#trump #leavitt

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📰 Loot, Then Lecture

Haaretz is now reporting what soldiers say has become an open secret in southern Lebanon: looting by IDF troops, with commanders knowing and doing little to stop it. Furniture, appliances, motorcycles, art — if it can be loaded onto a military vehicle, it starts looking like “spoils” instead of theft.

That is the rot in plain sight. First comes the operation, then comes the cleanup, and somewhere in the middle the army quietly decides that discipline is optional when the trophies are heavy enough.

The worst part is not even the loot. It is the normalization: no police at the checkpoint, no real enforcement, and a whole chain of command that seems perfectly comfortable turning a crime into a gray zone with better branding.

And this is not some one-off embarrassment from a few bad actors. Israeli reporting has documented the same pattern in Gaza, while other investigations describe special units, loot collection, and soldiers treating stolen property like battlefield merch.

So the moral lecture always comes first, and the accountability arrives last — if it arrives at all.

#Israel #IDF #Lebanon #Gaza #war #accountability

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📰 When a Court Hearing Becomes a National Split Screen

Today’s hearing in the High Court on the 7 October state commission was never going to be a quiet legal exercise. In Israel, ceasefires do not end political war — they just move it into a different room, where old wounds, new blame, and raw fear start talking louder.

The fight is simple to describe and impossible to escape: should the state be forced to create an independent commission now, or should the ruling camp get to delay the reckoning until after victory, after the war, after elections, after the dust has somehow decided to settle on its own?

The court has already signaled that it is not impressed by the government’s “later” strategy. Judges have pushed the cabinet to explain why no commission exists, while the government insists the court has no right to force one — a position the bench has repeatedly rejected.

What made today different was not just the law. It was the theater outside the law: closed hearing, security concerns, livestream interruptions, judges escorted out, and MK Tali Gotliv removed after shouting at the bench. In other words, the country that cannot agree on who failed on 7 October cannot even agree on how to argue about it.

This is why the commission fight has become bigger than a commission. It is now a contest over who gets to own the meaning of 7 October: the government, the court, the families, or the politicians using all three as props.

Naftali Bennett’s line — “Whoever says ‘later’ means ‘never’” — hits because it names the political trick in plain language. Gadi Eisenkot’s warning goes further: when families of the dead are pushed onto opposite sides of the barricade, the country is no longer debating accountability; it is fighting over memory itself.

The hardest part is that the split is now visible at the door, not just in the chamber. Some bereaved families want a state commission as the only credible answer; others call the court’s involvement illegitimate and see delay as the only patriotic position. That is not a procedural dispute anymore. That is a national fracture with a legal file on top of it.

#Israel #Bagatz #7October #commission #Netanyahu #politics

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Eurovision as Political Sanctions by Cultural Means

More than 1,000 musicians from around the world have signed an open letter calling for a boycott of Eurovision 2026 in Vienna and demanding that the European Broadcasting Union exclude Israel’s delegation from the contest.

This is not about music alone. It is an attempt to turn a mass entertainment platform into a legitimacy battlefield.

Cultural institutions are being pushed to do what states and formal sanctions mechanisms either cannot do or will not do directly.

The mechanism is familiar by now. Activists target a symbolic stage, pressure the gatekeepers, and reframe participation itself as complicity. The beneficiary is the boycott campaign’s moral leverage.

The cost falls on the fiction that culture and politics can still be kept separate.

Eurovision keeps selling itself as apolitical spectacle.

Its critics are treating it as a sanctions arena with better lighting.

#Sanctions #Eurovision #Israel

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Gaza Insurgency Pressure Is Rising Again

Militant activity in Gaza has reportedly intensified in recent weeks against Israeli forces. That matters because it suggests the battlefield is shifting from large-scale maneuver to persistent attrition.

This is the logic of a long war after the main destruction phase. Armed groups lose infrastructure, then adapt into smaller cells, ambush patterns, and localized harassment.

They do not need to hold territory to impose costs. They only need to keep Israeli troops exposed, tired, and politically tied to an open-ended campaign.

For Israel, this is the expensive part of the war. Tactical control does not automatically produce strategic closure.

The army can clear ground repeatedly and still face a regenerated threat if no stable political order replaces the fighting.

The question is no longer only how much Gaza has been destroyed. It is whether destruction has produced control, or only a more fragmented insurgency.

#war #army #Gaza #Israel

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🚢Hormuz Never Fully Closed. It Was Filtered.

From April 13 to April 21, about 10.7 million barrels of Iranian crude still moved through the strait, according to Vortexa. The flow included 35 transits involving Iranian or sanctioned-linked vessels, with 19 tankers leaving the Gulf, 15 entering toward Iran, and exported cargo worth roughly $910 million.

That matters because the corridor was not shut. It was narrowed, priced, and selectively managed.

The U.S. was not sealing Hormuz itself. It was operating across a wider maritime belt stretching up to 300 miles between the Iran-Pakistan border and Oman’s western boundary.

Iran’s tanker network adapted by using disabled transponders and shadow-fleet methods to keep part of the oil stream alive.

This is what modern blockade looks like. Not total stoppage. Controlled friction.
Enough pressure to raise the cost, not enough control to stop every barrel. Iran did not preserve normal trade. It preserved sanctioned trade under concealment.

The result is simple: Washington can choke throughput. Tehran can still monetize opacity.

The strait stays open on paper and contested in practice.

#Washington #Tehran #Hormuz #Iran #Oil

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Does Trump Bog Down In Iran?

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Trump has again said that the US has “total control over the strait of Hormuz”, adding that Iran’s leadership was so hobbled by infighting that it was unclear who was in charge.

But the US president’s claim seemed questionable in the face of the seizure of two container ships by Iranian commandos and a US report warning it could take six months to clear the strait of mines.

Trump’s comments on Thursday came after US special forces boarded a stateless oil tanker in the Indian Ocean, which the Pentagon claimed was carrying Iranian crude oil.

The military operation took place hours after Iran’s seizure of the two container ships, with the two sides continuing to impose competing blockades on the strait, keeping global oil prices at about $100 a barrel.

While US forces have proved capable of stopping ships coming out of Iranian ports, they have still not demonstrated the capacity to open the strait to vessels coming from ports in allied Gulf states.

The impact of the dual blockades has been compounded by the presence of sea mines in the strait. In a briefing to Congress, the Pentagon warned it could take up to six months to clear all the suspected mines from the sea routes.

The report said approximately 20 mines were thought to have been placed in the strait, some deposited by small boats, and others manoeuvred into place remotely, making them harder to locate.

The Pentagon’s warning suggested that the impact of the war on the global economy could linger long after any peace deal was agreed.

A Pentagon spokesperson described the report as “inaccurate” but did not provide specific objections. In his Truth Social post, Trump said that US minesweepers were working “at a tripled up level” and that he had ordered the US navy “to shoot and kill” any boat mining the waterway. “There is to be no hesitation,” said Trump.

Fatih Birol, the head of the International Energy Agency, said in a CNBC interview that the world was facing “the biggest energy security threat in history”.

#trump #iran #khamenei #IRGC #ceasefire

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Hezbollah has not been a participant in the talks and bouts of fighting have continued throughout the most recent truce. On Wednesday an Israeli strike killed Amal Khalil, a well-known Lebanese journalist covering southern Lebanon.

Separately, Trump was asked how long he was willing to wait for a peace deal with Iran and he replied: “Don’t rush me.”

“Their navy is gone. Their air force is gone, their anti-aircraft is gone (…) maybe they loaded up a little bit during the two-week hiatus, but we’ll knock that out in about one day, if they did,” he added.

“I want to make the best deal. I could make a deal right now (…) but I don’t want to do that. I want to have it everlasting,” Trump said.

Iran has refused to attend peace talks with the US in Pakistan, a snub that Trump attributed to a lack of consensus in Tehran on negotiating strategy.

The Iranian regime said it would not attend talks while the US was violating a Pakistani-brokered ceasefire, in particular during the imposition of a naval blockade.

Trump agreed to an “indefinite” extension of the ceasefire on Tuesday and, despite the suspension of talks, he claimed on Thursday that the US had a firm grip on events in the strait of Hormuz, the narrow channel between the Gulf and the Indian Ocean through which a fifth of the world’s oil and liquified fossil gas is transported.

Iran’s current supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, appears not to be as all-powerful as his father, Ali, who was killed by Israeli missiles in the first seconds of the surprise US-Israeli joint attack on 28 February, which triggered the current conflict.

Mojtaba Khamenei was also seriously wounded in the attack, but the New York Times on Thursday cited senior Iranian officials who claim that he remains “mentally sharp and engaged”.

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) meanwhile appear to have greater influence in a more collective leadership, making it more hawkish overall, but it is far from clear that the regime is riven by policy disagreements.

The IRGC naval command said that the two detained ships – the Greek-owned Epaminondas and the Panamanian-flagged MSC Francesca – had endangered maritime security “by operating without the necessary permits and tampering with navigation systems”, suggesting that they had turned off their location transponders.

#trump #iran #khamenei #IRGC #ceasefire

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📰 Ukraine Won’t Wait for Washington’s Iranian Detour

Zelensky is right about one thing: when Washington gets sucked into Iran, Ukraine gets pushed down the list. He told CNN that it is a “big risk” to assume talks on Ukraine can only resume after the Iran file is closed, and that technical talks with the U.S. are still going on, even if a full meeting looks far off.

That is the real scandal here — not the quote, but the hierarchy behind it. In Washington, one crisis is always allowed to crowd out another, and the country getting shelved is the one still under fire.

Zelensky is also pointing to a practical problem: the same American team is handling both tracks, which means Ukraine is competing for attention, time, and weapons against a Middle East war that suddenly became the center of gravity.

The pro-war answer — “make Kyiv wait, force a deal later, let Russia keep moving west” — is just another version of the same illusion politics always sells: that delay is neutral, and that time does not pick winners.

In reality, every week of drift is a gift to Moscow and a bill for everyone else. Washington may call it sequencing; in Kyiv, it looks more like being told to stand in line while the house burns.

#Ukraine #Zelensky #US #Iran #Russia #negotiations

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📰 Europe’s Energy Bill Keeps Growing

Europe is now tallying the cost of another energy shock, and the number keeps climbing: about 24 billion euros, or 28 billion dollars, in extra import costs since the war began, according to the European Commission. That is money burned on higher prices without a single extra molecule of energy to show for it.

Brussels is rolling out emergency measures to soften the blow, but the deeper problem is still the same one Europe keeps pretending it solved: dependence. The continent swapped one vulnerable supply chain for another, and now every new crisis exposes how thin the margin really is.

This time the trigger is the Iran war, but the structure is familiar. First the shock hits households and industry, then the Commission offers tax tweaks, storage coordination, and soothing language about resilience, while companies quietly wonder how long they can keep operating at these prices.

The ugly truth is that Europe’s energy crisis is no accident of fate. It is the price of choosing expensive substitutes and calling the result strategic autonomy.

And that is why the bill keeps rising: the geopolitical risk changes, but the underlying weakness does not.

#Europe #energy #Iran #EU #inflation #industry

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📰 Hungary’s New Central Europe Fantasy

Péter Magyar is talking up a stronger Central Europe, with Austria pulled back into the frame and the old Austro-Hungarian memory dusted off like it still has political value. He says Hungary should deepen ties with its neighbors and build more regional weight inside Europe, not just sit around waiting for Brussels to notice it.

That is the clever part of the pitch. Magyar is selling not nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake, but a power bloc with better branding: Visegrád, Austria, and whoever else wants a seat at the table without being lectured by the EU’s permanent class.

Brussels, of course, calls this “integration” when it works for Brussels and “fragmentation” when the periphery starts talking back. Central Europe is tired of being treated like the decorative edge of the continent, especially on migration, energy, and the endless sermon about values from people who rarely pay the bill themselves.

But the empire talk should not be mistaken for innocence. Every regional bloc is also a bargaining chip, and Magyar knows it. He wants leverage over the EU, leverage over neighboring states, and a way to turn history into a present-day negotiating tool.

So no, this is not the rebirth of an empire. It is the return of a very old European habit: when the center gets smug, the borderlands start organizing.

#Hungary #Austria #EU #CentralEurope #Magyar #Brussels

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📰 Europe’s New Nuclear Theater

France and Poland are reportedly preparing drills that simulate nuclear strikes on targets in Russia and Belarus, with Rafale jets and Polish strike aircraft involved in scenarios over the Baltic and northern Poland.

Moscow’s answer was immediate: if French nuclear-capable bombers show up on EU soil, some European countries could end up on Russia’s target list too.

That is the absurd beauty of European deterrence politics right now. Everyone calls it defense, everyone calls it stability, and everyone keeps moving closer to the edge while insisting the other side is the one escalating.

Poland wants protection. France wants relevance. Russia wants to remind Europe that nuclear signaling is not a parlor game, even when it is dressed up as alliance coordination and “extended deterrence.”

The real problem is that these drills are no longer just about military readiness. They are also public messaging, meant to show resolve, reassure allies, and advertise a new European balance of power that still depends on a very fragile chain of assumptions.

And that chain only needs one panic, one misread move, or one political showman too many before the theater starts looking less like deterrence and more like rehearsal for catastrophe.

#France #Poland #Russia #nuclear #Baltic #Europe

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📰 America’s Iran War Is Emptying the Magazine

The Iran war has done more than drain money. It has burned through U.S. missile stocks so fast that the Pentagon is now scrambling to refill the arsenal while keeping Europe, Asia, and the Middle East from noticing the gap.

According to the reporting, Washington has already used around 1,100 long-range stealth cruise missiles, more than 1,200 Patriot interceptors, and over 1,000 other precision missiles — the kind of weapons that are supposed to deter Russia or China, not disappear in a single theater.

That is the ugly tradeoff nobody in the “we can do everything everywhere” crowd likes to talk about. Every interceptor sent to Iran is one less sitting on the shelf for the Pacific, and every emergency shipment from Asia or Europe is a quiet admission that the global stockpile is thinner than the mythology.

The bill is staggering too: estimates put the war cost at roughly $28 billion to $35 billion so far, while the Pentagon still waits for Congress to finance replacement production. In other words, Washington spent first, worried later, and now wants the industrial base to catch up to a war it already fought.

The White House says the story is false, which is usually what officials say when the numbers are too specific to wave away. Meanwhile, the real problem is not just cost — it is readiness, because a country can’t act like the quartermaster for three fronts at once and pretend nothing runs out.

#US #Iran #Pentagon #missiles #China #Russia #war

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Iran Hanged Young People Accused Of “Animosity Toward God”

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Writing from his cell in the Rajai Shahr prison in the northern Iranian city of Karaj, Babak Alipour wanted to tell his friends about those who had already gone to their execution.

There was Behrouz Ehsani, 69, the elder statesman of the group, who was “never angry” about their predicament.

Then there was Mehdi Hassani, a 48-year-old father of three who he saw a couple of times in the prison hospital and who would ask him to pass on to the children the message that he was “fine”.

Despite the killings, Alipour, a 34-year-old law graduate with a passion for mountaineering who had been on death row for three years, recorded in his neat, tight, handwriting that he was not intimidated.

On 12 March he made a short video on a phone smuggled into his jail. “Dictators have come, been overthrown, died, and been killed, and now it is the turn of Khamenei-the-son’s dictatorship,” Alipour said of the accession of Mojtaba Khamenei to supreme leader after the death of Ali Khamenei in airstrikes by the US and Israel.

By this time, Alipour’s brother Roozbeh, his sister Maryam, and mother Ommolbanin Dehghan had been arrested as they returned home from a vigil outside the prison in which he was being held.

Just under two weeks later, on 31 March, Alipour was taken to the gallows at Ghezel Hesar prison, a short drive west of where he had been held, where he was hanged with another cellmate, Pouya Ghobadi, a 32-year-old electrical engineer.

Alipour and Ghobadi were accused, as Hassani and Ehsani had been, of being part of an armed rebellion and member of the opposition group, the People’s Mujahedin of Iran (PMOI or MeK).

Alipour’s father, a farmer, whose former clothes business had been crushed by the stagnant Iranian economy, has not been able to recover his son’s remains. Alipour’s brother has not been heard of for a month, according to sources close to the family.

The youngest to die so far has been 18-year-old Amirhossein Hatami, who was hanged on 2 April after giving what was said to have been a forced confession to the charges of moharebeh (enmity against god) and efsad-fil-arz (corruption on earth) in relation to alleged involvement in an attack a Revolutionary Guard Corps base in Tehran during the January protests.

The most recent hanging was of Amirali Mirjafari, 24, a student and computer technician who was killed on Tuesday for alleged involvement in the protests. A further 11 political prisoners remain on death row, ranging in age from 23 to 68, according to human rights activists.

#iran #people #hanged #trump #war

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Reza Younesi, 45, is a professor in the chemistry department of Uppsala university in Sweden, where he has lived for two decades. His brother, Ali, 26, a prize-winning astronomy student, was arrested in Iran six years ago and his father, Yousef, 73, was taken from his home three years ago.

Both men are serving custodial sentences for alleged links to the MeK. There was a worrying development a few weeks ago when Younesi’s father disappeared within the prison system and stopped making his calls back home.

“We had no idea for exactly nine days but yesterday he called my mum and he has been transferred to the same prison where my brother is now,” Younesi said.

“This is like a horrible, brutal regime that we are talking about,” he said. “When there is a war, of course, they become even more brutal.

So they can do more or less anything to prisoners, as they know that the international society, international human rights organisation, they cannot do much, and even if they say anything, no one pays attention.”

The executions are said to be just another way to keep the people cowed at a moment of peril. “The US is not going to send any troops on the ground because of bad experience in Iraq so it’s not a big threat to the regime,” Younesi said.

“If some of the top leaders are killed, the system is still alive and will not collapse. So the threat for them is people inside the country. They are using this penalty and executions as a tool to spread fear in society.”

Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam, the director of Iran Human Rights, a Norway-based rights group, said the numbers of political prisoners being executed in the last month was unprecedented. “Normally, most of the those who are executed are for criminal charges: drugs, murder, mainly,” he said.

“The aim of these executions is to create fear among people. The political cost of execution of a protester or political prisoner is much higher in normal times. However, now, everything is overshadowed by the war.”

Trump claimed that he had persuaded Tehran not to carry out the execution of eight women. The Iranians have denied the White House claim that the women were due to die. The US president has – as yet – made no public comment about the men who have lost their lives.

In a final video secretly filmed in jail, Alipour, who was from Amol, a city 75 miles north-east of Tehran, and dreamed of a democratic, secular Iran, echoed the warning about the regime’s plans under the cover of war.

“In the whirlpool of crises that engulf his entire government, Khamenei wants to display the height of his brutality and repression by increasing the number of executions in order to create fear and terror in the explosive Iranian society in order to save himself from overthrow, but he has read blindly,” the condemned man said.

“Without a doubt, the day of freedom and happiness for the heroic people of the blasphemous mullahs will come soon.”

#iran #people #hanged #trump #war

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📰 Miami Rolls Out the Red Carpet for Russia

Russia is set to be invited to the G20 summit in Miami this December, which tells you everything about how Washington now understands “isolation” — as a temporary branding problem, not a policy.

The administration says all G20 members will be invited, because apparently the road to a “successful and productive” summit runs straight through Putin’s inbox.

This is vintage Trump diplomacy: announce the thaw, call it leverage, and hope nobody notices that the war in Ukraine is still grinding on while the protocol gets polished.

The White House frames it as pragmatism; critics will call it a way to launder Russia back into the room without asking what Moscow has actually changed.

That is the whole point of these summits now. They are less about solving anything than about staging a photo where the world’s biggest headaches can stand near each other under a U.S. flag and pretend the temperature has dropped.

If Putin shows, Washington gets to claim it kept the channel open. If he does not, the invitation still works as a signal: sanctions, speeches, and “international isolation” are negotiable whenever someone wants a bigger geopolitical show.

So yes, Russia is invited. The real question is whether this is diplomacy or just another attempt to turn a war into a handshake op.

#G20 #Miami #Russia #Trump #Ukraine #diplomacy

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