Israel Brief: Monday, May 25
Washington drafts a framework that leaves Iran’s missiles and proxies standing, and the only enforcement actually running is the IDF doing it by hand.
Shalom, friends.
The framework Washington walked back over the weekend would end the war Israel fought without touching the two arms that made Iran a regional threat — the missiles and the proxy network. One of those proxies killed another Israeli in the north this weekend. At home the government that prosecuted the war cannot pass a single line of a conscription bill, and the haredi parties just handed it back rather than sign it, putting the country on the road to a September election.
⚡️Flash Brief: The Day in 90 Seconds or Less
Iran framework leaves the threats standing: Trump walks back a “largely negotiated” MOU that reopens Hormuz and the oil but touches neither the missiles nor the proxies. See The War Today.
Another soldier falls to Hezbollah drones: Sgt. Nehoray Leizer z”l, killed by FPV drones as Zamir readies a deeper fight. See The War Today.
Qassem rejects disarmament, praises the drones: Hezbollah’s chief calls Washington a dishonest broker and urges Lebanese to topple their own government. See The War Today.
An October 7 attacker eliminated in Gaza: The IDF kills a Zeitoun sniper who infiltrated Zikim, and clears three weapons caches near the Yellow Line. See The War Today.
Haredi parties kill their own exemption bill: Landau orders Degel HaTorah to neither vote for it nor pass it, pushing the realistic date to September 15. See Inside Israel.
The army is 12,000 soldiers short: Tayeb’s gap widens toward 17,000 by January 2027 as the IAF quietly opens a third haredi technician track at Tel Nof. See Inside Israel.
Spain beats the activists it sent, then condemns Israel: Madrid summons Israel’s ambassador over the flotilla as its own police club the returnees at Bilbao. See Inside Israel.
Grosskopf tells Levin the shortage is his own doing: The Court gives Levin until Tuesday on two district benches as the election freezes the appointment window. See Inside Israel.
Somaliland sites its first embassy in Jerusalem: Sixteen capitals call it “null and void” while refusing to recognize the republic they demand answer to Mogadishu. See Israel and the World.
CPJ scrubbed six terrorists off its journalist list: The watchdog deleted the names in the weeks before Kristof cited it as respected, then filed the corrections late. See Israel and the World.
Australia names the IRGC behind the synagogue attacks: ASIO’s chief testifies Tehran ran the Sydney and Melbourne arsons through local proxies. See Israel and the World.
Below: what a Likud MK meant calling the deal good for “every year and a half or two years,” why the dead exemption bill now drives the election timeline instead of the other way around, and the watchdog caught mid-scrub on the count the Times printed.
The framework on the table buys Tehran an oil revenue stream and a reopened Strait while leaving the missiles and the proxies it spent a generation building. The home front is its own contest: an army 12,000 bodies short, a yeshiva world that will not concede the principle, and an exemption nobody will put their name on six weeks from a vote. What ties the diplomacy to the draft fight is the gap between what the paper promises and what the ground delivers, and along the confrontation line that gap is measured in the seconds the new advance-warning system buys against a drone that hunts at night.
The War Today
The Iran Framework Leaves the Missiles and the Proxies Standing
Trump told Netanyahu on Saturday night the US and Iran had “largely negotiated” a memorandum of understanding, then spent Sunday walking it back on Truth Social — negotiators instructed “not to rush,” “time is on our side,” the naval blockade staying “in full force and effect until an agreement is reached, certified, and signed.” The reported framework has Iran disposing of its highly enriched uranium and reopening the Strait of Hormuz in exchange for the US lifting the blockade, with a sixty-day no-tolls window through Hormuz and some mine-sweeping while a nuclear agreement is deferred to later talks. Tehran’s Pakistan-routed counter still demands unrestricted oil sales, an end to the war on Hezbollah, US withdrawal from the region, and release of frozen assets. Mojtaba Khamenei reportedly signed off on the broad framework from a bunker reachable only through a courier network so layered that even senior officials cannot locate him, which is the regime’s stated reason for the latency in its own answers. Netanyahu posted that Trump assured him any final deal dismantles Iran’s enrichment facilities and removes the enriched material, and that Israel keeps “freedom of action against threats in all arenas, including Lebanon.” Senior IDF and Jerusalem officials called the emerging text “a bad agreement” — it touches neither the ballistic-missile program nor the proxy network, and the Lebanon clause could fence in the one front Israel is actively fighting.
Assessment: The framework buys Tehran a sanctioned-oil revenue stream and a reopened Strait while leaving intact the two arms that make Iran a regional threat — the missiles and the proxies it has spent a generation building. The probability of resumed conventional strikes we have tracked sliding upward now meets a counter-pressure: a Gulf bloc that does not want $250 oil before the US midterms, and a White House that would rather sign than strike. A Likud MK admitted Israel will have to go back at the missile stockpiles “every year and a half or two years,” which is the deal’s actual half-life stated as a maintenance schedule [the “peace” that schedules the next war]. The clause that matters most to this section is the Lebanon one, and Netanyahu has already extracted Trump’s word that it does not bind the IDF.
Another Soldier Falls to Hezbollah Drones as Zamir Readies a Deeper Fight
Sgt. Nehoray Leizer z”l, 19, of Eilat, a combat engineer in the 601st Battalion of the 401st “Ikvot HaBarzel” Brigade, was killed when a Hezbollah explosive drone struck the armored vehicle his force was operating in near Kafr Dabel in south Lebanon — he had been wounded in the knee hours earlier and went back in rather than leave his unit, and was a month from a planned visit home. Leizer is the eleventh soldier to fall since the Lebanon ceasefire was declared and the twenty-third since Roaring Lion began. Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir convened a Northern Command assessment in Safed, approved fire plans for continued combat “deep inside Lebanon,” and said the IDF stands ready to resume intensive operations against both Hezbollah and Iran — though the political echelon has not signed those plans off, in part over the Iran talks. Over the day the IAF killed four operatives entering a terror site, eliminated a fighter on a motorcycle near troops, dismantled a hundred-meter tunnel with four hideout rooms in the Mount Dov sector, and struck weapons-manufacturing infrastructure in the Beqaa and Tyre. Sirens and false drone-infiltration alerts ran through Kiryat Shmona, Yiftah, and the Upper and Western Galilee. The Home Front Command will begin issuing advance warnings for rocket and drone fire from Lebanese territory as early as Tuesday, after years of northern pressure. On Hezbollah’s “Resistance and Liberation Day,” Naim Qassem rejected disarmament as “extermination we cannot accept,” called Washington a dishonest broker, urged Lebanese to take to the streets and topple their own government, and praised the FPV drones that he said leave Israel “dizzy.”
Assessment: The arsenal degrades by hand at the cost of soldiers like Leizer z”l because Beirut will not disarm Hezbollah and the framework’s text was supposed to compel what Beirut cannot. Qassem naming the FPV drones on the same weekend one of them killed another Israeli teenager is the clearest statement of what this “ceasefire” is from the other side of the line — the strikes are the only fire-control regime actually running, and the drones are Hezbollah’s. The advance-warning system is a real improvement and an admission: along the confrontation line it buys residents several seconds, which is the honest measure of how little standoff the north has left against this threat. Zamir has the plans; the political echelon is holding them inside the Iran calendar, which is exactly the linkage the IDF warns the deal will harden [a Lebanese drone operator does not pause for a memorandum being drafted in Washington].
IDF Kills an October 7 Attacker and Clears Gaza Weapons Caches
Israeli forces eliminated Louay Hisham Mahmoud Basal, a sniper in Hamas’s Zeitoun Battalion identified by intelligence as having infiltrated the Zikim base during the October 7 massacre and as actively planning new attacks on troops, in a precision strike inside the ceasefire’s terms. Over twenty-four hours the IDF struck and destroyed three Hamas weapons-storage facilities in central Gaza holding anti-tank missiles, RPGs, long-range weapons, explosives, and combat vests, with secondary explosions indicating large stored quantities. The strikes hold the Yellow Line where Hamas stages for cross-line attacks. Lebanese and Gaza health authorities reported civilian deaths from Israeli fire over the same period, including a strike in the Nuseirat camp. Those figures travel through ministries that, like Hamas, do not separate combatants from civilians, and the IDF did not confirm the incidents.
Assessment: Basal is the standing logic of the ceasefire-as-fire-control reading we have run since November — the October 7 target deck can be worked on the intelligence calendar, with the IDF picking the hour, without leaving the agreement’s text. The caches matter more than the count: anti-tank missiles and long-range weapons staged near the Yellow Line are the rearmament the framework is supposed to be freezing and is not. Whoever Doha eventually elects to the political bureau inherits a Gaza wing being disassembled cache by cache while it waits.
Inside Israel
Haredi Parties Kill Their Own Exemption Bill, Pushing the Vote to September
The haredi parties told Netanyahu on Sunday evening they will not advance the draft-exemption bill, and Rabbi Dov Landau instructed Degel HaTorah’s MKs to neither vote for it nor work to pass it before the election. Bismuth had been set to publish the version for second and third readings that morning; by nightfall the rabbis had killed it. October 27 is now off, September 1 is gone, and September 15 has emerged as the realistic date, with Degel HaTorah pushing September 8 and Deri’s Shas holding for the 15th. Likud claims it has the 60 hands to pass the bill anyway over the same March text the rabbis already rejected, while Deri works behind the scenes to publish a version so he can tell his base he tried. Yaakov Margi left Shas after 23 years, the second senior Shas departure this month after Aryeh Arbel. Brig.-Gen. Shai Tayeb has the army 12,000 soldiers short, 7,500 of them combat, widening toward 17,000 by January 2027, and the IAF opened a third haredi technician track at Tel Nof the same week. UTJ moved to file a separate bill cutting the sentences of jailed draft evaders whenever the prison fails to meet their religious needs.
Assessment: The bill was never legislation the coalition wanted on the books, and the haredim now know it, which is why they handed it back rather than sign their names to a statute they expect to collapse into a farce. Landau does not trust Netanyahu and will not give him another exemption to dangle, so the haredi leadership is running on the position that the representation worked and the prime minister did not. The arithmetic the bill was meant to paper over now drives the calendar: an army 12,000 bodies short, a yeshiva world that will not concede the principle that learning Torah substitutes for serving, and an exemption nobody will put their name on with an election six weeks out. The IAF quietly stood up its third haredi technician track at Tel Nof the same week the Knesset proved it cannot pass a single line on conscription — the integration the army needs is happening on the tarmac while the rostrum argues about whether it should happen at all.
Herzog Smears Judea and Samaria While Spain Beats Its Own Activists
At the Jerusalem Unity Prize ceremony, President Herzog condemned what he called a “wave of terrible violence carried out by an anarchist mob” in Judea and Samaria and warned that abuse of detainees, however contemptible, crosses a line — aimed at Ben-Gvir over last week’s video of him taunting bound flotilla activists at Ashdod. Ben-Gvir answered that “a president who calls hundreds of thousands of citizens beasts is not fit to be president,” and his Otzma Yehudit colleague Yitzhak Wasserlauf walked out of the hall. The fallout compounded: the Group of Eight Arab-Islamic states condemned Ben-Gvir, France barred him from entry, and Canada and Spain summoned Israel’s ambassador. Then Spanish police were filmed clubbing the same returning flotilla activists with batons at Bilbao airport, and Sa’ar’s Foreign Ministry summoned Spain’s chargé d’affaires to ask why Madrid finds its voice on Israel within hours but loses it when its own officers are the ones swinging the batons. Reuters separately carried fresh activist claims of beatings and sexual assault in Israeli custody, which the prison service denies and Reuters itself could not verify.
Assessment: Herzog has it backwards. A sitting president stood on a stage built for unity and branded hundreds of thousands of Israeli citizens an “anarchist mob,” lending the office of the head of state to the same vocabulary Israel’s enemies use to delegitimize the communities of Judea and Samaria — the red line crossed at that ceremony was his. Ben-Gvir’s video was still an own goal, the victimhood footage the flotilla crowd sailed for and got for free, though what it actually shows is detainees humiliated and entirely intact [to be sure being zip-tied on a dock is likely unpleasant — fortunately, I’ve not encountered that. However, economy class on El Al may worse, and people survive that too]. Madrid sent provocateurs to break a lawful blockade [with drugs and condoms rather than the promised aid], condemned Israel before they had even landed, then had its own riot police beat them on the Bilbao tarmac — when a government clubs its returning heroes at the airport, it has rendered the verdict on them no one else needs to add to. The Reuters sexual-assault claims arrive uncorroborated, denied, and unverifiable by the wire that ran them, the kind of allegation that laps the planet before the denial reaches the lobby.
Grosskopf Tells Levin His Judge Shortage Is His Own Doing
The High Court held its third hearing on petitions demanding Levin convene the Judicial Selection Committee, and Justice Ofer Grosskopf told Levin’s private counsel it was “strange that the minister offers solutions to a problem he created himself,” noting Levin has refused to convene the committee for 16 months while vacancies climbed to 51 and head toward 67 by year’s end. Levin’s affidavit says he has already advanced nearly 200 appointments by consensus and now offers only temporary judges for the Beersheba and Haifa district courts, where a quarter of the bench sits empty. The justices pressed for permanent appointments, declined to issue a binding order, and gave Levin until end of Tuesday to say whether he will fill the two district benches in cooperation with the committee. The election timeline closes the window further: candidate names must be gazetted 45 days before the committee can vote, and ordinary appointments freeze once the campaign period opens.
Assessment: The committee Grosskopf wants convened is the one the judicial-reform package was written to rebalance, so the Court pressing Levin to staff it under the pre-reform composition is a move inside that fight — the deadlines are the legal guild reaching for the bench it cannot win at the ballot box, dressed as administrative concern for two understaffed courts. Levin is buying time inside a structure the reform aims to replace, and the dissolution does the work the Court would not. The Court’s reluctance to issue a binding order shows it wants the outcome without owning the confrontation, so it bargains for two benches it can claim as a win while leaving the 67 vacancies to whichever coalition takes office. Levin has chosen to wait, and next Tuesday decides whether he gets to keep waiting.
Israel and the World
Sixteen Capitals Condemn Somaliland’s Jerusalem Embassy
Somaliland will site its first embassy in Jerusalem, with Israel reciprocating in Hargeisa — the second leg of a recognition exchange begun in December when Israel became the first UN member to recognize the breakaway republic. The mission becomes the eighth embassy in Jerusalem. The foreign ministers of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Qatar, Jordan, Turkey, Pakistan, Indonesia, Djibouti, Somalia, Oman, Sudan, Yemen, Lebanon, Mauritania, and the Palestinian Authority answered with a joint statement calling the step “illegal and unacceptable,” a “flagrant violation of international law,” and reaffirming that '“East Jerusalem” is occupied Palestinian territory whose status no measure can alter. [I wonder what these regimes have in common? Hmm.] Somaliland’s first ambassador to Israel, Mohamed Hagi, said political pressure would not replace “constructive engagement,” and that the relationship rests on “mutual interests.”
Assessment: Sixteen governments invoked the territorial integrity of a Somalia that does not govern Somaliland to void a building decision they have no standing to reach — most of them refusing to recognize Somaliland as a state in the same breath they demand it answer to Mogadishu [a “null and void” with no court, no enforcer, and no member willing to spend anything on it]. The recognition-for-Jerusalem trade is the cleaner deal Israel has: Hargeisa needs Jerusalem more than Jerusalem needs Hargeisa, and a partner that needs you signs and stays.
CPJ Scrubbed Six Terrorists Off Its Journalist List Before Kristof Ran
The Committee to Protect Journalists deleted six names from its running list of “journalist casualties” in Gaza between March 29 and May 7, the weeks immediately preceding Nicholas Kristof’s May 11 Times column accusing Israel of systematic sexual violence against Palestinian security prisoners. HonestReporting’s Salo Aizenberg surfaced the removals. All six were terror combatants — a member of Hamas’s Jabalia Battalion, an Islamic Jihad fighter, a commander in the Nasser Salah al-Din Brigades, and three other known jihadists. CPJ added the six to a “clarifications and corrections” page only after Aizenberg flagged it, and still identifies them as civilian journalists. Kristof’s column cited CPJ as “a respected American organization.” Its casualty list was already shown in 2024, by British reporter David Collier, to be virtually identical to a Hamas-supplied roster.
Assessment: The watchdog that brands itself a protector of journalists quietly edited its own evidence in the weeks before its number was needed in print, then posted the deletions to a corrections page only when it got caught [which is the confession, just filed late]. This is how a count built off a Hamas roster reaches the New York Times opinion desk scrubbed of where it came from — the laundering we’ve been reading on the Kristof piece all month, now with the source caught mid-scrub. CPJ has not retracted, and the Times has not revisited [except to stand by it] the column its own sourcing rested on.
Australia’s Spy Chief Names the IRGC Behind the Sydney and Melbourne Attacks
Australia’s intelligence chief Mike Burgess told the Royal Commission into the Bondi Beach massacre that ASIO concluded the IRGC was behind the firebombing of a Sydney kosher restaurant and the arson at Melbourne’s Adass Israel synagogue, the finding that drove Canberra to expel Iran’s ambassador in August. Burgess testified that Jew-hatred left unchecked after October 7 was normalized and “gave more permission for violence,” escalating from intimidation to direct targeting of people, businesses, and houses of worship in the months before the December attack that killed fifteen Jews at a Hanukkah celebration. He said Tehran was probably behind more attacks ASIO could not pin down, working “their network of proxies and agents to do their bidding, and that is to bring harm to Jewish people wherever they are in the world.” In London the same week, a suspected Iranian handler was caught on Telegram offering cash to organize anti-Israel demonstrations and post antisemitic material, running the same account Israeli prosecutors tied to a Holon man recruited to photograph IDF bases.
Assessment: Another Western intelligence service has publicly admitted what every European and Anglosphere Jewish community already lives with: the firebombings and the synagogue arson are Quds Force operations run through expendable local proxies, the same Iranian hand al-Saadi names in the US federal docket. Defending Jews in Sydney and Hendon is counterterror work against the axis Israel is fighting in the Beqaa, and Canberra reached that read only after fifteen funerals [the price of two years treating Iranian intelligence ops as community-relations spikes]. Burgess’s “wherever they are in the world” is the operating premise, and the London Telegram recruiter is the live demonstration that the same account reaches the diaspora street and the IDF base in one motion.
Briefly Noted
Frontline & Security
Jerusalem Post: The IRGC’s Aerospace Force bought a Chinese satellite antenna for its drone program through a UAE front company, routed into Bandar Abbas aboard a vessel that spoofed its own GPS to hide the run.
Diplomacy & Geopolitics
Arutz Sheva: Slovenia’s newly elected Janez Jansa recorded a video greeting the residents of Judea and Samaria, and has already branded his predecessor’s recognition of “Palestine” illegal — an EU member reversing the travel bans and arms embargoes of a year ago in the span of one election.
Algemeiner: A Bahraini court handed nine defendants life sentences for collaborating with the IRGC on espionage and “terrorist acts,” the courtroom end of the Gulf roundup that pulled in 41 IRGC-linked suspects earlier this month.
Public Diplomacy & Media
Algemeiner: Trump posted an AI-generated image of a US drone hitting an Iranian vessel, captioned “Adios,” while his own team runs the ceasefire talks meant to stop him ordering the real one.
JNS: Paris mayor Emmanuel Gregoire will ask the city council in June to grant honorary citizenship to Palestinian “civilians and journalists” as an “act of peace,” filing it alongside Kyiv and Nagorno-Karabakh and folding October 7 into a tidy “two tragedies.” [Give them citizenship too and just be done with it.]
Domestic & Law
Israel Hayom: The Chief Rabbinate reopened its ordination exams to women for the Cheshvan sitting, complying only because Bagatz forced it after the first women’s exam ran four hours late. Rabbinate insiders are already setting up the next round — fail the women, then litigate the grading.
Israel Hayom: Hundreds of pirate wells and illegal tap-ins to Mekorot’s pipelines across Judea and Samaria are draining the mountain aquifer, and MK Avichai Boaron warns Netanyahu that enforcement bodies have neither the manpower nor the legal cover to stop it.
Economy, Tech & Infrastructure
Ynet: The shekel hit 2.88 to the dollar, which UBS now calls the world’s strongest currency, and that strength is what turns Yaron’s rate decision today into the harder call — deputy governor Abir is already floating a return to FX intervention if inflation slides under the 1% floor.
Globes: A Phoenix Financial study finds the average Israeli household earns only about 80% of the income needed to buy an average home, and a quarter-point cut barely moves the monthly payment — the supply-and-income problem the interest rate cannot fix.
Globes: Veeva Systems, the $26-billion US life-sciences software giant, acquired Israeli clinical-trial data startup Yonalink, closing the deal despite the Iran war it began with a cold approach to the founder.
Culture, Religion & Society
Times of Israel: Maxim Herkin, freed in October after more than two years in the Gaza tunnels, has published “Coming to Light,” built from a diary he kept in captivity while hiding from his captors that he was an IDF reserve captain and quietly gathering intelligence on them.
JNS: Tamar Steinberg took gold and Shahar Tibi silver at the European Windsurfing Championships in Portugal — an Israeli one-two on the podium while half the sporting world spends its energy trying to keep Israelis off it.
Jerusalem Post: Herzog handed the 2026 Jerusalem Unity Prize — established in memory of Eyal Yifrah, Naftali Fraenkel and Gil-Ad Shaer z”l, the three boys Hamas abducted and murdered in 2014 — to the Israeli Scouts, the city of Eilat for absorbing the displaced, and Rabbi Yonatan Reiss for routing haredi men into IDF service.
Developments to Watch
Northern Front (Lebanon / Syria)
Ground advance north of the Litani — Field reports place IDF ground forces pushing forward at two points in the south, near Yohmor al-Shaqif above the Litani and at Hadatha, with strike volume over the past day roughly double the daily average.
Hezbollah claims night-vision attack drones — Hezbollah has begun flying explosive drones fitted with night-vision optics. An after-dark strike capability takes away the cover of darkness the north relied on, and the Home Front Command’s new advance warning buys seconds against a threat that hunts through the night.
Regional Axis (Iran, Houthis, Militias)
Trump’s Abraham Accords ask rides on the deal closing — On Saturday’s conference call Trump told Arab and Muslim leaders that if the Iran deal lands he wants their states in the Abraham Accords, and the leaders without ties to Israel went silent, per Axios. Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Pakistan are the names Graham is already calling the accession that would make the deal historic.
A thirty-day US force presence is the deal’s only floor — The emerging text reportedly keeps American forces near Iran for thirty days and conditions Hormuz reopening on the US lifting its blockade inside that window. Thirty days of US presence is the entire enforcement mechanism on a framework that touches neither the missiles nor the proxies, and the count starts on a signature that keeps slipping.
First tankers transit Hormuz on Iran’s terms — Two tankers carrying oil and gas left the strait for Pakistan and China along the route Iran’s navy directed, and Tehran’s Khatam al-Anbiya command says the supreme leader’s new mechanism for the strait leaves “no place for foreigners.” Vessels now clear Hormuz by Iranian coordination before any agreement is signed, which sets the precedent the reopening clause was supposed to negotiate away.
Iran claims it downed an Israeli reconnaissance drone — Mehr reports Iranian air defense brought down an Israeli Orbiter over Bandar Abbas in Hormozgan and recovered the wreckage, a single Iranian-source claim Israel has not addressed.
Diplomatic & Legal
Beirut fears Hezbollah will bring down the government before Friday — Lebanese political sources tell An-Nahar they expect Hezbollah to collapse the cabinet and kill the disarmament talks before they reach Washington, and Rubio has accused the group of trying to drag Lebanon back into chaos.
Home Front & Politics
Haredi crowds storm the Oz military police base — In yet another chillul Hashem, dozens of haredi protesters tried to break into the Oz draft-enforcement station in Jerusalem overnight after a suspected deserter was arrested, slashing the tires of three police cars before Special Patrol units pushed them back. Apparently, they do have time to fight — just not for the state it protects them it seems.
The regime Netanyahu went to war to topple is still standing, still enriching, and now negotiating its oil revenue back, and the one front Israel is actively fighting is the one the framework’s Lebanon clause was drafted to freeze. Zamir has the plans for a deeper fight and the political echelon is holding them so the Iran talks can run, which is the linkage the IDF warns the deal will harden. The integration the army needs is happening on the tarmac at Tel Nof while the Knesset proves it cannot pass a single line on conscription, and the strikes in the Beqaa are the only fire-control regime actually running while everyone else drafts the one that is not.
— Uri Zehavi · Intelligence Editor
With Modi Zehavi · Data + Research Analyst
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