The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday reported that delegations from energy and automobile companies have been become a near-daily presence in Iran since the easing of sanctions under the interim Joint Plan of Action (JPA): As talks between Iran and six major powers on limiting its nuclear program enter the...

The Daily Beast on Tuesday conveyed assessments from a range of Israeli officials and U.S.-based experts linking the recent kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers to Saleh al-Arouri – a top Hamas official who sits atop the group’s terror infrastructure in the West Bank – who has reportedly been allowed to operate...

The Associated Press reported Wednesday that the Kurds are expanding and fortifying their semi-autonomous area in northern Iraq. According to the AP, the Kurds are creating barriers as both a defensive measure and as “a bid for greater autonomy or outright independence.” The emerging frontier of sand berms, trenches and roadblocks...

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu denounced the murder of 16-year-old Muhammed Abu Khdeir yesterday, calling for an investigation. A statement released by the Prime Minister’s office said: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, today spoke with Public Security Minister Yitzhak Aharonovitch and asked that law-enforcement elements work as quickly as possible in order...

A July 1 poll from Pew Research suggests that worries about the spread of violent Islamist extremism are increasing throughout the Middle East: …from civil war to suicide bombings, plague the Middle East, Africa and South Asia, concern about Islamic extremism is high among countries with substantial Muslim populations… in the Middle East,...

An analysis published Tuesday by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy identifies last month’s Fatah-Hamas unity agreement as a factor that enabled the abductions and murders of Gil-ad Shaar, Naftali Fraenkel and Eyal Yifrach. After noting that  Hamas publicly took credit for the kidnappings despite doubts expressed in some quarters...

Nine Islamist rebel groups on Monday rejected an announcement made the day before by the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) that the Al Qaeda offshoot was reforming a caliphate extending the group’s influence across the region: “The terms of the caliphate have not been realized at present,...

State Department Deputy Spokesperson Marie Harf on Tuesday linked Hamas to the murders of three Israeli teenagers whose bodies were discovered Monday. Hamas’s involvement in the murders promises to problematize relations between the terror group and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah faction, which formed a unity government just weeks before...

Reuters on Tuesday published new figures indicating that Iran has for the eighth straight month violated crude export restrictions set by the interim Joint Plan of Action (JPA), with the outlet quoting a range of experts suggesting that the Obama administration has been deliberately looking the other way as Tehran busted...

Tens of thousands of people of every religious and political orientation came together yesterday to bury Gil-ad Shaar (age 16), Naftali Fraenkel (16), and Eyal Yifrach (19), who were murdered by Hamas terrorists. Buses lined the roads to the Modi’in municipal cemetery hours before the funeral ceremony began. After separate ceremonies...