Israelis entered the final 24 hours of an intense election season on Monday, as reports circulated that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may have clashed with the Israeli military over initiating a possible escalation with Iran immediately before the vote.

Tensions flared over reports that Netanyahu and his military chief of staff disagreed over an instruction by the prime minister to carry out an “action” that the army worried could reignite the conflict with Iran. Netanyahu’s office denied the report, first published by Israel’s Channel 12, as “fake news.”

Defense Minister Israel Katz also quickly denied the report.

Israel’s opposition candidates accused Netanyahu of endangering regional stability for his political preservation. Netanyahu’s main rival, former military chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot, warned Netanyahu not to “dare to place your own political interests above the security of the state.” He posted on X, “Netanyahu, my eyes are on you.”

Avigdor Lieberman, head of the hawkish Yisrael Beytenu party which is part of the opposition bloc, sent a letter to Israel’s attorney general demanding a criminal investigation into possible treason by Netanyahu’s “attempts to drag Israel into a war on the eve of elections, including a willingness to sacrifice (Israeli) soldiers out of fear of losing the election.”

The election on Tuesday is the first since the Hamas-led attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, which sparked the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza and conflicts across the Middle East.

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Russia is playing a game not only in Europe, where it continues its brutal aggression against Ukraine. The stakes of the Kremlin's policy in the Middle East are also extremely high, particularly amid the growing tensions and geopolitical shifts across the region. Speaking on World Talks, Anna Borshchevskaya, Senior Fellow at the Washington Institute, explains that Russia can make it significantly harder for the United States to achieve its objectives in the region.

The Telegraph article describes the radical program of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party to dismantle the current architecture of the European Union. AfD proposes stripping Brussels of real power and turning the EU into a “free federation of sovereign nations.”According to AfD, Germany should no longer be the “cashier of Europe.”

SS: Despite the Brexit divide, Western Europe's Nuclear powers are working more closely together to protect themselves against threats from both Moscow and now, increasingly, Washington. France and the United Kingdom carried out a joint airborne nuclear strike exercise for the first time, with Eurofighter Typhoon jets from the Royal Air Force escorting French Rafale jets on a simulated nuclear-strike mission.

As the dust settled on Sunday's historic general election in Serbia that saw Aleksandar Vučić, the prime minister and dominant force in Serbian politics for over a decade, ousted from office along with his Serbian Progressive Party, one big question was left unanswered: who would fill his shoes? 

This question remains unanswered on Monday because the election winner, the Student List party, which morphed from a mass-protest movement into a political force potent enough to oust Vučić, did not nominate anyone as its candidate for prime minister. 

This decision perhaps reflected its organic bottom-up structure that differentiated the party from the political establishment it accused of nurturing an environment in which corruption flourished. 

So far the favorite to become the new prime minister is Ilija Srdanović.