“Today, the Board of ‌Peace reached a HISTORIC agreement for the COMPLETE DISARMAMENT of Hamas and all other armed groups in Gaza,” President Donald Trump triumphantly declared on Truth Social on Thursday. The Board of Peace, presided over by Trump and including Turkey and Qatar among its members, was charged with funding and implementing the administration’s September 2025 20-point peace plan for Gaza. This provided for a permanent ceasefire and the return of all of Hamas’s Israeli hostages, living and dead. But the fulfillment of the subsequent points—Gaza reconstruction, deradicalization, and long-term efforts for peace—was contingent on Hamas disarmament.

Once it commenced, the disarmament process, including the mapping of Hamas tunnels, would set in motion a gradual Israeli military withdrawal to the so-called Yellow Line and eventually from all of Gaza. Verifiably demilitarized, Gaza would then be secured by an International Stabilization Force, composed of troops from multiple countries, and administered by Palestinian technocrats of the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG). “This is a monumental step toward lasting PEACE and SECURITY,” Trump exulted this week, referring to Hamas’s pivotal willingness to disarm.

Read more

It’s arguably the most vivid illustration we’ve ever seen of the migrant crisis that has transformed the face of Europe in one decade and that continues to consume the continent’s politics. And no one saw it all coming more clearly than our own Douglas Murray. His 2017 book, The Strange Death of Europe, chronicles the errors of judgment that led Western leaders so carelessly to open their doors to unlimited migration.

Will the brief storming of Ceuta prompt a reckoning among European elites, or will the crisis linger on, with the same denials and failed solutions from the leadership class? Read Douglas’s take on what comes next. —The Editors

Eleven years ago, almost to the day, Europe was experiencing a migration wave that threatened to make the continent buckle. In the space of a matter of weeks, more than a million people from Africa, the Middle East, and the Far East made their way into Europe, principally by crossing to the islands of Greece and Italy: “the soft underbelly of Europe.”

As various European countries started to panic, it was German chancellor Angela Merkel who decided to control the day. “Wir schaffen das,” she said in August 2015. “We can do this.” Merkel and some of her counterparts in the EU effectively suspended normal immigration procedures and opened the borders of Europe to anyone who wanted to come.

In those days, the route into Europe via Spain was relatively quiet. That was because the option of getting into Europe via Central and Southeastern Europe had been opened up, so there was less need for migrants to use the Spanish option. There were also effective agreements with the Moroccan authorities—unlike those in lawless Libya, for instance—which saved Spain from the most challenging of the 2015 waves.

Still, Spain remained uniquely vulnerable. Not least because, like Greece and Italy, the country had an accident of geography. This was the fact that, as well as being a remarkably short sail from North Africa, Spain has two territories actually in Northern Africa: the enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla.

Read more

The Spanish government has done so, but it should never have come to this. It was bound to, though, because Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez, a Socialist, oversees one of Europe’s most permissive migration regimes. In January, Sánchez announced a blanket amnesty program to regularize the immigration status of half a million migrants living illegally in Spain. In a New York Times op-ed published in February, Sánchez characterized the move as both humane and economically necessary, and contrasted his policy to the restrictive ones of “MAGA-style leaders” (read: Hungary’s former prime minister Viktor Orbán).

By summer, applications had soared to over one million—this, in a country whose migrant population is estimated to be at around 15 percent of the national total. Granted, the beneficiaries of this program are mostly Latin Americans, who, owing to a shared language and cultural similarities, are relatively easy to integrate.

Read more

Matar was already serving a 25-year sentence after he was convicted of attempted murder last year in a New York court. But the federal case against him is important because it demonstrates the threat Iran poses not only to our republic, and our republic of letters, but to the liberties of a free society.

Read more

For Loomer, this is quite the change of heart. She had once accused President Joe Biden of funding “Nazi death squads” in Ukraine. And she had even contributed her own writing to Russia’s state-run network, RT. Today, she gushes about the heroism of the Ukrainian people and the land’s natural beauty.

“I think a lot of people don’t want to admit when they are wrong; it’s not exactly a comfortable thing to do. It’s also hard to do,” Loomer told me in a telephone interview from her hotel in Ukraine Tuesday. “I take responsibility for the content I consumed. Looking back, I consumed a lot of content that was clearly propaganda. I see now how RT has become a full-time clipper account for the woke reich,” she said. “It made me reevaluate some of the content I have consumed on RT.”

The news here is not the realization that Russia’s state-run media operation is a lie factory. Rather, it’s that Loomer has now accepted that America is itself in an information war, and many foreign actors—Iran, Qatar, China, and Russia—are fighting to influence American opinion.

Read more

Benjamin Netanyahu and Volodymyr Zelensky both came to Washington to attend the memorial for the late GOP senator Lindsey Graham, who helped persuade Trump for years to support their nations’ war efforts. But they also came with urgent business, seeking to extract commitments from the president: for Israel, a plan to eliminate Iran’s remaining and restored nuclear facilities; and for Ukraine, U.S. assistance, including access to Patriot missiles, to counter Russian attacks.

Both meetings on Tuesday remained closed, as Trump chose not to invite the press into the Oval Office as he often does at the end of visits from world leaders. Yet the early signs suggest that this confidentiality is a positive sign. Trump keeps his most important “working meetings” private, and officials from all three countries called the talks comprehensive and productive. Netanyahu said his session was “one of the best conversations I’ve ever had with a president of the United States.”

And the day before the visit, news broke of a Ukrainian action that showed exactly how the alliance with the U.S. can be mutually beneficial. Ukrainian forces targeted and sank an Iranian vessel in the Caspian Sea over the weekend, whittling down the Islamic regime’s arsenal that has bedeviled U.S. efforts to keep open the Strait of Hormuz.

Read more

At least this station was still operating. Several others I passed along the way had no gasoline to sell at all.

There was something surreal about watching drivers queue for fuel in the capital of one of the world’s largest oil-producing countries. I had never seen anything like it in the city where I grew up. It was also an unmistakable sign that the war Russia launched against Ukraine was becoming much harder to keep at a comfortable distance—even in Moscow, the city the Kremlin had worked hardest to shield from it.

For most of the past four years, the Russian capital existed in a kind of parallel reality—something I repeatedly observed on my semiannual trips back home. While Ukrainian cities were being bombarded, occupied, and destroyed, Moscow’s restaurants, shops, and nightclubs remained busy. Western businesses, many of which left the country in the immediate wake of the invasion of Ukraine, had reopened using Russian names. (McDonald’s became Vkusno—i tochka, which can be roughly translated as “Tasty—period.”) While poorer Russian regions bore the brunt of mobilization and military recruitment, Muscovites had remained comparatively insulated from the war’s human costs, with independent casualty tallies consistently showing the capital had suffered among the country’s lowest per-capita battlefield losses. The war itself was confined mostly to TV, where it was packaged as a distant “special military operation,” conducted by soldiers somewhere far away.

Until now.

Read more

In a completely unforeseen development, Lucy has once again yanked the football away from Charlie—sorry, President Donald Trump has once again backed away from his threats to annihilate Iran and opted for more diplomacy.

We were also shocked—shocked!—to learn one of the alleged reasons Trump decided to stop bombing Iran on Friday night: a shortage of key munitions. Indeed, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Axios, and CNN all ran stories over the weekend on the supposed “munitions” shortfall, reportedly raised by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine during a meeting with the president last week.

“Any major operation against Iran will face challenges because the U.S. munitions stockpile has been significantly depleted by Washington’s ongoing defense of Israel and support for Ukraine,” the Post reported Caine as telling the president. “Intensifying the war could dangerously drain the Pentagon’s already diminished stockpile of Patriot antimissile interceptors and other air defense munitions in the Middle East,” was the Times’ gloss on the same meeting. CNN and the Journal corroborated the claims about Caine, with CNN adding that Vice President J.D. Vance also warned Trump against resumption of the war. In an “analysis” article posted on Monday, CNN’s senior political reporter, Aaron Blake, argued that the question of “munitions stockpiles” had become “pivotal” to U.S. planning. Blake linked to an April analysis from CNN, which argued that there was now a “near-term risk” of the United States “running out of ammunition” in a conflict with a near-peer adversary such as China.

Read more

The war with Iran is stalemated, in part due to a shortage of munitions available to the U.S. military. If this situation is not a full-blown crisis, it is certainly a scandal, and many observers have drawn the conclusion that these shortages would make deterring a potential Chinese effort to take control of Taiwan more difficult.

The deeper reality is even worse: The munitions shortfalls reveal that the United States was not prepared to deter China—let alone fight a war with it—even before the Iran war. If American stockpiles of defensive munitions, like Terminal High Altitude Area Defenses (THAAD) and Patriot interceptors, and offensive weapons, like Tomahawk cruise missiles and the Army’s ballistic missiles, are running low after only five months of intermittent warfare of varying intensity with a middle power like Iran, what would happen in a broader and more intense campaign against the People’s Liberation Army?

If nothing else, the war against Iran reminds us that presumptively short wars have a tendency to run inconveniently long. Either our old war plans with China involved some magical thinking, or we simply were never serious about matching our resources to our strategic needs.

The United States is not the first nation, or even the first great power, to confront a munitions crisis. The history of modern warfare is replete with them. In recent years, Ukraine, Israel, and Russia have all faced critical shortfalls and addressed them through foreign suppliers (primarily the U.S. for Ukraine and Israel, and North Korea playing a key role for Russia) while ramping up domestic production. Israel was helped by the United States in the 1973 Arab-Israeli War in yet another such crisis.

Read more

As I have had cause to say too many times, this is something which, from Stockholm to Nice, is best understood as the “naughty van” phenomenon. If a van or car is driven into a crowd by an Islamist, you can swiftly tell who the culprit is because the vehicle will be talked about as though it suddenly took on a life of its own and began a rampage.

The reality is even more repetitive. The perpetrator of Saturday’s attack was a 21-year-old called Abdul Ballout. Born in Germany, of Lebanese parentage, last year he reportedly went to Lebanon to try to get to Syria in order to join ISIS. Arrested in Lebanon, he served three months in prison for a range of offenses including incitement to religious and sectarian conflict.

Read more

Then, in a fateful meeting at noon on Friday at the Oval Office, the plans for what one U.S. defense official called “Epic Fury 2: Electric Boogaloo,” were paused. That war plan “would mean hitting more missile facilities, more infrastructure, more weapons factories,” this source said, emphasizing that the focus was on the regime’s arsenal near the Strait of Hormuz. Iran’s oil refineries and power plants were also possible targets, this source said.

One reason Trump backed away was because America’s supply of interceptors, like the SM-3 and Patriot systems, have been significantly depleted, according to The New York Times. Already, the low stocks of interceptors have left American bases vulnerable. Earlier this month, an Iranian missile strike killed three U.S. service members at an American base in Jordan. Another round of intense fighting would deplete U.S. missile defense systems even further, potentially eating into the supply of interceptors in place to deter China from menacing Taiwan.

Read more

Then, on Thursday morning, President Donald Trump revealed that the deal was contingent on Saudi accession to the Abraham Accords. In other words, Saudi Arabia would have to establish diplomatic ties with the state of Israel—an objective long desired by the Trump administration—if it wanted access to U.S. technology and expanded security and economic cooperation.

The possible deal would accelerate the profound reorientation of the Middle East that is already underway. Since the war with Iran began on February 28, Arab countries have learned the hard way where they stand within the U.S.-led security order. As Iranian missiles rained down on their capitals, governments that had invested in military cooperation with Washington and Jerusalem benefited from years of integrated intelligence, early warning, and missile defense. Those that preferred strategic ambiguity discovered the limits of that approach.

The lesson was not lost on Washington. President Trump’s negotiating position over the past few days reflects a broader strategic objective: to build a regional order in which U.S. allies reinforce one another through intelligence sharing, integrated air defense, advanced technology, and energy cooperation such that the system functions even when American attention turns elsewhere. Saudi-Israeli normalization is the missing keystone to that goal.

Read more

That act of compassion was enough to send him to the gallows.

On that same Sunday morning, the regime hanged Gol-Mohammad Mohammadi, a 23-year-old Afghan refugee who had fled to Iran seeking safety. His crime, according to those same reports, was identical: He opened his door for protesters fleeing bullets. He was arrested, thrown into a show trial, and forced to endure three hearings, each lasting one hour. There was no independent lawyer.

Erfan and Gol-Mohammad were two of 59 men arrested together during the January uprising, in what has since become known as the Alikhani Square case. The two of them, alongside 10 others, were sentenced to death. Last week, all 12 were moved to quarantine. That is the signal: For the 10 still alive, execution is likely imminent.

On Sunday, the chess champion Garry Kasparov posted a comment on X about the executions. “How tragic that these executions became the norm in Iran and accepted as such by the Free World,” he wrote.

He’s right. The world is not paying enough attention. While diplomats negotiate, bombs fall, and flimsy ceasefire agreements are signed, the Islamic Republic of Iran has been running a quiet, systematic execution campaign against the young people who dared to stand up for their freedom. And they are using the world’s distraction as cover.

During the war, President Donald Trump publicly urged the Islamic Republic’s leaders to stop executing protesters. He even said they promised they would. But we Iranians knew better. We knew that the regime was only buying time to turn mass arrests into mass executions. That is exactly what has happened.

Read more

But of course it isn’t over. On Friday, Iranian ballistic missiles and drones slammed into Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan, killing two American service members, leaving a third missing, and wounding four others. The IRGC claimed responsibility within hours.

Vahidi launched the attack not simply to answer Trump. He was also sending a message to Speaker Mohammad Ghalibaf and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, the officials negotiating with Washington. You may sit across the table from the Americans, the strike in Jordan signaled to them, but I am the man really calling the shots.

Read more

The mainstream media, and what remains of the gay press, swiftly framed this as a pattern-example of anti-LGBT discrimination. Indeed, CNN ran the story under the headline: “Twice-Rejected American Cruise Puts Spotlight on Rollback of LGBTQ Rights, Passengers Say.”

The story CNN and others ran with was drawn in part from the testimony of one Kyle Olsen, the owner of an LGBT travel company who claimed that the ban reflected a “broader global trend.” He added that “We’re seeing a rise in right-wing governments and increasingly conservative political movements, and in many places LGBTQI+ rights are being rolled back as a result.” According to Olsen, “The decisions by Turkey and Egypt don’t exist in isolation.”

The strong insinuation of these reports is that the spurning of Scarlet Lady is a result of a world in which Donald Trump has been reelected and right-wing populism is on the march worldwide.

Read more

So what comes next? The reimposed blockade, if combined with enhanced efforts to protect non-Iranian traffic through the strait, will begin to heal some of the damage done to America’s strategic position in the region since April 7. That was when the president, in his eagerness to end the hostilities, announced a ceasefire with Iran in return for Iran opening the strait. But the Iranians, of course, did not open the strait—and between then and now, there has been a lot of to-and-fro over this question without much resolution.

Why did the president proceed with the ceasefire in the first place? Reports increasingly indicate that the war was predicated on a regime-change plan, driven by Israel, that failed.

Read more

Support for Maduro’s replacement and former vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, has been firm despite her regime’s poor response to the devastating earthquakes that struck on June 24. And now the United States risks losing the goodwill it earned by removing Maduro six months ago. As The New York Times reported last week, Venezuelans are “turning their anger toward the Trump administration, which has. . . stood by the government’s management of the disaster.” This is not only a betrayal of America’s long-standing commitment to restoring democracy in Venezuela after 27 years of socialist authoritarianism. It’s also against America’s own interests and counterproductive to the Trump administration’s main priority: extracting Venezuelan oil and getting it to consumers.

I served as the special representative for Venezuela in Trump’s first term. The administration imposed sanctions on Venezuela and rejected the 2018 presidential election stolen by Nicolás Maduro. And we backed the president of the National Assembly, Juan Guaidó, as interim president, while demanding an end to the Maduro dictatorship. Then came January’s daring raid on Maduro’s home and what Venezuelans hoped was a new era of freedom and democracy.

Read more

But the thriller on the field was also a prelude to something much bigger—and much darker. Within hours of the final whistle, an antisemitic conspiracy theory was born. The idea that began galloping across the internet was that a cabal including Benjamin Netanyahu, Mossad, Lionel Messi, Argentine president Javier Milei, and FIFA conspired to rig the game for the Argentine team. The “evidence” consisted of nothing more than photos of Messi posing with Israeli officials and praying at the Western Wall more than a decade ago, plus a few pictures of Milei with Netanyahu.

Even among the conspiratorially minded, this was pretty thin stuff. What the theory lacked was a FIFA component, something that would link the nebulous Israel-Argentina connection to the game itself. So, just like that, one was invented: a baseless claim that the game’s referee, François Letexier, was Jewish.

Read more

Based on the images the regime is broadcasting, one could easily conclude that the country has come to a standstill to mourn its fallen leader. But for anyone watching the funeral, which began Saturday and ends Thursday, I have one piece of advice: Don’t take what you’re seeing at face value.

In the months since Khamenei’s death, I have received hundreds of messages from friends and contacts inside Iran. They are not messages of grief but of disbelief, relief and, when people feel safe enough, joy. A woman from Isfahan told me in March that she had been dancing in the street with strangers. A man in Tehran sent a voice note laughing so hard he could barely speak. Then he caught himself: “Don’t use my name.”

He was still afraid. They are always afraid.

The Islamic Republic has billed this week’s ceremony as the largest state funeral in Iran’s history: a six-day spectacle, complete with processions through multiple cities and red flags of revenge billowing over those gathered at the Grand Mosalla. But the people who sent me those messages were not attending. They were heading to the coast.

Read more

First, the good news for Kyiv. After a bitterly cold winter made worse by Russian strikes against its power grid, Ukraine is now imposing pain in return through strikes not only on the battlefield but deep into occupied territories like Crimea and, often spectacularly, in Russia itself. As ably described by my CBS News colleague Aidan Stretch, these medium- and long-range strike campaigns have created military difficulties for Russia, and an energy and political crisis in Crimea, where authorities recently imposed a state of emergency.

An energy crisis also looms in the Russian heartland, with dangerous political implications for Russian president Vladimir Putin. Daring strikes on energy targets as far afield as St. Petersburg—more than 500 miles from the border—have shown Russians that much more of their country is exposed to the risks of war than was the case in 2022. Consequences are being felt at the gas pump, where prices are high and severe shortages are appearing, a result of the Ukrainian targeting of Russia’s refineries.

Read more