'The Guest' is Dead.

Making sense of life.

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1. Israel has determined that it killed top Hamas military commander Mohammed Deif in a July airstrike, the country’s military said Thursday, eliminating a planner of the Oct. 7 attacks and a militant it had tried to kill for decades. Deif, whose nom de guerre meaning “Guest” is taken as a reference to the practice of Palestinian fighters spending each night at the home of a different sympathizer in order to evade Israeli intelligence, is the most senior leader of the U.S.-designated terrorist group whom Israel says it has killed in more than nine months of fighting in the Gaza Strip and the third high-ranking enemy of the country to be declared dead in the last 48 hours. (Source: wsj.com)

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2. Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has issued an order for Iran to strike Israel directly, in retaliation for the killing in Tehran of Hamas’s leader, Ismail Haniyeh, according to three Iranian officials briefed on the order. Mr. Khamenei gave the order at an emergency meeting of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council on Wednesday morning, shortly after Iran announced that Mr. Haniyeh had been killed, said the three Iranian officials, including two members of the Revolutionary Guards. They asked that their names not be published because they were not authorized to speak publicly. Iran and Hamas have accused Israel of the assassination; Israel, which is at war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip, has neither acknowledged nor denied killing Mr. Haniyeh, who was in Tehran for the inauguration of Iran’s new president. Israel has a long history of killing enemies abroad, including Iranian nuclear scientists and military commanders. (Source: nytimes.com)

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3. The death of Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Iran raises questions about the Islamic Republic’s ability to secure the safety of its most senior state officials and allies — and what it plans to do next. Haniyeh — who was in Tehran to attend the inauguration of President Masoud Pezeshkian — was killed by an Israeli strike on his guest house overnight, Hamas said in a statement Wednesday. The death came hours after Israel said it killed a Hezbollah commander in Lebanon and just months following the death of a senior general of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in Syria, which Tehran blamed on Israel. Given Haniyeh was on Iranian soil and had hours earlier been shown live on state TV applauding Pezeshkian, his assassination is deeply embarrassing for Iran’s intelligence services, and in particular Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the IRGC. (Source: bloomberg.com)

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4. The two main mediators in Gaza cease-fire talks yesterday warned that the assassination of a senior Hamas figure on a visit to Iran could plunge the Middle East even deeper into chaos by inciting a new escalation of violence. The Gulf nation of Qatar, one of the mediators, said the targeted killing of Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas political chief, could upend the negotiations to end the nearly 10-month old war in Gaza. Mr. Haniyeh, who lived in exile in Qatar, was the lead Hamas negotiator, working closely with Qatari mediators. The foreign ministry of Egypt, which is also working to broker a cease-fire in Gaza, condemned the strike as a “dangerous escalation” and warned against “fueling conflict in the region.” It suggested, with more than a hint of frustration, that Israel seemed uninterested in pursuing regional calm despite Egypt’s “tireless efforts.” More conflict is the last thing most in the Middle East want. People and governments across the region fear that the war may not only drag on, but also metastasize into an even bigger and bloodier conflagration. Egypt and Qatar have huddled for months with Hamas, Israel and the United States, hoping for an ever-elusive breakthrough to yield a cease-fire in Gaza. (Source: nytimes.com)

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5. The Houthi militia, born in the wilds of northwestern Yemen, has been wanting a war with Israel for decades. Its distinctive five-line motto, printed on flags and chanted at rallies by the group’s faithful, includes the lines “Death to Israel” and “Curses on the Jews.” The Houthis got their wish on July 19, when one of their drones struck a high-rise in Tel Aviv, killing one man and wounding four others. The blast signaled a troubling new reality: Already embattled with Hamas in the south and Hezbollah in the north, Israel is now fighting yet another Islamist group, one that has succeeded—however modestly—in penetrating its fabled air defenses. The Houthis are not a threat just to Israel, which promptly retaliated with air strikes on a Houthi-controlled Red Sea port. They have grown steadily more dangerous and volatile in recent months. (Source: theatlantic.com)

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6. President Nicolás Maduro asked Venezuela’s top court to audit the results of Sunday’s presidential election in a bid to legitimize his self-declared victory, despite the opposition’s claim it has proof that he stole the vote. Speaking at the court’s headquarters in Caracas on Wednesday, Maduro said his socialist government would publish the complete tally sheets from the results of the vote. He reiterated his accusation that banned opposition leader María Corina Machado and her stand-in candidate, Edmundo González, are conspiring to sabotage the results. “I call on the High Court to summon all the registered candidates, the 38 parties, to review this attack on the electoral headquarters and the cyberattack, to conduct an expert report to certify the electoral results of July 28,” Maduro said. Venezuela’s top judicial body has for years been controlled by regime loyalists who have issued favorable decisions on issues from expropriations by the state to the banning of opposition political candidates. The disputed election outcome is casting doubt on hopes that the US will lift economic sanctions any time soon, promising to leave Venezuela cut off from international capital markets and delay efforts to deal with some $150 billion of defaulted bonds, loans and legal judgments owed to creditors from Wall Street to China. (Source: bloomberg.com)

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7. Even Mexico’s largest corporations are now being hit by demands from drug cartels, and gangs are increasingly trying to control the sale, distribution and pricing of certain goods. Well-known, high-ranking business leaders aren’t even safe. On Monday, the head of the business chambers’ federation in Tamaulipas state, across the border from Texas, gave television interviews complaining about drug cartel extortion in the state. Hours later on Tuesday, Julio Almanza was shot to death outside his offices in the city of Matamoros, across from Brownsville, Texas. “We are hostages to extortion demands, we are hostages of criminal groups,” Almanza said in one of his last interviews. “Charging extortion payments has practically become the national sport in Tamaulipas.” The problem came to a head when the Femsa corporation, which operates Oxxo, Mexico’s largest chain of convenience stores, announced late last week that it was closing all of its 191 stores and seven gas stations in another border city, Nuevo Laredo, because of gang problems. (Source: apnews.com)

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