U.S. social media giant Meta has banned Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei from Facebook and Instagram, restricting his global digital reach at a moment of heightened tensions between Washington and Tehran.

“We have removed these accounts for repeatedly violating our Dangerous Organizations & Individuals policy,” Meta said of the move, which comes amid ongoing attacks by Iran-backed militants against American troops — and waves of U.S. counterstrikes — in the Middle East.

Ayatollah Khamenei’s theocratic and authoritarian government has long blocked Facebook and Instagram inside Iran, but the platforms have served as key mechanisms through which Tehran monitors critics and spreads anti-U.S. propaganda outside the Islamic republic. It’s notable that former Facebook employee Behdad Esfahbod was imprisoned in Iran in 2020 and forced to agree to spy on Westerners to secure his release. The Times’ Ryan Lovelace is tracking the developments.

Since the 2022 arrival in office of conservative South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol, Washington’s dream of a trilateral security partnership between Japan, South Korea and the U.S. against military allies China and North Korea — not to mention Russia — has finally gained serious momentum. But there’s a problem. Both Mr. Yoon and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida are currently beset by political scandals at home. Washington Times Asia Editor Andrew Salmon digs into the situation, reporting that in Japan, no real change is likely, as Mr. Kishida’s Liberal Democratic Party is firmly entrenched.

In South Korea, however, the political ground looks far shakier for Mr. Yoon, widely considered to be the key mover behind current Seoul-Tokyo rapprochement undergirding the trilateral momentum with Washington. Mr. Salmon writes that if Mr. Yoon’s current scandals aren’t contained, his People Power Party could suffer losses in April elections and he could be seriously weakened for the final three years of his presidency — a situation that could have a dire impact on the nascent trilateral security cooperation. For context, it’s worth recalling Mr. Yoon’s rousing speech to U.S. lawmakers last year. Mr. Kishida has notably been invited to address Congress when he visits Washington in April.

Mr. Biden is under mounting pressure to end all U.S. funding for the embattled United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees — known as UNRWA — after the discovery of what the Israeli military said was a Hamas data center beneath the U.N. group’s headquarters in Gaza City. UNRWA was already under fire after Israel claimed at least 12 of the agency’s staffers took part in Hamas’ Oct. 7 terrorist attack that ignited the latest round of Israeli-Palestinian fighting.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is defending his military’s looming operation in the southern Gaza city of Rafah, an area packed with more than 1 million Palestinians who’ve fled there over the past several months. Even as international opposition mounts, Mr. Netanyahu is casting the move into Rafah as a necessary step toward fully defeating Hamas.

With that as a backdrop, National Security Correspondent Ben Wolfgang reports that U.S. forces capped off a four-day flurry of airstrikes against Iran-backed Houthi militants in Yemen over the weekend, targeting Houthi anti-ship missiles, ground vehicles and other weapons and material the militants have used to wreak havoc on commercial shipping in and around the Red Sea.

An Iraqi immigrant charged with trying to orchestrate the murder of former President George W. Bush is slated to be sentenced in U.S. federal court Monday, two years after he was arrested and accused of trying to smuggle former Iraqi intelligence officers into the U.S. to carry out the assassination. The Times’ Stephen Dinan reports that the case of Shihab Ahmed Shihab Shihab, who entered the U.S. through dubious means in 2020, serves as a warning about the country’s immigration system and the potential for terrorist activity.

The CIA has been “turning the tables” on Russian President Vladimir Putin by putting out its third Russian-language social media video designed to recruit Russian sources, according to former longtime agency Clandestine Service officer and regular Times columnist Daniel Hoffman. He writes that, while “we will never be privy to the metrics, … if the CIA’s outreach to disaffected Russians were not effective, then the agency would have surely abandoned this line of operation after the first two videos.” Mr. Hoffman adds that the CIA campaign is focused on Russian military and intelligence officers, who “recognize Mr. Putin’s ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine for the barbaric and costly war that it is.”