Eleven Israeli soldiers were killed in two separate incidents over the weekend in the Gaza Strip, underscoring Israel’s difficulty in destroying Hamas’ military capabilities and thereby achieving its primary goal of the current war. In Rafah, Hamas’ last urban stronghold, eight soldiers from the Combat Engineering Corps died when their Namer armored vehicle exploded after […]
Saudi Arabia, once one of the most reactionary countries in the Arab world, is buffing and improving its international image, judging by the manner in which Israel and Jews are portrayed in its newest school textbooks. A recent study by the Institute For Monitoring Peace And Cultural Tolerance In School Education reports that antisemitic references […]
Weighed down by the inordinate length and human cost of the Israel-Hamas war, Israelis had good reason to be euphoric on June 8. This was the day when Israeli commandos, disguised as Hamas operatives and Palestinian civilians, rescued four Israeli hostages — Noa Argamani, Almog Meir Jan, Andrei Kozlov and Shlomi Ziv — who had […]
What comes after the Israel-Hamas war? That’s the big unanswered question, even as fighting continues unabated throughout much of the Gaza Strip. The war started following the October 7 massacre during which Hamas terrorists killed roughly 1,200 Israeli civilians, soldiers and foreign farm workers and kidnapped some 250 people in southern Israel. But after eight […]
Joe Biden is acutely aware that his phased plan to end the Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip may well be stillborn, at least for now. “I know there are those in Israel who will not agree with this plan and will call for the war to continue indefinitely,” he said as he outlined its […]
Thanks to a recent agreement between the United States and Egypt, humanitarian aid has begun flowing into the Gaza Strip via Israel’s Kerem Shalom border crossing, albeit it on a far lower scale. This assistance had been channelled through the adjacent Rafah crossing prior to Israel’s invasion of Rafah and its takeover of the crossing […]
Israel has been bogged down in an undeclared war of attrition with Hezbollah for the past seven months, and if the current situation prevails or deteriorates, Israel may well be facing a “hot” summer, Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant warned recently. Since Hamas terrorists attacked southern Israel on October 7, Hezbollah, in a tangible show […]
Israel is going against the grain of international public opinion by refusing to countenance the eventual creation of a Palestinian state within the framework of a two-state solution. Scores of countries, including Israel’s friends and allies, already recognize this as a geopolitical necessity, yet Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far right-wing government is adamantly digging in […]
The helicopter crash on May 19 that killed Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi and Iran’s foreign minister, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, will likely have no tangible effect either in Iran or in the Middle East. Iran’s internal and external policies are tightly managed and controlled by its hardline supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in tandem with the Islamic […]
Seven months into the war in the Gaza Strip, Israel still has a long way to go before it achieves one of its main objectives — the destruction of Hamas’s military capabilities. Israeli forces have reportedly degraded 18 of its 24 battalions, yet Hamas remains unbowed and undefeated. In the meantime, Hamas can still call […]