An increasing number of violent incidents against members of the terror organization Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, have been carried out by an organization affiliated with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). In the past week, a bomb exploded in the car of an official in the Hamas Interior...

Steven Cook, an expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, published a blog post today questioning the criticism Ken Roth, Executive Director of Human Rights Watch, leveled at Israel for sending aid to earthquake-stricken Nepal. Roth had tweeted last week, “Easier to address a far-away humanitarian disaster than the nearby one...

On Saturdays, metal shutters cover the market stalls of the Machane Yehuda outdoor “shuk” in Jerusalem, and the ordinarily boisterous marketplace takes a Sabbath rest. While walking through the shuk on a quiet Sabbath, Berel Hahn had a vision. “I saw a flash of color and imagined the shuk full...

In a presentation last week at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew failed to convince skeptics of the emerging nuclear deal with Iran that the deal would prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons or discourage its destabilizing behavior in the Middle East, Josh Rogin of Bloomberg Views reported...

Despite recent reports of battlefield reversals suffered by the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, the embattled dictator is still relatively secure, Jonathan Spyer, director of the Rubin Center, wrote in an analysis published Friday in The Jerusalem Post. Spyer argued that two factors—Assad’s ability to consolidate his rule over critical...

The terrorist organization Hezbollah has begun recruiting children as young as eight to join the Mahdi Scouts, which prepares boys to become armed jihadists when they grow up. The scouts number some 50,000 members ranging in age from 8 to 18 and has branches in areas such as Beirut and south Lebanon, according to the Lebanese newspaper...

Citing the current “fecklessness” of American policy towards Syria, which has led to the defection of moderate rebels to extremist factions and the growing military assertiveness of Saudi Arabia and Turkey, a staff editorial in The Washington Post called for an American-protected safe zone to allow moderate opposition leaders and...

Iranian activists called foreign minister and chief nuclear negotiator Mohammad Javad Zarif a “Pinocchio” for saying that “the Islamic Republic doesn’t imprison journalists or dissidents over their views,” Bloomberg News reported Friday. The controversy was sparked when Zarif said in an interview with Charlie Rose last week that “We don’t...

An article (Persian link) published in the influential Persian-language Iranian website Alef claimed that Jews are “human history’s most bloodthirsty people.” The article provided “evidence” based on “historical events” drawn from some of the most infamous blood libels in Europe, which were previously used to justify the mass killings of...

The Obama administration is attempting to reassure the United States’ Gulf Arab allies, who fear the consequences of a potential nuclear deal with Iran. The New York Times reported Friday that the White House, State Department, and Pentagon have been “scrambling” to find a way to allay the Arab countries’ anxieties...