Israel’s Sea Raid Hit A Big Problem; Cyprus Won’t Like Where It Leads

Trump’s Gaza Peace Prize Fantasy Just Blew Up In His Face

The sham that is Trump's Board of Peace has come to a head with the announcement it's broke - so where did all the billions paid go? Right, so Donald Trump's grand Gaza peace machine has just been caught with nothing in the till. The official fund set up to rebuild Gaza, the one administered by the World Bank, endorsed by the United Nations, the one he stood up in January with all the fanfare of a man unveiling a new wing of a casino, that fund has taken in exactly zero dollars from donors. Not a slow start. Not a trickle. Zero. Four months in, with member states having pledged around seven billion dollars between them, Tony Blair involved as well as if it didn’t stink enough already and Trump personally promising another ten billion of American money on top, the public account that's meant to be holding all of it reads nil. And while that pot sits there empty, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister whose forces did the flattening in the first place, has stood up at a conference in a West Bank settlement and ordered his army to go and take seventy per cent of Gaza. So that's your peace deal, isn't it. An empty rebuilding fund, and a fresh order to seize more of the rubble it was supposed to rebuild. [CLIP] The audience there for the record was urging Netanyahu to push on from 60% to 100%. But this is the part Trump can't wave away, because it's where an embarrassing headline turns into something a lot dirtier.

TRUMP Just Made a HUGE Mistake with Iran!

Sheer lunacy from Trump as his Iran deal continues to implode, now threatening to bomb the mediators on camera! Right, so Trump did not threaten Iran last week. He threatened Oman. That is the tell. Not the bluster, not the sanctions announcement, not the press conference posturing, but the specific, deranged choice of target. When the man who spent months selling himself as the dealmaker who was going to force Tehran to its knees ends up pointing his finger at the Gulf state that has been quietly shuttling messages between Washington and the Iranians, something has gone badly wrong inside the deal, badly enough that he could not keep his fears off camera. So Oman, now apparently going from mediator to potential target according to the tangerine tyrant because there’s no pause in the middle apparently. Bit extreme isn’t it? Oman is a small, wealthy sultanate on the southeastern tip of the Arabian Peninsula that shares a coastline with the Strait of Hormuz, and it has maintained a carefully neutral diplomatic position for decades that makes it useful to everyone and threatening to nobody, which you would think is exactly what you want from the country running your back channel when you are trying to close a deal. It has been the go-between for Iran and the United States for years, most notably during the talks that produced the 2015 nuclear deal. The JCPOA. In this round, following the US-Israeli military assault on Iran, Oman is at the centre of the mediation process again, the channel Washington needs functioning if any agreement is going to land. But of course as you’ve just seen, Trump was asked about reports of an Iran-Oman shipping framework being negotiated for the strait, and rather than deny it or wave it away, he said Oman would "behave" or the United States would "have to blow them up."

Israel's Secret Mosque Plan Just Leaked; But They Forgot About The Guards

Israel’s secret mosque theft plot has leaked, and the one thing they forgot could wreck the whole plan before it even starts. Right, so this past Eid al-Fitr, Israel did something it hadn't done since 1967. It shut Palestinians out of the famous Al-Aqsa Mosque altogether. Barricaded gates, the Old City sealed, worshippers down on prayer mats in the open road outside the walls because they couldn't reach the third-holiest site in Islam on one of the holiest mornings of their year. That was of course back in March. Middle East Eye reported it, Al Jazeera reported it, many other outlets reported it and the official reason given was the "security situation" during the US-Israeli war on Iran. Now hang onto that notion for a minute, because the story being sold now is that all of this is just access and management. It isn't. Sitting above the gates is a reported plan most of those worshippers have never heard of, and the people drawing it up would much rather you kept staring at the checkpoints to gain access than at what they've got on paper in the here and now.

Trump Goes Begging to Netanyahu; Iran Trap Closes

Trump's selling peace from one podium while Smotrich's promising to flatten Beirut from another. One Israeli strike ends the whole deal. Right, so Donald Trump is doing his strange little victory lap about an Iran peace deal that he says is largely negotiated, the Strait of Hormuz reopening on his terms, frozen funds about to move, the whole region apparently lining up to thank him for ending a war he started. And while he is doing that, Benjamin Netanyahu's government has spent the last week threatening to flatten Beirut's southern suburbs, pushing Israeli ground forces beyond the Yellow Line into southern Lebanon, hitting the Qaraoun reservoir area, and producing a finance minister who has reportedly said that for every explosive drone fired at Israel, ten buildings in Beirut should fall. Bezalel Smotrich, the man saying that, is not some fringe lunatic shouting from a hilltop. He sits in cabinet. He votes on budgets. He gets briefings. And what he has just done, with one ugly sentence, is take Trump's deal and stick a bomb under it. Because Iran's whole position right now, the position being relayed through figures such as Mohammad Marandi, the Iranian academic close to the Tehran negotiation team, and through Hezbollah's political council member Ghaleb Abu Zeinab, is that Lebanon is part of the deal. An Israeli attack on Beirut or the Dahiyeh, the southern suburb that has functioned as Hezbollah's political and operational heartland for decades, destroys the negotiation path. That is not commentary from people on the outside. That is the condition being placed on the table by people inside the room. Netanyahu's coalition has just publicly volunteered to do the one thing that wrecks Trump's whole settlement. Cracking diplomatic work from the gang in Tel Aviv. Really inspired stuff.

Israel PANICS; Shock Shift CRUSHES Ben Gvir

He pressed record on his own evidence and pressed publish on his own travel ban. Ben-Gvir filmed the case against himself. Right, so Itamar Ben-Gvir, the Israeli national security minister, the man with the prison system and the police on his desk, decided to film the detained flotilla activists his forces had grabbed from international waters. Civilians cable-tied. Made to kneel. Taunted in front of the lens. Then he uploaded the thing. Pressed record on his own evidence and pressed publish on his own travel ban, all in one afternoon's work. And while he was busy admiring his handiwork, doing his little victory lap for the Otzma Yehudit base back home, the people kneeling in that footage were already on their way out. With names. Hospital paperwork. Sworn statements. Lawyers from more than forty countries lining up behind them. France has now banned Ben-Gvir from setting foot on French soil. Malaysia is loading up the International Court of Justice route. Mark Carney, the Canadian prime minister, has called the treatment of those detainees appalling and publicly demanded an independent investigation. And every single one of those moves traces back to one decision: Ben-Gvir held up a camera, and the camera held the receipt. The footage is from the latest interception of the Global Sumud Flotilla, a civilian convoy of aid boats sailing from Europe and North Africa towards Gaza, trying to break the Israeli blockade. Sumud is the Arabic word for steadfastness, the framing word for Palestinian resistance to dispossession since the 1960s. On the 18th of May, in international waters, Israeli naval forces boarded the boats and seized the people on them. The number Israel doesn't want anyone dwelling on is 428 civilian detainees, hauled off vessels they had every legal right to be on, dragged into Ashdod port, processed by the same prison machinery Ben-Gvir runs.