The Prime Minister’s Office said that Benjamin Netanyahu has landed back in Israel along with his wife Sara and his entourage, following a state visit to Washington D.C.
According to the statement, U.S. President Donald Trump gifted Netanyahu with two Bell Boeing V-22 Osprey aircraft from the presidential air fleet, which transported the prime minister and his wife.
Around mid-2024, in an attempt to convince him to reach a truce with Hamas, White House officials cited polls to Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, showing that over 50 percent of Israelis supported a hostage deal over the continuation of the war in Gaza. According to a New York Times investigation released Friday, the prime minister answered: “Not 50 percent of my voters.”
The Times also reported that Netanyahu covertly contacted Moshe Gafni, leader of the ultra-Orthodox United Torah Judaism faction in the coalition, on June 9, 2025, while he was leading a vote to dissolve Parliament over failure to advance a law effectively exempting the ultra-Orthodox from military conscription.
According to the report, the reveal prompted Gafni’s party to vote to preserve the government, and the strike against Iran to carry out as planned.
The roller coaster of delusions persisted throughout the entire week, leaving the families of the hostages in a state of constant worry and anxiety. Differences even appeared between U.S. President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during two separate meetings at the White House, held just a day apart.
In the first meeting, Trump appeared fully aligned with Netanyahu, seemingly accepting Israel’s demands in the ongoing negotiations with Hamas. Yet just 24 hours later, the tone shifted slightly.
Reports indicated that Trump was now pressuring Netanyahu to at long last make concessions and reach a deal.
As ever with Trump, certainty is elusive, especially when it comes to commitments regarding a timetable. It’s become impossible to track the number of times when the president promised progress, or a signature “this week, maybe next week.”
As Yitzhak Rabin once observed, in the Middle East, there are no sacred dates; the White House, it seems, doesn’t even keep a calendar.
Read the full analysis here
“The choice is America’s. Will the U.S. finally choose diplomacy? Or will it remain ensnared in someone else’s war?” This was the closing line in an essay published by Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi in the Financial Times on Tuesday.
It’s an interesting choice of words that frames the attack on Iran and Washington’s policy toward it as being dragged by Israel rather than as an American initiative.
Read the full story here
Here are the latest updates on day 644 of the war:
■ The IDF announced that Captain Reei Biran was killed by an explosion in a building that the army had lined with explosives in Khan Yunis.
■ The plans presented by Israel’s defense establishment to concentrate the population of Gaza in a “humanitarian city” constitute a war crime and a crime against humanity, 16 Israeli law experts warned.
■ The UN human rights office said on Friday that it had recorded at least 798 killings of Palestinians in Gaza at aid points run by GHF and other relief groups, including the UN, since May.
■ The IDF said its forces mapped out the houses of the two Palestinians killed after carrying out a shooting attack in the West Bank that took the life of Israeli Shalev Zvuluny on Thursday.
■ Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu confirmed Thursday that at least 20 Israeli hostages held by Hamas are still alive, expressing hope that a deal for their release could be completed within days.
The Israel Defense Forces said that its forces mapped the houses of Mahmoud Abed, 23, from Halhul, and Malek Salem, 23, from the Tulkarm area, who carried out the shooting attack that killed Israeli Shalev Zvuluny on Thursday and were shot dead by soldiers and armed civilians at the scene.
According to the IDF, the mapping was carried out ahead of inspections to determine whether they would be destroyed by Israeli forces.
The UN human rights office said on Friday that it had recorded at least 798 killings both at aid points run by the U.S.- and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) and near humanitarian convoys run by other relief groups, including the UN
The GHF uses private U.S. security and logistics companies to get supplies into Gaza, largely bypassing a UN-led system that Israel says had let militants divert aid.
The United Nations has called the plan “inherently unsafe” and a violation of humanitarian impartiality rules.
“Up until the seventh of July, we’ve recorded now 798 killings, including 615 in the vicinity of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation sites, and 183 presumably on the route of aid convoys,” OHCHR spokesperson Ravina Shamdasani told reporters in Geneva.
The GHF began distributing food packages in Gaza at the end of May and has repeatedly denied that incidents had occurred at its sites.
An Iranian attack on an air base in Qatar key to the U.S. military likely hit a geodesic dome housing equipment used by the Americans for secure communications, satellite images analyzed Friday by The Associated Press show. The U.S. military and Qatar did not immediately respond to requests for comment over the damage, which so far has not been publicly acknowledged.
Satellite images from Planet Labs PBC show the geodesic dome visible at the Al Udeid Air Base on the morning of June 23, just hours before the attack. The U.S. Air Force’s 379th Air Expeditionary Wing, which operates out of the base, in 2016 announced the installation of the $15 million piece of equipment, known as a modernized enterprise terminal. Photos of it show a satellite dish inside the dome, known as a radome.
Images taken June 25 and every day subsequently show the dome is gone, with some damage visible on a nearby building. The rest of the base appears largely untouched in the images.
It’s possible a fragment or something else struck the dome, but given the destruction of the dome, it was likely an Iranian attack, possibly with a bomb-carrying drone, given the limited visible damage to surrounding structures.
George Orwell taught us that the public must be careful about the concepts it uses to describe the social reality. In his oft-cited essay “Politics and the English Language,” he wrote that ethnic cleansing, colonial violence, mass executions, the torching of villages, aerial bombardments and so on are hard to defend in the public discourse because of the overt brutality of such acts. In other words, the public won’t grant legitimacy to the acts of the government.
“Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness,” wrote Orwell. “Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.” Are Orwell’s words also relevant to the discussion in Israel regarding the war in the Gaza Strip? And what does the present discussion teach us about the state of Israeli society and its future?
Delve deeper into the Israeli government’s discourse on Gaza here
The plans presented by Israel’s defense establishment to concentrate the population of Gaza in a “humanitarian city” constitute a blatantly illegal order, 16 Israeli experts in international law and the laws of war warned Israel’s Defense Minister Israel Katz and the Israel Defense Force’s chief of staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir in a public letter issued Friday.
In the letter, the experts warned that implementation of the plan would constitute a war crime and a crime against humanity. They said that under certain conditions, it could also be considered genocide.
“We call on all relevant parties to publicly withdraw from the plan, renounce it and refrain from carrying it out,” they wrote.
