After thirteen straight nights of the US bombing Iran, and Iran bombing back at half the Gulf, last night nobody bombed anyone. At least not those two. The wire services actually had to note “no overnight reports of air strikes,” which by this point counts as news. I’ve been writing about this thing daily for going on two weeks and had genuinely stopped imagining a version of the calendar where it just didn’t happen, one night.

Except the war didn’t take the night off. It just changed seats. The Houthis hit Jizan, Saudi Arabia, retaliating for Saudi strikes on Hodeida: a fight that’s technically about Yemen but has spent the last month metastasizing into every strait, tanker route, and power grid in the region, until “the Gulf” started to feel less like a place and more like a single circuit board where you can’t touch one wire without something sparking somewhere else. An Omani delegation flew in the same day, which is either the start of something or the fortieth false one. Oman has been the designated middleman in this feud since before I started paying attention, quietly ferrying messages nobody credits until, occasionally, one works.

Smaller and sadder: a shooting in the West Bank left four Palestinians and two Israelis dead, and the two sides can’t agree on what even happened (settler ambush, or a stolen weapon and hikers under fire). Not an unusual disagreement, for that stretch of land. Still strange, every time, how completely the same ten minutes can refuse to become one story.

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