(Ynet News) Lior Ben Ari - The Iranian news agency Fars, considered close to the Revolutionary Guards - citing a source close to Iran's negotiating team - reported that "there is no agreement regarding the opening of the Strait of Hormuz, and the news published in this context is false. As long as the hostile actions of the United States continue, the Strait of Hormuz will remain closed, and passage of vessels will only be possible through the declared route and with the approval of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy."

(Wall Street Journal) Feliz Solomon - A day after President Trump announced a breakthrough that he predicted would see Hamas relinquish its weapons and power in Gaza, both Israel and Hamas appeared at odds over what was actually agreed to. An Israeli official reiterated that Israel demands genuine demilitarization of Palestinian forces in Gaza before it is willing to pull its troops back. Hamas said it agreed only to relinquish its heavy weapons - stopping short of a pledge to hand over light arms, such as assault rifles. "We didn't say disarmament, we didn't say handing over the weapons," Ghazi Hamad, a member of Hamas's negotiating team, told the Wall Street Journal. Hamas insists Israel withdraw before it turns over its weapons, while Israel refuses to relinquish territory until the group is completely dismantled.

(Anadolu-Turkey) Tarek Chouiref - Ghazi Hamad, a member of Hamas's negotiating delegation, told Al Jazeera on Friday that the Palestinian group will not take any steps toward disarmament before Israeli forces withdraw from Gaza.

(Jerusalem Post) Ruby Sadikman - Hamas began distributing rifles to its operatives in Gaza amid the Board of Peace's Hamas disarmament deal, Israel's Channel 11 reported Saturday, citing a Palestinian source. The goal is to ensure that weapons stay in the hands of Hamas members under the guise of personal ownership. "Hamas will not disarm. Period," the Palestinian source asserted.

(Ynet News) Itamar Eichner - Israel on Thursday pushed back against reports that Hamas and mediators were close to reaching an agreement. A political source clarified that the deal being discussed in Cairo is not an agreement with Israel, and that Jerusalem does not accept the framework in its current form. Israel is demanding the complete disarmament of Hamas, including the removal of all weapons from Gaza and the full demilitarization of the Strip, as a prerequisite for any progress. The political source stressed that there will be no Israeli withdrawal from the yellow line in Gaza before Hamas completes its disarmament and the Strip is fully demilitarized. The Americans present the roadmap as a complete and absolute disarmament of Hamas. Israel, however, is making clear that storing weapons inside the Strip does not amount to demilitarization and that it has no intention of withdrawing based on promises or a mechanism that allows weapons to remain in Gaza. Jerusalem fears that leaving weapons in Gaza, even if stored in monitored facilities, would allow Hamas to regain control of them in the future.

(Ynet News) Ron Ben-Yishai - The "road map" for implementing President Trump's peace plan in Gaza published Friday by the "Peace Board" is a vague declaration of intent rather than a binding agreement. The "road map" grants Hamas in Gaza the same status that Hizbullah currently holds in Lebanon. This means armed political influence through Hamas members who will be absorbed into the new police force in Gaza, as well as behind-the-scenes management of central government institutions through Hamas officials who will retain their positions. All this will happen without Hamas bearing any responsibility for residents' welfare, their safety or the provision of essential services. The plan leaves Hamas as a force of power in Gaza and improves the personal situation of surviving Hamas operatives and commanders. The "road map" also speaks of opening a "credible pathway" toward a Palestinian state. This means Hamas has also secured a significant political and public-relations achievement that will allow it to expand its influence among Palestinians. Hamas members who serve as police officers or receive weapons permits from the technocratic government will retain their personal weapons. By contrast, the militias and clans that cooperated with Israel and the IDF during the war and clashed with Hamas will be disarmed and will not be allowed to serve as officials in the new government. Israel is on the giving side and Hamas is the one receiving. Israel is required to halt military operations, including the targeted strikes it is currently carrying out. According to the "road map," the IDF will have no ability to address violations of the agreement by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, even if the technocratic government and the international stabilization force fail or refuse to deal with them. Israel will have no veto over who will hold senior positions in the new Gaza government and no right to conduct "hot pursuit" if Hamas attacks or fires a mortar shell toward Israeli communities.

(Ha'aretz) Amos Harel - Hamas seems to have accepted the agreement with the Board of Peace mainly because it buys time. Living conditions in Gaza are extremely difficult, the IDF controls 60% of the enclave, and Israel has been killing Hamas military leaders every few days. The agreement could relieve the immediate military pressure on Hamas. Israel is demanding the surrender of both rifles and rockets, as well as the continued destruction of tunnels. It also insists that the disarmament process be completed before the IDF fully withdraws from Gaza. The international stabilization force currently consists of only 200 soldiers from Uganda and Morocco and is expected to deploy near the Rafah crossing in the south, initially focusing on facilitating the entry of humanitarian aid. The plan also envisions the dismantling of local militias that oppose Hamas. For those groups, surrendering their weapons would effectively mean a death sentence at the hands of Hamas.

(Israel Hayom) Danny Zaken - Israeli officials are responding cautiously to the understandings reached between the Board of Peace and Hamas. No agreement has been reached on where Hamas's weapons will be stored, how quickly they will be surrendered or who will receive them. Hamas is prepared to hand the weapons over to Palestinian authorities, since it believes it could regain control of the arms if necessary. Israel is demanding the complete removal of weapons from Gaza. The emerging compromise is that the arms would be transferred to storage facilities controlled by the multinational force, but located in territory under Israeli control. Israel assesses that Hamas will not fully uphold its side of the agreement and will continue seeking various ways to carry out terrorist attacks against Israel. A senior Israeli security official expressed doubt that the Islamist terrorist organization could be transformed into a purely political movement.

(Ynet News) Dr. Michael Milshtein - Hamas identifies more advantages than disadvantages in the Board of Peace agreement for Gaza and therefore welcomes it. The organization survived after three years of bitter war and remains the dominant force in Gaza. It does not assess that the arrangement threatens its status or its assets. In its understanding, it will be able to continue preserving its military and civilian power under the cosmetic cover of the technocratic government - adopting the Hizbullah model, meaning existing alongside a weak formal government. Hamas emphasizes that the demand for disarmament relates only to heavy weapons, of which it has barely any left. The arrangement appears to be creating a trap for Israel, enabling Hamas to preserve its power, despite the promise that nothing would be advanced in the area unless Hamas was first disarmed. Under the circumstances that have been created, vital interests in Gaza must be defined in the spirit of "prevention," first and foremost: preserving freedom of action against emerging threats in the area; designating a large area near the border where activity of any kind will be prohibited, all the more so the establishment of an enemy presence; preserving the right to veto foreign actors entering Gaza; and above all ensuring that the Philadelphi Corridor is not under Hamas control. The writer is a senior researcher at the Dayan Center at Tel Aviv University.

(JNS) Fiamma Nirenstein - It would be welcome news if Hamas had truly agreed to surrender its weapons as part of President Trump's proposed framework to end the war. But there are good reasons for skepticism. Hamas's ideology makes genuine disarmament difficult to imagine. Israel was not a direct participant in the negotiations, but it would ultimately have to decide whether its security requirements were met. Israel has made clear that it will remain in Gaza until Hamas gives up its weapons. That is the essential condition. Hamas has lost the war. Most of its senior leadership and many of the terrorists responsible for the rapes, murders and other atrocities committed on Oct. 7, 2023, have been killed. The campaign against those who remain is still ongoing. Israel has learned the lessons of Oct. 7. Any agreement must be built on ironclad guarantees. Israel cannot withdraw from Gaza until the threat posed by Hamas has been substantially eliminated. Only complete and verifiable disarmament can ensure that the mistakes of Oct. 7 are never repeated. The writer, a senior researcher at the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs, served as vice president of the Committee on Foreign Affairs in the Italian Chamber of Deputies.

(Jerusalem Post) Editorial - Israel cannot agree to a process in Gaza in which withdrawal, reconstruction, or political recognition move forward on the assumption that Hamas will disarm later. The issue is whether Hamas is required to disarm before Israel gives up the leverage needed to make it happen. Hamas has used every negotiation to gain time, preserve control, and push the most difficult questions into the next phase, while its military power has remained largely untouched by diplomacy. It has repeatedly rejected disarmament, qualified it, or offered formulations that leave its weapons under a different name or authority. Israel cannot base a withdrawal on what Hamas says it intends to do. The standard must be physical and verifiable. Weapons need to be collected and placed beyond use, while production sites and tunnels need to be located and destroyed. Smuggling routes, command networks, and financing systems need to be dismantled. Inspectors must be able to enter sites without warning. A Palestinian civilian administration should be built. But it cannot become a mechanism for allowing Hamas to survive the war with its weapons, its coercive power, and its ability to start the next one. The test is not whether Hamas signs a disarmament clause. It is whether Hamas is, in fact, disarmed.

(Times of Israel) Mansoor H. Laghari - As a father, as a Muslim, and as someone who has spent much of my life advocating for human rights, I refuse to become numb to the suffering of children, whether they are Israeli or Palestinian. But compassion cannot replace honesty. Much of the international conversation measures this war by counting the number of dead children, while asking almost nothing about how those children came to be in the middle of a battlefield in the first place. One of the most uncomfortable truths is that Palestinian terrorist organizations have systematically recruited, indoctrinated, trained, and used children for military purposes for decades. This is not Israeli propaganda. It is documented by the UN, UNICEF, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and Child Soldiers International. The militarization of Palestinian youth has been institutionalized. For years, Hamas organized military-style summer camps where tens of thousands of boys learned weapons handling, tactical drills, ideological indoctrination, and military discipline. International law recognizes that the party deliberately embedding military assets among civilians bears responsibility for creating extraordinary risks to those civilians. As long as children are taught that dying for a cause is more honorable than living for a future, peace will remain painfully out of reach. Only when Palestinian children are freed from the grip of militant organizations will they truly have the opportunity to build the peaceful future they deserve. The writer, born in Pakistan, is a U.S. Army veteran, human rights advocate, and founder of the Global Youth Unity Project.

(Jerusalem Post) Sogand Fakheri - Inside today's Islamic Republic, the regime can no longer be certain whom it controls, whom it merely pays, and whom it should fear. A man who served within Iran's security apparatus told me why many remain at their posts. "Most of them stay because they receive money. If it were not for the money, they would have turned their weapons toward the IRGC a long time ago." What happens when the regime can no longer afford to pay for loyalty? My source also drew a sharp distinction between pressure on the regime and damage to the country. He argued that attacks on power stations, factories and other civilian infrastructure weaken the Iranian people rather than the IRGC. In his view, military pressure, if used, should concentrate on the institutions and facilities responsible for repression rather than the infrastructure ordinary Iranians need to survive. The question for potential defectors is not necessarily whether they oppose the regime. It is whether they can survive opposing it. Disobedience can mean imprisonment, torture, execution or retaliation against relatives. A salary is only one part of the system. Fear is the other. The Islamic Republic does not require every soldier or policeman to believe in it. It only requires enough of them to obey at the decisive moment. In January, enough of them did. Isolated defections should not be romanticized as evidence that the security apparatus has collapsed. The decisive question in Iran's next uprising will be what happens when the person ordered to shoot looks at the people standing in front of him and decides which side offers him a future. The author is an Iran analyst at the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs.

(Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs) Lt.-Col. (res.) Maurice Hirsch - The Palestinian Authority established a comprehensive statutory framework governing financial benefits for terrorist prisoners and released terrorists. Over time, the remuneration system expanded beyond monthly salaries to include release grants, guaranteed employment within the PA apparatus, and continuing financial support where employment was unavailable. The legal framework progressively increased both the level of financial benefits and the institutional obligations imposed upon the PA toward terrorist prisoners and released terrorists. The PA/PLO's remuneration policy was not merely a humanitarian welfare program or a series of isolated financial payments. Rather, it evolved into a comprehensive statutory and administrative framework that systematically rewarded terrorist imprisonment, guaranteed continuing financial support following release, and, in many cases, facilitated the reintegration of released terrorists into publicly-funded employment. The policy substantially reduced the personal and economic consequences associated with terrorist activity and materially assisted a significant number of experienced terrorists who later resumed terrorist activity. Several ultimately rose to senior positions within Hamas or directly participated in planning, financing, directing, or executing the October 7 massacre. The writer, former director of the Military Prosecution in Judea and Samaria, is director of the Palestinian Authority Accountability Initiative at the Jerusalem Canter.

(Gatestone Institute) Bassam Tawil - Muslim imams in the United States continue to teach jihadist ideology and Islamic supremacism, promote anti-Western sentiments and antisemitism, and incite violence against non-Muslims. On July 3, 2026, Chicago-area Imam Zayd Mohammad prayed, "Oh Allah, destroy the criminal Zionists and those that support them. Count them one by one, kill them to the very last one, and do not spare a single one of them." A week later, also in a Friday sermon, Michigan Shiite scholar Hassan Qazwini, founder of the Islamic Institute of America in Dearborn Heights, praised Iran's slain Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei as "the leader of the Islamic Revolution...who was martyred and whose blood was spilled while defending his land, his honor, and that of the Islamic nation." The U.S. and other Western countries need to pay attention to what is being said by their politicians and in their mosques. Many immigrants to the West seem determined to recreate in their new homes the Islamic societies they walked out on.

(Washington Free Beacon) Adam Kredo - Multiple UN relief agencies continue to stonewall a U.S. probe into their ties to Hamas, withholding key documents and other information that could reveal their employees as affiliates of the terror group, according to U.S. officials. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) Inspector General's office sent letters in December 2025 to six separate UN agencies that purport to do humanitarian work in Gaza, asking them to name all their employees "who worked on U.S.-government funded awards" and provide their contact information and "date and place of birth." The office also asked the agencies to detail their "interactions with Hamas." None of the six organizations have furnished the full list of documents requested. A senior State Department official told the Free Beacon, "The UN's failure to cooperate with the USAID IG investigation into Hamas diversion and interference of aid to Gaza is totally unacceptable." The USAID inspector general has identified at least 100 Hamas members whose salaries were paid by UNRWA, which has repeatedly allowed its facilities to be used by Hamas to store weapons, station personnel, and conduct attacks on Israel. The U.S. probe recently expanded to include at least 1,500 UNRWA-linked individuals suspected of terror ties. "As we have said many times, UNRWA is a subsidiary of Hamas and aided and abetted terrorist activity, including on October 7," the senior State Department source said. "It is incumbent on all UN agencies to provide requested information to ensure that taxpayers never pay the salaries of terrorists. Never again will the United States accept UN agencies' failure to screen employees."

(National Interest) Abdullah Hayek - Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps thanked the people of Jordan on Sunday "for your sincere cooperation and your accurate intelligence, which enabled the precise targeting by the fighters of Islam and the destruction of 20 hangars housing the forces of the child-killing U.S. Army in the Al-Azraq area, resulting in the deaths of dozens of American terrorist forces." The IRGC refers to "U.S. bases" in Jordan, a false characterization. Under a 2021 Defense Cooperation Agreement, U.S. forces are granted access to agreed Jordanian military facilities for training, operations, logistics, and humanitarian missions, but sovereign U.S. bases were not established. These are Jordanian installations. Yet, the practical reality remains: Iran is attacking Jordan directly. Jordan has been in Iran's crosshairs for years. Iran's strategic miscalculation is believing pressure on Jordan will weaken its alliance with Washington. The opposite is unfolding. Every missile fired, every drone launched, and every act of coercion only reinforces Jordan's indispensability to American strategy. Military cooperation is expanding, political support is unequivocal, and economic integration is accelerating. Jordan is no longer merely another ally but an indispensable strategic anchor. Tehran understands Jordan's value. What it fails to understand is that every attack only increases that value.

(Jerusalem Post) Yisrael Medad - Israel's public diplomacy must shift its attention to attack mode. The burden of proof and defense must be placed on the pro-Palestinian side with questions such as: Should a Palestinian national identity of less than 100 years be preferred over a 3,000-year Jewish national identity? Were not the Arab Muslim conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries the real colonization process in the Middle East? Who is truly engaged in an "ethnic cleansing" if not Palestinianism? Who initiated genocidal violence, beginning in 1920? Should not the side that violates agreements be punished? Should a constant rejection of diplomacy and willingness to compromise be tolerated?

(Ynet News) Israeli exports reached an all-time high of $164 billion in 2025, setting a new national record despite war, global economic uncertainty and unprecedented hostility toward the country. The Israel Export Institute said this demonstrated the strength, innovation and resilience of Israeli companies, which continued to expand abroad. Services exports exceeded $90 billion for the first time, led by the high-tech, software, and research and development sectors.

(Calcalist) Israeli startups announced 29 funding rounds totaling $1.518 billion during July. Investors overwhelmingly favored companies building the technologies surrounding AI: security platforms protecting autonomous agents, enterprise software designed to manage AI workflows, networking chips connecting massive AI clusters, and observability platforms capable of monitoring AI-generated data.

(Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs) Irwin J. Mansdorf, Ph.D. and Charles Jacobs - Since the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war following Hamas's October 7, 2023, attack, accusations that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza have become increasingly common in political discourse, media coverage, and international institutions. Although the legal definition of genocide requires proof of a specific intent to destroy a protected national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, public debate increasingly appears to apply the term more broadly to armed conflicts involving large-scale civilian casualties. A nationally representative sample of American adults evaluated whether the term genocide applied to Israel's military campaign in Gaza, the Holocaust, the treatment of Native Americans, the Allied bombing of Germany during World War II, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Vietnam War, Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and Islamist violence against Black Christians in Africa. The findings indicate that many respondents apply the term genocide well beyond its accepted legal meaning. While the Holocaust remained the clearest and most universally recognized example of genocide, substantial numbers of respondents also characterized numerous military campaigns involving large-scale civilian casualties as genocide, including conflicts in which the U.S. was a participant. Younger respondents and those identifying as Democrats were significantly more likely than older respondents and Republicans to characterize both Israel's actions and other military conflicts as genocide. These differences extended beyond attitudes toward Israel, suggesting broader generational and political differences in how the concept itself is understood. The findings suggest that the public meaning of genocide has undergone a process of conceptual expansion that effectively downgrades its legal and historical distinctiveness. Increasingly, the term appears to function as a general expression of moral condemnation for wars involving extensive civilian casualties rather than as the legally defined crime requiring proof of specific intent. We can more accurately term this process of conceptual expansion as "conceptual dilution": a situation in which a concept with a precise legal or professional definition expands within public discourse to encompass situations not included in its original meaning. This is what appears to have happened with the term genocide. Dr. Irwin J. Mansdorf is a clinical psychologist and a fellow at the Jerusalem Center, specializing in political psychology. Charles Jacobs is founder of the International Freedom Coalition.