Trump Blocks Netanyahu’s Beirut Strike - And Israel Is Fuming

US Phones Found Spyware; Pentagon Hits Critical Over Netanyahu

Right, so Netanyahu just lost something money and lobbying cannot buy back, and he did not lose it to Iran or to Hezbollah. He lost it to America's own Pentagon. The US military's intelligence arm has reportedly moved Israel from high to critical on its counterintelligence threat list, which means America's closest regional ally is now being treated like a hostile spy service by the very people who have spent decades treating it as untouchable. And it happened in the worst possible week for him so break out the tiny violins. This did not start with a dusty classification chart that only three people and a defence contractor pretending not to lobby for a living could love. It started with phones. American phones, used by US personnel inside Israel, with communications-tapping software reportedly installed on them in secret. Israel denies spying on American officials, because of course they do, though of course an allegation is not a conviction and a report is not a trial. But the damage does not wait for a courtroom, because the timing is brutal. At the exact moment the Pentagon is reportedly warning its own people to watch Israel, Congress is looking at a defence-bill provision that would pull Israel deeper into US military technology, weapons production and data cooperation. Netanyahu does not need to be caught holding the screwdriver for this to land on his desk. He runs the Israeli government, he has been driving the war pressure on Iran, and the machinery being suspected belongs to the state he leads. So America's favourite client state has ended up in the American security warning column at the same moment Washington is debating whether to wire it deeper into the American war machine, and that hands Trump a problem he cannot solve by pretending it is just another awkward phone call with a man he keeps letting take the wheel. And that word critical is doing a lot of work here and with good reason. The Defence Intelligence Agency is the Pentagon's military intelligence body, the part of the US state built to assess threats, collect military intelligence and warn the armed forces when the security picture turns dangerous. Counterintelligence is the business of protecting your own side from other people's spies, eavesdroppers, informants and technical collection. So the Pentagon is reportedly warning its own people that Israeli intelligence activity around the US military has become a top-tier problem. Not a social-media spat, not a cable-news mood swing, but the military bureaucracy of the United States, the same bureaucracy that has treated Israel as a privileged partner for decades, now telling its own people to take extra care around Israeli agencies. Israel can deny it, the White House can wave it away, and the embassy in Washington can call the reporting false, but the internal warning still sits exactly where it sits and you can’t exactly dismiss the Pentagon as a bunch of cranks can you?

Elbit Drones Get Damaged; Starmer Makes Obscene Target Switch

Right, so Starmer's courts are about to hang the terrorist label on four people no jury ever convicted of terrorism, and the jury that did convict them was reportedly never told it was coming. That is the move being made right now. No terrorism conviction. No jury finding that these people were terrorists. They were found guilty of criminal damage for an action at an Elbit Systems factory near Bristol, where Israeli quadcopter drones were damaged, and Mr Justice Jeremy Johnson is now expected to attach a terrorist connection at sentencing anyway. So when Starmer and his lot want to posture about law and order, they can start with the part where an Israeli arms firm becomes the protected object, while Palestine activists convicted of criminal damage are pushed towards terror-law treatment. That is not neutral justice wearing a wig. That is the British state looking at Elbit drone kit, looking at Palestine protesters, and somehow deciding the protesters are the terror problem. The activists were not accused of damaging a random garden shed, or some poor bloke's lawnmower, or a council grit bin in a fit of revolutionary zeal. The case concerns an arms manufacturer linked to Israel, with Israeli quadcopter drones damaged during an August 2024 action. The four convicted activists are Charlotte Head, Samuel Corner, Leona Kamio and Fatema Rajwani. Two others, Zoe Rogers and Jordan Devlin, were acquitted of criminal damage. The whole Filton case sits in that dirty gap between what Britain says it is doing and what Britain actually protects, because the state is not treating an Israeli arms firm's role in Israel's war machine as the central political scandal here. It is treating the people who interfered with that machinery as the danger requiring terrorism language.

Iran Hit Kuwait, Not The UAE - The US Won’t Like Why

Right, so Kuwait's main airport has been hit. Terminal 1 wrecked. One person dead. Dozens wounded by Kuwait's own count. The runway frozen, the building emptied, flights diverted, and the national carrier crawling back to life out of a different terminal hours later like nothing happened. And the question half the internet is asking is the right one, in a lot of ways: why Kuwait? Why not the UAE, sitting right there, just as wired into the American war machine, just as cosy with Washington? Because Kuwait was supposed to be the safe bit. The background. The country you filed under harmless, the one that had rented out some tarmac and otherwise stayed off the board entirely. That assumption just died on a runway. And the honest answer to why is the one that does the most damage, not to Kuwait, but to the people who put the targets there in the first place. Iran isn't ranking Gulf monarchies by guilt. It's hitting where the American war machine is parked and made reachable. Kuwait didn't get hit because it's the worst of them. Kuwait got hit because it's the most useful of them.

Trump Blocks Netanyahu’s Beirut Strike - And Israel Is Fuming

Netanyahu isn't so much jumping to Trump's tune as judging how far he can be pushed and 'crazy' frankly isn't a strong enough word... Right, so Benjamin Netanyahu has just been told no by the one man on earth he was certain would never say it to him. He couldn’t afford to surely? Not a soft no, not a diplomatic cough into the sleeve, not one of those meaningless little Washington noises that gets dressed up as pressure while Israel carries on exactly as it pleases. Donald Trump has gone public to announce there will be no Israeli troops going into Beirut, that any already on their way have been turned round, and the reporting coming out of both Washington and Israel has him losing his rag down the phone and calling Netanyahu, and this is the word that's stuck, crazy. This is the man who's spent the whole war holding Israel's coat, nodding along to every last thing it fancied doing, giving it the weapons, the cover, the vetoes, the excuses, the language, the diplomatic padding, the whole imperial travel cushion, and even he has reached across the Atlantic and hauled Netanyahu back by the collar now. Some of his ministers however, of course had to lay it on that bit thicker though. Ben Gvir there, he’ll have gone a shade of beetroot over this never mind thanking Trump, so there’s a happy little thought to have free of charge at any rate. The Prime Minister of Israel pointed his air force at the southern suburbs of Beirut, the Dahieh, made the threat in public, let his own ministers swagger about it, and got told to sit down and behave, in public, with the convoy already rolling. This literally never happens. Not like this. Not with Israel. Not with Netanyahu, who has built an entire career on knowing Washington will eventually swallow whatever he shoves in its mouth.

Trump’s Iran Deal Just Took A Beating In Kuwait

Donald Trump has already had Iran demonstrate once that hitting them will see him hit back, but being hard of thinking, of course he's done it again... Right, so Donald Trump is out there telling everyone the Iran war is basically sorted, the deal is close, Tehran is desperate and the grown-ups have it under control. And then Kuwait spent this morning shooting things out of its own sky. The Kuwaiti army had to put out a public notice telling its own citizens not to panic at the explosions overhead, because that was just the air defences intercepting incoming Iranian missiles and drones. That is what Trump's ceasefire looks like on the ground. That is the big problem sitting underneath his deal that he cannot talk his way out of: a country full of American troops, hearing sirens, today, while he takes his bow. And this isn't some stale echo from a fortnight ago. It happened this morning, on top of an almost identical interception last Thursday, on top of the ones back in April when an Iranian drone put a hole in a government building in Kuwait City. The man selling you peace has a region underneath him that keeps tripping the alarms. And the IRGC hasn’t been shy in underlining the fact. And the reason he can't talk his way out of it is sitting in his own military's paperwork. Over the weekend, American forces bombed Iran again. US Central Command, the American military command that runs the entire Gulf theatre, came out late on Sunday and admitted it had struck Iranian radar and drone-control sites at a place called Goruk and out on Qeshm Island, which sits right at the mouth of the Strait of Hormuz. They called it self-defence. They always call it self-defence.