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Fragile diplomatic efforts to end a months-long joint US-Israeli military campaign against Iran have been thrown into turmoil by new reports revealing that senior Trump administration officials detected Israeli plans to assassinate Iran’s top negotiating leaders to sabotage any potential peace deal. Two leading US outlets, The New York Times and The Washington Post, have corroborated the claims, citing unnamed current and former American officials and on-the-record confirmation from a senior Iranian aide.

According to the Times’ reporting published Thursday, US intelligence concerns over planned Israeli targeting of two senior Iranian figures—Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf—grew sharply amid sensitive ceasefire negotiations that launched in April. The alarm was so severe that US officials went so far as to coordinate with regional third countries to relay explicit warnings to Iran about the looming threat to the two negotiators.

The timeline of the crisis dates back to late February, when the US and Israel launched a joint offensive campaign that has already killed dozens of high-ranking Iranian officials. By late March, both countries had temporarily removed Araghchi and Ghalibaf from their official target lists, a step that opened the door for high-level talks to end the ongoing conflict. But the Times reports that Israeli leadership remained determined to eliminate the negotiators, a finding later confirmed by independent reporting from The Washington Post.

One dramatic April incident laid bare the severity of the threat. Ghalibaf had planned a trip to Islamabad, Pakistan, to meet with US Vice President JD Vance, and Pakistani fighter jets escorted the Iranian aircraft carrying the 70-member delegation from the Iran-Pakistan border to the capital and back after the meeting concluded. However, as the plane began its return trip to Tehran, Israeli security threats emerged. Two unnamed American officials confirmed that Iranian security intercepted intelligence indicating Israel planned to target the plane, and that two Israeli fighter jets had entered Iranian airspace through the western border near Iraq.

Mahdi Mohammadi, a senior adviser to Ghalibaf who accompanied the delegation on the Islamabad trip, later confirmed the entire account on his public social media page. To avoid the imminent threat, the plane made an emergency landing in Mashhad, the closest major Iranian airport to the Pakistani border, and the entire delegation completed the remaining journey to Tehran over an eight-hour land trip.

The revelations have further exposed growing rifts between US and Israeli strategic approaches to the conflict, rifts that first emerged after Israel assassinated top Iranian national security official Ali Larijani in March. Speaking to reporters in late March, former President Donald Trump himself acknowledged that Israel’s widespread assassination campaign had complicated efforts to find viable Iranian negotiating partners, noting “They’ve wiped out everybody.”

Analysts say Israel’s efforts to derail peace talks align with long-standing strategic goals and the immediate political interests of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, argued that while Israel is formally classified as a US partner, its leadership is so committed to undermining US-led diplomacy that it is willing to assassinate the very Iranian officials Washington is negotiating with.

“I can’t recall a government as terrified of peace as the one running Israel,” Parsi wrote in response to the new reporting.

Netanyahu has already escalated tensions in the region through his ongoing military occupation and assault on southern Lebanon, a core issue that Iran has identified as a non-negotiable point in the ongoing ceasefire talks. During a visit to occupied southern Lebanon earlier this week, Netanyahu told Israeli troops that “our insistence is that we will not leave … until the threat is removed,” a statement that further weakened trust ahead of negotiations.

Parsi added that beyond Netanyahu’s long-stated goal of leveraging US power to bring Iran under Israeli dominance and reshape the regional balance of power in Israel’s favor, the Israeli prime minister faces urgent personal and political incentives to disrupt any peace deal. The emerging US-Iran memorandum of understanding on a ceasefire has already come at a major political cost for Netanyahu, whose chances of winning re-election in October’s national vote are now weaker than they have been in months. Once positioned as the only Israeli leader capable of maintaining a strong alliance with the Trump administration, Netanyahu now faces the prospect that a successful peace deal will leave Israel in a strategically weaker position, undermining the core justification for his leadership.

Most critically, if Netanyahu loses the October election, he will lose his legal immunity as prime minister and faces ongoing corruption trials that could result in years of prison time.

A high-profile arrest of one of Turkey’s most popular stand-up comics has reignited fierce debate over freedom of expression in the country, after authorities took Deniz Goktas into custody on charges of insulting President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and violating Islamic religious values.

Goktas was detained upon his arrival at Istanbul’s main airport on Thursday, just after returning from an overseas vacation, according to an official statement released by the Istanbul public prosecution service. He was formally placed under pre-trial arrest following initial processing. The charges stem directly from a 1 June stand-up set he performed in Istanbul, which was later uploaded to YouTube and has accumulated nearly 9 million views to date.

During the widely circulated performance, Goktas wove sharp satirical commentary on Turkish politics and society, targeting not just President Erdogan, but also imprisoned main opposition Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu, and two of Erdogan’s sons-in-law: former finance minister Berat Albayrak and leading defense industry figure Selcuk Bayraktar. One of Goktas’s most talked-about quips described Erdogan’s political evolution as shifting from a “shy dictator” to a leader who is now “at peace with his own identity.” He also joked that he would like to work as Erdogan’s personal therapist, noting the role would come with generous pay, extensive job security, and substantial perks, calling it a “perfect fit” for him.

The controversial jokes that triggered the religious value charges centered on a quip about the Quran, the central religious text of Islam. Goktas framed the Quran as the fourth and final holy text in the Abrahamic tradition, saying “The first three books were good, but the translation was weak in the fourth. I think it was the best of the four books.”

Appearing before a court on Friday for his formal arraignment, Goktas pushed back against all allegations, emphasizing he has performed the same stand-up routine since 2023 without incident, and never held any intention to insult either religious communities or the Turkish presidency. “The word ‘dictator’ is a political characterization. It is also a subject that is frequently debated in public,” Goktas told prosecutors. “I had no intention of insulting or denigrating anyone.”

According to prosecution records, the performance drew 185 separate formal complaints from members of the public. Turkey’s Information and Communication Technologies Authority (BTK), the country’s top digital regulator, has already moved to block public access to clips of the set shared across major social media platforms.

News of Goktas’s arrest has quickly sparked widespread condemnation from Turkish opposition politicians and human rights organizations, who frame the arrest as a deliberate attack on artistic expression and the latest in a long string of government crackdowns on public criticism of Erdogan’s administration. Murat Emir, a Member of Parliament from the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), accused Turkish courts of acting in bad faith to “invent a crime to arrest someone.” “You folks gripe about comedians, but the real improv show in this country is happening in the courthouse hallways,” Emir wrote on the social platform X, formerly Twitter.

The Turkish Human Rights Association called Goktas’s arrest a “severe blow to freedom of expression.” In an official post on X, the group stated “We demand that this judicial harassment against Goktas be immediately ended and that he be released.”

Goktas’s case is far from an anomaly in modern Turkey: thousands of people are arrested and prosecuted annually across the country under charges of insulting the presidency, outlined in Article 299 of the Turkish penal code. Convictions under the statute can carry prison sentences of up to four years.

A leading British non-governmental organization focused on combating Islamophobia has launched a formal regulatory complaint against X, the social media platform owned by billionaire Elon Musk, over Musk’s decision to host and promote a full-length feature film widely condemned for spreading anti-muslim and anti-migrant hate speech. The complaint, submitted by Muslim Engagement and Development (Mend), targets the controversial production *Citizen Vigilante*, directed by Uwe Boll and starring Armie Hammer – an actor who faces multiple sexual assault allegations from different women.

The film’s plot centers on a wealthy American landlord living in an unnamed European nation, who takes up vigilante violence to target people he labels as criminals, rapists and corrupt public officials, eventually being celebrated as a folk hero by the public. Throughout most of the runtime, Hammer’s brooding protagonist repeatedly berates immigrants and working-class people for minor offenses, from evading public transit fares to falling behind on rent payments to him. In one particularly extreme sequence, the main character breaks into a Muslim family’s home and kills every member, including unarmed civilians. Dialogue in the film falsely ties the abuse of women to the teachings of the Qur’an and core Islamic values.

Film critics have widely panned the production, with industry publication Variety’s critic Todd Gilchrist describing it as “a violent, incoherent, morally bankrupt slice of exploitation.” Other reviewers have echoed this criticism, noting that the movie relies on overused, harmful stereotypes to build a false narrative about European communities, leaning into anti-migrant tropes that have gained traction in far-right spaces internationally. Already, the film has been blocked from formal distribution in Germany, where regulators declined to issue an age rating – a move that bans it from theatrical screenings and most retail sales over evidence it incites violence against immigrant groups. Despite this ban, U.S. producers Berry Meyerowitz and Jeff Sackman acquired distribution rights through their company Quiver, and the film gained unprecedented visibility when Musk posted the entire feature for free to his personal X account, where it remained accessible for two full days.

In the complaint filed with UK media regulator Ofcom, Mend’s Chief Executive Abdullah Saif emphasized that the film’s bigotry is specifically targeted at Muslim communities, rather than being a generic take on crime. Since Musk’s original posting, the content has continued to spread across X, including via reposts from accounts based in the United Kingdom, bringing unregulated, age-unverified hate content directly to a mass British audience. Saif wrote that the film’s core narrative “endorses, incites and valorises the killing of Muslim families.”

Mend argues that Ofcom has clear authority to intervene under the 2023 UK Online Safety Act, which grants the regulator power to act against content that stirs up racial and religious hatred. The complaint raises particular red flags over the fact that the content was amplified not by an anonymous user evading platform moderation, but by the platform’s owner himself. This situation, Mend notes, forces urgent questions about whether X’s content safety systems operate fairly, consistently, and without granting preferential treatment to high-profile users – including the platform’s own owner.

The risk posed by the film’s distribution is amplified by current social context, the complaint adds. Just weeks before Musk posted the film, the United Kingdom saw a wave of anti-migrant rioting across Belfast and multiple regions of Scotland. Mend also references separate research from the Centre for Countering Digital Hate, which found that Musk’s own posts about the Belfast unrest reached extremely large audiences and amplified harmful narratives that carry a clear risk of inciting real-world violence.

Against this tense backdrop, the mass distribution of a film that celebrates the murder of Muslim people is far more than a distasteful creative choice, the organization argues: it carries a foreseeable risk of normalizing and encouraging offline hostility and violence against a clearly identifiable protected community. Mend is calling on Ofcom to open a formal investigation into whether X violated the Online Safety Act, and to compel the platform to explain whether it conducted required risk assessments for content targeting Muslim and migrant communities. The group has requested a formal response from the regulator within a 28-day window.