People in Israel, Iran try to restore daily lives amid ceasefire
In the central part of Israel's biggest commercial city, Tel Aviv, barbers were busy cleaning up broken glass after their shop was damaged by a missile attack.
Local officials said about 2,500 people in the city are living in shelters.
Multiple apartment blocks collapsed after an Iranian missile attack that left eight people injured.
Meanwhile, Iran has reopened some airports.
The Iranian ministry announced that a total of 13 airports in the country's east have started to gradually resume domestic and international flights.
The fighting between Israel and Iran is winding down, while Israel continues its attacks on the Gaza Strip, saying it will destroy the Islamic group Hamas.
Health authorities in the enclave said on Wednesday that the death toll had risen to 56,156 since October 7, 2023.
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Japan Today
2 hours ago
- Japan Today
U.S. envoy tells Israeli hostage families he is working on plan to end Gaza War
Palestinians climb onto trucks as they seek for aid supplies that entered Gaza through Israel in Beit Lahia, northern Gaza Strip, August 1, 2025. REUTERS/Mahmoud Issa/File Photo By Emily Rose U.S. President Donald Trump's Middle East envoy told families of hostages being held by Palestinian militant group Hamas on Saturday that he was working with the Israeli government on a plan that would effectively end the war in Gaza. Trump has made ending the conflict a major priority of his administration, though negotiations have faltered. Steve Witkoff is visiting Israel as its government faces mounting pressure over the deteriorating humanitarian conditions in the enclave. In a recording of the meeting, reviewed by Reuters, Witkoff is heard saying: "We have a very, very good plan that we're working on collectively with the Israeli government, with Prime Minister Netanyahu ... for the reconstruction of Gaza. That effectively means the end of the war." The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on his remarks. Witkoff also said that Hamas was prepared to disarm in order to end the war, though the group has repeatedly said it will not lay down its weapons. In response, Hamas, which has dominated Gaza since 2007 but has been militarily battered by Israel in the war, said it would not relinquish "armed resistance" unless an "independent, fully sovereign Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital" was established. Indirect negotiations between Hamas and Israel aimed at securing a 60-day ceasefire in the Gaza war and deal for the release of half the hostages ended last week in deadlock. On Saturday, Hamas released its second video in two days of Israeli hostage Evyatar David. In it, David, skeletally thin, is shown digging a hole, which, he says in the video, is for his own grave. "They are on the absolute brink of death," David's brother Ilay said at a rally in support of the hostages in Tel Aviv, where thousands gathered holding posters of those in captivity and chanted for their immediate release. "In the current unimaginable condition, they may have only days left to live." Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs Gideon Sa'ar said the "world cannot remain silent in the face of the difficult images that are the result of deliberate sadistic abuse of the hostages, which also includes starvation". Witkoff, who arrived in Israel with Benjamin Netanyahu's government facing a global outcry over the devastation in Gaza and the starvation growing among its 2.2 million people, met the prime minister on Thursday. Afterwards, a senior Israeli official said an understanding between Israel and Washington was emerging that there was a need to move from a plan to release some of the hostages to a plan to release all the hostages, disarm Hamas and demilitarise the Gaza Strip, echoing Israel's key demands for ending the war. GAZA STARVATION On Tuesday, Qatar and Egypt, who are mediating ceasefire efforts, endorsed a declaration by France and Saudi Arabia outlining steps toward a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As part of it, they said Hamas must hand over its arms to the Western-backed Palestinian Authority. The crisis in Gaza has also prompted a string of Western powers to announce they may recognise a Palestinian state. On Friday, Witkoff visited a U.S.-backed aid operation in southern Gaza, which the United Nations has partly blamed for deadly conditions in the enclave, saying he sought to get food and other aid to people there. Dozens have died of malnutrition in recent weeks after Israel cut off all supplies to the enclave for nearly three months from March to May, according to Gaza's health ministry. It said on Saturday that it had recorded seven more fatalities, including a child, since Friday. Israel blames Hamas for the suffering in Gaza and says it is taking steps for more aid to reach its population, including pausing fighting for part of the day in some areas, air drops and announcing protected routes for aid convoys. U.N. agencies have said that airdrops of food are insufficient and that Israel must let in far more aid by land and quickly ease the access to it. The Gaza war began when Hamas killed more than 1,200 people and took 251 hostage in an attack on southern Israel on October 7, 2023, according to Israeli figures. Israel's offensive has since killed more than 60,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza health officials. According to Israeli officials, 50 hostages now remain in Gaza, only 20 of whom are believed to be alive. © Thomson Reuters 2025.
Asahi Shimbun
15 hours ago
- Asahi Shimbun
Iran calls on Japan to join it in campaign to abolish WMDs
Iran's foreign minister is calling on Japan to join Tehran in leading a global movement to abolish weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). Seyed Abbas Araghchi submitted an opinion piece to The Asahi Shimbun and other Japanese media prior to the 80th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 'Japan and Iran must lead a global movement for the total abolition of all WMDs: nuclear, chemical and biological,' he wrote. He pointed out that Iran shared the pain and suffering of WMDs with Japan as it was targeted with chemical weapons in its war against Iraq in the 1980s. He called the atomic bombings of the Japanese cities on Aug. 6 and Aug. 9, 1945, 'a testament to the devastating power of nuclear weapons.' 'Many survivors carry physical and psychological wounds that time has not healed,' Araghchi wrote. 'They have lived their lives in the shadow of those nuclear flashes, turning their trauma into tireless advocacy for peace and disarmament.' In June, during a NATO summit meeting, U.S. President Donald Trump equated the U.S. attack against three nuclear facilities in Iran that month with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He told reporters, 'That hit ended the war. I don't want to use an example of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But that was essentially the same thing. That ended that war.' Araghchi took issue with Trump's comment, saying: 'The remark was more than a historical misstep; it was a deep insult to the memories of the dead and the dignity of those still living with the consequences of those bombings.' He added that in Iran, 'the comparison was received with particular pain and fury.' In 1987 during the Iran-Iraq war, the city of Sardasht in northwestern Iran came under a mustard gas attack from Iraq that killed about 130 Iranians and left several thousand with permanent disabilities. Based on that experience, Araghchi wrote that Iran 'has suffered from the effects of WMDs in its own modern history.' He added: 'Few nations understand, as deeply as ours, the irreversible impact of WMDs. We must raise our collective voice to say: never again.' Araghchi did not touch upon Iran's claim that its uranium enrichment program was for peaceful purposes. Israel bombed Iranian nuclear facilities and air defense system on grounds it had to remove the threat of Iranian nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles. Iran retaliated with ballistic missile attacks on Israel. The United States joined its ally Israel and bombed Iranian nuclear facilities. After 12 days of fighting a cease-fire agreement was reached by Iran and Israel. * * * Seyed Abbas Araghchi was born in 1962 and served as Iranian ambassador to Japan between 2008 and 2011. After serving as deputy foreign minister, he was appointed foreign minister in August 2024.
Japan Times
18 hours ago
- Japan Times
Israeli military intelligence goes back to basics with focus on spies, not tech
Humiliated by the Hamas attack that devastated Israel 22 months ago, the country's military intelligence agency is undergoing a reckoning. The service is making profound changes, including reviving an Arabic-language recruitment program for high school students and training all troops in Arabic and Islam. The plan is to rely less on technology and instead build a cadre of spies and analysts with a broad knowledge of dialects — Yemeni, Iraqi, Gazan — as well as a firm grasp of radical Islamic doctrines and discourse. Every part of Israel's security establishment has been engaged in a process of painful self-examination since Oct. 7, 2023, when thousands of Hamas operatives entered Israel from Gaza, killing 1,200 people and abducting 250 others — and setting off a brutal war in which an estimated 60,000 people have been killed, according to the Hamas-run health ministry, with many more going hungry. Yet even as debate continues about who was at fault and how much Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu knew in advance of the attacks, the intelligence branch has accepted the brunt of the blame. The agency had a "fundamental misunderstanding' of Hamas ideology and its concrete plans, said a military intelligence officer, laying out the changes and speaking under standard military anonymity. While the service was aware of Hamas' scheme to capture military bases and civilian communities near Gaza, even watching militants rehearse in plain sight, the assessment was that they were fantasizing. Analysts concluded that the Iran-backed Islamist group was content in its role as ruler, pacified by foreign donations and well-paid work for some Gazans in Israel. The failure to meet the enemy on its own terms is one that Israel's security apparatus is determined never to repeat. "If more Israelis could read Hamas newspapers and listen to their radio,' said Michael Milshtein, who heads Palestinian studies at Tel Aviv University's Dayan Center, "they'd understand Hamas was not deterred and was seeking jihad.' The renewed focus on language and religious training represents what the intelligence officer calls "a deep cultural shift' in an organization where even top officers rely on translations. The aim, the person said, is to create an internal culture "that lives and breathes how our enemy thinks.' Yet Milshtein and others say that for this to succeed, it will require significant, society-wide changes. Although Arabic is offered in public schools, most Israelis study English instead. Silicon Valley looms large for ambitious young people, who learn little about countries only a few hours away. The challenge lies in convincing Israelis to focus more on the region — its cultures, languages and threats — and less on global opportunities. Israel grew comfortable and rich seeing itself as part of the West, the thinking goes, when it needs to survive in the Middle East. That hasn't always been the case. In the first decades of its existence, Israel had a large population of Jews who'd emigrated from Arabic-speaking countries. The nation was poor and surrounded by hostile neighbors with sizable armies, so survival was on everyone's mind. Many of these emigres put their skills to use in the intelligence service, including Eli Cohen, who famously reached the highest echelons of the Syrian government before he was caught and executed in the 1960s. (He was recently played by Sacha Baron Cohen in the Netflix hit "The Spy.") Today, Egypt and Jordan have peace treaties with Israel, and Lebanon and Syria are weak states with little capacity to challenge Israeli might. The supply of native Arabic speakers has dwindled. Israelis whose grandparents came from Iraq, Syria and Yemen don't speak Arabic, and Israel's 2 million Arab citizens aren't required to serve in the military. Some Arabic-speaking Druze do go into intelligence, but they make up less than 2% of the population. As part of the intelligence changes, the service is reviving a program it shut down six years ago which encourages high school students to study Arabic, and plans to broaden its training in dialects. The officer mentioned that eavesdroppers were having trouble making out what Yemeni Houthis were saying because many were chewing khat, a narcotic shrub consumed in the afternoon. So older Yemeni Israelis are being recruited to help. It's also channeling resources into a once-sidelined unit whose function is to challenge mainstream intelligence conclusions by promoting unconventional thinking. The unit's work is colloquially known by an Aramaic phrase from the Talmud — ipcha mistabra — or "the reverse may be reasonable.' More broadly, the service is moving away from technology and toward a deeper reliance on human intelligence — such as planting undercover agents in the field and building up the interrogations unit. This breaks with a shift over the past decade toward working with data from satellite imagery and drones, and goes hand-in-hand with another change that was made after Oct. 7. While the country's borders used to be monitored by sensor-equipped fences and barriers, the military is now deploying more boots on the ground. These new approaches will not only require more people, said Ofer Guterman, a former officer in military intelligence currently at the Institute for the Research of the Methodology of Intelligence, but people who are "more alert to different arenas.' Prior to the Hamas attack, he said, "there was a national perception that the big threats were behind us, except an Iranian nuclear weapon.' Now that that has been proven false, he believes that Israel needs "to rebuild our intelligence culture.' To explain what this might look like, he distinguishes between uncovering a secret and solving a mystery. At exposing a secret — where is a certain leader hiding? — Israel has been excellent, as shown by its wiping out of the Hezbollah leadership in Lebanon last fall. At unraveling a mystery — what is that leader planning? — it has lost its way. Acquiring the kind of knowledge needed for this requires deep commitment to humanistic studies — literature, history and culture. And he worries that Israeli students have developed a contempt for the rich cultures of their neighbors. That too, he says, has to change. At the same time, not everyone is persuaded that the planned changes are the right ones. Dan Meridor, a former strategic affairs minister under Netanyahu who wrote a landmark study of Israel's security needs two decades ago, says the wrong conclusions are being drawn from the Hamas attack. "The failure of Oct. 7 wasn't a lack of knowledge of the verses in the Koran and Arabic dialect,' he says. Rather, he believes that Israel is viewing its neighbors only through the lens of hostility. "It's not more intelligence that we need,' he added, "it's more dialogue and negotiation.'
