Luxembourg's financial regulator has refused to renew the approval Israel needs to sell bonds inside the European Union, and that approval runs out on Monday, 31 August. Diaspora Jews and pro-Israel organizations bought most of the $2.5 billion that market took last year, and no other member state has picked the work up. No parliament voted on any of it.

Andy Burnham, Britain's new Prime Minister, is preparing a ban on trade with Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria. He wants it out before Labour's conference next month. He has been in Downing Street five weeks. Bloomberg had his government weighing a sanctions regime to do it on 21 August. By this week the Times of Israel had him poised to announce one, reaching import, sale, purchase and brokerage. What set it off is a tender. Israel's Housing Ministry has 1,234 homes on the market at E1, the ground east of Jerusalem that runs up to the Israeli city of Maale Adumim, and bids close on 19 October. The ask has not changed: withdraw the tender, stop building. Ed Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, put his own name to the measures last week. And 140 Labour MPs, about a third of the Commons benches, have signed a letter asking him for more. Burnham's own officials have told him the ban cannot be policed. They cannot tell the goods apart. Bank Hapoalim and Teva, two of Israel's largest companies, both operate in eastern Jerusalem, banks over-comply with anything shaped like a boycott, and Israel sells Britain something in the region of $2 billion of goods a year.

Below the line: the week's deployable language — what to say when a reporter asks whether a settlement trade ban is a boycott, how to answer the donor whose federation holds Israel Bonds, the claims you'll field on genocide and on "Death to Zionism," and the traps that lose the room. Members read the full brief.

Unlock this week's Watchwords →

Ask a different authority and you get a different answer. An envoy told the Security Council he had certified a breakthrough his own counterparty had emptied days earlier.

Flash Brief: The Day in 90 Seconds or Less

• Gaza: Israel pushes the strike approval back down to Southern Command, and the Board of Peace's envoy objects publicly. See The War Today.

• Lebanon: Aoun calls negotiation Lebanon's only route while Israeli aircraft take apart the Ali al-Taher ridge. See The War Today.

• Iran: The chief of naval operations pulls a carrier out of the Pacific to hold the Gulf. See The War Today.

• Eisenkot: The poll leader rules out a Palestinian state, and rules against the E1 tender in the same interview. See Inside Israel.

• Britain: Burnham prepares a full trade ban on Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria before Labour's conference. See Israel and the World.

• Palestine Action: Treasury designates the group a terrorist entity months before Britain's Supreme Court hears its appeal. See Israel and the World.

• The UN: Guterres says the special rapporteurs have gone out of control on Israel, and refuses the bias charge. See Israel and the World.

• Campus: Departmental events booking a boycott activist accuse Israel of genocide forty times more often than the rest. See Israel and the World.

• High Holidays: Washington tells nearly every mission to ask host governments for guards on the walk to shul. See Israel and the World.

• Aliyah: More than 2,200 North Americans arrive between June and September, close to 480 of them families. See Israel and the World.

Two of the three theaters in The War Today turn on whose reading of an agreement governs, and in Gaza and on the Ali al-Taher ridge it is whoever is already in the field. The third is the American Navy paying for a decision nobody intends to take before November. Abroad the bloc could not get twenty-seven signatures onto a single statement, and the national laws keep arriving anyway.

Today: the envoy who certified a breakthrough his counterparty had already voided, Washington cutting Palestine Action off the dollar, and a Likud count that keeps moving.

Read today's brief

The leverage today belongs to whoever can afford to say no and then wait. It costs nothing to hold that position, and the ones holding it have been holding it for months. Everybody doing the asking has a deadline.

Flash Brief: The Day in 90 Seconds or Less

• Iran: Washington puts off striking Iran until after the midterms, and says again that it has cleared Hormuz. See The War Today.

• Gaza: The Board of Peace warns Hamas through mediators and tells reporters Israel's strikes carry no security value. See The War Today.

• Judea and Samaria: The Palestinian Authority trains sixty thousand men on infantry standards a kilometre from Route 90. See The War Today.

• MK tours: The army closes Judea and Samaria to Knesset visits until October, after Sukkot hammers a terrorist's memorial. See Inside Israel.

• The ballot: Netanyahu tells Winter, Feiglin and Maoz to merge or withdraw before lists close on 8 September. See Inside Israel.

• Saudi Arabia: Trump sends Congress the thirty-year reactor deal, with normalization a condition Congress can let lapse. See Israel and the World.

• The Netherlands: Sa'ar expels the Dutch from the Kiryat Gat coordination center over a trade ban taking effect next month. See Israel and the World.

• Sanctions: Bessent aims sixty Iran designations at third countries, and Beijing threatens all necessary measures. See Israel and the World.

• Australia: The antisemitism commission refuses more hearings and reports in December, with much of the inquiry held in camera. See Israel and the World.

• Lebanon: Washington's ambassador in Beirut puts a two-day window on Ali al-Taher as Israeli jets work the ridge. See Developments to Watch.

Ofer Winter will not merge and cannot be made to, and Moshe Gafni knows what he means to recommend and is not allowed to say it — and the lists close on 8 September whether either of them moves or not. Abroad a refusal is free, and whoever refuses can outwait whoever is asking. Here it costs seats.

Today: when Washington's restraint toward Iran expires, why the army shut Judea and Samaria to MKs, and who is training off Route 90.

Read today's brief

Rome and Beirut are two months into an appointment nobody has made, and a Michigan nominee issued a statement that condemned no one. None of it commits anyone to anything. The rest of the day belongs to people who did not stop to explain themselves — a survey ship holding station over a wreck at 503 metres, a brigade that sealed thirteen kilometres of tunnel before it moved north, and an Efrat council putting five hundred homes on the slope below Zayit.

Flash Brief: The Day in 90 Seconds or Less

• Iran: Bessent launches Operation Economic Outcast and concedes that enforcing it now could damage the world economy. See The War Today.

• Hormuz: Iran blacklists forty-six ships in the strait, and transits fall to sixteen a day from a hundred and thirty. See The War Today.

• Election security: Netanyahu says Iran tried to murder one of his sons, and asks Shin Bet to guard every candidate. See The War Today.

• Gaza: Israel stops taking individual gunmen and starts destroying the Hamas weapons stores kept inside mosques. See The War Today.

• Lebanon: Israeli jets hit Bint Jbeil while Rome argues over who verifies that a village has been cleared. See The War Today.

• Judea and Samaria: MK Sukkot takes a hammer to a monument the Samaria brigade had already planned to demolish. See Inside Israel.

• The ballot: Ben-Gvir rules out a joint list with Smotrich and sends him to Ofer Winter instead. See Inside Israel.

• Syria: Washington delists Damascus after forty-seven years, and Israel and Turkey argue over one Idlib airbase. See Israel and the World.

• Israel Bonds: Luxembourg stops approving the prospectuses on 1 September, and Israel loses a $2.5 billion European market. See Israel and the World.

• Democrats: Two members of Congress condemn Hasan Piker by name, and Michigan's Senate nominee never uses it. See Israel and the World.

• York: A jury finds a former Harrogate mayor stirred up racial hatred, and the court can impose nothing. See Israel and the World.

• American opinion: Support for military action against Iran falls to 31 percent, with Republican backing down eight points. See Developments to Watch.

The Treasury can designate sixty entities across five sectors and cannot make China stop buying Iranian oil. Rome can host the argument about who verifies a Lebanese village and cannot appoint anyone to do it. A Luxembourg regulator, asked only to renew a filing, declined — and took two and a half billion dollars a year off Israel's borrowing on his own reading of prospectus law. The bigger the podium today, the less came off it.

Today: the sanctions Washington will not yet enforce, Iran's answer in Hormuz, and the regulator shutting Israel out of the EU bond market.

Read today's brief

Also from Uri, recently:

• Hamas Wants to Keep Its Arsenal, Just Change the Address · The Algemeiner

The countries in between get to decide how much of somebody else's war they are willing to carry, and none of them asked for the job. Israel spent the weekend on the actor actually in the way. And at home, the rules that are supposed to govern an election turn out not to cover the situation the country is in.

Flash Brief: The Day in 90 Seconds or Less

• Iran: Bessent aims Washington's economic campaign at the countries carrying Iran's oil and money, and Tehran calls them enemies. See Israel and the World.

• Gaza: Katz orders every launch out of Gaza treated as an act of war, and threatens to move civilians out. See The War Today.

• Syria: Israel's Mossad chief meets Syria's foreign minister in Jordan, five days after Israeli jets cratered Abu al-Duhur. See The War Today.

• Judea and Samaria: A soldier is stabbed on Route 90 and a rifle grabbed at Rimonim, and both attackers are stopped. See The War Today.

• Eisenkot: Shin Bet chief Zini refuses the poll-leading candidate a security detail, and Netanyahu orders him protected anyway. See Inside Israel.

• Police oversight: The High Court freezes Levin's appointments to the rebuilt Police Investigations Department until it rules on the election period. See Inside Israel.

• The ballot: Lists are due in a little over two weeks, and no mainstream poll gives either bloc the 61 seats. See Inside Israel.

• Golan: Trump's envoy Barrack calls the Golan occupied on Friday and reverses himself on the record by Sunday. See Israel and the World.

• Hamas: Hamas drops eleven points in ten months, and goes looking for Mohammed Dahlan in Egypt. See Israel and the World.

• Incitement: Twitch's Hasan Piker tells his audience that American Jews who back Israel are inviting the violence. See Israel and the World.

• Australia: Melbourne's mayor tells Australia's antisemitism commission his synagogues are tagged almost weekly, and asks Canberra to pay. See Israel and the World.

• Draft: Peleg calls its people back onto Highway 4 this afternoon after a yeshiva student is handed to the Military Police. See Developments to Watch.

Melbourne can clean a wall inside an hour and cannot find who wrote on it. An Israeli in Athens got walked out of a party by men his own government has no word with. Israel has a runway it can crater and a road it can search.

Today: Washington's economic campaign opens on the countries carrying Iran, a runway strike that produced a Syrian delegation, and a front-runner nobody will guard.

Read today's brief

The war has moved onto the things Hezbollah and Iran cannot replace quickly — the concrete poured under the border villages, and the oil money that keeps Tehran solvent. Neither is close to settling, and the arguing over whether Israel may touch either is happening a long way from both. At home, a good deal of what got promised this weekend was promised on behalf of a government nobody has elected yet.

Flash Brief: The Day in 90 Seconds or Less

• Lebanon: Katz speeds up the demolition, and Hezbollah would rather Israel take the ridge than the Lebanese army. See The War Today.

• Syria: Trump's envoy calls the Idlib strike election bait, and Katz answers on Shabbat with the intelligence. See The War Today.

• Gaza: Hamas flies kites over Nahal Oz to time Israel's response, and presses mediators to call a breach. See The War Today.

• Draft: Deri buys Rabbi Yosef back by committing Shas's next coalition to the yeshiva exemption law. See Inside Israel.

• Airport: A workers' committee chairman shuts Ben Gurion to arrivals on one of the year's busiest days. See Inside Israel.

• Ankara: Turkey asks Interpol for a red notice on Netanyahu, off an Istanbul case naming 35 Israelis. See Israel and the World.

• Iran: Bessent says the sanctions are meant to collapse the regime, and Qatar cuts its ministries and its aid. See Israel and the World.

• Hollywood: Ruffalo attacks the Paramount-Warner merger through Oracle's work for the IDF, and Paramount answers on the record. See Israel and the World.

• New York: Jewish teachers hand Mamdani 250 school incidents the city's own complaint forms could never have counted. See Israel and the World.

• Gaza journalists: HonestReporting ties 120 of the 209 names on CPJ's Gaza list to armed groups. See Briefly Noted.

• Hormuz: Tehran lets Iraqi oil through the strait it has kept shut since the end of February. See Developments to Watch.

The War Today runs three theaters on one question: what Israel will have finished before anybody else gets to rule on it. Inside Israel bends toward 27 October, where the exemption law and the next coalition's inheritance are both waiting on a result. The world sections are about reach — what an Interpol filing, a Treasury press conference and an actor's post can each actually make happen.

Today: Hezbollah choosing demolition over a handover, Washington putting regime collapse in writing, and a rabbi bought back with the next government's exemption bill.

Read today's brief

Ed Miliband, Britain's Foreign Secretary, summoned Israel's senior diplomat in London yesterday and promised sanctions within weeks. (Israel's Housing Ministry had opened bidding the day before on about 1,200 homes at E1, the open ground between Jerusalem and the Israeli city of Maale Adumim, with bids closing eight days before Israelis vote on 27 October.) What London is answering is a sovereignty claim every Israeli government since Rabin has made.

Miliband called that an "unacceptable and destructive act" and pledged "a comprehensive set of measures," with targeted sanctions on people who take part in Israeli building in Judea and Samaria. He said separately that the measures come within weeks. Germany, France, and Italy had already warned their own companies off the bidding. The UN Secretary-General's spokesman said E1 would "effectively sever the connection between occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank."

London wants the tender pulled and the building stopped. Every Israeli government since Rabin proposed that corridor in 1994 has kept it on the map — and yet none of them ever sold a plot there. The closing date is what is new.

It falls inside an Israeli election campaign, so London is drafting sanctions against a government that will not be the one in office when they arrive.

Below the line: the week's deployable language — what to say when a reporter asks whether E1 buries the two-state solution, how to answer the donor asking whether British sanctions reach our giving, the claims you'll field on the Military Advocate General's first public accounting since October 7, and the traps that lose the room. Members get the full brief.

Unlock this week's Watchwords →

Nobody in this war gets surprised any more. Israel asks first and then strikes, Washington posts the threat before it does anything. Underneath that, a slower argument is running about who has to show their work. Israel is documenting its own conduct in public, the institutions that grade that conduct have never had to document theirs, and this week somebody finally went and looked.

Flash Brief: The Day in 90 Seconds or Less

• Syria: Mossad's chief calls Damascus four days before Israel bombs the Abu al-Duhur airbase. See The War Today.

• Hormuz: Washington escorts ten million barrels a day through the closed strait, and Trump threatens Iran's remaining money lines. See The War Today.

• Gaza: Israel strikes a police headquarters, and Hamas claims the dead as part of their own officer corps. See The War Today.

• Accountability: Military prosecutors open criminal files in two of five Gaza cases, and Canberra summons Israel's ambassador. See Inside Israel.

• Defense budget: Netanyahu and Smotrich break the spending ceiling for some 25 billion shekels of munitions. See Inside Israel.

• Gaza force: Washington puts $206 million into a stabilization force nobody has agreed to deploy. See Israel and the World.

• Ankara: Israeli officials read Trump's Syria envoy as Erdogan's advocate, and Zamir hosts Greece's chief of defense. See Israel and the World.

• WHO: Two academics find the database behind the "genocide" charge logs checkpoint delays as attacks. See Israel and the World.

• Australia: A royal commission on antisemitism hears a hate-speech model that protects hostility to Zionism. See Israel and the World.

• Argentina: Milei's government strips a federal judge for Jew-hate and refuses to let him resign. See Israel and the World.

• Births: Israel counts 137,343 Jewish births in a year, the highest figure in a table going back to 1996. See Briefly Noted.

What separates the institutions in today's brief is which of them can survive being read closely. Israel's military prosecutors published a count and reversed a denial the army had held for a year, and Human Rights Watch called it a whitewash inside the hour. The WHO's database has never been open to a challenge from anybody, which is why it travels — and two academics have now put its methodology somewhere a prosecutor has to look at it.

Today: a Mossad phone call four days before the airbase strike, an American convoy lane through the closed strait, and 25 billion shekels of munitions.

Read today's brief

Also published today. The red-green alliance stopped producing marches and started producing appointments. New York is the first major American city where it holds the executive instead of lobbying it — and Jewish institutions are still answering the marches.

Read the full dossier →

Three governments told Israel no yesterday, and not one of them had anything behind it — an objection, a denial, a letter to the Security Council. What moved instead sat with people who needed nobody's permission: a chief of staff's signature, a lands authority's tender, a secretary of state's list of names.

Flash Brief: The Day in 90 Seconds or Less

• Syria: Israel puts its name on eight strikes at the Abu al-Duhur airbase, and Washington's envoy objects. See The War Today.

• Gaza: The IDF kills a Nukhba company commander at Shati, hours after Kushner withholds the October 7 carve-out. See The War Today.

• Iran: Iran fires two ballistic missiles at Emirati waters, and Abu Dhabi halts all trade and finance with Tehran. See The War Today.

• Hormuz: Trump ends the Iran talks and maps the strait as American territory, and Ghalibaf names his terms for reopening it. See Israel and the World.

• Damascus: Syria keeps the Assad-era nuclear material it told the IAEA last month it would hand over. See Israel and the World.

• Judea and Samaria: The Israel Lands Authority markets E1's first 1,400 homes, thirty-two years after Rabin proposed the corridor. See Inside Israel.

• Draft: The Attorney General puts haredim at 83 percent of draft evaders and 10 percent of indictments. See Inside Israel.

• The Hague: Rubio sanctions the ICC's president and a lawyer off the team that sought Netanyahu's warrant. See Israel and the World.

• Florida: Both Republicans who ran on Jew-hate lose badly, and a DSA member takes the Senate nomination. See Israel and the World.

What Washington has left in these arguments is the objection and the furniture around it — a deconfliction cell staffed around the clock in four languages, and a sanctions list that now reaches the judge presiding over the ICC. Neither stops a strike, and neither was built to. What settled anything settled closer to home, where a tender on the market is harder to undo than the cabinet decision behind it.

Today: eight Israeli strikes in Idlib with Washington objecting on the record, E1 reaching contractors after thirty-two years, and Iran down to no Gulf customers.

Read today's brief

Israel's terms for Gaza are now the American ones. Weapons get surrendered for destruction first, and nothing gets rebuilt in the Strip until Hamas is disarmed. Ten months of ceasefire have produced no handed-over weapon and no dissolved formation, so what is left to argue is the handover itself and how far back the army goes in the unlikely event it happens. Tehran spent yesterday denying it has any channel to Washington and announcing it won a war Jerusalem reads it as preparing to widen.

Flash Brief: The Day in 90 Seconds or Less

• Gaza: Netanyahu and Kushner settle Israel's sequence — weapons destroyed first, and nothing rebuilt until Hamas disarms. See The War Today.

• Iran: Israeli officials read Tehran as preparing to widen the war, and two drones hit Kurdistan's leadership overnight. See The War Today.

• Sultan Yacoub: Israel recovers the last of its missing from the 1982 battle, forty-four years on. See Briefly Noted.

• Likud: Five ministers fall off the slate, and the three men Netanyahu's circle marked all place. See Inside Israel.

• Judea and Samaria: Katz gives the army two weeks to hand policing of Israelis to the police, and Ben-Gvir names his price. See Inside Israel.

• Upper Galilee: Kibbutz Yiftah is pouring foundations for twenty-two new families on a border Hezbollah held two years ago. See Inside Israel.

• Saudi Arabia: The last of the Jew-hate is out of the kingdom's 136 school textbooks this year. See Israel and the World.

• Campuses: Reed settles a Jewish student's harassment complaint, and nine more small colleges are still in dispute. See Israel and the World.

• Great Neck: Eight Persian Jewish families move to Israel together, into one neighborhood. See Israel and the World.

• Hormuz: The Revolutionary Guards seize an Emirati-owned tanker, and Tehran names six carriers hauling for American forces. See Developments to Watch.

Inside Israel this week's arguments are about what the next government inherits. Katz has given the army two weeks to hand policing of Israelis in Judea and Samaria to the police, and Ben-Gvir has attached a price — the Border Police division, and the authority to sign administrative detention orders himself. None of it takes effect before 27 October, which makes the next ten weeks a fight over where people stand when the counting is done. Trump spent the weekend showing what declining an American ask costs, and Seoul is paying it this week.

Today: the disarmament sequence Kushner took back to Washington, Israel's read on Tehran widening the war, and what Likud's members did to Netanyahu's slate.

Read today's brief

The sixty-day window ran out at midnight, Tehran spent it putting the Revolutionary Guards over the regular army and the men who fought Iraq back into the senior chairs, and Washington's answer this morning was that it is in no hurry. Iran and Oman have settled a map for moving ships through Hormuz, and the president who wants that water open says he will bomb Oman if it gets in the way. Israel holds the surface of the Ali al-Taher ridge and is preparing for several days of fighting over what Hezbollah spent fourteen years building underneath it.

Flash Brief: The Day in 90 Seconds or Less

• Iran: The sixty-day memorandum expires with no deal, and Tehran comes out of it with the Guards over the army. See The War Today.

• Hormuz: Iran and Oman agree a transit map, and Trump says he will bomb Oman if it gets in the way. See The War Today.

• Lebanon: Israel prepares for days of fighting on the Ali al-Taher ridge and kills two Hezbollah commanders. See The War Today.

• Gaza: Kushner tells Hamas there is nothing to negotiate about disarmament, then asks Israel to start the pullback. See The War Today.

• Likud: Some 140,000 members vote today on the slate the party takes into the 27 October election. See Inside Israel.

• Temple Mount: Jewish men pray from siddurim on the Mount for the first time. See Inside Israel.

• Reservists: A reservist takes his own life two weeks after a platoon retreat that volunteers, not the state, ran. See Inside Israel.

• Mecca pact: Trump congratulates a defense agreement three governments built because they have stopped counting on Washington. See Israel and the World.

• Seoul: Trump cuts the annual Korean exercise after South Korea declines to join the Iran war. See Israel and the World.

• Florida: Tomorrow's Republican primary in the sixth district carries a candidate running on his opponent being Jewish. See Israel and the World.

Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas are each on the other side of a negotiation, and each of them used the interval to build. Sixty days for Iran, fourteen years of tunnel under Ali al-Taher, ten months of Gaza ceasefire with no weapon handed over. What Washington is asking for in all three is a slower Israel, and what it offers back is a verification nobody has yet had to deliver. And 140,000 Likud members spend today picking who carries that argument into the next Knesset.

Today: what Iran built inside the sixty days, the ridge Israel now has to go under, and the fabricated quote that reached Netanyahu's podium.

Read today's brief

Hezbollah's answer to losing the Ali al-Taher ridge was an explosive drone into the engineering team standing on top of it, at half past two on Shabbat morning. Three soldiers went to Rambam, two of them on ventilators. Dozens of Radwan men are sealed in the tunnels underneath, the army is at high readiness for an operation to take the ridge, and Washington has told Beirut it can make that operation smaller but not stop it. Inside Israel the argument is about ground too — who polices Israelis in Judea and Samaria, the army or the police — and Likud's members vote tomorrow with the courts on their minds.

Flash Brief: The Day in 90 Seconds or Less

• Lebanon: A Hezbollah drone wounds three Yahalom soldiers on Ali al-Taher, and Israel kills two commanders in reply. See The War Today.

• Hormuz: The sixty days Washington and Tehran set aside expire tomorrow with no negotiation held and no crude moving. See The War Today.

• Gaza: Israel resumes strikes after a week's pause, and the Board of Peace tells it not to stop. See The War Today.

• Judea and Samaria: Katz orders a plan moving civilian law enforcement over Israeli residents from the army to the police. See Inside Israel.

• Likud: Some 140,000 eligible members vote tomorrow, and eighty percent of them name the legal system first. See Inside Israel.

• Manpower: Zamir has grown the combat force by tens of percent and is still 12,000 soldiers short. See Inside Israel.

• Turkey: Ankara turns the Mecca defense pact into permanent bodies and joint production of drones and electronic warfare. See Israel and the World.

• Colombia: Bogota quits the ICJ case, recognizes the Golan, and takes Israel's ambassador back. See Israel and the World.

• RSF: Reporters Without Borders deletes two terror-affiliated names from its Gaza journalist count and issues no correction. See Israel and the World.

• New York: A man storms Central Synagogue's bimah mid-service and faces fourteen charges, six of them hate crimes. See Israel and the World.

• Harvard: A federal judge throws out the Title VI suit and raises the standard for every case behind it. See Israel and the World.

• Yemen: Mocha port suspends operations after more than twenty-five missiles, and Riyadh weighs backing a Yemeni ground campaign. See Developments to Watch.

Two documents written in June were supposed to produce an act by now, and neither has. The Lebanon framework ties Israel's pullback to a disarmament nobody has started. The sixty days Washington and Tehran gave themselves run out tomorrow with no negotiation held, and Iran spent them putting fifty of sixty-nine tunnel entrances back into service. What is actually moving is physical — troops standing on the shafts at Ali al-Taher, and a police force Katz wants raised for a job the army cannot hand over until somebody applies Israeli law.

Today: what is sealed under the Ali al-Taher ridge, the sixty days running out on Hormuz, and Katz moving policing off the army.

Read today's brief

A few dozen Israeli criminals sealed two Palestinian homes shut on Sunday — with the families inside them. Holding them there for days. Israeli soldiers cleared the hilltop on Thursday and demolished what those men had built. Mike Huckabee, the American ambassador in Jerusalem, called them "Israeli terrorists." He was right. Tzedek isn't this.

"Settler violence" is a loaded term that, as we have argued extensively [and, I think, successfully], is more or less relegated to a few dozen extremist acting criminally. That we are now faced with a terrible attack and a further diminishing Israel's international standing and giving fuel to that fire? Talk about giving up the high ground — which is something I thought they were opposed to.

The Security Council met to argue that Israel cannot police this and somebody else must. Inadvertently, the UN more or less agreed with the logic of formal annexation, without saying it.

Keep this attack in mind. Condemn it (rightly). But don't let it cloud your judgment.

• The UN Security Council took up Judea and Samaria on Tuesday after Israeli criminals harassed Palestinians — dragging Israel into another imbroglio. Mike Huckabee called the men besieging two Palestinian homes at Qusra "Israeli terrorists," and called the siege "a horrific act of terror." Qusra is a Palestinian village south of Nablus, the two houses were sealed off from Sunday (with the families still inside them). He also claims the army and the police went in at his request — something government has not confirmed. The operation is not in question. Border Police took the tent down yesterday morning with Central Command chief Avi Bluth present, after word of it got out and dozens of Israelis got there ahead of the force. They came back today and demolished the structures at Qusra and Jalud. The Council's 10207th session put its own [correctly disputed] figures on the UN. What that session is asking for is jurisdiction — dismantle the outposts and run the prosecutions from outside Israel, on the incorrect premise that Israel will do neither. It enforces both already. Israeli soldiers conducted enforcement operations again this week. The criminals on that hilltop can be counted in dozens. Half a million Israelis live in Judea and Samaria, and it is Israelis who are building the case against those dozens.

Below the line: the week's deployable language — what to say when a reporter asks whether Israel is refusing the Gaza plan, how to answer the donor watching Britain draft its September package, the claims you'll field on Qusra and Zionism, and the traps that lose the room. Members read the full brief.

Unlock this week's Watchwords →

Katz stood on the Beaufort ridge yesterday and told the soldiers the army is not leaving Lebanon, Syria or Gaza, and Washington's answer came back in near realtime. The Ganim families set their caravans down this morning on ground the state emptied twenty-one years ago.

Flash Brief: The Day in 90 Seconds or Less

• Lebanon: Katz tells the Beaufort garrison the army is not leaving, and Washington objects within hours. See The War Today.

• Hormuz: Trump calls the blockade a wall of steel, and Tehran keeps the strait shut. See The War Today.

• Ganim: Caravans go up on the northern Samaria hill the state emptied twenty-one years ago. See Inside Israel.

• Draft: One arrest closes Route 4, and the Jerusalem Faction hands out yellow patches. See Inside Israel.

• Mecca pact: Erdogan wants the defense clause widened, and Riyadh blocks Egypt from getting in. See Israel and the World.

• Ankara: The Secret Service acts on Israel's missile warning, and officials then brief against the intelligence. See Israel and the World.

• London: Tehran orders British-Iranian dissidents onto anti-Israel marches, with a jailed relative as the lever. See Israel and the World.

• New York: A magazine lists Zionism beside xenophobia. See Israel and the World.

• Campus: The ADL puts the American campus problem inside the syllabus and the faculty senate. See Israel and the World.

• School boards: New Jewish groups organize at city halls and statehouses, outside the tax-exempt institutions. See Israel and the World.

Washington's rebuke went out with no name on it, and Beirut, which calls the demolitions a violation of international law, has spent a year declining to search the houses that would end them. The American story runs the other way. There the fight is over a magazine's terms of admission and a school board's harassment policy, and the institutions holding the community's money have been bringing statements to it.

Today: Katz builds for a long stay in south Lebanon, Border Police clear the Qusra outposts overnight, and New York Magazine files Zionism under bigotry.

Read today's brief

Israel cut the water to the tunnels under Ali Taher, and the resupply drones Hezbollah flies in overnight are coming down. Dozens of men are sealed in there. No Lebanese unit is coming for them. Three weeks into the first handover, the Lebanese army has photographed caches in the villages and left Hezbollah's own infrastructure alone. (See The War Today.)

Flash Brief: The Day in 90 Seconds or Less

• Gaza: The 99th Division fires at a sniper near the Yellow Line, the first strike published since the rules changed. See The War Today.

• Hormuz: Tehran makes ending the wars in Gaza and Lebanon the price of reopening the strait. See The War Today.

• Likud: The party's own tribunal stops one of Netanyahu's three reserved slots with the secretariat mid-vote. See Inside Israel.

• Levin: A recording has the justice minister counting ten High Court appointments inside the next Knesset's term. See Inside Israel.

• Qusra: Bluth takes the tent outside Qusra down himself, and a magistrate frees Dardik without conditions. See Inside Israel.

• Venezuela: Caracas restores consular relations seventeen years after Chavez cut them, and Washington cleared it first. See Israel and the World.

• Primaries: AIPAC's lane loses Minnesota and Connecticut in one night, and its endorsement is now the attack. See Israel and the World.

• Hasan Piker: Britain pulls the streamer's visa and Sanders vouches for him, and neither move reaches the stream. See Israel and the World.

• Influence: An Iranian operation writes the incitement against Netanyahu, and his own supporters do the distributing. See Israel and the World.

• New York: Mamdani's office picks the ten rabbis who get the hour, a week after he sat with Satmar. See Israel and the World.

• Jewish schools: A government reviewer finds Britain's Jewish head teachers losing whole weeks to security. See Israel and the World.

Rezaei's price for reopening the strait is an end to the wars in Gaza and Lebanon, and the party that would have to deliver it sits in Washington. Rome has now agreed how somebody would certify a disarmament nobody in Beirut intends to carry out.

Today: the men sealed under Ali Taher, the first Israeli fire past the Yellow Line under the new rules, and Levin counting ten court seats.

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"We look at what is actually happening, less at statements and declarations." That is Trump's Board of Peace, telling Israeli reporters that Netanyahu's rejection of the 15-point roadmap describes nothing Israel is doing — the targeted killings stopped, the roadmap being implemented by a government whose public position is that it refuses it. Israel's own defense officials and political echelon spent yesterday calling each other liars over who stopped the shooting. Washington has taken the Iran strike off the table until after November, and Jerusalem apparently is fine with it.

Flash Brief: The Day in 90 Seconds or Less

• Gaza: Trump's Board of Peace says Israel is implementing the 15-point roadmap its government publicly refuses. See The War Today.

• Iran: Trump drops further strikes for sanctions and the naval blockade until after the November midterms. See The War Today.

• Lebanon: Hezbollah's clinics and food parcels are back inside the one village Israel has handed over. See The War Today.

• Likud: Netanyahu reserves eleven of the top twenty-nine places six days before his party's primary. See Inside Israel.

• Rambam: Katz sends the IDF into a hospital's clinical file, and Israel's doctors close ranks. See Inside Israel.

• Colombia: Bogota recognizes Israeli sovereignty on the Golan and walks out of the Hague Group. See Israel and the World.

• Syria: The IAEA takes al-Kibar's leftover yellowcake off Damascus, on a schedule Jerusalem does not set. See Israel and the World.

• Carlson: Hunter Biden certifies Tucker Carlson's charge that "the Israelis" handed him the laptop story. See Israel and the World.

• Britain: The Palestine Solidarity Campaign triples its income and puts 1,468 councilors on a divestment pledge. See Israel and the World.

• Haverford: A settlement writes Zionism into the college's anti-discrimination rules, binding every professor it employs. See Israel and the World.

What is left to fight over is discretion: which names stay on a target list, and how many places 140,000 Likud members get to fill.

Today: the roadmap Israel is executing while it refuses it, an Iran pause that runs past the midterms, and Colombia on the Golan.

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Netanyahu turned the Board of Peace's 15-point roadmap down yesterday, twice. To which a US official answered that Washington has no problem with that — as long as Israel goes on restraining its attacks in Gaza. Of course, it has been restraining them since the beginning — to say nothing of the further restraint the past week or so. Tehran has put an end to the Gaza and Lebanon operations on its list of conditions for reopening Hormuz. Beirut won't come to the September round until the earthworks stop. Three negotiations, no Israelis in any of the rooms. And all three impact Israel.

Flash Brief: The Day in 90 Seconds or Less

• Gaza: Netanyahu rejects the 15-point roadmap Israel never signed, and Washington says it doesn't mind. See The War Today.

• Iran: Trump drops the strike for the blockade, and Tehran attaches the whole war to Hormuz. See The War Today.

• Lebanon: Israel shells the Ali Taher ridge while Beirut conditions September's round on the earthworks stopping. See The War Today.

• Elections: Gafni won't promise Netanyahu his seats, and neither bloc reaches sixty-one in last night's poll. See Inside Israel.

• Arab parties: Tibi breaks the Joint List over ninth place while Abbas prepares to seat a Jewish candidate. See Inside Israel.

• Syria: Russia's bases at Hmeimim and Tartus become "joint training" centers, and Damascus takes the pier. See Israel and the World.

• Mecca pact: Pakistan's defense minister points the new mutual-defense clause at Israel, and Ankara and Islamabad walk it back. See Israel and the World.

• OCHA: The UN's "settler violence" dashboard counts an attack on a Jewish shepherd, and 1,361 Temple Mount visits. See Israel and the World.

• London: Washington sanctions the Brotherhood's secretary-general, and Britain leaves him living beside two Jewish schools. See Israel and the World.

• Lone soldiers: Diaspora enlistment through Garin Tzabar runs a third above October 7, and France twentyfold. See Israel and the World.

Israel's own operations have become what other people trade with. Washington will live with the rejection while the strikes stay stopped, Tehran wrote an end to the Gaza and Lebanon operations into its conditions for reopening Hormuz, and Beirut wants the bulldozers off the ridge before it names a September date. Enforcement is the one thing Israel is still doing on its own, and it is what all three of them want it to stop.

Today: the Gaza rejection Washington shrugged at, Iran's six conditions for reopening Hormuz, and an election neither bloc is winning.

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Israel has signed nothing — not the roadmap, not the document on the force that would take the ground — and the sequence is running ahead of it regardless. Tehran spent the weekend attaching war reparations and an American withdrawal from the region to the price of reopening Hormuz, and the Revolutionary Guards said within hours that none of it turns on the Oman talks. In Mecca, Riyadh, Ankara and Islamabad signed a mutual-defense clause and published no text. Three days of paper, and not a line of it binds anybody to anything.

Flash Brief: The Day in 90 Seconds or Less

• Hormuz: Iran demands war reparations and an American withdrawal from the region before it reopens the strait. See The War Today.

• Gaza: Almost three years on, some four hundred of the October 7 attackers are still alive — the price of fighting around a civilian population. See The War Today.

• Lebanon: A second Hezbollah attack drone reaches Israeli troops, and Northern Command orders it unpublished. See The War Today.

• Judea and Samaria: Yinon Levi is charged over a route his excavator never should have cut, and the shot that followed a crowd and a hail of stones. See Inside Israel.

• Elections: Erdan and Edelstein launch a party without a name, and Segalovitz quits Yesh Atid for Ra'am. See Inside Israel.

• Mecca: Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan sign a mutual-defense clause with no published text, and the UAE stays out. See Israel and the World.

• Washington: The Senate passes Graham's sanctions bill, and the money to rebuild interceptor lines waits on the House. See Israel and the World.

• Canada: A federal survey has 95.7 percent of Jewish students witnessing Jew-hatred, and McGill faces 4,000 plaintiffs. See Israel and the World.

• Greece: Jerusalem tells Israelis to conceal Jewish identifiers before 36 protest locations open today. See Israel and the World.

• Home front: The cabinet moves a billion shekels into defense procurement, most of it out of tech investment. See Developments to Watch.

The Guards put a missile into an Emirati tanker while Muscat drafts a route, and Hamas is pressing Gazans to kill the militiamen the roadmap says it will have to disarm in any case. Israel's side of it rests on forces nobody has assembled — 150 Moroccans in tents six weeks out, and a shortlist Rome handed Washington to certify a disarmament Hezbollah refuses.

Today: Iran's price for reopening Hormuz, the October 7 hunt Israel stopped without saying so, and a fabricated quote that reached Netanyahu's podium inside eight hours.

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The week isn’t free of deranged claims and libels. Maybe next week? For now:

• Eight Arab and Muslim foreign ministers declared Israel in breach on Thursday. Hamas signed the American 15-point roadmap for Gaza on July 30. Israel did not. That text ties Hamas handing over its heavy weapons to an Israeli pullback in stages, and it requires Israel to stop military operations once the deal starts. Netanyahu rightly will not move at all. Israel holds over 60 percent of the Strip, the plan asks it back to the 53 percent it held in October, and he told the country "we did not agree to it. It was not our draft." The Board of Peace — the American-run panel that brokered the roadmap — sent envoys to him on Monday, then issued a statement putting withdrawal after disarmament and dropped the word "full" from its own terms. On Thursday Türkiye, Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE called Israel's strikes a clear breach of international law and of the peace plan. Qatar helped write the roadmap, signed that finding, and has blamed Israel for the delay.

In this Watchwords: the week's deployable language — what to say when a reporter asks why Israel won't sign a deal Hamas already signed, how to answer a donor watching eight British Jewish charities go under statutory inquiry, the claims you'll field on Ceuta and the Miller judgment, and the traps that lose the room. Members read the full brief.

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Two reservists are dead in a house nobody had checked, in a village Israel has held since March, and the scale of the answer is still being argued inside the government this morning. The narrow version went out within hours — an evacuation warning at Mansouri, then the 91st Division's fire brigade working weapons stores from the air and the ground. The army wanted more and is still pushing. Rome broke up three hours early the same afternoon, and at home the campaign has organized itself around who serves. We also have a new dossier out, part two of our Islam series (details below).

Flash Brief: The Day in 90 Seconds or Less

• Lebanon: A charge at Majdal Zoun kills two reservists, and the scale of Israel's answer is still unresolved. See The War Today.

• Hormuz: Two ships cross the strait, and Trump and Hegseth fight over what is left in the magazine. See The War Today.

• Gaza: Zamir promises a permanent hunt for October 7's planners, days after the signature moved to him. See The War Today.

• Elections: Illouz quits Likud for Liberman, Erdan launches tonight, and a haredi party forms behind real conscription. See Inside Israel.

• Ben-Gvir: Netanyahu tells the High Court the appointment stands, and a new party bids for the ministry. See Inside Israel.

• Energy: Israel and Gulf states are working a route to the Mediterranean that misses Hormuz and Bab el-Mandeb. See Israel and the World.

• Michigan: Harris raises money for El-Sayed within a day, and the pro-Israel Democrat loses his Detroit seat. See Israel and the World.

• Canada: October 7's defenders advised the national human-rights museum on the Nakba exhibit it opened in June. See Israel and the World.

• Federations: JFNA drops the consultant who told its next lay leaders to avoid the word "Zionism." See Israel and the World.

• Sbarro: Jewish leaders press Washington to get Ahlam Tamimi out of Jordan, twenty-five years on. See Israel and the World.

• Reserves: Katz stops the IDF from releasing the Gaza-border standby squads it calls superfluous. See Developments to Watch.

The decisions that matter today all got held over. Israel's cabinet hasn't fixed how hard it hits back in Lebanon, Washington is counting what's in its own magazine before it writes a target list, and the Gulf states are out shopping for a road around a strait Iran shut in February. The only one on a deadline is the decision Israelis take on October 27, and that one is about who serves.

Today: two reservists dead in southern Lebanon with the answer unwritten, Washington short of ordnance, and a haredi party running on the draft.

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If you’re looking for some more shabbat reading, we have a new dossier today:

Islam Is Plural, Within Real Limits

Islam’s internal arguments run along a few mappable fault lines — authority, geography, engineered state religions, mysticism, and rival renewals — each contested and each with an impact on the wider world.

Read the full dossier →