Mohammed Deif, the elusive commander of Hamas’ military wing, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, is like the proverbial cat with nine lives. Against all odds, he manages to survive and pull through impossible situations. Needless to say, his astonishing knack for survival has constantly frustrated Israel, his arch nemesis. In the past two decades, he […]
Amid its protracted war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip and its increasingly destructive war of attrition with Hezbollah in Lebanon, Israel is creating unacceptable and potentially destabilizing facts on the ground in the occupied West Bank. Earlier this month, on two successive days, Israeli government bodies converted yet more land in the West Bank […]
Masoud Pezeshkian, Iran’s president-elect, is regarded as a “reformer” in some Western circles. Within the strict parameters of Iranian politics, this could even be true. Compared to his staunchly conservative predecessor, Ebrahim Raisi, who was killed in a helicopter crash in May along with the Iranian foreign minister, and to his hard-line opponent, Saeed Jalili, […]
Nine months into the Israel-Hamas war, one of the longest and most arduous in Israeli history, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seems to have reached a crossroads. Should he carry on relentlessly until Israel’s main objectives are achieved? Victory would mean the elimination of Hamas as a military and political force in the Gaza Strip and […]
Joe Biden, the president of the United States, recently delivered an impassioned speech at a Holocaust memorial event during which he strongly condemned antisemitism and described American support for Israel’s security as “ironclad.” Yet the following day, he threatened to withhold certain weapons from Israel if it launched a major ground offensive in Rafah, Hamas’ […]
Israel’s low-intensity war of attrition with Hezbollah is heating up to the boiling point as the prospect of a full-scale war grows dangerously possible. In the past few weeks, the fighting along and near Israel’s border with Lebanon has escalated ominously as the United States and France have attempted to head off an all-out war. […]
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 […]