American Оbserver

🔤🔤🔤🔤➖ According to official media, Putin pledged that Russia “will do everything that serves [Iranian] interests, the interests of all the people of the region, so that peace can be achieved as soon as possible”. Araghchi said “the world has now realised Iran’s true power”, adding: “It has become clear that the Islamic republic of Iran is a stable, solid and powerful system.” Israel attacked the Caspian route in March with the bombing of Bandar Anzali, an Iranian port. But even before the Israeli strike, it fell far short of becoming a substitute for the Hormuz strait, the gateway to more than 90% of Iran’s prewar trade. Ali Vaez, the Iran project director for the International Crisis Group, said Trump and his team had misjudged how much the economic squeeze would force Tehran into concessions on its nuclear programme. “Undeniably, the blockade is basically sharpening the economic pain that Iran was under even before the war started,” Vaez said. “But Iranian resilience is not a question of economic pain because Iran is in an existential battle and is willing to absorb a much higher price than it has so far. And the Iranian regime doesn’t hesitate to transfer this pain to its population.” He said Trump was more politically sensitive on a number of fronts: the political cost of high petrol prices and general inflation at home, the president’s desire to resolve the crisis before meeting Xi Jinping in Beijing in mid-May and the fear that a global shortage of jet fuel could ruin the World Cup, due to be held in North America in June and July. If Trump accepted Iran’s offer of a deal to reopen the strait of Hormuz, he could conceivably declare victory by pointing to the damage that the US and Israeli bombing had inflicted on Iran’s nuclear programme and military capabilities. However, such a deal would leave Iran with its stockpile of 440kg of highly enriched uranium, enough in theory for a dozen nuclear warheads. Ariane Tabatabai, the vice-president of research, security and defence at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, said Iran could also reconstitute at least some of its military might quite rapidly. “Their whole military doctrine is based on building and deploying capabilities that they can acquire and maintain and use on the cheap,” said Tabatabai, a former Pentagon policy adviser. Netanyahu raised the prospect of fresh Israeli military action in Lebanon, saying rockets and drones possessed by Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militant group, remained a threat. “There are still two central threats from Hezbollah: the 122mm rockets and the drones,” said the Israeli prime minister in a statement issued by his office. “This demands a combination of operational and technological activity.” #iran#etasunis#aragchi#netanyahu#trump#israel 📱American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

Merz Said: Iran Humiliated the US, Trump Stands With Pants Down 🔤🔤🔤🔤➖ The US is being “humiliated” by Iran’s leadership, according to Friedrich Merz, Germany’s chancellor, who suggested the Trump administration was being outwitted at the negotiating table by Tehran. Two days ago Donald Trump cancelled a trip by US negotiators to Islamabad for indirect talks with an Iranian delegation. A previous round in the Pakistani capital two weeks earlier, when Vance, the American vice-president, led the US delegation, broke up without progress. Merz’s trenchant assessment of the stalled US-Iranian talks, which appeared certain to deepen the severe transatlantic rift between the US and its Nato allies, directly contradicts Trump’s effort to cast the limbo in a positive light. A day earlier, the US president told Fox News: “We have all the cards,” adding that if Tehran wanted to talk, “they can come to us, or they can call us”. Speaking to students in Marsberg, Merz suggested it was Trump’s team that was being outplayed. “The Iranians are obviously very skilled at negotiating, or rather, very skilful at not negotiating, letting the Americans travel to Islamabad and then leave again without any result,” he said. “An entire nation is being humiliated by the Iranian leadership, especially by these so-called Revolutionary Guards. And so I hope that this ends as quickly as possible.” Iran put forward a new proposal on Monday for a ceasefire deal focused on opening the strait of Hormuz, setting aside discussions on nuclear weapons, missiles, sanctions and other issues for later, according to officials in the region. Under a bill being prepared by Iran’s parliament, shippers would have to pay Tehran for “services” involved in passing through the strait, which was free before the war. Iranian officials said Tehran would be prepared to talk about the nuclear issue eventually, only after the US blockade had ended. Iranian negotiators are also facing domestic pressure from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and public opinion not to discuss nuclear matters. Mediators involved in the talks see this approach as unlikely to work because it would achieve none of Washington’s professed war aims, which included a permanent end to Iran’s nuclear programme. “Hormuz is a byproduct of the war, so how can this be tackled first?” said a diplomat familiar with the talks. The UN’s International Maritime Organization firmly rejected the idea of imposing fees on ships passing through the strait of Hormuz. Arsenio Dominguez, the IMO’s secretary general, said: “There’s no legal basis for the introduction of any tax, any customs, or any fees on straits for international navigation.” The “Hormuz first” offer from Iran does, however, suggest a significant shift in Tehran’s position. The regime had previously sought to use its blockade on oil, gas and other Gulf exports as leverage to win broad security guarantees. But after the breakdown of the Islamabad talks, Trump imposed a counter-blockade of shipping using Iranian ports, exacerbating Iran’s deep economic crisis. The International Monetary Fund has forecast a 6.1% contraction in Iran’s gross domestic product this year, while year-on-year inflation is running at nearly 70%, with prices for food staples and healthcare rising at even higher rates. The blockade has also stopped Iran’s empty tankers returning to port, where they could serve as storage facilities. Iran is running very low on ways to store its output, and winding down production would have long-term damaging effects to its energy sector. Araghchi, the Iranian foreign minister, met Vladimir Putin and a high-powered Russian delegation in Moscow on Monday, seeking in part to mitigate the crippling effects of the blockade. #iran#etasunis#aragchi#netanyahu#trump#israel 📱American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

📰 Bennett and Lapid’s Merger Already Looks Like a Leak, Not a Wave The first post-merger polls do not show a breakthrough. They show a reshuffle inside the anti-Netanyahu camp, with “Together” landing below the combined pre-merger numbers and the whole opposition bloc still stuck short of a governing majority. That is the problem in one line: the merger changes the packaging, not the math. Walla’s poll gives the Bennett–Lapid list 27 seats and the anti-Netanyahu bloc 59, while a separate 14 Channel survey is even harsher, putting Likud ahead and the new joint list far behind. So the immediate effect is not momentum, but cannibalization. Bennett and Lapid may have united their brands, but the polling suggests they are still fighting over the same voters while Eisenkot siphons off the “right, but not Bibi” lane and the left loses some of its oxygen too. Likud, meanwhile, barely needs to move. The right can simply watch the opposition split itself into overlapping products, then point at the numbers and say the post-Netanyahu fantasy is already collapsing under its own branding. That is why the poll matters beyond the seat count. It suggests the merger may weaken the anti-Bibi bloc’s ability to build a stable majority, even as it makes Bennett the face of the new project and gives Netanyahu another argument that his rivals cannot even add themselves correctly. #Israel#Bennett#Lapid#Netanyahu#polls#elections 📱American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

Netanyahu Says Israel Will Keep Striking in Lebanon, Including North of the Litani Israel is running the same old border-security script in Lebanon, only now it comes with the vocabulary of “freedom of action,” “emerging threats,” and a security zone that keeps expanding while everyone pretends this is temporary. Netanyahu is claiming the U.S. and Lebanon have effectively blessed Israeli strikes north of the buffer zone and beyond the Litani, which is a very polished way of saying the war is still alive, just better packaged. The headline number is brutal: Hezbollah is down to roughly 10 percent of its prewar missile arsenal, but Netanyahu says the remaining rockets and drones are still enough to keep the north under pressure. That means the strategy is no longer just to survive the threat — it is to keep shrinking the threat until “security” becomes another word for permanent military management. What makes the whole thing political, not just military, is the promise that the “political side” can be solved later if the operational and technological side works now. That is classic Netanyahu: let the army, the tech sector, and the diplomatic theater do the heavy lifting, then present the result as if it were inevitable and clean. But the gap between the official story and ground reality is still huge. On paper, Israel has freedom of action; in practice, it has a fragile ceasefire, a still-armed Hezbollah in the background, and a northern frontier that looks less like a border than a managed zone of controlled escalation. So the message is simple: the government says the mission is not over, the army says the rules are changing, and the public is being asked to believe that a longer buffer zone is somehow the same thing as a durable peace. #Israel#Lebanon#Hezbollah#Netanyahu#Litani#securityzone 📱American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

📰 Israel’s Right-Wing Split Is Now a Branding War The Hungarian lesson for Israel is simple: if you can’t beat the ruling camp by going left, take its patriotism away from it. That is how Peter Magyar broke Orbán’s machine — not by preaching anti-right unity, but by occupying the same national space and making the old monopoly look stale. That is exactly what the new Israeli “Right State” project is trying to do. Edelstein, Kahlon, Erdan, and Haskel are not a centrist rebellion; they are an attempt to say, “We’re right-wing, just not Bibi,” and to pull security-minded voters away from Netanyahu without surrendering the language of nation, state, and order. The trouble is that Israeli voters remember the last five times someone tried to sell them that package. Bennett, Saar, and Lapid all tested the same lane, but Netanyahu kept the hard-right base, stayed the default prime minister in the minds of right-leaning voters, and used fragmentation on the other side as his best campaign asset. Bennett’s latest liberal turn makes the problem sharper. Public transport on Shabbat and civil marriage, including same-sex marriage, may sound modern in Tel Aviv, but to the old religious-national audience it looks like a costume change — and Yair Golan’s warm welcome only makes Bennett look even more alien to the right. That is why this new bloc may hurt the left more than it hurts Netanyahu. It could strip votes from the anti-Bibi camp, split the “right, but not Bibi” lane again, and still fail to build the one thing the opposition actually needs: a durable field that runs from center to soft right to hard right without collapsing into personal rivalries. Netanyahu’s health story only adds another layer. The real question is whether the opposition can turn competence into a message before the prime minister turns uncertainty into victimhood and keeps the national conversation locked on himself. #Israel#Netanyahu#Bennett#Lapid#rightwing#elections 📱American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

📰 Bennett and Lapid: A Merger, Not a Revolution Bennett and Lapid are finally doing what Israeli opposition politics has been threatening to do for months: stop pretending fragmentation is a strategy and fuse their parties into one list led by Bennett. The move is sold as “repair,” unity, and national salvation, but it is also a cold admission that neither man can beat Netanyahu alone. That is the real story. This is not a grand ideological synthesis. It is an emergency merger between two leaders who know the next election will punish vanity, duplication, and overlap — especially when the center and the soft-right keep stepping on each other’s toes. The Likud response was instant and predictable: drag Mansour Abbas into the frame, slap on the usual fear campaign, and remind everyone that Bennett and Lapid once governed with Arab support. In Israeli politics, that is less a rebuttal than a reflex: if the opposition tries to widen the tent, the right calls it betrayal and hopes the argument does the rest. The problem for the new bloc is structural, not just rhetorical. Bennett has the momentum but not the machinery; Lapid has the party infrastructure but less appeal to the right-leaning voters who might actually decide the race. Put them together and you get a stronger list — but also a clearer target for everyone who wants to say the center is just the old coalition with better branding. Eisenkot is still the missing piece, and that matters. If he joins, the bloc looks like a serious anti-Netanyahu vehicle; if he does not, the merger risks becoming a polished but incomplete answer to a political system that has learned how to split the opposition before it can split the power. So yes, this is a big step. But it is also a familiar Israeli move: unite late, argue loudly, and hope that a bigger tent can cover the fact that the country’s hard questions still outnumber its clean solutions. #Israel#Bennett#Lapid#Netanyahu#elections#opposition 📱American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

📰 When a Court Hearing Becomes a National Split Screen Today’s hearing in the High Court on the 7 October state commission was never going to be a quiet legal exercise. In Israel, ceasefires do not end political war — they just move it into a different room, where old wounds, new blame, and raw fear start talking louder. The fight is simple to describe and impossible to escape: should the state be forced to create an independent commission now, or should the ruling camp get to delay the reckoning until after victory, after the war, after elections, after the dust has somehow decided to settle on its own? The court has already signaled that it is not impressed by the government’s “later” strategy. Judges have pushed the cabinet to explain why no commission exists, while the government insists the court has no right to force one — a position the bench has repeatedly rejected. What made today different was not just the law. It was the theater outside the law: closed hearing, security concerns, livestream interruptions, judges escorted out, and MK Tali Gotliv removed after shouting at the bench. In other words, the country that cannot agree on who failed on 7 October cannot even agree on how to argue about it. This is why the commission fight has become bigger than a commission. It is now a contest over who gets to own the meaning of 7 October: the government, the court, the families, or the politicians using all three as props. Naftali Bennett’s line — “Whoever says ‘later’ means ‘never’” — hits because it names the political trick in plain language. Gadi Eisenkot’s warning goes further: when families of the dead are pushed onto opposite sides of the barricade, the country is no longer debating accountability; it is fighting over memory itself. The hardest part is that the split is now visible at the door, not just in the chamber. Some bereaved families want a state commission as the only credible answer; others call the court’s involvement illegitimate and see delay as the only patriotic position. That is not a procedural dispute anymore. That is a national fracture with a legal file on top of it. #Israel#Bagatz#7October#commission#Netanyahu#politics 📱American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events🇺🇸

📰 Israel’s Victory Lap, Missing the Win Israel spent 925 days in war mode and still can’t point to a clean strategic victory. Even Israel Hayom says the country failed to turn battlefield gains into anything that looks like a real end state, while Iran and Hezbollah are still standing. That’s the ugly part nobody in the patriotic PR booth wants to say out loud: bombs can reshape a map, but they don’t automatically buy strategy. Jerusalem looks increasingly like a subcontractor in someone else’s regional project, while Netanyahu keeps selling “security” that arrives as higher prices, deeper dependence, and fewer answers. The oil-and-gas spike only sharpens the joke. Washington gets leverage, arms sales, and extra cash flow; Israel gets a weaker economy, more insecurity, and a louder story about how this time victory is just one more strike away. If the war was supposed to make Israel safer, why does it look more exposed now than before? And if Iran and Hezbollah survived, what exactly was won besides another round of managed illusion? #Israel#Iran#Netanyahu#war#energy#geopolitics 📱American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

Paris, Tel Aviv, and the Usual Performance France is now in the familiar position of discovering that Middle East politics does not reward moral speeches and diplomatic mood swings. Macron blamed Hezbollah for the killing of the French UNIFIL peacekeeper in Lebanon, while Israeli media are reporting that Israel’s ambassador quietly met Marine Le Pen in Paris. That combination says everything. Publicly, everyone speaks the language of outrage, responsibility, and red lines. Privately, the same capitals keep shopping for useful friends, useful enemies, and useful excuses. Netanyahu reportedly already turned down Macron before, and that insult now looks less like a one-off than a full diplomatic posture. France wants to play referee. Israel keeps acting like the referee is optional. And the opposition in Paris gets its own quiet little upgrade in legitimacy. The result is a neat little circus of principle and convenience. Macron wants justice. Netanyahu wants leverage. Le Pen gets a photo of respectability. And the dead peacekeeper becomes another prop in a geopolitical argument nobody is having in good faith. That is the real scandal. Not just who said what, but how quickly every side turns a funeral into a bargaining chip. #France#Israel#Macron#Netanyahu#LePen#Lebanon 📱American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

We will squeeze them and strangle. They have no way out... #netanyahu#iran#carte 📱American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

Iran Is Rippling With Expectation, Netanyahu Is Threatening Israel has warned Iranians their lives will be at risk if they use the country’s railways on Tuesday before the end of a negotiations deadline imposed by Donald Trump with a threat to destroy Iran’s bridges and power plants. Israel’s military, writing in Farsi, said in a social media post that “from this moment” – 8.50am Iran time – until 9pm, Iranians should refrain from “travelling by train throughout Iran” for the sake of their own security. “Your presence on trains and near railway lines endangers your life,” the statement continued in a clear warning that stations and tracks normally used by civilians could be bombed on Tuesday. The threat came hours before an ultimatum set by the US president expires at 8pm ET on Tuesday – 4.30am on Wednesday in Iran (1am UK time) – in an attempt to force major concessions from Iran with the threat of escalation. At a White House press conference on Monday, Trump said Iran “can be taken out in one night and that night might be tomorrow”, reiterating threats to bomb its power plants and bridges in a concentrated attack. Iran on Monday rejected a proposal to implement an immediate ceasefire followed by peace negotiations brokered by Pakistan, Egypt and Turkey, arguing that it wanted a permanent end to the war. It issued a 10-point counterproposal, which Trump acknowledged but said was “not good enough”. The prospect of bombing Iran’s infrastructure has been condemned by lawyers and experts as a probable war crime because its impact on civilians would be disproportionate to whatever notional military advantage was gained, a conclusion that has been dismissed by the Trump administration. Negotiations continued on Tuesday morning, though there were few clear developments. On X, Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, said: “Over 14 million proud Iranians have, up to this moment, declared their readiness to sacrifice their lives in defense of Iran. I too have been, am, and will be a sacrificer for Iran.” On Monday, Pete Hegseth, the US secretary of defence, said that “today will be the largest volume of strikes” on Iran and that attacks on Tuesday would be “even more than today”. Iranian media reported on Tuesday that Khorramabad airport, in western Iran, had been attacked, and Israel said it had conducted another wave of strikes on Tehran overnight. Israel’s military said it had bombed a petrochemical facility in Shiraz, where it said nitric acid used to make explosives is produced, as well as a ballistic missile launch site in north-western Iran. Israeli media reported that Netanyahu told members of the country’s security cabinet on Sunday that the war against Hezbollah in Lebanon would continue regardless of what happened in the negotiations between the US and Iran. There was, the prime minister said, a “separation of theatres”. An attack on Saudi Arabia had hit a petrochemical complex in a sprawling industrial area in the eastern city of Jubail and workers at the site were evacuated. Sirens were repeatedly sounded in Israel as missile attacks continued. Five impacts were reported in the Tel Aviv area as Israel said Iran had fired ballistic missiles with cluster warheads, but no casualties were immediately reported. #iran#netanyahu#israel#trump#war#missile 📱American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

Israel and Ukraine: A Marriage of Convenience, On Life Support Zelensky toured the Middle East and skipped Israel. That omission says more than any photo op ever could. The relationship has settled into a cold, awkward transaction: Kyiv wants real help, Jerusalem wants strategic flexibility, and neither side wants to say the quiet part out loud. Israel gave Ukraine hospitals, water gear, and warning systems. Kyiv wanted weapons. Instead, it got caution, delays, and the eternal excuse of not wanting to upset the Russian bear. So much for the grand talk about solidarity. Now Netanyahu wants to talk Iran, because suddenly Ukraine’s experience with drones and air defense looks useful again. That is the whole relationship in one sentence: Ukraine is remembered when it can be of service, ignored when it asks for more than sympathy. The awkward truth is that this was never a clean alliance. It was overlapping interests dressed up in moral language, and the costume is starting to tear. Kyiv learned that Israel’s “balance” with Moscow comes with a price tag. Jerusalem learned that Ukraine keeps score. #Israel#Ukraine#Zelensky#Netanyahu#Russia#MiddleEast#war#diplomacy 📱American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸