ERIK PRINCE: OFF LEASH UPDATE 30 OCT 2026

Off Leash update 30 October 2026

ISRAEL
•Israel’s final vote count confirmed early indications that neither Prime Minister Netanyahu’s ruling coalition nor Gadi Eisenkot’s opposition bloc won enough seats in Tuesday’s election to form a government.
•Netanyahu’s Likud party rushed to discredit the vote by alleging – without evidence – that it had been swayed by foreign interference. Specifically, Likud claimed that Qatar and Turkey illegally funded opposition two Arab parties that are on track to win a record 17 seats in the Knesset. Shin Bet is investigating.
•Eisenkot – who is Netanyahu’s main rival – said it would indeed be an especially scary concern if Qatar – which hosts Hamas leaders – had meddled in an Israeli election, but he and both Arab party leaders both denounced Likud’s allegations as a ruthless politician’s attempt to prevent his rivals from uniting to oust him by delegitimizing the Arab parties Eisenkot must recruit to form a majority.
•Qatar firmly denied any involvement in Israel’s election, calling allegations otherwise “ridiculous and dangerous,” and both of Israel’s main Arab parties said they’d achieved their historic result without help from any foreign hand.

CHINA
•China’s Fifth Plenum wrapped up with a confirmation of yet another purge of senior political and military officials from the Communist Party’s ranks. Many of the 33 expulsions happened earlier in the year but weren’t formally confirmed until now.
•In 2022, the Plenum’s Central Committee meeting included 376 attendees. The communiqué from this year’s session said that only 279 officials attended the Central Committee meeting this year. That suggests around 100 of Xi’s own appointees have ghosted in the past four years – most were purged.
•Separately, the NYT reported that U.S. intelligence outed a Chinese spy who’d costumed as a top executive for a Singapore-based data center to develop a close relationship with Nvidia’s CEO, Jensen Huang, and relayed information about Huang and Nvidia to Beijing.
•The revelation must have frightened some in the White House who have endeavored to keep the best U.S. artificial intelligence out of Chinese hands – but who have also shared a lot of their policy thoughts with Huang.

VENEZUELA
•Interim president Delcy Rodriguez committed – again – to holding elections…but not quite yet. She said polls will have to wait until Venezuela has undergone thorough institutional reforms and a legislative and electoral overhaul, and has complete political stability – because “the political future of the country is not measured by a date on the calendar.”
•That Rodriguez even bothered to resurrect the same no-deadline promise about elections she made under pressure earlier this year is a sign that her government feels threatened by the return of opposition leader Maria Corina Machado to Venezuela.
•Rodriguez is right to feel threatened: polls show that Machado – who spoke shortly after Rodriguez did (but to a very different audience) and reiterated her call for elections to take place in 2027 – would win if the contest was between her and Rodriguez today.

CRYPTO
•Binance suspended trading yesterday, after North Korea-linked hacking group TraderTraitor made off with the largest crypto heist on record, spiriting $6.36 billion out of wallets on ten blockchains over a span of about 20 minutes. That’s more than quadruple the previous record the same hackers stole from Bybit in Feb. 2025.
•For a crypto company, Binance has been surprisingly transparent about the incident and its response to it. It told customers it had been able to freeze about half of the affected assets – $3 billion – so far, and its co-founder promised the exchange would “cover all hacking losses.”

— ErikDPrince (@realErikDPrince) October 30, 2026