KOENIG

Despite the Gaza war’s evisceration of Israel’s image throughout the Arab world, Saudi Arabia has continued holding high-level discussions with the White House in recent weeks aimed at brokering a normalization agreement with Jerusalem, three US officials told The Times of Israel.

Significant obstacles remain, and any possible deal would hinge on securing a temporary truce in Gaza through a long-elusive hostage deal between Israel and Hamas, the officials clarified.

Still, they all asserted that the gaps between Washington and Riyadh are bridgeable.

Where the US officials said the administration is more divided is on whether Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will be prepared to advance the cause of Palestinian statehood to get the Saudis on board.

The details of what the Palestinian element of the deal will be are still being finalized, but it will require Israel to take concrete steps aimed at establishing a pathway to an eventual Palestinian state, the officials said.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken highlighted both Hamas’s October 7 onslaught and the subsequent war Israel launched to defeat the terror group among the issues covered in the State Department’s 2023 human rights report that was unveiled Monday.

“Hamas’s horrific attacks on Israel on October 7 last year and the devastating loss of civilian life in Gaza as Israel exercises its right to ensure that those attacks never happen again, have raised deeply troubling human rights concerns,” Blinken said at a press conference called to unveil the report.

“We continue to work every day to bring the fighting to an end, to secure the release of hostages held by Hamas and other groups, to uphold international humanitarian law, to prevent further suffering, to create a path toward a more peaceful and secure future for Israelis and Palestinians alike,” Blinken added.

The IDF killed Hassin Ali Ezkol, a terrorist and central member of Hezbollah's aerial defense unit during a targeted strike on a vehicle he was riding in, the IDF confirmed on Tuesday.

According to the announcement, another unnamed senior Hezbollah terrorist was killed in the strike as well.

Additionally, fighter jets attacked a Hezbollah military building along other terrorist infrastructure in the Yaroun area in south Lebanon at the time of the targeted strike.

Jewish people around the world are gathering to celebrate Passover, as the war in Gaza nears its seventh month.

The Washington Hebrew Congregation is celebrating Seder to a full house Monday night.

Passover celebrations are happening at a time when antisemitism continues to rise.

Russia warned Monday that the risk of a “direct military clash” between Russia and nuclear powers in the West is rising.

“Westerners are dangerously balancing on the brink of a direct military clash between nuclear powers, which is fraught with catastrophic consequences,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in a video message to the participants of the Moscow Nonproliferation Conference.

The comments come after Russia reacted angrily to the U.S. House of Representatives passing a $61 billion foreign aid package for Kyiv at the weekend.

DAWN (Democracy for the Arab World Now), a U.S.-based NGO that has sought “arrest warrants against Israelis” in international fora, has provided the so-called evidence driving the U.S. State Department’s anticipated sanctions against an Israel Defense Forces battalion, NGO Monitor reports. 

“The reported sanctions to be imposed by the U.S. State Department on IDF combat units and individuals stem directly from a coordinated campaign by extreme political NGOs,” said Gerald Steinberg, founder and president of NGO Monitor, in a statement provided to JNS.

“Currently, the leading NGO is DAWN, a U.S.-based tax-exempt organization that has intensified its legal attacks against Israeli officials since October 7,” he said. 

In October 2022, DAWN submitted to the State Department a Leahy Law referral against the Netzach Yehuda Battalion for alleged “systematic and widespread abuses.”

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken will head to Beijing this week, with a warning for China to curb its technical support for Russia's military — or else.

Blinken's three-day trip starting Wednesday comes after the approval of a $61 billion aid package for Ukraine by the U.S. House, and in the midst of fears in Western capitals that Chinese aid to Moscow for manufacturing of military hardware is ramping up.

"We're prepared to take steps when we believe necessary against firms that ... severely undermine security in both Ukraine and Europe," a State Department official told reporters ahead of Blinken's trip. "We've demonstrated our willingness to do so regarding firms from a number of countries, not just China."

Minister-without-portfolio Benny Gantz urged US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Sunday to reconsider a reported decision to issue sanctions against the IDF's Netzah Yehuda battalion.

Terrorists in Lebanon fired barrages of rockets towards northern Israel on Sunday morning, lightly injuring one Israeli, local media reported.

Iran-backed Hezbollah launched two rockets at Moshav Dovev in the Eastern Galilee, with the projectiles striking open areas. No casualties were reported. No warning sirens sounded during the attack.

Earlier in the morning, air raid sirens sounded in communities in the Western Galilee near the Lebanese border, including Shlomi and Rosh HaNikra.

Israel will inflict “painful blows” on Hamas in the coming days in an attempt to free the remaining 133 hostages held by the terrorist group in the Gaza Strip, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday.

“Why is this night different, citizens of Israel? That on this night, 133 of our dear brothers and sisters are not at the seder table and are still held captive in the inferno of Hamas,” he said in his Passover remarks.

“We have already freed 124 of our hostages and we are committed to returning them all home—the living and the fallen,” continued the premier.

“At a time when our soldiers are fighting terrorist monsters, the intention to sanction a unit in the IDF is the height of absurdity and a moral low,” Netanyahu wrote in a post on X.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu lashed out at the United States for its plans to issue its first-ever sanctions against IDF units over alleged human rights violations, starting with the Netzah Yehuda Battalion, which in the past has been accused of mistreating Palestinians.

Among the more high-profile incidents was the death of Palestinian American Omar As’ad, 80, of a heart attack in January 2022 after he had been detained, blindfolded, gagged, and handcuffed by that battalion in the West Bank.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Saturday urged Palestinians to unite for “victory” amid Israel’s war in Gaza, following hours-long talks with Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh in Istanbul, his office said.

Erdogan, who has called Hamas a “liberation group” and Israel worse than the Nazis, has tried and failed to establish a foothold as a mediator in the Gaza conflict that has roiled the region.

Erdogan said Palestinian unity was “vital” following the talks at the Dolmabahce Palace on the banks of the Bosphorus strait, which Turkish media reports said lasted more than two and a half hours.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken is expected to announce sanctions against the IDF’s Netzah Yehuda Battalion in the next few days, according to three American sources.  

Iran’s S-300 air defense in Isfahan, which protects its key Natanz nuclear site, was destroyed without detection by long-range missiles fired from outside Iranian air space, sources and multiple satellite imagery posts confirmed by Saturday.

Israel will summon ambassadors of six of the 12 countries that voted for full Palestinian UN membership “for a protest talk” tomorrow, a foreign ministry spokesman says in a statement.

“The ambassadors of France, Japan, South Korea, Malta, Slovakia and Ecuador will be summoned tomorrow for a demarche, and a strong protest will be presented to them,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson Oren Marmorstein writes in a post on X, formerly Twitter.

“An identical protest will be presented to additional countries,” he notes, without specifying why all of the countries in the UN Security Council that voted in favor of the resolution — including China and Russia — were not mentioned in the statement.

The US vetoed the Palestinian membership bid on Friday, while the UK and Switzerland abstained.

The US House of Representatives on Saturday passed a $95 billion legislative package with broad bipartisan support providing security assistance to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, over bitter objections from Republican hardliners.

This included $17 billion in defense aid to Israel, and some $9 billion providing humanitarian relief to people in Gaza as well as other war-torn regions (the final decision on allocation was up to the White House, with analysts expecting roughly $2 billion would go to Gaza).

The legislation now proceeds to the Democratic-majority Senate, which passed a similar measure more than two months ago.

A U.S. intelligence source confirms to ALL ISRAEL NEWS that Israel has just attacked and severely damaged a base in Iraq used by an Iranian terror proxy militia.

Within the last few hours, Israeli fighter jets — believed to be F35 stealth jets — blew up a base used by the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), an Iranian financed proxy terror group.

The PMF base is located in the province of Babylon, about 50 kilometers south of Baghdad, the capital of Iraq.

The message was unmistakable, 'we chose not to hit your nuclear sites this time, but we could have done worse right here,' sources told the Post.

Sources have confirmed to the Jerusalem Post that the attack on Iran at Isfahan, attributed by sources in the New York Times to Israel, hit Iranian air force assets at Isfahan, almost right next door to the Islamic Republic's nuclear site in the same area.

The message was unmistakable, 'we chose not to hit your nuclear sites this time, but we could have done worse right here,' sources told the Post.

The International Criminal Court may be considering issuing international arrest warrants in the relatively near future against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other top officials for alleged war crimes, N12 reported Thursday night.

Around 125 countries are members of the ICC, including essentially all of Europe, and are bound by treaty law to honor the ICC’s arrest warrants, though there have been examples of countries protesting such warrants and refusing to honor them.

The report was extremely puzzling given that the ICC has not decided all of the relevant jurisdictional questions it is supposed to decide before reaching an arrest warrants stage.

Iran took its best shot (or a very significant one) at Israel with over 100 ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and over 100 drones, totaling over 300 forms of aerial attack from many different sides and vectors.

What if Israel finally decides to strike back? What if it decides to take this opportunity to finally bomb Iran’s prized nuclear weapons program?

Israel attacked deep in Iran early Friday morning, reportedly targeting a military facility close to the city of Isfahan, some 930 miles from the Jewish state.

Three Iranian sources confirmed to The New York Times that an airbase in Isfahan was targeted, while anonymous Israeli and U.S. officials were cited by outlets as saying that the IDF conducted the strike.

Iranian media denied any Israeli missile attack, claiming that the Islamic Republic had shot down drones in its airspace. Iran’s nuclear facilities were not hit, according to the U.N.’s atomic watchdog.

The United States on Thursday effectively stopped the United Nations from recognizing a Palestinian state by casting a veto in the Security Council to deny the Palestinian Authority full membership of the world body.

The United States says an independent Palestinian state should be established through direct negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority and not through UN action.

It vetoed a draft resolution that recommended to the 193-member UN General Assembly that "the State of Palestine be admitted to membership of the United Nations." Britain and Switzerland abstained, while the remaining 12 council members voted yes.

The Biden administration is intensifying efforts to broker a groundbreaking deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia, aiming to solidify a historic normalization of relations, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal on Thursday. 

According to sources familiar with the matter, the White House is actively engaging Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, urging him to commit to a renewed push for Palestinian statehood. In exchange, Riyadh would extend diplomatic recognition to Israel.

The International Criminal Court may be considering issuing international arrest warrants in the relatively near future against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other top officials for alleged war crimes, N12 reported Thursday night.

Around 125 countries are members of the ICC, including essentially all of Europe, and are bound by treaty law to honor the ICC’s arrest warrants, though there have been examples of countries protesting such warrants and refusing to honor them.

The Biden Administration has agreed to Israel’s planned incursion into the southern Gaza city of Rafah, after receiving assurances that Israel wouldn’t carry out a large-scale strike against Iran, the Qatari newspaper Al-Araby Al-Jadeed reported.

“The American administration showed acceptance of the plan previously presented by the ... government regarding the military operation in Rafah, in exchange for not carrying out a large-scale attack against Iran,” an Egyptian official told the outlet.

The U.S. government has opposed the long-planned Israeli operation in the town that is Hamas’ last major stronghold in the enclave.

Iran could review its “nuclear doctrine” following Israeli threats to strike the country, a senior Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander said on Thursday, as the world braces for an Israeli response to Tehran’s unprecedented April 13 drone and missile attack on it.

Tehran has always insisted its nuclear program was strictly for peaceful purposes, a claim Israel and much of the Western world doubt.

“The threats of the Zionist regime against Iran’s nuclear facilities make it possible to review our nuclear doctrine and deviate from our previous considerations,” Ahmad Haghtalab, the Guards commander in charge of nuclear security, was quoted as saying by the semi-official Tasnim news agency.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu backtracked on a pre-approved military response to Iran’s massive drone and missile attack due to pressure by U.S. President Joe Biden, Israel’s Kan public broadcaster reported Wednesday.

Biden reportedly told Netanyahu during a phone call on Saturday that Washington would not participate in nor support an Israeli retaliatory attack.

According to the report, Netanyahu thereafter shelved a series of options that had already been approved by the Cabinet.

Following meetings with the British and German foreign ministers, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed at Wednesday’s cabinet meeting that Israel will make its own decisions and do whatever is necessary to protect itself, even if it is contrary to the advice offered by its allies.

British Foreign Secretary David Cameron and German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock both arrived in Israel on Wednesday for a flying visit in the wake of Iran’s unprecedented attack on Israel overnight Saturday-Sunday, in which it launched some 350 attack drones and missiles at the country.

Both Germany and the UK have urged Israel to show restraint in the aftermath of the attack, warning that any additional direct hostilities with Iran could send the Middle East spiraling into an all-out war. Israel, however, has vowed to retaliate against Iran, saying that it cannot be allowed to attack without facing repercussions.

Ismail Haniyeh, the political leader of the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, is scheduled to visit Turkey for talks with Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan, according to reports from broadcaster NTV.

Erdogan had earlier confirmed the upcoming meeting while addressing lawmakers from his AK Party in parliament, reaffirming Turkey's stance on Hamas as a "liberation movement."

Diplomats say the United Nations Security Council is scheduled to vote Friday on a Palestinian request for full UN membership, a move that Israel’s ally the United States is expected to block because it would effectively recognize a Palestinian state.

The 15-member council is due to vote at 3 p.m. Friday on a draft resolution that recommends to the 193-member UN General Assembly that “the State of Palestine be admitted to membership of the United Nations,” said diplomats.

A council resolution needs at least nine votes in favor and no vetoes by the US, Britain, France, Russia or China to pass. Diplomats say the measure could have the support of up to 13 council members, which would force the US to use its veto.

Israel will make its own decision on how to respond to Tehran’s unprecedented missile and drone attack, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday after speaking with the foreign ministers of the United Kingdom and Germany.

“I thank our friends for supporting Israel’s defense—support both in words and in deeds,” Netanyahu told government ministers ahead of a Cabinet meeting in Jerusalem, according to a readout of the meeting.

“They also have all kinds of suggestions and advice. I appreciate those, but I want to make it clear: We will make our own decisions, and the State of Israel will do everything necessary to defend itself,” he added.

The United States and European allies redoubled efforts Tuesday to press Israel for restraint following Iran’s unprecedented weekend bombardment, promising to levy tough sanctions on Tehran’s ability to sell oil and build attack drones.

Western powers fear an Israeli retaliation could plunge the region into a wider war that could draw them in while further eroding international support for Jerusalem. Senior Israeli officials have vowed to respond while promising to take the position of the US and other allies into account.

“Further significant escalation will only deepen instability in the region,” British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said he told Israeli counterpart Benjamin Netanyahu in a phone call Tuesday evening. “This is a moment for calm heads to prevail.”

The IDF has decided how it will counter-strike Iran and its proxies but has not yet settled on the timing; multiple sources told The Jerusalem Post on Tuesday.

Because the timing is still variable and because of all the necessary complex preparations, the current decision could change.

However, the very development of a decision shows the severity and determination of Israel’s leadership to strike back, though all indications are that Jerusalem still seeks to tamp down the attack to avoid spiraling into a regional war.

U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin spoke with his Israeli counterpart Yoav Gallant overnight Monday to reinforce Washington’s commitment to the Jewish state’s security and emphasize the importance of upholding regional stability.

The two men “discuss[ed] the aftermath of Iran’s unprecedented April 13 attacks, which U.S., Israeli, and partner forces thwarted in a combined defensive operation. The Secretary reiterated steadfast U.S. support for Israel’s defense and reaffirmed the strategic goal of regional stability,” according to a Pentagon readout of the call.

Israel’s War Cabinet is in the process of deciding on a “painful” response to the Islamic Republic’s massive drone and missile assault overnight Saturday.

Vowing retribution but urged to show restraint, Israel has yet to agree on its response to an expansive drone and missile strike carried out on its territories by Iran on Saturday.

A Monday meeting of Israel’s five-person war Cabinet, headed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, concluded without comment on whether the Jewish state will honor its pledge to “exact a price” from Tehran or concede to calls for a measured response from international leaders.