Vessels in the Strait of Hormuz, Musandam, Oman, May 8, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Stringer

A ship was reported seized off the coast of the United Arab Emirates and was heading for Iranian waters on Thursday, a British navy agency said, as the US and Chinese leaders met in Beijing to discuss global problems including the Iran war.

After the talks between US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping, a White House official said the two leaders had agreed that the Strait of Hormuz should be open, and that Iran should never obtain nuclear weapons.

China is close to Iran and the main buyer of its oil. Iran has largely shut the strait to ships apart from its own since the US-Israeli war on Iran began on Feb. 28, causing a major disruption to global energy supplies.

The US paused the bombing last month but added a blockade of Iran‘s ports.

DIPLOMACY ON HOLD

In an interview with CNBC in Beijing, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said he believed China would “do what they can” to help open the strait, which he said was “very much in their interest.” Before the war, about a fifth of global oil and liquefied natural gas supplies passed through the strait.

But diplomacy to end the conflict has been on hold since last week when Iran and the US each rejected the other’s most recent proposals.

In the latest incidents on the trade route, an Indian cargo vessel carrying livestock from Africa to the United Arab Emirates was sunk in waters off the coast of Oman.

India condemned the attack and said all 14 crew members had been rescued by the Omani coastguard. Vanguard, a British maritime security advisory firm, said the vessel was believed to have been hit by a missile or drone which caused an explosion.

Separately, British maritime security agency UKMTO reported on Thursday that “unauthorized personnel” had boarded a ship anchored off the coast of the United Arab Emirates port of Fujairah and were steering it toward Iran.

“The company security officer reported that the vessel was taken by Iranian personnel while at anchor,” Vanguard said.

Security in that area is particularly sensitive, as Fujairah is the UAE‘s sole oil port on the far side of the strait, allowing some exports to reach markets without passing through it. Iran included that part of the coast on an expanded map it released last week of waters it claimed were under its control.

Still, Iran appears to be making more deals with countries to allow some ships to pass through the strait – if they accept Tehran’s terms.

A Japanese tanker crossed on Wednesday after Japan’s prime minister announced that she had requested help from the Iranian president. A huge Chinese tanker also crossed on Wednesday, and Iran‘s Fars news agency reported on Thursday that an agreement had been reached to let some Chinese ships pass.

Iran‘s Revolutionary Guards said 30 vessels had crossed the strait since Wednesday evening, still far short of some 140 that typically crossed daily before the war, but a substantial increase if confirmed.

According to shipping analytics firm Kpler, some 10 ships had sailed through the strait in the past 24 hours, only a slight increase from the five to seven ships that have crossed daily in recent weeks.

Iran‘s Judiciary Spokesperson Asghar Jahangir said on Thursday the seizure of “US tankers” violating Iranian regulations was being carried out under domestic and international law.

IRAN‘S THREAT ‘SIGNIFICANTLY DEGRADED’

Thousands of Iranians were killed in the US and Israeli airstrikes in the first weeks of the war, and thousands more have been killed in Lebanon since the war reignited fighting between Israel and the Iran-backed terrorist group Hezbollah.

Lebanese and Israeli envoys were meeting with US officials in Washington on Thursday in efforts to end the hostilities.

There has been little progress in talks on ending the war in Iran since a single round of talks was held in Pakistan last month.

Trump said his aims in starting the war were to destroy Iran‘s nuclear program, end its capability to attack its neighbors and make it easier for Iranians to overthrow their government.

A senior US admiral told a Senate committee on Thursday that Iran‘s ability to threaten its neighbors and US interests in the region had been dramatically reduced.

“Iran has a significantly degraded threat, and they no longer threaten regional partners, or the United States, in ways that they were able to do before, across every domain,” Admiral Brad Cooper said. “They’ve been significantly degraded.”

But Cooper declined to directly address reports by Reuters and other news organizations that Iran, which stockpiled arms in underground facilities, had retained significant missile and drone capabilities.

Iran‘s rulers, who had to use force to put down anti-government protests at the start of the year, have faced no organized opposition since the war began. And their closure of the strait has given them additional leverage in negotiations.

Washington wants Tehran to hand over the uranium and forgo further enrichment. Iran is seeking the lifting of sanctions, reparations for war damage, and acknowledgment of its control over the strait.

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof. Photo: Screenshot

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof’s latest article, which accuses Israeli soldiers and prison guards of widespread sexual abuse against Palestinian prisoners, has prompted a wave of backlash, with critics arguing the column is riddled with false claims and based on questionable sourcing linked to the Hamas terrorist group.

Israel plans to sue the Times over the column, which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called a “blood libel about rape.”

A joint statement by Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar described the op-ed by Kristof, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, as “one of the most hideous and distorted lies ever published against the State of Israel in the modern press” and said the country would sue for defamation.

The column accused Israel of “sexual violence against men, women, and even children” by Israeli security personnel, including allegations that prisoners were stripped naked, groped, penetrated with objects, and raped by specially trained dogs.

The Foreign Ministry also accused the Times of timing Kristof’s column, “The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians,” to appear a day before the release of an independent Israeli report, similarly titled “Silenced No More,” which found that Hamas systematically used sexual violence during the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel and against hostages in captivity in Gaza.

The ministry said the Times had been approached with the Israeli report “months ago.”

That report, conducted by an independent group, the Civil Commission on Oct. 7 Crimes by Hamas Against Women and Children, is based on an archive built over two years, with more than 10,000 photos and video segments, over 1,800 hours of footage, and more than 430 testimonies.

The report outlines rape, gang rape, and sexual torture of both women and men, including intentional burning and mutilation, and one case where family members were coerced into performing sexual acts on one another.

“There was laughter. There were jokes. They were passing them from one to another. It wasn’t — it was done for fun,” one survivor of the massacre at the Nova festival told the commission in testimony.

“I heard one rape where they were passing her around. She was probably injured, judging by her screams — screams you have never heard anywhere. It’s between silence and screams, between pain and wanting to die,” she said.

The acts constitute war crimes, crimes against humanity, and acts of genocide, according to the authors of the nearly 300-page report, who recommended that both Israeli and foreign courts prosecute the perpetrators, noting that the victims of Oct. 7 represented 52 nationalities.

Former Canadian justice minister Irwin Cotler served as a principal contributor to the report, which was also endorsed by Sheryl Sandberg, Hillary Clinton, former UN special adviser on the prevention of genocide Alice Wairimu Nderitu, former chief prosecutor of the UN Special Court for Sierra Leone Prof. David Crane, and former Israeli Supreme Court president Aharon Barak.

Kristof’s column on Tuesday cited an unnamed Palestinian journalist who said he “was held down, stripped naked, and as he was blindfolded and handcuffed, a dog was summoned. With encouragement from a handler in Hebrew, he said, the dog mounted him.” Canine experts have noted that training a dog to rape a human – especially a male – is extremely unlikely, if not impossible.

He also claimed to have shared the abuse allegations with former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert, who responded, “Do I believe it happens? Definitely.”

But Olmert later issued a statement to the Times saying that he “did not validate these claims.”

“Mr. Kristof’s article includes claims of extraordinary gravity: that Israeli authorities have directed the rape of children, that dogs have been used as instruments of sexual assault, that systematic sexual torture is state policy,” he said in the statement, which The Free Press published. “I have no knowledge supporting these claims as I said to Mr. Kristof. Therefore, the positioning of my quote after pages of such allegations misrepresents my views.”

Kristof also relied on corroboration from Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, a Geneva-based non-governmental organization that watchdog NGO Monitor and Israeli authorities allege has ideological and operational links to Hamas. Its chairman, Ramy Abdu, who made social media posts on Oct. 7 and 8, 2023, that praised the Hamas-led attacks on Israel, has been accused by Israeli authorities of being an operative for Hamas-affiliated institutions, and the group is frequently accused of spreading pro-Hamas propaganda and disinformation.

Writing on X, Netanyahu said that he instructed his legal advisers “to consider the harshest legal action,” adding that the report “defamed the soldiers of Israel and perpetuated a blood libel about rape, trying to create a false symmetry between the genocidal terrorists of Hamas and Israel’s valiant soldiers.”

“We will fight these lies in the court of public opinion and in the court of law,” he said.

But a lawsuit would face steep hurdles, especially if filed in the US, where the Times would likely argue Kristof’s column was protected opinion and Israel would have to prove “actual malice” under American defamation law, according to an article in The Jerusalem Post. Even an Israeli judgment could be difficult to enforce in the US if American courts found it incompatible with First Amendment protections.

Cardozo constitutional law professor David Rudenstine told Haaretz that such a case would be unlikely to succeed, explaining that libel claims generally require an identifiable person to show reputational and financial harm, meaning the case would likely have to be brought by Netanyahu or another official rather than Israel as a whole.

“It would be Netanyahu v. The New York Times, just like Donald Trump suing The New York Times,” Rudenstine told the paper.

Even then, the plaintiff would face the high US bar of proving the Times knew the claims were false or acted with reckless disregard for the truth. 

The Times defended the column, saying it was “extensively fact-checked.”

For Rep. Mike Lawler, a practicing Catholic, the antisemitic insult hurled at him this week was not just a ugly political attack by an intoxicated political scion. It highlighted how closely the Hudson Valley Republican has become linked to New York’s Jewish community because of the district he represents, the relationships he has built and his role as one of the GOP’s strongest pro-Israel voices.

“I have one of the largest Jewish populations anywhere in the country in my congressional district, and I’m not going to stop standing up for my constituents,” Lawler told reporters on Wednesday, a day after William Paul, the son of Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, confronted him in a Washington bar and blamed “Jews” for political attacks — targeting Lawler because he believed the New York rep was Jewish. Paul later apologized and said he has a drinking problem for which he is seeking treatment.

Lawler, 39, represents New York’s 17th Congressional District, a suburban swing seat in Rockland and Westchester counties that has the nation’s largest Jewish population per capita. Lawler narrowly defeated Democratic incumbent Sean Patrick Maloney in the last midterm elections by a slim 2,000-vote margin, with strong support from the large Hasidic communities in Monsey, New Square and New Hempstead.

The episode reflected how deeply Lawler has become associated with Jewish causes and support for Israel. Lawler, who previously served two years in the New York State Assembly, took credit for lowering the temperature in Rockland County after local GOP officials in 2019 posted a video widely criticized as antisemitic. After his election to Congress, Lawler chose a seat on the influential House Foreign Affairs Committee, saying it was because support for Israel is important for the people in his district. He now serves as chair of the Middle East and North Africa Subcommittee.

He was the lead sponsor of the bipartisan Antisemitism Awareness Act that would require the Department of Education to use the controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism — which classifies most anti-Zionism as antisemitic — when investigating allegations of discrimination. It passed in the House in 2024 by an overwhelming majority of 320-91, but was stalled in the Senate due to resistance over constitutionally protected free speech. It was reintroduced in the House last year.

More recently, Lawler partnered with Rep. Josh Gottheimer, a moderate Democrat from New Jersey, on a bipartisan House resolution condemning antisemitic rhetoric from online personalities including Hasan Piker and Candace Owens.

His close ties with Orthodox and Hasidic leaders have also become a hallmark of his political brand. During the 2024 campaign, Lawler brought former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy to visit the Hasidic communities and rabbinic leaders —and twice the current speaker, Mike Johnson — to shore up support for his reelection. Former Rep. Mondaire Jones, who ran against Lawler in 2024, had to delete a social media post that some deemed insulting to Orthodox Jews after he remarked that the former Republican leader’s meeting with Rabbi David Twersky, the 84-year-old spiritual leader known as the Skverer Rebbe in Rockland County, “was a waste of everyone’s time.”

Those relationships have given Lawler unusual credibility in communities that have historically leaned Democratic. Kamala Harris carried the district by a narrow 50-49 margin in 2024, and it voted for Joe Biden by a 59-39 margin.

The combination of his district’s demographics and his outspoken support for Israel has increasingly tied Lawler politically to Jewish communal issues.

“I am proud to be a Zionist,”  Lawler proclaimed at the annual legislative breakfast hosted by the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York in February,

A Lawler spokesperson did not make the congressman available for an interview with the Forward on Thursday.

At that breakfast,  Lawler joked about his physical resemblance to New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, whose handling of antisemitism and criticism of Israel has left many Jewish voters uneasy.

“I know some of you looking at me may look and say, ‘Looks like Zohran Mamdani,’” Lawler quipped, referring to their similar trimmed black beards. Noting that the two served together in the New York State Assembly and regularly played poker in Albany,  Lawler said the similarities end there.

“On issues of combating antisemitism and support of the State of Israel, there are strong differences,” Lalwker said. “And I think one of the things that I have spent my time in Congress focused on is strengthening the U.S.-Israel relationship and being unapologetic about it.”

Lawler is gearing up for a difficult reelection campaign. National Democrats see him as a top target. Five candidates are competing in the June 23 Democratic primary.

Earlier this year, Lawler challenged the Democratic candidates to condemn a TV ad sponsored by the Institute for Middle East Understanding, which attacked him for prioritizing aid to Israel. Lawler said the commercial “traffics antisemitic tropes.”

With a handful of suburban swing districts likely to decide control of the House, Lawler’s support among Jewish voters could once again prove politically decisive.

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