Police officers closed Jerusalem’s Temple Mount to Jewish and other visitors on April 13, after Arabs atop the compound began rioting, seemingly in part at the behest of Hamas. Hamas Movement has called for defending al-Aqsa Mosque in light of Israeli settlers’ intention to break into the mosque next Monday…Al-Aqsa...

A recent report by Jonathan D. Halevi for the Jersusalem Center for Public Affairs supports the suspicion that that the crisis in negotiations precipitated by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to refuse any reasonable compromise with Israel was “a premeditated effort to participate in talks without the intention of compromising on...

A suspected terrorist attack on an Israeli family driving in the West Bank – assailants riddled the family’s car with bullets as it was en route to Passover dinner on Monday – has reportedly claimed the life of one man, left his wife and child injured, and thrown into doubt efforts to...

Top Iranian cleric Ayatollah Imami Kashani declared in a nationally televised sermon on Friday that Tehran would continue pushing forward with its nuclear program despite the intentions of the country’s “enemies,” prompting the Wall Street Journal – which read the boast against the backdrop of similar remarks recently aired by...

Turkey’s Hurriyet Daily News on Saturday summarized a weekend speech given by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan as one in which the Turkish leader “lashe[d] out at all his ‘foes’,” outlining that Erdogan “maintained his angry criticism of the Constitutional Court, the Gezi Park protesters, Twitter and the Gulen movement.” Saying the...

Agence France-Presse (AFP) on Monday outlined the details of a new International Monetary Fund report concluding – pre the outlet – that “Iran’s economy is stabilizing” and will grow in 2014 “even if sanctions relief under [the interim Joint Plan of Action (JPA)] deal proves short-lived.” Masood Ahmed, director of the IMF’s...

Turkey’s Constitutional Court this week appears to have opened its own Twitter account – and to have quickly amassed over 50,000 followers across just six tweets – amid legal and political battles that have seen the Court brush off demands by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party...

English-language Palestinian media reported on Thursday that the Executive Board of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) had voted to dispatch an expert mission to Jerusalem: Palestine and Jordan, thanks to support from Arab and Islamic groups, successfully passed Thursday a UNESCO Executive Board resolution to send an expert...

The United Nation’s news service on Thursday conveyed a call by what the wire described as “a group of independent [U.N.] human rights experts” demanding that the Iranian government provide medical treatment – or, more precisely, that it cease denying such treatment – to blogger Mohammad Reza Pourshajari and religious cleric Sayed...

Reuters reported last week that Iranian oil exports “have surged to their highest in 20 months” – far above the “sanctions cap” outlined by the interim Joint Plan of Action (JPA) that granted financial relief to the Islamic Republic – per revised estimates for February global crude imports published by the International Energy...