Israel Brief: Thursday, June 25
Trump offers the Lebanon job to Damascus and a New York primary makes “genocide enabler” the winning charge.
Trump’s answer to buildings coming down in southern Lebanon is to hand the demolition to al-Sharaa’s Syria, a force that would flatten the same ground with none of the warning calls, roof-knocks, and evacuation orders the IDF places before it strikes. Tehran banks every front-loaded clause of the memorandum and still threatens shipping. And in Jerusalem the coalition moves to seat a contested commission of inquiry into October 7.
⚡️Flash Brief: The Day in 90 Seconds or Less
Tebnit: The IDF sealed dozens of Hezbollah fighters underground and told them to surrender or die inside.
Syria offer: Trump floated empowering al-Sharaa to send Syrian forces against Hezbollah. Jerusalem opposes it outright.
Hormuz: Trump posted Iran’s denial of strait tolls while the IRGC threatened the new route and mines held traffic below normal.
Judea and Samaria: The Shin Bet found a 25-meter tunnel near a-Zaim as Iran runs the rebuild from Turkey in crypto.
The inquiry: The haredi parties get their exemption laws and vote first-reading for the government’s October 7 commission of inquiry.
Netanyahu: The prime minister left the stand after 98 hearings. The trial now accelerates to five sessions a week.
NATO invoice: Rutte read Italy’s classified base logs into Fox News, detonating a scandal on Meloni’s desk over Epic Fury.
The Hague: The ICC’s prosecutor faces a removal vote for misconduct while three of its judges sue Trump over sanctions.
New York: Mamdani-backed challengers retired two pro-Israel incumbents on a single charge — enabling genocide.
Brussels: Belgium indicted three mohels, and the Commission’s own antisemitism czar flew in to warn it outlaws Jewish life.
Across the fronts, the actors with the initiative keep declining to spend it. The ICC runs on deputies while its prosecutor fights a removal vote and its judges sue the President of the United States to keep their credit cards. A New York electorate hands its largest Jewish community a hostile mayor and a congressional delegation thinning of the members who would have questioned him.
Today's Israel Brief reads a week in which everyone who could close a question has decided the open version pays better. The flash bullets give you Tebnit, Hormuz, the October 7 inquiry, the New York primaries. The full edition is where it lands: why Trump's plan to deputize al-Sharaa's Syria against Hezbollah gets the IDF's restraint exactly backwards, why a commission of inquiry the Chief Justice picks lets one implicated branch judge a failure both branches own, and why a stolen launcher and a shaft sunk toward Jerusalem are the second front advancing under the floorboards.
The mines do not read Truth Social.
The Israel Brief is the Mitzpe Institute's read on Israel and the region — most mornings, Sunday through Thursday. More at mitzpe.org.