Sunday 30 Tishrei – 34 Bnei Yeshivah Spend Shabbos Bereishis in Military Prison – Flydubai Co-Pilot Planned 9/11-Style Attack on Ben Gurion, UAE Says – Trump Strikes Diesel Deal With Putin, Says Ukraine Needs ‘A New President’ & more…

Thirty-four bnei yeshivah and avreichim spent Shabbos Bereishis in military prison, held for refusing to enlist in line with the instructions of their Rabbanim.

Three of them were arrested this past week in a new wave of arrests, according to the Chareidi news site Emess, which published their names before Shabbos with a call for tefillah. Organisers urged the public to daven for their swift release under the slogan “No! Not even one!”

On Monday, Rosh Chodesh Cheshvan, about 2,000 older talmidim from 18 Breslov talmud torahs are due to hold an atzeres of tefillah and protest at Military Prison 10. Harav Yaakov Meir Schechter is among those expected to attend.

The gathering follows a wave of arrests of Breslover bachurim travelling to Uman. Of about 212 people detained as deserters at border crossings in Elul, 163 were Chareidim, most of them Breslover chassidim. About 70 were in prison over Rosh Hashanah.

“The state has turned the road to Rabbeinu into an arrest trap,” Breslov askanim said.

On Motzei Shabbos, Harav Yitzchak Yosef, the former Rishon LeTzion, condemned media “incitement” against bnei yeshivah. “Bachurim of the yeshivos are saving the generation!” he said. “They are saving all of Eretz Yisroel!”

United Torah Judaism has opened its campaign for the 27 October Knesset election, with MK Yitzchak Pindrus warning of “a frontal and open war on the very existence of the Chareidi public”.

“The struggle is no longer over budgets, another seat or this or that position,” Pindrus told activists at Degel HaTorah’s first gathering in Bnei Brak on Motzei Shabbos. “The masks have fallen completely.”

UTJ chairman Yaakov Asher said: “We are soldiers of generals – the Gedolei Yisroel.”

Moshe Rosenthal recalled that UTJ lost a seat at the last election for want of just 800 votes. The party is aiming for 320,000 votes, about 40,000 more than last time, according to Bhol.

In Beitar Illit, MK Meir Porush warned that without strong representation in the Knesset, government ministries would trample the development of Chareidi cities. Mayor Meir Rubinstein called it “a fateful election”.

Earlier in the week, letters from Harav Dovid Landau and Harav Moshe Hillel Hirsch were read at a gathering of Rabbanim at the home of Harav Yitzchak Zilberstein.

Shas leader Aryeh Deri, meanwhile, is mobilising the party’s local representatives, telling them the campaign is “a kind of primary for you”.

Two men accused of spying on Jewish and Israeli sites in London for Iran pleaded not guilty at the Old Bailey on Friday.

Nematollah Shahsavani, 41, of North Finchley, and Alireza Farasati, 22, of Colindale, each deny engaging in conduct likely to assist a foreign intelligence service, under the National Security Act 2023, between 9 July and 15 August 2025.

Prosecutors allege that Shahsavani, acting on instructions from Iranian intelligence, tasked Farasati with carrying out surveillance. “It is believed Mr Farasati was tasked by Nematollah Shahsavani to conduct surveillance,” prosecutor Lynden Harris told the court.

The alleged targets include the Israeli embassy in London and Bevis Marks, Britain’s oldest shul, built in 1701. At an earlier hearing in March, the court was told that JW3, the Sternberg Centre and the headquarters of the CST were also on the list.

Shahsavani, a dual Iranian-British national, appeared by videolink from Pentonville prison. Farasati, an Iranian national, appeared in the dock. Both were arrested in March and remain in custody.

The trial has been set for 26 April 2027 and is expected to last three weeks.

The Foreign Office summoned Iran’s ambassador after the men were charged.

Thousands of anti-Israel protesters marched through central London on Shabbos, and police made 20 arrests.

The Palestine Coalition’s “National March for Palestine” set off from the Embankment at midday and ended with a rally on Whitehall. Organisers claimed 250,000 took part; police had expected up to 10,000.

According to the Metropolitan Police, six people were arrested for criminal damage after climbing onto the Battle of Britain memorial. Seven were held for breaching protest conditions, two of whom also refused to remove face coverings. Two were arrested for displaying placards supporting the banned group Palestine Action.

Two more were arrested for public order offences, one of them racially aggravated, after a protester was seen making a Nazi salute.

Speakers included the anti-Israel MPs Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell and Zarah Sultana.

About 30 members of the Jewish group Stop The Hate held a counter-protest outside New Scotland Yard. “Jewish people have the same rights as everyone else in this country: to assemble, to protest, to be heard,” the group said.

Ahead of the march, days after the third anniversary of 7 October, Deputy Assistant Commissioner Carl Galvin promised “a zero-tolerance approach to hate crime”.

President Donald Trump has agreed with Vladimir Putin to lift sanctions on Russian diesel, and says it is time for Ukraine to replace its leader.

Announcing the deal on Friday night, Mr Trump wrote that Russia “will immediately supply over 300,000 Tons of Diesel Fuel to the American and Global Marketplace”, with 500,000 tonnes in November and 1,000,000 tonnes after that.

On Saturday, he turned on President Volodymyr Zelensky over Ukrainian drone strikes on Russian oil refineries. “So he better damn well stop,” Mr Trump told reporters at the White House. “I think it’s time for Ukraine to get a new president.”

A US official told Axios that the deal came after Mr Zelensky ignored “half a dozen” American requests to stop hitting the refineries.

Mr Zelensky called the deal “not fair and not honest”, a “birthday gift” to Mr Putin and a “sign of weakness”. “Gifts to Putin will not bring peace,” he said.

The British Government said it would “maintain pressure on Russia through the toughest sanctions regime ever imposed by the UK”.

The row came as US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner held talks with Ukrainian officials in Miami.

Hurricane Isaias has killed at least four people after slamming into the Florida Panhandle on Friday night.

The storm made landfall near Destin at about 8pm local time as a Category 2 hurricane, having briefly reached Category 3 strength with winds of 120mph. It weakened to a post-tropical storm within hours.

Two people died in Alabama, one of them when a tree fell on a house near Birmingham. In Escambia County, Florida, one person was killed by a falling tree, and a man was found dead in a garage with a generator running. Four members of his family were taken to hospital with carbon monoxide poisoning.

Power cuts peaked at more than 884,000 homes and businesses. More than 700,000 were still without power on Saturday afternoon, most of them in Florida and Alabama.

More than two-thirds of oil production in the US Gulf was shut down ahead of the storm, according to AP.

Forecasters warned of up to 15 inches of rain in places. “The flooding story is not over,” Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said.

President Trump has approved emergency declarations for Florida, Alabama and Georgia.

The Omani co-pilot of a Flydubai airliner bound for Tel Aviv planned to crash it into the passenger terminal at Ben Gurion Airport, the UAE’s Attorney General has said.

Dr Hamad Saif Al Shamsi said on Friday that Hamam al-Hammami “intended to seize control of the aircraft and use it to carry out a suicide attack”. He had flown to Tel Aviv twice before to study the route and the airport, and planned to strike on his third flight.

On 30 September, flight FZ1073 from Dubai, carrying about 174 passengers, briefly plunged some 17,000 feet after the co-pilot attacked Captain Smit Machchhar with the cockpit crash axe. The captain resisted. A pilot rostered for the return flight entered the cockpit and, with a crew member and several passengers, overpowered the attacker. The plane landed safely in Tabuk, Saudi Arabia.

According to the UAE, al-Hammami was radicalised from 2017 while studying in Melbourne. He passed the airline’s vetting with no warning signs. He has confessed and says he acted alone, but investigators are still examining his contacts.

A senior Israeli security official said “a disaster was averted here that could have become Israel’s 9/11”.

Israel is preparing for the possibility that President Trump will allow renewed military action against Iran, possibly including an independent Israeli strike, Kan News reported on Motzei Shabbos.

The report follows intelligence that Iran has sped up the rebuilding of its ballistic missile and drone production lines in recent weeks.

Journalist Ben Caspit reported that Washington had asked Israel to strike Iran alone, without American involvement, before the US midterm elections on 3 November. According to Channel 12, IDF Chief of Staff Lt Gen Eyal Zamir warned the Americans that such a strike would almost certainly force Israel’s 27 October election to be postponed, and the US has dropped the request for now.

However, two senior Trump administration officials and a senior Israeli official told journalist Barak Ravid that there had been no American demand for Israel to strike before the elections.

Channel 13 reported that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu does not want to open a new front before the election unless security requires it.

Mr Trump said on Thursday that the US would not attack Iran before the midterms. On Friday, asked about military action, he said: “We may. I mean, we’ll see.”

More first-grade pupils will be in Chareidi education than in the state Hebrew stream by 2030 if current trends continue, according to a new analysis.

Between 2023 and 2026, the number of first-graders in the state Hebrew stream fell by about 12 per cent, while the Chareidi stream grew by about 11 per cent.

The analysis, based on official Education Ministry figures, was written by economist Eli Morgenstern, a former education coordinator in the Finance Ministry’s budget division who learned in the Mir Yeshivah until the age of 28.

He found that Chareidi and Arab children together made up 48.9 per cent of kindergarten pupils this year, up from 43.8 per cent in 2019, and are projected to pass 50 per cent by 2028.

The change is coming far sooner than official forecasts predicted. A 2023 Central Bureau of Statistics forecast overestimated state Hebrew kindergarten numbers for 2025 by about 23,600 children.

“The changes in the education system are much faster than we estimated over the years,” Morgenstern wrote.

He uses the figures to argue for greater state control over Chareidi education, including curricula and teacher hiring – a call that comes ahead of the 27 October election.