Iran will be ready to begin discussing renewed negotiations, according to the country’s foreign minister, just as soon as the regime gets around to forming a new negotiating team. The team is to be composed by President-elect Hassan Rouhani after his inauguration, though Rouhani and his team have little control...

Israel undertook a number of steps to facilitate travel during this year’s Ramadan. Jerusalem expected an estimated one-million Palestinians to cross the country’s 1948 armistice lines from from the West Bank, a record and up from the 850,000 Palestinians who visited last year. Israel lifted a number of security restrictions,...

The UAE has worked hard – and spent not inconsiderable wealth – on branding Dubai as a cosmopolitan, high-tech, modern metropolis. The region’s legacy of gender discrimination, coupled with a court system that enforces Muslim law, is threatening those efforts. Social media platforms, which have allowed victims to criticize Dubai...

Critics who have been blasting Hezbollah for its involvement in the Syrian conflict have outlined an array of fears regarding the consequences of the Iran-backed terror group’s actions. The regional consequences of the group’s actions – Hezbollah risks creating a crescent of Sunni-Shiit conflict from the Mediteranean coast into Iraq...

The reigning valedictorian of the medical school at Israel’s Technion – the country’s oldest university, dating back to 1912 – is a Muslim-Arab woman from a Nazareth-area village who only became fluent in Hebrew after leaving home. 27 year old Mais Ali-Saleh, from the village of Yafa an-Naseriyye, considers herself...

Bulgarian Interior Minister Tsvetlin Yovchev today emphasized that Sofia had in recent months uncovered additional evidence implicating Hezbollah in the July 2012 bus bombing in Burgas, Bulgaria that killed five Israelis and a Bulgarian. There has been some doubt about Sofia’s position regarding the bombing, and Yovchev sought to be as explicit...

Tuesday saw a variety of potentially escalatory fire from across the Syrian border into Israel. Unidentified gunmen firing on Israeli troops who were investigating an infiltration into Israeli territory by Syrian suspects. Dozens of blasts being linked to mortars fired across the border. The situation is not, in other words, stable. The...

Egyptian President Adly Mansour swore in the country’s new cabinet on Tuesday. The move marks the formal end – temporary though many fear it will be – of what had been a a widely criticized process widely criticized process of “Brotherhoodization” of Egypt’s political institutions. Senior Arab League official and former head...

Observers have long feared that financial mismanagement by Palestinian officials – a function of endemic corruption, and coupled with political illegitimacy – would prevent the emergence of a stable Palestinian economy. A functioning economy is considered a critical prerequisite in efforts to achieve a viable Palestinian state, lest that state...

Hassan Rouhani is easing into his August 4 inauguration by dismissing Israel as a “miserable” country that makes him “laugh.” The boasts are in line with Rouhani’s status as a “consummate regime insider,” but align uneasily with declarations from corners of the foreign policy and journalistic communities describing him as...