Israel Brief: Thursday, June 25
Trump offers the Lebanon job to Damascus and a New York primary makes “genocide enabler” the winning charge.
Shalom, friends.
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. See The War Today.
Syria offer: Trump floated empowering al-Sharaa to send Syrian forces against Hezbollah. Jerusalem opposes it outright. See The War Today.
Hormuz: Trump posted Iran’s denial of strait tolls while the IRGC threatened the new route and mines held traffic below normal. See The War Today.
Judea and Samaria: The Shin Bet found a 25-meter tunnel near a-Zaim as Iran runs the rebuild from Turkey in crypto. See The War Today.
The inquiry: The haredi parties get their exemption laws and vote first-reading for the government’s October 7 commission of inquiry. See Inside Israel.
Netanyahu: The prime minister left the stand after 98 hearings. The trial now accelerates to five sessions a week. See Inside Israel.
NATO invoice: Rutte read Italy’s classified base logs into Fox News, detonating a scandal on Meloni’s desk over Epic Fury. See Israel and the World.
The Hague: The ICC’s prosecutor faces a removal vote for misconduct while three of its judges sue Trump over sanctions. See Israel and the World.
New York: Mamdani-backed challengers retired two pro-Israel incumbents on a single charge — enabling genocide. See Israel and the World.
Brussels: Belgium indicted three mohels, and the Commission’s own antisemitism czar flew in to warn it outlaws Jewish life. See Israel and the World.
Below: the actor with the initiative this week leaves the question open and gets the other side to supply the terms of the answer. Qassem poses the withdrawal he demands as a concession he is granting because the talks let him. Trump turns the IDF’s restraint into the complaint that justifies handing Lebanon to Damascus. And a New York electorate lets the challengers’ charge become the vocabulary the count is now scored in. The party that benefits from the open question wins twice when its opponent provides the language for closing it.
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.
The War Today
The Army Seals Hezbollah Underground as Trump Offers the Job to Syria
The IDF cornered dozens of Hezbollah fighters in an underground complex at Tebnit, sealed the entrances, and sent the same message back through every mediator: surrender or be killed inside. Security officials reviewed the standoff against a feared kidnapping attempt and are treating the trapped cell as a pilot for clearing the area of armed men. Master Sgt. (res.) Basil Sweid z”l, 32, of Peki’in, a driver in the 7th Armored Brigade attached to the Golani combat team, was killed when his fuel tanker overturned near Rab El Thalathine before dawn, with a second soldier moderately wounded. Troops and aircraft hit two more Hezbollah men near the Ali al-Taher ridge after marking them an immediate threat. The fifth round of Washington talks closed its second day deadlocked over where a Lebanese Army pilot deployment would start and which positions Israel would vacate first, while Katz told a conference of mayors that the army stays in the security zone “even if there is an American demand” — adding there is no such demand yet. Reuters, citing a senior US official, reported Israel is pulling back from part of southern Lebanon with the Lebanese army set to deploy behind it, a senior Israeli official calling it a goodwill gesture to Beirut. The political echelon denies the report, and the IDF says it has received no withdrawal order yet. Trump, telling Fox the IDF “can’t do anything without knocking buildings down,” floated empowering al-Sharaa to send Syrian forces in to fight Hezbollah instead. Netanyahu called a closed security session on the prospect, which Jerusalem opposes outright.
Assessment: Israel built the 1985 security zone over again with the population pulled out — soldiers inside, civilians outside — and now holds it as the only enforcement clause it controls, which is why Washington is shopping the deeper job to a force that levels what it clears. The deconfliction cell we’ve tracked already seats Iran in judgment of strikes on Iran’s terror proxy. And Trump’s complaint that the IDF “can’t do anything without knocking buildings down” gets the restraint backwards: the IDF calls ahead, knocks the roof, and orders the evacuation before it strikes, and al-Sharaa’s men would do the same demolition with none of that [the buildings being where the tunnels are]. Qassem can demand a withdrawal “without an inch” because the talks let him pose it as the concession he is granting. The pullback Reuters describes, if it holds, comes off ground the IDF took these past days for exactly this purpose: seize the territory, then hand it back as the opening concession, Israel manufacturing its own bargaining chip. The men sealed underground at Tebnit are the version that doesn’t read out on a State Department podium.
Trump Posts Iran’s Tolls Away While the Mines Run the Strait
Trump posted on Truth Social that Iran assured him there are “no tolls, no insurance costs, and no other charges of any kind” on ships transiting Hormuz, warning that “negotiations would end, immediately” if the claim proves false. Ghalibaf, the parliament speaker leading the next round, called the memorandum “America’s declaration of defeat” and has said Iran will administer the strait and not return it to pre-war status. The IRGC threatened to fire on vessels using the new Omani-coast route that skips Iranian coordination. Roughly 20 million barrels of crude cleared the strait over the day, with the US energy secretary blaming Iranian mines for holding traffic below normal. Trump told Fox there is “no rush” on the IAEA inspections the deal promises, repeating that the enriched uranium is “buried” and may never be found.
Assessment: The principal who signed the deal is now reduced to posting a denial of the toll his counterpart confirms on the record. “No rush” on inspectors at sites Iran has already buried is the regime’s safest approach to the line since February, dressed as patience. The mines do not read Truth Social.
Iran Runs Its Judea and Samaria Rebuild From Turkey as Tunnels Surface
The security establishment assesses Iran is intensifying its effort to rebuild terror networks in Judea and Samaria, directing much of it from Turkey through crypto financing, overland smuggling, and remote training, with the IDF concentrating on the border and on stopping FPV-drone capability before it takes root. The Shin Bet’s Judea and Samaria district uncovered a 25-meter tunnel dug toward Israeli territory near the a-Zaim crossing east of Jerusalem and arrested two suspects — a Palestinian from al-Azaria and a resident of eastern Jerusalem — after forensic evidence including DNA tied them to it. Troops recovered digging tools, water bottles, gloves, and face masks at the site. Forces killed a 29-year-old man near Jenin during operations in the northern arena.
Assessment: The same buried-charge and tunnel grammar that turned Gaza into Gaza is being imported into the hills above the coastal plain, financed in crypto and run from Erdogan’s Istanbul a thousand miles past the targeting deck. A shaft sunk toward Israeli ground a few kilometers from the Knesset is the second front advancing under the floorboards while the eyes are on the fence. Iran lost the open war and is reinvesting where the IDF has the least room to operate and the loudest audience watching every raid.
Inside Israel
Coalition Moves to Seat Its October 7 Inquiry as Haredi Convoys Snarl the Highways
The Gerrer court sent slow-moving car convoys out of nineteen cities yesterday afternoon toward Military Prison 10, snarling Highway 6, Highway 1, Highway 4, and the Ayalon, with Goldknopf vowing to “turn the country upside down” and police detaining two men near Highway 1, one filmed pulling a pistol at protesters. Underneath the road map sits the settlement Netanyahu, Deri, and Gafni reached: the haredi parties get Basic Law: Torah Study, the arrest-freeze law, and the kashrut bill, and in return vote in first reading for the government’s bill to seat a commission of inquiry into October 7, with dissolution now pushed to July 15. Gafni told Netanyahu to his face the parties have no trust left, that the promised daycare subsidy never came and “you don’t understand the street.” Shir Matias, whose parents were murdered in Holit, and Haviva Itzikzon-Man, sister of the murdered Be’eri paramedic Amit Mann z”l, said the coalition is trafficking in their dead for political survival.
Assessment: The families’ grief and anger are more than justified; however, the alternative they are pointed toward — a state commission of inquiry — is chaired by a judge the President of the High Court appoints, which means the legal establishment picks the panel. But October 7 was a failure the executive and the judicial-legal guild share. The High Court and the broader guild are implicated in the decade of deferred warnings. A panel the Chief Justice selects therefore lets one implicated branch sit in judgment of a failure both branches own, and dresses the guild’s preferred venue as neutrality. The government’s commission denies the implicated judiciary the appointment monopoly the state-commission route hands it. And yet has the much the same problem from the other side. Half the country won’t trust the results from one and the other half from the other. A new mechanism is needed.
Netanyahu Ends 98 Hearings of Testimony as the Trial Accelerates
Netanyahu stepped down from the stand after ninety-eight hearing days across eighteen months in the three corruption cases, ending on a defense re-examination and a closing attack calling the indictment “ten years of hell” and a “political assassination” that “destroyed families” and “found nothing.” His lawyer Amit Hadad spent the final session back in Case 4000, the Bezeq-Walla affair, complaining the court’s limits had blocked the defense from addressing discrepancies between Netanyahu’s account and other witnesses. Judge Rivka Friedman-Feldman noted the objection was on the record. The court will move to five hearings a week, and the defense now calls its remaining witnesses.
Assessment: Ten years, ninety-eight days of testimony from a sitting prime minister moving between the witness box and the Security Cabinet, and the case still has not landed the corruption it promised. The delays, the venue contests, the evidentiary fights Hadad spent the last session relitigating in Case 4000 are the prosecution’s structural weakness on display. He called it “ten years of hell” and a “political assassination” that “found nothing,” and on the merits that is the plainest description of the proceeding on offer — the political weapon it was built as, hurried now to five sessions a week because the pace is the only thing the prosecution has left to show for a decade and, by some accouting, hundreds of millions of shekels.
Israel and the World
Trump Demands Loyalty From NATO and the Bill Lands on Meloni’s Desk
Trump told Mark Rutte at the White House he expects loyalty from allies and is disappointed in most of them, railing that Europe did too little in the war on Iran. Rutte, deploying flattery and gentle pushback, answered that the continent had been there all along, then disclosed the number that detonated in Rome: 500 US aircraft took off from bases in Italy for Operation Epic Fury, part of 4,000 to 5,000 sorties flown from European soil. Meloni’s government had told its own parliament Italy “neither supported nor participated in” the campaign. Crosetto now insists Rome authorized only “technical and logistical, non-kinetic” flights and called Rutte’s account misleading, while the opposition demands she explain the gap. Trump also volunteered that he personally kept Erdogan, Xi, and Putin out of the war, describing the Turkish president, who took Iranian missiles during it, as a “prime candidate” to have entered on Iran’s side. The same week, Washington opened a six-month review of its entire European military presence as it pivots toward Asia.
Assessment: The war is over and the invoice is circulating, and Europe is discovering the protection it bought costs a public accounting it never authorized. Rutte’s job was to keep Trump from walking, so he traded Meloni’s parliamentary cover for one night of presidential calm and handed her a scandal in exchange [the alliance’s senior diplomat read a host nation’s classified base logs to manage one bad afternoon]. A senior NATO officer put the leverage plainly: free American use of European bases is the single biggest argument against the drawdown, which means the bases the continent treats as its shield are the ones Washington values as its springboard.
The Court Holding Netanyahu’s Warrant Spends a Week Eating Itself
The International Criminal Court’s oversight bureau concluded that chief prosecutor Karim Khan committed serious misconduct and non-consensual sexual contact with a junior lawyer across his office, his residence, and official missions, and recommended his removal, sending the question to a July 24 vote of the 125 member states that needs 63 to pass. Khan, the prosecutor who sought the 2024 arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant on a starvation-as-warfare theory, calls the finding “unlawful, procedurally unfair.” The same day, three sitting ICC judges from Canada, Uganda, and Benin sued Trump in a Manhattan federal court, arguing the sanctions he imposed over those warrants are an illegal “financial death penalty” that bars them from banking, credit cards, and travel, and is designed to coerce them off the bench.
Assessment: The court that issued a warrant against a sitting prime minister for feeding two million people he was at war with now 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 [the institution that exists to try heads of state cannot presently process an Amazon order]. Khan’s camp spent a year hinting Jerusalem was behind the complaint, a charge even the Guardian could not make stick to the Malaysian lawyer who lived it.
New York Democrats Make “Genocide Enabler” the Winning Primary Verb
Mamdani-backed challengers swept New York’s Democratic congressional primaries, taking out two pro-Israel incumbents on a single charge their opponents ran as the central indictment: enabling genocide. Brad Lander beat Dan Goldman. Darializa Avila Chevalier, who helped lead the Columbia encampment, beat Adriano Espaillat in the district that holds the campus, and Claire Valdez took the open seat. Eli Northrup, endorsed by the mayor, unseated Rabbi Stephanie Ruskay in an Assembly race that put the right to protest outside synagogues on the ballot, and Jewish anti-Zionist David Orkin won an Assembly primary in Queens with JVP cheering a “champion for Palestinian freedom.” AIPAC absorbed the losses in the city and a win outside it, where its candidate Adrian Boafo took Steny Hoyer’s Maryland seat. Ritchie Torres held the Bronx 72 to 22 against a challenger who called him bought, and Thomas DiNapoli beat a primary opponent who promised to divest the state pension from Israel Bonds. Trump branded the winners “communists.”
Assessment: A Democratic primary electorate retired a sitting Jewish congressman for the same offense a Williamsburg barista charged him with last week, which is the partisan sort arriving at the count we said it would reach. AIPAC can still carry a seat where the Democratic establishment closes ranks behind a hand-picked protege, and cannot carry one in the city where “Zionist” has become the entry test. The diaspora’s largest community now lives under a mayor who runs the department that counts the crimes against it, with a congressional delegation thinning of the members who would have asked him about the count. The same week’s Quinnipiac numbers — a record 48 percent calling the country too supportive of Israel, 60 percent calling the Iran war not worth it — are the national electorate moving underneath the primary results.
Belgium Indicts Three Mohels and Brussels Calls an Emergency Meeting
Belgian prosecutors indicted three Jewish circumcisers, and the European Commission’s own antisemitism coordinator, Katharina von Schnurbein, used an emergency meeting to warn that outlawing brit milah would outlaw Jewish life in Europe. The case has opened a diplomatic rupture among Belgium, Israel, and Washington, and the European Jewish Association convened a parallel emergency conference in Brussels arguing the prosecution sets a continental precedent on a practice Jewish communities have observed for millenia.
Assessment: A European state has decided that the act every Jewish boy undergoes on his eighth day is now a matter for the criminal docket, and the Commission’s own czar had to fly in to state the obvious. The open question is whether von Schnurbein’s intervention is leverage or theater — whether the Commission can pull a national prosecution off the rails, or whether it files the warning and lets a Belgian court decide what Jewish life in Antwerp is permitted to include.
Briefly Noted
Frontline & Security
Jerusalem Post: Yossi Cohen has named, for the first time, the geography of the Mossad’s full-scale dress rehearsal for the 2018 Iran nuclear-archive raid — Africa, on a life-sized model of the Tehran facility, down to the safes that needed 3,600-degree torches to cut.
Ynet News: Twenty years to the morning, the IDF archive released the minute-by-minute logs of the Gilad Shalit abduction — the first 87 minutes from “soldier missing from a tank” to a confirmed kidnapping and the early fear he had already been moved into Sinai.
Arutz Sheva: Yahya Hosseini Panjaki, who ran the “Handala” group that posed as grassroots hacktivists and was in fact a front for Iran’s intelligence ministry — the unit cyber firms track as Void Manticore — died in the opening-phase Israeli strike on MOIS headquarters, an IRGC-linked channel now tying him to the operation’s leadership. His reach ran the regime’s wider grey-zone war: criminal gangs hired to hit Jewish targets in Spain, Britain, Australia and Sweden, a wiper attack on a Fortune-500 US medical-device maker, and hack-and-leak campaigns against Israeli officials, all of it the kind of act-of-war Iran only stops paying for when its operatives draw kinetic consequences.
Diplomacy & Geopolitics
JNS: Twin earthquakes killed at least 32 in Venezuela, and Jerusalem moved to dispatch an aid delegation with IsraAID, ZAKA and MDA mobilizing — the Foreign Ministry running disaster relief into a country whose government severed ties and opened an embassy in Ramallah.
Times of Israel: Colombia’s president-elect Abelardo de la Espriella told Sa’ar he will restore ties “like never before,” reversing Petro’s 2024 rupture and his “genocide” charge. He takes office in August and pledged to open an embassy in Jerusalem.
Jewish Insider: Acting DNI Pulte forced out Will Ruger, a defender of the 2015 nuclear deal and an opponent of the maximum-pressure campaign, from the office that runs the president’s daily intelligence brief.
Public Diplomacy & Media
Times of Israel: The share of Israelis who believe Washington weighs their interests fell to 68% in Pew’s new global survey, the lowest reading since 2013 and down twelve points from 2023. The poll closed before the US signed the Iran memorandum.
JNS: Wikipedia indefinitely banned co-founder Larry Sanger days after he filed a proposed project to curb the site’s bias against “disfavored” groups, Jews and Zionists among them. The encyclopedia that titles its article “Gaza genocide” removed the man asking it to show the receitps.
The JC: Palantir is suing Mayor Sadiq Khan to reverse his veto of a £50 million Met Police contract his office tied to the firm’s “ethics” — its work with Israel and US immigration enforcement.
Domestic & Law
Jerusalem Post: Rabbis and public figures have approached Yuli Edelstein and former justice minister Ayelet Shaked about a new vehicle for right-wing voters disillusioned with the coalition and modern-Orthodox Israelis outside Smotrich’s Religious Zionist Party, while Gilad Erdan resigned his Israel Aerospace Industries board seat citing “significant decisions.”
JNS: Noam Shapira was named director of Israel’s National Public Diplomacy Staff under Tzipi Hotovely, filling a post left vacant since January 2023. The apparatus meant to carry Israel’s case abroad spent two and a half years without the official whose job is to run it.
Economy, Tech & Infrastructure
Times of Israel: Switzerland opened talks with Israel, France and South Korea for a long-range air-defense system after delays in its US Patriot delivery, putting the Arrow and David’s Sling in the running for a European buyer. A “neutral” state shopping past Washington for interceptors is the export market the Iran war advertised.
Globes: Sanitaryware maker Hamat shut its Turkish subsidiary, the latest Israeli firm peeling off from Turkish industry under Erdogan’s trade embargo, with Teva, ICL and Netafim still operating there.
Arutz Sheva: Israel’s new Eastern Railway opens to passengers Sunday, a 64-kilometer electrified line running Hadera to Lod alongside Highway 6 that ties Samaria and the Sharon into the national network and adds roughly 30% to rail capacity. The infrastructure draws the line on the map the diplomatic process keeps insisting isn’t there.
Globes: Chipmaker Tower Semiconductor briefly became Israel’s most valuable company at a $37.7 billion market cap on the AI-infrastructure run, then fell nearly 11% the next day as chip stocks sold off, dropping back below Leumi, Elbit and Teva.
Developments to Watch
Northern Front (Lebanon / Syria)
CENTCOM commander lands tomorrow — Admiral Brad Cooper arrives in Israel to sit with Zamir and Katz on Iran, the northern front, and Hormuz, the same week the fifth Beirut round deadlocked and Trump floated handing the deeper job to Damascus. Cooper carries Washington’s withdrawal ask into the room where the army is recommending the line move the other way, and what he brings back sets whether the pilot-pullout pressure hardens into a demand inside the week.
Syria builds a wall on the Golan as Jerusalem watches its other flank — Syrian state media shows al-Sharaa’s forces erecting an iron barrier west of al-Rafid in southern Quneitra, while Israel assesses Damascus may already be moving toward Lebanon despite its denials. A regime Washington wants to deputize against Hezbollah is fortifying the Golan seam and edging toward the northern front at once, and the next physical step on either line forces the closed cabinet session to answer a move already underway.
Gaza & Southern Theater
Hamas rebuilds the launchers under the renewed quiet — The IDF struck and dismantled four rocket-launch positions Hamas stood up inside Gaza since the renewal, and detained an operative who approached the Kerem Shalom crossing.
Iran moves to fold Gaza into the Washington talks — Araghchi told Hamas’s Basem Naim by phone that Iran will raise Gaza in its US track and reaffirmed support for the group.
Regional Axis (Iran, Houthis, Militias)
US and Iranian technical teams reconvene in Switzerland Monday — Rubio confirmed the working-level meeting for June 29, the round Pakistan is mediating alongside Qatar. The teams arrive with the inspections, the buried stockpile, and the strait all unresolved and the principal already posting denials of his own deal.
Riyadh moves to host an Iran-Gulf reconciliation table — Saudi Arabia is expected to convene talks to repair Gulf-Iran relations after the war, a channel that seats Tehran with the monarchies and writes Washington out of the room. Riyadh takes the chair Doha usually holds, and a Saudi-chaired detente with the regime the US just signed is the realignment toward the war’s apparent survivor arriving at the address that matters most to Jerusalem.
Diplomatic & Legal
Europe moves to underwrite the Lebanese army before UNIFIL leaves — The EU’s diplomatic service circulated a proposal to train Lebanese forces, and the Netherlands is funding a new base and anti-terror instruction in the south.
The war’s invoice goes to Congress as the interceptor shelves run low — The White House formally asked Congress for $87.6 billion in Iran-war recovery, and Trump berated the missile makers for not replenishing stocks fast enough after Epic Fury, with a $35 billion Lockheed order already signed.
Home Front & Politics
Secular counter-protest threatens to seal Bnei Brak before Shabbat — The founder of Mothers at the Front said her group will blockade the entrance to Bnei Brak on Friday in answer to the haredi convoys, declaring “blockades will be met with blockades.” The draft fight crossing into reciprocal civilian blockade puts two crowds on the same roads hours before Shabbat entry, and the first contact between them is the moment the street stops being a one-sided demonstration the police can route around.
The week comes to a close with the army holding ground it cannot fire from, a coalition moving to seat an inquiry into a failure it shares with the bench that would otherwise pick the panel, and a New York primary electorate retiring Jewish congressmen for an offense a Williamsburg barista invented. This is a season in which every party who could close one of these questions has decided the open version pays better.
Shabbat shalom!
— Uri Zehavi · Intelligence Editor
With Modi Zehavi · Data + Research Analyst
P.S. Friday's Long Brief — The Tollgate State — is on a Palestinian state that no one intends to build and that everyone bills Israel for not finishing. It's for paid subscribers. If you've been meaning to upgrade, this is the one to do it for.
The relative who heard “the strait is reopened” and exhaled? Forward them the part with the mines.