An Iranian missile struck Beersheba, the largest city in southern Israel, for the second consecutive day on Friday, hours after President Donald Trump said he would decide in the next two weeks whether to join Israel in striking the Islamic Republic.

The IDF unsuccessfully attempted to intercept the surface-to-surface missile from Iran, which injured seven and left a crater at the blast site and damage to buildings in the area of Beersheba’s HiTech Park.

Rep. Max Miller (R-OH), one of four Jewish Republicans in the House, said on Thursday that his car was run off the road by a pro-Palestinian activist who threatened his and his family’s lives, earlier in the day.

“If you have an issue with a legislator, your city councilman, your mayor, anyone like that, the appropriate thing to do is to reach out to them for a phone call to set up a meeting at one of our district offices,” Miller said in an angry video posted on Thursday afternoon on X. “What is not OK is to assault anyone, whether you’re a member of Congress or anybody else within our district while you are driving to work.”

After an Iranian ballistic missile struck a home in the northern Israeli city of Tamra, killing a woman, her two daughters and her sister-in-law, news outlets faced an additional challenge beyond the sober responsibility of covering a tragic loss: choosing what language to use to describe these women and their ethnic identity. 

Tamra is an Arab town, with a history dating back hundreds of years. When Israeli President Isaac Herzog visited on Wednesday, he talked about the “shared society of Jews and Arabs” in Israel that “believe in our common life together,” and described the victims as “Muslim women.” Most news reports — in major international outlets including the Associated Press, Reuters, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal — referred to Tamra as either an “Arab-Israeli city” or an “Arab town in Israel.” 

CIA Director John Ratcliffe has told colleagues behind closed doors he believes Iran is actively working toward building a nuclear weapon, comparing the claim that Tehran isn’t working on building a nuclear weapon to the idea that football players at the 1-yard line would not attempt to score a touchdown, per CBS News, citing an unnamed U.S. official.

His reported comments function as a rebuke of U.S. intelligence assessments that Iran is not actively developing a nuclear weapon, in spite of its accelerating efforts to amass stockpiles of highly enriched uranium in violation of nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty commitments and construction of ballistic missiles with which a nuclear weapon could be launched.

President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Wednesday swore in Charles Kushner as the U.S. ambassador to France. 

Kushner, a real estate executive, longtime Jewish philanthropist and father of Trump’s son-in-law Jared, was confirmed in May on a mostly party-line vote, with Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) the only Democrat to support the confirmation. 

This week brought more signs that progress on Joel Rayburn’s nomination to be assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs has ground to a halt, more than a month after his confirmation hearing in mid-May, with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee declining to call up Rayburn’s nomination for a vote on Thursday and no apparent plans to move the process to the Senate floor.

Rayburn served in President Donald Trump’s first administration and is seen as less aligned with the isolationist figures who have taken other senior roles in the second Trump administration.

Bipartisan groups of House and Senate members have introduced legislation to repeal the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act, sanctions legislation passed in 2019 targeting the former Syrian government led by Bashar al-Assad, a step that proponents say will help remove obstacles to reconstruction and stabilization efforts in post-Assad Syria.

The administration recently announced that it would be lifting all sanctions on Syria, but the Caesar Act sanctions can only be temporarily waived, for periods of 180 days, barring a full repeal by Congress. Administration officials have indicated that they’d support such a step, and sanctions relief, in principle, has broad support on both sides of the aisle.

Asserting that President Donald Trump “owes Congress and the American people a strategy for U.S. engagement” in the Middle East, top Senate Democrats on Wednesday cautioned against potential U.S. strikes on Iran and argued that the president would need congressional authorization to conduct such an operation.

The signatories to the statement include Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Sens. Chris Coons (D-DE), Patty Murray (D-WA), Jack Reed (D-RI) and Mark Warner (D-VA), the top Democrats on several key Senate committees and subcommittees. The statement suggests that a direct U.S. military intervention in Iran would see little support among Senate Democrats.