(Wall Street Journal) Benoit Faucon - It's now clear that there are deep divisions within Iran's leadership over how far to go to strike a deal with the Americans. A tug of war is pitting newly empowered hard-liners in the Revolutionary Guard - who are increasingly putting pressure on Iranian negotiators not to compromise - against top officials who are more focused on repairing Iran's battered economy.

(Israel Hayom) Danny Zaken - The Iranian document submitted to mediators in Pakistan does not include a commitment by all elements of Iran's leadership to uphold understandings with the U.S. According to two diplomatic sources, this was the main reason for President Trump's decision to cancel the talks in Pakistan. Another key reason was Iran's retreat from previous agreements, and its demand for sanctions relief and the release of funds even before implementing its obligations. Iran refuses even to discuss its support for regional terrorist organizations and restrictions on its missile project.

(Wall Street Journal) Ed Ballard - Analysts and oil industry executives say reanimating the world's most productive oil patch will require overcoming substantial engineering and logistical challenges. "There's an awful lot of infrastructure that's been shut down," said Russell Hardy, chief executive of oil trader Vitol. "It takes some time to put all that back."

(Times of Israel) Emanuel Fabian - After Hizbullah launched two rockets and a drone from Lebanon at northern Israel on Saturday, Prime Minister Netanyahu instructed the IDF to go after Hizbullah targets "with force," despite the extension of a ceasefire. Hizbullah also launched several explosive drones at Israeli troops stationed in southern Lebanon. No casualties were reported. At the same time, the IDF killed several Hizbullah operatives that "posed a threat to IDF troops operating in southern Lebanon." Additionally, the IDF struck several buildings used by Hizbullah for storing weapons and carrying out attacks. The Israeli Air Force also struck Hizbullah rocket launchers in southern Lebanon north of the IDF-held security zone. The IDF said that since the truce took effect on April 17, it has killed over 30 Hizbullah operatives and destroyed hundreds of the group's positions. Hizbullah, meanwhile, has been carrying out multiple attacks per day on Israeli forces stationed in southern Lebanon amid the ceasefire.

(Israel Hayom) Ariel Kahana - A senior Israeli official told Israel Hayom that Israel's Diplomatic-Security Cabinet never instructed the IDF to eliminate Hizbullah's military force. Dismantling Hizbullah is indeed the overall objective, but it was not defined as a goal to be achieved specifically through military means. Moreover, there is effectively no military way to prevent Hizbullah from firing missiles and rockets. Operational plans proposed by the IDF may weaken Hizbullah, however they cannot completely paralyze its launch capabilities. Achieving such a result militarily would require a far more drastic offensive, one that would demand a massive increase in military manpower that is not realistic. For these reasons, the ceasefire and the diplomatic track are the way to restore quiet to northern communities. The official stressed that Hizbullah's current condition bears no resemblance to its past strength, because the IDF has achieved very significant gains against it. In addition, the IDF has removed the threat of a ground invasion of northern Israeli communities and maintains security control over the territory up to the Litani River, and even north of it at certain points.

(Ynet News) Ron Ben-Yishai - In Lebanon, fighting is effectively ongoing. But under limits imposed by President Trump, Israel cannot operate throughout Lebanon or against every target it says it needs to strike. The current ceasefire resembles the ceasefire declared in late 2024 between Israel and Lebanon, during which Israel continued systematically targeting Hizbullah's attempts to rebuild and rearm. Israel has decided to cooperate with a U.S.-Saudi framework aimed at weakening Hizbullah and stripping it of legitimacy to continue fighting. In Iran, the U.S. and Tehran are now waging an economic and psychological war, each seeking to force the other to accept minimum demands in diplomatic talks aimed at ending the war. Trump is using a broad and systematic economic campaign to choke the Iranian regime. Washington chose economic pressure because the U.S. military and the IDF have largely exhausted what they can do from the air and sea against Iran's military and nuclear capabilities. The task now is to preserve those gains and prevent Iran from rebuilding for years. Israel is largely watching from the sidelines while preparing for the possibility that fire resumes. Alongside the naval blockade, Washington is applying economic pressure through every available channel. CNN reported that the U.S. Treasury recently froze $334 million in cryptocurrency accounts used by the Revolutionary Guards. CNN also reported that hackers, apparently acting for Israel, stole $90 million last year from cryptocurrency accounts linked to the Revolutionary Guards. Time may be working against Iran. The naval blockade could cause lasting damage to Iran's oil industry. The oil storage tanks on Kharg Island and at oil fields are already full. As a result, Iran is being forced to reduce production and may soon have to stop pumping altogether. The situation in Gaza is effectively frozen. Hamas refuses to disarm, leaving no progress on Trump's 21-point plan. But Hamas is using the deadlock to reassert its rule and rebuild militarily. Israeli officials say there may be no choice but to resume fighting to remove Hamas from Gaza and disarm it.

(Jerusalem Post) Herb Keinon - When President Trump extended the ceasefire with Iran, it was said that he backed down. But that would be a misreading of the situation. The bombing may have paused, but the pressure on the Islamic Republic has not. It has merely changed form. For six weeks, the emphasis was on military force, with U.S. and Israeli strikes designed to degrade Iran's military infrastructure and nuclear capabilities. That objective was largely achieved. Iran's military and nuclear capabilities are not today what they were before Feb. 28. What Washington is now attempting is to turn those battlefield gains into leverage through sustained economic pressure. Such pressure does not produce immediate results. It is gradual. Trump's calculation appears to be that a strategy that reduces immediate risk to American lives - even if it brings economic discomfort - is more sustainable domestically than a return to high-intensity military escalation. Any pause in active military operations carries the possibility that Iran will use the time to regroup and reposition assets that have not yet been targeted. But it does the same for the other side as well. For the U.S. and Israel, this period allows for replenishment, repositioning, rest for pilots and air crews, and the quiet preparation of next steps should the current approach fail. Trump is attempting to turn time from an Iranian asset into an Iranian liability. Every day that passes without a decision is another day of lost revenue, another day of economic strain, another day in which the pressure does not ease but tightens. This is no longer about dramatic airstrikes. It is about endurance.

(Jerusalem Report) Maj. (ret.) Andrew Fox - The Islamic Republic of Iran fills prisons, gallows, and morgues with its own citizens. January's crackdown killed tens of thousands, yet parts of the West have granted the regime false victimhood. Tehran has piggybacked on two years of anti-Israel sentiment and the collapse of moral vocabulary around Gaza. In too many circles, "anti-Israel" has become a solvent. It dissolves distinctions between democracy and theocracy, between wartime error and deliberate terror, and between sympathy for civilians and indulgence towards tyrants. Once Israel is cast as the master villain, Iran can appear, absurdly, as part of a global resistance front. Its own victims - women beaten for showing their hair, teenagers hanged for protesting, minorities, dissidents, and students - vanish. The Iranian people deserve solidarity. The Islamic Republic deserves exposure, pressure, and defeat. The tragedy is that too many young Westerners, convinced they are siding with the oppressed, are being trained to cheer the oppressors. The writer, a research fellow at the Henry Jackson Society, served for 16 years in the British Army.

(Jerusalem Report) Lt.-Col. (res.) Shaul Bartal - The current war cycle has stripped away any remaining ambiguity about Hizbullah's role. It is no longer simply a "resistance movement" but a strategic arm of Iran operating on Lebanese soil, often in direct contradiction to Lebanon's own national interests. Lebanon must confront this reality and embrace a framework that enables Hizbullah's exit from the military sphere. Following the 1949 armistice after Israel's War of Independence, the Israeli-Lebanese border remained relatively quiet for decades. The Lebanese civil war in 1975 transformed the reality in the south. Palestinian armed organizations, chiefly the PLO, turned the area into a forward base against Israel. During the First Lebanon War in 1982, a short-lived Israel-Lebanon agreement emerged on May 17, 1983, offering mutual recognition and normalization. Hizbullah emerged from that same war, reshaping the self-image and sociopolitical position of Lebanon's Shi'ite community and elevating loyalty to Tehran. Successive Lebanese governments have lacked both the capacity and the will to confront Hizbullah. Until such a strategic decision is made in Beirut, Israel will likely insist on maintaining a security zone up to the Litani River, and on preventing the organized return of the Shi'ite population to devastated villages that could quickly be remilitarized. The hard choice before Lebanon is clear: either assume responsibility for disarming Hizbullah and normalizing relations with Israel, or live for the coming years with an Israeli-controlled buffer zone on its soil as the price of leaving Hizbullah's weapons in place. The writer is a research fellow at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University.

(Telegraph-UK) Jake Wallis Simons - Israel is the only OECD country to have a birth rate above replacement, with an extra baby boom of 10% taking place during the war. Its citizens are among the most resilient, patriotic and innovative on Earth. Its economy is booming - per capita, its GDP ranks five places higher than Britain, according to IMF data - and despite three years of appalling war, it is the 8th happiest country in the world, showing extremely low levels of crime, addiction, family breakdown and mental illness. In the realm of defense, both Hamas and Hizbullah are shadows of their former selves and their Iranian paymasters have taken a huge battering. Today, Israel has military buffer zones in Gaza, Lebanon and Syria, preventing another marauding attack as seen on Oct. 7. It has proved to the world that no amount of pressure, either from terrorists or their sympathizers in the West, can deter its mission of protecting its people. What is Israel's secret? The first factor is its unapologetic sense of peoplehood, that most unfashionable yet fundamental of concepts. In Israel, whether a political rally is supportive of the government or against it, both groups of activists will fly their national flag. And beneath all the arguments lies a basic solidarity. These citizens will fight and die together, whatever their political differences. Such is the power of peoplehood. It produces great national resilience as well as strong social bonds, a deep sense of meaning, and happiness. While the Jewish state speaks the language of existential war, so removed are other democracies from such things that they can only think in terms of luxury morality. Our leaders lecture Israel on "human rights" and the U.S. on "international law," without realizing that to anybody facing true tyranny, whether Israeli or Iranian or Ukrainian, their words sound like the quacking of pompous ducks. Those who wag their fingers at Israel should really be taking notes. For all its problems, the Jewish state's 78th birthday dawns on one of the mightiest open societies on the planet. When it comes to the future of democracy, my money is firmly on Israel.

(Fox News) Majeed Gly - I was born on the Iranian border and raised in the shadow of its wars. I have seen firsthand what these policies do to the people of this region. I was in Erbil, Riyadh and Dubai just recently. I know what people say when the cameras are off. It is not anger at America. It is relief. For millions of people across the Middle East, this war did not start on Feb. 28. It started decades ago. Across the Gulf, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan, people want what any American wants: a job, a stable country and a future that is not hostage to someone else's ideology. What stops progress, every time, is the same force. Iran-backed armed groups in Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen - all taking orders from Tehran, all blocking the future the rest of the region is trying to build. Since Feb. 28, Iran has struck every country in the region that chose partnership with the West - and not one of them fired a shot at Iran. In the UAE, 13 people were killed and over 200 were wounded. Kurdistan has been hit more than 700 times, with 14 dead. Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar - all struck. None of them threatened Iran. The fear across this region is not that America acted. It is that the world will lose interest before anything changes. The writer is president of the American Kurdish Committee.

(New York Post) Joseph Epstein - U.S. military aid to Israel is the best investment the U.S. government makes. Most of the $3.8 billion must be spent on American-made military equipment. It's a subsidy for our own defense industrial base, with the funds flowing to Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon and General Dynamics. Israel was the first to use the F-35 in combat. Its real-world combat testing fixed critical glitches that U.S. engineers couldn't replicate in a lab. Israel also shares daily operational lessons from every American weapons system it fields, saving years and millions in research and development. In addition, the value of Israel's intelligence assistance brings a return that dwarfs a $3.8 billion investment many times over. All this is without U.S. soldiers stationed there, while in Europe we spend $25 billion to $30 billion a year to station 80,000 troops. Israel's June 2025 air offensive against Iran - featuring 200 U.S.-made F-35s, F-16s and F-15s - was the most consequential live demonstration of American air superiority in a generation. It exposed the vulnerabilities of Russian and Chinese air defenses and became the best sales pitch Lockheed Martin could ever ask for. Beyond defense, Israeli firms are the second-largest source of foreign listings on NASDAQ. In New York alone, 600 Israeli-founded companies generated $19.5 billion in output last year and supported 57,000 jobs. The writer is the director of the Turan Research Center hosted by the Yorktown Institute dedicated to modern-day developments in the Turkic and Persian worlds.

(Jerusalem Post) Naomi Linder Kahn - Turmus Aiya, a Palestinian Authority village north of Jerusalem, has made headlines in recent months with accounts of violence. Since many of its residents also hold U.S. citizenship, incidents there often receive outsized attention in American media. In the latest episode, initial reports described Israeli youths stoning cars on the highway just outside Turmus Aiya. The facts tell a different story. On April 20, Turmus Aiya dedicated a park in memory of Amar Rabi, a local terrorist killed last year by IDF soldiers while attacking Israeli motorists. Turmus Aiya's social media channels actively promoted the event and called on participants to carry out stone-throwing attacks afterward. Israeli vehicles were pelted with stones on Route 60 immediately afterward. Despite the IDF presence, documented incitement, and the IDF arrest of the perpetrators, some journalists misreported the event, attributing the stone-throwing to Israelis. By the time retractions or corrections trickled in, the story of Israeli violence against the peaceful village of Turmus Aiya had already taken hold. The narrative war is not a sideshow. It is a battlefield in its own right. At a minimum, reporting should be grounded in verifiable facts - not assumptions, not social media echo chambers, and not the pressure to conform to a preferred storyline. The writer is the director of the International Division of Regavim.

(Telegraph-UK) Allison Pearson - So many Jews in Britain never before had to worry about their ethnicity or religion. I am no longer using the word antisemitism. This is racism of the most hateful and monstrous kind. In the aftermath of the Oct. 7 massacres, criticism of Israel's response to the rape, murder and kidnapping of its men, women and children by marauding barbarians has morphed into an escalating campaign against Jews here. The attempted firebombing of Kenton United Synagogue in northwest London on April 18 was just the latest in a heinous wave of arson attacks. Last month, masked men set fire to four ambulances belonging to a Jewish charity in Golders Green - life-saving vehicles that helped the whole neighborhood. All this while British Jews are still reeling from an assault on a synagogue in Manchester on Yom Kippur in which two men were killed. Imagine the furore if the recent spate of attacks on synagogues had been against mosques. The prime minister would have called out the army. Jews are just told to be vigilant. Jews are among our most valuable and patriotic citizens and shaped the country we live in. Why should they leave? Millions of us don't want them to go, although we are too quiet about it. But go they will if this vile hatred is allowed to spread unchecked. If the Jews leave Britain, we will have lost not just them, but what it means to be us.

(Jerusalem Report) Eric R. Mandel - Israelis are not fighting on distant battlefields, they are fighting in their own backyards. This is the essence of Israeli resilience. Their instinct to rebuild, to resume, to refuse defeat, defines Israeli society. After decades of spending time with ordinary Israelis, meeting victims of terror, embedding with soldiers, and observing how Israeli media covers conflict, I have come to understand that Israeli resilience is a fusion of necessity, history, and identity. Americans like myself cannot fully grasp what it means to wake up multiple times a night to sirens, rushing children into shelters, living under a constant cloud of fatigue. Nor can we easily comprehend a society where nearly everyone is one degree removed from someone physically or emotionally scarred by war. Israeli resilience is deeply embedded, a national operating system forged through both modern statehood and two millennia of Jewish vulnerability in exile. In the U.S., happiness is often equated with material success and individual achievement. Israelis value prosperity as well, but their sense of fulfillment is more closely tied to meaning, contribution, and collective responsibility. The sanitation worker and the tech executive stand side by side in the reserves. One of my friends, a major in the Home Front Command, repeatedly leaves her children in the care of grandparents so she can serve her country. The writer is director of the Middle East Political Information Network (MEPIN).