Hafsa Halawa talks about why she thinks the Gaza ceasefire negotiations in Qatar are no more than political posturing.

Al Sadd forward Afif won the award for the second time after leading Qatar to the AFC Asian Cup title at home in 2023.

It took 25 days, but in the early hours today, Israel responded to Iran’s salvo of missiles earlier this month. The operation, named “Days of Repentance,” was the most significant attack on Iran by any country since the 1980s. The Iranian regime’s years of waging a shadow war on Israel have finally brought the violence home, something the regime had repeatedly promised its people it would avoid.

The attacks were significant, and likely to cause considerable damage. At least four officers of the Iranian army, serving in missile-defense units, were killed. Nevertheless, Iran is relieved that its worst fears didn’t come true. A day before the attacks, Israel had used intermediaries to warn Iran about them, to make sure they wouldn’t cause massive casualties, Mostafa Najafi, a security expert in Tehran with connections to the regime’s elites, told me. He said the attacks weren’t “as vast and painful as Israeli officials had claimed” they would be. Israel did not target Iran’s infrastructure, such as its oil and gas refineries, nor did it assassinate political or military leaders.

Because of this, Iran has an opportunity to call it quits by giving a weak enough response that wouldn’t invite Israeli retaliation. Iran can stop the tit for tat, if it’s willing to resist the hard-line voices that want the country to escalate and even widen the conflict.

[Read: Iran is not ready for war with Israel]

Life in Tehran has quickly sprung back to normal. The city’s streets were clogged with traffic as usual on Saturday, the first day of the week in the country. Although all flights had initially been suspended, Tehran’s two main airports are back in operation.

“I believe Iran will respond to the attacks,” Afifeh Abedi, a security expert in Iran who is supportive of the government, told me. “But I doubt there would be escalation,” she said. “Countries of the region will stop this, and the U.S. will try to manage the situation.”

Abas Aslani of the Tehran-based Center for Middle East Strategic Studies agrees. “The evidence doesn’t currently point to a broader war,” he told me. “But this doesn’t necessarily mean that Iran won’t respond.”

I also spoke with two senior Iranian politicians, a conservative and a reformist, both of whom requested anonymity for fear of reprisals. They said that Iran wasn’t looking to broaden the conflict now. Iran and the U.S. had implicitly agreed to allow a limited Israeli strike followed by no significant Iranian response, the conservative figure, who is close to the parliamentary speaker, Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf, told me.  

The reformist politician, who has served in cabinet-level roles before, said that the diplomatic efforts of Iran’s minister of foreign affairs, Abbas Araghchi, helped ensure that the Israeli attacks were restricted to the military targets. Araghchi visited about a dozen nearby countries in the past few weeks, and he is believed to have asked them to put pressure on the U.S. and Israel to keep the attacks limited.

Across the region, there is broad opposition to widening the conflict. Saudi Arabia condemned the latest Israeli attacks on Iran as “a violation of its sovereignty and a violation of international laws and norms” and reiterated its “firm position in rejecting the continued escalation.” Similar condemnations have been issued by Turkey, Iraq, Lebanon, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Oman, Qatar, Kuwait, Jordan, Algeria, Mauritania, and, farther afield, Switzerland, Pakistan, Indonesia, and the Maldives. Jordan, which is a neighbor of Israel’s and signed a peace treaty with it 30 years ago on this very day, also confirmed that no Israeli strikers had been allowed to use Jordanian airspace. Trying to maintain neutrality, Jordan had previously helped Israel defend itself against Iranian drone and missile attacks.

[Read: Iran cannot be conciliated]

Iran knows that its future prosperity and success rely on economic development, which is actively hurt by its isolation from the international economy and its current war footing. Yesterday, the Paris-based Financial Action Task Force, a G7 initiative that helps enforce global anti-money-laundering rules, declared that it was going to keep Iran on its blacklist alongside only two other countries, North Korea and Myanmar. On Saturday, the U.S. dollar was selling for 680,000 Iranian rials, a historic high. These are not problems you can solve by fighting Israel.

Yesterday, in a rare candid moment, Ghalibaf acknowledged the stakes: “Sadly, our economy is not doing as well as our missiles. But it should.”

And yet, Iran is still a long way from taking the necessary steps to drop its anti-Israel campaign, overcome its international isolation, and focus on its domestic problems. Currently, any deviation from the anti-Israel orthodoxy leads to quick backlash by the hard-liners. Last month, the Assembly of Scholars and Instructors at the Qom Seminary, a reformist-leaning body of Shiite clerics, issued a statement that condemned Israel’s ongoing attacks on Lebanon while calling on it “to go back to its legal borders before the 1967 aggression” and urging the “formation of an independent Palestinian state.” This endorsement of the two-state solution incensed the hard-liners, some of whom called for the assembly to be shut down, but its position has been defended by the reformist press.

And some hard-liners are clamoring for all-out war with Israel.

“The Zionist regime is on decline, and Iran won’t let this attack go without a response,” Hossein Shariatmadari, the editor in chief of the hard-line daily Kayhan, told me. “Our response will be ever more decisive and crushing.”

Shariatmadari is known for outlandish pronouncements. Najafi, who tends to be more levelheaded, also believes that the Iranian-Israeli clashes are set to continue “in the medium term, especially after the U.S. elections.”

Some supporters of Israel also hope that the conflict will escalate. Mark Dubowitz, the CEO of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington, D.C.–based think tank, said on X that Israel must now prepare for the “next phase” of its strategy: helping Iranians overthrow their regime, followed by “decisive decapitation strikes.”

As long as Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is alive and in power, the country’s attitude toward Israel will not decisively shift. But he is 85, and, in preparation for an eventual succession struggle, the regime’s different factions are already squabbling over the country’s future direction. The hard-liners are not as politically powerful as they once were. They lost the presidency recently and are being marginalized in other institutions as well.

“The likes of Shariatmadari don’t matter to anyone,” the conservative politician told me. “Iran is set to change.”

If Iran wants to avoid a war, it can’t change fast enough.

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Over the past three months, Elon Musk has mobilized his many resources—his exceptional wealth, far-reaching online platform, and time—for a cause that could have profound effects on his personal fortune and American society: electing Donald Trump.

Musk is going all in: In addition to donating $75 million to America PAC, a group he founded that backs Trump, he has also temporarily relocated to the all-important swing state of Pennsylvania to effectively run Trump’s get-out-the-vote strategy from a war room he set up in Pittsburgh. He has stumped on the trail, hosting a Trump town hall in the auditorium of a Pennsylvania high school last week and telling locals to go “hog wild” on voter registration. And, in his latest stunt, he has offered $1 million a day to registered voters in swing states who sign an America PAC petition backing the First and Second Amendments—a move that the Justice Department reportedly said might be breaking election laws. His efforts may prove consequential: As my colleague Franklin Foer wrote this past weekend, “If Trump wins, it will likely be by a narrow margin that can be attributed to turnout. Musk can tout himself as the single variable of success.”

Musk is far from the only major donor in this race. Bill Gates has reportedly given $50 million to Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign, and various billionaires publicly support Harris or Trump. What distinguishes Musk though, beyond his on-the-ground efforts, is his ownership of X. He can spread information (and disinformation) with ease, and stifle views he doesn’t like, Sophia Rosenfeld, a historian at the University of Pennsylvania, told me in an email. Media owners have always been influential in American politics (Rupert Murdoch, for example, played a prominent role in past elections through his leadership of Fox News). But Rosenfeld noted that Musk’s particular combination of wealth and media control is “unprecedented.”

Musk’s audience is massive on X: His posts, many of which have amplified false and inflammatory rhetoric, get billions of views. Over the weekend he boosted the baseless claim that Michigan had more registered voters than eligible citizens. After Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson said that wasn’t true—and that Musk was spreading “dangerous disinformation”—Musk doubled down and accused her of lying to the public. This disinformation had a swift real-world impact: Benson told CBS that her team received harassing messages and threats after Musk’s post. Such rhetoric has the potential to warp how much voters trust election processes. Musk’s America PAC has also been urging people to report examples of “voter fraud” through what it calls the Election Integrity Community on X. Though such fraud remains exceptionally rare, his efforts could further sow distrust in election integrity and lay the groundwork for future claims of a stolen race. (America PAC did not immediately respond to my request for comment.) So prominent is Musk’s role in the MAGA movement that Minnesota Governor Tim Walz joked archly at a recent rally: “I’m going to talk about [Trump’s] running mate …. Elon Musk.”

Musk wasn’t always aligned, at least in public, with such zealotry. He reportedly said that Trump was a “stone-cold loser” in 2020, and he supported Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. Still, as my colleague Charlie Warzel told me last month, Musk’s feelings of being aggrieved and attacked escalated when he faced pushback from liberals after his Twitter takeover; soon after, he began using X as a megaphone for MAGA. And, though his Trump endorsement seemed out of step with his long-standing image as a climate innovator, it is consistent with his rightward drift: Over the past few years, he has reportedly been quietly donating to Republican causes and candidates, including giving $10 million to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis last year for his ill-fated primary run.

The wealthy have long played an outsize role in politics—but Musk, as he so often does, is venturing to new extremes. If Trump wins, Musk’s gamble may pay off handsomely: In addition to a promised role in Trump’s government, he is poised to receive epic government contracts for his companies. But even if Trump doesn’t win, Musk could set a precedent for uber-rich donors getting more directly involved with political campaigns; that could intensify the “oligarchic side of modern American democracy,” Rosenfeld warned. Though Musk’s hands-on, incendiary campaigning methods are chaotic—and possibly illegal—his efforts during this election may pioneer a model for other megadonors looking to reshape a race.

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Today’s News

Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that U.S. and Israeli negotiators will travel to Qatar in the coming days for Gaza cease-fire talks. Former President Barack Obama joined Kamala Harris at a rally in Atlanta tonight. A Los Angeles prosecutor is recommending the resentencing of Erik and Lyle Menendez, who were convicted in 1996 for the murder of their parents, after new evidence surfaced suggesting that their father sexually abused them.

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The Weekly Planet: Cheap solar panels are changing the world, Zoë Schlanger writes. Time-Travel Thursdays: The myths that fueled marijuana’s criminalization have deep roots, Malcolm Ferguson writes.

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Evening Read

Illustration by Paul Spella / The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

Ratpocalypse Now

By Annie Lowrey

Has any man in history talked about “how much he hates rats” more than New York City Mayor Eric Adams? Adams himself posed that question at the city’s inaugural National Urban Rat Summit last month. “Let’s figure out how we unify against public enemy number one: Mickey and his crew.”

Mickey is, canonically, a mouse. But Adams’s campaign against the city’s endemic brown-rat population might be the most effective and highest-profile initiative of his scandal-ridden mayoralty.

Read the full article.

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Qatar's Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani also calls for lasting solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

When Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, was killed last month, my social-media feeds lit up with images and videos from Syria, my home country. In some areas, including Idlib and the suburbs of Aleppo, residents celebrated late into the night, blasting music and raising banners calling for Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian dictator, to be next. People handed out sweets; celebratory messages, memes, and phone calls flooded my WhatsApp. But the news channels broadcasting from just across the border captured something else: a wave of grief sweeping southern Lebanon.

The jubilation on one side of the line and the mourning on the other reflect our region’s deep complexity. For several years, Hezbollah ravaged the Syrian opposition on behalf of the autocratic Assad government. Its intervention left deep scars—displacement, destruction, and trauma, especially in the Damascus suburbs and Homs, which Hezbollah besieged. The Syrians who welcomed Nasrallah’s assassination were not exactly celebrating the Israelis who carried it out. But many of us felt that for once, the world had tipped in our favor.

Assad—and his father, the dictator Hafez al-Assad, before him—had made Syria the crucial geographical and political link between Iran and Hezbollah. The Lebanese Shiite militia could not have survived without the weapons, fighters, and funds that Tehran supplied by way of Syria. But in 2011, circumstances in Syria threatened this arrangement. Peaceful protests challenged the country’s autocracy; Assad met them brutally, and the country’s opposition transformed into an armed rebellion. Nasrallah saw little choice but to defend his supply line and political network. Hezbollah justified this intervention by framing it as a war against extremists, a fight against chaos, and a defense of Syria’s sovereignty against Western-backed militants. But on the ground, Hezbollah wasn’t just fighting armed factions; it was waging a war against the Syrian people.

[Read: Nasrallah’s folly]

Madaya, a small town near the Lebanese border, lay along Hezbollah’s supply route to Syria. Armed rebel fighters reached that town in 2015, and Hezbollah, together with Assad’s forces, encircled it, cutting off food and medical supplies. Within weeks, the people of Madaya were starving. A border town once home to markets for smuggled electronics and clothes transformed into a fortress of suffering. Some civilians resorted to eating leaves, grass, or stray animals. People foraging for food were shot by snipers or killed by land mines. At least 23 people, six of them babies younger than 1, died from starvation in Madaya in a little over a month, in December 2015 and January 2016. An international outcry did nothing to stop Hezbollah from continuing to enforce its siege.

Syrians tried to expose these horrors by posting stories and photos from Madaya on social media. But before long, supporters of Hezbollah and the Syrian government sadistically  adopted the hashtag “in solidarity with the siege of Madaya” and posted photos of tables laden with grilled meat and fish, along with selfies in front of overloaded fridges. Despite numerous human-rights groups’ reports to the contrary, the government and Hezbollah claimed that the photos of starvation were fake, and that no civilians remained in Madaya anyway—just foreign agents and traitors whose deaths were necessary to save Syria.

Madaya remained under blockade until 2017, when Qatar, representing the rebel forces, and Iran, representing the Syrian government, brokered an evacuation deal relocating the survivors of the siege to opposition-held areas, such as Idlib. Worn down by hunger and bombardment, the evacuees were told to pack only one small bag each, and leave everything else behind.

Hezbollah was not kinder to other Syrian cities. In Aleppo, a relentless bombing campaign that was the joint work of the Syrian government, Russian forces, and Hezbollah destroyed neighborhoods, killed thousands of people, and wrecked infrastructure. Nasrallah called the contest for Aleppo the “greatest battle” of the Syrian war. He deployed additional fighters there to tighten the regime’s hold. Civilians were forced to evacuate—and as they did so, Hosein Mortada, one of the founders of the Iranian news channel Al-Alam and a propagandist embedded with Hezbollah, stood by and mocked them.

Mortada was already infamous among Syrians for turning media coverage into a weapon of psychological warfare. With his thick Lebanese accent and brutal livestreams from the battlefield, Mortada cheered missile strikes and referred to opposition figures as “sheep.” In one YouTube video, he sits in a big bulldozer and praises its power, then squats in the dirt with a toy truck, saying gleefully, “This bulldozer is better for some of you, because you don’t have anything.”

Many who endured the siege of their cities, only to have Hezbollah agents mock and question their suffering before international eyes, have little ambivalence about celebrating Nasrallah’s death. They view the Hezbollah leader’s fate with a tragic sense of justice: Finally, someone whose hands were stained with blood, and who seemed untouchable, was killed.

But as the prominent Syrian intellectual and dissident Yassin Al Haj Saleh often admonished, looking at the world solely through a Syrian lens only isolates us. For many of us Syrians who were active in the uprising and now live in exile, that warning has resonated since Nasrallah’s death. Both on social media and in private conversations, we question whether the justice felt in Nasrallah’s demise should be tempered with concern for the broader regional suffering. We ask: Is it moral to welcome Nasrallah’s killing if the cost is the destruction of Lebanon—a country already reeling from economic collapse, political mismanagement, and the Beirut port explosion just a few years ago? Nasrallah is dead—but for many Syrians who oppose Israel’s war in Gaza, which has killed thousands of civilians, the manner of his death made the event hard to celebrate. Dara Abdallah, a Syrian writer and poet exiled in Berlin, wrote on social media that he could not condone Nasrallah’s assassination, because the means—what appears to have been multiple 2,000-pound bombs rather than, say, a sniper’s bullet—demonstrated that “Israel has no problem eliminating an entire group of people in order to kill just one person.”

[Read: How Beirut is responding to Hassan Nasrallah’s death]

I worry that when the parties, memes, and trays of sweets are finished, Syria will be all the more isolated. Our country’s anguish has been pushed to the margins of global consciousness. Its regime has committed atrocities detailed in thousands of pages of documents that have yielded nothing but distant, largely symbolic trials in European courts. To live through all of this is to understand, in the deepest sense, that the world’s moral compass does not always point toward justice.

When the news of Nasrallah’s death broke, many Syrians felt, for a brief moment, that an elusive dream had taken material shape—that eliminating a figure like Nasrallah would somehow move us closer to peace, closer to righting the wrongs done to us. But the rising death toll in Lebanon also suggests a bitter truth. I am reminded of other moments in our region’s history—the deaths of Saddam Hussein and Muammar Qaddafi, for example—that seemed at first to render justice but only perpetuated the cycle of violence.

In our region, we sometimes feel as though accountability is destined to be followed by more destruction and bloodshed—as though we can never say that the scales have tipped in our favor without questioning the cost.

French and Qatari military planes deliver 27 metric tonnes of medicines and basic necessities to Lebanon.

For the Palestinian children evacuated from Gaza, weekly football training brings smiles and unearths future stars.

In indirect message to the US via Qatar, Iran says it doesn't want a regional war, but that Israel must be 'deterred'.

The UAE, Japan and Qatar call for restraint amid Israel's expanded military operations, but Washington offers support.