The Mitzpe Institute is a think tank working on Israeli security and the threats facing Jewish communities abroad. It's an educational programme of the Atlanta Israel Coalition. We publish the Israel Brief from Sunday to Friday, in two forms. The Flash Brief is free by email: a short scan of what moved overnight. The full Brief is for members on mitzpe.org, with our analysis of the war, Israeli politics, the region and the diaspora, and the shorter items in Briefly Noted. Each Friday this edition pulls the week together for Guerre and Shalom readers.
Strasbourg gave its top human-rights prize to the International Criminal Court on Thursday. That's the court with a warrant out for Netanyahu since November 2024. Roberta Metsola, who read out the winner, comes from the European People's Party, the centre-right group Israel likes to think of as its friends in that chamber. The prize is worth €50,000. It's worth a good deal more to every government now deciding whether to stand between the court and Washington's sanctions.
Rome's prosecutors added Israel Katz and Eyal Zamir, the defence minister and the chief of staff, to a criminal investigation built on complaints from 50 Italians who sailed with the Gaza flotillas and got intercepted, which was rather the point of sailing. In London, Ed Miliband warned British firms and individuals off the 1,234 homes going out to tender at E1, on the day the bids closed, under sanctions powers he hasn't yet used on anybody. And today Britain, France, and Germany sit down in Istanbul with Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Pakistan, and Ankara has put "settler violence" on the agenda four days before Israelis vote.
Last Friday masked men beat a veteran Washington Post photographer in an olive grove at Abu Falah, badly enough that she needed an operation. On Saturday a mob with clubs chased French, Belgian, and Polish diplomats out of a harvest at Taybeh and knocked a French mayor to the ground. It was a disgrace, and Belgium went straight to Brussels for sanctions. By Monday morning police and the Shin Bet had ten men in custody. This morning prosecutors charged a security coordinator from Givot Olam with shooting into a car at Aqraba and wounding the woman inside. Israel arrests its own offenders and puts them in front of a judge, and it did both inside a week.
It also does the defending. At a quarter past seven this morning two Hamas men from Hebron opened fire on the pillbox at Judea Junction from a car loaded with ammunition, and soldiers of a Home Front search-and-rescue battalion killed both after more than twenty minutes of shooting. Five people were hurt, and two are in a bad way. Zamir says the ammunition was meant for something much bigger. Meanwhile the RAF is flying defensive patrols over Saudi cities, and it's Israeli intelligence, passed through the Americans, that's helping Riyadh hit the Houthis. Nobody in Istanbul saved Israel a seat.
Sir David Bell's review found three in five Jewish pupils in England's schools have experienced antisemitism, and about half of them never reported it because they didn't think anybody would take it seriously. The government accepted all 27 of his recommendations, the IHRA definition among them. England's biggest teaching union answered inside a day that IHRA would put a "chilling grip" on classroom talk about Gaza, which its general secretary calls a genocide.
Israelis vote on Tuesday with Judea and Samaria closed and leave frozen across the army. Europe will have plenty to say about the result. The three in five are a lot closer to home.
You Should Know
Ynet News: Israeli security officials say Hamas skims up to 10,000 shekels off every lorry into Gaza, plus cash worth 30 per cent of what's on it.
Jerusalem Post: Major terror attacks in Judea and Samaria dropped from 218 in 2024 to 62 last year, by Shin Bet and Foreign Ministry figures.
Arutz Sheva: The haredi Hashmonaim Brigade commissioned its first fifteen officers, after eight months that took them into Lebanon, and the next course starts in November.
Globes: Cyprus is in talks with Israel Shipyards and Rafael over a naval package topping $100 million, and the shipyard's shares jumped 6 per cent.
JNS: Tel-Hai became Israel's eleventh research university, in Kiryat Shmona, with more than 5,000 students signed up, back where enrolment stood before the war.
Arutz Sheva: Fourteen families moved into Neot Harim, a new community in Binyamin between Neve Tzuf and Nahliel, the third there in six months.
The JC: Israel is now a Pacific Islands Forum partner, after leaders meeting in Palau said yes, and will work with members on water, desalination, and farming.
Israeli Politics
Benny Gantz quit the race, saying he hadn't convinced enough people, and warned of repeat elections without a cross-bloc government.
Smotrich offered Ofer Winter a ministry inside the defence establishment to quit, and Winter turned it down: "We didn't come here for a job."
The High Court kept the E1 tender shut until after the vote, and Smotrich accused the attorney general's staff of playing in the election.
Shas's oldest Torah sage told voters that backing Likud costs them their share in the world to come.
The attorney general counted 110,330 draft evaders and asked the High Court to let ministries tie benefits to enlistment without a new law.
The Diaspora
A man has been charged with assaulting three Jewish women on Clapton Common, after Shomrim volunteers held him for the police.
Labour gave its Green council partners seven days to disown "Zionism is racism" or lose their power-sharing deals in places like Sheffield and Lewes.
Paris prosecutors want a suspended sentence and an office ban for Rima Hassan, the MEP who quoted the Lod Airport gunman Kozo Okamoto.
A woman stabbed a Chabad man in the back in Manhattan's Diamond District and got away, and the NYPD is treating it as a hate crime.
An Upper East Side synagogue dropped Mark Levine from its Shabbat dinner after New York's comptroller backed away from buying Israel Bonds.
Uriel Zehavi is Managing Director of the Mitzpe Institute, which publishes the Israel Brief from Sunday to Friday. Read it at israelbrief.com.
