Israel Brief: Tuesday, February 24
Tehran buys days. Beijing buys Iran's survival. Hamas buys uniforms.
Shalom, friends.
The Trump ultimatum expires this week, and the question of whether it was a countdown or a negotiating posture is about to be answered for everyone. Iran is not waiting passively — it is spending, rearming, and embedding. The Russia MANPADS deal is a three-year project. The Chinese anti-ship missiles are imminent. Gaza’s “transition” is proceeding on schedule — unfortunately that schedule belongs to Hamas rather than Jerusalem. And inside Israel, a coalition that can’t hold eight Likud votes on a VAT exemption is about to face a conscription bill. This doesn’t really suggest resolution on any front.
⚡️Flash Brief: The Day in 90 Seconds or Less
Iran Rearms: Russia delivers Verba MANPADS under a €500M deal; China anti-ship missile transfer near completion. See The War Today.
Strike Window: Trump’s 10-day ultimatum expires this week as Poland, Germany, Japan, and Serbia order citizens out of Iran. See Developments to Watch.
Hamas Embedded: Leaked files confirm al-Qassam commanders placed in Gaza ministries; IDF warned Netanyahu in January. See The War Today.
PIJ Rising: Islamic Jihad fills Hamas’s operational vacuum in northern Judea and Samaria, deepening Iran’s foothold. See The War Today.
Coalition Fractures: Eight Likud MKs voted against Smotrich’s VAT order and warned they’ll break on conscription too. See Inside Israel.
Corbyn’s Blood Libel: Former UK Labour leader broadcast IDF organ-harvesting claims from Al-Shifa’s Hamas-linked director. See Israel and the World.
Buchenwald Protest: Anti-Zionist group plans demonstration at Nazi death camp on liberation anniversary, accusing the memorial of “genocide denial.” See Israel and the World.
Modi Address Wednesday: Supreme Court President Amit excluded again; opposition threatening boycott of Knesset session. See Inside Israel.
Below: theater-by-theater operational analysis, proxy rearming logic, coalition arithmetic, and the decisions that have to land in the next 72 hours.
These aren’t simultaneous crises by coincidence, but a set of actors each calculating that we’re in the moment to move. Iran is rearming because it was hit and expects to be hit again. Hamas is embedding because the political window is open and the U.S. isn’t looking closely enough. PIJ is recruiting because Hamas left a crack open for them—and Iran foots the bill until it becomes due for Israel. The coalition is fracturing because the war could no longer mask the underlying centrifugal forces. All in all? Opportunism—against a constrained defender.
The War Today
Iran Rearms on Two Fronts as Strike Window Shortens
Iran signed a €500 million contract with Russia in December for 500 Verba MANPADS launch units and 2,500 more missiles—with deliveries phased from 2027 to 2029. This purchase is a direct response to the air-defense attrition Israel inflicted during the June war. The Verba is infrared-guided, capable of engaging cruise missiles, low-flying aircraft, and drones. Simultaneously, Iran is near completion of a separate deal with China for CM-302 supersonic anti-ship cruise missiles (290-kilometer range, sea-skimming flight profile, designed to defeat shipborne intercept systems). Deputy Defense Minister Massoud Oraei traveled to Beijing personally as talks entered final stages last summer — a visit previously unreported. Iran is also in concurrent negotiations for Chinese surface-to-air systems, additional MANPADS, anti-ballistic weapons, and anti-satellite systems. This lands as two U.S. carrier strike groups — USS Abraham Lincoln and USS Gerald R. Ford, together carrying 5,000 personnel and 150 aircraft — are assembling within strike range. Khamenei publicly threatened to sink the U.S. carriers—apparently they’re on his mental radar. Tehran rejected the latest U.S. nuclear offer and floated unspecified “moderate concessions,” with a written proposal reportedly pending. Poland has issued an emergency evacuation order for its citizens in Iran, warning windows to leave could close within hours or days.
The arms architecture behind today's deals didn't materialize after June — it was already built. Axis in the Shadows is the structural map.
Assessment: The Russia deal is a future problem — deliveries begin 2027, meaning those Verbas don’t change this standoff’s math. The China deal is a present one. If CM-302s transfer before any strike, Iran gains a carrier-killing option, and the U.S. naval armada currently serving as leverage becomes a liability. Beijing understands this. China wants Iran functional, dependent, and pointed at American power—but it doesn’t want to risk a direct confrontation with the US. The cascade of acquisitions (MANPADS, anti-ship, SAMs, anti-satellite) reflects an Iranian military leadership that has studied June and concluded the answer is quantity, layering, and distributed lethality. Israel’s June strikes bought time temporarily. That’s now being purchased back, with Chinese credit.
PIJ Moves Into Hamas’s Shadow in Judea and Samaria
Palestinian Islamic Jihad has accelerated recruitment and propaganda operations throughout Judea and Samaria (especially in the north) as Hamas — absorbed by Gaza’s political and military costs — has reduced its operational and financial footprint in the territory. PIJ has deepened alliances with decentralized armed gangs, most notably Brigade 313 in Jenin, an Iran-backed outfit named after a Shiite messianic number, which has been described in Arabic media as an affiliate of the al-Quds Brigades. Unlike Hamas, PIJ has no governance pretensions, no political wing, and no need to balance armed resistance against administrative legitimacy — factors that make it both more useful to Iran and harder to deter. PIJ’s recruitment now runs heavily on financial incentive, accelerated by the freeze of work/entry permits following October 7, which left an estimated half-million Palestinians unemployed. Analysts at FDD assess counterterrorism pressure is “waning” and the group is resurging.
Assessment: Hamas’s constraint created space, and PIJ filled it — not because PIJ is uniquely strong, but because Iran still has cash and a mission. The decentralized gang-alliance model is the specific threat. It comes with no leadership node worth targeting, no political calculation worth appealing to, no ceasefire logic that reaches an entity whose program is “chaos and resistance.” PIJ’s Jenin network is an IRGC franchise. Israel has been running kinetic operations in Judea and Samaria near continuously and the group is still resurging. The current operational tempo is insufficient. Hamas being “focused on Gaza revival” — including its shadow-government gambit — doesn’t free up Israeli attention… it splits it. Two theaters of Iranian proxy expansion running simultaneously right next to Israel’s population centers—with Washington’s gaze fixed on the nuclear clock.
Hamas Shadow Government Embedded in Gaza Governance Structures
Hamas internal documents, corroborated by an IDF briefing of Netanyahu in January, confirm that Hamas is embedding senior military commanders from the al-Qassam Brigades into civilian governance roles as a deliberate strategy to maintain control through the U.S.-backed post-war transition. On orders from al-Qassam commander Izz al-Din al-Haddad, Hamas has appointed district governors and officials in the interior and finance ministries with clear ties to its military-wing (read: terrorists). These roles are set to be absorbed into the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG), the nominally technocratic panel that Washington endorses. Hamas is providing NCAG with its governmental files — while retaining complete duplicates. Hamas’s intelligence apparatus maintains active surveillance throughout Gaza—even through medical centers. According to their own internal documents, Hamas views renewed military conflict with Israel as inevitable and does not intend to honor disarmament commitments. The NCAG’s inaugural chair, Ali Shaath, is a former PA deputy minister—despite prior Trump administration assurances that neither the PA nor Hamas would have governance roles.
Assessment: This is not a gray area. The IDF warned the Prime Minister in January. The documents are leaked and corroborated. Hamas is not hedging its bets — it is executing a deliberate infiltration of a governance structure that Washington is sponsoring. The U.S. is funding and legitimizing a shell organization whose internal command structure is Hamas. The NCAG becomes a legal vehicle for Hamas’s continuity, with American diplomatic cover providing the license plate. If the Trump administration was genuinely surprised by Shaath’s appointment after pledging PA and Hamas exclusion, it should say so publicly and act accordingly. If it wasn’t surprised, that’s a different problem. Hamas survives this war with institutional continuity, state-adjacent resources, and a document retention strategy. Which, to be clear, is not a ceasefire.
Inside Israel
Coalition Fractures on VAT and Conscription; Netanyahu Faces Dual Defections
Eight Likud MKs voted against Finance Minister Smotrich’s VAT exemption order on imported goods, with a large number of ministers abstaining. Netanyahu attempted to enforce coalition discipline, recognized the arithmetic wasn’t there, and allowed a free vote — which became a coalition-plus-opposition vote against his own government’s economic measure. Smotrich announced he will re-sign the order. More consequentially, several of the same Likud rebels warned that they will also withhold their votes on the conscription law. Separately, Supreme Court President Isaac Amit has again been excluded from a major diplomatic event — Prime Minister Modi’s Knesset address on Wednesday — confirmed by both the Judicial Authority and Knesset Speaker Ohana’s office. Ohana indicated the empty opposition seats would be filled with former lawmakers if the opposition boycotts in protest.
Assessment: The VAT revolt is a proxy war. Eight Likud MKs didn’t vote against cheaper imports because of economic principle—they voted to establish that Netanyahu cannot take their votes for granted on the conscription bill. Smotrich may have reset the clock by re-signing the order but that doesn’t resolve the underlying leverage play. The conscription law is the real structural fight, and the coalition’s arithmetic is worse than it looks on paper. Ohana’s gambit of filling empty seats with former lawmakers is an aesthetics operation. Modi doesn’t care who’s sitting in which chair. But the opposition boycott — and the optics of Israel’s top justice being pointedly excluded from a visiting head of government’s address — is a gift to every commentator currently writing about Israeli democratic backsliding. Ohana is entitled to his position on Amit’s legitimacy. Regardless of your own position, it’s certainly hard to say there isn’t enough underpinning his view. That said, staging a visible snub during a high-profile state visit might make for good politics ahead of a campaign season but does Israel itself no favors.
AI Acceleration, Negev Arms Crackdown, Toxic Produce Scandal
Netanyahu’s cabinet voted to fast-track AI data center construction, with Energy Minister Cohen reporting that data centers with one gigawatt of combined capacity are already under construction — more than 5% of Israel’s total national energy consumption. Bibi explicitly linked AI leadership to military power projection, and referenced a forthcoming new national security doctrine. Separately, Israeli undercover agents spent a year embedded in crime networks in the Negev’s Bedouin communities, conducting dozens of controlled weapons purchases, seizing 13 M-16 rifles, 11 Glock pistols, and over NIS 1 million in arms, leading to multiple arrests across Rahat, Lakiya, and Hura. Against that progress, we have a bleak picture as the Knesset Health Committee reported that 50% of cucumber samples, 49% of tomatoes, and 66% of hot peppers from Palestinian Authority agricultural exports tested positive for banned pesticides — including neurotoxins. Roughly 15,000 tons of Palestinian produce cross into Israel annually, and contaminated goods were regularly sold before test results arrived, with the Civil Administration admitting it had prioritized the Palestinian economy over Israeli public health.
Assessment: Three separate domestic stories that share an underlying theme: institutional gaps that were tolerated because they were inconvenient to close. The Negev arms network didn’t materialize last week. It built over years, fueled by the same illegal weapons pipelines that keep surfacing in Judea and Samaria operations. The Knesset Health Committee findings aren’t a revelation — testing data going back to 2015 shows the contamination trend was visible and rising. The Civil Administration’s admission that it prioritized the Palestinian economy over Israeli health outcomes is a statement that deserves more attention than it’s getting. Bureaucracies make choices. This was one. On AI: Netanyahu framing data centers as national security infrastructure is correct. Whether the governance and regulatory velocity matches the investment ambition is a separate question — one the Committee will eventually have to answer.
Israel and the World
Corbyn Amplifies Blood Libel; Buchenwald Protest Targets Holocaust Memory
Former UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn posted an Instagram video repeating claims by Al-Shifa Hospital director Mohammed Abu Salmiya — who was himself imprisoned for seven months over the hospital’s role as a Hamas command node — that the IDF delivered boxes containing Palestinian skulls and the bodies of women with removed organs. The IDF’s international spokesperson, Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani, stated directly that IDF soldiers had not been near Shifa in months and described the claim as “a wild blood libel.” Separately in Germany, an anti-Zionist group calling itself “Kufiyas in Buchenwald” announced a protest at the Buchenwald concentration camp memorial on April 11 — the anniversary of the camp’s liberation — accusing the memorial of “historical revisionism and genocide denial” and claiming it spreads “Israeli propaganda.” A German court had previously ruled the memorial could ban keffiyehs, prompting the group’s protest threat.
Assessment: Corbyn is not confused. He knew the source’s credibility, chose to broadcast the claim anyway, and framed it as established fact — “that is what is happening to the people of Palestine.” Blood libel is a specific, centuries-old mechanism for inciting violence against Jews. Broadcasting it through a verified social media account to a large following is an amplification of a dehumanization narrative—one with a documented body count in the historical record. Perhaps that’s his idea. The IDF’s response was clean and direct—but ineffective. The institutional question is what UK political and media structures do with a former party leader and known Jew-hater who has again, on the record, spread a medieval Jew-hatred trope. As for Buchenwald: staging a pro-Palestinian protest at a Nazi death camp on liberation day, while accusing the memorial itself of “genocide denial,” is not satire. It is the most precise possible statement of where antizionism ends up — at the gates of the camps, demanding entry under a different banner.
Briefly Noted
Frontline & Security
Jerusalem Post: Up to 20 drones a day cross from Egypt into Israel carrying weapons and drugs, with a payload capacity now reaching 150 kilograms each — and Cairo’s cooperation under its bilateral security commitments with Israel remains effectively nonexistent. Former ambassador David Govrin said Egypt has a treaty obligation to stop this traffic. If Israeli Bedouin were running weapons into Egypt, the reaction would be immediate and severe.
Diplomacy & Geopolitics
Jewish Insider: Rep. Sean Casten (D-IL) and 25 Democratic co-sponsors introduced the Ceasefire Compliance Act, which would impose 90-day rolling assessments of Israeli compliance with the October 2025 ceasefire and ban U.S. military transfers to Israel for use in Gaza or Judea and Samaria if Israel falls short — with no carve-out for strikes in response to Hamas violations. Predictably, J Street has made the bill its top legislative priority. Fortunately, the legislation has no path through a Republican-controlled Congress—but this establishes the template for the next time Democrats hold the majority.
JNS: Israel and Azerbaijan (who share a common threat environment centered on Iran) signed an AI memorandum of understanding in Jerusalem, covering supercomputing infrastructure, civilian AI applications, and joint research — the second such agreement this month, following a joint declaration with the United States in January.
Jerusalem Post: Reps. Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna will force a War Powers vote next week to restrict unilateral U.S. military action against Iran, fracturing the nominal congressional consensus behind the Trump administration’s pressure campaign. Tehran’s negotiators will have read the vote count before Washington does.
Culture, Religion & Society
Jerusalem Post: The United States’ first Palestinian bookstore, Watermelon Books LA, opened in Los Angeles, stocking texts that include works by a PFLP spokesman killed for his role in the Lod Airport massacre, Norman Finkelstein’s The Holocaust Industry, and a children’s book teaching that the Jewish state is a temporary “occupying” entity. What could possibly go wrong?
Jerusalem Post: The director, with ties to a terror organization, of Australia’s Malek Fahd Islamic School — a federally funded institution receiving 60% of its budget from Canberra — resigned after Sky News reported he had posted a Hamas combat video with an Arabic prayer for jihadist victory.
HonestReporting: On the first Friday of Ramadan, 80,000 Muslim worshippers prayed at Al-Aqsa without incident — a fact The Guardian did not report, having already filed a piece framing Israel’s routine security preparations as an attack on Muslim prayer rights and drawing comparisons to the Second Intifada and October 7.
Times of Israel: The Great Isaiah Scroll — the oldest near-complete biblical manuscript ever found, recovered from Qumran in 1947 — is on public display in its entirety at the Israel Museum for the first time since 1968, in a specially climate-controlled room. Seven meters of unbroken Hebrew text, older than most of Western civilization’s foundational documents, sitting in Jerusalem. Which is where it belongs.
Developments to Watch
Regional Axis (Iran, Houthis, Militias)
Trump’s 10-Day Clock Expires This Week — Trump’s February 19 ultimatum gives Iran until roughly Friday–Saturday before he moves to “something very tough.” Poland, Germany, Japan, and Serbia have all issued emergency evacuation orders.
War Powers Vote Next Week — Reps. Massie and Khanna force a floor vote to restrict unilateral Iran action. If it passes or draws significant Republican support, it hands Tehran a legislative argument that Washington’s fuse is political, not military.
Iraq Al-Nujaba Pre-Delegation — Iran-aligned Al-Nujaba has reportedly established a decentralized “corps system” authorizing attacks on U.S. targets without leadership sign-off if Iran is struck.
China CM-302 Delivery Timeline — No delivery date has been agreed on the near-complete anti-ship missile deal, but Oraei’s personal Beijing trip last summer and accelerating talks suggest the transfer window is months, not years.
Northern Front (Lebanon / Syria)
Beqaa Strike Aftermath — Lebanese media reported an Israeli airstrike in the eastern Beqaa Valley overnight; target banks are reportedly finalized for a Hezbollah contingency.
Suweida Power Vacuum — Syrian forces are reportedly preparing to enter Druze-controlled Suweida as the U.S. moves to withdraw roughly 1,000 troops from Syria.
Gaza & Southern Theater
Hamas Shadow Government Integration Deadline — The NCAG is moving toward operational status while IDF and PMO assessments confirm Hamas military-wing commanders are already embedded in civilian roles. The window to contest the structure’s legitimacy — before it becomes a functioning, U.S.-legitimized institution — is closing fast.
Egypt Drone Corridor Unresolved — Up to 20 drones cross daily from Egypt carrying weapons and drugs. Cairo is not enforcing its treaty obligations and Israeli leadership contact with Egypt is, by former ambassador accounts, effectively absent.
Judea & Samaria
PIJ Recruitment Momentum — PIJ is expanding in Judea and Samaria—through mosque networks, gang alliances, and social media.
Sa-Nur Reentry Preparations Under Pressure — Defense approval to reopen access roads to Sa-Nur (evacuated 2005) is being delayed by manpower diversion to ongoing clashes. The reentry is politically committed; operationally it’s competing with everything else for the same soldiers.
Home Front & Politics
Conscription Law Arithmetic Collapsing — Eight Likud rebels signaled they’ll withhold votes on the conscription bill after the VAT revolt. Netanyahu couldn’t hold the coalition on an economic measure lets see if he fairs better with conscription.
Modi Address Wednesday — Supreme Court President Amit remains uninvited to Modi’s Knesset address. The opposition has threatened a boycott Ohana says he’ll fill with former MKs. Whatever happens Wednesday becomes the week’s international optics story on Israeli democratic institutions — regardless of what’s happening in the Gulf.
What moved today? The Iran acquisition picture got measurably worse, the Hamas transition fraud became a matter of documented record rather than informed suspicion, and the Israeli coalition demonstrated it cannot take its own arithmetic for granted. What holds? Israel’s operational initiative, the U.S. military buildup, and the fact that Tehran still hasn’t found a negotiating position that addresses anything Washington actually cares about. The next inflection point is Friday — when Trump’s stated deadline lands and everyone discovers whether it was a fuse or a prop.
— Uri Zehavi · Intelligence Editor
With Modi Zehavi · Data + Research Analyst
For whoever in your life is still waiting for Corbyn to fact-check something before posting it.