Last December Israel conducted the third of four planned prisoner releases, part of a basket of confidence building measures designed to coax Palestinian diplomats into peace negotiations and keep them there. Each release has proven more controversial than the last, with the Palestinian public and Palestinian leaders staging spectacles celebrating...

Israel’s air force chief Major-General Amir Eshel yesterday described “thousands” of military installations created by Hezbollah in residential buildings across Lebanon. “We will have to deal aggressively with thousands of Hezbollah bases which threaten the State of Israel and mainly our interior,” Eshel said in a speech, citing Beirut, the Bekaa Valley...

A top official from the Palestinian Fatah faction declared on Wednesday that his organization may move to bolster ties with Iran, after years in which Tehran had largely eschewed backing Fatah and had opted instead to provide military, financial, and diplomatic support to the more radical Hamas faction. Speaking in an interview with...

Syria retains the vast majority of its chemical arsenal, can likely weaponize biological agents, and has restored the pace of its missile production to pre-war levels, according to a stream of analysis and reporting published on Tuesday and Wednesday. A written statement by James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, disclosed that U.S. intelligence...

Analysts are expressing increasingly pointed concerns that Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif may lack either the ability or the willingness to help secure a comprehensive deal between Iran and the West that would put Tehran’s nuclear program verifiably beyond use for weaponization, with his recently published memoirs and multiple recent...

Egyptian officials on Tuesday brought to court the country’s Muslim Brotherhood-linked former president Mohammed Morsi to stand trial on charges relating to a 2011 jail break, as continuing violence targeting Egyptian political and security institutions continued to rock the country for the second week in a row. General Mohamed Saeed, head of the Interior...

Turkey seems set to renew its diplomatic relationship with Iran and deepen its trade ties with the Islamic republic, even as top U.S. officials pleaded with Turkish officials on Monday to heed Washington’s insistence that remaining sanctions on Iran mean that the country “is not open for business.” Speaking in Turkey, which is looking...

Egyptian army chief Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi was yesterday cleared to run for president by the country’s Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), setting the stage for what is widely expected to be an easy glide into the presidency by the broadly popular and seemingly teflon military figure. Following a decree issued by Egypt’s interim President Adly...

American voters from across both political parties and all demographics believe that Congress must have a voice in any final agreement with Iran, favor Congressional legislation that would impose new financial pressure on Tehran, and prefer almost virtually any scenario – including targeted military strikes – to allowing the Islamic...

An overnight explosion reported in Syria’s Mediterranean port city of Latakia, which Syrian opposition sources linked to action by the Israeli Air Force (IAF), has refocused attention not just on Jerusalem’s oft-reiterated commitment to stem the flow of advanced weapons through Syria but on Russia’s increasingly open efforts to arm the Bashar al-Assad regime....