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In a move that signals shifting educational and diplomatic dynamics in the Middle East, an Israel-founded research organization has lauded Saudi Arabia for sweeping changes to the kingdom’s K-12 school curricula that alter long-held narratives about Jerusalem, Israel, and religious minorities. Impact-se, an institution closely tied to the Israeli state and Zionist organizations, published its long-awaited review of updated Saudi teaching materials at the end of July, framing the changes as a meaningful step toward moderation while still criticizing remaining content that it says rejects Israeli legitimacy.

Among the most significant changes highlighted in the report is the removal of the iconic phrase “the Muslims will never give up Jerusalem” from Saudi textbooks. Impact-se’s analysis notes that the original wording implied Muslim sovereignty over the city was under ongoing threat, a framing that could be read as casting Jerusalem as a permanent site of conflict between Muslims and Israel. This development comes at a time of escalating provocative actions by Israeli authorities against the status quo at Jerusalem’s holy sites: just this week, Israeli officials formally allowed Jewish settlers to conduct organized prayers inside the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in occupied East Jerusalem, breaking a decades-old understanding that restricted non-Muslim worship at the site, which is the third-holiest location in Islam. It also follows repeated calls by far-right Israeli politicians to destroy the existing mosque to construct a Jewish Third Temple on the site, even as Israeli settlers continue expanding illegal settlements on Palestinian land across the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem to shift the region’s demographic makeup in favor of Israel.

Impact-se also highlighted the removal of what it classifies as all antisemitic content from Saudi curricula, including the excision of select passages from the Quran and Hadith, the collected teachings of the Prophet Muhammad. One notable removal is a well-known hadith that recounts Muhammad visiting a sick Jewish child who ultimately converted to Islam. The organization framed this deletion as an improvement to how religious minorities are portrayed, arguing it means students are no longer taught that rejection of Islam leads to eternal damnation. Impact-se also praised the truncation of Quranic verses that address disbelief and sin, though it criticized Saudi curricula for retaining the framing of Islam as humanity’s natural religion, a common theological positioning found across most major world faiths that the organization still objects to in this context.

The report also documented sweeping changes to how maps and terminology related to the conflict are presented. Previously, Saudi maps did not label Israel and marked the entire territory between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea as Palestine. In the updated 2024-2025 curricula, the “Palestine” label has been removed entirely. While the new maps still do not explicitly identify Israel, Impact-se noted that the change eliminates the explicit claim to the full territory. A grade 11 history textbook also replaced the anti-Zionist phrase “the Zionist Enemy” with the term “the Israeli Occupation.” Even this moderate shift did not satisfy Impact-se, which argued that because the term is applied broadly rather than only to territories occupied after 1967, it still reflects a Saudi position of non-recognition of the State of Israel. This criticism comes amid the explicit public rejection of Palestinian statehood by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who stated clearly in November 2023 that “There will not be a Palestinian state. It’s very simple: it will not be established.”

Impact-se also objected to remaining passages that describe Zionists as “cunning and devious,” specifically calling out an account of a 1900s meeting between Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann, who later became Israel’s first president, and Saudi Arabia’s founding monarch King Abdulaziz (Ibn Saud). The textbook recounts that Weizmann attempted to bribe Ibn Saud to abandon support for the Palestinian cause and step aside for the Zionist movement’s ambitions, a move the king dismissed as “criminal audacity.” Impact-se argued that this account promotes a conspiratorial, negative view of Zionism as a movement. Notably, the core claims of the textbook account are corroborated by declassified historical records: a February 1940 U.S. State Department memorandum confirms Weizmann offered to raise three to four million British pounds in exchange for Ibn Saud’s support for a plan to “voluntarily transfer” the Palestinian population to Transjordan and Iraq. This language echoes recent statements by current Israeli ministers who have promoted “voluntary migration” of Palestinians from Gaza and the occupied West Bank, a policy widely labeled as ethnic cleansing by international observers.

Impact-se, which was founded by leaders with close ties to Israeli government institutions and Zionist organizations, operates across the Middle East pushing for curriculum changes that align with the Israeli official narrative of regional history. The organization has long demanded that all Arab and Palestinian textbooks explicitly recognize the State of Israel, but neither Impact-se nor its founders have publicly called for equivalent recognition of Palestinian statehood. The campaign for these curriculum changes has received active backing from the U.S. government through diplomatic pressure, led in part by Israeli-born U.S. Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism Rabbi Yehuda Kaploun.

Following the publication of its review, Impact-se wrote on social platform X that it “appreciates Saudi Arabia’s continued efforts to improve school curricula, including work to address concerning themes in textbooks. The portrayal of Israel and Zionism continues the gradual moderation documented in previous IMPACT-se reports.”

A new economic investigation published by Israeli outlet *TheMarker* on Sunday has delivered staggering projections for the total financial cost of Israel’s ongoing military campaign in the Gaza Strip, with the current toll already hitting 420 billion shekels ($114 billion) and on track to surpass 500 billion shekels in the near future.

The findings come alongside sharp internal criticism of Israeli military strategy ahead of planned long-term defense budget increases. A former Israeli army chief speaking to *TheMarker* linked the massive costs to the military’s high-profile failure to prevent the October 2023 Hamas-led attack, arguing that the security gap created by that failure has forced major budget expansions. “If we had received enough security, there would probably be no need to double the defence budget over the coming decade,” one senior economic expert told the outlet. Defense budget data shows the ministry’s annual allocation has already surged to more than 175 billion shekels for 2026, marking the third consecutive year of spending above that threshold and a more than 100% increase from the 84 billion shekel budget allocated in 2022.

While analysts have yet to draw a definitive link between the increased defense spending and improved long-term security for Israel, senior officials acknowledged to *TheMarker* that “similar or better results could have been achieved in a shorter war.” The report specifically calls out the Israeli military’s unnecessarily costly and wasteful operational approach in the early months of the conflict: the campaign opened with an unprecedented barrage of aerial and artillery bombardment, and the military mobilized roughly 220,000 reserve troops – a deployment that drove a massive surge in operational costs. “In the first weeks, too much fire was used,” a retired senior Israeli army officer stated, referring to the opening phase of the war that has killed tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. The officer also confirmed that the intensive early bombardment quickly left Israeli forces with critical shortages of tank ammunition and aerial bombs.

Separately, on the same day the cost report was released, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling Likud party launched a high-stakes public billboard campaign framing the upcoming election as a battle against foreign leaders the party labels enemies of Israel. Netanyahu himself shared an image of the massive Tel Aviv billboard via the social platform X, confirming the list of figures featured: Iran’s Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Hezbollah Secretary-General Naim Qassem, and even recently elected New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani. The billboard’s slogan reads directly: “They want Netanyahu to lose. Don’t let them win.” The following day, Netanyahu followed up the campaign rollout with a video clip highlighting past comments from Erdogan and Mamdani, where Erdogan compared Netanyahu to Nazi leader Adolf Hitler and Mamdani labeled the Israeli prime minister a war criminal. Netanyahu repeated the campaign’s core slogan in the video’s caption.

In another development spanning the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Israeli newspaper *Haaretz* reported Monday that the Jerusalem municipality has seized control of a large UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) complex containing a school and clinic in the Shuafat refugee camp in occupied East Jerusalem. According to Roland Friedrich, UNRWA’s director for the occupied West Bank, municipal officials changed the locks on the complex and began repair work without prior authorization from the UN agency. Friedrich emphasized that the complex is UN property that holds legal immunity under international law, which strictly prohibits unauthorized entry or seizure of UN assets.

Both the school and clinic at the site were shut down by Israeli authorities over the past year, with the municipality promising it would replace the UN-run services for the camp’s 20,000 residents. But *Haaretz* confirmed that the municipality has yet to open a new school to serve the camp’s school-aged children, leaving hundreds of students without access to formal education. “Over the years, UNRWA has invested enormous sums in establishing and developing these buildings,” Friedrich added, expressing deep concern over what he calls a deliberate violation of international law by the municipal government. For its part, the Jerusalem municipality rejected Friedrich’s claims, arguing that UNRWA constructed the complex on privately owned Israeli land without compensation and that it plans to build a new public school for camp residents on the seized site.

In a piece of positive archaeological news also reported Sunday by *Haaretz*, researchers from the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) have uncovered a remarkably well-preserved large-scale Islamic-era commercial and industrial complex beneath a football stadium car park in Ramat Gan, a city just east of Tel Aviv. The 2,500-square-metre site dates to the late seventh or early eighth century CE, a period when the region was under early Muslim rule.

Excavations at the site have uncovered paved streets, ceramic kilns, retail shopfronts, and large storage warehouses, all laid out in a clear planned grid. IAA researchers say the site’s uniform construction indicates it was planned and funded by a central regional authority with substantial resources. “The main phase at the site was planned in detail and in advance by engineers. It was built with the knowledge of the regional authorities, and perhaps even at their initiative and with their funding,” a lead IAA researcher told *Haaretz*. The site is believed to have served as a key economic hub for travelers and merchants moving along the main trade route between Jerusalem and Ramla, which was the regional administrative capital at the time.

While researchers have not yet uncovered the site’s original name or detailed information about the communities that used it, dating analysis confirms it was first abandoned in the ninth century, briefly repopulated as a residential neighborhood in the 10th century, and permanently abandoned by the 11th century. The discovery offers unprecedented new insight into early Islamic economic and urban development in the historic Palestine region.

Tucked along Lebanon’s eastern border with Israel, inside the Israeli-occupied zone of southern Lebanon, the small Sunni-majority village of Kfarchouba carries a rare and painful distinction: unlike hundreds of thousands of neighboring residents who have been forcibly displaced from their homes, Israeli military authorities have allowed its population to remain on their ancestral land. But this permission to stay has come at a devastating cost, leaving the village’s people trapped in a permanent state of isolation, fear and economic collapse under harsh occupation rule.

In an interview with Middle East Eye, Kfarchouba’s 80-year-old mayor Qassem al-Adiri laid bare the brutal conditions imposed by Israeli forces on the community. He detailed how officials from Israel’s defense ministry directly contacted local tribal leaders to lay out non-negotiable terms for the village to avoid the mass destruction and expulsion that leveled nearby settlements. The core demand was unambiguous: no armed individuals or groups could be allowed to enter Kfarchouba, and any cooperation, sheltering or tolerance of armed presence would result in immediate expulsion and the total destruction of the village, matching the fate of neighboring communities.

As one of a small number of non-Shia villages falling inside Israel’s self-declared “yellow line” — a 600-square-kilometer occupied buffer zone stretching along the entire Lebanon-Israel border — Kfarchouba has formally distanced itself from Hezbollah, aligning its political and security standing with the official Lebanese government and national army. Even with this compliance, daily life for residents remains defined by systematic repression and pervasive uncertainty.

Al-Adiri confirmed that the village has maintained its pledge to Israeli forces, stating no armed individuals are present within Kfarchouba. This cooperation has done nothing to ease the occupation’s hardships: residents live under constant surveillance, face regular threats of military raids, arbitrary detention and coercive interrogation, and suffer severe movement restrictions that have cut off access to most of the village’s own agricultural lands.

“We can’t use our land, they don’t allow us. The mountains, the valleys, the orchards, the farmlands where we cultivate,” al-Adiri said, adding that boundaries for permitted movement are deliberately left unclear, with residents long barred from entering the southern half of the village entirely. In the village’s southeastern outskirts, he added, Israeli forces have seized and occupied evicted civilian homes to establish new temporary military outposts in strategically valuable positions.

Abductions of local residents by Israeli troops have become a frequent, terrifying occurrence in Kfarchouba and its outskirts. One of the deadliest incidents unfolded during a pre-dawn raid on Halta, a Kfarchouba outskirt, on March 24. Soldiers entered the area and abducted 35-year-old Shadi Karama Abdel Aal, alleging he had ties to Saraya al-Muqawama, a group linked to Hezbollah. During the operation, 15-year-old Mohammed Ali Abdel Aal stepped outside his home after hearing screams, and was fatally shot by an Israeli sniper. Another local resident, Ashraf Khalil al-Qadri, was wounded, and Israeli forces cordoned off the targeted home to block all access, preventing anyone from providing emergency first aid to the wounded.

Al-Adiri noted that this incident is far from isolated: during separate raids on Halta farm, which falls under Kfarchouba’s jurisdiction, Israeli troops abducted five local residents, three of whom were simply cutting grass for pasture in the nearby Rachaya al-Fakhar area, all of whom were subsequently accused of affiliation with Saraya al-Muqawama.

Israel’s broader military campaign across southern Lebanon has combined mass forced displacement with systematic large-scale destruction of civilian homes, infrastructure and agricultural land, leaving entire communities uninhabitable and wiping out long-standing local economic productive capacity. One particularly destructive tactic that has directly harmed Kfarchouba is the widespread starting of fires across southern Lebanon, targeting forests, olive groves and active farmland that leave large swathes of scorched, unusable land in their wake.

According to Lebanon’s National News Agency, Israeli military activity sparked a major fire in a wooded area of Kfarchouba on August 5 that spread rapidly toward Halta. The blaze burned uncontrolled for hours, as Israeli forces blocked Lebanese firefighting teams from reaching the affected area to contain the spread. Hussein Fakih, a firefighter based in nearby Nabatiyeh, told The Guardian that just six days later on August 11, Israeli forces started another fire using incendiary materials near Khiam, a Kfarchouba neighbor. When Lebanese fire crews moved in to extinguish the blaze, an Israeli drone carried out a strike in the immediate area, forcing the team to withdraw and abandon their efforts.

For Kfarchouba, an agricultural village that draws nearly all of its local income from olive groves and tobacco plantations, the destruction of farmland and restricted access have pushed the local economy to the brink of collapse. Even though the village was not labeled an active military target by Israel, it now faces crippling shortages of basic necessities, worsened by severe damage to core civilian infrastructure, particularly electricity and water networks.

Al-Adiri explained that the village’s main power grid has been completely cut off by Israeli forces, who have also refused to allow residents to carry out repairs. To access running water, locals are forced to power the village water pump using a private generator, which costs $300 per day in fuel and requires roughly 10 hours of continuous operation just to fill the village’s main water reservoir.

The village’s forced isolation has forced residents to drastically alter their daily consumption patterns, while severe restrictions on movement and transport have limited consistent access to food, medical supplies and incoming goods. Local shop owner Hasan Amro told Middle East Eye that the flow of people and goods into Kfarchouba has dropped off sharply, forcing residents to risk Israeli interception just to travel to the Bekaa Valley to source essential supplies.

“People who live outside the village used to come on weekends. Now we are living here but we feel like we are living in a big prison. We can’t come and go as we please,” Amro said. “We can’t go much farther to check on the olive trees. The olive harvest is approaching and we need to harvest the olives. Of course, this year we won’t be able to harvest again. We live surrounded by everything this place has to offer, but we can’t do anything. At this point, we can’t do anything.”

Amro added that residents have not been able to tend to their olive groves since the 2024 war between Israel and Hezbollah. While local efforts to bring supplies in from the Bekaa Valley have slightly improved access to provisions, this cannot replace the traditional cross-community trade that the village relied on with nearby settlements like Khiam and Kfar Kila, most of which have been completely destroyed by Israeli occupation forces.

“This war has been harder than the last one. We can’t bring supplies from the neighbouring villages, most of them were completely destroyed. The ones that haven’t been destroyed don’t want to come to us. Now we have someone who delivers supplies to our shop, and this is the first time he has come here since the beginning of the war. Before, we would go to the Bekaa to get supplies. It’s dangerous to travel on the roads at the moment,” Amro said.

Since ceasefire and border talks between Israel and Lebanon began in April, observers have noted that the Lebanese government holds little to no meaningful bargaining power to force a full Israeli withdrawal from occupied southern Lebanese territory. A US-brokered negotiating framework allows the Israeli military to maintain its presence in occupied south Lebanon until Hezbollah fully disarms and the Lebanese army assumes full control of the border zone — terms that Hezbollah has rejected as a demand for unconditional surrender.

Regional observers warn that the so-called “pilot zones” Israel has established in previously unoccupied areas, a move that contradicts official Israeli claims of drawing down its presence, have only served as a cover to expand Israeli occupation deeper into southern Lebanon. Recent Lebanese media reports confirm that Israel has already widened its occupied zone to include additional villages including Mansouri, Majdal Zoun, Haddatha and Braasheet, with ground forces advancing further inland toward Tibnin and Beit Yahoun.

Critics emphasize that the current US-brokered framework provides no meaningful protection for Lebanese civilians, both inside the occupied zone and in surrounding areas, from the ongoing threats and human rights abuses carried out by Israeli forces. Just last weekend, Israel intensified its military escalation in southern Lebanon, carrying out a series of air strikes on Ansar and Deir al-Zahrani that killed 11 people — including three children — and wounded 19 more. The attack marked the deadliest single incident since a June ceasefire agreement meant to reduce cross-border hostilities took effect.

After a year of stalled negotiations and two collapsed acquisition attempts, Canadian mining firm Allied Gold has finalized a nearly $300 million strategic investment deal that gives China’s Zijin Gold International a 9.2% minority stake in the company’s global mining assets. The agreement marks the conclusion of a high-stakes corporate saga that has intertwined global mining interests, geopolitical competition, and the ongoing civil conflict in Sudan, raising urgent questions about unregulated gold financing of armed groups.

Under the terms of the deal, Zijin Gold, which counts three major Chinese state-owned entities among its top shareholders and counts the United Arab Emirates’ sovereign wealth fund Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA) as a top 10 shareholder since 2022, gains partial ownership of Allied Gold’s portfolio spanning Mali, Côte d’Ivoire, and the contentious 1,600-square-kilometer Kurmuk mining concession in western Ethiopia’s Benishangul-Gumuz region.

The timing and location of the deal have drawn sharp scrutiny: the agreement was announced the same day last week that mass graves attributed to killings by Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF) were discovered in the Sudanese town of Kurmuk, located just 20 kilometers from the concession border. The Benishangul-Gumuz region has long grappled with internal displacement, low-intensity conflict, and widespread unregulated informal gold mining, and it already hosts Ethiopian military bases that the UN and independent investigators confirm are used to support the RSF, the paramilitary group that has been at war with Sudan’s legitimate national armed forces since April 2023. The concession is also just 100 kilometers from Ethiopia’s strategically critical Grand Renaissance Dam on the Nile, and roughly 60 kilometers from a documented UAE-Ethiopian logistics hub in Asosa that is used to train and arm RSF fighters.

The deal closes a turbulent 12-month period for Allied Gold, which saw two prior acquisition attempts fall through. First, a $500 million deal to sell a 50% stake in its assets to Ambrosia, a little-known Emirati firm linked to prominent Abu Dhabi business leader Ahmed Amer al-Amry, collapsed earlier this year after the deal failed to meet required conditions amid a surge in global gold prices. Then, a planned $4 billion full acquisition of Allied Gold by Zijin was scrapped earlier this year after the transaction failed to secure required regulatory approval from Chinese authorities. Negotiators pivoted to a minority stake transaction after the full buyout fell apart, and Allied Gold CEO Peter Marrone has publicly left the door open to additional stake sales to outside investors if offers meet the company’s valuation expectations.

Allied Gold has expressed optimism about its expansion plans, announcing that it expects to launch commercial mining operations at the Kurmuk site in August, with projected annual output of 240,000 to 270,000 ounces of gold by 2027 — a volume valued at roughly $1 billion at current market prices. The company says it will use the proceeds from the latest stake sale to fund operational expansion and ramp-up activities across all three of its core mining projects, including the Kurmuk concession.

However, the transaction has sparked significant controversy over potential links to RSF financing and the worsening humanitarian crisis in Sudan. For years, independent researchers and United Nations investigators have documented that the UAE, a key backer of the RSF, is the primary global transit hub for illegally smuggled conflict gold from Sudan. The RSF operates its own gold trading firm, al-Junaid, and generates hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue by smuggling gold out of Sudanese territory under its control to Dubai, money that is then used to fund weapons purchases and military operations. Industry experts confirm that roughly 85% to 90% of Sudan’s gold production comes from small-scale artisanal miners, and most of this gold is ultimately smuggled to the UAE via private traders.

Ethiopia, which hosts the Kurmuk concession, is also the UAE’s main source of official gold exports, and both Addis Ababa and Abu Dhabi have repeatedly denied accusations that they support the RSF and fuel the Sudan conflict. The UN has documented that the RSF has carried out widespread massacres, sexual violence, and ethnic cleansing against non-Arab civilian communities, acts that UN independent investigators have classified as genocide. More than three years of conflict have displaced over 9 million people and created what UN officials describe as the worst humanitarian catastrophe on the globe.

China officially maintains a stance of neutrality in the Sudan civil war, but investigators have documented that the UAE has transferred sophisticated Chinese-made weapons including heavy artillery, machine guns, and armed drones to the RSF in violation of a UN arms embargo, and Beijing has taken no concrete action to stop the flow of its weapons to the paramilitary group despite repeated requests from Sudan’s recognized government.

When Middle East Eye reached out to Allied Gold, Zijin Gold, and relevant government stakeholders to ask whether the companies would take steps to prevent gold from the Kurmuk concession from being diverted to fund RSF activities, none of the parties provided an on-the-record response. Ethiopian Mines Minister has publicly welcomed expanded foreign investment in the country’s gold, critical mineral, petroleum, and fertilizer sectors, framing new mining deals as a boost to national economic development.

Analysts warn that the joint Chinese-Emirati presence in the strategically located Kurmuk mine could provide a new, formal source of revenue for the RSF, given the site’s proximity to RSF logistics hubs and the Sudanese war front. The development also extends a pattern of controversial foreign mining activity in conflict-affected East Africa: Canadian mining firms have a well-documented history of pursuing extractive projects amid active conflict in the region, including during the 2020–2022 Tigray war in Ethiopia that killed hundreds of thousands of people.