Trump thought he was sending Iran a message; The reply came back with a new return address courtesy of Kuwait. Right, so Iran has fired a missile at an American air base in Kuwait, and the worst part of that sentence, for Trump anyway, isn't the Iranian bit. It's the American bit. Because it's the United States military itself, through Central Command, the lot who run every American operation across the Middle East, that has come out and said Kuwait got hit, and called it an egregious ceasefire violation, very much forgetting they hit Bandar Abbas just the other day – that was the ceasefire violation or are they all getting as addled as the citrus skinned commander in chief they all follow? Well, a US official went further and said it was American forces in Kuwait that were the suspected target. So no, this isn't Tehran shouting into a microphone while Washington has a little chuckle. This is Washington itself confirming that the place where America parks its soldiers in the Gulf has just been hit, hours after Donald Trump's own forces went and struck inside Iran. And the man who's spent months telling everyone he's got Iran boxed in, that the pressure's working, that the deal's nearly done, has just watched one of his own base once again become the thing on the receiving end. And of course Iran, put a little bit of video out all about this, just to hammer the point home [CLIP] So leet me lay out who did what here, because the order matters, and Trump would much rather you didn't follow it too closely, he certainly doesn’t seem to. Late Wednesday night, Washington time, US Central Command says its forces shot down five Iranian one-way attack drones near the Strait of Hormuz.

Hezbollah's unstoppable drones have found a new target amongst the IDF - and it's causing some proper panic. Right, so the officer Israel handed one of its proudest armoured brigades is lying in a hospital in Haifa with a serious head wound, and the thing that put him there cost less than a second-hand motorbike. His name is Colonel Meir Biderman. He is forty-one, he commands the 401st Armoured Brigade, and on a Wednesday morning in southern Lebanon a Hezbollah drone struck him in the head. He was hit on the exact stretch of ground Benjamin Netanyahu keeps telling Israelis his army has under control. Not a missile. Not an ambush by some crack unit out of a film. A small flying machine, a bit of explosive, and a thread of glass that Israel's air defences cannot see, cannot jam and cannot stop. That is the weak spot, and it is a humiliating one. The most advanced air-defence shield in the region, walked straight past by a toy. Netanyahu sold this whole campaign as clean dominance: march into Lebanon, hunt Hezbollah down, make the north safe, come home the winner. It has reached the point where an army that bills itself as the most advanced in the world cannot keep its own brigade commanders alive on the ground it claims to own. Israel went into Lebanon as the hunter. Somewhere in those villages, the hunting quietly started going the other way.

The sham that is Trump's Board of Peace has come to a head with the announcement it's broke - so where did all the billions paid go? Right, so Donald Trump's grand Gaza peace machine has just been caught with nothing in the till. The official fund set up to rebuild Gaza, the one administered by the World Bank, endorsed by the United Nations, the one he stood up in January with all the fanfare of a man unveiling a new wing of a casino, that fund has taken in exactly zero dollars from donors. Not a slow start. Not a trickle. Zero. Four months in, with member states having pledged around seven billion dollars between them, Tony Blair involved as well as if it didn’t stink enough already and Trump personally promising another ten billion of American money on top, the public account that's meant to be holding all of it reads nil. And while that pot sits there empty, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister whose forces did the flattening in the first place, has stood up at a conference in a West Bank settlement and ordered his army to go and take seventy per cent of Gaza. So that's your peace deal, isn't it. An empty rebuilding fund, and a fresh order to seize more of the rubble it was supposed to rebuild. [CLIP] The audience there for the record was urging Netanyahu to push on from 60% to 100%. But this is the part Trump can't wave away, because it's where an embarrassing headline turns into something a lot dirtier.