Israel Update 15.7.26

VIDEO: WHAT LIFE UNDER ROCKET FIRE LOOKS LIKE FOR ISRAELIS

 

 

An online video shows the horrendous volume of bombardment that Israelis have endured since Oct. 7, 2023, from Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and the IRGC. For decades, Israelis  accepted life under the threat of rocket fire from Gaza, occasionally “mowing the lawn” when the bombardments became severe. But the Oct. 7 attack shattered the illusion that such a status quo was sustainable. Article with embedded 2 minute video here – scroll down. Full screen recommended.

PROPAGANDA WAR AGAINST ISRAEL

 

Shortly after the Hamas atrocities of October 7, 2023, Canadian political strategist Warren Kinsella began noticing the fingerprints of a professional propaganda campaign. Hamas and its networks, along with their Western followers, had thousands of social media accounts primed, protest banners ready, and talking points translated into multiple languages long before the IDF response  had even begun.
What may appear to be spontaneous outrage on Western streets and social feeds was, in fact, a coordinated political operation that could only be executed by state actors and professional agitators.
In October 2023, “there were thousands of protests around the planet using the same slogans,”… That was either “one hell of a coincidence” or evidence of central planning. The U.S. Director of National Intelligence  has accused Iran of  funding and encouraging anti-Israel protests. Report here

 IRAN 

 

Following the collapse of last month’s Memorandum of Understanding and interim ceasefire between the US and Iran, the region, including Israel, is in a state of heightened tension. In the last week, Iran has launched a series of drone and missile attacks targeting U.S. military assets stationed on Jordanian soil next door to Israel, as well as in the Gulf states.  On July 14 PM Netanyahu issued a stern warning directly to Iran’s leadership saying that Israel is prepared for “every scenario” and that any direct attack on Israeli territory would be met with an overwhelmingly powerful retaliation. Report here

 

TURKEY

 

If President Trump sells F-35 aircraft to Turkey, Israeli defence officials believe the Turks could work around American limits placed on the aircraft. Since no country has successfully detected the F-35 stealth aircraft, Turkey could theoretically attack Israel with no warning. In another nightmare scenario, Turkey could provide Syria, or even Iran, with the capacity to track F-35s. Report here

 

Hamas has shifted much of its organizational centre of gravity toward Turkey in recent months. In May, Hamas chose Turkey as the venue for internal elections to select the head of its political bureau.
The vast majority of Hamas leaders have recently been based in Turkey and have stayed there for extended periods, including leaders whose families live in Qatar. One source said Turkey was now a safer destination for Hamas after an Israeli attack on its leaders in Doha, Qatar. Report here

GAZA

 

 President Trump’s peace plan for Gaza envisioned 20,000 international peacekeepers to prevent the re-emergence of Hamas as a military power.
An initial group of 10-20 Moroccan soldiers are training near Gaza’s border in Israel before beginning limited operations, and more are expected.
The second phase of the peace plan required Hamas to disarm and transfer power to a Palestinian technocratic council. Then the peacekeepers would move in. But Hamas refuses to disarm.
Rebuilding hasn’t yet begun, billions of dollars pledged for reconstruction haven’t materialized, and initial offers of troops have been held back.Report here (paywall)

 

During the ceasefire in Gaza, between October 2025 and June 2026, aid deliveries significantly exceeded needs identified by the UN, according to a new report recently published by the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), the Israeli Defence Department body responsible for civilian affairs in the Palestinian territories. About 1.78 million tons of food entered Gaza between the start of the ceasefire and June 7, roughly three times the requirements defined by the World Food Programme.
Gaza receives more than 70,000 cubic metres of water a day through pipelines, desalination facilities and other infrastructure, exceeding international humanitarian standards. COGAT also said Gaza’s health care system remains operational, with 18,000 tons of medicines and medical supplies entering the territory since the ceasefire. Hospital bed capacity has increased by 55%.Report here

 

UN Deputy Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, Ramiz Alakbarov, on Monday accused Hamas of interfering with humanitarian deliveries in Gaza and intimidating aid workers. Report here

HONDURAS

 

Responding to a request from Honduran President Nasry Asfura, Israel sent an emergency ophthalmology mission to treat Hondurans suffering from serious eye conditions.
The Israeli delegation completed the first stage of its work Tuesday after treating 155 patients, including 136 who successfully underwent eye surgery.
Additional medical equipment, professional training, and another Israeli delegation are planned for later this year. Report here

DEFENCE

 

Innoviz Technologies announced the launch of Perciz, a new defence and homeland security division that is built around the company’s automotive‑grade Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) sensors. The announcement comes as militaries and security agencies are racing to stock up on counter-unmanned autonomous systems (C-UAS) that can detect, track and neutralise drones. Report here

 

 

Footnote

The Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), Volkswagen’s third-largest shareholder, blocked a proposed agreement between Volkswagen and Israeli defence company Rafael to manufacture Iron Dome components in Germany.
The plan would have repurposed the automaker’s struggling plant in Osnabruck and the veto puts hundreds of jobs at risk. Report here

 

 

 

AGRICULTURE

 

Israeli agricultural technology startup Nanovel has been awarded a €2.5 million ($2.9 million) grant from the European Innovation Council to accelerate development and commercialization of autonomous robots designed to harvest citrus fruit. Report here

 

A record avocado harvest of 300,000 tons is expected to boost exports, increase global competition and push Israeli prices lower. Favourable weather conditions produced high quality fruit with minimal external defects.  Report here

 

 

Israel is on track for its best wheat harvest in a decade. Farmers are projected to harvest about 140,000 toms, well above the usual 80,000 to 100,000, as late season rainfall boosted fields across southern Israel and increased supplies for national emergency reserves. Report here

 

 

THE UK

 

The UK Trade Envoy to Israel, Lord Austin of Dudley, welcomed new figures showing that Israel has risen to eighth place in a ranking of the top European and regional nations investing in the UK, saying  “This welcome news shows that Israel has firmly established itself as one of the UK’s most important trading partners, creating thousands of jobs across the UK and supporting thousands more in Israel.”

19 Israeli companies either established or expanded operations in the UK from 2024-2025. Report here

 

 

UK Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood  announced that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) will be designated a threat to national security.
Support for the IRGC, from expressing a positive opinion to assisting them, will now be an offense punishable by up to 14 years in prison.
The IRGC is believed to have directed seven attacks at UK locations linked to Jewish and Israeli communities.
MI5 identified at least 20 potentially lethal Iranian-backed plots against people in the UK in the last year. The EU added the IRGC to its terror list in January. Report here

 

CHURCH OF ENGLAND

 

The Church of England’s legislative body voted Monday to encourage churches across England to engage with a document produced by Palestinian Christians that accuses Israel of genocide, despite requests from Jewish organizations and Britain’s chief rabbi to reject it.

Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis said it was “shameful that the Church of England General Synod has recommended engagement with Kairos II…This is a document full of falsehood, which openly rejects dialogue, uses extreme rhetoric to challenge the very existence of Israel and objects to existing peace agreements in the region…reducing one of the world’s most complex conflicts to a single, warped narrative, which can only harm the cause of peace…This is a sad day for Jewish-Christian relations.” Reports here & here

 

 

George Deek (Israel’s Special Envoy to the Christian World) posted:

Israel strongly condemns the shameful decision of the Church of England @Synod to grant legitimacy to the extremist Kairos Palestine document. This hateful document undermines the right of the world’s only Jewish state to exist, and seeks to justify the atrocities of October 7 by blaming Israel for causing it. Even more disturbingly, it urges churches to boycott dialogue with “Zionist voices,” in practice excluding the overwhelming majority of the Jewish community in the UK from Christian-Jewish engagement unless they renounce Jewish self-determination.

And on a personal note: The Church of England had an opportunity to promote understanding by engaging the full diversity of Christian voices from the Holy Land. It did not. I say this as an Arab Christian whose family has lived in this land for centuries. Instead, the Church opted to elevate one of the most radical and divisive theological and political manifestos produced in recent years. X post here

 

and see article by Nicole Lampert in Comment & Opinion below

 

 

GAS

 

 

NewMed Energy announced the completion of a new undersea pipeline between Ashdod and Ashkelon that will make it possible to increase the flow of natural gas from Israel to Egypt by 2 billion cubic metres a year, marking the first stage in implementing the export agreement with Egypt signed in August – Israel’s largest energy export deal, worth $35 billion. Report here

 

 

State revenues from natural gas royalties totalled $650 million (NIS 1.96 billion) in 2025.
The cumulative amount since 2004 totals more than $5.66 billion (NIS 17 billion). Report here

 

 

 

THAI WORKERS IN ISRAEL

 

 

Thai workers make up the largest group of foreign workers currently in Israel. Many of them  remain vulnerable to potential drone and rocket attacks from both Hamas in the south and Hezbollah in the north. Report here

 

 

 

SPORT

 

Israeli Paralympic tennis player Guy Sasson and his Dutch partner, Niels Vink, won the Quad Wheelchair Doubles title at the 2026 Wimbledon   Championships. The win is Sasson’s sixth grand slam title. Report here

 

Israel’s women’s under-20 basketball team on Sunday won a silver medal in the FIBA EuroBasket tournament having lost to France in the final. It was the first medal won by Israel in this tournament. Report heree

 

 

 

COMMENT & OPINION

 

 

Turkey

 

Dr. Dan Diker: Although formally allied with the West, Turkey under President Erdogan increasingly behaves like an aggressive rogue power by pursuing regional dominance, hosting Islamist networks including Hamas , and positioning itself as a Sunni imperial competitor to Iran. Through actions such as occupying Northern Cyprus, maintaining Russian air defences, and utilizing eliminationist anti-Israel rhetoric, Turkey’s current leadership actively undermines the cohesion and principles of the NATO alliance. This aggressive stance marks a sharp departure from Turkey’s historical role as a stabilizing, secular democracy. Ignoring Ankara’s current ambitions will only invite greater regional instability. Article here

Hamas

 

Khaled Abu Toameh: Hamas’s Latest Trick: Leaving Government, Keeping Weapons.
Hamas’s announcement that it is dissolving its governing body to hand authority to a Palestinian technocratic committee is a deceptive attempt to appear compliant with the Trump peace initiative while preserving its military power. Despite the transition, nothing essential changes as Hamas admits its ministry employees will remain in place and the group will continue to oversee security and policing in Gaza. Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar and critics warn that this move merely outsources civilian responsibilities to avoid disarmament, allowing Hamas to replicate the Hizbullah model and keep any new administration operating under the shadow of its guns. Article here

 

The UK

 

Nicole Lampert: Why is the CofE debating Anti-Semitic Propaganda?
On July 12, the Church’s General Synod debated one of the most appalling pieces of contemporary antisemitic propaganda in modern Christian history.
Titled “A Moment of Truth: Faith in a Time of Genocide,” the report seems to defend the terror group Hamas, saying their Oct. 7 massacre of 2023 was “born out of decades of injustice, oppression and displacement since the Nakba of 1948.”…The document describes Palestinians as the “indigenous people of the land” and criticizes the Abraham Accords that normalized relations between Israel and several Arab states. It is little wonder that the Jewish Board of Deputies has claimed the document “risks real harm to Jews in the UK through its dissemination,” while Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis said it was “little more than political activism dressed up as theology.”

While visiting the Palestinian territories recently the Archbishop of Canterbury demanded peace in the region… But in none of her statements or sermons did she mention the horror of Palestinian terrorism over decades, and why such violence might make peace so difficult.

Psychologist Gad Saad has labelled this sort of blindness to terrorism because you feel sorry for the underdog as “suicidal empathy”. The Church is drowning in it, even though Christians are being targeted by Islamists across the Middle East and in Africa. Is it just that it is easier to attack the Jewish state? Article here (paywall)

 

 

Limor Simhony Philpott: Britain’s largest protest movement is not nearly as spontaneous or grassroots as it looks. Instead, a small number of well-organised groups, motivated by a common loathing of Israel, have spent years building the infrastructure that now drives much of Britain’s pro-Palestine activism. As soon as Hamas launched its attack on 7 October 2023, the activists were ready to hit the streets.

The report maps 40 organisations at the centre of the protests. Eleven are linked, or have leaders who are linked, to extremist groups such as Hamas, Hezbollah and the Iranian regime. Ten of the organisations are charities, eight are companies, nine are hybrids and 13 – nearly a third – have no formal legal structure at all. Nineteen receive UK government money…while at least 11 take money from other governments, too. Article here

 

Iran

 

Washington Post Editorial: The experiment with appeasing the Islamic Republic of Iran didn’t last long. The U.S. revoked an oil sanctions waiver on Tuesday after Iranian forces fired on three tankers in the Strait of Hormuz. The reality is that diplomacy was doomed from the start.
The Iranian regime perceived the White House decision to end the fighting under political pressure and offer multibillion-dollar sanctions relief not as a sign of goodwill but proof of weakness. Apparently, direct discussions aren’t enough to persuade the men who control Iran’s military that it’s in their interest to stop shooting at shipping vessels or executing political dissidents.
As the White House weighs a post-ceasefire strategy, it sees that releasing tens of billions of dollars to a regime that won’t honour its end of the bargain will embolden it to ask for more. The administration can ratchet up sanctions pressure, impose an embargo on Iranian oil, and take limited kinetic action when necessary. There will be pressure to go back to the tired playbook of bribing the regime into good behaviour, but that hasn’t worked recently and it won’t work again. Editorial here (paywall)

 

 

 

Telegraph Editorial: The war in the Gulf that everyone thought had ended has been revived.
The critical Strait of Hormuz has become pivotal to the entire conflict with Iran, which is using its geographical proximity to force the strait’s closure.
Iran has interpreted the MOU as giving it carte blanche to dictate the progress of traffic when it stated that “Iran will use its best efforts for the safe passage of commercial vessels.”
Given the benefits that would accrue to Iran from the terms of the memorandum, the continued attacks on Gulf shipping confirm that we are not dealing with rational actors – and certainly not those who will adhere to any peace treaty that may be negotiated. Editorial here (paywall)

 

 

 

Mark Dubowitz: Tehran’s promise to keep the Strait of Hormuz open for international shipping turned out to be about as trustworthy as every other major promise the Islamic Republic has ever made. The lesson for the U.S. is that it must stop negotiating with a regime that weaponizes negotiations…
Iran’s ability to export oil must be permanently revoked. Frozen assets should remain frozen, rather than being used to finance the regime’s next bout of aggression. Crushing sanctions need to be enforced, with no loopholes. The president should direct the U.S. military to win the Battle of Hormuz.
Washington also shouldn’t tolerate Tehran using proxies like Hizbullah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen to bully negotiators. Yes, renewed confrontation carries risks. But allowing the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism to rebuild its power under the guise of yet another failed negotiation is far more dangerous. Article here

 

 

Michael Jacobson: A ceasefire won’t end Iran’s terror war on Europe. Even if US-Iran talks resume, Tehran will keep sending its proxies to commit attacks and buy weapons. European governments must crack down harder. Article here