A woman walks past an anti-US billboard depicting US President Donald Trump and the Strait of Hormuz, in Tehran, Iran, May 2, 2026. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS

The United States said it expected an Iranian response as soon as later in the day on Friday to its latest proposal to end the war in the Gulf, even as US and Iranian forces clashed in the Gulf and the United Arab Emirates came under renewed attack.

Recent days have seen the biggest flare-ups in fighting in and around the contested Strait of Hormuz since a ceasefire began a month ago, despite the US and Iran indicating they were closer than ever to a deal to end the war.

“We should know something today,” US Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters in Rome. “We’re expecting a response from them … The hope is it’s something that can put us into a serious process of negotiation.” Iran‘s foreign ministry spokesperson said Tehran was still weighing its response.

Sporadic clashes between Iranian armed forces and US vessels were taking place in the Strait of Hormuz on Friday, Iran‘s semi-official Fars news agency reported. The US military said it had struck two more Iran-linked vessels that were trying to enter an Iranian port. A US fighter jet had hit the vessels’ smokestacks and prevented them from entering Iran.

President Donald Trump said on Thursday a ceasefire was still holding despite the flare-ups. Washington is awaiting Tehran’s response to a US proposal, which would formally end the war first, before talks to resolve the most contentious issues such as the fate of Iran‘s nuclear program.

Trump said three US Navy destroyers were attacked as they moved through the strait, and the US military fired back.

“Three World Class American Destroyers just transited, very successfully, out of the Strait of Hormuz, under fire. There was no damage done to the three Destroyers, but great damage done to the Iranian attackers,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

He later told reporters the ceasefire remained in effect and played down the exchange. “They trifled with us today. We blew them away,” Trump said in Washington.

IRAN ACCUSES US OF BREACHING TRUCE

Iran accused the United States of breaching the ceasefire, which had largely held since it was announced on April 7 but has come under far greater strain this week since Trump announced – and then paused – a new naval mission to force open the strait.

“Every time a diplomatic solution is on the table, the US opts for a reckless military adventure,” Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi said on Friday.

Iran‘s top joint military command said US forces had targeted an Iranian oil tanker and another ship, and carried out air attacks on civilian areas on Qeshm Island in the Strait of Hormuz and nearby coastal areas. Iranian forces responded by attacking US military vessels east of the strait and south of the port of Chabahar.

A spokesperson for Khatam al-Anbiya Central Headquarters said the Iranian strikes inflicted “significant damage,” but US Central Command said none of its assets was hit.

Iran‘s Mehr news agency reported that one crew member was killed, 10 wounded and four were missing after the US Navy attacked an Iranian commercial ship late on Thursday in waters near the strait, the vital conduit for global energy supplies that Tehran has all but closed since the war began.

The confrontation was not confined to the waterway. The United Arab Emirates said its air defenses engaged with two ballistic missiles and three drones from Iran on Friday, resulting in three moderate injuries.

During the war, Iran has repeatedly targeted the UAE and other Gulf states that host US military bases. In what the UAE called a “major escalation,” Iran stepped up attacks on its neighbor this week after Trump announced “Project Freedom” to escort ships in the strait, which he then paused after 48 hours.

OIL PRICES HOVER AROUND $100

In a separate incident, Iranian forces seized an oil tanker, the Ocean Koi, in the Gulf of Oman east of the strait, over an alleged attempt to disrupt Iran‘s oil exports, state media said on Friday, quoting an army statement.

It said the Barbados-flagged tanker, which is under US sanctions, was carrying Iranian oil and “was trying to harm and disrupt oil exports … by exploiting regional conditions,” without giving further explanation.

Oil prices held steady, with Brent crude futures hovering around $100 a barrel, as traders weigh the conflicting signals of clashes in the Gulf against reports of diplomatic progress.

TRUMP URGES NEGOTIATED END TO WAR

The latest US proposal would formally end the conflict first, before addressing Washington’s core demands – that Iran suspend its nuclear program and reopen the strait. Tehran, which had made a similar proposal last week, said it had not yet reached a decision on the US plan.

Trump said Tehran had acknowledged his demand that Iran could never get a nuclear weapon, a prohibition he said was implicit in the US proposal.

“There’s zero chance. And they know that, and they’ve agreed to that. Let’s see if they are willing to sign it,” Trump said. Iran has always said its nuclear program is peaceful and it is not pursuing a weapon.

Asked when any deal might be reached, Trump said: “It might not happen, but it could happen any day.”

STERLING, ILLINOIS — On Wednesday, Nik Jakobs was planting corn. On Thursday, the 41-year-old Illinois cattle farmer stood in a two-acre cornfield preparing to plant something else: a synagogue.

Around 75 people gathered on the edge of the field this week in Sterling, Illinois, a two-hour drive west of Chicago, where Jakobs and his family broke ground on a new home for Temple Sholom, the small congregation that has anchored Jewish life here for more than a century, and where his family has prayed since the 1950s.

The planned 4,000-square-foot building will also house a Holocaust museum inspired by the story of Jakobs’ grandparents, Edith and Norbert, who survived the war after Christian families in the Netherlands hid them in their homes for years. Jakobs described the future museum as a place devoted not only to Jewish history, but to teaching the dangers of hatred and division. “If you have the choice to be right or kind,” he said, repeating advice from his grandmother, “choose kind.”

A 60-foot blue ribbon — chosen by Jakobs’ wife, Katie, to match the color of the Israeli flag — stretched across the future building site. His four daughters held it alongside his parents, brothers and friends. Then Jakobs lifted oversized gold scissors and cut the ribbon as pastors, farmers, city officials and members of neighboring churches applauded.

I’m writing a book about a young Jewish farmer who is building a synagogue in a two-acre cornfield in rural Illinois using sacred objects (ark, Torah, stained glass windows) donated by closing congregations across America. Today, they held the groundbreaking. 🧑‍🌾 🌽🕍🪏 pic.twitter.com/90TynBMWHC

— Benyamin Cohen (@benyamincohen) May 8, 2026

The synagogue rising from this Illinois cornfield will house pieces of the past.

A nearby storage area holds Jewish objects Jakobs rescued from shuttered synagogues across the country: stained-glass windows, Torah arks, rabbi’s chairs, memorial plaques and wooden tablets engraved with the tribes of Israel. Many came from Temple B’nai Israel, a 113-year-old synagogue that closed down in 2025. It served generations of Jews in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, now a ghost town since the steel mills closed. Its remaining congregants donated sacred objects to Jakobs so their story could live on rather than disappear.

The day before the groundbreaking, the Jakobs family began opening some of the crates for the first time since they were packed away nearly a year ago. Nik’s father, Dave Jakobs, pried open one box with a hammer and crowbar while Nik loosened screws with an electric drill, the family gathered around like archaeologists opening a tomb.

Inside was a stained-glass window with images of a tallit and shofar bursting in jewel tones of blue, yellow and red. Jakobs’ mother, Margo, lifted Annie, the youngest of Nik’s daughters, so the 4-year-old could peer inside. The bright red glass matched the bow in her hair.

Nearby sat the massive wooden ark salvaged from Pennsylvania, topped with twin Lions of Judah whose carved paws once overlooked generations of worshippers.

Faith on the farmland

Temple Sholom — founded in 1910 — was once the center of Jewish life in Sterling, a town of 14,500 surrounded by flat farmland and tall grain silos. Its Jewish community once included a pharmacist, the manager of Kline’s department store and the owner of a local McDonald’s franchise.

Over time, membership dwindled. The roof sagged. The pews emptied.

Last year, the congregation sold its aging building and relocated High Holiday services to a tent on the Jakobs’ farm, where prayers mingled with the smell of manure and cattle lowing nearby.

At a moment when many small-town synagogues are closing, Temple Sholom is doing something increasingly rare: building a bigger new sanctuary from scratch. The synagogue will sit prominently along one of Sterling’s main roads — a highly visible expression of Jewish life in a region where Jews are few.

Thursday’s groundbreaking took place on the National Day of Prayer, the annual observance formalized under President Ronald Reagan, who grew up a few miles away in Dixon, Illinois. Earlier that morning, attendees gathered inside New Life Lutheran Church for a breakfast sponsored by Temple Sholom.

“I was so happy to see bagels, lox and cream cheese,” said Rev. James Keenan, a Catholic priest originally from Brooklyn. “It reminded me of home.”

Inside the church sanctuary, a large wooden cross glowed amber and blue above the dais while two giant screens displayed the National Day of Prayer logo. Jakobs, wearing cowboy boots, jeans and a powder-blue blazer, addressed the crowd.

“Tolerance is not weakness,” he said. “It is strength.”

The new synagogue will sit beside New Life Lutheran Church on land sold to Temple Sholom by farmer Dan Koster, 71, who has known the Jakobs family for three generations.

“We need more religious presence in the community,” Koster said.

For Drew Williams, New Life’s 38-year-old lead pastor, the synagogue and museum represent more than neighboring buildings. His church already hosts food-packing drives, summer meal programs and community events. He imagines future partnerships with Temple Sholom.

“I don’t think there’s any community that is immune to hate,” Williams said. “That just means it’s on us” to be on the other side “spreading peace.”

Sterling Mayor Diana Merdian, who is 41 and grew up in town with Jakobs, said the project reflects a broader desire among younger generations to preserve local history and identity. “If we don’t carry those stories, we lose them,” she said. “Once you lose that, you can’t get it back.”

During the ceremony in the cornfield, Temple Sholom’s longtime cantor, Lori Schwaber, asked those gathered to remember the congregation’s founding members and recite the Mourner’s Kaddish together. Jews and Christians stood side by side in the prairie wind as Hebrew prayers drifted across the open farmland.

Lester Weinstine, a 90-year-old congregant who was the first bar mitzvah at Temple Sholom when the shul was still housed out of a Pepsi bottling plant, looked out across the field in disbelief. “I never thought I would see this,” he said.

For Jakobs, the synagogue project has become inseparable from the lessons his grandparents’ survival taught him. “You sometimes feel on an island as a Jew, especially in rural America,” he said. “But this community — that’s not what I’ve experienced here.”

If construction stays on schedule, the synagogue will open in fall 2027. Its first major service will not be a dedication ceremony, but the bat mitzvah of Jakobs’ oldest daughter, Taylor.

Members of the Pennsylvania congregation are planning a bus trip to Illinois for the occasion, after donating many of their sacred objects to help build Jakob’s synagogue. Their former rabbi has offered to officiate.

“If a farmer can build a synagogue in a cornfield,” Jakobs said, “anybody can do it anywhere.”

The post A Jewish farmer broke ground on a synagogue in an Illinois cornfield. His neighbors showed up to help. appeared first on The Forward.

AppleTV+’s new thriller Unconditional has the trappings of so much streaming content.

A young woman disappears into hostile territory. Her mother, already juggling a family health crisis, does her own sleuthing to get her daughter back. People die, twisty alliances emerge. It’s all part of the suspense boiler plate, and it sizzles just enough to keep your interest. What makes the show, airing May 8, different from every other show is the early response.

Sight almost entirely unseen, the internet was in an uproar. The show is Israeli, and the announcement trailer showed the character Gali (Ronn Talia Lynne) in her IDF uniform. Pro-Palestine accounts were quick to shout “hasbara” or “overt ziopropaganda” for a show whose premise is ostensibly a sympathetic story of an Israeli taken prisoner by the evil, Putin-era Russian state. (The trailer makes no mention of Palestinians or a war in Gaza. The show doesn’t either.)

The online response alone proves the challenging optics for anything Israeli, but the show actually has quite a bit to say about the Jewish state’s propaganda apparatus — within the country and without.

On a layover in the Moscow Airport, Gali and her mother, Orna (Liraz Chamami), are taken in for questioning. Security claims to have found drugs in Gali’s backpack — an echo of the Naama Issacher affair from 2019 — and she’s summarily sentenced to seven years in a Russian jail.

Orna returns to Israel and hires a PR handler to plead Gali’s case. Together they curate a specific image to sell to the state media.

Gali is a “happy, good-hearted girl. She served in the army, like everyone” and even extended her service, Orna says in radio and television interviews. The file photo for news segments is exactly what so many outside of Israel would object to: Gali in uniform. In Israel it tugs heart strings. Abroad, it makes the abductee a war criminal who had it coming.

It’s probably not giving much away, given that the hands behind this show are the creators of Hatufim, which became a hit in the U.S. as the antihero-forward War on Terror commentary Homeland, that Gali is not a perfect victim. This is a strange sort of hasbara, if one Israel often produces, the kind that’s peopled by problematic characters operating in the society’s gray zones. (See streaming hit Fauda, following a morally-dubious undercover unit made up of trigger-happy adulterers exploiting their Palestinian contacts.)

What’s surprising, given the premise, is how much time the show spends not in Russia or Israel, but in India, where Gali and Orna were touring before their fateful missed connection in Moscow. It’s here we’re given entree into the Ugly Israeli abroad, a stereotype that is growing increasingly common thanks to reports of poor behavior — stealing money from temples, creating chaos in hospitals and restaurants — in the global East. (On the flip side, many Israelis, like a couple at a noodle shop in Vietnam, are being harassed by other tourists for no reason other than their country of origin and some feel the need to hide their identity while traveling.)

Gali sings the praises of an Indian gastropub that will give you dysentery. “We are so lucky because for the last three months the kitchen has been condemned by the health department,” she smirks. “But yesterday some truck driver hit a wild boar, so they gave them an exemption. So it won’t be a waste.”

In a later episode, one of Gali’s companions wisecrack about the pestilential heat and jibe that prisons in India are particularly atrocious. (This must ring alarm bells for those aware of Israel’s carceral system for Palestinians.)

Russia is equally backward. Unlike in Israel, “not everyone here is happy to work with a woman,” a Russian arms dealer weighs in. If you didn’t get it, these countries are backward. Israel has its problems, but at least it has women in power!

Watching, I was reminded of social media posts by Indians complaining about racism and drug use from IDF veterans on the so-called “Hummus trail.” One post by AJ+ said the soldiers come there to “detox” from “carrying out a genocide in Gaza.”

Unconditional is under no illusions that Israelis can be a disruptive presence. If anything, it pushes the concept to new places. These Sabras ruin mindfulness workshops and start shoot-outs in hotel lobbies. It’s not great for the brand.

But then again, we live in a climate where simply acknowledging the existence of Israelis — as seen in a recent ballyhoo surrounding author R.F. Kuang — can prove controversial or politically-loaded, no matter how neutral the depiction.

Why Apple would give their imprimatur to an Israeli project today, when public opinion of the Jewish state has fallen off a demographic cliff, is a valid question likely explained by the positive reception of another Israeli import on the streamer, the show Tehran, about an IDF hacker stuck in Iran. From within the silos it’s hard to tell if audiences will cancel their subscriptions, as some have threatened.

Maybe, like Gali’s uniform, the show is a Rorschach. BDS types may boycott, yet the show seems to echo many of their talking points about Israel’s overzealous campaign in Gaza after Oct. 7 — at least by way of metaphor.

In a late episode, Orna tells her government companion Rita (Evgenia Dodina) about a time a classmate broke Gali’s arm, and the teacher excused his actions because his mother was in the hospital.

“You’re exactly like the teacher,” Rita tells Orna. “You give me a thousand excuses for Gali. ‘It’s because of me. It’s not her fault. Poor thing.’ It doesn’t matter she didn’t understand what she was getting into, and it doesn’t matter she didn’t mean to.”

Orna says it’s different with Gali — because it’s her daughter. One can overlook a lot when it’s your family, or, for that matter, your country.

The post Is this Apple TV thriller hasbara — or societal critique? appeared first on The Forward.