifting Project)

Since 2016, archaeologists have been reconstructing the opus sectile floors—intricate mosaics of colored stone—that once adorned the Temple Mount. These geometric tile patterns, made from marble and other stones, challenge what we thought we knew about ancient Jewish grandeur and help explain why Herod’s Temple was the most lavish structure in the Roman Empire.

Dr. Assaf Avraham first identified the tile fragments in sifting work, proposing they matched Josephus’s description of the Temple Mount courtyard: “paved entirely with stones of various types and colors.” Rabbinic sources corroborate this account, describing the floor as resembling “waves of the sea.” Initially, scholars dismissed the idea—opus sectile was thought too expensive and too late for the Second Temple period.

Frankie Schneider, a mathematician-turned-archaeologist, took the research to unprecedented depth. Over years of painstaking work, she reconstructed seven complete floor patterns from thousands of fragmented tiles. Her findings reveal that the Temple Mount featured the most extensive use of opus sectile flooring anywhere in the Roman world—a technique normally reserved for small elite spaces.

The explanation is not that Judea was wealthy. Rather, all the Jewish world’s taxation flowed to a single destination: the Temple. While Roman cities distributed public resources among dozens of temples, Jews everywhere sent their tithes and pilgrim offerings to Jerusalem. This concentration of resources toward one monumental project created something unprecedented—a sacred precinct larger than any in the Roman Empire, with flooring more luxurious than anything Rome itself produced.

Recent 3D reconstructions by Scripture Central visualize this vanished splendor in vivid detail, though researchers caution that major questions remain unsettled.

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.

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Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu. (White House/Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

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