White House officials said Thursday they had coordinated a ceasefire plan that the US and France presented a day earlier with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and believed Israel was fully on board with it. And they indicated surprise and disappointment that Israel had rejected it and that the Prime Minister’s Office was now saying Netanyahu had never indicated he would back it.

A French official also made clear to The Times of Israel that the ceasefire initiative had been coordinated with Israel.

While still in the air, however, Netanyahu’s office issued a firm denial that he had assented to the idea, calling it an “American-French proposal that the prime minister didn’t even respond to.”

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In February, Moody's downgraded Israel's rating to A2. The upcoming change reflects not only the geopolitical escalation but also Moody's lack of confidence in the Israeli government's ability to manage fiscal consolidation and reduce debt.

Credit rating agency Moody's is set to release an updated rating on Friday which is expected to downgrade Israel's credit rating to A3, equivalent to an A- rating by other agencies.

Self-styled free speech warrior Elon Musk’s X (Twitter) banned me after I published a copy of the Donald Trump campaign’s JD Vance research dossier. X says that I’ve been suspended for “violating our rules against posting private information,” citing a tweet linking to my story about the JD Vance dossier. First, I never published any private information on X. I linked to an article I wrote here, linking to a document of controversial provenance, one that I didn’t want to alter for that very reason.

On the one hand, this is a very funny end to my Twitter journey. On the other hand, I no longer have access to the primary channel by which I disseminate primarily news (and shitposts of course) to the general public.

This chilling effect on speech is exactly why we published the Vance Dossier in its entirety. Not a single media organization was willing to publish a document that would have been a no-brainer during or prior to the heyday of Edward Snowden’s disclosures. That illustrates the dramatic shift in attitudes about what the news media thinks the public should know, and the role the mainstream plays in steadily ceding that territory to the national security threat machine. Media’s job, I believe, is to push back against these various forms of censorship. I’ll keep doing that here on this newsletter, where you can find me going forward. If you agree with what I laid out, I hope you’ll subscribe.

Behold the dossier. (link to dossier from article)

It reportedly comes from an alleged Iranian government hack of the Trump campaign, and since June, the news media has been sitting on it (and other documents), declining to publish in fear of finding itself at odds with the government’s campaign against “foreign malign influence.”

I disagree. The dossier has been offered to me and I’ve decided to publish it because it’s of keen public interest in an election season. It’s a 271-page research paper the Trump campaign prepared to vet now vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance. As far as I can tell, it hasn’t been altered, but even if it was, its contents are publicly verifiable. I’ll let it speak for itself.

“The terror regime in Iran loves the weakness and stupidity of Kamala Harris, and is terrified of the strength and resolve of President Donald J. Trump,” Steven Cheung, communications director for the Trump campaign, responded when I asked him about the hack.

This is not the Steele Dossier of 2016, with its golden showers and anti-Trump fanfiction. Unlike the Steele Dossier, which was both fraudulent and discredited, the Vance Dossier is factual and intelligently written. No Jason Bourne style capers appear, and there’s no sleaze. Instead, the Vance Dossier enumerates pretty reasonable liabilities as a then-contender for VP nominee, including:

• “Vance has been one of the chief obstructionists to U.S. efforts to providing [sic] assistance to Ukraine.”

• “Vance criticized public health experts and elected officials for supporting Black Lives Matter protests while condemning anti-lockdown [Covid] protests.”

• “Vance ‘embraced non-interventionism.’”

• “In 2020, Vance criticized President Trump’s airstrike killing Iranian General Qasem Soleimani, worrying it would continue to bog down America in the Middle East to the advantage of China. Vance suggested that the country had been entangled in wars in the Middle East so ‘financial elites’ could profit from the rise of China.”

The announcement came as Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas hit out at Washington in his address to the UN General Assembly in New York, accusing it of providing Israel with the "deadly weapons that it used to kill thousands of innocent civilians, children and women".

"The package includes $3.5 billion for essential wartime procurement ... and $5.2 billion designated for air defence systems, including the Iron Dome, David's Sling and an advanced laser system," the ministry said in a statement.

Some $3.5 billion had already been received "for critical acquisitions", it said.

Williams has condemned Israel’s defensive military operations in Gaza as a “war crime” and criticized the US Congress for inviting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to speak in July.

Williams issued a statement on Oct. 11 of last year, four days after Oct. 7, lamenteing the attacks before calling not to retaliate and shifting attention to oppression of Palestinians.

“We can, we have to be able to, at once grieve the hundreds of innocent lives taken in Israel, and oppose the escalating violence of retaliation, the endless war, the systemic violence and oppression of Palestinians too often ignored, excused, or condoned,” Williams wrote.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams has been charged with bribery and taking illegal campaign contributions from foreign sources, an unsealed indictment has revealed, throwing the United States’ largest city’s government into turmoil.

In a five-count indictment on Thursday, Adams was charged with crimes such as conspiracy, wire fraud, and bribery. Prosecutors have accused him of offering favours and influence in exchange for luxury travel and airline benefits.

Adams, a 64-year-old Democrat who became the first of the city’s 110 mayors to be criminally charged while in office, has denied the allegations and said he has no plans to step down as mayor.

A Taiwanese pager company was identified last week in connection to Israel's terrorist attack on Lebanon, in which booby-trapped pagers were detonated, killing at least 32 people and injuring thousands more.

Israeli-Taiwanese relations warmed considerably after Israel launched its genocidal war against the Palestinian people in Gaza last October. Taiwan rushed to condemn the Palestinian operation of 7 October and donated more than half a million dollars to fund services to Israeli soldiers and their families.

The subsequent genocide did not alter Taiwan's stance, as expressed by its foreign minister, Joseph Wu, in a March meeting with Israeli academics in Taipei: "We condemn the Hamas terrorist attack and stand in solidarity with Israel. Our position hasn't changed."

The Taiwanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs supported the visit. After Iran's 13 April retaliation against Israel for the latter's attacks on its consulate in Damascus, Taiwan quickly moved to condemn Iran. Two days later, Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen met with a delegation of Israeli Knesset members led by Boaz Toporovsky, the head of the Israel-Taiwan interparliamentary friendship group, and expressed her country's solidarity with Israel.

Even though Taiwan was a close friend of all conservative anti-communist Arab regimes, especially Saudi Arabia and Jordan, in 1975, Israel secretly transferred US missile technology to Taiwan and began to sell it Israeli missiles to the tune of half a billion dollars. Indeed, the Israeli defence ministry established a permanent station in Taipei to facilitate military cooperation. Weapons cooperation and sales included artillery guns, mortars, missile boats, rifles, and submachine guns.

To understand how it has managed to document tens of thousands of dead in Gaza to a high degree of accuracy, the processes it has used, and the philosophy behind it, Drop Site conducted an interview with Dr. Zaher al-Wahaidi, director of the information center at the Ministry of Health in Gaza who is based at Nasser hospital in Khan Younis.

The first source is e-Hospital, a computerized program, which monitors all emergency departments in government hospitals. Any casualty brought to a government hospital is registered in the emergency department through the electronic system, and the information is automatically transferred to the repository.

The second source is an Excel file provided by field hospitals that offer emergency services and handle mass casualties, like the Red Cross hospital, the Kuwaiti field hospital and so forth. These hospitals document the casualties in the Excel sheet, which they supply to us; we then process this file and upload it to our system.

A third source was introduced in January – a link provided by the Ministry of Health for reporting martyrs who had not reached ministry hospitals, remained trapped under rubble, or who could not be identified.

DSN: So the number announced by the Ministry of Health, for example, around 41,000 martyrs, could potentially be higher, but this is the figure you were able to confirm?

Dr. Zaher al-Wahaidi Correct. 41,266 martyrs [official ministry of health tally on September 16, 2024], as per the latest report. Bear in mind that the ministry releases multiple figures. The first figure of 41,266 martyrs represents the total number of martyrs who have reached the ministry's hospitals.

Last Friday, Israel attacked a meeting of Hezbollah leaders in the southern Beirut neighborhood of al-Qaem. It was an assassination operation following the detonation, days before, of thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies that had been packed with explosives.

In al-Qaem, the Israeli military boasted of a “precise strike” in the “heart of Hezbollah’s stronghold in Beirut.” The language conjured images of a brazen operation against a well-protected military compound, a Pentagon of its kind, a wholly valiant endeavor.

In reality, this was a massive strike that completely leveled a residential building, one that killed Hezbollah leaders just as much as it did countless families inside. Many of those families remain under the rubble, with others still missing.

Almost every time news emerges from south Beirut, the Western news media parrots the language of the Israeli military, as if “Hezbollah stronghold” is part of the neighborhood’s name.

Defenders of this kind of language may point to the usage of “strongholds” to describe bases of support for the Democratic Party or U.K.’s Labour, but these are usages in a Western context, a use nobody is confused by. In Lebanon, the connotations are obvious. And they directly serve Israeli interests.

Maura Finkelstein never hid her support for Palestinian liberation during her nine years working as a professor of anthropology at Muhlenberg College, a small liberal arts school in Allentown, Pennsylvania.

“I have always had an ethical practice of making sure that I include Palestine in my teaching,” Finkelstein told me. “It was never outside the bounds of what I do.” For Finkelstein, who is Jewish, this was not always easy. More than 30 percent of Muhlenberg’s 2,200 students are Jewish, many of them vocal supporters of Israel.

In late May, however, Muhlenberg told Finkelstein that she was fired. The reason? She had shared, on her personal Instagram account, in a temporary story slide, a post written not by herself but by Palestinian poet Remi Kanazi calling for the shunning of Zionist ideology and its supporters.

“Do not cower to Zionists,” Kanazi wrote on January 16. “Shame them. Do not welcome them in your spaces. Why should these genocide loving fascists be treated any different than any other flat out racist.” At the time, Israel had already killed over 22,000 Palestinians in Gaza, the majority of whom were women and children.