Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu canceled his schedule, including his appearance at his trial, for the remainder of the day after being diagnosed with bronchitis, the Prime Minister's Office confirmed on Wednesday.

During the trial that morning, Netanyahu had complained of a cough and a cold during cross-examination in the Tel Aviv District Court, in which judges agreed to his request to delay the hearing.

At the recommendation of his doctor, Netanyahu will spend the day resting at home, the PMO stated.

The hearing was set to end at 4:30 pm, but the prime minister had requested to testify for only a short period more.

The prime minister came under fire for exposing the allegedly poor health of newly released hostages who are undergoing rehabilitation at hospitals in Israel's center.

Western support for a two-state solution was never intended to create Palestinian statehood — it was meant to justify the existence of the Palestinian Authority. Now that the Western consensus is shifting, so are thoughts about the need for the PA.

Total and lasting "forever" peace. Not just for Palestine, but the entire Middle East.

That's what U.S. President Donald Trump promised at the signing of the Gaza ceasefire deal in Egypt last week. One way the plan differs from previous incarnations of the "peace process" is that it abandons the framework of the two-state solution as the accepted way of resolving the Palestine question.

Historically, the U.S. model for integrating Israel into the region was the establishment of the Palestinian Authority (PA) in 1994 after the Oslo Accords, which was given limited governing responsibilities over the West Bank and Gaza with the nominal assumption that it would be the precursor to a Palestinian state.

Trump's plan tries to bypass all of this, putting Gaza under the administration of a U.S.-led board of "peace" headed by Trump himself. The PA has no clear role in running the Strip — at least not according to Trump's 20 points, which mentions that the PA would have to undergo a series of "reforms" that could, in some unspecified future, establish "a path" toward Palestinian self-determination. During the reconstruction phase, the West Bank and Gaza would be politically split.

Dozens of Palestinian bodies returned by Israeli authorities were 'blindfolded, bound, crushed under tanks, and missing corneas, livers, and limbs,' officials denounced.

Gaza's Government Media Office formally accused Israel on 17 October of stealing organs from Palestinians after Israel returned 120 mutilated bodies following the recent ceasefire, including some who had been tortured to death.

"We formally accuse the Israeli army of stealing organs from the martyrs," stated Dr. Ismail al-Thawabta, Director General of the Media Office, while demanding an international investigation into Israel's "torture, mutilation, and organ theft." The 120 bodies "arrived in extremely poor and distressing condition," including blindfolded, bound, crushed under tanks, and missing corneas, livers, and limbs. Thawabta stated:

"The Israeli occupation executed many of them in cold blood. A large number were found blindfolded, with their hands and feet bound, and others showed signs of hanging or close-range gunfire. We also found bodies showing clear evidence of severe torture until death."

Ukraine has failed to secure approval to receive Tomahawk long-range missies from Washington, as various reports have made clear over the weekend in the wake of Zelensky's Friday meeting with President Trump at the White House.

Trump had given a strong hint on where he stands when just before the two leaders' working lunch when he declared he wants to resolve the war "without thinking about Tomahawks" and additionally that the weapon is one America "needs".

Following the White House talks, Trump further said on social media that their talks were "very interesting, and cordial, but I told him, as I likewise strongly suggested to President Putin, that it is time to stop the killing, and make a DEAL!"

'Brennan's assertion that the CIA was not 'involved at all' with the Steele dossier cannot be reconciled with the facts.'

The House Judiciary Committee referred former CIA Director John Brennan to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution on Tuesday over allegations that he "knowingly made false statements" to Congress about his role in the Russia collusion hoax.

In the letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi obtained by The Federalist, Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, argued that "Brennan made numerous willfully and intentionally false statements of material fact contradicted by the record established by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) and the CIA."

"Making false statements before Congress," Jordan wrote, "is a crime that undermines the integrity of the Committee's constitutional duty to conduct oversight."

The IDF provides additional details on the physical markers demarcating the Yellow Line — to which the military withdrew under the terms of the current ceasefire — in the Gaza Strip.

The concrete blocks painted yellow, topped with a yellow metal sign, are 3.5 meters (nearly 11.5 feet) tall, and are being placed at distances of some 200 meters (more than a tenth of a mile) from each other along the Yellow Line, the military says.

The IDF began marking the line yesterday, and the military says the effort will continue "in the coming period."

The Yellow Line, as drawn out by mediators, encompasses over half of the Strip's territory, or 53 percent — most of which is outside of urban areas.

Trump-backed proclamation backing Gaza ceasefire stresses equality, but stops short of supporting Palestine statehood.

The leaders of Egypt, Qatar, Turkiye and the United States have released a joint statement backing the Gaza ceasefire deal and committing to "enduring peace" in the region.

The statement, released on Monday after an international summit in Egypt's Sharm el-Sheikh, is a rare acknowledgement by the administration of US President Donald Trump that Palestinians and Israelis deserve equal rights.

The proclamation also does not point the finger at Palestinians as the cause of the conflict in the way that successive US administrations have.

'It is forbidden to kill: therefore, all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.'

Voltaire

'I don't know of any army that does more than an Israeli army does to avoid civilian casualties. But incidental and unintended casualties accompany every war.'

Benjamin Netanyahu

'The right number of civilian casualties is zero.'

John Kirby, former US National Security Council spokesperson

TRUTH UNDER SIEGE - 'DEBATING' GAZA'S BODY COUNT

In a recent interview with the former Israeli government minister and now ambassador to the United Kingdom, Tzipora 'Tzipi' Hotovely, combative British journalist Piers Morgan asked repeatedly whether she knew the number of children that had been killed in Gaza since 7 October 2023. Morgan pointed out that the ambassador's firm estimate of 30,000 'Hamas terrorists' killed during the conflict contrasted starkly with her apparent ignorance of the number of dead and injured Palestinian children. Clearly frustrated, Morgan kept repeating the same question, but to no avail. Towards the end of what was a protracted and often terse exchange, a clearly discomforted ambassador (at one stage accusing Morgan of 'blood libel'), dismissed the figures of civilian casualties produced by Gaza's Ministry of Health — figures which over many years have been regarded as reliable by numerous media and aid organisations.

President Donald Trump embodies American political culture in its purest, most exaggerated form. His mix of blunt pragmatism, self-confidence, and showmanship is easily parodied, yet it perfectly mirrors the style that now defines US statecraft. At the 'Peace Summit' in Sharm el-Sheikh, he once again promised "eternal peace" in the Middle East and a final settlement of the region's three-thousand-year conflict. The spectacle was classic Trump: loud, declarative, and aimed as much at headlines as at history.

But once the noise fades, what has really happened?

The new Gaza "deal," negotiated for more than a year and hailed as a breakthrough, is hardly revolutionary. Prisoner exchanges between Israel and its opponents have been a recurring feature of the region's politics for decades. They are controversial but familiar - rituals that temporarily ease tensions without changing the underlying reality.

What is different this time is the ambition behind the arrangement. Washington hopes to turn the Gaza exchange into the first step toward a wider realignment of regional power. The architects of this plan are drawing on Trump's earlier experiment - the Abraham Accords - which sought to replace religious and historical antagonisms with a network of pragmatic, profit-based ties between Israel and the Gulf monarchies. The theory is that shared commercial interests can suppress ideological conflict.

Zelensky's latest Washington humiliation is about more than yet another Trump mood swing.

Leave it to Mr. Unpredictable, aka Donald Trump, President of the United States, to pack a policy U-turn, a harsh unfriending, and some fuzzy ambiguity into just a few days. As things stand now, Trump has said "no" to American Tomahawk cruise missiles for Kiev - maybe not yet forever, as his vice president J.D. Vance has stressed - but, clearly, for the foreseeable future, whatever that may mean with Trump.

In the process, he has also made it clear - painfully clear - that Kiev's Vladimir Zelensky is back in the doghouse. Seemingly in favor for a while - after donning a suite like a good boy and flattering Trump at every opportunity and without inhibitions - the Ukrainian leader-without-elections is out in the cold again: No welcome at the airport; a Friday-afternoon meeting demonstratively scheduled to get a nuisance visitor out of the way before the weekend; and, we hear, some rough talk, even shouting, again.

It is as if Zelensky did not board a plane to pay another submission visit to Washington but a time machine. And it deposited him right back in February, when he received an urgently needed public drubbing in the Oval Office.

Compulsive optimists among the thinning crowd of deadly "friends"-of-Ukraine in the West may want to take solace in the fact that, this time, Trump had the decency to administer Zelensky's spanking behind closed doors. But then, it was leaked immediately, to the Financial Times, no less.

Of course, the leaker may have been a desperate pro-Zelensky holdout still hiding somewhere in the US administration (that you, Keith Kellogg?), trying to alert the Europeans so they can come again to their Ukrainian protégé's aid and sabotage the oh-so-horrible prospect of a quick peace. And according to Maria Zakharova, speaking for the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, they have already started interfering again.

Lucky Ukrainians! You have a government that feeds you into a lost meatgrinder war for which your Western friends-from-hell once promised you NATO (Remember that one? Never mind, it was always a transparent lie) and now simply nothing. And you have diehard European "supporters" who fear nothing more than that this bloody scam will stop while some of you are still alive.