In a recent public speech, David Barnea, the head of Israel’s vaunted intelligence agency, did something very unusual: he declared that his organization was ready to strike “deep in Iran, in the very heart of Tehran,” if the Islamic Republic harmed Israeli citizens. As a rule, high-ranking Israeli security officials, and especially those associated with the Mossad, avoid making explicit threats of this sort. Meir Ben-Shabbat believes that Barnea’s words weren’t directed at Tehran at all, but at Washington:

The U.S. administration under President Biden, which has sought to lower the profile of the Iranian problem and to remove the danger of a military confrontation with it as far as possible, is now seeing the tangible results of its policy: a growing sense of confidence in Iran, leading to defiant activity on its nuclear program [and its] providing aid to Russia in the form of supplying Moscow with drones for its combat effort in Ukraine—compounded by a significant increase in its efforts to promote acts of terrorism around the globe, owing to a feeling that it will not be required to pay any real price for all of this.

The Mossad chief’s speech, only a few days prior to the arrival of the prime minister in the U.S. for a meeting with Biden and attendance at the UN General Assembly, constitutes a good preparation for these two key events. For understandable reasons, Barnea did not point an accusatory finger at our good friends in Washington, but as the popular [Middle Eastern] idiom has it—he “shouted at the tree so that the camel might hear.”

Although tough Israeli talk on the Iranian issue might not go down too well with those U.S. administration officials, who are currently working hard to establish normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia, it does accurately reflect the situation that has developed under the auspices of their policy and will serve to clarify Israel’s current priority: neutralizing the existential threat posed by Iran, [which, in Jerusalem’s view, rightly] takes precedence even over normalization with Saudi Arabia.

For the past 36 hours, I’ve been reading and listening to analyses of the terms and implications of the recent hostage deal. More will appear in the coming days, and I’ll try to put the best of them in this newsletter. But today I want to share a comment made on Tuesday by the Palestinian analyst Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib. While he and I would probably disagree on numerous points about the current conflict, this analysis is spot on, and goes entirely against most arguments made by those who consider themselves pro-Palestinian, and certainly those chanting for a cease-fire at all costs:

When a cease-fire in Gaza is announced, Hamas’s fascists will do everything they can to frame this as the ultimate victory; they will wear their military uniforms, emerge from their tunnels, stop hiding in schools and displacement centers, and very quickly reassert their control over the coastal enclave. They’ll even get a few Gazans to celebrate and dance for them.

This, I should note, is exactly what has happened. Alkhatib continues:

The reality is that the Islamist terrorism of Hamas, masquerading as “resistance,” has achieved nothing for the Palestinian people except for billions of dollars in wasted resources and tens of thousands of needless deaths, with Gaza in ruins after twenty years following the withdrawal of settlements in 2005. . . . Hamas’s propaganda machine, run by Qatari state media, Al Jazeera Arabic, will work overtime to help the terror group turn a catastrophic disaster into a victory akin to the battles of Stalingrad and Leningrad.

Hamas will also start punishing anyone who criticized or worked against it, and preparing for its next attack. Perhaps Palestinians would have been better off if, instead of granting them a temporary reprieve, the IDF kept fighting until Hamas was utterly defeated.