July 22 2026 News

At 8:15 p.m. ET on July 21, U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) successfully completed the 11th consecutive evening of strikes against Iran. CENTCOM assets targeted Iranian military operations centers, maritime capabilities, aircraft hangars, drone storage facilities, and military logistics infrastructure to further degrade Iran’s ability to threaten commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz.

Hamas is working to install loyalists in influential clan, neighborhood and municipal positions across the Gaza Strip, according to a report Wednesday, raising further doubts that the terrorist organization intends to relinquish control to a planned technocratic administration. The effort is intended to preserve Hamas’ influence from the ground up even if it formally withdraws from Gaza’s civilian government, Kan Reshet Bet reported, citing Palestinian security sources. Hamas has reportedly sought to organize elections for family councils and promote allied figures as mukhtars, the traditional local leaders who frequently mediate disputes and represent extended families or neighborhoods.

A 30-year civilian nuclear agreement with Saudi Arabia has received formal approval from US President Donald Trump, administration officials confirmed to The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday. The multi-billion-dollar deal guarantees American firms a commanding position in establishing the kingdom’s atomic infrastructure while preventing rival foreign nations from securing the contract, according to the report. Under a central term of the arrangement, American companies could construct a uranium enrichment plant in Saudi Arabia if an upcoming joint feasibility evaluation validates the initiative. US officials maintain that active American oversight will prevent the program from turning toward military applications.

Starting September 22, the Netherlands will ban all imports originating from Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria, a top Dutch diplomat disclosed to Haaretz on Tuesday.vAccording to the official, the boycott aims to align Dutch commercial policy with international legal frameworks that deem Israeli presence in Judea and Samaria unlawful. Under the newly instituted regulations, it will be illegal to purchase, sell, or import items produced in Israeli towns across the region. The legislation also criminalizes commercial brokerage services for these products and penalizes any attempts to bypass the sanctions.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani admitted that his administration does not have the authority to execute the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) arrest warrant for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a video statement released by the mayor’s office on Wednesday. In the statement, titled “Benjamin Netanyahu is a war criminal,” Mamdani reiterated accusations that Netanyahu was responsible for an alleged “genocide against the Palestinian people” and the blocking of humanitarian aid to Gaza. “He is responsible for the killing of more than 73,000 people. For the maiming of tens of thousands of children,” Mamdani claimed.

Data centers are expected to use one-fifth of the electricity generated in the U.S. by 2035, four times that of today, according to a new report from BloombergNEF. A surge in AI compute will push data center capacity to nearly 200 gigawatts over the next decade, the report predicts. Nearly half of that capacity will be devoted to training and inference, and most of that will remain concentrated in the U.S. By 2033, the country will host 64% of AI chips by power demand.

ChatGPT maker OpenAI said Tuesday that its artificial intelligence system hacked into another AI company on its own in what the company called an “unprecedented cyber incident.” “We had a significant security incident during evaluation of our models,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a statement posted on social media. AI startup Hugging Face said last week that it had detected an intrusion into its data processing systems that it suspected was caused by an AI agent autonomously acting on its own. “We suspected last week’s cyberattack might have come from a frontier lab, given the sophistication of the agent,” Hugging Face co-founder and CEO Clément Delangue said in a statement. “Turns out it did!” The disclosure comes amid heightened concerns about the cybersecurity capabilities of powerful models that led President Donald Trump in June to sign an executive order creating a framework for the federal government to vet the national security risks of the most advanced AI systems for up to a month before their public release. “AI is accelerating the discovery and exploitation of vulnerabilities,” OpenAI said in its statement Tuesday. “The primary lesson from this incident is that model security and safety must keep pace with rapidly advancing capabilities.”

According to a report from the Daily Mail, an extensive network of more than 117,000 automated license plate readers has been mapped throughout the United States, highlighting the growing reach of technology designed to track vehicle movements on public roads. The interactive DeFlock heat map, developed as an open-source project, compiles locations of these cameras submitted by the public and sourced from platforms including OpenStreetMap. These devices capture images of passing vehicles, logging license plates, locations, dates, and times to assist law enforcement efforts. California stands out with more than 16,000 documented readers positioned along major roads, intersections, and routes into populated areas. Florida follows with 7,169, Georgia with 7,046, and Illinois with 5,822. These numbers represent a snapshot rather than a full accounting of the nationwide system.

Newly released messages among the authors of a widely cited paper regarding the origins of C-19 privately raised doubts that the virus originated from bats, as their paper stated. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., on Tuesday released the internal Slack messages exchanged among the authors of “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2” — Kristian Andersen, Robert Garry, Eddie Holmes and Andrew Rambaut. “The idea that it came from a lab is implausible, and, yet, privately they’re saying the opposite. … This level of dishonesty, I think, needs to be exposed,” Paul told Fox News. “These are people who get large, multimillion-dollar grants from our country, and we shouldn’t be giving money to people who lied to us.”