Kernow Damo

As Israel cheers sticking a flag on Beaufort Castle, it's Lebanon invasion belies utter failure back on their northern border... Right, so Israel has just planted its flag on top of a nine-hundred-year-old castle in southern Lebanon, and it still couldn't keep the schools open in its own north. That is the whole story in one breath. The Israeli military announced on Sunday that its troops had taken Beaufort Castle, a crusader-era stone fortress on a ridge looking down over both southern Lebanon and northern Israel, and the army's own spokesman, Colonel Avichay Adraee posted the images, and Israel Katz wrapped them in the usual heroic language about another chapter being written at Beaufort. Benjamin Netanyahu called it returning to Beaufort stronger than ever. The defence minister, Israel Katz, made sure the photo of the Israeli flag flying over the castle went everywhere. And on the very same weekend that picture was being passed around as a triumph, as this story currently dominates social media today certainly, towns in northern Israel were closing their schools and shutting their nature parks because Hezbollah was still firing rockets and drones across the border. Netanyahu wanted that castle to be the day the war turned in his favour. What he actually bought was a deeper occupation, a dead soldier, and a northern border still under fire while all the cameras rolled for his latest bit of propaganda. So that is the victory. He went looking for the picture that ends the panic, and the panic was still going off behind the picture, wasn't it? Beaufort Castle sits on a high ridge near the town of Nabatieh, about fourteen kilometres inside Lebanon. It is high ground, the kind of position armies have fought over for a thousand years because whoever holds it can see for miles in every direction.

The Starmer government's determination to see palestine Action sent down appears to now be providing cover for something even more sinister... Right, so a café owner in Manchester went to a police station to pick up devices the police had taken off him in an earlier case, and the police, instead of just handing them back, sat him down and tried to recruit him as a spy. Shams Sadiq, fifty-one years old, owns two cafés in Manchester, is known locally for his pro-Palestine activism, and he says that on the fifteenth of May two officers at Ashton-under-Lyne police station asked to speak to him "man to man," told him they'd been through his devices, told him they knew he was, in their phrase, fully involved with Palestine Action, and then told him he wouldn't be charged in relation to that earlier arrest. No charges on that. Just a favour. They said there were benefits in helping them. He asked what kind, financial? Were they going to pay his taxes? And the answer, more or less, was yes, we can help with things like that. One of them added there were other benefits too. They weren't saying he could go out and commit a serious crime, you understand, they were far too professional for that, but they could turn a blind eye to certain low-level things. So this is the law-and-order government, isn't it? This is the terrorism crackdown. The one that's already blown up in the government's own face in the High Court, though we'll get to that. And it has arrived at the point where the actual mechanism is a copper leaning across a desk offering financial benefits and leniency around low-level offences if you'll grass on your mates.

As Reform's Makerfield candidate cracks up further, Labour and the Greens seem intent on self sabotage. Right, so Reform UK walked into Makerfield looking for blood, and the first body on the floor turned out to be their own candidate. Makerfield is a working-class seat just outside Wigan, in Greater Manchester, an old Labour heartland Reform has spent two years desperate to crack open to prove it can finish Labour off in the north. So they went and picked a local man, Robert Kenyon, a 41-year-old plumber and Wigan councillor, born in the area, exactly the "one of us" pitch Reform loves to run. And within days of his selection his old internet posts came crawling back to bury the campaign. On a rugby league forum he'd written, in his own words, "I'm sexist, sorry but I am," that women "can't referee, drive or give directions." There were posts sneering at women who have abortions, posts about women's bodies, and degrading comments about Carol Vorderman, who turned round and called him a misogynist and an online abuser, in public, by name. The material reported in the press was sexist and homophobic, and Reform still chose to defend him as a straight-talking local candidate. And Reform's answer to all of it? Their MP Danny Kruger went on the radio and called them the "private" comments of "an ordinary man," while a party spokesman waved the whole pile away as "locker room banter" from over a decade ago and sniffed that they "simply don't care about establishment hit jobs." Well how about this instead then Danny – is this a hit job, or just a man woefully out of his depth?

A hidden section of an upcoming US war bill is about to hand Israel the keys to the US defence kingdom and nobody is talking about it Right, so the week most of the American public turned against arming Israel, Congress quietly handed Israel something it has wanted for years and could never get through the front door. Not more rifles. Not another shipment of bombs. A merger. There's a single page buried in the new House defence bill that would fuse the American and Israeli militaries together more tightly than America is fused to any country on Earth, and it was written to slide past you before anyone got to vote on it. It's called Section 224, it sits inside House of Representatives Bill 8800, the new National Defence Authorisation Act, and the man who released it on the 26th of May is the House Armed Services chairman Mike Rogers, the Republican from Alabama. His committee votes on it on the 4th of June, so this coming Thursday, not long to kick up a fuss about in the meantime then? This is very much in the present and the near future, and it isn't a warning about something that might happen one day. It's on the table this week, and what's on the table is Israel getting wired into the machinery of America's next war. Section 224 carries the polite little title "United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative," which is the sort of name you give something precisely so people scroll straight past it.

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.

Sheer lunacy from Trump as his Iran deal continues to implode, now threatening to bomb the mediators on camera! Right, so Trump did not threaten Iran last week. He threatened Oman. That is the tell. Not the bluster, not the sanctions announcement, not the press conference posturing, but the specific, deranged choice of target. When the man who spent months selling himself as the dealmaker who was going to force Tehran to its knees ends up pointing his finger at the Gulf state that has been quietly shuttling messages between Washington and the Iranians, something has gone badly wrong inside the deal, badly enough that he could not keep his fears off camera. So Oman, now apparently going from mediator to potential target according to the tangerine tyrant because there’s no pause in the middle apparently. Bit extreme isn’t it? Oman is a small, wealthy sultanate on the southeastern tip of the Arabian Peninsula that shares a coastline with the Strait of Hormuz, and it has maintained a carefully neutral diplomatic position for decades that makes it useful to everyone and threatening to nobody, which you would think is exactly what you want from the country running your back channel when you are trying to close a deal. It has been the go-between for Iran and the United States for years, most notably during the talks that produced the 2015 nuclear deal. The JCPOA. In this round, following the US-Israeli military assault on Iran, Oman is at the centre of the mediation process again, the channel Washington needs functioning if any agreement is going to land. But of course as you’ve just seen, Trump was asked about reports of an Iran-Oman shipping framework being negotiated for the strait, and rather than deny it or wave it away, he said Oman would "behave" or the United States would "have to blow them up."

Israel’s secret mosque theft plot has leaked, and the one thing they forgot could wreck the whole plan before it even starts. Right, so this past Eid al-Fitr, Israel did something it hadn't done since 1967. It shut Palestinians out of the famous Al-Aqsa Mosque altogether. Barricaded gates, the Old City sealed, worshippers down on prayer mats in the open road outside the walls because they couldn't reach the third-holiest site in Islam on one of the holiest mornings of their year. That was of course back in March. Middle East Eye reported it, Al Jazeera reported it, many other outlets reported it and the official reason given was the "security situation" during the US-Israeli war on Iran. Now hang onto that notion for a minute, because the story being sold now is that all of this is just access and management. It isn't. Sitting above the gates is a reported plan most of those worshippers have never heard of, and the people drawing it up would much rather you kept staring at the checkpoints to gain access than at what they've got on paper in the here and now.

Trump's selling peace from one podium while Smotrich's promising to flatten Beirut from another. One Israeli strike ends the whole deal. Right, so Donald Trump is doing his strange little victory lap about an Iran peace deal that he says is largely negotiated, the Strait of Hormuz reopening on his terms, frozen funds about to move, the whole region apparently lining up to thank him for ending a war he started. And while he is doing that, Benjamin Netanyahu's government has spent the last week threatening to flatten Beirut's southern suburbs, pushing Israeli ground forces beyond the Yellow Line into southern Lebanon, hitting the Qaraoun reservoir area, and producing a finance minister who has reportedly said that for every explosive drone fired at Israel, ten buildings in Beirut should fall. Bezalel Smotrich, the man saying that, is not some fringe lunatic shouting from a hilltop. He sits in cabinet. He votes on budgets. He gets briefings. And what he has just done, with one ugly sentence, is take Trump's deal and stick a bomb under it. Because Iran's whole position right now, the position being relayed through figures such as Mohammad Marandi, the Iranian academic close to the Tehran negotiation team, and through Hezbollah's political council member Ghaleb Abu Zeinab, is that Lebanon is part of the deal. An Israeli attack on Beirut or the Dahiyeh, the southern suburb that has functioned as Hezbollah's political and operational heartland for decades, destroys the negotiation path. That is not commentary from people on the outside. That is the condition being placed on the table by people inside the room. Netanyahu's coalition has just publicly volunteered to do the one thing that wrecks Trump's whole settlement. Cracking diplomatic work from the gang in Tel Aviv. Really inspired stuff.