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Iranian president criticises international silence over Israeli actions

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Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian delivers a speech during the “Leader of Resistance: Imam Khomeini International Conference” in Tehran, Iran, on July 4, 2026. [Iranian Presidency / Handout – Anadolu Agency]

Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian on Saturday criticised international institutions for what he described as their failure to stop Israeli actions in the region, saying global bodies have remained silent while Israel openly speaks of assassinations and targeted killings, Anadolu reports.

Speaking at a conference in Tehran’s Summit Hall held in commemoration of slain former Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, Pezeshkian said international organisations and human rights advocates were expected to prevent such actions, but instead political and logistical support was being provided.

He said Israel attacked multiple countries in the region and was responsible for many of the crises and instability across the Middle East, adding that Muslim countries had not initiated such aggression.

Pezeshkian also referred to the beginning of a “new leadership” for the Islamic community, saying the current leadership bears a heavy responsibility and that his government would continue working toward the ideals of the revolution, strengthening Islamic unity and expanding solidarity among Muslim nations.

The remarks came as funeral ceremonies for Khamenei got underway in Tehran, where thousands of mourners gathered at the Imam Khomeini Mosalla Mosque.

READ: Iran rejects UK-France Hormuz statement, warns against foreign military presence

Khamenei was killed in joint US-Israeli strikes on Iran on Feb. 28, which triggered weeks of war before a ceasefire was reached under Pakistan’s mediation in April, followed by an interim deal in June.

According to the official schedule, memorial ceremonies will continue in Tehran through the weekend with the participation of heads of state, senior officials and religious figures.

Public farewell ceremonies are scheduled for Saturday and Sunday, followed by the main funeral procession in Tehran on Monday. The funeral rites will then move to Qom on July 7.

On July 8, ceremonies are scheduled in Iraq, including in Baghdad, Najaf and Karbala, where the body will be received by religious and political figures before being transferred to major Shia shrines.

The final funeral and burial ceremony is scheduled for July 9 at the Imam Ali Reza Shrine in the northeastern city of Mashhad, one of Shia Islam’s holiest sites.

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Keir Starmer explains that UK is actively supporting Israel's genocidal expansion and repeats his previous quotation that he supports Zionism "without qualification". Keir Starmer said “I said it loud and clear – and meant it – that I support Zionism without qualification.” here: https://www.jewishnews.co.uk/keir-starmer-interview-i-will-work-to-eradicate-antisemitism-from-day-one/
Keir Starmer explains that UK is actively supporting Israel’s genocidal expansion and repeats his previous quotation that he supports Zionism “without qualification”. Keir Starmer said “I said it loud and clear – and meant it – that I support Zionism without qualification.” here: https://www.jewishnews.co.uk/keir-starmer-interview-i-will-work-to-eradicate-antisemitism-from-day-one/
Donald Trump explains why he established his Bored of Peace
Donald Trump explains why he established his Bored of Peace

Continue ReadingIranian president criticises international silence over Israeli actions

Israeli strike kills Palestinian in Gaza as army continues demolitions

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Citizens and relatives of the three Palestinians, including 9-year-old Tariq Sabah and his uncle Omar Sabah, who died as a result of the Israeli attack on the tents of displaced Palestinians in the Al-Mawasi area of Khan Yunis despite the ceasefire, attend the funeral ceremony in front of Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis, Gaza, Palestine, on July 1, 2026. [Abed Rahim Khatib – Anadolu Agency]

At least one Palestinian was killed and several others injured in an Israeli strike on Gaza City on Saturday, while the Israeli army continued demolishing buildings and shelling areas across the enclave in the latest reported violations of the ceasefire in force since October 2025, Anadolu reports.

The developments came hours after the Palestinian presidency warned that Israel’s “daily killing policy” in the Gaza Strip, along with settler attacks in the occupied West Bank, could lead to an “uncontrollable explosion” of the situation.

A medical source told Anadolu that the body of Mohammad Najib Ashour and several wounded were taken to Al-Shifa Hospital and Al-Ahli Arab Hospital after an Israeli drone strike targeted a young man riding a bicycle near the Asqula junction in the Zeitoun neighborhood, southeast of Gaza City.

Ambulance crews also recovered the bodies of two Palestinians killed by Israeli forces near military deployment areas in Beit Lahia in northern Gaza, according to medical sources.

Local sources identified them as Bilal Hussein Abu Rabia and Hamza Imad Hamdouna, who had gone missing days earlier before their bodies were recovered Saturday.

Gaza’s Health Ministry said seven Palestinians were killed and nine more bodies were recovered over the past 48 hours, while 16 others were injured.

Israeli intelligence rejects Netanyahu’s request to back claim Iran’s nuclear program was completely destroyed: Report

The ministry said the overall death toll from Israel’s war on Gaza since October 2023 has risen to 73,090, with 173,553 injured.

Meanwhile, Israeli artillery shelled the Al-Salatin area west of Beit Lahia, accompanied by heavy gunfire from military vehicles.

Earlier Saturday, the Israeli army demolished Palestinian-owned buildings and facilities in areas under its control east of Bani Suheila near Khan Younis, triggering a large explosion but causing no reported casualties, according to Anadolu correspondents citing eyewitnesses.

Since the ceasefire took effect on Oct. 10, 2025, Israeli forces have continued carrying out airstrikes, shootings and demolitions across Gaza.

Israel has expanded its control to around 70% of Gaza’s territory, confining Palestinians to less than 30% of the strip, according to local estimates.

The Israeli war on Gaza, launched on Oct. 8, 2023 with US backing, has devastated nearly 90% of the enclave’s civilian infrastructure and killed more than 73,000 Palestinians.

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Keir Starmer explains that UK is actively supporting Israel's genocidal expansion and repeats his previous quotation that he supports Zionism "without qualification". Keir Starmer said “I said it loud and clear – and meant it – that I support Zionism without qualification.” here: https://www.jewishnews.co.uk/keir-starmer-interview-i-will-work-to-eradicate-antisemitism-from-day-one/
Keir Starmer explains that UK is actively supporting Israel’s genocidal expansion and repeats his previous quotation that he supports Zionism “without qualification”. Keir Starmer said “I said it loud and clear – and meant it – that I support Zionism without qualification.” here: https://www.jewishnews.co.uk/keir-starmer-interview-i-will-work-to-eradicate-antisemitism-from-day-one/
Donald Trump explains why he established his Bored of Peace
Donald Trump explains why he established his Bored of Peace

Continue ReadingIsraeli strike kills Palestinian in Gaza as army continues demolitions

Iran rejects UK-France Hormuz statement, warns against foreign military presence

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Iran’s UN ambassador Kazem Gharibabadi in Vienna, Austria on 10 July 2019 [Aşkın Kıyağan/Anadolu Agency]

Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi on Saturday said the Strait of Hormuz “is not a stage for extra-regional powers to display military force,” warning against “any military activity” in the key waterway, Anadolu reports.

“The Strait of Hormuz is not a stage for extra-regional powers to display military force.

“As a responsible power and the guarantor of security in the strait, Iran warns against any military activity in this sensitive waterway,” Gharibabadi wrote on US social media company X.

His remarks came in a post in which he shared a UK-France joint statement on the Strait of Hormuz, saying the two countries “stand ready to deploy the wider Multinational Military Mission to support freedom of navigation” in the waterway.

In response, Gharibabadi said the strait’s security “rests with the littoral states.”

“Those who create crises will bear responsibility for the consequences of their adventurism. This is a serious warning,” he added.

A memorandum of understanding between Iran and the US, brokered under Pakistani mediation, entered into force on June 18 after being electronically signed by Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and US President Donald Trump.

It provides a framework for ending the conflict and addressing outstanding issues between Tehran and Washington through negotiations, including a cessation of hostilities, sanctions relief, the nuclear issue, the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, and broader regional security arrangements.

READ: Israel planned to target Iranian negotiators to derail talks, US acted to prevent it – report

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Keir Starmer explains that UK is actively supporting Israel's genocidal expansion and repeats his previous quotation that he supports Zionism "without qualification". Keir Starmer said “I said it loud and clear – and meant it – that I support Zionism without qualification.” here: https://www.jewishnews.co.uk/keir-starmer-interview-i-will-work-to-eradicate-antisemitism-from-day-one/
Keir Starmer explains that UK is actively supporting Israel’s genocidal expansion and repeats his previous quotation that he supports Zionism “without qualification”. Keir Starmer said “I said it loud and clear – and meant it – that I support Zionism without qualification.” here: https://www.jewishnews.co.uk/keir-starmer-interview-i-will-work-to-eradicate-antisemitism-from-day-one/
Donald Trump explains why he established his Bored of Peace
Donald Trump explains why he established his Bored of Peace

Continue ReadingIran rejects UK-France Hormuz statement, warns against foreign military presence

Two scorpions in a jar

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U.S. President Donald Trump (R) welcomes Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (L) at his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida, United States on December 29, 2025. [Amos Ben-Gershom (GPO)/Handout – Anadolu Agency]

Trump and Netanyahu need each other more than they trust each other — and that mutual need, not any shared conviction, is the only thing still holding the alliance together.

by Jasim Al-Azzawi

There is an old parable about two scorpions in a jar. Neither can leave. Neither trusts the other. And sooner or later, one strikes, not because it wants to kill the other, but because the jar has become unbearable.

Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu are those scorpions now, and the jar is the wreckage of the Middle East they built together.

For the better part of a year, they marched in locked steps. One man’s appetite for spectacle matched by the other’s genius for making disaster look like deliverance. Netanyahu persuaded Trump that Iran could be shattered quickly, cleanly, at no real cost. Trump believed him because believing him was easier than doubting him, and doubt has never been a currency Trump trades in. The war came. But Iran did not break. And when the bill arrived, it was delivered to Trump’s door, not Netanyahu’s.

John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago, who has spent a career mapping the architecture of American deference to Israeli interests, put the verdict as bluntly as a man of his discipline allows:

Netanyahu convinced Trump the war would be short and decisive, and Trump, in Mearsheimer’s words, was foolish enough to believe him.

Elsewhere, Mearsheimer has been blunter still, arguing flatly that Israel and its lobby own Trump,

and that the President has demonstrated, repeatedly, a willingness to dance to Jerusalem’s tune.

Then came Lebanon, and with it the profanity that told the truth polite diplomacy never does. Reports of a fifteen-minute call, confirmed by Trump himself, describe the President screaming at Netanyahu, demanding to know what the hell he was doing. He called Netanyahu “crazy,” reminded him that he would be sitting in prison were it not for American protection, and scolded him in the most excruciating language, that the world now despised him for it. This is not the language of alliance. It is the language of a landlord screaming at a tenant who has torched the building and still expects a reference letter.

Monsters playing victims: Danny Danon’s twisted war on the truth

Netanyahu absorbed the insult silently, the way he absorbs everything, with a statement insisting nothing had changed, that Israel’s “position remains the same,” even as his troops turned back from Beirut on Trump’s order. One American official described the call more crudely: Trump had steamrolled him, and all the great warrior-statesman could manage in reply was a chastened “OK, OK”. This isn’t how empires normally treat client states, but this was never a partnership of equals. It is, as Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University observes, the latest chapter in a decades-long bid for regional dominance. In this script, Netanyahu and the architects of Greater Israel are the sole victors; everyone else is left with the ashes. Sachs does not flinch from naming the architecture. The war on Iran, he argues, was never separate from the older “Clean Break” doctrine first sketched in 1996, a blueprint for regime-change wars with Washington cast as the enforcement arm of Israeli strategy. In that reading, Trump is not a partner but an instrument, wielded by a prime minister facing indictment at home and a coalition that cannot survive a genuine peace.

Gideon Levy of Haaretz, writing from inside Israel’s collapsing consensus, sees the same rot from the other direction. He has warned that Israel follows Netanyahu mindlessly toward a reckoning it has not yet allowed itself to imagine, and that the U.S.-Israel relationship itself is nearing its breaking point. Even Thomas Friedman, hardly a radical, has confessed to being torn, rooting against the Iranian regime while dreading what its defeat would do for two men, he flatly calls terrible people, “alleged crooks” running “anti-democratic projects” in their own countries.

Phyllis Bennis of Institute for Policy Studies frames the arrangement in the coldest terms available: not statesmanship, but real-estate logic: a transactional partnership between a president with no re-election ahead of him but a legacy to launder, and a prime minister facing an October election and a courtroom he has spent years trying to outrun.

Both men need a win they cannot contrive through governance, so they manufacture it through war. Both are impeachable, indictable, and disposable to the very coalitions that elevated them.

AIPAC, the Israeli religious right, and the Republican Zionist bloc in the U.S. Senate are Netanyahu’s insurance policy. Miriam Adelson’s checkbook and the MAGA base are Trump’s. Each man is one betrayal away from being fed to those bases as a sacrifice, and each of them knows it.

This is why the scorpion metaphor holds. Two men who need each other to survive politically are also the two men most capable of mortally stinging each other. Trump has already shown he will humiliate Netanyahu the moment the war stops being useful to him. Netanyahu has already shown he will defy Trump’s orders the moment his coalition demands it. The sting, when it finally comes, will not be ideological. It will be self-preservation, dressed up as principle, in a jar built from the bones of Lebanon, Gaza, and Iran, while the region, and the truth, are left to rot in the glass along with them.

READ: Pepe, Pakistan, and the last of the great foreign correspondents

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.

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Keir Starmer explains that UK is actively supporting Israel's genocidal expansion and repeats his previous quotation that he supports Zionism "without qualification". Keir Starmer said “I said it loud and clear – and meant it – that I support Zionism without qualification.” here: https://www.jewishnews.co.uk/keir-starmer-interview-i-will-work-to-eradicate-antisemitism-from-day-one/
Keir Starmer explains that UK is actively supporting Israel’s genocidal expansion and repeats his previous quotation that he supports Zionism “without qualification”. Keir Starmer said “I said it loud and clear – and meant it – that I support Zionism without qualification.” here: https://www.jewishnews.co.uk/keir-starmer-interview-i-will-work-to-eradicate-antisemitism-from-day-one/
Donald Trump explains why he established his Bored of Peace
Donald Trump explains why he established his Bored of Peace

Continue ReadingTwo scorpions in a jar

Rights center documents 83 Israeli attacks on Christians in 3 months, mostly in occupied Jerusalem

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Palestinian Christians attend a Christmas Mass at the Holy Family Church with Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa taking part in the service amid Israel’s blockade, in Gaza City, Gaza, on December 21, 2025. [Khames Alrefi – Anadolu Agency]

This April to June saw 83 Israeli attacks on Christians in Israel or Israeli-occupied territories in 76 incidents, most of them in Jerusalem, according to a report released Friday, Anadolu reports.

The report was issued by Israel’s Religious Freedom Data Center (RFDC) and the its Hotline for Documenting Harassment against Christians in Israel, a nongovernmental center specializing in documenting attacks related to freedom of worship.

According to the report, 68 incidents took place inside Jerusalem, a city also revered by Christians. Two incidents were recorded in Haifa and the Galilee in northern Israel, one in the Sea of Galilee area, one in the West Bank, one in Beit Shemesh west of Jerusalem, and two in Mevaseret Zion west of Jerusalem. The report did not give the location of the remaining incident.

Of the 68 incidents recorded in Jerusalem, 46 took place in the Old City, 13 in West Jerusalem and nine on Mount Zion, a historic hill southwest of the Old City, the report said.

“As in previous reports, the high number of spitting incidents remains particularly striking. During this quarter, 47 incidents involved spitting, accounting for 56% of all recorded forms of harassment,” the RFDC said.

“In recent years, these acts have increasingly taken place openly, in broad daylight, and at times in a deliberately demonstrative manner. In several cases, perpetrators even explained to Hotline volunteers—and on camera—why they believed such behavior was justified,” it added.

The center said reported incidents included Israeli parents spitting and directing insults in front of their children, and encouraging them to do the same.

READ: Palestinian president urges Jerusalem churches to reject Israeli municipal tax, warns of threat to Christian presence

-Rise in harassment

As in previous years, the report noted a sharp increase in incidents during Jerusalem Day and the Flag March (28 Iyar on the Hebrew calendar), an annual Israeli event marking the occupation of East Jerusalem.

“While some incidents involved individuals acting alone, moving in groups appeared to encourage spitting and similar acts,” the report says.

The report said harassment and attacks are increasingly taking place openly in public spaces, with little hesitation from perpetrators. It cited a violent assault on a nun on Mount Zion and verbal abuse directed at a monk in a store.

The center says on its website that the reality in the Christian Quarter and the Old City of Jerusalem has long been sensitive and full of challenges and complexities, but that the situation changed radically for the worse in early 2023 with a rise in harassment.

In April, Israeli police prevented Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Latin patriarch of Jerusalem, from reaching the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in East Jerusalem during Christian holidays, and imposed restrictions on Christians taking part in Easter celebrations at the church.

In recent years, Israeli extremists have been involved in spitting incidents targeting churches and Christian clergy in Jerusalem, along with attacks on holy sites in Jerusalem and the West Bank and the targeting of churches in the Gaza Strip during Israel’s war that started in October 2023.

Churches around the world have also criticized Israel’s recent wars on Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran, warning of their humanitarian and religious consequences.

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Keir Starmer explains that UK is actively supporting Israel's genocidal expansion and repeats his previous quotation that he supports Zionism "without qualification". Keir Starmer said “I said it loud and clear – and meant it – that I support Zionism without qualification.” here: https://www.jewishnews.co.uk/keir-starmer-interview-i-will-work-to-eradicate-antisemitism-from-day-one/
Keir Starmer explains that UK is actively supporting Israel’s genocidal expansion and repeats his previous quotation that he supports Zionism “without qualification”. Keir Starmer said “I said it loud and clear – and meant it – that I support Zionism without qualification.” here: https://www.jewishnews.co.uk/keir-starmer-interview-i-will-work-to-eradicate-antisemitism-from-day-one/
Donald Trump explains why he established his Bored of Peace
Donald Trump explains why he established his Bored of Peace

Continue ReadingRights center documents 83 Israeli attacks on Christians in 3 months, mostly in occupied Jerusalem