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THE WORLD SAYS NO
Israel’s Housing Ministry issued tenders this week for more than 1,200 housing units in the E1 settlement area near Jerusalem, advancing a plan first approved last August that critics say would make a Palestinian state geographically impossible. The project would create a continuous bloc of Jewish settlement from East Jerusalem into the West Bank, splitting the territory into a northern and southern half and cutting occupied East Jerusalem off from the rest of what Palestinians hope will become their future state.
The international response was immediate and broad. Al Jazeera correspondent Nida Ibrahim, reporting from Hizma in the West Bank as the tenders were issued, said the project would be the “last nail in the coffin” for any two-state solution if it goes ahead as planned. Seven countries, including four EU member states plus the UK, Canada, and Norway, issued a joint statement Thursday demanding Israel “retract the plans immediately.” That statement built on a warning a larger group of Western countries, including Canada, Australia, and Germany, had already issued in May, cautioning companies against participating in E1 construction due to “legal and reputational consequences.” UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy summoned Israel’s charge d’affaires. UN Secretary-General António Guterres said he was gravely concerned and called on Israel to halt the plan in line with a 2024 International Court of Justice advisory opinion. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the UAE, Qatar, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Türkiye separately condemned the move.
The Palestinian Authority’s own Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission warned the plan would confine Palestinians in the West Bank to “disconnected enclaves surrounded by settlements.” Peace Now, the Israeli settlement watchdog, noted that bids are due one week before Israel’s October elections, calling it “a last-minute maneuver” tied to the government’s political calendar.
The United States did not join the condemnations. A State Department spokesperson said only that “a stable West Bank keeps Israel secure,” and referred further questions to the Israeli government. That response has drawn bipartisan criticism at home. Dozens of House Democrats wrote to Secretary of State Marco Rubio this year urging him to use “every diplomatic tool at your disposal” to halt the process before any bids are awarded, warning that the window for meaningful intervention was closing. Trump has separately stated he does not support Israel formally annexing the West Bank, a position the White House reiterated earlier this year, though that position has not translated into opposition to E1 specifically.
🇺🇸 What American readers need to know: At least a dozen countries across Europe, the Gulf, and Asia have condemned this settlement plan as a move that would kill any remaining chance of a Palestinian state. The Trump administration’s own State Department has declined to do the same, calling the same plan consistent with its goals for regional peace.
Sources: CNN (US — tender detail, Peace Now “last-minute maneuver” quote, election-timing detail, May Western-country warning); Bloomberg (US — seven-country joint statement, Lammy detail); Al Jazeera (Qatar, state-funded/editorially independent — Gulf and Asian state condemnations, displacement context); Al Jazeera via Yahoo News Canada (Qatar, state-funded/editorially independent — Ibrahim’s on-the-ground quote from Hizma, CRRC “disconnected enclaves” quote); UN News (UN, primary source — Guterres statement, ICJ advisory opinion reference); The Times of Israel (Israel, liveblog — House Democrats’ letter, “window for meaningful intervention” detail); CNN via KRDO (US — Egyptian government statement)
FORTY TRILLION
Total US public debt surpassed $40 trillion for the first time in history, the Treasury Department reported Wednesday, with the figure standing at $40.05 trillion as of Tuesday’s close. The milestone arrived months earlier than the Congressional Budget Office’s own forecast of $39.4 trillion by the end of the fiscal year, and just five months after the debt crossed $39 trillion in March.
Part of the acceleration traces to Trump’s own tariffs. Many of them were collected illegally, and after the Supreme Court struck them down earlier this year, the Treasury was required to refund more than $100 billion in import taxes it had no legal right to keep, widening the deficit further. July’s monthly deficit alone reached $432.3 billion, the highest since March 2021, and the fiscal year’s shortfall now stands near $1.8 trillion.
Under his current term, the debt has grown by $3.8 trillion since January 2025. Interest payments on the debt now exceed the entire national defense budget. The war with Iran has added its own pressure, costing $37.5 billion in military spending and 18 American service members’ lives over nearly six months, while Congress separately passed a record $1.15 trillion Pentagon funding bill in July. The Department of Government Efficiency’s promised federal savings, meanwhile, have proven difficult to verify independently, even as DOGE cut an estimated 250,000 to 350,000 federal jobs.
Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, called the trajectory “staggering,” noting it took nearly 200 years for the debt to reach $1 trillion for the first time, in 1981, and now doubles roughly every decade. Margaret Spellings, president of the Bipartisan Policy Center, said the country is “speeding toward a cliff and refusing to turn the wheel.” A White House spokesman placed blame on the prior administration’s fiscal record. Democratic Rep. Ted Lieu said Trump had promised to cut the debt and instead “ran it up to $40 trillion while he and his family made billions.”
🇺🇸 What American readers need to know: The debt has grown by $3.8 trillion since Trump’s current term began in January 2025, and now sits at roughly $117,000 for every American. Interest payments alone now cost more than the entire US military budget, and neither party in Washington has shown any sign of changing course.
Sources: Bloomberg (US — $40.05 trillion figure, Treasury release detail); CNBC (US — July deficit figure, year-to-date shortfall, decade-over-decade comparison); Al Jazeera (Qatar, state-funded/editorially independent — 2017 baseline figure, per-capita debt calculation, term-specific growth figure); Spectrum News (US — MacGuineas quote, Spellings quote); Gulf Today via AFP (UAE — Iran war cost figures, defense bill detail, Lieu quote); NPR (US — tariff refund detail, White House spokesman statement)
THE FIFTH HANGING
Iran executed 21-year-old Ghaem Hosseini at dawn Thursday in Isfahan’s central prison, the fifth person put to death in a case Iran’s own judiciary says stems from a single day of protests in January. The execution defied a direct appeal from the UN Special Rapporteur on Iran, who had called for a halt to the killings weeks earlier.
Iranian state media identified Hosseini only as a “foreign national.” Iran Human Rights, a Norway-based rights group, identified him as Afghan, the second Afghan national executed in the same case; his cousin, Gol Mohammad Mohammadi, was among four defendants already executed in July. Iranian authorities accused Hosseini of involvement in the deaths of four police officers during protests at Isfahan’s Alikhani Square on January 8, along with damaging a body and helping burn a charity building. Iran Human Rights disputes that account, saying Iran’s own case file accuses Hosseini only of kicking an officer’s body and does not claim he caused any of the four deaths.
Hosseini’s case fits a much larger, longer-running pattern that outlets covering Afghanistan and the region have tracked for years: Iran executing Afghan nationals at a sharply accelerating rate. Sixteen Afghans were executed in Iran in 2022. That rose to 25 in 2023, then to at least 80 in 2024, according to Iran Human Rights. Afghan nationals now make up roughly 95 percent of foreign inmates in Iranian prisons. Rights groups attribute the disproportionate toll partly to the fact that Iran does not recognize Afghanistan’s Taliban government, leaving Afghan nationals facing execution with no consular protection at all. Iran Human Rights director Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam has said Afghan nationals are “amongst the weakest segments of society and the least costly victims” of Iran’s use of capital punishment.
Hosseini’s execution brings to 28 the number of people Iran has put to death in connection with the January protests since March 19, according to Iran Human Rights. Twelve people were originally sentenced to death in the Alikhani Square case alone; seven remain at risk. Defendants in the case were denied the right to choose their own lawyers and were tried instead with court-appointed attorneys selected by the judiciary, according to multiple rights organizations tracking the case.
🇺🇸 What American readers need to know: Iran has now executed 28 people connected to a single day of protest since March, defying direct UN appeals to stop. Hosseini’s case also sits inside a much bigger, years-long pattern of Iran executing Afghan nationals at a rising rate, in part because they have no government able to protect them. Almost none of this has drawn meaningful American attention.
Sources: France 24 (France, public broadcaster — Iran Human Rights identification, Mizan’s official charges); Iran International (opposition-aligned, Saudi-connected funding — Supreme Court appeal detail, moharebeh charge, 12-defendant case total); Iran Human Rights (Norway-based rights group, primary source — 28-executions-since-March figure, execution location, prior co-defendant timeline); Iran Human Rights statement (Norway-based rights group, primary source — Afghan-execution year-over-year figures, Amiry-Moghaddam “weakest segments” quote, 95-percent foreign-inmate figure); IranWire (Iran-focused independent outlet — Mizan News Agency detail, judicial proceeding description); NCRI (Iranian opposition group, flag prominently — UN Special Rapporteur Mai Sato appeal date and detail, used only for the appeal’s documented timing, independently corroborated by Iran Human Rights’ own tracking)
ANKARA CALLS IT GENOCIDE
Israel’s confrontation with Syria escalated on two separate fronts this week, not one. Tuesday’s airstrikes on the Abu al-Duhur airbase, reported in this space Wednesday night, were followed roughly 36 hours later by a ground incursion. More than 100 Israeli soldiers and 15 vehicles entered a town in Syria’s Quneitra province, near the occupied Golan Heights, abducting two people, according to Syrian state television. Israeli army Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir personally visited troops in the area the same day, meeting with reserve forces and receiving a security briefing.
The incursion drew condemnation from Ankara, Cairo, Doha, and Riyadh, and concern from Washington itself. Damascus-based security analyst Ahmed Al-Kinani told The Washington Times that Israel is now running two distinct operations at once, airstrikes targeting strategic weapons sites and ground incursions in the south, and that the incursions “will continue until there are real negotiations to put an end to the Israeli aggression.”
Syria formally protested the incursions in writing. In letters to the UN and UN Security Council Tuesday evening, Damascus said continued Israeli attacks, incursions, and kidnappings “undermine stabilization efforts and threaten the region with further tensions,” and demanded Israel fully withdraw from territory it has entered since Assad’s fall in December 2024. Separately, the UN’s own Disengagement Observer Force sent a team to tour Al-Rafid, in southern Quneitra, to document conditions and the effects of repeated Israeli incursions directly from residents.
Türkiye’s presidency escalated its own rhetoric against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sharply Thursday, with senior communications official Burhanettin Duran directly accusing him of trying to drag the region into a wider war. The statement, delivered through Türkiye’s state-run Anadolu Agency, went well beyond the diplomatic language Ankara used earlier in the week.
Duran said Netanyahu’s threats against Türkiye and Syria reflected his international isolation and political fears, and that Ankara would keep opposing “the destabilizing activities of the genocidal Netanyahu” while standing with Syria. Asked whether the rhetoric might signal Israel expanding hostilities to include Türkiye directly, Duran said Ankara had enough experience not to be drawn into that kind of provocation, and suggested Netanyahu’s accusations were tied to Israel’s October 27 elections rather than genuine security concerns.
The exchange traces back to Netanyahu’s own office, which said this week that Syria had been “on the verge” of violating an agreed security arrangement by allowing Turkish forces to deploy at Abu al-Duhur, the base Israel struck Tuesday. Türkiye’s presidency dismissed that justification as an attempt to legitimize what it called Israel’s unlawful airstrikes, and said it would continue military cooperation with Syria’s government regardless of Israeli objections. Syria’s own foreign ministry has separately hosted Turkish counterpart officials this month to sign a formal military cooperation agreement.
🇺🇸 What American readers need to know: This is no longer just a war of words. Israel has struck an airbase, sent ground troops into Syrian territory, and drawn accusations of genocide from a NATO member’s own government, all inside a single week. This is a real diplomatic and military rupture between two countries Washington relies on in the region, and it’s escalating on more than one front at once.
Sources: The Washington Times (US — Quneitra incursion detail, 100-soldier figure, 36-hour timeline, Al-Kinani quote, Ankara/Cairo/Doha/Riyadh condemnation); Anadolu Agency (Türkiye, state-affiliated — independent confirmation via Syrian state TV of 100+ personnel and 15 vehicles, abduction detail, Zamir visit, UNDOF tour, Syria’s UN Security Council letters); Ynetnews (Israel — Duran’s full “genocidal” quote, election-timing framing, “occupationist approach” detail); Türkiye Today (Türkiye — Duran’s “trap” framing, state-tradition detail); Anadolu Agency (Türkiye, state-affiliated — original Duran statement, standing-with-Syria language); The Jerusalem Post (Israel, centre-right — Netanyahu office’s original “status quo” justification, deployment timeline); SANA via Türkiye’s Anadolu Agency (Syria, state media — used only for confirming Duran’s remarks were made to Anadolu, independently corroborated by Ynetnews and Türkiye Today)
NUMBERS AT PUBLICATION
🇮🇷 Iran: 3,636 killed
🇱🇧 Lebanon: 4,333 killed
🇮🇱 Israel: 1,200+ killed, ~5,400 wounded (includes 472 killed, 3,004 wounded in Gaza)
🇺🇸 US military: 18 killed, 687 wounded
🇵🇸 Gaza: 73,399+ Palestinians killed, 174,310 wounded
🛢️ Brent crude: $93.13/barrel
⛽ US gas: $4.11/gallon
Sources: HRANA (Iran), Lebanon MOPH, INSS (Israel), DCAS (US, disputed — see Aug 4 story), OCHA/Haaretz (Gaza), OilPrice.com, AAA.
“Whenever the people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government.” — Thomas Jefferson, 1789
