Israel Brief: Sunday, January 25
Rafah stays the lever as Hamas rejects disarmament and Israel readies the next phase. The Iran file keeps everyone “coordinating” while Tehran keeps killing at home and threatening abroad.
Shalom, friends.
Gaza’s “rehabilitation” crowd wants timelines, armed actors want immunity, and Israel is still expected to make everyone but itself happy. Rafah remains the hinge because it’s the one gate that forces outsiders to choose between calendars and coercion. Meanwhile, the situation with Iran remains tense and operationally busy, even without a confirmed strike indicator—so every secondary front is a candidate for distraction fire.
⚡️Flash Brief: The Day in 90 Seconds or Less
Gaza Line: Southern Command runs battle-prep as Hamas rejects weapons removal; Rafah remains the leverage fight. See The War Today.
Yellow Line: IDF completes four-kilometer tunnel dismantling and maps barrier grid with towers and sensors. See The War Today.
Northern Front: IDF strikes Hezbollah weapons-production site in Bir al-Sansal and infrastructure in the Beqaa. See Northern Front.
Iran Window: CENTCOM commander meets IDF leadership as Patriot, THAAD, tanker, and airlift cycles continue. See Bridge Section.
Judea & Samaria: Ramallah closure follows gunfire report near Talmon; Hebron sweep ends with arrests and rifles seized. See Developments to Watch.
Home Front: Joint List talks resume as January murders drive protests in Arab towns and a Tel Aviv rally. See Inside Israel.
West: France moves Muslim Brotherhood toward EU terror listing; U.S. presses Bolivia on IRGC designations. See Israel and the World.
Below: full operational analysis across Gaza leverage and tunnel reality, Iran decision friction and retaliation ladders, northern enforcement patterns, and internal-security governance stress.
Not much has changed since Friday. Things remain rather tense, and the Iranian mess looks like an operational coordination sprint, not a talking-point cycle. CENTCOM’s commander spent extended time with Israel’s top military leadership, while U.S. envoys keep the political lane warm with direct meetings with Bibi and his senior staff. The “insurance” layer keeps building: Patriot and THAAD deployments are positioned to calm Gulf partners who don’t trust their own air-defense math, while U.S. strategic lift and tanker rotations continue in a sustained rhythm rather than a one-night surge, with heavy transport arrivals stacking into the region and refueling assets cycling through European staging fields.
Tehran’s deterrence theater stays on script. UN-stage warnings of regional collapse. Claims of control over Hormuz—as a coercive bargaining chip. Officials boasting about missile and air-defense expansion since the last war cycle. Inside Iran, the repression layer is not alleviating. Credible reporting describes mass killing, mass detention, and verified chemical-weapon use against civilians. Israeli intelligence reporting presented to Washington—described as tangible evidence of executions—has reportedly sharpened internal U.S. arguments about restraint versus action, which is exactly where Tehran wants the fight: inside American hesitation, not inside Iran.
Israel hit Hezbollah’s weapons-production capacity and additional infrastructure in Lebanon, and it is re-investing in the eastern frontier—Jordan Valley positions, barrier upgrades, surveillance—because smuggling networks and drone trafficking don’t stay politely categorized as “crime.” Add the allied-intercept chatter (Britain, Jordan, UAE) and the unverified China-airlift claims, and you get Iran trying to exploit rumors ahead of indicators and panic offered as a substitute for power.
The War Today
Rafah Leverage Tightens As Hamas Says “No” And Israel Preps “Yes, War”
Southern Command has moved from ceasefire arrangement management into battle-prep. Commanders were briefed on a renewed campaign plan to disarm Hamas and demilitarize Gaza, and forces on the line have begun advanced preparation procedures. Hamas publicly declared it will not dismantle its weapons “as long as the occupation exists,” i.e., as long as Israel exists, which is probably the only honest sentence they’ve uttered in months. Along the Yellow Line, troops identified multiple terrorists who crossed, planted an explosive device, and moved to approach IDF forces. An Air Force strike removed the immediate threat. In the south, the 7th Brigade completed the dismantling of an underground tunnel route roughly four kilometers long with multiple underground rooms and weapons caches inside. Searches also located explosives, magazines, a bomb-making manual, several weapons, and five rocket launchers. The IDF is fortifying the Yellow Line as a de facto new border: a yellow concrete barrier line is being mapped and numbered, fixed surveillance towers are going up, and the IDF has built layered defensive belts—community defense along the Israeli side, a buffer strip roughly 800–1,000 meters inside Gaza, and the deeper Yellow Line belt—with permanent assets, engineering, intelligence, and rapid air support preplanned. The tunnel neutralization is continuing with deep sensors placed down to groundwater levels—amongst other techniques we don’t want to publicize. Meanwhile, Trump’s envoys arrived to press Netanyahu to reopen Rafah and starting “rehabilitation”—conveniently forgetting Israel’s red lines in the process (Ran Gvili z”l and Hamas’s weapons, for starters)—an exchange rate that translates into: Israel gives up leverage now, and maybe gets sympathy later.
Assessment: Hamas’s refusal to disarm isn’t a negotiating posture. It’s part of their mission statement. Their charter spells it out. The Israeli answer is already visible: the Yellow Line is being engineered into a border that assumes continued contact, continued tunnel discovery, and continued “immediate threats” that need immediate killing—not a peace dividend. Rafah remains the last external pressure valve. Opening it on a timetable designed by people who can’t seize a rifle is how Israel funds the next round while being told to applaud the “process.” As for Turkey and Qatar: you can try to bind adversarial influence into a framework, but really, you already know how that will work out. You’re not “testing” them—you’re laundering them. This is exactly the moderate-laundering mechanism we mapped in The Jihadist Continuum—governance language as cover for jihadist survival.
Inside Israel
Election Bloc Math Shifts As Arab Crime Wave Forces Unity
Israel’s election map is being redrawn by two pressures that do not wait for campaign slogans to be printed. Coalition arithmetic and internal security failure. Polling now shows Benny Gantz’s party clawing back above the electoral threshold, driven by a deliberately blunt “consensus government” pitch. He wants to end Netanyahu’s current coalition, but also refuses to return to narrow hostage-coalitions, and says he would join a national unity government even if Netanyahu assembles a narrow bloc—on the condition it excludes “extremists,” specifically Ben-Gvir’s party and dependence on Ra’am. Alternatively, Gadi Eisenkot is reported to be exploring a “big-tent” joint run with Lapid and Bennett—another merger attempt designed to outsize Likud and then stitch together a governing majority with additional partners. Separately, a new October 7–shaped political class is stepping out of the civic sphere. Yonatan Shamriz, a Kfar Aza survivor and activist whose brother was taken hostage and later killed during an escape attempt, announced he is entering politics, arguing civic influence has hit its ceiling—polling cited around him suggests a standalone list could clear the threshold and take mid–single-digit seats, with other bereaved and hostage-linked figures also exploring party routes. Meanwhile, Arab politics is consolidating under direct community pressure: Hadash, Ta’al, Balad and Ra’am signed an agreement to revive a Joint List framework—reportedly with a built-in option for Ra’am to split post-election—explicitly in the shadow of the surging crime wave. That crime wave keeps journalists writing headlines. Last night a 37-year-old man was shot dead in Nazareth as protests spread across northern Arab towns demanding police actually remove guns and dismantle gangs. Demonstrations included torchlit human chains and road-blocks, with clashes in Kafr Yasif and the arrest of a former mayor amid accusations of police violence. Organizers cite 21 homicide victims already this January, with a larger rally slated for Tel Aviv next weekend.
Assessment: Israel’s political system keeps “rearranging the furniture” as if a new seating chart produces a new house. It doesn’t. The same structural problems—coalition blackmail, institutional distrust, and internal security collapse in parts of the country—just get re-priced into new math. Gantz’s gambit is a confession that the center wants stability and a Zionist governing majority without being chained to either Ben-Gvir on one side or an Islamist veto on the other. That’s sort of fine—but it also signals that “unity” is now a brand used to launder paralysis. If you want to exclude who you consider “extreme,” do it. But do it pragmatically. Don’t cut out groups for PR wins rather than legislative wins. It is a dumb, short-sighted move to cave to international pressure on Smotrich or Ben-Gvir. It doesn’t accomplish anything but further empower those on their right—those that don’t get international observation since they keep to their domestic lane. Keeping in Smotrich and Ben-Gvir allow you to veto the Haredi draft dodging math. Eisenkot’s mega-list idea carries the usual merger risk: you don’t add voters, you just concentrate disappointments, and the first internal fight turns the “big bang” into a wet firecracker. October 7 survivors and bereaved activists entering the Knesset is not inherently virtuous, but it is inherently destabilizing to the old cartel—because they speak in moral debt, not committee etiquette. This is the constitutional vacuum and post–Oct. 7 governance failure in motion—institutions improvising legitimacy while the street demands results.
Israel’s Two-Speed Economy: Tech Windfall, OECD Stagnation, War Strain
Israel’s economic story is now openly split between headline triumph and baseline underperformance. Long-run comparative data using PPP-adjusted GDP per capita show real gains—rising from about $25,069 in 2005 to $55,766 in 2025—but also a stubborn relative stagnation inside the OECD. Israel has hovered in the lower tier of the distribution, with the top 10 now roughly a $75,000 threshold; over the same 20-year period, Israel’s cumulative improvement I trailing most peers in its 2005 cohort (with only crisis-hit Greece and Portugal doing worse), implying that matching the average growth of comparable non-crisis countries could have put Israel around ~$63,500 today—translated in the piece as an annual household gap of more than 81,400 shekels. Absent deep structural reforms, infrastructure investment, and human-capital upgrades across all sectors, “status quo” becomes a policy choice—made worse by war damage to the high-productivity workforce. And yet the high-tech engine is simultaneously throwing off astonishing numbers: 2025 saw more than $111 billion in capital deals (M&A, public offerings, etc.), with private funding at $16.7 billion across 801 rounds and M&A value at $82.3 billion. High-tech exports are cited at 56% of total exports, and output per employee rising even as employment dipped—AI-driven productivity gains rather than headcount expansion. Regional business links also deepened, with MENA-linked deals cited at $186 million, the highest since 2021. Energy security also quietly tightened: Israeli imports of Azerbaijani oil via Ceyhan reportedly hit a three-year high in 2025—up 31% year-on-year to about 94,000 barrels per day—underscoring the state’s ability to keep supply lines functioning even when politics is hostile.
Assessment: The “stagnation” diagnosis is a warning that Israel’s comparative advantage (human capital density) does not automatically convert into broad living-standard convergence unless the state stops dodging structural reforms and starts treating infrastructure and education as national-security assets, not ribbon-cutting props. The high-tech windfall numbers prove the country is still globally investable, but they also prove how narrow the real growth engine is—and how dangerous it is to let war strain, manpower fights, and emigration nibble at that engine.
Israel and the World
UK Holocaust Center Advances as Boycotts and Classrooms Punish Jews
A flagship Holocaust memorial and learning center cleared its last legislative obstacle this week after Parliament granted royal assent to the enabling bill, removing an old statutory block and opening the door to seek planning permission for construction in Victoria Tower Gardens—steps away from Westminster itself. In the same news cycle, contemporary Jewish life remains at risk. A previously-thriving Jewish restaurant chain in Belgium shut down after a two-year activist boycott campaign that began within days of October 7 with harassment, escalated into public blood-libel accusations (“blood on our hands”), and metastasized through radio and local pressure. In New York City, the mayor publicly opposed renewing five decades of municipal Israel Bond purchases even as the comptroller framed the bonds as an investment-grade, performance-driven fiduciary decision for roughly $295B in pension assets—turning a routine allocation question into an ideological purity test. And inside U.S. K–12 schools, survey data from hundreds of Jewish teachers shows antisemitism is now routine. Most respondents report being targets or witnesses at work—with nearly half citing Jew-hate coming from their own unions and anti-bias trainings which overwhelmingly omit antisemitism—leaving Jewish staff to absorb the “equity” industry’s blind spot while students learn, quickly, what society permits.
Assessment: Paging Dara Horn. The West is getting very good at commemorating dead Jews while disciplining living ones. A Holocaust center beside Parliament is a moral trophy. It costs nothing in enforcement. Nothing in institutional risk. And it polishes the UK’s national image. Meanwhile, activists can kneecap a Jewish business into closure, unions can launder ideology as pedagogy, and city halls can test-drive Israel exceptionalism as “prudence” without paying a social price—because the cultural algorithm says Jews are manageable and “Zionists” are fair game. The strategic implication for Israel is blunt: diaspora pressure is the external flank of the war. When Jewish life abroad is taught to feel conditional, Israel loses influence, donors, legitimacy buffers, and operational room. A memorial wall won’t stop that. Reciprocal cost will.
Saudi Arabia Reprices “Land For Peace” as Iran Weakens
A widening Middle East realignment is being described as the downstream effect of Iran’s weakening. Riyadh edges closer to Doha and Ankara even as Abu Dhabi deepens practical alliance with Jerusalem. Splitting the Gulf into two instincts—one that hedges with Muslim Brotherhood patrons, and one that invests in capability and shared threat recognition. Against that backdrop, a “peace for land” argument is gaining renewed interest. Reverse the stale formula of territorial concessions purchased on promises, and condition any Palestinian territorial gains on explicit acceptance of Zionism, abandonment of demographic warfare via “right of return,” and a genuine end to the eliminationist premise—especially as Gaza becomes a live test case under a U.S.-driven postwar architecture. In Europe, France’s parliament voted to move the Muslim Brotherhood toward EU terror designation—an overdue recognition that the “civil society” wrapper is often the delivery mechanism, not a rebuttal, for Islamist political warfare. Meanwhile, Israel keeps securing strategic supply lines even under political hostility—energy flows via regional corridors are rising, not shrinking—because states still buy what they need, even when they tweet what they feel.
Assessment: “Land for peace” worked as a sedative when Israel was underdeveloped and lacked overt strength — and when the Arab world still believed rejectionism was cost-free. Today, the only viable currency is proof of acceptance—and the Palestinians’ governing movements keep refusing the basic transaction. Recognize Israel’s sovereignty. End the war. Give up arms and the remaining hostage. Then talk borders. Gaza makes the reality unavoidable: committees can publish charters forever; Hamas vetos it with one sentence. Europe is finally, belatedly, noticing that the Brotherhood ecosystem is not a community club. Israel’s opportunity is to exploit the split: deepen the Abu Dhabi lane, harden the deterrence architecture, and treat Saudi hedging as negotiable. If Riyadh drifts into the Doha–Ankara orbit while the West keeps funding “process” and calling it progress, Israel will be asked to trade coercion for optics again.
Briefly Noted
Frontline & Security
The Times of Israel: Damascus says it has taken control of the al-Aktan prison in Raqqa from the Kurdish-led SDF, a facility holding ISIS-linked detainees.
Culture, Religion & Society
JNS: Manischewitz opened a national vote to pick two NCAA Jewish athletes for a limited-edition matzah box, with $10,000 prizes and a Hall of Fame tie-in.
Economy, Tech & Infrastructure
Times of Israel: Lebanon’s prime minister says the IMF is demanding changes to the “financial gap” rescue bill, especially clearer rules on who eats the losses from the 2019 crash. If parliament keeps stalling, Lebanon stays a cash-only zombie state—perfect terrain for Hezbollah patronage, smuggling, and permanent dysfunction on Israel’s border.
Diplomacy & Geopolitics
JNS: US House lawmakers introduced a bipartisan bill to update America’s strategy against captagon and other narcotics networks as trafficking adapts in Syria and beyond after Assad’s fall. Washington is treating narco-trafficking as strategy—and the money routes keep intersecting with Iran-backed proxies and Hezbollah.
Jerusalem Post: The Pentagon’s 2026 defense strategy calls Israel a “model ally,” pushes “peace through strength,” and demands allies carry more of the burden—while asserting Iran’s regional network has been badly degraded. Translation: more room for Israeli freedom of action and a sharper bill for every “partner” that loves US protection but hates paying for it.
Israel National News: Trump told the New York Post that a classified device nicknamed “The Discombobulator” helped disable Venezuelan defenses during the January 3 raid that captured Nicolás Maduro.
Ynet: Spain’s refusal to meet new NATO defense spending targets and its embargo on Israeli defense goods (and fuel transit to Israel) is straining alliance logistics and irritating Washington. Madrid is trying to run virtue-signaling foreign policy on an alliance credit card, and NATO’s southern flank doesn’t need another strategic freeloading problem child.
Developments to Watch
Judea & Samaria
Ramallah Closure Tightens Arteries — IDF imposed roadblocks and a closure on Ramallah after reported gunfire near Talmon/Eyn Kinya; searches continue.
Post-Hebron Revenge Cycle — After the Jabal Johar sweep (14 arrests, rifles seized), expect the ego-repair phase: IED attempts on access roads, lone-gunman bursts, and stone ambushes on patrol routes once forces thin. They don’t generally forgive humiliation.
Northern Front (Lebanon / Syria)
Hezbollah Industry Gets Burned — IDF struck a Hezbollah weapons-manufacturing site in Bir al-Sansal and additional infrastructure in the Beqaa. Israel is widening “ceasefire enforcement” beyond the border strip.
Gaza & Southern Theater
CMCC Oversight Quietly Expands — CENTCOM commander Brad Cooper’s Israel visit is paired with a congressional delegation tour of the CMCC overseeing Gaza. Washington is building a supervision layer that will soon come with “requests”—corridors, timelines, and restraint lectures—backed by American rank on the ground.
Regional Axis (Iran, Houthis, Militias)
IRGC–Army Ground Forces Sync — Iran’s Army and IRGC ground-force commanders signed a cooperation memorandum and are selling “unity” for a crisis. When Tehran starts advertising internal cohesion, it’s usually because they fear fractures.
Chinese Airlift Claims To Tehran — Arab-media and OSINT claims say China flew roughly 16 military cargo aircraft into Tehran delivering gear. If confirmed, it’s Beijing hedging against regime instability while helping Tehran harden defenses—expect denials, then more quiet flights.
Diplomatic & Legal
Bolivia Terror Listing Pressure — The Trump administration is pressing Bolivia’s new government to expel alleged Iranian spies and designate IRGC/Hezbollah/Hamas as terror groups.
Home Front & Politics
Airlines Blink Before Governments — ITA airways canceled night flights to Israel through January 27. Airlines read threat math. Watch for more carriers shifting to daylight-only or suspending service.
Washington’s push to open Rafah and start “rehabilitation” before leverage is collected is the same old error of money first, control later, and surprise when Hamas treats it as a resupply grant. In the north, Israel’s message is unambiguous—production sites and logistics infrastructure stay targetable even when Beirut files optimistic paperwork.
The next few days are about whether Washington translates assembled reach into an order or keeps stretching the runway while Tehran massacres even more of its own people and dares the region to blink. Either way, expect proxy activation attempts, cyber noise, and civil aviation disruptions. If Gaza’s managers demand openings before disarmament, treat it as the admission it is: they want Israel to surrender the lever that still works.
— Uri Zehavi · Intelligence Editor
With Modi Zehavi · Data + Research Analyst
Gift this to the person hearing “Hormuz control” and picturing diplomacy, not mines with branding—consider it civic hygiene.