DARRYL'S WEEKLY BRIEFING

The Week That Was

Sunday 19 April 2026

Here’s a quote – reported in yesterday’s The Jerusalem Post – from a spokesman for the Iranian military: “As long as the United States does not ensure full freedom of navigation for vessels travelling to and from Iran, the situation in the Strait of Hormuz will remain tightly controlled.”

And from the current Iranian Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei: “The Iranian navy is prepared to inflict new, bitter defeats on its enemies.”

So, is it me or does something not seem quite right when Donald Trump says the Strait is open again and the Iranian regime has agreed to all the US demands?

Monday 20 April 2026

Kenton United Synagogue is within a kilometre or two of where my family and I once lived. Back in the day, it was a staid, peaceful, happy area of Greater London where you could walk down the street, day or night, and feel safe and secure.

But on Saturday there was an attempted arson attack on the synagogue resulting in minor smoke damage to an internal room with, thank God, no-one injured.

This synagogue sits next to a school and a children’s playground.

By Sunday morning, a large police cordon was in place. Forensics officers, fire investigation dogs, plainclothes detectives and a black SUV being searched nearby.

This is the fourth attack on the Jewish community in London in four weeks.

Whoever lit the fire knew that the school sat beside the synagogue and that there was a playground there too.

So, four ambulances torched in Golders Green, a predominantly Jewish suburb, petrol bottles at Finchley Synagogue, arson in a Jewish site in Hendon and now an attempted arson attack in Kenton.

No synagogue – indeed no place of worship – should be a crime scene.

Credit: Hen Mazzig.

Tuesday 21 April 2026

Egyptian Muslim author and commentator Dalia Zaida has posted overnight on the so-called peace talks taking place in, of all places, Islamabad, Pakistan between the US and Iran.

“Arabs (and also Israel)” she says, “do not care whether the US-Iran negotiations will end with a ceasefire; they want to make sure that the future Iran will have no economic or military authority over them.”

As she says, Pakistan is not the right mediator, but the only one, and thus some Gulf states, like Saudi Arabia and Qatar, are paying heavily to align with it.

I remain perplexed why these negotiations are taking place at all. Iran doesn’t have a great record of keeping its word on anything so what’s the point of a deal?

Wednesday 22 April 2026

Here’s a story I guarantee you, you will not read about in the mainstream media.

A Muslim, Arab falafel shop owner named Haim in the north of Israel refused to take money from IDF soldiers for months, despite being bankrupt.

He decided at the beginning of the war between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon that all soldiers in uniform would eat free.

Day after day, week after week he stood behind the counter feeding fighters heading in and out of combat zones.

Thousands passed through. What began as generosity slowly developed into financial collapse, with the business plunged into debt and facing complete closure.

Then came the moment that captivated the country. An IDF reserve unit heard about Haim’s experience. One Friday morning, dozens of soldiers showed up – this time not to receive, but to give. They arrived with families, friends and other civilians buying everything in sight. The stand sold out within hours.

But the real moment came afterward. When Haim opened his tip jar, he reportedly found an envelope containing tens of thousands of shekels and a handwritten note.

“You fed us before the battle – now it’s our turn to feed your business” is what it said.

Haim sat down on a plastic chair and burst into tears.

Credit to Jewish Breaking News and Lauri Meizler.

Thursday 23 April 2026

Here’s another item you won’t find in the mainstream media.

An exclusive report in last Sunday’s Daily Mail in the UK, exposed the reality inside Gaza. Women living under Hamas rule say they are being sexually exploited by terrorists, coerced into acts in exchange for basic survival.

The testimonies are not vague. They are specific, raw and deeply disturbing.

One woman told the Daily Mail: “They told me if I don’t cooperate, my children will starve.” Another said she was “forced into sex in return for food aid,” describing a system where access to basic survival is conditioned on submission. These are direct testimonies of coercion in a place where saying no can mean suffering and death.

According to the report, this utter collapse of moral boundaries was perpetrated by the very people who claim to protect the Palestinian people, including by Islamic charity workers tasked with assisting the most vulnerable.

Another Gazan man confirmed that a similar episode had happened with one of his female neighbours, who was blackmailed by “one of Hamas’ charity organisations…they wanted her to whore herself in exchange for a food parcel, or an aid voucher, or 100 shekels.”

The allegations reflect a pattern that has surfaced before in smaller fragments, now brought into focus through the work of local journalists from Jusoor News in Gaza, whose reporting under Hamas rule carries real personal risk. This is not an international brand with institutional backing. It is a small digital outlet covering the Middle East, including Gaza – and it is no coincidence that its reporters do not splash themselves across social media like other self-styled Gazan “citizen journalists.”

This is what real journalism looks like. Not curated narratives or selective outrage in Hamas’ media office press vests. But the willingness to expose abuse even when it implicates those who claim to represent your own people.

And yet, beyond the Daily Mail the silence is deafening.

There are no headlines in major outlets. No urgent panels. No viral campaigns. The same ecosystem that amplifies every unverified allegation against Israel has shown little interest in testimonies coming from inside Gaza when they implicate Hamas.

Contrast that with the recent claims circulated by Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, a Hamas front organisation that presents itself as a neutral watchdog but has repeatedly pushed sensational allegations aligned with Hamas narratives to distract from the atrocities the terror group has committed in Gaza and in Israel on October 7, 2023. Among them are allegations of extreme abuse in Israeli detention, amplified across social media despite lacking evidentiary backing. These accounts, including claims such as dogs raping detainees, are spreading widely without the scrutiny that serious reporting demands.

The difference is clear: when allegations point at Israel, they travel fast. When they point at Hamas, they stall. That imbalance is not just a media failure, it is a moral one.

The silence around these testimonies fits a broader pattern. When Israeli survivors of sexual violence have come forward, like the former Hamas hostage, Romi Gonen, their accounts have been, ignored, minimized or even treated with suspicion, despite clear testimony and evidence. In some cases, Israeli victims are not just overlooked but accused of “weaponizing” their own trauma, while their attackers are shielded from accountability. The message is unmistakable: some victims are believed, others are doubted and the difference depends less on evidence than on who is blamed, Hamas or Israel.

Ultimately, the Daily Mail report forces an uncomfortable question: why are the testimonies from Gaza not leading global coverage?

Why are the journalists who exposed this, operating under Hamas control and at a great personal risk, not being celebrated, while others who recycle talking points are elevated and even awarded? Why are self-proclaimed Gaza “influencers” like Hind Khoudari, who was exposed as a Hamas and Islamic Jihad sympathizer, or Motaz Azaiza, who celebrated Hamas’ October 7 massacre online, treated as cultural heroes, while no one has ever heard of any reporter from Jusoor News?

The answer lies in what the story disrupts.

It challenges the simplified narrative of victim and oppressor. It exposes the reality that Hamas does not just fight Israel. It exerts brutal control over its own population, including through exploitation and coercion.

This is a story many prefer not to tell, but it is the story that matters; ignoring it does not protect the victims, it protects their abusers.

Credit to both the Daily Mail and Honest Reporting.

Friday 24 April 2026

I’ve written about Khaled Abu Toameh before. He is a half-Palestinian, award-willing, Muslim Arab journalist based in Israel. He knows a thing or two about the Middle East. An article of his appeared in a newsletter of the Gatestone Institute during the week. It’s dated April 20 at 5:00 am if you would like to read the entire piece but here are the highlights:

· The US president’s negotiations and ceasefires are viewed by Tehran, Gaza and Beirut as infidels trying to tell Muslims what to do. For them, such a situation is unimaginable, unacceptable and cannot be allowed to stand.

· To Iran’s current leaders, whoever they are, if Trump carries out his threat to bomb the country’s bridges and power plants on Wednesday, so be it. In the view of Iran’s theocratic regime, none of that is of any importance so long as it survives, in any form, to be able to continue waging jihad (holy war) against its people, its neighbour and the West.

· A piece of paper signed with infidels at the point of a gun is, in their eyes, nothing more than a Western fantasy.

· They see anything short of the total destruction of their entire power base as a total victory.

· That is why all three regimes – the Islamic Republic of Iran, Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon – need to be totally dismantled if there is to be any real, permanent change of conduct in the Middle East.

· The message should by now be clear: Iran’s regime, Hamas and Hezbollah have no intention of laying down their arms, no interest in compromise and no respect for Trump and his policies. In fact, they are telling Trump: your initiatives and efforts are irrelevant.

· The intractability of their leaders also aligns with their long-term ideological objective of sustaining a permanent conflict with Israel and the West.

· Even if the Iranian regime is no longer able to continue funding, arming and guiding its proxies, all will remain committed to armed struggle until “victory”.

· “Victory”, in their terms, means first the destruction of Israel (“the little Satan”), then taking over their oil-rich neighbours and eventually the destruction of Europe and the United States (“the Great Satan”).

· So long as the Iranian regime – or Hamas or Hezbollah – is able to survive, there’ll be no disarmament, no moderation and no peace.

For God’s sake please cut this out and send it to Donald Trump, just in case he’s serious about these “peace talks” and “ceasefires”.

Saturday 25 April 2026

Today in Australia it is, of course, Anzac Day, a day when we remember the sacrifice of Australian men and women who, over the entire time we have been a country, have fought for the freedoms we now seem to take for granted.

Lest we forget.

Meanwhile, in the Middle East…

I have written many times about the president-for-life of the Palestinian Authority (PA), Mahmoud Abbas. In case you missed it, he was the principal financier of the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympic Games in 1972, he is now in the twentieth year of a four-year-term as PA president, his presidency has been so scarred by corruption and scandal that polls show that if, God forbid, an election were to be held, Hamas – yes that Hamas – would be preferred over him to run the PA and despite promises to the contrary to ignorant politicians of the West, including those of our own federal government, the PA continues to handsomely reward terrorists and their families for slaughtering “infidels”, particularly of the Israeli variety. He is also reputedly worth $US100 million, no doubt most if not all of it as a result of “aid” provided to the PA by idiots in the West for the benefit of its citizens who, sadly, never see a cent of it. Idiots, by the way, who look upon Abbas as a “moderate”.

A lengthy article by Hen Mazzig appeared two days ago on JewishLink which is rather lengthy so put the kettle on and settle into it. It’s well worth a read.

“He thought nobody was listening. The Saudis heard everything. And the Palestinian Authority will never recover.

“There is a recording making its way around Arab intelligence services this month. In it, Mahmoud Abbas…expresses quiet satisfaction that Saudi Arabia was struck by Iranian regime missiles during the war. He says, the coded language Palestinian politicians use when they think nobody is listening, that the Saudis had it coming.

“He did not think he was being recorded.

“He knows now.

“The tape is just the symptom. What it exposes is that the president of the Palestinian Authority has no friends left in the Arab world and the leaders of Hamas, sitting in their Doha (Qatar) suites, have just spent six weeks demonstrating the same thing.

“The English-language press has missed almost all of it. Don’t be too shocked. Here is what actually happened.

“When Israel and the United States opened the war on the regime in Iran this spring, the Palestinian factions discovered something they had spent decades insulating themselves from. They were irrelevant to their own war. The biggest Middle East war in a generation was unfolding and nobody in any serious capital was asking Ramallah (in the West Bank under PA control) or Gaza what they thought.

“The Palestinian commentator Ahmad al-Attawna put words to it on Arab television: ‘The Palestinian people clearly have no leadership and I’m not speaking metaphorically; even in reality there is no true leadership capable of presenting the Palestinian people with a vision or a sense of where they are headed’.

“For two decades, Hamas has been Iran’s most valuable asset in the region. Funded and armed by Tehran, built carefully into an organization capable of executing Oct. 7^th. Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas political chief the Israeli’s killed in Tehran in 2024, said it plainly on camera before his death: ‘I can only thank the Islamic Republic of Iran, which did not withhold money, weapons or technology from the resistance.’

“Simply reading from the ledger. Without Iran, the Qassam Brigades would be a street gang with grievances. With Iran, they became the most effective non-state terrorist army on the planet.

“Which is why, what Hamas did when the war started is so revealing: Nothing. Hamas did nothing. Not one rocket from Gaza. Not one drone. Nothing beyond a thin statement from Abu Obeida, formerly the masked spokesman of Hamas’ military wing, that was so perfunctory it felt drafted by committee: ‘We welcome the Iranian response that targeted all of occupied Palestine and dealt a heavy blow to the criminal occupation forces.’

“Twenty years of Iranian investment, returned with a press release.

“And it got worse. According to reporting circulating in Gulf capitals, Hamas quietly asked Iran to stop attacking neighbouring Arab states during the war.

“Iran was firing on Qatar. Qatar is where the political bureau sleeps, where the money clears, where the deals get cut. In the choice between the patron that had built the army and the host that was paying the bills, Hamas sided with the host.

“The Egyptian analyst Ahmed Sultan, who watches these relationships the way Kremlinologists once watched Politburo seating charts, summed it up: ‘Hamas’ leaders have a pragmatic strategy; they see relations with Arab countries as purely based on interest but the relationship with Iran is strategic. It is truly shameful.’

“In Arabic political discourse, ‘shameful’ is a charge of moral bankruptcy that does not translate cleanly. When an Egyptian analyst applies it to Hamas on Arab airwaves, he is not describing a policy disagreement; he is saying the organisation has lost its honour.

“Tehran heard it too. There is already talk within Iranian security circles of making Hamas pay for its silence. Hamas will pay in ledger entries. Hezbollah showed up and paid for it in bodies. Hamas went quiet and will pay for it in dollars.

“Then came the line from the Kuwaiti analyst Ayed Al-Manaa that I suspect will outlive this war: ‘Iran, which supported Hamas in Gaza, slaughtered, along with Hezbollah, the Syrians with knives. This is the Iran that Hamas is crying over.’

“It took a war and the collapse of Iran’s deterrent for an Arab analyst to say that on television.

“The Palestinian Authority is a different story and a darker one.

“On paper, Mahmoud Abbas should have welcomed this war. The regime in Iran is patron of his worst enemies, the force that expelled his government from Gaza in the 2007 coup and has been agitating against his rule in the West Bank ever since. The humbling of Tehran should have been the best month Abbas had in 20 years.

“Instead, he spent it nursing a grievance.

“Saudi Arabia has spent the last several years reducing its financial support to the Palestinian Authority, the slow drawdown Gulf royals use to send a message. Abbas has never forgiven them.

“Layer in two other resentments: the United Arab Emirates bypassed him entirely through the 2020 Abraham Accords, and Qatar funds Hamas, which is trying to destroy him. Abbas looks around the Gulf and sees no allies, only men who either ignored him or bankrolled the people who want him gone.

“So when Iranian missiles started landing in Riyadh (Saudi Arabia), Abbas, if the recording is authentic, which every official I have spoken to about it believes it is, expressed joy in what he thought were private conversations. Open pleasure that the Saudis were getting what he felt they had coming.

“The Saudis found out as the Saudis always do.

“Abbas was forced to send Hussein al-Sheikh, his deputy and the man most people assume will inherit whatever is left of the PA, to Riyadh on a mission of abject apology.

“Samir Hulileh, the former secretary-general of the Palestinian cabinet, described the situation with the kind of candour you rarely hear at that level: ‘From the beginning, we didn’t have much influence over what was happening; now we’ve become even more irrelevant.’

“What this month exposed is a truth the Palestinian national movement has spent 50 years concealing from the world and from itself.

“It does not have principles. It has patrons. Hamas’ loyalty to Iran lasted exactly as long as Iran was the strongest player in the room. Abbas’ commitment to Arab solidarity lasted exactly as long as the Saudis were signing the cheques.

“Call this what it is. A franchise operation. Loyalty runs in one direction only – downward from the top and evaporates the moment the royalty payments stop.

“I have spent years being told, in every Western capital where I am invited to speak, that the Palestinian cause is the conscience of the Arab world. This month, the Arab world watched Hamas refuse to lift a finger for the regime that armed it for 20 years and watched the president of the Palestinian Authority laugh at the destruction of the country that has paid his civil servants’ salaries for most of his presidency.

“Therein lies the conscience of the Arab world.

“Iran will punish Hamas quietly, the way Tehran punishes proxies who disappoint it: a late transfer, a missed shipment, a Quds Force contact who stops returning calls. The Saudis will decide what to do with Abbas and my guess is that Mohammed bin Salman (Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia often referred to as MBS) is already running the arithmetic on whether it is easier to replace the old man than to reform him. Saudi-Israeli normalisation is back on the table and MBS is not the kind of ruler who lets a man with a recording problem sit across the table of the deal that reshapes the region.

“The Palestinian people – the actual people – the ones nobody in Ramallah or Doha or Tehran has consulted in decades, will be handed whatever arrangement the leaders decide to hand them.

“This is the consequence of a leadership that spent a war performing for three audiences at once and forgot the oldest rule of politics in the Arab world: someone in the room is always recording.

“If this gave you a sharper picture of what just happened in the Arab world, forward it to one person who is still operating on 2023 assumptions.”

Who says the Middle East isn’t interesting – and complex? It’s a pity Western “journalists” didn’t try a little harder to present reality instead of their own ideology.