US Press
Washington spends the weekend on an Iran war it cannot end
Graphic: Times of Palestine
Original Reporting
The Newsdesk gathers reporting from wire services and primary sources and rewrites every story in-house before publication. How our journalism is made →
What the American papers and Washington's research institutions put in front of policymakers this weekend, and where Palestine sits in it.
The papers#
The New York Times led its Middle East file with Turkey's request for the arrest of Benjamin Netanyahu over the treatment of the flotilla activists, and with the killing of a Palestinian teenager after settlers entered a West Bank village — a report that sets the Palestinian and Israeli accounts against each other and places both inside a documented surge in settler violence.
The Washington Post reported that the Israeli fact-finding mechanism is examining the killing of Hind Rajab, the child who called for help from a car in Gaza City, while declining to send other cases it had itself marked exceptional — among them the killing of the World Central Kitchen aid workers — to military prosecutors.
The Post's second Middle East line is about frustration: with victory in the Iran war still out of reach, the president is turning on partners, and Oman, the mediator on the Strait of Hormuz shipping lanes, is taking the sharpest of it. The Atlantic described the same sultanate's passage from indispensable ally to target of annihilation, and The Hill reported Iran's parliament speaker calling the newest American sanctions unjust.
The think tanks#
The Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a hawkish Washington institute with a long record of arguing for pressure on Iran and its neighbours, spent the week on the sanctions campaign and asked in a podcast whether Erdogan's Turkey is the Middle East's next great threat — a question that lands the same week Ankara took Netanyahu's case to Interpol.
Foreign Policy ran two pieces cutting the other way: one arguing that the sanctions campaign cannot work without Beijing's cooperation, another that the United States is drawing the wrong military lessons from the war.
What is missing#
The gap is the same one this desk recorded last week. Gaza appears in Washington's weekend reading through Israeli investigations and American doctors, not as a policy file with money, a timetable and a name attached. The reconstruction fund, the Board of Peace's disarmament mechanics and the West Bank's fiscal collapse went unmentioned in the outlets swept for this roundup.
