Fdd's overnight brief

Israel

Israel accused Turkey ​of “dangerous adventures in Syria” on Thursday, while Ankara called for a halt to “reckless” Israeli attacks, two days after Israel bombed a Syrian airbase where it said Turkish troops ‌were about to deploy. – Reuters

Turkey, Egypt and Qatar, which have been trying to mediate an end ​to the Gaza conflict, condemned recent Israeli strikes in ‌the Palestinian enclave, urging Israel to meet its ceasefire obligations and avoid steps that could escalate tension. – Reuters

U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee has warned militant Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank not to steal property owned by Palestinian ​Americans, describing such behavior as “a violation of God’s law”. – Reuters

Six European governments and Canada decried Israel’s latest plan to expand settlements in the occupied West Bank as “unacceptable” and warned companies to refrain from bidding on construction tenders. – Bloomberg

Israeli Ambassador to the United States Yechiel Leiter told The Jerusalem Post that Israel had received clear intelligence indicating that Turkey intended to significantly expand its military presence in Syria, a move Jerusalem viewed as crossing a red line. – Jerusalem Post

The Prime Minister’s Office on Thursday denied reports that the political echelon had approved the entry of the International Stabilization Force (ISF) into the Gaza Strip. – Jerusalem Post

Israel and Colombia are set to mutually exempt one another from requiring visas for travel starting on September 1, the Foreign Ministry announced in a post on X/Twitter on Thursday. – Jerusalem Post

The United States plans to bar Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas from traveling to New York City in September to address the United Nations General Assembly, a source told The Jerusalem Post. – Jerusalem Post

The IDF revealed on Thursday that Hamas is using the Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis to carry out interrogations and torture the Palestinians, in a push to retain control of the Gaza Strip through fear. – Jerusalem Post

Russia and Ukraine

Russia launched a massive missile and drone attack on Kyiv, the latest in a string of assaults on Ukraine’s capital, which has been left exposed this summer by the global shortage of Patriot air-defense missiles. – Wall Street Journal

There was no disguising the gaps in the usually well-stocked shelves of the Silpo supermarket in Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, this week. They had no barley, buckwheat, quinoa or rice. No spring onions or packaged lettuce, and just one lonely, wilted bunch of cilantro. – New York Times

Russia is open to listening to new proposals on how to reach a settlement on the Ukraine conflict, a senior Russian diplomat said, ​but any proposals should reflect the “realities on the ground”. – Reuters

A bid by ousted Ukrainian defence minister Mykhailo Fedorov to broaden a political fight with President Volodymyr Zelenskiy by calling for wartime elections appears to have backfired, failing to ​win over protesters who had demanded his return. – Reuters

President Vladimir Putin inspected on Thursday the open sarcophagus of medieval warrior prince Dmitry Donskoy, whose remains were ​recently uncovered during restoration work at Moscow’s Cathedral of ‌the Archangel. – Reuters

A dual Russian-Australian citizen was charged on Friday by the Australian ​Federal Police of foreign interference for trying ‌to give Ukrainian military information to people he believed were linked to Russian intelligence. – Reuters

Russia conducted a rare missile exercise involving naval vessels and a land-based launcher near islands in its Far East that are also claimed by Japan, adding to recent friction between the two nations. – Bloomberg

A new wave of North Korean troops, already numbering 8,500 in Russia, contains a drone unit that could attack targets inside Ukraine, according to a senior Ukrainian intelligence official. – CNN

“Independence means something very special for Ukrainian people,” Ukrainian Ambassador to Israel Yevgen Korniychuk told The Jerusalem Post ahead of the August 24, 35th Ukrainian Independence Day. – Jerusalem Post

Amy Knight writes: Mr. Putin’s Federal Security Service arrests and imprisons ordinary Russians for expressing even small signs of opposition to the war. A Russian court on Monday sentenced Yabloko leader Lev Shlosberg to 11 years in prison for speaking out against the war. But similar reprisals against high-level officials close to the Kremlin could backfire and arouse even more elite discontent. While Mr. Klepach will doubtless accept his resignation quietly, he has spread his bold message to those who matter. – Wall Street Journal

Ani Chkhikvadze writes: Fedorov, a popular reformer credited with modernizing Ukraine’s government and expanding its military drone program, had served as one of President Volodymyr Zelensky’s most prominent ministers before his dismissal last month. […] Fedorov stopped short of demanding an immediate vote or proposing a timetable. Instead, he called for a mechanism that would allow Ukrainians to judge the record of those governing them. He also criticized corruption, bureaucratic inertia, and the concentration of power, arguing that wartime authority must be accompanied by accountability. – Washington Examiner

Yemen

Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels said on Thursday that they targeted an airport and a facility belonging to state-owned oil giant Aramco in Saudi Arabia’s southern Najran region, near the Yemeni border. – Agence France-Presse

Alexandra Stark writes: While the United States looks to wind down the war with Iran, the Houthis are threatening to resume their war in Yemen, which would likely draw in Saudi Arabia, menace the global oil trade and keep the region unstable. It will be difficult to de-escalate regional tensions without addressing the Houthis’ threat directly, rather than assuming it can be resolved by dealing with their supposed boss, Iran. At the same time, no one should assume that a deal with Iran will bind what the Houthis do next. The international community should confront them as a pragmatic and dangerous actor making decisions in their own self-interest. – New York Times

Korean Peninsula

President Trump wants to meet Kim Jong Un again. But landing another face-to-face exchange will take convincing a North Korean leader who has spurned U.S. outreach in recent years. – Wall Street Journal

For years, the U.S. and South Korea militaries have participated in one of the largest military exercises in the world, with thousands of troops from both countries preparing for possible North Korea aggression. – New York Times

The U.S. and South Korean militaries were wrapping up their annual drills six days earlier than initially scheduled on Friday in a conciliatory gesture toward North Korea, though the North said the step isn’t enough to convince it to return to talks. – Associated Press

South Korea’s presidential office ​on Friday called ‌on North Korea to stop “unnecessary slander” and ​move forward ​together for peace on ⁠the Korean Peninsula, ​according to South ​Korean media reports. – Reuters

South Korea plans to create a new fund to channel tax windfalls from the country’s semiconductor boom into supporting younger generations and ​invest in future growth industries such as artificial intelligence, the budget ‌ministry said on Friday. – Reuters 

North Korea’s Kim Yo Jong, sister of leader Kim Jong Un, said on ​Thursday South Korean President Lee Jae Myung’s reaction to a U.S. move ‌to reduce joint drills with Seoul amounted to “double-dealing remarks” that revealed uneasiness and impatience, KCNA reported. – Reuters

South Korea’s presidential office condemned North ‌Korea’s launch of more than 10 short-range ballistic missiles on Thursday and ordered its military to maintain full readiness during ongoing joint exercises with the United States. – Reuters

South Asia

Imran Khan, Pakistan’s former prime minister, was briefly transferred on Friday to a hospital in Islamabad, the capital, a win for his supporters in their prolonged legal battle over his medical treatment. – New York Times

Jailed former Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan would not confront the military or army chief Asim Munir if freed, one of his closest aides told Reuters, portraying Munir as able to extend a “healing ​hand” after a legal breakthrough this week. – Reuters 

Two U.N. staff members detained by ​authorities in Afghanistan were released ‌on Thursday in good health, U.N. spokesperson Stephane Dujarric told a press briefing. – Reuters

Bangladeshi lawmakers elected veteran Bangladesh Nationalist Party leader Mirza Fakhrul ‌Islam Alamgir as the country’s new president on Thursday, making the longtime opposition figure the head of state after his party came to power in a major political transition. – Reuters

India’s top court has ordered a probe into police action against students during last month’s youth demonstrations, which led a minister to resign from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s cabinet. – Bloomberg

Andy Mukherjee writes: For Washington, the takeaway is equally obvious. Even before UPI, Indians didn’t really flash their Visa or Mastercard debit cards to pay shopkeepers. The use of American plastic was either for credit — or at the ATM. Siding with legacy card networks to accuse India of “creating a non-level playing field” is going to stand in the way of genuine reform by making even a pragmatic fix hard to defend, especially if it gets played up as a capitulation to US interests. Walmart and Google won’t say no if a part of the fee gets kicked up to them, but they’re in the game for consumer data. It’s the local players, who’re trying to do innovative things with merchant payments, that badly need to make some money. – Bloomberg

Europe

Romania said it deployed two F-16 jet fighters to destroy a Russia-launched explosive marine drone that threatened hundreds of lives near one of its gas platforms. – Wall Street Journal

Viktor Orban, the prime minister of Hungary for 16 years until his humiliating defeat in an April election, was never a despot, but his downfall has still opened his long sealed inner sanctum to the public gaze. – New York Times

Norway expanded on Thursday a recently created military brigade headquartered in the Arctic, the latest move by a NATO nation to boost ​its defence footprint in the wake of the Ukraine war. – Reuters 

Serbia has turned to Russia for help in ‌fighting wildfires because of a lack of available planes from the European Union, its interior ministry said. – Reuters

For weeks, migrants in the Spanish territory of Ceuta had gathered on a beach away from the city center, sleeping on cardboard sheets, under reed huts and guarding their few possessions in tattered plastic bags. – Associated Press

A fisherman disembarked from his boat in a small harbor on Lake Velence in Hungary last week, trudging up the dock plank that had become extremely steep as the water receded to record lows. – Associated Press

A Croatian judge on Thursday ordered the detention of a Ukrainian man who is wanted in Germany in connection with the 2022 undersea explosions that damaged the Nord Stream gas pipelines, his lawyer said. – Associated Press

A plebiscite on making Switzerland’s traditional neutrality stricter is likely to be rejected by the country’s voters, according to a poll ahead of the Sept. 27 ballot measure. – Bloomberg

French police stopped more than 4,300 migrants from reaching UK shores aboard small boats in the first three months of a new deal between the two countries, the Home Office said, as it seeks to demonstrate headway in cracking down on irregular crossings. – Bloomberg

German Finance Minister Lars Klingbeil accused China of flouting global trade rules and said the government in Berlin is likely to adopt a “firmer stance” in its engagement with the world’s second-largest economy. – Bloomberg

We are now one year away from the latest possible date — Aug. 22, 2027 — that Spain can hold a general election. For embattled Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, it looks like it’s going to be a bruising ride to get that far. – Politico

The United States government’s $40 trillion debt pile is rapidly becoming everybody’s problem. […] That’s spilling over into financial markets in Europe, too, because European governments have to compete with Washington for the global pool of savings. And that competition has gotten a lot stiffer this year as U.S. tech giants have borrowed hundreds of billions of dollars in pursuit of artificial intelligence-related riches. – Politico

The human rights of people held in Italy’s migrant detention hubs in Albania are not being protected, Amnesty International said as it warned the EU to reconsider the use of return hubs. – Politico

Editorial: That said, the EU does impose some genuinely excessive burdens. Instead of engaging in a race to the bottom, it should focus on removing them. For one, its banks face myriad confusing and overlapping capital rules. Demanding a prudent amount of simple, automatically loss-absorbing equity — instead of inadequate synthetic or hybrid substitutes — would render them much better prepared for whatever shocks the US might deliver. Also, the EU’s regulatory fragmentation hinders the creation of banks with the scale to compete with juggernauts like JPMorgan Chase & Co. and deploy money to its best uses throughout the region. Such pan-European institutions won’t emerge unless national leaders set aside their parochial interests and complete the EU’s banking union. – Bloomberg

The Americas

President Trump suggested a revival of the long-contested Keystone XL oil pipeline could be in the cards when he said the U.S. is close to reaching a trade deal with Canada to avert new tariffs. Pipeline developers are already piecing together an alternative to the scuttled Keystone expansion. – Wall Street Journal

Canada’s minister in charge of U.S. trade said Ottawa and Washington are “very close” to finalizing an agreement. Dominic LeBlanc made the remarks to Canadian reporters Thursday in Washington, following a roughly three-hour meeting with senior trade officials in the Trump administration. – Wall Street Journal

The Panama Canal ‌Authority will cap daily transits as of early September as it gears up for a longer-than-usual El Niño season expected to reduce water levels, it said on Thursday, walking back a previous pledge to not limit vessel passage. – Reuters

Guatemala has received around ​2,300 Mexicans deported from the United States so far this year, according to the Guatemalan government, offering fresh details on ‌a Trump administration practice intended to deter migration but opposed by Mexico. – Reuters

The United States tightened sanctions on Cuba on Thursday, blacklisting three officials ​tied to a state-run organization that promotes Cuba’s ties ‌with foreign solidarity activists, along with nine state entities in the metals, mining and construction sectors. – Reuters

People deported ​by the U.S. to Liberia will mostly hail from Latin American countries including Cuba and Venezuela, Liberia’s information minister ‌told Reuters, as authorities received the first deportation flight on Thursday. – Reuters

The U.S. deported more than 160 people to Haiti on Thursday for the first time since the Trump administration won a legal battle to end Temporary Protected Status for some 350,000 Haitians. – Associated Press

U.S. Customs and Border Protection faced scrutiny Thursday after a watchdog group warned that forced labor persists on sugarcane fields in the Dominican Republic, which exports large amounts of sugar and other products to the U.S. – Associated Press

The US Treasury sanctioned a fleet of fishing vessels suspected of smuggling tons of cocaine to Mexico each month, ultimately bound for the US. – Bloomberg

León Krauze writes: Without exposing sources, compromising investigations or violating legal limits on visa records, the State Department could say whether the revocation rests on alleged criminal conduct, a security assessment, immigration-related concerns or a discretionary foreign-policy judgment. Such clarity would not end the accusations of interventionism. But it would make them harder to sustain. For the bilateral relationship, clarity and candor are preferable to insinuation. And for Mexico’s public debate, few things would be more useful than an honest accounting of what lies behind the dynastic architecture of a hegemonic party that is accumulating ever-greater power in the United States’ most important trading partner. – Washington Post

United States

Editorial: Other rulings? The case upholding state laws to protect girls’ sports (West Virginia v. B.P.J.) was supported by 65% of respondents. Sixty-one percent favored the holding that it violates the Second Amendment to ban marijuana users from owning guns (U.S. v. Hemani). The decision to get race out of redistricting (Louisiana v. Callais) had 53% support. Most Americans don’t follow the Supreme Court closely—33% in the Marquette poll said they’d “never heard of” Chief Justice John Roberts—so such survey results always have to be taken for what they’re worth. Still, it sure doesn’t seem as if the Justices are widely out of step with the country. What that looks like is a partisan smear. – Wall Street Journal

Editorial: The press is playing up the $40 trillion milestone and rising interest rates to scare Republicans off further tax cuts to give the economy a supply-side boost. And to justify tax increases when Democrats next control Congress. President Trump’s advisers are reportedly noodling the good idea of adjusting capital gains for inflation. But the policy answer on the debt is spending restraint, and one reason yields on long-term Treasurys might be going up is that investors have concluded that neither party intends to quit the double cheeseburgers. – Wall Street Journal

Tevi Troy writes: What’s happening in New York is about more than one mayor running an administration oddly focused on demonizing Israel. The atmosphere is changing the character of what was once America’s most Jewish city and making it simply another place. It feels to many New York Jews as if something is being taken away, an atypical feeling in the American Jewish experience. In this period before Rosh Hashana, the daily shofar blasts are supposed to get Jews thinking about what they have done wrong in the past year and how they could be better in the next. This year that sound is also having them look to the city that has long been the center of American Jewish life and hoping against hope that it too can be better in the year ahead. – Wall Street Journal

Defense

Ever since President Trump’s return to office, America’s allies have been fretting about Washington’s intentions. Now, after the inconclusive war against Iran has eroded U.S. weapons stockpiles and laid bare the limits of American hard power, they also worry about American capabilities. – Wall Street Journal

The Asia-based USS George Washington aircraft carrier is now operating in the Middle East, the U.S. military said Thursday, relieving a long-deployed carrier following reports of mental health challenges and supply shortages aboard while it was supporting the Iran war. – Associated Press

A U.S. Air Force flight enroute to Antarctica turned around to New Zealand after being notified of “potentially hazardous” space activity this week. – Defense News

The U.S. Department of State approved a possible $4.5 billion Foreign Military Sale to Qatar for the purchase of aerial refueling aircraft and related equipment. – Defense News

The U.S. Navy is leading a multinational effort to develop a new version of the Evolved SeaSparrow air defense missile. The goal is to create a variant of the SeaSparrow that can be used by the 12 nations in the NATO SeaSparrow Project Office consortium, or NSPO, according to the Navy Sources Sought notice. The deadline is Oct. 19. – Defense News

More than 750 Americans have been wounded in the United States’ war with Iran, according to the Department of Defense (DOD). The human toll of the conflict comes as its financial cost increases, with the Pentagon pinning the direct cost of the military campaign at $37.5 billion. – Military.com

The Marine Corps is fielding tracked robots that crawl the seabed, transit the surf zone, and hunt mines and unexploded ordnance on the beach itself. The Bayonet Autonomous Underwater Ground Vehicles give explosive ordnance disposal teams a way to survey and clear the most dangerous stretch of the approach without first putting Marines in the water. – Military.com

The Defense Innovation Unit has a new, specialized team that’s hustling to clear major constraints associated with transitioning proven commercial technologies directly into the military services. – DefenseScoop

Hal Brands writes: Trump has, to his credit, proposed major hikes to the US military budget and emergency measures to rebuild weapons stocks. Yet even if those proposals are enacted, the results may not materialize for several nerve-wracking years. In 2022, Michael Beckley and I suggested that America would enter a danger zone in the late 2020s, as the risk of confrontation with China became acute. The late 2020s are here. America has entered a danger zone of global dimensions. It may be stuck there through Trump’s presidency and beyond. – Bloomberg

Doug Beck writes: Fixing the military’s procurement and adoption systems cannot, of course, guarantee that Washington will deter U.S. adversaries or win a major conflict. But the current administration and Congress have a historic opportunity to work with an eager tech sector in support of the best warriors in the world, to bring real change right now, and to make the United States and the world much safer in doing so. No matter where individual Americans stand on the political spectrum, and no matter how different their views on domestic or foreign policy choices, none can afford for the nation to miss that chance. – Foreign Affairs