He pressed record on his own evidence and pressed publish on his own travel ban. Ben-Gvir filmed the case against himself. Right, so Itamar Ben-Gvir, the Israeli national security minister, the man with the prison system and the police on his desk, decided to film the detained flotilla activists his forces had grabbed from international waters. Civilians cable-tied. Made to kneel. Taunted in front of the lens. Then he uploaded the thing. Pressed record on his own evidence and pressed publish on his own travel ban, all in one afternoon's work. And while he was busy admiring his handiwork, doing his little victory lap for the Otzma Yehudit base back home, the people kneeling in that footage were already on their way out. With names. Hospital paperwork. Sworn statements. Lawyers from more than forty countries lining up behind them. France has now banned Ben-Gvir from setting foot on French soil. Malaysia is loading up the International Court of Justice route. Mark Carney, the Canadian prime minister, has called the treatment of those detainees appalling and publicly demanded an independent investigation. And every single one of those moves traces back to one decision: Ben-Gvir held up a camera, and the camera held the receipt. The footage is from the latest interception of the Global Sumud Flotilla, a civilian convoy of aid boats sailing from Europe and North Africa towards Gaza, trying to break the Israeli blockade. Sumud is the Arabic word for steadfastness, the framing word for Palestinian resistance to dispossession since the 1960s. On the 18th of May, in international waters, Israeli naval forces boarded the boats and seized the people on them. The number Israel doesn't want anyone dwelling on is 428 civilian detainees, hauled off vessels they had every legal right to be on, dragged into Ashdod port, processed by the same prison machinery Ben-Gvir runs.

Trump bombed Iran to force surrender, then discovered Iran still controlled the way out. Israel is reaping what it has sown. Right, so Donald Trump has bombed Iran again while his own side is telling everyone a deal could be just days away, because apparently nothing says peace like another set of explosions over the country you are supposedly negotiating with. Marco Rubio, the US Secretary of State, has been saying the Strait of Hormuz has to be opened one way or another, which is a very American way of describing a waterway that is not actually in America, not owned by America, and not sitting there waiting for a man in Washington to shout at it. CENTCOM, the US military command running American operations across the Middle East and Central Asia, has acknowledged strikes in southern Iran, saying American forces hit missile launch sites and Iranian boats it claimed were trying to lay mines near the Strait. The reported blast areas were around Bandar Abbas, Sirik and Jask, right next to the pressure point Trump desperately needs reopened. So Trump is selling peace, Rubio is selling progress, CENTCOM is selling self-defence, and Iran is looking at the smoke and saying the Americans have just violated the ceasefire again. The Iranian Foreign Ministry has called the latest US action a ceasefire violation and a sign of bad faith, and that is not a small claim, because these strikes aren't happening in some dead space outside the diplomatic process. Pakistan has been mediating between Washington and Tehran, Iranian officials have been in Qatar, the discussions have been circling Hormuz, blockade relief, frozen assets and how the war ends, and then the US military has decided to add fresh bombing to the timetable. That isn't strength. That is a man trying to look in control while using the one tool that keeps proving it cannot buy him the thing he needs. US officials can call the strikes defensive until the aircraft run out of fuel, but Iran is not answering like a state that has been beaten into obedience.

Hezbollah’s night drones are now seeing Israel in the dark - and Netanyahu’s army is running out of places to hide. Right, so Hezbollah's latest drone problem for Israel isn't just that something is flying at them again. The problem is that something is now seeing them in a way their usual battlefield habits were never built to survive. Thermal-camera drones don't need a clean daylight image of a soldier standing nicely in the open, waving at the sky like an idiot waiting to be introduced to physics. They read heat. They pick out bodies, engines, warm metal, active vehicles, recently used kit and movement that darkness was supposed to help hide. Israel has spent months trying to adjust to drones on the northern front, pushing work into different hours, changing movement patterns, hiding vehicles, throwing nets over positions, and trying to convince itself that if soldiers could be made less visible, less static and less exposed, if they worked at night, they could claw back some control. Well, Hezbollah has come up with an answer to that. Thermal imagery changes what the operator is looking at before the strike even happens. A normal camera needs enough light, contrast and visual detail to make a target clear. A thermal camera makes a human body show up because it is hotter than the ground around it. A vehicle that has been running, a generator beside a position, a group of soldiers moving through scrub, a rescue scene where bodies and engines are clustered together, all become readable in a different way. At night, they just become visible. The IDF can try to make the field harder to see, but it cannot make soldiers stop being warm without creating a rather bigger recruitment problem. Israel's northern-front answer has been built around a set of assumptions that thermal drones now chew straight through. Daylight is dangerous, the FPV fibre-optic drones can get you, so you shift work into darkness. Open movement is dangerous, so use cover.