MEFILES

Katz rules out any Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon, and the ridge question stays open

The defence minister mapped a buffer zone running from the Mediterranean to Mount Hermon and said the Ali Taher ridge stays under Israeli control. Two Israeli outlets describe that control differently.

On Sunday, Defence Minister Israel Katz said Israel will not withdraw from the zone it holds in southern Lebanon, and for the first time gave its geography. Per Haaretz’s rolling file, Katz described a belt running from the Mediterranean coast through the Beaufort Castle area to Mount Hermon, including the Ali Taher ridge, where he said the military will maintain control after killing Hezbollah operatives and destroying tunnels, to stop the group or anyone else re-establishing a presence. His line, carried by Haaretz, the Times of Israel liveblog and Arutz Sheva: “Anyone who approaches the Ali Taher ridge will be destroyed.” The formulation restates a policy Katz set out at a Rosh Hashanah toast at the Defence Ministry on 3 September, when he said Israel would not leave the security zone until Hezbollah is disarmed throughout Lebanon, calling the capture of Ali Taher “an important step in achieving this goal.”

The wording matters because Israeli outlets are not describing the same physical situation. Arutz Sheva’s write-up of the same remarks refers to “the withdrawal from the ridge,” saying the IDF has continued strikes in the Ali al-Taher area and nearby villages over two days to stop Hezbollah returning — while the same piece says the military “is currently deployed to enforce its control over the ridge.” Arutz Sheva is a settler-right outlet and the line may be a rendering artefact of the Hebrew rather than a scoop; The Files has not seen a second Hebrew source for it. What is established is the scale of what preceded this: the military said on 10 September it used 1,100 tons of explosives to destroy the Hezbollah complex beneath the ridge, on a directive Netanyahu and Katz announced jointly, with residents of northern Israel warned in advance that explosions were expected.

Assessment: “Will be destroyed” is the language of fire control, not of occupation, and the difference decides what any future negotiation is actually about. A garrison is a bargaining chip that can be traded for Hezbollah disarmament; a free-fire strip held from the Israeli side of the line is not, because there is nothing to hand over. That is the sense in which Katz’s mapping forecloses the US-brokered sequencing formula, under which the Lebanese army would take the ridge and Israel would leave only after weapons were collected. Treat the reported Iranian warning to Washington with care: the Critical Threats Project attributes it to unspecified regional sources, a different evidentiary class from the three briefed officials cited in a Reuters line The Files could only see truncated.

Venice prize for ‘NAZA' draws a citizenship threat from the culture minister and censure from the opposition

Miki Zohar said he would move to strip Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor of Israeli citizenship. Liberman and Gantz attacked the film too, which is the part that describes the electorate.

NAZA, by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, the co-creators of No Other Land, won the Special Jury Prize at the 83rd Venice Film Festival on Saturday. The Hollywood Reporter describes a documentary built on testimony from 24 Israeli military officers “outlining the systems and protocols they allege Israel uses to target and kill civilians in Gaza”; the synopsis cited by Haaretz says it reveals “in detail the systems behind Israel’s calculated mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza” after October 7. On Sunday, Culture and Sport Minister Miki Zohar said, in the Times of Israel’s translation, that “as culture minister, I will immediately act to revoke the Israeli citizenship of these despicable directors for betraying the country,” calling the filmmakers' “searing self-hatred” a betrayal. TheWrap, working from a machine translation of the Hebrew post, adds a line tying the win to the cinema-funding reform Zohar says he led so that Israeli citizens “will no longer have to pay from their own pockets” for such work.

The hardest number in the affair is a claim, not a finding. The Times of Israel’s Sunday liveblog reports that the military “denies ever planning or carrying out a strike during the war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip in which 500 civilian deaths were anticipated,” following such claims in the film; Arutz Sheva carries the spokesperson’s phrasing as “the IDF categorically rejects these allegations.” The Files has not seen the full IDF statement. The condemnation was not confined to the coalition. Yisrael Beytenu chairman Avigdor Liberman called the filmmakers “enemies of Israel” and the film “a slanderous account against Israel,” per Arutz Sheva; the same outlet’s homepage reports Benny Gantz saying “revenge was never the purpose of the fighting,” a line The Files has seen only in a teaser. The director told Haaretz the crew will do “everything” to distribute the film in Israel “as widely as possible.”

Assessment: Zohar cannot do what he said he would do. Revoking citizenship runs through the interior minister and the courts under the Citizenship Law; the culture portfolio has no such instrument. The operative threat is the one buried in the truncated clause — the cinema-funding reform, which is a real lever over who gets financed next. Read Liberman and Gantz, not Zohar, for what the day means: both sit in the anti-Netanyahu bloc, both went at the film unprompted six weeks before a ballot, and their calculation is that there is no centre-right vote in defending it. That consensus, not the ministerial bluster, is what will shape distribution inside Israel.

Likud says it will ask the elections committee to bar the Arab-majority parties from the 27 October ballot

The party says Ra’am and the Joint List “harm IDF soldiers.” Previous attempts have been struck down by the High Court, and the announcement is not yet a filing.

Likud announced on Monday that it will petition the Central Elections Committee to disqualify the Arab-majority slates from the 27 October ballot. “There is no room in the Knesset for those who harm IDF soldiers and are unable to say that Hamas and Hezbollah are terrorist organizations,” the party said in a statement carried by the Times of Israel, which notes the request is unlikely to survive the High Court, which has struck down previous efforts. Haaretz’s morning recap rendered it simply: “Likud seeks to bar Arab parties Joint List, UAL from election.” Two things are not established in what The Files has seen: whether the petition has actually been lodged with the committee, and which member of Knesset would sign it. The Times of Israel’s wording is that Likud “says it will petition” — an announcement, not yet a filing.

The timing follows a consolidation on the other side. Hadash, Ta’al and Balad agreed in mid-August on a joint run, after a deal in which Hadash said Ahmad Tibi accepted the slate on condition that the sixth and ninth places rotate and that Ta’al receive a deputy Knesset speaker position — a settlement reached only days after Ta’al publicly opposed the proposed slate on 9 August while Hadash and Balad backed it. One housekeeping note for anyone following this file: searches currently surface near-identical stories about Likud joining an Otzma Yehudit petition to bar the Joint List ahead of a “September 17” election. Those are from the 2019 cycle, and at least one aggregator carries a 2019 piece with a 2026 crawl date. They are not this story.

assessment

Assessment: A disqualification bid that the party’s own press coverage expects to fail is not primarily a legal strategy, it is a placement strategy: it puts the legitimacy of the Arab slates at the centre of the campaign’s opening weeks and forces every rival to answer for it. Note how it rhymes with the NAZA row — the same test of who is willing to defend whom, applied to a slate rather than a film. Watch for the filing itself and the sponsoring MK, because an announcement that never becomes a petition would confirm the messaging read. And check datelines on this file; the 2019 duplicates are circulating with fresh crawl dates.