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On Thursday, just hours after the United States and Iran signed a landmark memorandum of understanding to guide negotiations ending a regional war launched in late February, the Israeli military launched two targeted drone strikes across southern Lebanon, leaving one person dead and three others injured, according to local official media.

Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency confirmed the details of the attacks: the first strike hit the town of Beit Yahoun, where an Israeli drone dropped an explosive device that wounded two local residents. A second attack targeted a vehicle at a roundabout connecting the villages of Kfartebnit and Arnoun, killing one passenger and leaving a second in critical condition.

The unprovoked attacks have immediately raised urgent questions about the future of the new US-Iran peace deal, whose text explicitly includes provisions for Lebanese security and requires an immediate end to all military operations across the country. The MOU, signed by both leaders during a diplomatic gathering in France late Wednesday, formalizes a binding commitment to end all active hostilities on every front—including Lebanon—between the two nations and their respective allies. It also requires all signatory parties to abandon threats of force, respect each other’s territorial sovereignty, and guarantee the full territorial integrity and political independence of Lebanon.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has long faced accusations of actively working to derail diplomatic progress between Washington and Tehran, and he has openly defied the terms of the new framework, refusing to issue any commitment to withdraw Israeli military forces currently occupying large swathes of southern Lebanon. Since Israeli military operations against targets in Lebanon began on March 2, Lebanese official data records that nearly 3,800 people have been killed in these attacks, hundreds of whom are children.

Reuters reported Thursday that Israeli officials are currently holding closed-door negotiations with the United States to push for permission to maintain a permanent military presence in southern Lebanon. An anonymous senior Israeli official close to Netanyahu told the outlet that the Israeli government would not back away from its demands, including keeping troops deployed in the strategic area south of Lebanon’s Litani River. A second senior Israeli official added that the final outcome of these negotiations will depend entirely on whether US President Donald Trump is willing to pressure Israel into compliance, by threatening concrete repercussions if Jerusalem refuses to adhere to the interim peace pact’s terms.

During a press conference held Wednesday, one day after the MOU was signed, Trump struck a diplomatic tone when speaking about Netanyahu, calling the Israeli leader “a very good man” and an “amazing prime minister.” He did, however, acknowledge the ongoing rift over Lebanon, saying, “We have a little dispute over Lebanon. I say, ‘You can do a little softer touch, Bibi. You don’t have to knock down a building every time somebody walks into it that’s from Hezbollah.’”

Iran has already issued a clear warning that the entire MOU will be invalidated if Israel refuses to fully withdraw all its forces from Lebanese territory and end all military attacks. Speaking Thursday, Esmaeil Baqaei, spokesperson for Iran’s Foreign Ministry, said that the United States bears full responsibility for forcing Israel to uphold the commitments Washington made to Tehran in the signed document, saying “It is the responsibility of the US to force Israel to respect the US commitments to Iran in this document.”

A senior far-right Israeli cabinet member from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling Likud party has stoked regional tensions this week with explosive comments forecasting that Israel will ultimately go to war with Syria, and outlining a sweeping new anti-Israel alliance he claims is taking shape across the Muslim world.

Amichai Chikli, Israel’s Minister of Diaspora Affairs, laid out his controversial assessment in a series of radio interviews conducted across Wednesday and Thursday, framing the emerging bloc as a far greater threat to Israeli national security than Iran and its recently finalized ceasefire agreement with the United States.

Chikli centered his criticism on the new government led by Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa, claiming its jihadist ideological roots tied to the Islamic State and al-Qaeda, paired with its stated goal of securing the unification of Jerusalem, make peaceful coexistence with Israel impossible. From that foundation, he argued that a full military confrontation between Israel and Syria is inevitable. “There is no way that a jihadist regime rooted in Isis and al-Qaeda, whose aspiration is the unification of Jerusalem, can live in peace alongside the State of Israel,” Chikli stated.

The minister went on to identify a three-country coalition he calls the “radical Sunni axis of evil”, made up of Pakistan, Turkey, and Qatar. In remarks to Israel’s Army Radio, he emphasized that this unreported new alliance poses a far more acute danger to Israel than Tehran, even as he acknowledged that Iran has secured major strategic gains through its U.S.-brokered ceasefire. “What is far more troubling is the new axis emerging in the Middle East,” Chikli explained.

He argued Pakistan and Turkey earned their place in the bloc through their outsized influence during U.S.-Iran negotiations, while he dismissed Qatar as the global public relations mouthpiece for jihadist movements during an interview with Kol Barama Radio. Chikli reserved his sharpest criticism for Ankara, describing Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s regional ambitions as “an extremely dangerous combination” for Israel. He claimed Turkey has effectively installed a protectorate over much of Syria, and doubled down on his assessment by saying “Turkey and Syria are ten thousand times more concerning than Iran.”

Chikli’s comments come amid a sharp upward trajectory in bilateral tensions between Ankara and Jerusalem. Erdogan earlier this month declared that Israel’s ongoing military strikes in Syria and Lebanon constitute a direct threat to Turkish national security, stating that “Israel must be stopped, this is the duty of humanity.” Just weeks prior, Turkish Interior Minister Mustafa Ciftci publicly called for the “liberation” of Jerusalem, further ramping up rhetorical hostility between the two countries.

Chikli is not an outlier in his hardline stance toward Turkey among senior Israeli political figures. Last week, fellow Likud lawmaker Ariel Kellner officially labeled Turkey an “enemy state,” while Israeli Culture and Sports Minister Miki Zohar argued last month that Israel must reclassify Turkey as an enemy state, warning that Ankara would face devastating consequences in any future conflict with Israel. Even former Israeli Prime Minister and opposition figure Naftali Bennett backed that framing back in February, declaring that “Turkey is the new Iran.”

Outside of his regional security assessments, Chikli used his recent media appearances to defend a high-profile far-right British political agitator. After UK police detained Tommy Robinson, whose legal name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, and seized his electronic devices upon his return from a trip to Russia, Chikla called the action an attack on free speech. “One of Britain’s clearest voices against real Islamic terrorism is now being hunted under anti-terrorism laws. At this rate Britain will become the second Islamic Republic in Europe,” he claimed.

Chikli also pushed back against the idea that the region is set for a long period of peace after two and a half years of continuous conflict. When asked if Israelis could expect an extended period of calm, he said he hoped for that outcome but did not expect it to hold. He argued that Turkey has open regional ambitions that directly undermine Israeli interests, though he was careful to clarify that Israel has no intention of capturing the Turkish capital of Ankara, and would welcome lasting peace with both Syria and Turkey. He closed by referencing the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack on Israel as a lesson: “When the enemy says something, I listen.”

For years, Chikli has worked to build close working relationships with far-right political figures and governments across the globe, aligning with their anti-Islam and anti-immigration policy platforms.

In a recent diplomatic development that has sent ripples across global geopolitics, the leaders of the United States and Iran have signed a 14-point memorandum of understanding (MOU) designed to end active hostilities between the two nations, as well as halt Israel’s ongoing military campaign against Hezbollah in Lebanon. But according to analysis from Jessica Genauer, Academic Director of the Public Policy Institute at UNSW Sydney, the agreement is rife with critical structural flaws, unfulfillable promises, and one-sided concessions that leave the U.S. with few tangible gains while abandoning key regional allies and endangering long-term regional stability.

Genauer frames the deal as a classic “emperor has no clothes” moment: despite the Trump administration’s loud claims of a historic diplomatic victory, the agreement delivers almost no new benefits to the U.S. that were not already in place before the outbreak of war. Even the limited nuclear concessions offered by Iran are nothing new, she argues, and the U.S. has given up significant leverage in exchange for almost no meaningful progress on core national security priorities. Beyond that, the MOU abandons long-standing U.S. partners, most notably Gulf Cooperation Council states, while sidelining core Israeli security interests and ignoring the democratic aspirations of the Iranian people. Worse, many of the core commitments laid out in the document are impossible for the U.S. to deliver on, particularly pledges around broad sanctions relief and the unfreezing of billions in Iranian assets held around the world.

Breaking down the most problematic provisions of the MOU, Genauer first examines the clause calling for an immediate and permanent end to all military operations across all fronts, including Lebanon. A glaring oversight here is that the agreement never mentions the two primary parties to the Lebanese conflict — Israel and Hezbollah — and neither side was consulted before the clause was added to the MOU. The text also fails to clarify whether the ceasefire requires a full withdrawal of Israeli forces from southern Lebanon, a step that is all but politically impossible for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to implement. A solid majority of the Israeli public supports continued military pressure on Hezbollah and retaining control over southern Lebanon to eliminate the group’s cross-border threat. While a temporary ceasefire may hold in the short term, Genauer concludes the underlying conflict will almost certainly reignite in the near future.

Next, the MOU includes a provision requiring Iran to allow unimpeded, fee-free safe passage for commercial shipping through the Strait of Hormuz for a 60-day period, a clause Genauer calls deeply problematic. In effect, the agreement explicitly concedes Iran’s right to begin charging shipping fees for passage through the strait once the 60-day window expires — a major win for the Iranian regime that upends decades of international consensus around free navigation through the critical global energy chokepoint. This provision places Gulf states and Oman in an extraordinarily difficult position: the agreement includes no binding security guarantees to protect these nations from Iranian aggression, leaving them with little choice but to accept Iran’s demand for fees to keep their energy and commodity exports flowing.

The MOU also includes a commitment from the U.S. and unspecified regional partners to develop a $300 billion fund for Iranian post-conflict reconstruction and economic development. Genauer notes the U.S. is highly unlikely to contribute any of its own funding to the initiative, meaning the entire burden will fall on Gulf regional partners. For Iran, this provision creates a powerful new coercive tool: Tehran can pressure Gulf states to fund the reconstruction plan, threatening to block the Strait of Hormuz and resume cross-border attacks if they refuse. Faced with a choice between paying billions or enduring sustained economic and security damage, most Gulf states will likely concede to Iran’s demands. This dynamic also pushes Gulf nations into a delicate position with the U.S.: while they remain dependent on Washington for military security and will not openly break with the U.S., they are almost certain to pursue deeper diplomatic and economic partnerships with other global powers, particularly China, to hedge their bets.

On the critical issues of sanctions relief and unfreezing Iranian assets, two core pledges laid out in points 7 and 11 of the MOU, Genauer highlights that the U.S. simply cannot deliver on most of its promises. Washington can only lift unilateral U.S. sanctions and unfreeze assets held directly on U.S. territory, which make up a tiny fraction of Iran’s total frozen assets globally. The agreement requires the U.S. to also cancel United Nations Security Council and International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) sanctions resolutions, a step that is completely outside Washington’s unilateral control. What’s more, the U.S. did not consult with its allies who hold the vast majority of Iran’s frozen assets before signing the MOU, leaving no clear path to pressure those allies to release the funds.

Finally, on the nuclear issue that has been at the center of U.S.-Iran tensions for decades, the MOU delivers almost no new progress. The agreement only reaffirms Iran’s existing pre-war commitment not to develop nuclear weapons, and deliberately omits any ban on Iranian uranium enrichment — a core long-standing red line for U.S. negotiators. The only concrete nuclear provision requires Iran to dilute its existing stockpiles of enriched uranium under IAEA supervision in exchange for sanctions relief, and the text only commits both sides to “discuss the issue of enrichment” at some future date. Genauer notes it is extremely unlikely that a more detailed, binding agreement on enrichment will be reached within the 60-day window outlined in the MOU; any future negotiations would take months at a minimum, and a final deal is far from guaranteed. Despite this lack of progress, the U.S. has already agreed to offer sweeping sanctions relief, representing a major one-sided concession to Tehran.

This analysis, originally published in *The Conversation* under a Creative Commons license, offers a critical, detailed breakdown of the gaps and risks of the new U.S.-Iran diplomatic agreement.

For nearly 30 years, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has built a legacy of clashing with sitting U.S. presidents, leaving even the most powerful leaders in the world reaching for expletives to express their frustration. A candid new analysis traces this long-running pattern of tension, revealing how Netanyahu’s strategic choices and the unique structure of U.S.-Israel relations have repeatedly put the two allies at odds – with escalating consequences that now threaten Israel’s long-standing bipartisan support in America.

The string of high-profile friction stretches back to 1996, when Netanyahu met newly elected U.S. president Bill Clinton for the first time. After Netanyahu delivered a lengthy, unsolicited lecture on the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict, an exasperated Clinton turned to his aides afterward asking, “Who the fuck does he think he is? Who’s the fucking superpower here?”

Relations between Netanyahu and Barack Obama were hostile from the start, and deteriorated rapidly after Obama launched negotiations for a landmark nuclear deal with Iran. In a 2011 open-mic incident years before the deal was finalized, then-French president Nicolas Sarkozy described Netanyahu to Obama as “a liar,” to which Obama replied: “You may be sick of him, but me, I have to deal with him every day.” Journalist Jeffrey Goldberg later documented that Obama’s senior staffers privately referred to Netanyahu with the scathing insult “chickenshit.”

Most recently, the pattern repeated with Donald Trump in June 2024, after Netanyahu ordered a military strike on Beirut, the capital of Lebanon. Concerned the attack would upend a fragile pending agreement to end escalating conflict with Iran, Trump lashed out publicly, saying Netanyahu has “no fucking judgment.” Even current president Joe Biden has joined the long list of frustrated leaders, with reports indicating Biden called Netanyahu a “fucking liar” over his management of the devastating post-October 2023 war in Gaza.

While many observers attribute this repeated friction to Netanyahu’s stubborn, single-minded personality, the analysis argues there is a deeper structural explanation rooted in the unique nature of U.S.-Israel relations. Unlike other foreign leaders who clash with U.S. presidents, sitting American chief executives cannot simply dismiss Netanyahu or cut off U.S. military and diplomatic support for Israel, thanks to the powerful, well-organized pro-Israel constituencies that exert major influence over U.S. domestic politics.

Netanyahu has actively leveraged this dynamic to advance his own policy goals, mobilizing U.S. domestic pro-Israel groups to pressure sitting presidents when their priorities diverge from his. In 1998, for example, when Clinton pressured Netanyahu to cede territory in the Israeli-occupied West Bank during a Washington visit, Netanyahu spoke the night before his meeting with Clinton to 1,000 members of the pro-Israel Christian right, a core constituency that openly opposed Clinton’s agenda, and held separate meetings with top Republican leaders. When Clinton met him the next day, he dryly noted, “I know where you were last night.”

This strategy reached new heights during the Obama administration, when Netanyahu rallied broad opposition within U.S. political circles to derail Obama’s Iran nuclear deal. Whenever Obama pressured Netanyahu to curb settlement expansion in the West Bank, Netanyahu stoked domestic U.S. political backlash that ultimately forced Obama to back down rather than absorb the political cost of confrontation.

In recent years, Netanyahu has doubled down on this approach by making a deliberate strategic choice to align himself closely with the U.S. Republican conservative right. This partisan alignment has amplified tensions with Democratic presidents, who have historically been more willing to challenge Israeli policy, and has turned U.S. support for Israel into an increasingly divisive partisan issue – a shift that critics warn has already eroded support for Israel among the American left.

The 2024 clash with Trump marks a major turning point, however: it is the first time a sitting Republican president has openly and harshly criticized Netanyahu, undermining the core of his long-standing partisan strategy. The analysis argues that over the past year, Netanyahu overextended his influence, pushing aggressively to draw the U.S. into a direct military confrontation with Iran, a goal he has pursued for decades. From Trump’s perspective, Netanyahu maneuvered the U.S. into a costly, intractable conflict that damages U.S. economic and global interests, and Netanyahu refuses to prioritize a quick cease-fire that would ease global economic pressure.

Today, the consequences of Netanyahu’s decades-long strategy are playing out against a dramatically shifted backdrop. Broad public support for Israel across the U.S. political spectrum has collapsed amid mounting casualties from the Gaza war, and even traditionally pro-Israel conservative voters are growing frustrated over the economic harm of the escalating regional conflict. Netanyahu now finds that his partisan alignment has left his country with no solid base of bipartisan support in the U.S. The article concludes that future Israeli leaders will likely look back at Netanyahu’s approach and share the frustrated assessment that led Trump to reach for a curse word – that the long-serving prime minister lacked the judgment to protect Israel’s most critical alliance.

For Israelis across the political and military spectrum, the newly announced US-Iran peace deal to end the ongoing conflict is far more than a simple diplomatic breakthrough between Washington and Tehran. To the country’s ruling elite, this agreement marks a defining strategic turning point—one that threatens to erode Israel’s regional standing, fray its most critical alliance with the United States, and hasten the end of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s decades-long political career.

Though a deal had been broadly anticipated since April, Pakistan’s official confirmation of the agreement on Sunday sent immediate shockwaves through Israeli political and military circles. While key details of the deal’s terms remain undisclosed and open to speculation, one thing is clear: the end of the joint US-Israeli campaign against Iran was not supposed to unfold this way. When Netanyahu launched Israel’s military offensive against Iran on February 28, the stated goals were unambiguous: dismantle Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs, and bring about the collapse of the Iranian government.

Nearly four months later, none of these core objectives have been achieved. In fact, Iran leaves the conflict in a stronger geopolitical position than it held before February. It retains full control over its nuclear and missile development programs, and the Iranian leadership has emerged politically consolidated even after major Israeli strikes, including the reported assassination of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Iran is now increasingly recognized as an ascendant regional power, with Arab Gulf states shifting their alignment toward Tehran and away from Jerusalem.

For Israel, this new landscape has left the country in a position of geopolitical isolation unseen for decades, a sentiment that has grown steadily among the Israeli public. This sense of estrangement began building over the past two and a half years, as Israel’s brutal military campaign in Gaza sparked widespread international boycotts. But the current situation marks a far more alarming shift: Israel now finds itself increasingly distanced even from its closest ally, the United States, with multiple reports documenting a deepening rift between Netanyahu and US President Donald Trump.

To most Israelis, any fracture in the US-Israel alliance is viewed as an existential threat. For generations, Israel’s national security doctrine has been anchored to its strategic partnership with Washington. Today, both sitting government ministers and senior military commanders acknowledge they are uncertain of the deal’s long-term implications, scrambling to adjust to a rapidly shifting regional order that defies their past assumptions.

Domestically, the agreement carries profound political consequences for Netanyahu, whose right-wing coalition already trails opposition blocs in pre-election polling ahead of upcoming national votes. Speaking at a televised press conference on Monday, Netanyahu doubled down on his narrative of Israeli victory, claiming the country had achieved major gains across all recent conflict zones: Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and Iran. He argued that without Israel’s two major military strikes on Iran in 2025 and February 2026, Tehran would have already acquired a functional nuclear weapon. Addressing the Israeli public, he claimed he had “saved the State of Israel from annihilation” — rhetoric that has only widened the growing gap between the prime minister and an increasingly skeptical public. Rather than presenting himself as an accountable leader answerable to voters, Netanyahu positioned himself as a singular, legendary figure above the fray of day-to-day politics, a framing that has fallen flat for many Israelis.

While polling currently puts Netanyahu’s coalition at between 50 and 53 seats in the 120-seat Knesset, the full impact of the US-Iran deal has not yet been reflected in public opinion. Even so, current trends suggest Netanyahu will fall far short of the 61-seat majority needed to form a new government if elections were held today. It remains unclear whether the deal includes explicit language requiring Israel to withdraw its military forces from southern Lebanon, or whether Trump will pressure Netanyahu to pull out even without a formal clause mandating the move. For Netanyahu, Lebanon is already a major political vulnerability, and opposition parties have seized on the deal to criticize his leadership — focusing less on the decision to go to war, and more on the chaotic mismanagement of the conflict that led to this outcome.

An Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon could mark the beginning of the end for Netanyahu, the longest-serving prime minister in Israeli history. Former Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot, a leading opposition figure, has seen his support surge in recent polling, and he is now widely viewed as the top contender to replace Netanyahu. This week could prove to be the defining turning point in the race for prime minister. Netanyahu is increasingly framed by voters and commentators alike as a leader mired in multiple open-ended conflicts with no clear strategic goals or exit plans, and his public rift with Trump has only reinforced the narrative of growing Israeli and Netanyahu-led isolation. By contrast, Eisenkot is increasingly seen as a measured, responsible leader capable of making clear, strategic choices about Israel’s conflicts. This contrast could well prove decisive in the upcoming election.

Beyond the fate of Netanyahu’s political career, the US-Iran deal poses a fundamental challenge to Israel’s long-standing approach to regional security. For years under Netanyahu, Israel has prioritized overwhelming military force as the primary solution to regional challenges, sidelining diplomatic engagement. This trend accelerated dramatically after the October 2023 Hamas attack, when military force became the dominant tool for advancing Israeli policy, with the Israeli military — particularly under current Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir — abandoning the broader, more nuanced strategic outlook that guided its leadership in years past. Today, the army’s only answer to security challenges is total destruction, framed as a way to boost Israeli deterrence. Even as senior officers continue to push for expanded military operations across the region, strikes like the recent attack on Beirut’s Dahieh district have carried significant long-term strategic costs for Israel. If Israel is forced to withdraw from Lebanon, it would deal a major blow to the prestige of the Israeli military, which has grown into a powerful domestic political actor that has consistently pushed for expanded conflict. While Netanyahu and his far-right allies Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir are widely recognized as the driving force behind Israel’s shift toward prolonged conflict, the military’s outsized role in shaping these policies has received far less public scrutiny. The new deal calls into question not just the military’s approach to conflict, but Israel’s entire framework for managing its interests across the Middle East.

Netanyahu appears to grasp the scale of the potential changes better than most of his political rivals. If the agreement ultimately forces Israel to withdraw from southern Lebanon under Iranian pressure, while a new regional alignment uniting Iran, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Turkey takes shape, the consequences will extend far beyond Lebanon’s borders. These shifts will almost certainly reshape the ongoing conflict in Gaza as well. As Israel grows weaker and more distanced from Washington, Iran and its regional allies will likely push for the same changes in Gaza that they are demanding in Lebanon. Regional powers including Qatar and Turkey may also extract concessions from the Trump administration in exchange for maintaining ties with Washington rather than shifting closer to Iran and China. Those concessions would almost certainly include changes to Israel’s current control over Gaza. This is not a new dynamic: in 1991, the US rewarded Arab and Muslim states for joining the Gulf War coalition by brokering the first formal Israeli-Palestinian peace talks at the Madrid Conference. A similar dynamic could emerge today, even in a different form, putting Gaza and the occupied West Bank at the center of regional negotiations in the near future.

While opposition figures accuse Netanyahu of damaging the US-Israel special relationship, repairing that alliance may prove far more difficult than many assume. A single visit to the White House will not be enough to reverse the dramatic shifts in Israel’s strategic position.

Standing alone in defiance of Washington could become the core theme of Netanyahu’s reelection campaign. For that reason, it is entirely possible that Israel will refuse to withdraw from Lebanon even if Trump formally demands a pullout, risking a far deeper rupture with the White House. Earlier this week, Yinon Magal, a prominent Channel 14 journalist widely seen as close to Netanyahu, floated a possible name for a future Israeli military operation against Iran: “A People Dwells Alone.” Echoing the myth of Masada, where Jewish rebels chose death over surrender to Roman forces, the phrase frames a vision of Israel fighting its own battles independently, even without the support of its most critical ally. Israel retains formidable military capabilities, including a powerful air force and an undocumented nuclear arsenal, and for the foreseeable future, it can sustain its regional isolation through military superiority.

Netanyahu will almost certainly frame himself as the only leader willing to defy international pressure and protect Israeli citizens from external threats, leaning into this narrative of lonely defiance. But if Israel rejects the path of isolation that Netanyahu is currently charting, this week will go down in history as a watershed moment for the Middle East. Israel could be forced to accept foreign-led policy changes not just in Lebanon, but across the occupied Palestinian territories.

New details have emerged from a recent phone call between US President Donald Trump and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, revealing that Trump committed to attending the upcoming Nato summit in Ankara specifically as a gesture to the Turkish leader, multiple sources familiar with the conversation told Middle East Eye.

This development comes amid steadily escalating frictions between the United States and its European Nato allies, with the July gathering in Turkey widely framed as a critical turning point for the alliance. Leaders on both sides are expected to lay out their long-held positions and work toward a unified path forward after months of growing disagreement over alliance priorities and burden sharing.

Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan reinforced this framing during comments to reporters on Thursday, noting that many European capitals view Ankara’s hosting of the summit — and Erdogan’s personal role as host — as the single biggest factor securing Trump’s participation. Fidan argued that without Turkey in the hosting role and Erdogan at the event, Trump would have skipped the summit, sending a clear signal that he did not view the gathering as a priority. He added that productive talks require Trump’s presence, as the summit will address core disagreements between US and European perspectives that cannot be resolved without the American leader in attendance.

The tensions over alliance burden sharing moved to the forefront this week as US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth delivered a sharp warning to Nato allies during the bloc’s defense minister meeting in Brussels. Hegseth announced that over the next six months, the US will conduct a full review of its military footprint across Europe, and will cut its contributions to the alliance’s collective budget if European member states fail to raise their national defense spending to 5 percent of gross domestic product. “Make no mistake about it, this will be a real review,” Hegseth told attendees.

Unusually, Turkey has so far avoided the American anger directed at many allies over insufficient defense spending, thanks to a string of policy wins for the Trump administration from Erdogan’s government. Ankara has delivered on multiple key priorities for Trump, from brokering last year’s ceasefire in Gaza to playing a critical supportive role in the recent Iran memorandum of understanding, a deal Trump personally publicly praised.

Turkey has already outpaced Nato’s original 2 percent defense spending target in 2024, hitting 2.3 percent of GDP. On Thursday, the Turkish defense ministry confirmed that Ankara’s long-term military budgeting is already aligned with the goal of reaching the new 5 percent target, which Nato has required all member states to hit by 2035.

In a show of allied cooperation ahead of the July summit, Nato members have moved to bolster Turkey’s national air defense capabilities. The United States and Germany deployed Patriot air defense systems to southern Turkey in May. On Thursday, Turkey’s defense ministry announced that an Italian SAMP/T air defense system had also been deployed to the 3rd Main Jet Base Command in the central Turkish city of Konya, as part of Nato’s Standing Defence Plan to strengthen the alliance’s collective eastern air defenses.

A unprecedented coalition of dozens of high-ranking former Israeli national security and government leaders has launched a scathing rebuke of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right government, issuing a urgent “final wake-up call” demanding immediate action to crack down on growing Jewish settler violence and terrorism targeting Palestinian communities in the occupied West Bank.

Released publicly Thursday and first reported by Israeli newspaper Haaretz, the joint statement carries unprecedented weight, signed by former prime ministers Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert, former Israel Defense Forces chiefs of staff Moshe Ya’alon and Dan Halutz, ex-Mossad director Tamir Pardo, former heads of the domestic Shin Bet security agency Carmi Gillon and Yaakov Peri, a former Israeli national security adviser, a retired Supreme Court justice, retired major generals, a former state prosecutor, prominent rabbis, leading academics, and six recipients of the Israel Prize, the country’s highest civilian honor. Drafted by Israeli attorney Shmuel Berkowitz, copies of the statement were also delivered to Defense Minister Israel Katz, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, senior military commanders and other top government officials.

The coalition accuses Netanyahu and his governing coalition of complete inaction to root out organized settler violence, and in many cases, of actively enabling the terror campaign. The statement charges that Netanyahu and his ministers “have done nothing to eliminate Jewish terrorism”, pointing out that sitting officials have provided material backing to the illegal West Bank outposts where extremist settler leaders are based. “They do not condemn it, do not require the Israel Defence Forces, the police, the Shin Bet and the Civil Administration to fight it, and some of them, at least, even support this terror by providing financial and equipment assistance, and building illegal farms and outposts that serve as residences for Jewish terror activists,” the statement reads.

The group specifically pushes back against Netanyahu’s repeated framing of settler attackers, challenging the prime minister’s description of the perpetrators as just “about 70 kids” from broken homes who commit minor offenses like tree cutting, a claim Netanyahu made in a December 2023 interview. The coalition dismisses Netanyahu’s casual label of “hilltop youth” as intentionally misleading, arguing that the violence is not the work of a small group of unruly teens, but a coordinated, systematic movement that includes hundreds of adult organizers who incite minors to carry out attacks.

“For some reason, these Jewish criminals are referred to by you with the naive term of ‘hilltop youth’, as if they were members of a youth movement, marginalised youth or outliers. These are also young people and adults who lead even minors on the path of terror, crime and deadly violence,” the statement notes.

The open letter ties the violence directly to the expansion of illegal settlement outposts built near Palestinian villages under the goal of so-called “Judaisation” of the occupied West Bank. The document explains that these outposts are intentionally established to displace local Palestinian communities through force, advancing the extremist movement’s ideology of “land redemption” by expelling Palestinians from their ancestral land. The coalition details how the attacks are coordinated: armed settlers from outposts are regularly joined by adult extremists from other settlements, regional defense units, and local security squads from inside Israel during large-scale raids on Palestinian communities. Attacks have included fatal shootings of Palestinian villagers and shepherds, as well as widespread destruction and looting of Palestinian property.

The statement comes after several of the signatories joined tours of recently attacked Palestinian villages in the West Bank earlier this year, where many reported being shocked by the scale of damage and shared accounts from survivors, with multiple former leaders stating publicly that they felt “ashamed” by what they witnessed.

Settler violence against Palestinian communities in the occupied West Bank has spiked dramatically since the outbreak of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza in October 2023. Multiple on-the-ground reports have documented that these attacks frequently occur in full view of Israeli military forces, which rarely intervene to stop the violence. International bodies including the United Nations and Amnesty International have repeatedly warned that the campaign of settler expansion and violence amounts to systematic ethnic cleansing that has forced entire Palestinian communities to leave their land.

If the Netanyahu government fails to enact immediate policy changes to crack down on settler terror, the coalition says it will petition the Israeli Supreme Court to force action, marking an extraordinary step by former top Israeli officials against a sitting Israeli government.

Controversial Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir is scheduled to travel to New York next month to participate in the annual United Nations policing summit, Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz has reported. Ben Gvir will lead a delegation from Israel’s national security ministry to the two-day conference, which is set to run from July 7 to 8 under the official theme “Investing in Peace”. The high-profile gathering brings together security ministers and police leaders from across the globe to explore how national and cross-border law enforcement agencies can work together to advance shared goals of global peace, security and inclusive development.

What makes Ben Gvir’s upcoming appearance notable is his years-long, public record of fierce criticism against the United Nations. As recently as June 2024, after Israel was added to the UN’s blacklist of state actors responsible for harming children in conflict zones, Ben Gvir launched a scathing attack, claiming the global body had aligned itself with Hamas and become an accomplice to terrorist activity. Earlier that same year, he publicly celebrated Israeli forces’ destruction of a facility belonging to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (UNRWA) in occupied East Jerusalem.

Just one week before news of his planned UN trip broke, Ben Gvir sparked international outrage by calling for the abduction of Lebanese women and young people as a pressure tactic against the Hezbollah militant group. “Let’s start thinking outside the box about Hezbollah,” he stated in public comments. “Conquering territory and killing many terrorists, but also detaining their women and youth and taking them to terrorist prisons… That’s what hurts them the most.”

The month prior to that call, a video showing Ben Gvir overseeing the mistreatment of activists from the Global Sumud Flotilla, which was seeking to break Israel’s blockade of Gaza, went viral online and drew widespread condemnation both inside Israel and across the international community. Footage captured Ben Gvir waving an Israeli flag and confronting the detained activists while Israeli Prison Service officers forced the detainees to kneel face-down on the ground and manhandled them. The incident prompted official criticism from multiple world leaders, including representatives from nations whose citizens were among those detained. While condemnation also emerged within Israel, much of the domestic criticism centered on concerns that the embarrassing incident had severely damaged Israel’s global reputation.

Ben Gvir, who resides in the illegal Israeli settlement of Kiryat Arba in the occupied Palestinian city of Hebron, has long been the public face of efforts by Israeli settlers to storm Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, a flashpoint site sacred to both Muslims and Jews. His far-right ideological views are rooted in the legacy of Meir Kahane, an ultranationalist American-Israeli rabbi, former Israeli lawmaker and founder of the Kach Party, a movement that openly advocated for the creation of an ethnically pure Jewish state and the expulsion of all Palestinians from Israeli-controlled territory.

Ben Gvir joined Kach as an activist at the age of 16, years before the party was designated a terrorist organization by the United States and banned by the Israeli government following the 1994 Ibrahimi Mosque massacre in Hebron. In that attack, Kach member Baruch Goldstein opened fire on unarmed Palestinian worshippers at the holy site, killing dozens of people. Despite the attack’s global notoriety, Ben Gvir has openly praised both Kahane and Goldstein. He has repeatedly referred to Kahane as a “holy man, a righteous man”, and for decades kept a portrait of Goldstein hanging on the wall of his personal residence. A previously unearthed video from a Jewish Purim celebration also shows Ben Gvir dressed in costume as Goldstein, declaring “He is my hero.”

In 2007, Ben Gvir was convicted by an Israeli court on charges of inciting racism and supporting a banned terrorist organization, after he was found carrying a sign that read “Arabs out”. Police also discovered Kahanist posters in his vehicle that read “It’s us or them” and “There is a solution – expel the Arab enemy.” For many years prior to entering politics, Ben Gvir worked as a lawyer representing Israelis accused of anti-Palestinian incitement and violent attacks against Palestinians. His highest-profile client was one of two Israeli teenagers charged with carrying out a 2015 arson attack on a Palestinian family home in the West Bank village of Duma, an attack that killed an 18-month-old Palestinian baby and multiple other family members.

Just days before news of his planned UN trip was confirmed, Ben Gvir was forced to scrap a separate trip to the United States to attend a friend’s wedding after he encountered unexpected difficulties securing a US travel visa. However, a source familiar with the plans told Haaretz that Ben Gvir is not expected to face similar barriers for his upcoming UN trip, thanks to his official status as a sitting Israeli cabinet minister.

This independent reporting was originally published by Middle East Eye, which provides in-depth, independent coverage of the Middle East, North Africa and global affairs.