In a stunning piece published by the head of one of Israel’s most prominent think tanks, Maj. Gen. Tamir Hayman describes the reality of Israel’s new security doctrine:

A few crucial principles he describes:

1. The United States is a “declining power” and, given its ongoing social and political shifts, will soon abandon Israel in any event. This is compelling Israel to move toward greater self-reliance in order to avoid “excessive dependence” on the US since it “exposes Israel to the influence of a progressive American value system that is incompatible with Israel’s Jewish character.”

Then he concludes: “Severing ties with the United States is therefore not only inevitable, but essential to Israel’s independence and the resilience of its Jewish national identity.”

2. Primacy of Jewish Identity over Democracy: The state’s Jewish identity takes precedence over its democratic system of government.

3. Peace as a Means Rather Than an End: “A meaningful peace agreement is unattainable in the Middle East, as peace agreements are merely technical and temporary arrangements requiring constant reassessment. According to this view, peace is not an intrinsic value that generates security, but a means of achieving other policy objectives.”

4. “Rejection of the Independent Existence of Arab States: The underlying premise is that most Arab states are not genuine nation-states, but collections of tribes and ethnic groups lacking a shared history and a foundational national vision. Consequently, undermining their stability is viewed as a natural process, one that Israel can manage more effectively than it can contend with strong nation-states, and one that it should even encourage.”

Reprinted with permission from Trita Parsi’s Substack.

According to an earlier Bloomberg investigation into the attack, within hours of the strikes, Pentagon personnel were aware that the US was responsible, but the Trump administration has still not admitted to carrying out the attack.

The new Bloomberg report said that advisors to US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth have conveyed to other Pentagon personnel that the report on the massacre, which found flawed intelligence, outdated imagery, and an overreliance on AI contributed to the attack, will not be shared with the public before the November 3 elections. Officials said the investigation has been all but complete for several months.

The exact toll in the bombing varies, with Bloomberg putting the number of children killed at 123, while the general prosecutor in Minab said in early April that the final death toll was 156, including 120 students – 73 boys, 47 girls – 26 female teachers, the unborn child of a pregnant teacher, seven parents, a school bus driver, and a technician at a nearby clinic.

The MOAB is the most powerful non-nuclear bomb in the US arsenal and has been used only once before in a strike on a village in Afghanistan’s Nangarhar province in 2017. The US said the strike killed dozens of ISIS-K fighters, and the now-defunct US-backed Afghan government said no civilians were killed because they evacuated due to the ISIS occupation. But since returning, the residents have dealt with environmental effects and the damage from the attack, which destroyed about 30 civilian homes.

The MOAB is about 30 feet long, and due to its size, it must be dropped from a C-130 cargo aircraft close to the intended target, meaning that any MOAB strike on Iran would be vulnerable to Iranian air defenses.

The CNN report said that the potential target of the MOAB includes Iranian energy infrastructure, with one source telling the outlet that President Trump ordered the military to develop additional strike packages against Iranian targets that include “a lot of energy infrastructure” and the potential use of a MOAB.

The Health Ministry said on Wednesday that over the previous 24 hours, Israeli attacks killed two Palestinians and another died of wounds sustained in an earlier Israeli attack, bringing the post-ceasefire deal death toll to 1,501. Another 5,323 Palestinians have been wounded in that time.

In that same period, seven IDF soldiers have been killed in Gaza, including one who was killed by other Israeli soldiers in a friendly-fire incident in February of this year, and two who were killed in September in the accidental explosion of an Israeli military drone. The other four died as a result of “combat” in southern Gaza in October 2025, when Hamas militants were trapped on the Israeli-occupied side of the Strip.

Hamas has also not launched any rocket attacks on Israel and has agreed to a US-backed proposal that would see the group give up its weapons, but Israel rejected the potential deal. Despite President Trump calling for Israel to stop bombing Gaza because Hamas agreed to disarm, the US continues backing Israel’s daily attacks.

The report, which cited unnamed US and Israeli sources, said that the two leaders had held multiple calls over the past two weeks about the possibility of resuming “major combat operations” against the Islamic Republic, including the possibility of joint US and Israeli strikes on military and nuclear targets.

Restarting major attacks on Iran would likely hurt Republicans in the November 3 midterm elections, as it would worsen the energy crisis and raise gas prices in the US, while Netanyahu and his coalition may benefit in the October 27 Knesset elections.

“Bibi’s got an election before the midterms. He believes his strength is being a wartime prime minister,” one US official told Axios reporter Barak Ravid, who is a former IDF intelligence officer.

A government that claims the authority to kill persons after they have been subdued, disarmed, tried, convicted and confined in prison has made a startling claim about the nature of political power. It claims not merely the authority to protect the innocent from violence, but the authority to inflict violence when no immediate threat exists.

It claims that the taking of human life, which it rightly condemns when committed by private individuals, somehow becomes morally permissible when committed by government agents. This is the fundamental contradiction of the death penalty: Government killing the helpless protects the living.

The Declaration of Independence offers a radically different understanding of government. All human beings possess natural rights, and governments are instituted to protect those rights. Government’s just powers derive solely from the consent of the governed. Government is not the owner of our lives. It is our creature, established to protect rights that precede its existence. Its authority is limited, and it cannot legitimately claim powers that the people whom it governs do not themselves possess.

For more information, contact

akeaton@antiwar.com

323-512-7095

Antiwar.com

1017 El Camino Real #306

Redwood City, CA 94063