Israel Brief: Sunday, May 31
The army crosses the Litani and takes Gaza to 70 percent while the talks, the courts, and the memoranda are still deciding whether to begin.
Shavua tov, friends.
One actor in this picture is answering when, and everyone else is still arguing whether. The 36th Division is on Beaufort Ridge for the first time in twenty-six years and Netanyahu has ordered Gaza control to 70 percent, while the Pentagon channel deadlocks, Tehran negotiates back the strait its launchers can no longer hold, and Brussels, the Hague, and Pretoria answer all of it with paper. The home front carries the bill the diplomacy will not — Safed and Karmiel back under sirens, a soldier lost to a drone on the ridge. The week’s disposition is sharpening on the one axis that matters: the field is moving faster than anyone negotiating against it can keep up.
⚡️Flash Brief: The Day in 90 Seconds or Less
The IDF crosses the Litani: The 36th Division takes Beaufort Ridge, the first Israeli hold on the fortress since 2000. See The War Today.
Hezbollah reaches Safed and Karmiel: The barrage stretches deepest since April, a direct hit on a Kiryat Shmona center, the north back under restriction. See The War Today.
Trump reopens Hormuz, holds the uranium clause: The memorandum lifts the blockade and defers the centrifuges; he refuses to sign on the one term that matters. See The War Today.
Netanyahu orders Gaza control to 70 percent: The disarmament clause Hamas signed and ignored, answered with terrain past the October line. See The War Today.
The Military Police resume evader arrests: The haredi street answers with stone-throwing, a base-desertion threat, and a plan to break the state’s economy. See Inside Israel.
Baharav-Miara charges Urich on a classified leak: The coalition closes ranks and reads the indictment as persecution days before the Comptroller vote. See Inside Israel.
Zamir tells the politicians to keep the army out of their fights: The Chief of Staff names the 12,000-soldier shortfall the coalition will not legislate away. See Inside Israel.
Treasury widens the blockade Trump is lifting: “Economic Fury” lists the Hormuz toll authority, the shadow fleet, and re-freezes the rapporteur Albanese. See Israel and the World.
The EU sanctions Nachala and Regavim as Smotrich flies to Washington: Brussels lists an NGO for petitioning an Israeli court; Smotrich signs the Isaac Accords fund. See Israel and the World.
A Times shareholder turns the Kristof column into a liability: A books-and-records demand puts the paper’s verification process on a discovery track with a stock price attached. See Israel and the World.
Mamdani protects the Israel Day parade he will not attend: His grand marshal walks it; 1,395 New York Jews and the first Muslim delegation answer by showing up under guard. See Israel and the World.
Below: why the next 72 hours are decided at Beaufort and not at the Pentagon table, the one move running underneath the Urich indictment that decides whether the October 7 report gets buried, and the shareholder letter aimed at the single node in the libel pipeline that has a stock price.
Read this edition as a contest of clocks. Almost everything in it runs on a deadline someone chose — a sixty-day nuclear window, Wednesday’s secret ballot for State Comptroller, five business days for the Times to open its books, a June petition debate in the Commons, a genocide case parked at 2029. The actors who profit from delay set the long clocks and wait, confident that paper outlasts. The ones with something to lose by waiting reset the short ones, on the ridge and in Gaza and at the Treasury desk, because a fact established on the ground is the only kind that does not expire. What to hold while reading below is which of these deadlines is real and which is theater, because the distance between the two is where the next surprise is already forming.
The War Today
IDF Crosses the Litani and Retakes Beaufort Ridge for the First Time in 26 Years
The 36th Division crossed the Litani over the weekend, securing Beaufort Ridge and the Wadi al-Saluki approaches roughly 18 miles north of the border, the first Israeli hold on the Crusader fortress since the 2000 withdrawal. Netanyahu, visiting the line with Katz and briefed by Northern Command chief Maj. Gen. Rafi Milo and 36th Division commander Brig. Gen. Yiftach Norkin, said forces are operating in Beirut and the Bekaa “across the entire width of the front.” The Air Force ran extensive support strikes ahead of the ground move, with artillery and armor behind it, and hit more than 135 targets in 24 hours across Tyre, the Bekaa, and southern Lebanon. Thursday’s strike on Beirut’s southern suburbs, the first near the capital in three weeks, targeted Ali al-Husseini, an Iranian-aligned militia missile chief, though the kill is still under review. Zamir, who told the Security Cabinet the equation now has to include bringing down buildings in Beirut and Tyre, called the damage “unprecedented”: 7,500 Hezbollah fighters killed since October 8, 2023, 2,500 of them since Operation Roaring Lion opened on February 28, and roughly a third of the prewar force gone. The IDF named seven senior field commanders eliminated in the past two weeks. Staff Sgt. Michael Tyukin z”l, 21, of the Givati Reconnaissance Battalion — an only son who made aliyah from Ukraine six years ago — was killed by a Hezbollah drone Sunday, days after Sgt. Rotem Yanai z”l, 20, of Givati’s 435th, was killed reaching a protected room.
Assessment: Beaufort is the dominating ground above the northern communities, and the stockpile the forty-five-day extension let Hezbollah harden north of the Litani is now being cleared by the 36th Division instead of by a memorandum Beirut cannot enforce. Zamir’s “no tweezers” line to the Cabinet is the operational read the envoys at the Pentagon are negotiating against: the generals are answering when, the talks are still asking whether. Senior officers concede the tactical win does not yet settle Hezbollah’s survival [the honest version, which is why it leads with the ridge and not a victory lap].
Hezbollah Stretches Its Barrage to Safed and Karmiel as the North Goes Back to Sirens
Hezbollah fired more than 65 rockets at IDF forces and another roughly 14 at northern communities over about twelve hours, alongside ten one-way drones and two anti-tank attacks, as the IDF braced for heavier fire in response to the Litani crossing. The range extended for the first time since the April ceasefire to Safed and Karmiel, with a direct hit on a Kiryat Shmona commercial center — nine or ten of some fifteen rockets intercepted, the rest landing after midnight when the shops were closed, which is the only reason the casualty line reads no injuries. Bathers fled the Nahariya beachfront under siren. The Home Front Command tightened civilian restrictions across the north through Monday. Overnight Thursday, Hezbollah rockets struck the Saint George’s Orthodox Church in the Christian village of Marjaayoun in southern Lebanon, and the IDF released footage establishing its forces were not operating in the area when the projectiles hit.
Assessment: Thirteen people have been killed on the Israeli side since the ceasefire “took effect,” and the barrage reaching Safed and Karmiel is Hezbollah pushing the cost of the ground operation onto the Israeli home front, the one front Beirut cannot be made to police. The church footage is the pre-emptive answer to a blood libel that writes itself — Hezbollah fires from and into a Christian village, and absent the IDF’s own imagery the projectiles would have been an Israeli airstrike on a house of worship by Friday’s wire copy [the IDF has learned to publish the camera before the caption arrives]. Qassem keeps the fire going because the reprisal is the only lever left that Beirut cannot be made to confiscate.
Trump Lifts the Hormuz Blockade and Holds the Iran MoU for a Tighter Uranium Clause
US and Iranian negotiators agreed a memorandum of understanding extending the ceasefire 60 days and reopening the Strait of Hormuz to unrestricted traffic, but Trump withheld approval after a Friday Situation Room meeting, demanding stronger terms on Iran’s enriched-uranium stockpile and saying “no money will be exchanged, until further notice.” He announced the US is lifting its naval blockade of the strait regardless, and Lloyd’s List data already shows a rising share of non-Iranian vessels, Singapore, UAE, South Korea, and Norway-flagged, transiting the waterway, with Oman pledged not to participate in Iranian tolling. The draft contemplates a roughly $300 billion international investment fund in Iran and defers the nuclear question to talks inside the 60-day window. Mojtaba Khamenei reportedly has still not signed off, a silence that reads in Tehran as non-approval, and Trump hardened the terms in response. The Supreme Leader has not been seen in public since the war. Iranian forces claimed warning shots at four vessels crossing the strait “without permission,” and the IRGC asserted it struck a US base in Kuwait — a claim that travels only on regime channels. Separately, US investigators reportedly assess that a Chinese shoulder-fired missile downed the American F-15E lost over Iran in April, and a Wall Street Journal report puts the UAE at dozens of coordinated airstrikes inside Iran during the war.
Assessment: The MoU reopens Hormuz, lifts the blockade, contemplates $300 billion in investment, and leaves the centrifuges for “later” — which is the Hormuz-only trade Trump’s red line existed to refuse, dressed as a memorandum, and his pause on the uranium clause is the one place he is still refusing it. Whether Mojtaba is actually withholding a signature, whether the regime is only reported to be, and whether the Supreme Leader is even alive to approve anything are the questions no one negotiating against Tehran can answer, with most of the regime said to be learning the terms from television. And a signature would settle little — there is no version of this regime that honors the uranium clause once the cameras leave. The probability of conventional escalation inside the regime’s own ceiling, which we have tracked at already more than fifty-fifty, sharpens upward again — Tehran is reconstituting faster than the talks can close, and the lifted blockade hands it back the waterway the strikes were meant to deny.
Netanyahu Orders Gaza Control to 70 Percent as the Money Line and Command Bench Keep Thinning
Netanyahu told the Jordan Valley Conference he has directed the IDF to expand control of Gaza from the current roughly 60 to 64 percent to 70 percent, well past the line the October framework drew for Israel to hold, citing Hamas’s refusal to disarm. The order followed Wednesday-evening strikes that killed Imad Aslim, deputy commander of Hamas’s Gaza Brigade, who led the Zeitoun Battalion’s infiltration into Israeli territory on October 7 and directed dozens of attacks on troops since, caught with northern-brigade commander Ezz al-Din Beik.
Assessment: The 70 percent order is the framework’s disarmament clause answered with terrain — the IDF is taking on the ground what Hamas agreed on paper not to make necessary, because the bench keeps refilling and the money line keeps moving until a strike reaches it. Aslim is the second senior commander off the Gaza Brigade in a week, and the field deck the war built keeps getting worked on the intelligence calendar inside the same ceasefire Hamas reads as a financing window.
Inside Israel
Haredi Streets Move From Road-Blocking to Mass-Desertion Threats as the IDF Readies Arrests
The draft confrontation escalated across the weekend as the Military Police resumed evader arrests after a weeks-long pause and the haredi street answered in kind. Three evaders were seized within hours. One was stopped for a routine check on Route 6 and identified by his license plate. A second was arrested when he arrived to collect the first man’s car and turned out to be an evader himself. Rabbi Zvi Friedman of the Jerusalem Faction’s more militant wing called protests for five in the afternoon Thursday. Demonstrators blocked Route 4 at the Geha interchange and Jabotinsky through Bnei Brak and Petah Tikva, sat on the Bar-Ilan junction in Jerusalem under signs reading “better to die a haredi than enlist,” and threw stones at police, one of whom was filmed being told “Itbah al-Yahud” — Arabic for “slaughter the Jews.” A separate Friday riot erupted outside the Kiryat Gat station after an avrech who came in to file a complaint was found to be an evader and handed to the Military Police. The Belz faction, the largest with men actually in uniform, threatened that “hundreds will not return to base” Sunday if he were not released before Shabbat, and Police Commissioner Danny Levy responded by ordering a probe of the arrest and opening a direct channel to the Military Police to free the man — not by backing his officers. Protesters had earlier tried to break into the home of the chief military-police officer, Brig. Gen. Yuval Yamin, and reached the Kiryat Ata home of the NCO responsible for security at Prison 10. Degel HaTorah’s Gafni ordered party officials in local authorities to halt all cooperation with the police, including community policing. Haredi MKs and rabbinical courts are now weighing a consumer boycott of large food companies (Tnuva is named) and blanket mortgage-payment deferrals, on the stated logic of forcing big firms to pressure the state to “calm the haredim.” The IDF has requested police support for mass arrests of evaders as early as next week.
Assessment: The haredi public are doing exactly what the absence of a law leaves it free to do — and the commissioner who ordered a probe of his own officers instead of the rioters who tried to storm a Military Police commander’s house has told the next mob what to expect. Levy is running the same catch-and-release reflex one level up, hunting the version of enforcement that lets the High Court say arrests happen and lets Gafni say no yeshiva student sits in a cell. The economic-collapse plan is the more honest signal: a community that has decided the answer to conscription is to break the economy of the state it will not serve [the Litvak mainstream’s own people now warning that “when there’s no law, they became far more extreme”]. Ninety thousand men outside the system is what the burden-not-shared diagnosis looks like once the IDF has read its shortfall into the cabinet record and the only thing scaling to meet it is the protest.
The Coalition Closes Ranks Behind Urich as the Charge Lands and the Comptroller Vote Nears
Attorney General Baharav-Miara filed to charge Jonatan Urich, a senior Netanyahu adviser who still works alongside the prime minister despite no longer being on the payroll, with allegations of transmitting classified information with intent to harm state security, possessing classified information, and destroying evidence, over the September 2024 leak of an IDF military-intelligence document to the German tabloid Bild. The document was passed to a foreign outlet to bypass the military censor and to push Israeli opinion against a hostage deal days after six hostages were murdered in Rafah. The Bild piece attributed it to Sinwar though it was written by a marginal Hamas figure. Nearly the entire coalition rushed out statements defending Urich and attacking the AG. Regev called the security-harm charge “absurd and detached,” “persecution of the right.” Justice Minister Levin sent “words of support” and called it “selective enforcement.” On Wednesday the MKs vote by secret ballot for State Comptroller between retired Justice Yosef Elron, who held opposition backing and until recently ten Likud votes, and Michael Rabilio, Netanyahu’s private attorney, with outgoing Comptroller Englman’s near-complete October 7 report cluster waiting on the winner’s desk.
Assessment: An office three years into filing against this government chose the dissolution window to charge the prime minister’s closest adviser. And the coalition answered by treating a classified-leak indictment as proof of persecution, and thus poisoning discourse and optics even further. The Comptroller race is the more consequential move running underneath it: whoever wins decides whether Englman’s October 7 findings get deepened or buried, which is why Netanyahu peeled renegade Likud votes off the retired justice and onto his own lawyer. Rabilio breaks the convention that hands the seat to a retired justice — the guild’s standard pick — and that break is the whole fight, not the personnel.
Zamir Tells the Politicians to Keep the Army Out of Their Fights
Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir used a command-and-staff graduation to push back against weeks of coalition fire — both over his repeated warnings of a severe combat-soldier shortage and over the punishment of a Nahal fighter who wore a “Mashiach” patch. “The IDF is challenged from the outside in, in attempts to drag it into political fights that are not its own,” Zamir said, “and here too we will stand as a fortified wall — doing only what is right, with statesmanship, responsibility, and humility.” He tied the line directly to the war’s toll on manpower, the order of battle, discipline, and “our families at home.” The push came after the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee chair Bismuth and Cabinet Secretary Fuchs claimed last month that Zamir backed a specific exemption framework, a claim the IDF Spokesperson denied, stressing Zamir had called only for comprehensive legislation to close a worsening combat shortfall. Zamir warned the cabinet in March that “the IDF is going to collapse into itself” and that “the reserves will not hold,” raising “ten red flags.”
Assessment: The Chief of Staff saying that the political system is trying to enlist his army into its quarrels is the manpower crisis arriving. The officer who has to find the soldiers is refusing to let the politicians [who will not pass the law to produce the necessary soldiers] recruit him as a prop in the fight over why. The patch storm and the disputed exemption-endorsement are the same maneuver: pin the IDF to a coalition position so the gap between the shortfall Zamir keeps reading into the record and the bill that answers it with a few hundred a year stops being the coalition’s to own.
Israel and the World
Treasury Runs the Pressure Campaign the Hormuz Memorandum Was Drafted to End
The Treasury and State Departments designated Iran’s new Persian Gulf Strait Authority, the body Tehran stood up on May 5 to charge tolls on shipping through Hormuz, as a counterterrorism target for funneling extortion proceeds to the IRGC. They also added Hong Kong front companies moving Iranian crude through the shadow fleet to China, eight more tankers, a procurement network led by Iran-based Ali Majd Sepehr that defrauded dozens of US technology firms through Dubai intermediaries to acquire spectrum analyzers and encryption hardware for Tehran’s defense sector, and a $15 million bounty on IRGC financing. Bessent named the campaign “Economic Fury” and put numbers on it — troops unpaid, Kharg Island shut, the currency in free fall, tens of billions in revenue cut off. Treasury also reinstated the sanctions on UN special rapporteur Francesca Albanese, the asset freeze and travel ban restored after a federal appeals court paused the lower-court order that had blocked them.
Assessment: The negotiation Trump calls unsatisfactory and the sanctions wave work two ends of one lever — Tehran is offered a memorandum that reopens Hormuz against a lifted blockade while Treasury widens the blockade by the week, which is what keeps the regime at the Doha table after the strikes stopped paying for themselves. The Albanese re-designation, landing in the same batch of Treasury notices, points the financial machinery at the lawfare node — the office that freezes shadow-fleet tankers now freezing the rapporteur who wrote the corporate-prosecution roadmap.
EU Sanctions Nachala and Regavim as Smotrich Takes the Isaac Fund Stateside
The European Union imposed asset freezes and travel bans on the Nachala Settlement Movement and its director Daniella Weiss, the Regavim NGO and director Meir Deutsch, Hashomer Yosh and Avichai Suissa, and Amana, the building cooperative tied to Gush Emunim — designating them “extremist Israeli settlers and organizations” under the bloc’s Global Human Rights Sanctions Regime for alleged abuses in Judea and Samaria. Regavim’s listed “crime” was filing a petition in the Israeli courts against a European Union structure built without permit at the foot of Herodium, a building an engineering assessment submitted to the court found a safety hazard. The package, agreed in principle three weeks ago alongside designations of ten Hamas leaders, lands the same week the Hague’s second-round warrants name Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, and the same week Smotrich travels to Washington to sign the Isaac Accords investment fund — Israeli capital and an Inter-American Development Bank lead, directed at Argentina, Paraguay, Honduras, Ecuador, and Chile. The International Court of Justice, separately, granted South Africa an effective 36-month extension in the genocide case, pushing Pretoria’s reply to November 2027 and Israel’s rejoinder to May 2029.
Assessment: Brussels sanctioned an Israeli NGO for petitioning an Israeli court and named the move human-rights enforcement, which tells you the listing is aimed at the act of contesting European facts on the ground in Judea and Samaria, not at any conduct toward Palestinians [Regavim’s lawyers read it correctly: the next target is the judge who rules their way]. The package was draftable months before it deployed, and it surfaced beside the ICC warrants because the EU sanctions and the Hague filings are one campaign deploying its prepared material on whatever trigger arrives. The answer Smotrich is carrying to Washington is the only register that costs that campaign anything — sovereignty financed and exported, the Inter-American Development Bank putting other states’ capital behind a fund the warrants were built to deter, while the Hague issues paper. The ICJ’s three-year extension runs the same play at multilateral speed: a genocide case Pretoria cannot afford to lose and cannot afford to try, kept open as a standing accusation that does its work without a verdict.
📚 Long Brief: The Long Brief: Judea’s Settlers — The narrative-warfare-over-settlements argument this Long Brief develops — the EU’s Area C construction, the contested legal record in Judea and Samaria, and the listing of the act of contesting European facts on the ground as the offense — is exactly the move Brussels makes in sanctioning Regavim for filing a petition in an Israeli court.
A Times Shareholder Turns the Kristof Column Into a Governance Liability
A beneficial shareholder of the New York Times Company, the National Center for Public Policy Research, has demanded the paper hand over documents on its publication of Nicholas Kristof’s May 11 column accusing Israeli forces of training dogs to sexually assault Palestinian detainees, and its May 21 follow-up. The demand, sent by Mark Goldfeder of the National Jewish Advocacy Center, invokes state law allowing shareholders to inspect books and records, and asks one narrow question: whether the company’s own verification, defamation-risk, and correction policies were followed, triggered, waived, or bypassed. It disclaims any interest in reporter notes, sources, or editorial deliberation. The company has five business days to permit inspection or face suit. The move lands the same week Guterres put the Israeli Prison Service on the UN’s conflict-sexual-violence annex beside Hamas, ISIS, and al-Qaeda, drawing condemnations from Danny Danon, first lady Michal Herzog, and World Jewish Congress-Israel’s Sylvan Adams, who called the secretary-general “morally bankrupt.”
Assessment: We’ve tracked the Euro-Med-to-Kristof-to-UN-annex sequence as a laundering pipeline — a claim that begins in B’Tselem dossiers and Middle East Eye detainee testimony, gets a Times byline, and ends as a citation in a UN report that “does not need to be true, it needs to be cited.” Goldfeder’s letter attacks the pipeline at the one node that has a fiduciary obligation and a stock price: the corporate governance that signed off on running an allegation Kristof himself conceded had no supporting evidence. The annex costs Guterres nothing with seven months left on a terminal tenure [the list was always going to outlive the man who signed it]. A document-inspection suit against the company that built the citation is a different instrument — it puts the verification process itself on a discovery track, where “we ran it anyway” becomes a board-level liability with a stock price attached.
Mamdani Protects the Israel Day Parade He Will Not Be Seen At
Tens of thousands march up Fifth Avenue today for Israel Day on Fifth, the largest pro-Israel parade outside Israel and the one event every sitting New York mayor has joined for sixty-one straight years. Zohran Mamdani is skipping it. His police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, a publicly observant Jew, will serve as grand marshal and walk it instead, telling reporters, when asked whether the mayor would send a representative, “It’s the mayor’s decision not to march. And it’s my decision to march with pride.” Tisch announced what she called the NYPD’s “most extensive” security operation ever for the parade, citing the surge in Jew-hatred and the protesters who have waved Hezbollah and Hamas flags across the city. Mamdani, who scrapped the IHRA antisemitism definition by executive order on his first day in office and vetoed buffer-zone protection for Jewish schools in April, said only that he looks forward to the event “occurring seamlessly and peacefully.” The day arrives against a letter from 1,395 New York Jews — including 76 rabbis and cantors, organized by Jewish Majority — demanding he condemn rather than merely “discourage” calls to globalize the intifada and back protective legislation he has so far blocked. Consul General Ofir Akunis says he has no intention of meeting the mayor and that Mamdani “is not wanted” at the parade in any case. A Pakistani-born interfaith activist, Anila Ali, will lead the first Muslim delegation ever to march. UJA-Federation bought 20,000 bags of Bamba to hand out along the route, answering the Park Slope co-op’s vote to boycott Israeli products with peanut snacks.
Assessment: Mamdani has found a posture that costs him nothing and concedes nothing — provide the permits and the officers the courts would have forced on him anyway, and stay home. The security he is “providing” is the security the law requires of any mayor for any permitted event, dressed up as magnanimity [as the Catholic League’s Bill Donohue put it, had Mamdani tried to deny a permit “he would have gotten a licking in court”].
Briefly Noted
Frontline & Security
Jerusalem Post: Prosecutors indicted two Jerusalem residents, Hussein Ghanayem and Abd al-Rahim Hamida, for planning to throw an explosive device at the Anatot base east of the city.
Diplomacy & Geopolitics
Jerusalem Post: Kataib Hezbollah — the group that killed three Americans in Jordan in 2025 — offered to “assume responsibility” for the drones, cruise missiles, and loitering munitions other Iraqi factions are supposedly surrendering to the state, and floated buying the weapons back itself. The handover routes the arsenal from one PMF wing to another and calls it disarmament.
Ynet: British prosecutors charged a Munich-based man with assisting Iranian intelligence after he allegedly hid a camera in a sock to surveil an Iran International journalist in London, the latest in a run of Tehran plots UK counterterror has disrupted since 2022.
Walla: Organizers of the “Global Sumud” Gaza flotilla filed an ICC complaint accusing Israeli commanders and officials of war crimes and genocide-related conduct over the April and May interceptions of their boats, and called on every Rome Statute member to do the same.
Public Diplomacy & Media
Jewish Insider: Ambassador Yechiel Leiter rightly doubled down on calling J Street “a cancer within the Jewish community,” telling 300 Reform leaders that the group’s push for an arms embargo and its amplification of the Kristof canard are “decidedly not pro-Israel.” He named J Street as the lobbying source behind 40 of 47 Senate Democrats voting for the embargo.
Times of Israel: Italy banned a July Kanye West concert in Reggio Emilia after the Modena and Reggio Emilia Jewish communities spoke out over his record of praising Hitler and trading in Nazi imagery, adding to cancellations in Britain, France, Poland, and Switzerland.
Algemeiner: Michigan Senate candidate Mallory McMorrow conceded on a primary debate stage that her party has an antisemitism problem, while rival Abdul El-Sayed answered the same question by reaching for “white supremacy” and accusing Israel of “genocide” and “apartheid” — the partisan-sort thesis really needs a dictionary.
Domestic & Law
Jerusalem Post: Former finance minister Moshe Kahlon was convicted Sunday on a securities-reporting count in the UnetCredit collapse, pleading to a suspended term, a NIS 180,000 fine, and an 18-month bar on serving as an officer of a public company. He admitted withholding from the board and the public, for five months, the irregularities he had been shown at the firm’s Nazareth branch while he chaired it.
Jerusalem Post: Agriculture Minister Avi Dichter signed eight northern-border forests into reserve status, locking 27,000 dunams against rezoning and development across the war zone the IDF is fighting back from.
Economy, Tech & Infrastructure
Jerusalem Post: Wix is cutting 20% of its workforce, CEO Avishai Abrahami blaming a shekel at a 30-year high — dollar revenue against shekel costs — and AI agents now absorbing roles that used to need people.
Algemeiner: Dozens of US refueling tankers have Ben Gurion running at a third of capacity, and Airports Authority chief Sharon Kedmi puts the two-month loss at 700 million shekels with up to three million passengers facing summer cancellations.
Jerusalem Post: Katz named the 2026 Israel Security Prize winners — a Rafael weapons system that was central to Roaring Lion, the Ofek 13 and 19 satellite array, a Unit 81 breakthrough, electronic-warfare systems credited with the air superiority over Iran, and a classified Mossad collection asset.
JNS: Leviathan’s annual capacity has run past forecast to 15.8 BCM after a third pipeline came online, though transport bottlenecks still cap the field until the Ashdod-Ashkelon line finishes in June and the delayed Nitzana line in 2028.
Culture, Religion & Society
Jerusalem Post: A Maronite Christian from a village fifteen kilometers north of the border tells the story of fleeing Hezbollah and finding refuge in Israel — one of the thousands the May 2000 withdrawal brought across, a reminder that the minorities Hezbollah hunts see the Jewish state as the safer ground.
Developments to Watch
Northern Front (Lebanon / Syria)
Pentagon channel deadlocks as the line moves — Israeli and Lebanese military delegations met directly in Washington, and the Lebanese side left disappointed after Israel refused to discuss a halt and pressed for a joint security committee in the south.
Hezbollah opens a Hebrew psy-war track as the IDF readies for heavier fire — Hezbollah launched a Hebrew-language messaging campaign against continued operations, modeled on the Hamas pre-deal playbook, while the IDF told northern communities to expect intensified rocket and drone fire and tightened Home Front Command restrictions through Monday evening.
Regional Axis (Iran, Houthis, Militias)
Iran reopens its underground launch sites mid-ceasefire — Footage reportedly shows Iran using bulldozers to reopen at least 50 entrances to 18 underground missile complexes sealed by the wartime strikes, moving launchers and missiles back into the mountain shelters.
US Hellfire enforcement runs against Tehran’s “direct action” warning — CENTCOM fired a Hellfire into the engine room of a Gambia-flagged tanker running the blockade toward an Iranian port, the fifth vessel disabled, as Tehran threatened direct action over the interdictions.
Iraq’s new premier forced to choose on the militias — A senior Iranian-backed militia commander was killed in a Baghdad car bombing as Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi faces direct US pressure to bring the armed factions under state control, with Kataib Hezbollah vowing to keep its weapons.
Yemen’s recognized government stands up an anti-Houthi naval force — Yemen’s internationally recognized government announced a new Saudi-backed naval force to contest Houthi control of the Red Sea and Bab el-Mandeb, with the Houthis and Iran condemning the move and threatening to escalate against shipping.
Diplomatic & Legal
An “Islamic emirate” is declared in a Damascus suburb — A self-proclaimed Islamic territory enforcing Sharia and rejecting Syrian civil law was declared in Arbin, in the Damascus suburbs, with al-Sharaa’s government issuing no clarification. Whether Damascus moves on it or lets it stand is the near-term read on how much of post-Assad Syria the center actually governs, on the flank Israel watches for the next axis foothold.
Home Front & Politics
The opposition turns the northern barrage into a no-confidence lever — Bennett and Eisenkot accused the government of reverting to “containment” after the direct hit in central Kiryat Shmona, recasting the renewed northern fire as a security failure the government owns.
The field is the only place this week where something was settled. Beaufort changed hands, the Gaza line moved, the money chiefs and field commanders came off the deck. Against that sits a memorandum that reopens a strait, a sanctions package that lists a petition, a genocide case kept open to 2029 without a verdict. The army cannot win the argument over why the law that would refill its ranks never passed, and it cannot make Beirut confiscate the reprisal that lands on Safed. What it can do, it is doing, faster than anyone negotiating against it can write it down.
— Uri Zehavi · Intelligence Editor
With Modi Zehavi · Data + Research Analyst
The relative who read “ceasefire” in a headline and assumed the north went quiet? Catch them up.