Fdd's overnight brief

Israel

Five Western countries, including the U.K. and Canada, imposed a range of sanctions against two senior far-right Israeli cabinet members on Tuesday, saying they incited violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, a move that highlights the growing divide between Israel and some of its Western allies. – Wall Street Journal

Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority president, has called for Hamas to “hand over its weapons,” immediately free all hostages and cease ruling Gaza, the French presidency said on Tuesday after receiving a letter from him. – New York Times

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Tuesday that there had been “significant progress” in efforts to secure the release of the remaining hostages in Gaza, but that it was “too soon” to raise hopes that a deal would be reached. – Reuters

The Trump administration imposed sanctions on a leading Palestinian human rights organization as well as five charity groups in the Middle East and Europe on Tuesday, accusing them of supporting Palestinian militants including Hamas. – Reuters

Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich ordered on Tuesday the cancellation of a waiver on cooperation between Israeli and Palestinian banks, in a move that puts the Palestinian banking system at risk. – Reuters

The Israeli military said on Tuesday that a missile launched from Yemen toward Israel had “most likely” been intercepted, hours after Israel deployed its navy to hit targets in the Yemeni Red Sea port of Hodeidah. – Reuters

The US no longer wholeheartedly endorses an independent state for Palestinians, Washington’s ambassador to Israel said, adding that if one were to be formed it could be elsewhere in the region rather than the West Bank. – Bloomberg

US President Donald Trump told Prime Minister Benjamin to end the war in Gaza and to remove the option of striking Iran, N12 reported on Tuesday. – Jerusalem Post

A 13-year-old boy from Tel Aviv was arrested by Israel Police and Shin Bet for allegedly carrying out tasks on behalf of Iran. During interrogations, the teen said that Iranian operatives contacted him on the Telegram app and offered him money for a small number of tasks. – Jerusalem Post

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu approved multimillion-dollar defense deals between Israel’s top defense companies and Qatar, according to a Tuesday report from the Walla news outlet. Netanyahu denied the report hours later as “fake news.” – Times of Israel

Editorial: There are those that would say, “What can you expect? This is Ben-Gvir.” But this is a man that, personality and past aside, has a job to do. It is on that metric that we judge him, and it is on that metric that he is, so far, failing. As rumors of elections circulate, let this serve as a cry and a wake-up call to our elected officials of what they were elected to do and where their failures lie, following and unrelated to the October 7 massacre. – Jerusalem Post

Patrick Desbois writes: If terrorists remain nameless and faceless, we cannot fight them. And we cannot afford for Oct. 7 denialism or minimization to spread as Holocaust denial and minimization have spread. The sole prophylactic is hard evidence. Otherwise, we’ll be forced to confront the same challenges we do with the Holocaust, piecing together evidence 80 years later. The victims — and the world — deserve better. – Washington Post

Oleg Ivanov writes: We must join together to call on our elected officials and community leaders to condemn those who blame Israel for defending themselves against the crimes committed by Hamas and its allies against Jews and others on October 7 and since. Silence is not an option, because what we are seeing now is the push to globalize the violent “intifada.” If we don’t put an end to it together, its flames will only continue to spread. – Jerusalem Post

Russia and Ukraine

Moscow’s chief negotiator in peace talks with Kyiv was a lead architect of the historical revisionism that drove Russia to invade Ukraine. Now, Vladimir Medinsky is drawing on his view of history again as he tries to convince Ukraine that it would be better off unwinding its integration with the West and embracing Moscow’s terms for peace. – Wall Street Journal

A massive overnight drone and missile attack on Ukraine damaged a maternity hospital in the southern port city of Odessa and left buildings in the nation’s capital smoking and smoldering on Tuesday. – Washington Post

Russian opposition politician Lev Shlosberg was arrested on Tuesday and charged with discrediting the Russian army after describing the Ukraine war as a game of “bloody chess”, his party said. – Reuters

Ukraine’s overnight drone strikes have forced a temporary suspension of flights in all airports serving Moscow and the country’s second-largest city St. Petersburg, but caused no damage, Russian officials reported on Tuesday. – Reuters

Ukraine on Tuesday returned a new group of prisoners of war as part of an earlier agreement with Russia, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said. – Reuters

Middle East & North Africa

An Istanbul court has issued an arrest warrant for the owner of a television channel aligned with Turkey’s main opposition party on charges of bid-rigging, the prosecutor’s office said late on Tuesday. – Reuters

Algerian authorities have launched a counterterrorism investigation after a man had set himself on fire, an act investigators suspect was part of coordinated plot with links abroad, prosecutors said Tuesday. – Agence France-Presse

Hundreds of pro-Palestinian activists taking part in a convoy crossed the Tunisian border on Tuesday into Libya, aiming to keep heading eastwards until they break Israel’s blockade on the Palestinian territory, organizers said. – Agence France-Presse

Qatar has been actively working to advance a hostage deal and identify wording that could resolve questions about the final day of a hostage deal, sources familiar with the details told The Jerusalem Post on Tuesday. – Jerusalem Post

A Hezbollah operative and a member of an allied terror group, identified by Lebanese authorities as a father and son, were killed in an Israeli drone strike in a southern Lebanese village on Tuesday, the military said. – Times of Israel

Efraim Inbar writes: This is not just a regional contest: Turkey supported Muslim Pakistan (a protégé of China) against India. Erdogan has expressed his desire to acquire nuclear weapons and did not refrain from supporting ISIS and Hamas. The Middle East continues to pose a dual threat: nuclear proliferation and Islamist terrorism. As Shi’ite Iran weakens, it is being replaced by a radical Sunni alliance. Democracies must wake up to this new danger. – Jerusalem Post

Mona Yacoubian writes: Efforts by U.S. Special Envoy Steve Witkoff—charged with negotiating on both Gaza and Iran, among other conflicts—are central to a recalibrated Middle East policy. Yet spoilers abound. Both state and nonstate actors who seek to address these challenges primarily through violence could derail diplomacy. However, successful, U.S. negotiations on both Gaza and Iran—an admittedly tall order—could pave the way for a new Middle East and a recalibrated U.S. approach to the region. – Center for Strategic and International Studies

China

China said Tuesday that it would extend a yearlong probe into pork imports from the European Union, as Beijing seeks to bolster ties with the 27-member bloc amid heightened trade tensions with the U.S. – Wall Street Journal

U.S. and Chinese negotiators wrapped up two days of intense talks here with what they said was a framework to get their trade truce back on track and ratchet down tensions between the two biggest economies. – Wall Street Journal

The two Chinese aircraft carriers spotted conducting simultaneous operations in the Pacific for the first time send a political message about the country’s “expansionist” aims, Taiwan Defence Minister Wellington Koo said on Wednesday. – Reuters

China’s commerce minister said China and Britain should engage in dialogue and expand cooperation in sustainability, digital development, green initiatives and finance, in a commerce ministry statement published on Tuesday. – Reuters

Karishma Vaswani writes: Beijing should be able to understand what happens when politicians need to cater to public pressure. Neither side has the upper hand to make the other come away an obvious loser. At the most, the London talks might have achieved just enough to help shape the future on a less-hostile basis. That in itself is progress — but it would be a mistake to call this moment a reset. – Bloomberg

Al Mauroni and Glenn Cross write: China’s conventional and nuclear strength undercut arguments for deterrence by retaliation, and U.S. unwillingness to invest in military biodefense and public health undercuts arguments for deterrence by denial. […] These historical scenarios have no application to modern biological warfare. Policymakers and military planners today must collectively re-examine the biological weapons threat and take steps to move away from 20th-century threat models for biological defense. – War on Rocks

Asia

Taipei prosecutors indicted four people on Tuesday suspected of spying for China in a case that reached Taiwan’s presidential office, seeking jail terms of more than 18 years. – Reuters

Philippine senators on Tuesday voted to return an impeachment case against Vice President Sara Duterte to the lower house to clarify its constitutionality, in a surprise move just hours after convening a trial that could end her political career. – Reuters

The United States should treat Taiwan like a partner and not an adversary, remove new and proposed tariffs, restore high-level cabinet visits and agree a double taxation deal, the American Chamber of Commerce in Taiwan said on Tuesday. – Reuters

Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said condemnation by the U.S. and Israel of sanctions imposed on two far-right Israeli cabinet ministers was “predictable”, and that the two men had impeded a two-state solution. – Reuters

A state-of-the-art Japanese warship has arrived in Australia as part of a high-stakes campaign to secure a $6.5 billion contract to build the country’s next fleet of general-purpose frigates. – Associated Press

Samoa will head to the polls on Aug. 29, a half-year earlier than expected, after Prime Minister Fiamē Naomi Mata’afa’s government collapsed following a budget defeat in parliament late last month. – Associated Press

James Kraska and Gavin Logan write: An agreement cannot be completed and if one is adopted, China will not comply. For example, even the members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations now acknowledge that the 20-year effort to negotiate a code of conduct with China has stalled. Despite a looming 2026 deadline, no state is confident of reaching an agreement. The purpose of the code of conduct? To provide greater fidelity on compliance with the rules of the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea. In 2016, an international tribunal composed under the Law of the Sea unanimously determined China was a serial violator of the treaty. – War on Rocks

Africa

Samia Suluhu Hassan, Tanzania’s first female president, came to power as a renowned defender of human rights. She is clinging to it, critics say, by locking up and torturing those who stand in her way. – Wall Street Journal

The United States is promoting a deal that would require Rwanda to pull troops from eastern Congo before the two sides sign a peace agreement, sources say, a condition that is sure to rankle Kigali, which describes Congo-based armed groups as an existential threat. – Reuters

Several areas south of Sudan’s capital Khartoum are at risk of famine, the World Food Programme said on Tuesday, with need on the ground outstripping resources amidst a food aid funding shortfall for war-ravaged Sudanese regions. – Reuters

The Sudanese army accused forces under eastern Libyan military commander Khalifa Haftar of attacking border posts on Tuesday, the first time it has accused its northwestern neighbour of direct involvement in the country’s two-year war. – Reuters

Togo’s President Faure Gnassingbé is facing growing pressure following a government clampdown on protests calling for his resignation over recent changes in the constitution that could effectively keep him in power indefinitely. – Associated Press

United States

The Trump administration is preparing to begin the transfer of potentially thousands of foreigners who are in the United States illegally to the U.S. military base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, starting as early as this week, said U.S. officials familiar with the matter. – Washington Post

A federal appeals court allowed President Donald Trump’s most sweeping tariffs to remain in effect on Tuesday while it reviews a lower-court decision blocking them on grounds that he had exceeded his authority by imposing them. – Reuters

U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on Tuesday criticized Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum for comments that she said encouraged violence at protests in Los Angeles, drawing a rebuke from the Mexican leader, who denied the claims. – Reuters

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass on Tuesday issued a curfew for the city’s downtown following several days of intense protests against ICE raids that saw clashes between demonstrators and law enforcement, widespread vandalism and some looting, particularly during the late night and early morning hours. – Reuters

A Pakistani man was extradited from Canada to the United States on Tuesday to face charges of plotting to carry out an attack on Jews in New York City, the Justice Department said. – Agence France-Presse

An influential group of GOP hawks has launched a behind-the-scenes lobbying offensive pressing President Donald Trump to not only back off his administration’s quest for a nuclear deal with Iran, but greenlight an attack on Tehran by Israel. – Politico

A Portland State University professor who proclaimed “I am Hamas” at a demonstration has been placed on administrative leave pending an internal investigation. – Washington Times

Tom Cotton writes: Further, the Republican budget bill provides a huge funding boost to immigration authorities so they can secure our border and deport criminal illegal aliens out of our country. These ideas are basic common sense, but as was the case five years ago, the Democrats haven’t learned. It isn’t “inflammatory,” as Mr. Newsom claimed, to enforce federal law, stand with law enforcement and protect civilians. It’s necessary to keep the peace. – Wall Street Journal

David Ignatius writes: Yes, of course, we need new bipartisan legislation to resolve the gut issue of how to protect the “dreamers” and other longtime residents who show every day that they want only to be good citizens. But on the way to that day of sweet reason, Democrats need to oppose violence, by anyone — and to help enforce immigration policies that begin with a recognition that it isn’t immoral to have a border. – Washington Post

Joseph Epstein writes: Azerbaijan is located on the very bottleneck between Iran and Russia that crosses the Middle Corridor. Kazakhstan’s location makes it the most feasible country for Chinese products to cross over to Europe. The U.S. must take the Turkic world seriously, and soon — not just in words, but with a presidential visit, sustained investment and a new Silk Road strategy. – The Hill

Defense

Seven Army bases whose names were changed in 2023 because they honored Confederate leaders are all reverting back to their original names, the Army said Tuesday. – Associated Press

The Air Force has cut in half its request to Congress for its signature F-35s, dealing a blow to Lockheed Martin Corp., the top US defense contractor. – Bloomberg

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth pushed back against Democrats’ criticism of the decision to deploy troops to Los Angeles, telling Congress that the Trump administration wants to protect immigration agents and keep demonstrations there from getting out of control. – Bloomberg

After spending the better part of a decade transitioning outdated systems and infrastructure to the cloud, the Air Force agency responsible for providing key weather and environmental inputs for military and intelligence operations is starting to see a silver lining. – Defense News

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Tuesday cast doubt on the future utility of airborne battle management aircraft, particularly the E-7 Wedgetail, and said space-based capabilities represent the future of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. – Defense News

Jon Gruen writes: A second executive order issued last week aims to promote American-made drones. Building true resilience will require expanding domestic production capacity and securing supply chains that are fully independent of adversarial influence. We’re unprepared for the next war, and the next war won’t wait until we’re ready. Drones have changed the game; we need to change our strategy, preparations and laws to match. – Wall Street Journal