Congress has faced intermittent pressure to respond to the Egyptian army’s moves against former president Mohammed Morsi by halting U.S. aid to Egypt. The House of Representatives today unveiled a draft spending bill declining to respond to those calls and keeping foreign aid at $1.3 billion. Meanwhile the Egyptian military...

The European Union yesterday formally blacklisted the military wing of Hezbollah – the Iran-backed Shiite organization which has been critical in enabling the Bashar al-Assad regime to steadily erode two years of opposition gains – as a terror organization. The Western-backed umbrella group representing the rebels evaluated the decision and...

Top Palestinian Authority (PA) figures are downplaying the significance of Secretary of State John Kerry’s recent announcement that a “basis” had been established for renewing Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. Spokespeople for Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas are explaining that that an upcoming three-way meeting in Washington will be at best exploratory...

Reports continue to emerge of Israeli efforts to assist Syrian civilians injured in the country’s bloody conflict. Last March the IDF set up a field hospital in the Golan Heights to treat Syrians with light to moderate injuries. Civilians with more serious injuries have been taken to Israeli hospitals, and...

Hezbollah and Hezbollah-linked officials are reacting poorly to the European Union’s decision, made yesterday, to blacklist what the E.U. calls the group’s ‘military wing’ as a terrorist organization. Lebanon’s sitting, Hezbollah-affiliated foreign minister, Adnan Mansour, had already pointedly brought up the matter of E.U. contributions to the U.N. peacekeeping force in...

The European Union on Monday officially designated the military wing of Hezbollah as a terrorist organization. The blacklisting comes just over a year after the July 2012 bus bombing in Burgas, Bulgaria that killed five Israelis and a Bulgarian, and which Bulgarian investigators linked to the Iran-backed terror group. A Cypriot court subsequently convicted...

Last week saw top U.S. military and intelligence officials openly worrying that the momentum in the Syrian conflict had shifted in favor of the Bashar al-Assad regime. Violence this weekend seemed to grimly confirm that the regime was consolidating gains it had made in recent months, during which support from the Iran-backed...

At least six Egyptians were killed on Monday in a string of attacks carried out against police station and army checkpoints in the Sinai Peninsula. The attacks, conducted by Islamists, added up to the single worst day of violence this month: At least 10 attacks were carried out by Islamist militants against...

Late last week Secretary of State John Kerry announced that he had achieved a “basis” for restarting peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians. On Sunday a top Palestinian official clarified that, actually, not so much: Yasser Abed Rabbo, secretary-general of the Palestine Liberation Organization and one of the Palestinians’...

Secretary of State John Kerry’s announcement that Israeli-Palestinian peace talks are set to resume is running into immediate hurdles, with Palestinians issuing further demands before agreeing to return to the negotiating table. Kerry’s initiative also faces more systematic problems. Palestinian glorification of terrorism and Palestinian incitement, which has been explicitly...