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By Tal Shalev and Dana Karni, CNN

Tel Aviv, Israel (CNN) — Israeli police detained a Jewish man on Monday for wearing a kippah embroidered with an Israeli and a Palestinian flag — then cut up the religious head covering, he says — in a rare case that has drawn national attention.

Alex Sinclair, a 53-year-old author and adjunct lecturer at the Hebrew University, told CNN that police approached him while he was sitting at a cafe in his hometown of Modiin about 22 miles southeast of Tel Aviv. Within minutes, he said, he was taken to a local police station, searched and detained.

In a detailed Facebook post, Sinclair wrote that he had been working on his computer when “a religious man came over to me with an angry face and shouted that my kippah is against the law.” Sinclair said he attempted to engage the man in conversation but that the man refused to listen and called police.

Two officers soon arrived and told him that his “kippah is against the law and that they are going to confiscate it,” Sinclair said.

He was then taken to a local police station. “Take off your belt. Face the wall, hands against the wall. They frisked me. Then they locked me in the cell, on my own, no water, no phone, no idea of what was going on or what the process would be,” he wrote of the experience.

After about 20 minutes of detention, the officers agreed to release him, initially without returning the kippah he has worn for 20 years, Sinclair said on Facebook. It was only after he insisted that the officers returned what was left of it, he said.

“She had cut out the Palestinian flag,” he wrote, referring to a young policewoman he said was in charge. “She’d taken my possession, a religious ritual object, something that is very dear to my heart, and destroyed it.”

Sinclair’s case may well be unique. Israeli police have for years confiscated Palestinian flags from Palestinians, accusing them of disturbing the peace. And Palestinian flags are occasionally displayed at ultra-Orthodox Jewish rallies, where a portion of the population opposes the modern state of Israel. But it is incredibly rare for police to take action against a Jewish man for wearing a kippah, even if it shows Palestinian and Israeli flags.

While Israeli law does not ban public display of a Palestinian flag, Israeli authorities can restrict or remove it if they determine it constitutes support for a terrorist organization or poses a genuine risk of public disorder. In 2023, Israel’s far-right minister of national security, Itamar Ben Gvir, instructed officers to remove Palestinian flags, a directive that the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) said was illegal.

In a statement, Israeli police acknowledged the incident but made no mention of the flags or of Sinclair’s allegation that an officer ruined his kippah. It said they received a call alerting them to a man “wearing a kippah bearing a Palestinian flag” and that he was detained but then released “following a clarification process.”

Sinclair told CNN on Thursday that his kippah holds symbolic meaning for him, as “a proud Jew and proud Zionist that also believes that the Palestinians, like the Jews, are a people with a right to self-determination and a legitimate historical connection to this part of the world.”

“There are people on both sides who try to erase the identity of the other. Being a Zionist does not contradict recognizing the rights of the other people who also have a legitimate connection to this country,” he said.

“I don’t want to over-react to this but it’s ha

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By Zachary Cohen, CNN

(CNN) — US military officials are developing new plans to target Iran’s capabilities in the Strait of Hormuz in the event the current ceasefire with Iran falls apart, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter.

The options, among several sets of target types under consideration, include strikes with a particular focus on “dynamic targeting” of Iran’s capabilities around the Strait of Hormuz, southern Arabian Gulf and Gulf of Oman, the sources said, describing potential attacks against small fast attack boats, minelaying vessels and other asymmetric assets that have helped Tehran effectively shut down those key waterways and use them as leverage over the US.

That shut down has caused massive ripples in the global economy, threatening to undermine President Donald Trump’s efforts to reduce US inflation and has occurred despite a ceasefire pausing US strikes that began on April 7.

While the military has targeted Iran’s Navy, much of the first month of bombing was focused on targets away from the strait that would allow the US military to strike further inside Iran itself. The new plans call for a much more concentrated bombing campaign around strategic waterways.

CNN has previously reported that a large percentage of the country’s coastal defense missiles remain intact. Iran also has numerous small boats that could be used as platforms to launch attacks on ships, complicating US efforts to open the strait.

Military strikes around the strait, on their own, are unlikely to immediately re-open the waterway, multiple sources, including a senior shipping broker, told CNN.

“Unless you can unequivocally prove that 100% of Iran’s military capability is destroyed or near certainty that the US can mitigate the risk with our capability, it will come down to how badly is [Trump] willing to accept the risk and start pushing ships through the strait,” one source familiar with the military planning said.

The US military could also follow through on Trump’s previous threat to strike dual-use and infrastructure targets, including energy facilities, in an effort to compel Iran to the negotiating table, the sources told CNN. Trump has said the US would resume combat operations in the absence of a diplomatic resolution to the war.

Striking infrastructure targets would represent a controversial escalation in the conflict, some current and former US officials have warned.

Another option developed by military planners is to target individual Iranian military leaders and other “obstructionists” within the regime who US officials have recently suggested are actively undermining negotiations, one of the sources noted. That includes Ahmad Vahidi, who serves as Commander-in-Chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the source said.

“Due to operations security, we do not discuss future or hypothetical movements,” a Defense Department official said when asked about target planning. “The U.S. military continues to provide the President options, and all options remain on the table.”

Trump has repeatedly claimed that the Iranian regime is “fractured” after joint US-Israeli operations killed a number of high-ranking officials, including the country’s supreme leader. In a social media post on Thursday, Trump pointed to an apparent split between the IRGC and members of the government who had been engaged in talks with the US as one challenge standing in the way of a diplomatic agreement.

“Iran is having a very hard time figuring out who their leader is! They just don’t know! The infighting i