The most consequential development of the weekend for Israel happened about 1,000 kilometres away, in the Hejaz. Saudi Arabia shut its East-West pipeline on Friday after a drone attack on the line and its pumping stations, and by Sunday the closure had worked its way into crude prices. Everything else on the Israeli agenda, the election, Gaza, Lebanon, sat underneath that.
Energy and the Gulf front
The East-West line runs 1,200 kilometres from Abqaiq in the east to Yanbu on the Red Sea. Since the Strait of Hormuz closed in March it has been the kingdom’s main bypass, carrying something on the order of 5 million barrels a day toward the Red Sea. With it shut, roughly 4 percent of global supply is in question, and Riyadh has not said how badly the line was damaged or when it might reopen.
The drones were launched from Iraq. No group has claimed the attack, and an investigation is under way.
Markets opened Sunday on the news. Brent traded up about 3 percent to just under $108, WTI up about 2.8 percent to roughly $103. A planned diplomatic meeting between Iran and the Gulf states on the Hormuz situation was postponed shortly after the strike. The Houthis, meanwhile, seized Perim Island in Bab al-Mandeb, completing their control of that chokepoint, and struck inside southern Saudi Arabia, wounding two people and damaging a mosque.
Two other Iran items landed in the same window. Iranian state media reported explosions at Sirik overnight. And the New York Times reported Sunday that a hardline faction inside the Revolutionary Guards attacked a vessel in Hormuz in July on its own initiative, without informing senior military or political leadership; President Masoud Pezeshkian was said to be furious, and the operation had not been authorised by the Guards’ commander-in-chief. If that account holds, it says something uncomfortable about who is actually setting escalation policy in Tehran.
Lebanon: quiet, and staying occupied
Defence Minister Israel Katz said Israel will not withdraw from the roughly 700 square kilometre security zone it holds inside Lebanon until Hezbollah is disarmed across the whole country, not merely south of the Litani. The IDF separately assessed that Beirut is not moving seriously against the organisation.
The front itself has gone silent. No fire was reported in either direction for a second consecutive day. Hezbollah has not fired since Israel took the Ali al-Taher ridge on 4 September, and it did not fire while eight of its tunnels beneath that ridge and the Beaufort Castle area were destroyed with more than 1,100 tonnes of explosives, a demolition large enough to register on seismographs.
Gaza, and a public row with Washington
Two people were killed in a strike on a vehicle in Gaza; the IDF said it had targeted Hamas engineers. Two further Hamas operatives were assassinated over the weekend.
The louder story was political. Jared Kushner, speaking by video link to a security conference during his Ukraine trip, described the September 2025 strike on Hamas leaders in Doha as a terrible operation and an operational failure that left Israel globally isolated, and said Washington used that isolation to push Israel into the October 2025 hostage and ceasefire deal.
Likud answered Sunday night in a Hebrew statement that pointedly did not name him, arguing that the decision to send the IDF into Gaza City and to strike Hamas’s leadership in Qatar, combined with pressure from Donald Trump, is what made Hamas drop its demands. Israeli officials briefing other outlets made the same case in blunter terms: the Doha strike demonstrated that Hamas leaders had no sanctuary anywhere.
Netanyahu apologised to Qatar for that strike at Trump’s arrangement at the time. Having his own party now defend it as a success, six weeks before an election, is not an accident of messaging.
West Bank
A soldier on leave was arrested Sunday after firing toward the Palestinian village of al-Mughayyir, north of Ramallah, on Saturday. He was suspended pending investigation; he says stones were thrown at him.
Separately, three Palestinians were reported beaten in unrelated incidents, farmland was set alight, a vehicle was smashed, and a foreign television crew was assaulted outside an illegal outpost. A Galilee Arab municipality says settlers erected an outpost on land it owns. The United Kingdom, France and Canada announced sanctions targeting West Bank settlements, with Britain using the phrase ethnic cleansing about settler conduct.
The 27 October election
Likud announced Sunday evening that it will ask the Central Elections Committee to disqualify Ra’am and the Joint List, on the grounds that they harm IDF soldiers and will not describe Hamas and Hezbollah as terrorist organisations. Such a ban is unlikely to survive High Court review, which has rejected comparable petitions before. Otzma Yehudit filed its own request against Ra’am and Mansour Abbas last week, running to 39 pages and leaning on a registrar’s report about funds moved by a Ra’am-affiliated nonprofit.
The campaign logic is not hidden. Likud’s statement tied both parties directly to Gadi Eisenkot, arguing they are his natural coalition partners alongside Yair Golan and Avigdor Lieberman.
Five polls published since the party slates closed show a fragmented field and no clear bloc advantage. Eisenkot’s Yashar came first in four of them, reaching 22 to 24 seats. An i24NEWS/Direct Polls survey broke the pattern, putting Likud first at 27 and Yashar at 22. Naftali Bennett’s B’Yachad has slipped to 10 to 14 depending on the poll. Ofer Winter’s People of Israel crossed the threshold in all five. Two surveys showed an exact tie between the blocs; most of the rest gave the opposition a narrow edge, with the Arab parties holding 12 to 14 seats and, therefore, the arithmetic.
Elsewhere
Netanyahu’s UN trip is expected to meet intense protests in New York after Zohran Mamdani called for rallies. The documentary NAZA, which addresses Israel’s use of AI systems in Gaza, took the Special Jury Prize at Venice to a long standing ovation; Culture Minister Miki Zohar accused its makers of betraying the country, and Benny Gantz criticised it from a different direction, saying revenge was never the point of the fighting. Israel is preparing for another flotilla, expected to sail from Italy in late October, and the IDF has begun initial planning to stop it. In Ukraine, a 45-year-old British Jewish man was found dead in a forest near Rabbi Nachman’s tomb during Rosh Hashanah, and police are investigating.
The Hebrew year turned to 5787 this weekend, three weeks before the third anniversary of 7 October and six weeks before the vote.