The Times reports that the Trump administration is planning to change the definition of a Palestinian refugee. This would reduce the number of recognised refugees by nine tenths. President Donald Trump and Middle East adviser Jared Kushner are believed to have decided that all but 500,000 of the 5.5 million Palestinian refugees should be stripped of their refugee status. The proposal will be part of a new strategy which will also reduce the amount of money the US gives to the Palestinian territories. Kushner said in recently leaked emails to his colleagues that the goal “can’t be to keep things stable and as they are. Sometimes you have to strategically risk breaking things”.

The Daily Mail reports that Israel has demolished the home of a Palestinian who killed an Israeli last month. Footage released by the military shows a bulldozer bringing down the one-story home in the village of Kauber in the West Bank. The Palestinian, identified by the military as Muhammad Tarek Ibrahim Dar Yusuf, was shot and killed at the scene of last month’s attack.

Reuters and the Daily Mail report that Iran and Syrian have signed a deal for military cooperation. Reuters reports that according to Tasnim news agency, Iranian Defence Minister Amir Hatami travelled to Damascus on Sunday for a two-day visit, meeting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and senior military officials. US National Security Adviser John Bolton said last week that Iran should remove its forces from Syria. Senior Iranian officials have said their military presence in Syria is at the invitation of the Syrian government and that they have no immediate plans to withdraw. In an interview Monday night with the Beirut-based Al-Mayadeen television channel, Defence Minister Hatami said the agreement included the rehabilitation of Syria’s defence industry and assured Iran would provide a “good service”.

The International Business Times (IBT), BBC and the Express report that Iran has asked the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to lift US imposed sanctions. Tehran asked judges to urgently order a suspension of the sanctions while the case challenging their legality is being heard — a process that can take years. A decision on the urgent request for a suspension is likely to take weeks. The BBC quotes Iranian lawyer Mohsen Mohebi who said the US aimed to damage Iran’s economy “as severely as possible” and had violated a little-known 1955 friendship treaty. The Iranian rial has lost half its value against the dollar, whilst the monthly inflation rate has risen to 10.2 per cent, and official unemployment stands at 12.5 per cent. The Express reports that US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in a statement: “The proceedings instituted by Iran are a misuse of the Court.” US lawyers are also expected to argue that the ICJ should not have any jurisdiction in the dispute.

Reuters reports that a Chinese firm is close to buying Israeli company ColorChip for $300m. ColorChip is a maker of communication components for telecom providers and data centres. Israeli companies and technologies have attracted significant interest from China in recent years.

The Daily Mail reports that Israel has reopened its crossing for inhabitants in the Gaza Strip. The reopening, following days of relative calm, comes as Egypt holds talks with Palestinian officials as part of efforts to reach a long-term truce between Hamas and Israel. A spokeswoman for the Israeli Defence Ministry unit that oversees the Erez crossing confirmed it had opened as planned on Monday morning. On Sunday night, Israeli Defence Minister Avigdor Lieberman said the crossing was being reopened due to “calm that has been maintained over the past week”.

Writing in The Times, Thunderer column Nigel Goodrich says that the “BBC’s bias against Israel shows it is not fit for purpose”. Goodrich comments that “when it comes to the BBC’s coverage of Israel, this purpose is clearly not being met: coverage is neither impartial nor informative”.

Yediot Ahronot reports on the Defence Ministry’s deal with state-owned Israel Military Industries to procure advanced rockets for hundreds of millions of dollars. Yediot Ahronot’s military commentator Ron Ben-Yishai writes that the Defence Minister is not planning a separate missile corps, but rather seeking to arm the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) with additional rockets and missiles to serve as backup for the Israel Air Force’s accurate offensive capabilities in case Israel comes under attack on many fronts at the same time.

Israel Hayom reports that Israel has demanded that UNIFIL take action against Hezbollah activity in southern Lebanon. The demand came in a meeting held last week between Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Gadi Eisenkot and the newly-appointed commander of UNIFIL, Italian Major-General Stefano Del Col, who assumed his duties at the beginning of August. This was General Del Col’s first meeting with Eisenkot.  Israel is concerned that UNIFIL does not operate at all against Hezbollah in urban areas in southern Lebanon, a policy decision that has resulted in the group turning more than 200 Shiite villages into fortified combat compounds.

Kan Radio News reports that IDF troops in Nablus opened fire on a Palestinian car that accelerated in their direction last night. Palestinian sources reported that several people sustained injuries, including one man who was described as being in moderate to serious condition. No soldiers were injured. The IDF Spokesperson’s Office said soldiers had been sent to secure Joseph’s Tomb in the lead-up to a visit by Jewish worshippers.

Over the weekend, all the media reported focused on an attack on Arab residents of Shefaram men on Kiryat Haim beach. The Arabs, who were not named, are known as M.Y, a doctor, his friend M.A., a 28 year-old nurse at Tel Hashomer Medical Centre and another friend, M., a 22 year-old relative of the nurse were attacked on the beach by a number of men in an alleged racist attack. The District Court denied the Police’s appeal and ordered that one of the two young people arrested on suspicion of involvement in the assault be released under house arrest.  Zionist Union MK Eyal Ben Reuven, who chairs the Knesset caucus to promote Jewish-Arab coexistence, said: “The attack on the three men by despicable thugs, only because they were Arabs, is sickening and infuriating, and deserves condemnation across the board, and the police should handle it resolutely and quickly.”

Maariv reports that Egypt will restart talks with the Palestinians factions, meeting separately with senior Palestinian Authority (PA) officials and senior Hamas officials. However, Israeli security officials believe that the chances for progress in these talks are very low since each side has entirely different interests. These officials believe that the chances that the PA will again allow officials in the Gaza Strip to be paid are also very low and they are thus preparing for the consequences of the eruption expected in the attempts to reach understandings.

Kan Radio News reported that Defence Minister Avigdor Lieberman has reopened the Erez crossing, which is used for people crossing between Israel and the Gaza Strip. The Minister’s Bureau issued a statement noting that the decision had been made in response to the calm security situation this past week and the considerable drop in the number of violent incidents. Israel is due to present a number of projects to improve the humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip at a special conference next week in Brussels. The proposals include building a paediatric oncology ward, an industrial zone in Karni and laying an electricity line that will double the electricity supply to the Gaza Strip. The conference is to be held prior to a meeting of donor states at the end of next month in New York.

Haaretz reports that Israel’s Supreme Court has allowed Gazan relatives of Hamas members to receive medical treatment in Israel, overruling a Cabinet decision. The Justices rejected a compromise pushed by the Defence Ministry that would permit patients to travel through Israel to seek treatment abroad.

Haaretz and Yediot Ahronot report on an attack on Israeli left-wing activists in the Mitzpe Yair outpost in the southern Hebron hills over the weekend. The activists went to protest the confiscation of work tools owned by a Palestinian man who had been charged with illegal construction when they were confronted by several settlers.

Maariv reports that the the White House intends to soon announce that only 500,000 Palestinians will be recognised by the US as refugees rather than the five million people currently recognised by UNRWA. Writing in Israel Hayom, Ron Prosor argues that “responsibility for the Palestinian refugees and the budgets need to be turned over to the UNHCR, the UN refugee agency that operates (as opposed to UNRWA) to solve the problem of refugeehood instead of perpetuating it, or to other UN agencies that already operate on the ground in the area, such as the UNDP. The situation in the West Bank is even more distorted since one of the ways of strengthening the Palestinian Authority there is to give the powers and budgets directly to it, instead of to UNRWA, which collaborates with Hamas that operates against the PA”. He concludes that [closing UNRWA] might produce short-term difficulties, but the long-term view necessitates taking those steps and we mustn’t allow the tactical view of things perpetuate a strategic problem.

Kan Radio News reports that the Arab Joint List confirmed the report that its MKs had joined the Palestinian initiative to condemn Israel at the UN for passing the Nation-State Law. Joint List Chairman Ayman Odeh tweeted that “the Jewish supremacy law that institutionalised the segregation, the discrimination and the racism, had to be fought on all fronts”. In a letter written by Israeli UN Ambassador Danny Danon to Knesset Speaker Yuli Edelstein, Danon said: “It is inappropriate for incumbent MKs to collaborate with such initiatives and to cynically exploit their position as official representatives of the state to damage the state in the international arena.” A delegation of the Supreme Monitoring Committee for Israeli Arabs, headed by Mohammed Barakeh, is scheduled to go to Geneva in September and hold meetings on the matter with top UN officials. Zionist Union Chairman Avi Gabbay said that the Arab Joint List MKs continued to malign the state everywhere and that his faction would continue to fight against this.