In response to growing tensions, Iran is flexing its muscles and threatening to send “millions” of soldiers into Palestinian territories to fight Israel. Commander of Iran’s Basij force, Mohammad Reza Naqdi, said millions of Iranians are ready to be sent to the Gaza Strip in order to assist the Palestinians...

• Kindle

Tensions deepened on Thursday between the White House and Congress over the Obama administration’s diplomacy toward Iran, after the Wall Street Journal reported that that President Barack Obama had sent a secret letter to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei discussing a proposed nuclear deal and suggesting that Washington and Tehran...

• Kindle

Analysts have worried since literally the first hours after the election of Iranian president Hassan Rouhani that the revolutionary-era cleric, who ran on a platform more moderate than his fellow regime-approved candidates, would be hamstrung by Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. The Supreme Leader controls Iran’s nuclear policy, and had...

• Kindle

Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has named Hassan Rouhani’s predecessor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Iran’s Expediency Council, a top arbitration body that has supervisory and arbitration powers over other parts of the Iranian government, including the country’s powerful Council of Guardians. In announcing the appointment, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei praised Ahmadinejad’s “worthy efforts”...

• Kindle

The UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) held its thrice-yearly session Monday. As always, the body deliberated over its infamous Item 7 – the council’s permanent agenda item on Israel and the only one devoted to a specific country. As always, a convoy of some of the world’s worst human-rights abusers...

• Kindle

Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei this week ordered that the country’s next president not make any concessions to the West. None: Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei warned on Tuesday that the country’s next president should avoid making “concessions” to the west, saying this would not diffuse tensions over Tehran’s nuclear drive…...

• Kindle

A top Iranian think tanker closely associated with Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei is accusing Jews of using witchcraft to undermine stability and solidarity inside the Islamic republic: “The Jews are currently subjecting us to an unprecedented trial,” [Mehdi] Taeb said, according to a translation provided by the Middle East...

• Kindle

Alaeddin Boroujerdi, the chairman of Iran’s Majlis National Security and Foreign Policy Committee, warned this weekend that any Western move to assist forces seeking the overthrow of Syrian ruler Bashar al-Assad would trigger a regional war that would engulf Israel. Iran had previously declared that Tehran would treat any attack on Syria as...

• Kindle

The Syrian army has begun transfering portions of the country’s chemical weapons arsenal to the Iran-backed terror group Hezbollah, according to an Israeli opposition figure. If confirmed – and Israeli defense officials quoted by the Associated Press and by Israeli sources considered the assessment premature – the development would mark...

• Kindle

Iran has already crossed Israel’s nuclear red line, the former head of Israeli military intelligence said Tuesday. “By the summer, Iran will be a month or two away from a decision about the bomb,” said Maj. Gen. (res.) Amos Yadlin, now the director of the Institute of National Security Studies,...

• Kindle