Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir remained defiant on May 20, undaunted by international protests triggered by images of him mocking Gaza Flotilla activists, who appeared in videos kneeling and handcuffed with their faces to the floor in the port of Ashdod. “Whoever comes to our territory to support terrorism and identify with Hamas, will receive harsh punishment,” he warned on social networks, after several Western countries, including Spain, Italy, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Germany, condemned Israel’s treatment of the activists, criticism that has even come from a handful of Israeli leaders. “We will not turn the other cheek,” Ben-Gvir railed.

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Two technical concepts — sporadic absences and the idea of a taxpayer with no effective tax residence — have become the Spanish Treasury’s main arguments as it seeks to overturn a court ruling that handed Colombian singer Shakira a major victory on Monday. These terms are little known outside specialist circles, but they increasingly shape multimillion‑dollar disputes. They are especially useful for tax inspectors when they try to challenge residency claims built on dense travel schedules, fragmented stays, or international moves that are hard to substantiate.

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The war on Iran is headed for an end without victors, but the ceasefire agreement does have a clear loser: Benjamin Netanyahu. The strategic failure of the campaign he launched in February, alongside the United States, is scarcely matched in Israel’s history. With an added dimension: for Netanyahu (who has spent nearly 19 of the 78 years Israel has existed in power), attacking the Islamic Republic was not only a “dream” for four decades (in his own words) for which he lacked a willing partner in the White House. Had it succeeded, it would have been a kind of personal and political redemption for the other enormous security fiasco of his tenure: Hamas’s October 2023 attack. Israel’s powerful intelligence services did not foresee the surprise operation and Palestinian militants had hours to kill nearly 1,200 people before reinforcements arrived.

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Arab Barghouti (Jerusalem, 35) says that “at the end of the day” he does not think of Marwan Barghouti as a politician, nor as the Palestinian leader of the Second Intifada (2000–2005), who was sentenced by Israel to five life terms in a trial full of irregularities 24 years ago. He thinks of himself as the son who wants his father “to come home.”

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Irish soldier John Timmins traded the green meadows of Baltinglass, an hour from Dublin, for the military bases that the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) maintains in the country’s hills near Israel. Timmins, 26, arrived last year in that conflict zone inspired by Ireland’s peacekeeping tradition and by his father’s career: four decades earlier he had served in the same force and patrolled the villages where Timmins now serves as captain of the Irish-Polish Battalion.

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When Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew the United States from the previous Iran nuclear agreement with world powers — the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) — in 2018, he justified it with a string of epithets: “horrible,” “disastrous,” “weak” and “the worst deal ever.” Among the arguments he cited at the time was that the 150-page pact, which took two years to negotiate, allowed Tehran to keep enriching uranium and did not eliminate its missile program or its support for allied militia networks in the region. He also said it gave “billions of dollars” to a “regime of great terror” by easing international sanctions.

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Writer Etgar Keret (Ramat Gan, Israel, 58) had planned to deliver his ninth book of short stories to his publisher on October 8, 2023. He had picked the date at random: he produces one every seven years or so and sets himself a firm deadline. Two days earlier, he told his wife, Shira Geffen — the screenwriter and filmmaker who wrote the film Jellyfish (2007), directed by Keret and awarded at Cannes — that he felt the book had become too dark because of the personal and political events that had marked him in preceding years: his mother’s death, the coronavirus pandemic, a herniated disc, the return to power of Benjamin Netanyahu with the most right-wing government in the country’s history… His wife advised him to reread it calmly the next day and, if he still felt that way, to ask the publisher for an extension.

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The hearing at Israel’s Supreme Court is closed to the public. It is clear to everyone that the imprisonment of Hussam Abu Safiya (held without charges and on the basis of secret accusations that even his lawyer does not know) has perhaps generated the most international mobilization, with calls for his release from the World Health Organization, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and Amnesty International. He is the pediatrician who ran Gaza’s Kamal Adwan Hospital and became a vocal critic of the Israeli invasion until troops arrested him in December 2024. He was seized inside the hospital, the only one still operating in the northern Gaza Strip.

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