Pakistan, which once boasted a small but active Jewish community, is now home to at most a handful of Jews, who generally conceal their identities due to widespread anti-Semitism. Faisal Benkhald, who prefers to go by his Jewish first name of Fishel, has dedicated himself to preserving and restoring the country’s Jewish cemeteries, most of which have fallen into disrepair. About one in Karachi, Erica Lyons writes:

[Benkhald] is outspoken and relentless in his efforts to make the story of this cemetery known and fears that it could potentially be entirely destroyed. In a place where a historic synagogue was razed and the community now nearly entirely forgotten, this is perhaps not an unfounded fear. So what would drive one to protect neglected Jewish graves? Fishel’s own family story is largely responsible for this. He was born in Karachi to an Arab father and a Jewish mother in 1987. Though there is no way to verify it, he says that he was told as a child by an elderly Jewish gentleman that he knew only as Mr. David that there were 200 Jews living in Pakistan at the time. He speaks of having a fascination with the [Karachi] cemetery since his teens and is perhaps clinging onto what little is left.

This week, there have been numerous unconfirmed reports about the fate of Esmail Qaani, who is the head of the Quds Force, the expeditionary arm of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. Benny Avni writes:

On Thursday, Sky News Arabic reported that Mr. Qaani was rushed to a hospital after suffering a heart attack. He became [the Quds Force] commander in 2020, after an American drone strike killed his predecessor, Qassem Suleimani. The unit oversees the Islamic Republic’s various Mideast proxies, as well as the exporting of the Iranian revolution to the region and beyond.

The Sky News report attempts to put to rest earlier claims that Mr. Qaani was killed at Beirut. It follows several reports asserting he has been arrested and interrogated at Tehran over suspicion that he, or a top lieutenant, leaked information to Israel. Five days ago, the Arabic-language al-Arabiya network reported that Mr. Qaani “is under surveillance and isolation, following the Israeli assassinations of prominent Iranian leaders.”

Iranians are desperately scrambling to plug possible leaks that gave Israel precise intelligence to conduct pinpoint strikes against Hizballah commanders. . . . “I find it hard to believe that Qaani was compromised,” an Iran watcher at Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies, Beni Sabti, tells the Sun. Perhaps one or more of [Qaani’s] top aides have been recruited by Israel, he says, adding that “psychological warfare” could well be stoking the rumor mill.

If so, prominent Iranians seem to be exacerbating the internal turmoil by alleging that the country’s security apparatus has been infiltrated.