The Ansar Allah-led Yemeni Armed Forces announced on Monday that its forces attacked the al-Alam camp in Yemen’s south-central Shabwa province, which it described as being run by “Saudi officers.”
The local authority told Reuters that there were significant casualties, reporting that 53 people were killed and more than 200 were wounded. The report described al-Alam as a military training camp for the security forces of the Saudi-backed Yemeni government.
Local media reported that among the wounded were members of the Security Belt Forces, a militia affiliated with the Southern Transitional Council, which has historically been backed by the UAE, though Saudi Arabia ousted the UAE from Yemen late last year and injected cash into the country to pay the salaries of the fighters that Abu Dhabi had supported.
A screengrab from a video shows a person walking near bodies in the aftermath of an Ansar Allah attack on a Saudi-backed Yemeni government military camp in Shabwa, Yemen, October 19, 2026 (Social Media via REUTERS)
Ansar Allah, also known as the Houthis, claimed that the attack caused Saudi casualties, which so far haven’t been confirmed, and it warned Yemenis against joining the Saudi-backed forces. “We warn those who have been deceived against responding to the Saudi enemy’s calls to send them to their deaths with tainted money, sacrificing them instead of their own soldiers and showing no regard for their lives,” Ansar Allah military spokesman Yahya Saree wrote on Telegram.
Saree also announced a ballistic missile attack on Saudi-backed forces in the al-Saqiya and Ras al-Ara areas in the southwestern Lahj province, which has a coast on the Gulf of Aden, and claimed it resulted in “dozens of dead and wounded and the destruction of several vehicles.” Later, he issued another statement announcing a series of six attacks on Saudi Arabia, including strikes on airports and oil infrastructure.
He said the attacks on Saudi Arabia came “in retaliation for the brutal Saudi aggression targeting our country and people, which has launched more than two hundred airstrikes and missile attacks during the past 48 hours, targeting civilian infrastructure in the capital, Sana’a, and the liberal provinces, leaving dozens of martyrs and wounded, most of whom are women and children.”
A Saudi airstrike hit a civilian home in Yemen’s Saada province on Sunday, killing at least 10 people, including seven children. The US is strongly supporting the Saudi air campaign despite the large number of civilian casualties and is providing intelligence and refueling Saudi warplanes.
A natural question to ask about Eli Clifton and Ian Lustick’s Israel’s Lobby is how it differs from the magisterial work of similar name published by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt nearly 20 years ago. Certainly its entry into the American debate is less dramatic: Mearsheimer and Walt’s work had behind it the force of taboo-breaking, taking on a subject which had been more whispered about than debated for two generations. Despite a massive campaign to denigrate their work by the lobby’s many allies in the mainstream media (I believe The American Conservative was the only American print publication to give it a positive review), Mearsheimer and Walt’s book became not only a best-seller but a genuine international publishing sensation.
Though it wasn’t obvious at the time, Mearsheimer and Walt’s book appeared at a moment when there was still a clear open path towards a moderate future, sanctioned by a strong international consensus. This was true both for the American-Israeli relationship (they urged that America treat Israel like a normal country, while maintaining a moral commitment to defend it) and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict (they favored a two-state solution). The Iraq War, pushed relentlessly by Benjamin Netanhayu and other Israeli officials, and in great part the project of small group of passionately pro-Israel neoconservatives in American journalism and government, was already in the rearview mirror. The two authors cheered the birth of new liberal Zionist institutions like J Street, created to encourage United States support for a more moderate Israel at peace with its neighbors.
Clifton and Lustick’s impressive follow-up does not, to say the least, arrive at such a propitious time. Lustick is an accomplished Ivy-League political scientist who has produced important work on how ethnically driven conflicts can be managed or resolved. Clifton is a Quincy Institute co-founder and journalist who belongs to the cohort of American millennials who grew up when it was no longer outlandish to question the moral correctness of Zionism. Their book arrives as an erratic American president has started, at Israel’s behest, a war against the largest and most highly educated country in the Mideast, and oscillates between uttering threats of genocide and claims that the war is already won. On the home front it has become almost shockingly commonplace for entertainers and college students alike to shout slogans that call implicitly or explicitly for the destruction of Israel, something unimaginable 20 years ago. Meanwhile Israel, in response to the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, has conducted a brutal campaign against Gaza’s defenseless civilians that is often described as a genocide and is indisputably a project of ethnic cleansing. Israel’s lobby today is both similar and quite different from the one Walt and Mearsheimer described. Is it stronger or weaker? Some of both certainly, and while it may be weaker overall, it is clearly dangerous the way all wounded creatures are.
Of the many elements which have changed since 2007, three stand out. The main institutions of the lobby, always wealthy relative to their opponents and competitors, are far richer. Israel itself has changed. Its commitment to peace with the Palestinians, if in the past more advertised than actual, has been completely submerged; no Israeli leader of consequence even pretends to want a settlement with the people who inhabit the land Israel now controls, and the country’s policy of seeking outright military domination of its entire region, though challenged by many Israeli former officials and scholars, faces no substantial political opposition. And finally, in a point emphasized by Clifton and Lustick, its lobby has more or less abandoned efforts to explain or justify Israeli policies, to convince Americans of their necessity and appropriateness. Instead increasingly Israel’s supporters in the United States seek to conflate any opposition to Israel and American support for it with antisemitism.
That is to say, to challenge seriously Washington’s special relationship with Israel is presented as a major moral failing, the kind of mark which would place one beyond the pale of respectable discourse. And while these three developments make Israel as influential as ever in Washington and particularly within the Trump administration, its actual popularity among voters, particularly among Democrats and the young of both parties, has sunk like a stone.
In a key section, the authors document how in the last generation America has seen the greater concentration of wealth in the hands of the super-rich. The percentage share of national wealth held by the top 0.1 percent rose by two-thirds. Meanwhile, two court decisions from 2010 have made it much easier for billionaires to buy national policies to their liking.
As pro-Israel think tank and advocacy money rose, so did Israel-related campaign and advocacy group contributions. When Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission was decided in 2010, no one anticipated it would weigh critically on American Mideast policy. The decision struck down limitations on campaign spending by unions and corporations, and in conjunction with the consequences of the SpeechNow.org v. FEC decision, opened the gates for increased spending by the super rich. Individual campaign spending limitations, $1,000 until 2003, later raised to roughly $3,000, suddenly became almost irrelevant as ultra wealthy individual donors began to dispense virtually unlimited funds to support or oppose candidates through so-called superPACs.
In principle this enhanced capacity of billionaires to buy policies of their choosing was available to anyone; in practice those passionate about supporting Israel used it the most effectively. Sheldon and Miriam Adelson, virtually unknown before 2012, became the most important donors in the Republican Party. They spent more than $100 million on mostly losing candidates in 2012, but “forced the relatively niche issue of Israel into the Republican primary and general election discourse and normalized the idea of political megadonors across party lines, no longer restricted by campaign finance laws, largely underwriting campaigns.”
It wasn’t just the Adelsons of course; scores of Israel-First billionaires joined them with more power to shape American policy than ever before. As Clifton and Lustick put it, “These donors form the backbone of an Israel First movement which crosses party lines…. The donors are funding both the election of politicians as well as shaping the world view of these same elected officials, creating an echo chamber of pro-Israel talking points and policy recommendations for politicians already indebted to pro-Israel donors.” To give a sense of the rising volume of the echo chamber, the authors track the exponential rise in the budgets of pro-Israel advocacy groups. AIPAC had $19.5 million in assets in 2000, nine times that amount in 2023. Similar advances were made by the Washington Institute for Mideast Policy and the Jewish Institute for National Security of America. The Foundation for Defense of Democracies, the most influential Beltway group pushing for war with Iran, increased its revenues 16-fold from 2011 to 2022.
As its American lobby has grown richer, Israel too has changed considerably. Until the last 15 years, most Israeli leaders at least paid lip-service to making a durable peace with the Palestinians, and some believed peace as necessary for Israel’s own flourishing. But no Israeli prime minister since Ehud Olmert has breathed a word about trying to accommodate Palestinian national aspirations. The authors consider this a profound shift; Israel, they claim with a borrowed phrase from an Israeli political scientist, has become a “crazy state,” increasingly dismissive of the legitimate interests and opinions of other countries.
Along the way they provide an unexpected, quite complimentary digression about Vladimir Jabotinsky, an early right-wing Zionist leader and popularizer of the so-called Iron Wall strategy; its point was to win battles so forcefully as make Arabs realize they had no hope of destroying Israel and would have to accept it in the region. But such acceptance by Arabs was actually a goal, and a corollary of the Iron Wall doctrine was that Israel should not go out of its way to kill Arab civilians. Many times ignored, such scruples did exist in principle.
Today they do not. Replacing them is a near hysteric view of Palestinian resistance. As Clifton and Lustick put it, “Palestinian resistance was understood as illegitimate, evidence of intransigence, and often as akin to Nazi antisemitism.” This justified a ramp-up in the brutality of Israeli tactics, as Palestinian enmity came to be understood as “pathological and ineradicable” and such Israeli measures as mass imprisonment, breaking the bones of protesting children, and torture of prisoners became commonplace.
This transformation in Israel had a parallel shift in the lobby’s accelerating efforts to police Israel-related discourse in the United States. In the early 2000s, the former Soviet dissident and right wing Israeli politician Natan Sharansky began to push the idea of a “new antisemitism” which would include any statement which “demonized” or “delegitimized” Israel or held it to a “double standard.” Activists following his lead soon persuaded a minor organization, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, to adopt a definition of antisemitism incorporating these notions, and then pressed governments and institutions to embrace the “widely accepted” IHRA working definition. In a campaign that unfolded over years, Israel advocates eventually got the Obama State Department to incorporate the definition in an annual report. By 2018 the Trump Department of Education had adopted it, and would eventually use it as a weapon to punish pro-Palestinian academics and students at American universities. The authors provide a detailed account of the new definition’s rise and codification, a fascinating window into the nuts and bolts and high stakes of what might at first glance have seemed a somewhat niche academic debate.
Despite these efforts, the lobby has clearly become less able to police the American discourse than it was 20 or 40 years ago. Israel’s poll numbers are bad, particularly among younger Americans. The lobby hopes that by gaining control of such internet platforms as TikTok, such opinion shifts can be reversed. (Oracle’s CEO is quoted in a hacked email telling an Israeli leader, “We have to embed the love and respect for Israel in American culture.”) It is difficult to see that happening; a great part of pro-Israeli argument now increasingly rests on such claims as “God Gave Us This Land,” which is likely to be less persuasive to a diverse and fairly secular America than snappy catchphrases popular in the 1950s like “a land without a people for a people without a land.”
Meanwhile, in genuinely stunning political developments, candidates far more anti-Zionist than Walt and Mearsheimer have been able to win major elections in New York City and potentially in Michigan.
At the same time, the last several months have been a very cold shower for people who thought the Israel lobby was no longer an extremely consequential voice when Washington decided matters of war and peace. No one seriously expected that President Donald Trump would try to deliver a peace settlement between Israelis and Palestinians, which he clearly had no real interest in, and which relatively few Palestinians or Israelis seemed ready for. But it was also assumed that assuring, with American military might, Israel’s complete dominance of the Mideast was not part of an America First agenda. Trump had displayed a great deal of bravado in 2015, mocking the Adelsons’ lavish support of Marco Rubio while boasting that he didn’t need their money. In 2024, it turned out that he did.
Subscribe Today
Get daily emails in your inbox
The man who had famously denounced the Iraq war in a Republican debate and campaigned explicitly against more stupid wars would, in office a second time, turn to Benjamin Netanyahu as his most consequential foreign policy advisor and satisfy the yearnings for an American war against Iran which Netanyahu—and all the voices in the Israel lobby echo chamber—had sought for a generation. It is this unexpected and calamitous development, this demonstration that even an America First candidate could be maneuvered into a costly war by Israel and its lobby, that has rendered the more extreme slogans of the anti-Israel left—“Free Palestine” etc.—less noxious than they seemed a generation ago.
Clifton and Lustick have written an important, extremely well-researched book, which tries to capture in motion a vast and complex phenomenon which is very much in flux, and whose fortunes are changing nearly month to month. They are to some degree men of the left, and some of their formulations—putting “woke” in scare quotes or describing the AfD, the German anti-immigration party that is one of the largest antiwar parties in Europe, as “Nazi adjacent”—will seem lazy, at best, to most TAC readers. And perhaps a less progressive treatment would have noted the irony of both the lobby and the Trump administration borrowing heavily from tropes of the woke era in their efforts to portray Jewish college students as made to “feel uncomfortable” and “unsafe” by student protests against Israeli brutalities.
But it cannot be denied that it is the American Left, not the Right, that has taken the lead in trying to free the United States from, as the authors call it in their book’s subtitle, “the grip of a foreign power.” For that it, and the authors, deserve commendation.
Iran’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has summoned Germany’s ambassador after a court in Hamburg found two men guilty of plotting to kill two leaders of Jewish organisations at Tehran’s behest, accusing Berlin of leveling “baseless political allegations”.
The decision to summon envoy Axel Dittmann came after Germany summoned the Iranian ambassador, Majid Nili Ahmadabadi, on Monday over allegations that Tehran was behind the plot to assassinate the two pro-Israel public figures.
“Levelling security-related accusations against Iran has long been a tactic employed by the Zionist regime and certain Western nations,” Iran’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement broadcast by official news agency IRNA.
“Attempting to provide a judicial face to baseless political claims not only fails to lend any credibility to such allegations but also undermines the standing of the German judiciary itself,” the statement added.
Hamburg conviction
Berlin’s allegations stem from a court case involving two men, a Danish national and an Afghan national, who were convicted in a Hamburg court on Thursday for planning to target the president of Germany’s main group representing the Jewish community and the head of the German-Israeli society.
The German Foreign Ministry said on X that the Iranian ambassador had been summoned, adding Tehran would not be allowed to “threaten our free society”.
“The malicious assassination attempts against Josef Schuster and Volker Beck will have legal consequences,” it added.
“We do not tolerate attacks on Jewish life and on those who defend it anywhere, and certainly not in Germany.”
Advertisement
The Dane, partially identified as Ali Hassan S, was jailed for eight-and-a-half years.
The Afghan, who was recruited as his accomplice, was sentenced to four-and-a-half years.
The court said that one of the men had been steered by Iran’s intelligence service.
The pair were arrested in Denmark last year and extradited.
In sentencing the men, the judge said they were guilty of “terrorist activities orchestrated by Iran”.
At the time they were charged, the Iranian embassy in Berlin released a statement rejecting what it called “unfounded allegations made at the behest of Iran’s enemies”.
At least one person has been killed in a shooting near a mosque in Columbus, Ohio in the United States, according to police.
The US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in Columbus, Ohio initially said its agents were “responding to a reported shooting incident at a mosque in the 2200 block of Albert Ave”.
However, local police later said the shooting took place near the mosque, but the facility was not targeted.
“We want to make it clear this was not an attack on the mosque,” said Sergeant James Fuqua, according to the Associated Press.
He said the shooting stemmed from a dispute at an apartment building at the same location as the mosque.
A wave of drone attacks across Sudan has killed more than 160 people in recent days, according to medics and rights groups.
Drone attacks on Khartoum killed three children on Monday, according to Emergency Lawyers, a group that monitors violence against civilians in Sudan’s civil war, while more than 160 were reported to have been killed in western regions since Friday.
The attacks were blamed on both the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and government forces, They have been fighting since 2023, but the increasing use of drones in recent months has caused growing numbers of civilian casualties.
The deadliest recent attack was near a market on Sunday evening in Al-Dibab town in the southwestern state of West Kordofan, which is controlled by the RSF. Residents and medical workers said a drone attacked a transport hub where villagers had gathered after a market day to find rides home, killing 80 people.
Another 47 wounded people were taken to the nearby town of Al-Mujlad, where 30 later died from their injuries, a medical source said, according to the AFP news agency.
The RSF’s self-declared administration, known as Tasis, and Emergency Lawyers accused the army of carrying out the attack.
Dams attack
In eastern Sudan, a military source said on Sunday that air defences intercepted several RSF drones targeting the Atbara and Setit dams in Gadaref state, about 420km east of Khartoum. There was no immediate comment from the RSF.
Early on Monday, another drone attack hit the RSF stronghold of Nyala, the capital of South Darfur. Medical and RSF sources said 17 people, including seven RSF officers, were killed and 23 wounded.
Advertisement
An RSF drone attack on Friday hit a gathering of displaced people in Sudan’s Blue Nile province on the border with Ethiopia, killing 41 people, Emergency Lawyers said.
The group condemned the attack, calling it a humanitarian tragedy.
The United Nations condemned the deadly attacks on Monday.
“We are alarmed by the continued deadly drone strikes across the country that are killing civilians, including children, and that are disrupting central services,” Stephane Dujarric, spokesperson for UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, told reporters.
Sudanese refugees arrive at Oure Cassoni refuge camp in Chad to escape war in Sudan, February 24, 2026 [Dan Kitwood/Getty]
At least 59,000 killed
The current war in Sudan began in April 2023 when the military leader, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and RSF leader Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, also known as Hemedti, fell out over plans to fold the paramilitary into Sudan’s army.
However, the fighting, now in its fourth year, continues and has killed at least 59,000 people, according to conflict monitor ACLED. Aid groups say the actual toll is likely higher.
The UN says about 13 million people have been forced from their homes, creating what aid groups call the world’s largest humanitarian crisis.
Across Sudan, 33.7 million people, including 17.3 million children, urgently need food support this year. An estimated 825,000 children face severe, acute malnutrition, according to the UN.
The United States on Friday urged the UN Security Council to push for a humanitarian truce and expand an arms embargo on Sudan, but China and Russia opposed widening the embargo.
United States President Donald Trump has announced his official endorsement of Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s election campaign after previously refusing to endorse anyone.
Trump posted on his Truth Social platform on Sunday that Netanyahu had been a “great warrior prime minister and an even greater partner for peace”, adding that Iran had been “systematically destroyed both militarily and financially, and unless they change their ways, rapidly, we will soon finish the job.”
“If Israel has the wrong Leader, which would be anyone other than Bibi, America will have to do this work ourselves, and I am not inclined to do so,” Trump wrote.
“Bibi Netanyahu has been Strong, Brave, and Brilliant in the face of tremendous opposition, including that coming from even Israel, itself. Despite all of that, he has endured and, in fact, he has thrived!”.
The president added that normal men and women would have “wilted” under the pressure that Netanyahu was under, but the Israeli prime minister “got stronger”.
“This is the kind of Partner that the United States of America is demanding of Israel, a Country for which it has done so much. Please let this Letter serve to represent my Complete and Total Endorsement of Bibi Netanyahu in his upcoming Race for Re-Election as Prime Minister of Israel. BIBI NETANYAHU WILL NEVER LET YOU DOWN!”, he added.
The Israeli election will be on October 27 . According to Israeli news outlet Haaretz’s tracker, as of Sunday, the opposition alliance led by the Yashar party of Gadi Eisenkot is expected to win the most seats, at 52, with Netanyahu’s Likud party-led coalition taking 51 of the 120 seats in the Knesset.
Advertisement
So far, no party is projected to secure an outright majority.
2:05
Now Playing
02:05
Iran war becomes key election issue as Israeli opposition targets Netanyahu
Next
01:50
Could your halal pension be funding Israel’s military?
02:11
France protests: Government counts cost of violence as more demonstrations loom
00:49
Israeli police say they arrested 10 in connection with settler attacks
09:34
Trump speaks to reporters on Ukraine, Russia, Iran, France and US midterms
But Trump’s endorsement comes after he had previously shied away from fully backing Netanyahu’s election campaign.
Earlier this month, when asked twice by TIME magazine if Netanyahu should be given another term, Trump pivoted to his own popularity in Israel and Washington’s actions supporting Israel.
When asked on Thursday by the right-wing US news outlet, Newsmax, if he was planning to get involved in the Israeli elections, Trump said: “They’d like me to be. Yeah, they’d like me to be”.
When asked whether he trusted Netanyahu, Trump replied, “I don’t trust anybody, honestly”.
Still, Sanam Vakil, director of the Middle East North Africa programme at the British think tank Chatham House, explained that Trump’s endorsement of Netanyahu was “politically significant” because it comes after months of tension between the two leaders.
“It allows Netanyahu to reinforce his claim that he is indispensable to Israel’s relationship with Washington,” Vakil told Al Jazeera.
“However, its electoral impact should not be overstated. Israeli voters remain divided over Netanyahu’s leadership and the outcome of the Iran war. The endorsement may help consolidate his existing support, but it does not resolve the wider questions surrounding his record,” she added.
Andreas Krieg, senior lecturer at the school of security studies at King’s College London, said that Trump’s endorsement was a “political gift” to Netanyahu, whose electoral campaign is struggling.
But like Vakil, he cautioned against treating Trump’s endorsement as a game-changer.
“Netanyahu’s problems are structural, involving fragmented right-wing parties, disillusioned ultra-Orthodox voters and the legacy of October 7. Trump may mobilise reluctant Likud voters, potentially worth a seat or two in a close contest, but he cannot manufacture the coalition majority Netanyahu currently lacks,” Krieg told Al Jazeera.
What the endorsement means for the Iran war
Much of Trump’s endorsement has been heavily focused on the Iran war, at a time when many analysts suggest the US president might be looking to restart attacks, either before or after the midterm elections in early November.
The conflict, which began in February after the US and Israel launched attacks across Iran, is currently at a standstill.
The Strait of Hormuz, which once transported 20 percent of global crude, was effectively shut by Iran after the war started. A US naval blockade of Iranian vessels followed, as each country struck ships passing through the waterway that they accused of not complying with its orders. Oil traffic last month through the strait picked up to pre-war levels as the US Navy shepherded an increasing number of tankers. But a spate of Iranian attacks on vessels early this month has again hit crude exports through Hormuz.
Advertisement
On Monday morning, Brent crude futures stood at $107.57 a barrel, down slightly after reaching their highest since May 19 on Friday, when they briefly touched $110 a barrel.
Last month, Iran presented a proposal to Washington to reopen the waterway within seven days, but negotiations failed after the US did not address Tehran’s seven conditions, which included the lifting of sanctions and the ending of its naval blockade.
Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi told Iranian media outlets on Sunday that the proposal remained on the table and, if Washington accepts Tehran’s conditions, the strait could reopen within six days, with talks resuming the following day.
At the same time, Araghchi, in a post on X on Sunday night, accused Netanyahu of wanting to restart attacks on Iran with the US to “stay out of jail”.
“Last time you wanted to ‘finish the job’, Iran emerged even stronger. Want to try your luck again? Be our guest. But be careful; we have unfinished jobs too,” he wrote.
“Netanyahu is driving America into another war to stay out of jail, whatever the consequences for Israel – let alone POTUS,” he added.
Krieg said Trump was prioritising the use of “coercive leverage” through his endorsement of Netanyahu but not necessarily “war over diplomacy”.
“The naval blockade is hurting Iran considerably and Washington believes time is working in its favour. Trump’s calculation is that Iran will eventually accept nuclear concessions and reopen Hormuz, without Washington having to offer significant concessions first,” he argued.
“His endorsement reinforces the military threat underpinning that strategy. But it does not mean diplomacy is finished. Trump still wants a deal he can present as a victory. The danger is that Tehran increasingly believes it must escalate to improve its bargaining position.”
What is next?
Vakil explained that, while Trump’s declaration of support for Netanyahu had signalled renewed political alignment with Israel and left the door open for future joint military action, it also makes it “harder for Trump to distance himself from the war or portray the US as having been reluctantly drawn into it”.
“He is explicitly taking ownership of the partnership and its military campaign against Iran. However, the endorsement does not necessarily mean that the two leaders have agreed on another operation, nor does it settle the question of who initially pushed hardest for war,” she said.
Vakil added that for Tehran, the statement will reinforce the belief of Iranian leaders that there is “little meaningful distinction between US and Israeli objectives.”
“At the same time, Trump’s suggestion that he is reluctant to confront Iran without Netanyahu could be interpreted as evidence of the limits of Washington’s appetite for another war.”
Meanwhile, while Trump has said that he would not attack Iran before the November midterms, several US media outlets have reported that the Pentagon has drawn up plans to relaunch attacks before voters head to the polls.
Last week, US news outlet Axios reported, citing both US and Israeli officials, that both Trump and Netanyahu had spoken about launching a major new operation against Iran ahead of the elections in both countries.
Advertisement
For Krieg, the likelihood that the US and Israel launch an attack on Iran remains low, assuming there is no Iranian strike that forces a response.
“The more dangerous window opens after November 3 [US midterms], when those electoral constraints disappear. Both militaries are preparing for that possibility. The greatest immediate risk is an uncontrolled escalation in Hormuz that forces Washington’s hand before either leader is politically ready,” he said.
