"White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt says Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has expressed interest in coming to Washington to meet with US President Donald Trump.

Trump is open to the idea, but a date has not been set, she says."
https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/leavitt-netanyahu-has-expressed-interest-in-visiting-white-house-trump-open-to-idea-but-no-date-set/

"A senior Israeli official tells the Kan public broadcaster that US President Donald Trump’s Truth Social post calling for the end of Netanyahu’s trial “wasn’t sent out for no reason.”

“It is part of a larger move that is meant to bring an end to the war in Gaza, the release of all the hostages, an end to Netanyahu’s trial, and a serious regional move,” says the official.

There are “discussions about dramatic moves in the Middle East,” senior Israeli officials tell Channel 13."
https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/report-trumps-call-for-ending-pms-trial-part-of-broader-initiative-to-end-gaza-war-expand-abraham-accords/

"A ballistic missile launched at Israel by the Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen fell short outside the country’s borders, according to a military official.

The IDF identified the launch, but no sirens sounded in Israel because the missile did not pose a threat."
https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/houthi-missile-launched-at-israel-falls-short-idf-official-says/

"Hours after a report emerged that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US President Donald Trump agreed on a vision that would see the war in Gaza end within two weeks and Arab states sign peace deals with Israel, the premier releases a video stressing that Israel has the chance to attain the “dramatic expansion” of its normalization accords.

“We fought valiantly against Iran – and achieved a great victory,” says Netanyahu. “This victory opens up an opportunity for a dramatic expansion of the peace agreements. We are working hard on this.”

“Along with the release of our hostages and the defeat of Hamas,” he continues, “there is a window of opportunity here that must not be missed. Not even a single day can be wasted.”

https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/pm-win-over-iran-created-opportunity-to-expand-peace-deals-that-must-be-seized/

"The UN nuclear watchdog says it has not received an official communication from Iran about a parliamentary bill to suspend cooperation with it that, according to media reports earlier in the day, had received final approval.

“We are aware of these reports. As of now, the IAEA has not received an official communication from Iran on this matter,” the International Atomic Energy Agency says in a statement."
https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/iaea-says-no-word-yet-from-iran-on-bill-to-reduce-its-cooperation/

"Israel has stopped aid from entering northern Gaza but is still allowing it to enter from the south, two officials say, after images were circulated of masked men on aid trucks, who clan leaders say are protecting aid and are not Hamas stealing it.

Israeli government spokesperson David Mencer tells reporters that aid is continuing to enter from the south, but did not specify whether any supplies were entering from the north.

A Gaza Humanitarian Foundation spokesperson says the group is exempt from a two-day suspension of humanitarian aid deliveries into the territory.

The Higher Commission for Tribal Affairs, which represents influential clans in Gaza, says that trucks had been protected as part of an aid security process managed “solely through tribal efforts.” The commission says that no Palestinian faction, a reference to Hamas, had taken part in the process.

Hamas, the terror group that has ruled Gaza for more than two decades but now controls only parts of the territory after nearly two years of war with Israel, denies any involvement.

Throughout the war, numerous clans, civil society groups, and factions – including Hamas’ secular political rival Fatah – have stepped in to help provide security for the aid convoys.

Clans made up of extended families connected through blood and marriage have long been a fundamental part of Gazan society.

Amjad al-Shawa, director of an umbrella body for Palestinian non-governmental organizations, says the aid protected by clans on Wednesday was being distributed to vulnerable families.

There is an acute shortage of food and other basic supplies after the nearly two-year military campaign by Israel that has displaced most of Gaza’s two million inhabitants.

Aid trucks and warehouses storing supplies have often been looted, frequently by desperate and starving Palestinians. Israel accuses Hamas of stealing aid for its own fighters or to sell to finance its operations, an accusation Hamas denies.

“The clans came … to form a stance to prevent the aggressors and the thieves from stealing the food that belongs to our people,” Abu Salman Al Moghani, a representative of Gazan clans, says, referring to Wednesday’s operation."
https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/israel-halts-aid-into-northern-gaza-officials-say-as-clans-deny-hamas-stealing-it/

"The Palestinian Authority’s foreign ministry says that despite reports of a halt on aid deliveries in northern Gaza, several humanitarian aid trucks successfully reached warehouses in that area of the Strip.

The ministry doesn’t say which crossing the aid came from and when.

The boxes pictured in a tweet published by the ministry show the logo of an Emirati aid organization. Israel has made a point of ensuring that aid from the UAE is delivered into the Strip..."
https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/pa-says-several-aid-trucks-reached-warehouses-in-northern-gaza-on-thursday/

"Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei claimed US President Donald Trump had “exaggerated” the impact of strikes on Iranian nuclear sites, while threatening to repeat the “slap” his country had dealt American forces in the region, speaking in a televised address Thursday.

Khamenei, making his first appearance in over a week after going into hiding amid a punishing Israeli air campaign that killed many of his top generals, also hailed his country’s “victory” in the 12-day air war launched by Israel, which he claimed had “almost collapsed” because of Iran’s strikes.

The statement and a televised speech carried by state media came two days after a ceasefire ended the war between Iran and Israel, as analysts attempted to work out the extent to which Iran’s nuclear program had been set back.

“The American president exaggerated events in unusual ways, and it turned out that he needed this exaggeration,” Khamenei said, looking more tired than he did a week ago.

The United States “has gained nothing from this war,” he added, claiming that American strikes “did nothing significant” to Iran’s nuclear facilities. “The Islamic Republic won, and in retaliation dealt a severe slap to the face of America,” he said, referring to Iran’s missile launch targeting a military base in Qatar housing US troops.

According to Washington and Doha, that attack was telegraphed in advance in what was widely seen as an Iranian attempt to avoid escalating the conflict. All but one missile fired at the al-Udeid air base was intercepted, and there were no casualties..."
https://www.timesofisrael.com/threatening-to-slap-us-again-irans-khamenei-claims-trump-exaggerated-strikes/

From H.A. Mansour
"Perhaps no modern work has achieved the strange, inexhaustible success of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. If you were alive in the twentieth century—no matter where you lived or what language you spoke—you almost certainly knew the Count from Transylvania, and probably watched him and his progeny sink their fangs into the necks of victims on a television screen. Yet this vast cultural success came at a cost: the superimposition of Hollywood’s comic imagery onto a late nineteenth-century novel, rendering it almost inseparable from its media afterlife. But Dracula deserves more than that. It is not mere Gothic indulgence, nor a curiosity of perverse imagination.

There are two main reasons to resummon Undead to examination with new interest and curiosity:

First, Dracula is one of the richest and most comprehensive archives of the long nineteenth century; the century in which our current culture was born, and which still governs our epistemic and psychic lives. It preserves, within a single narrative frame, the sediments of that age’s dreams, delusions, upheavals, contradictions, and myths. It takes seriously, and without anachronistic irony, the now-forgotten disciplines that once promised salvation: mesmerism, spiritualism, physiognomy, vitalism, racialism, phrenology, hypnosis, telepathy, and the whole haunted laboratory of scientific esoterica. Dracula is not just a novel; it truly is a compact museum of the moment of our birth. It catalogs the moment when our current world was ordered the way it is currently, records a snapshot at the instance when scientific materialism was competing with but hadn't yet fully displaced spiritual and pseudo-scientific worldviews. To read Dracula is not simply to read a vampire story; it is to descend into the archive of a world dying and a world being born that still shapes our sense of self. No modern person seeking serious self-knowledge can afford to ignore understanding the graveyard of failed projects and aborted embryos that our modern science and culture stand.

Dracula, thus, is the Gothic rendition of the history of science, and psychology in particular, the most promising post-Christian science to try to directly substitute religion in the actual concrete sense of the daily life of the individual, at the cusp of transition. It is filled with hysterias, fugues, nervous collapses, trance states, dream fugues, somnambulism, and wasting illnesses whose origins are neither clearly physical nor entirely mental. The line between hereditary weakness and demonic affliction is never firm, nor does it need to be. The novel inhabits a world where Darwinism was still half-digested, where medicine, mesmerism, and metaphysics still compete for the same vocabulary, where diagnosis is not yet distinct from discernment, and where pathology may still imply sin, and scientific materialism is still grappling with a vibrant, refusing to die spiritualism and idealism. What we now divide, psyche, soma, soul, is still tangled in its ancestral knots. Dracula is not merely a vampire; he is also a case study, a haunting symptom, a patient whose file could sit in both a monastery and a clinic.

Second, while the nineteenth century produced many works in which civilized European men faced monsters, works that meditate on supernaturalism, naturalism, and occultism, it is in Dracula that the underlying terror of the 19th century revolution of meaning, and in whose aftermath we are currently living, is most fully and completly disclosed: that we are no longer the image of the good as humans once understood it, but its exact inversion. This is achieved through producing a Dracula that is the perfect theological negative of Christ. He is not merely an evil villain; he presents a complete, coherent, and terrifyingly seductive alternative spiritual path. It is a path that mimics the structure of salvation (offering "eternal life," a "communion," a "baptism" in blood, a "father" figure) but inverts its substance at every point, leading not to divine life but to demonic undeath, descent to the tomb and not ascent to heaven. That is what makes him the ultimate anti-Incarnational figure. A path, I will argue later in the essay, we already agreed to take a long time ago that we don’t even remember that it began somewhere.

It is time to retrieve the monster from his flattened Hollywood image and read Dracula not as a Halloween character, but as a herald of a modern theology—an inverted Christ, heralding the Gospel in reverse.

This essay makes its case in five parts. It begins by briefly establishing the core tenets of Christian Incarnation theology in order to define Dracula’s true nature: not a simple monster, but a coherent theology of anti-Incarnation, a perfect, photographic negative of the Christian idea of salvation. Second, it demonstrates how this theological horror enters the world not through conquest, but through the consent of the modern, rational mind, which can no longer recognize evil in its civilized form. From there, it unpacks the devastating results of this entry by analyzing the fates of the novel’s key characters, from the Brides of the East to the Brides of the West. The essay concludes by arguing that Dracula’s victory is now complete, and offers as proof the vampiric logic that governs our own era’s criticism and cinematic retellings of this very story itself. The way modern man came to think about Dracula is proof that the successful infection already occurred a long time ago and that we are his grandchildren. For interested readers, a final addendum will explore how the novel's central dynamic provides an anticipatory prophetic template for the logic of modern postcolonial politics, in which the wronged periphery is invited to dissolve the weakened center..."
https://critiqueanddigest.substack.com/p/the-gospel-in-reverse

My own substack essay released today
https://ihulkower.substack.com/p/bombs-over-fordow