The BBC, Sky News, The Guardian and Reuters report that the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority have announced a joint commitment to take immediate steps to end a surge in violence. The move has emerged from rare talks in Jordan, also attended by US and Egyptian officials. The meeting agreed to support confidence-building steps and “to work towards a just and lasting peace”. As the talks took place, a Palestinian gunman shot dead two Israelis in the occupied West Bank. The Guardian also reports on the shooting.

Reuters reports that El Al Israel Airlines Ltd. said it would on Sunday become the first Israeli national carrier to use a new corridor over Saudi Arabia and Oman, after Muscat last week joined Riyadh in allowing Israeli civilian overflights. El Al Flight 083, departing Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport in the evening, will take around eight hours to reach Bangkok – two and a half hours less than previously, the company said.

The Guardian publishes a letter from the Israeli embassy in the UK in response to a previous publication, reading: “Palestinians and Israelis are both suffering, and this pains me. This is precisely why the article illustrates a problem in the wider discourse – the denial of, and refusal to accept, Israeli suffering. In 2022, Israelis suffered from over 5,000 Palestinian terror attacks, including car-rammings, shootings, stabbings and bombings targeting innocent men, women and children on the streets of Israel. This is the reality on the ground.”

The Telegraph reports that Iran’s Crown Prince has urged the UK to proscribe the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), arguing it would be akin to “pulling out the biggest tooth the regime has”. Reza Pahlavi – who is known to his most devoted followers as His Imperial Majesty the Shah – has been living in exile since his father was deposed in 1979. The prince, who is the son and heir to the last Shah of Iran, has spent almost half a century campaigning for a secular and democratic Iran and remains an important figurehead for the four million strong Iranian diaspora.

There is wide Israeli media coverage of events in Huwara. Yediot Ahronot’s Nahum Barnea describes yesterday evening’s scenes as “Kristallnacht in Huwara,” continuing: “The government needs to decide what it is—is it the sovereign power in the territories? Is it resolved to enforce law and order on Arabs and Jews alike? Or is it a fig leaf for the hilltop youth, who do as they please in the territories? That same question also applies to the IDF, which has thus far failed to deal effectively with either Palestinian terrorism or Jewish terrorism.”

Israel Hayom’s Yoav Limor writes: “Despite the fact that no intelligence was in hand about the planned terror attack and the IDF and GSS could not prepare for it, the revenge taken by the Jews was written on the wall. This begs the question: why didn’t the IDF and the Judea and Samaria District Police beef up their forces in the village to separate the sides and reduce the violence? This was a failure, and this incident has more explosive potential than any other incident in the sector this past year.”

In Maariv, Ben Caspit compares the current government to the previous Bennett-Lapid administration. “For a year and a half,” he writes, the current collation parties “screamed and shouted against the previous government, tweeted like mad after every terror attack, lamented the loss of deterrence (because the government was ‘dependent on the Muslim Brotherhood’) and promised to change everything once they were back in power, to restore order, to eradicate terrorism and to save Jewish lives. In reality, the opposite has happened.” “The terrible Muslim Brotherhood government,” Caspit continues, “never imagined doing what the ‘fully right-wing’ government did yesterday. The Muslim Brotherhood government never contemplated agreeing to freeze settlements. Not for four months and not for four days. That government preferred to talk less and to do more against terrorism, with relative success, at least in the Gaza sector. Throughout the entire time, that government was the victim of a dastardly, crude, unbridled campaign by the gang of zeros now running the show. When Gantz met Abu Mazen in an effort to maintain the important security coordination with the Palestinians, the mob rushed him with pitchforks.”

Ynet covers the Ministerial Committee for Legislation yesterday approving the initial thrust of a bill allowing for the imposition of the death penalty on terrorists. Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara has voiced her opposition, saying that “Even though the current and past bills were always seen as a ‘necessary deterrents’, imposing worse punishment in general, and the death penalty in particular, would not lead to strengthening the deterrence. This is even more true in cases of ideological criminals and terrorists, who are already willing to die while committing the offence.”

Haaretz reports that Saturday’s latest protest against the government’s judicial reforms were the largest yet, with at least 160,000 people gathering at the main demonstration on Tel Aviv’s Kaplan Street and smaller protests across Israel, including in the Gaza border town of Sderot, Rosh Pina, Rehovot, Eilat, Modi’in, Herzliya, Ra’anana, Hod Hasharon, Hadera, and the settlement of Efrat. In Tel Aviv, clashes broke out between protesters and police, as some 2,000 of the former broke through barriers and managed to block the Ayalon Highway. Notable speakers at the latest protest included former Prime Minister Ehud Barak, former police chief Roni Alsheich, and the former vice president of Israel’s Supreme Court Elyakim Rubinstein.

Haaretz covers several dozen army reservists from Israel’s Military Intelligence research division announcing that they will no longer report for service in protest against judicial reform. “We call upon the government and the coalition to halt this legislation,” they wrote in a letter to senior officials, “and to formulate a broad consensus for the proper balance between the three branches [of government]. We have been there – in times of war and in times of peace – and this is an emergency. Over the past two months, we have been facing legislation which is promoted with the aim of seriously wounding the Israeli justice system and turning it into a political arm of the government and coalition.” The paper also reports that the letter’s previously most senior signatory, a major general, was persuaded not to sign in the end by IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi.