分类： politics

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — In a high-stakes ruling that has underscored ongoing tensions between Cambodia’s ruling government and opposition forces, the nation’s Supreme Court delivered a mixed verdict Friday: it upheld an incitement conviction against prominent opposition advisor Rong Chhun, but suspended the remaining jail time in his original sentence. The outcome bars the 56-year-old opposition leader from political participation for years while keeping him out of prison. Rong Chhun, a senior advisor to the Cambodia’s Nation Power Party, was first found guilty of inciting social unrest last year following his meetings with villagers displaced by state-backed infrastructure development projects. Legal analysts and international observers have widely framed the case against him as one of a series of targeted legal actions by Prime Minister Hun Manet’s administration to crack down on dissenting voices and eliminate public criticism of government policy. When the Supreme Court’s ruling was announced publicly, crowds of Rong Chhun’s supporters gathered outside the Phnom Penh court complex reacted with immediate anger, voicing their opposition to what they view as a politically motivated judgment. Speaking to reporters following the decision, Em Chantha, Rong Chhun’s defense attorney, outlined the full terms of the ruling: in addition to the suspended remaining prison sentence, Rong Chhun will face a five-year ban on all political activity — a restriction that strips him of even the right to vote and run for public office. He will also be prohibited from leaving the country for a three-year period, which matches the length of the unexpired portion of his original four-year prison sentence. The opposition figure had remained released on bail throughout the appeal process, a status that will continue under the new ruling. While Supreme Court verdicts are legally final in Cambodia, Rong Chhun says he and his legal team will conduct a thorough review of the judgment to explore the possibility of petitioning King Norodom Sihamoni for a royal pardon. The ruling has renewed public debate over the state of political pluralism in Cambodia, as critics argue the pattern of using legal systems to sideline opposition figures narrows democratic space ahead of future electoral cycles. Supporters of the government maintain the legal process was carried out in accordance with Cambodian law, and that the conviction was justified over allegations that Rong Chhun’s actions threatened public stability.

Parallels between the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, which ended World War I on humiliating terms for Imperial Germany, and a new 2025 ceasefire agreement between the United States and Iran have emerged after U.S. President Donald Trump signed the deal at the same French palace that hosted the historic post-WWI conference.

The agreement, dubbed the Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), opens a 60-day window for permanent negotiations to end the full-scale war launched by the U.S. and Israel against Iran earlier this year. Even across the U.S. political spectrum, the deal is widely labeled a strategic debacle for Washington, even among factions that support ending the conflict on its current terms.

When Trump first launched military strikes on Iran in June 2025, he laid out a sweeping set of non-negotiable war aims: he claimed the attack was justified to eliminate Iran’s nuclear program, initially floated plans to overthrow the Islamic Republic by backing Kurdish militants and domestic opposition, vowed to destroy Iran’s conventional military and ballistic missile program, and repeatedly demanded Iran’s unconditional surrender. None of these core objectives have been achieved, according to current and former U.S. officials, independent analysts, and political commentators from across the ideological spectrum.

“War opponents can be glad the war is over and also point out that this insane deal is a final proof point that the whole war…was a total calamity,” Democratic Senator Chris Murphy wrote on social media platform X. Conservative commentator Brandon Weichert echoed that criticism, blaming interventionist neoconservative Republicans for dragging the U.S. into a conflict it could not win. “We are only in this terrible position because of the ‘Neocons’ who pushed [us] into an unwinnable war. Again. This is what happens when you lose a war,” Weichert wrote.

Aaron David Miller, a former Middle East negotiator who has served both Republican and Democratic administrations, summed up the widespread assessment of the U.S. position in comments to Middle East Eye. “The US deployed its power foolishly and recklessly,” Miller said. “We have lost, vis-a-vis Iran, a lot of power and influence. Deterrence is gone. Iran has survived the largest deployment of American air, naval and missile assets since the Second Iraq War.”

On paper, the MoU only includes a loose Iranian pledge to refrain from developing nuclear weapons – a commitment that is already codified in a fatwa issued by former Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who was assassinated early in the conflict. The agreement leaves the door open for Iran to continue enriching uranium for civilian purposes as part of a final permanent deal, and experts note the U.S.-led bombing campaign has already set Iran’s nuclear program back by years, meaning any temporary enrichment moratorium would be largely symbolic. “Iran’s nuclear programme is already years damaged. So if they propose a moratorium they aren’t really offering anything,” explained David Schenker, a former senior U.S. official now based at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

Critics of the deal have focused heavily on the sweeping economic concessions granted to Tehran. The MoU lifts all U.S. sanctions on Iranian oil exports, ends the American blockade of Iranian ports, and outlines a process to unfreeze more than $100 billion in Iranian assets held abroad, with many of these funds expected to be released during the 60-day negotiation window. Alan Pino, a former CIA and National Intelligence Council officer now at the Atlantic Council, noted that the MoU ties few of these economic benefits to concrete Iranian concessions on Washington’s original policy goals. “Iran clearly gets a lot of economic benefits from the MoU. What is not clear is how many of these benefits are tied to implementation of a final agreement,” Pino said. “It seems like these frozen funds might start flowing to Iran during the 60-day period. Either way, with the sanctions waiver, it sounds like Iran is going to get its hands on a lot of money without fully complying with the US’s goals and objectives.”

Analysts say the final outcome of the conflict was shaped by Iran’s successful asymmetric pressure campaign that wore down U.S. resolve long before Tehran’s own position weakened. Though Iran never launched direct attacks on the U.S. homeland, its missile and drone strikes depleted American stocks of air defense interceptors to critically low levels, while its blockade of the Strait of Hormuz – the chokepoint through which 20% of global oil supplies flow – pushed U.S. strategic petroleum reserves to a 40-year low and created widespread fears of a global energy crisis. By mid-April, two weeks after the war launched, multiple outlets including Middle East Eye warned the U.S. was facing a “Suez moment,” a parallel to the 1956 failed Suez Crisis that marked the end of British and French dominance over the Middle East. Trump continued the conflict for another month, however, with a shaky ceasefire repeatedly broken by flare-ups in fighting and empty threats to target Iranian civilian infrastructure.

Experts say Trump entered the war largely on the urging of Israeli lobbyists who claimed that toppling the Iranian government would be quick and low-cost. When the initial invasion plan failed, Trump doubled down on a blockade and threats of further escalation, betting that the Iranian government would collapse under pressure. Instead, Iran outlasted the U.S., as growing global fears of an energy crisis and pressure from U.S.-allied Gulf states forced Washington to compromise.

William Usher, a former CIA analyst and Middle East expert, explained the timeline that led to the MoU. “The US and Iran both had clocks that were winding down for several weeks,” Usher said. Oil executives warned that a prolonged closure of the Strait of Hormuz would trigger a global supply shock by summer, and Iran responded to U.S. threats with warnings of new attacks on oil-rich Gulf U.S. allies – states that hold major investments in the U.S. economy and have extensive personal business ties to the Trump family. “The US clock wound down first because concerns about rising energy prices hit a fever pitch. Iran had a little bit more sand in the hourglass and is reaping the benefit of strategic patience,” Usher added. “Iran basically got paid to reopen the strait.”

While the war has inflicted massive damage on Iran – Trump has claimed U.S. and Israeli strikes caused up to $2 trillion in damages to Iranian military, civilian, and energy infrastructure – Tehran is already moving to recoup its losses. The MoU outlines a $300 billion reconstruction fund for Iran in a final peace deal. While Trump has ruled out using U.S. taxpayer money for the fund, he has not objected to contributions from Gulf Arab states. Diplomatic sources say Qatar and the United Arab Emirates are already in informal talks to contribute to the fund, a sharp shift from the start of the war, when most Gulf states opened their military bases to the U.S. and joined the coalition attacking Iran.

That shift underscores the new regional reality created by the war: Gulf states now recognize that U.S. deterrence against Iran has been weakened, and are moving to strike their own conciliatory deals with Tehran to avoid future conflict. “The Gulf states know we [the US] lost and that we can’t protect them from Iran. They are paying Iran for safety, and it appears to be part of a US arrangement,” a former senior U.S. official told Middle East Eye. Schenker summarized the dynamic: “The US has given its blessing for hedging.”

This war, Usher noted, fits a decades-long pattern of U.S. military interventions in the Middle East that have ultimately strengthened Iran’s strategic position. After the U.S. toppled Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq in 2003, Iran filled the power vacuum and built deep influence with Iraq’s Shia majority government. “Like the Iraq war, the US has left Iran in a strategically better position,” Usher said.

While parallels to the 1919 Versailles Treaty have been drawn, experts note there are key differences between the two outcomes. The Versailles Treaty led to the collapse of Imperial Germany and the rise of the fragile Weimar Republic, but the war with Iran was never an existential threat to the United States, which remains the dominant military power in the Middle East. Miller argued that despite the strategic defeat, no external power is positioned to displace U.S. influence in the region. “Is American power and influence in the Gulf fundamentally eroded as a result of this strategic defeat?” Miller asked. “Well, where are the Russians, the Chinese and the Europeans? This was an unprecedented crisis dominated by three countries: the US, Israel and Iran. The US is still the only game in town.”

On Thursday, the Israeli military made public an official map marking an expanded zone of military control deep inside southern Lebanese territory, a move that directly undermines a recently reached ceasefire memorandum brokered between the United States and Iran. According to reporting from Reuters, the new map, which marks the expanded occupied area in dark red, confirms that Israeli forces have pushed far past their previous operational boundaries, extending their hold on both land and maritime areas roughly 10 kilometers along the contested Yellow Line that separates Israeli and Lebanese territory. This newly claimed control encompasses eight additional Lebanese villages that were not previously listed as falling under Israeli occupation: Mazraat Byout El Saiyad, Majdal Zoun, Haddatha, Beit Yahoun, Zawtar El Charqiyeh, Arnoun, Yohmor, and Kfar Tebnit, details confirmed by architect and spatial researcher Ahmad Baydoun. While Israeli troops have operated in these newly marked areas for several weeks, Thursday’s publication marks the first official acknowledgment of the expanded occupation. The disclosure comes at a moment of sharp tension, as Israel openly rejects the terms of the U.S.-Iran Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding, a deal that requires an immediate and permanent end to all military operations across every front, including Lebanon, and guarantees full respect for Lebanon’s territorial integrity and national sovereignty. Even after the memorandum was signed, Israeli forces have continued offensive strikes across southern Lebanon and have repeatedly refused international and diplomatic calls to withdraw its troops from occupied southern Lebanese territory. Israeli officials speaking to Reuters confirmed that tough, ongoing negotiations are still underway with the Trump administration over Israel’s demand to keep its military deployed inside Lebanese territory south of the Litani River, adding that the outcome of these talks will hinge on whether President Trump chooses to pressure Israel to comply with the ceasefire terms by threatening consequences for noncompliance. The day before the map’s release, U.S. President Donald Trump publicly voiced sharp irritation with Israel’s heavy-handed military tactics in Lebanon, marking a rare public rift between the American leader and his long-time Israeli ally. In comments made at the G7 Summit in Evian, France, Trump criticized Israel for disproportionate and indiscriminate tactics that have led to mass civilian casualties, saying that Israeli forces do not need to destroy entire residential apartment buildings to target individual members of Hezbollah. “You don’t have to knock down an apartment house every time you’re looking for somebody, because there are a lot of people in those apartment houses, and they’re not all Hezbollah,” Trump told reporters. He added that the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah has dragged on for far too long, noting that “too many people have been killed in Lebanon.” This public rebuke follows a heated exchange one week prior, when Trump excoriated Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for launching new strikes that threatened to derail the ceasefire deal just hours before its official announcement. In unusually blunt comments, Trump called Netanyahu “a very difficult guy” and reminded Israel that the U.S.-brokered deal prevents Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, a outcome he claimed saves Israel from annihilation. In an even more provocative remark made on the sidelines of the G7 alongside Qatar’s ruler, Trump said he has suggested that Syria should be allowed to handle Hezbollah instead of Israel, arguing that Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa’s forces are more than capable of defeating the group and would do a better job than the Israeli military. “If Israel can’t do the job without killing everyone else, he’ll do the job. Syria will do the job,” Trump stated. Even as diplomatic clashes continue between Washington and Jerusalem, violence on the ground continues to escalate. Lebanon’s National News Agency reported that on the same day Israel released its control map, an Israeli drone strike targeted a civilian vehicle near Kfar Tebnit, killing two people. A separate strike in Zebdine killed one additional person, and a drone strike on Beit Yahoun wounded two more. Since the launch of the U.S.-backed Israeli campaign against Iran, Lebanon’s health ministry reported that at least 3,826 people have been killed across the country, and more than 11,800 others have sustained injuries. Israeli military officials have also made clear that they do not rule out expanding offensive strikes even further beyond their newly declared occupation lines, a stance that puts the entire U.S.-Iran ceasefire agreement at risk of total collapse, as regional tensions continue to rise.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) is set to face a pivotal moment on July 24, when 123 member states will gather in New York City for a historic special vote that will decide the future of sitting chief prosecutor Karim Khan, multiple diplomatic sources have confirmed exclusively to Middle East Eye. The vote stems from misconduct allegations that have roiled the global court, and will mark the final step in a process that has already sparked deep controversy over institutional process and political interference.

The path to this special session began in May 2024, when unpublicized allegations of sexual misconduct against Khan first emerged. Khan has repeatedly and forcefully denied all wrongdoing connected to the claims. When the original complainant declined to cooperate with the ICC’s internal investigative mechanisms, the court’s governing body, the Assembly of States Parties (ASP), commissioned an independent probe led by the United Nations. Over the course of more than a year, UN investigators collected and vetted evidence, with their findings then passed to a panel of independent judges appointed by the ASP Bureau — the 15-member executive steering committee of the ICC’s member states.

Working to the strict legal standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt, the judicial panel delivered a unanimous ruling in March 2025, following three months of review of the 150-page UN investigative report and its 5,000 pages of supporting evidence. In a conclusion viewed by Middle East Eye, the panel confirmed that the evidence presented “do not establish misconduct or breach of duty under the relevant framework.”

In a move that has alarmed legal observers, however, the ASP Bureau simply set aside the judicial panel’s independent finding when it met on June 8. By a qualified majority vote, the Bureau moved to suspend Khan from his post, and in a confidential decision obtained by MEE, a two-thirds majority of voting Bureau members went a step further, formally recommending a finding of “serious misconduct” against the prosecutor. That recommendation cleared the way for the full ASP to hold a final vote on the matter, scheduled for the New York special session this month.

Under the ICC’s existing governing rules, the 125-member ASP is the sole body with authority to issue a final binding determination on the misconduct allegations and rule on whether to remove Khan from office permanently. When member states convene, they will first vote on whether to uphold the Bureau’s recommendation, with three possible outcomes on the table: a finding of serious misconduct, a finding of less serious misconduct, or a ruling that no misconduct occurred. Any finding of misconduct will require approval from a two-thirds majority of member states present and casting a vote.

If a majority endorses a finding of serious misconduct, the ASP will move to a second, separate vote on whether to remove Khan from his position permanently. To remove the prosecutor, the motion will need the support of an absolute majority of all 125 ICC member states — a minimum threshold of 63 votes.

The entire process has thrown the ICC into a state of unprecedented institutional uncertainty, with unregulated media leaks about the allegations compounding instability around Khan’s leadership. Legal experts have raised sharp alarms about the Bureau’s decision to disregard the independent judicial panel’s finding, warning that the move risks turning a disciplinary process into a politicized exercise that undermines the court’s credibility.

Critics have also drawn attention to the timing of the allegations, which have unfolded alongside a sustained diplomatic campaign by the United States and its allies to block Khan’s ongoing investigation into alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by Israeli officials in Gaza, where the UN and multiple human rights groups have documented widespread civilian death and humanitarian catastrophe.

Khan, a British barrister who was elected as the ICC’s third chief prosecutor in February 2021, has made pursuing high-profile cases against sitting and former heads of state a central priority of his tenure. His office has secured arrest warrants for Russian President Vladimir Putin over the illegal invasion of Ukraine, for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over actions in Gaza, for junta leaders in Myanmar accused of genocide against the Rohingya people, and for senior Taliban officials over targeted attacks on Afghan civilians.

Khan’s aggressive pursuit of these high-stakes cases has already triggered retaliation from major non-member states. In 2025, the Trump administration reimposed and expanded harsh economic sanctions on Khan, later extending the measures to target two deputy prosecutors, eight sitting ICC judges, the UN Special Rapporteur on Palestine, and multiple Palestinian non-governmental organizations that provided evidence to the court’s Gaza investigation. Russian courts have also issued an arrest warrant for Khan in absentia in retaliation for the Putin warrant. The ICC holds jurisdiction over crimes committed on the territory of its member states, even when the accused are nationals of non-member countries like the United States, Russia, and Israel.

WASHINGTON, D.C. – In a solemn and moving White House ceremony Thursday, former President Donald Trump presented the Medal of Honor, the U.S. military’s highest decoration for valor, to three veterans whose extraordinary acts of bravery saved countless lives and turned the tide of enemy advances during conflicts in Vietnam and Afghanistan.

Two of the honorees, retired Marine Corps Maj. James Capers Jr. and Army Maj. Nicholas Dockery, accepted the award in person, while the third, retired Marine Corps Col. John W. Ripley, received the honor posthumously more than 15 years after his 2008 passing. Opening the ceremony, Trump paid tribute to the three men, saying, “These are great men, great people. We thank you and we will never, ever forget you.”

At 88 years old, Capers was recognized for his selfless leadership during a fatal 1967 Vietnam ambush. What began as a routine reconnaissance mission targeting a suspected North Vietnamese Army base camp quickly devolved into days of brutal close-quarters combat in the thick, unforgiving Vietnamese jungle. On the fourth day of the operation, Capers’ small team was surrounded and outnumbered by enemy fighters, and a hidden land mine blast left the major with a broken leg and severe abdominal wounds. Despite his life-threatening injuries, Capers insisted on retaining command after receiving a dose of morphine, Trump recounted. “He took over like nobody’s ever seen before,” the former president said.

Capers immediately called in targeted air support to repel the attacking force, and when a rescue helicopter arrived to evacuate the unit, he insisted all wounded Marines be loaded onto the aircraft before he boarded himself. A heartfelt, unscripted moment unfolded during the medal presentation: after pinning the Medal of Honor around Capers’ neck, Trump adjusted the decoration to sit straight against the veteran’s chest, pulling him forward in a gesture of respect. The 88-year-old, who had held a composed expression up to that point, broke into a warm smile when Trump grinned back at him.

The second posthumous honor went to Ripley, celebrated for a one-man mission that halted a massive North Vietnamese advance in 1972. When more than 30,000 enemy troops and 200 tanks advanced toward a critical strategic bridge in the village of Dong Ha, Ripley took on the high-risk task of destroying the crossing single-handedly. Over five grueling hours, he repeatedly climbed across the bridge’s exposed steel beams while under constant enemy fire, placing a total of 500 pounds of explosives in key positions. “John completed not one, not two, but five such trips,” Trump noted, calling Ripley a “very strong guy.” After placing the final charge, Ripley said a prayer before triggering the detonation, sending the entire bridge collapsing into the river below and stopping the enemy advance in its tracks. Ripley’s three sons and other extended family members attended the ceremony to accept the medal on his behalf.

The final living recipient, Dockery, was honored for his extraordinary courage during a 2012 Taliban ambush in Afghanistan’s Kapisa Province, where his platoon was tasked with guarding a local compound. Outnumbered by an estimated 150 attacking insurgents, Dockery immediately sprinted across open, enemy-exposed ground to rally his scattered troops, then set out to locate missing service members. After carrying one wounded soldier out of active gunfire, he spotted two enemy fighters moving to kill a second wounded American troops trapped in an alley. Dockery eliminated the two insurgents before administering CPR to the wounded soldier, restoring his breathing, according to his official citation.

After calling in mortar support to target enemy positions, Dockery used his own body to shield the wounded soldier from incoming blast shrapnel. After hours of intense urban combat, Dockery deployed smoke grenades to mark enemy positions for U.S. attack gunships, and he refused to leave the battle site until every last wounded service member had been evacuated to safety. “You were the last man to depart the battlefield that day,” Trump told Dockery. “and you left it a legend and a hero.”

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.