Bernard Haykel There are two immediate reasons why these attacks took place. First, Hamas has been vying with the Palestinian Authority (PA) for the leadership of the Palestinian cause and the success of these attacks is one way to achieve this. The PA is the official government of the Palestinians that signed the Oslo Peace… Read More Why Hamas attacked now – and how it weakens both Israel and hopes for peace
The exact reasons for the attack are not clear, but there has been growing violence for months between Israeli soldiers and settlers and Palestinians in the West Bank. Armed settlers have attacked Palestinian villages; militants in the West Bank have attacked soldiers and settlers, and there have been repeated IDF raids on Palestinian cities. More… Read More Israel-Hamas war: what has happened and what has caused the conflict?
Peter Beaumont Hamas’s surprise attack on Israel, on the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur war, will be remembered as an intelligence failure for the ages. In the space of several hours, dozens of Gaza militants broke through the border fence into southern Israel, surprising local military positions. Gunmen kidnapped and murdered Israelis in the southern border… Read More Hamas’s attack will be remembered as Israeli intelligence failure for the ages
First posted May 13, 2016 NB: Etel Adnan, writer, poet, artist and musician was born in 1925 and raised in Beirut, Lebanon. Her mother was a Greek from Smyrna, her father, a high ranking Ottoman officer born in Damascus. This prose poem is the final chapter of her book In the Heart of the Heart of Another… Read More Etel Adnan: To Be In A Time Of War
Patrick Wintour When the climate crisis meets a failed state, the outcome is the kind of disaster that Libya is witnessing in Derna. Any city would have struggled with the extraordinary level of precipitation that Storm Daniel visited upon Libya’s northern coast. In its earlier, milder form, the storm caused severe damage in Greece before it crossed the Mediterranean.… Read More Libya’s floods are result of climate crisis meeting a failed state
Tamir Pardo comments, slammed by ruling Likud party, carry weight because of high regard for intelligence agency in Israel Chris McGreal A former head of the Mossad intelligence agency has said Israel is imposing a form of apartheid on the Palestinians, joining a growing number of prominent Israelis to compare the occupation of the West Bank to… Read More Israel imposing apartheid on Palestinians, says former Mossad chief
Saudi border guards are accused of the mass killing of migrants along the Yemeni border in a new report by Human Rights Watch. By Paul Adams The report says hundreds of people, many of them Ethiopians who cross war-torn Yemen to reach Saudi Arabia, have been shot dead. Migrants have told the BBC they had… Read More Hundreds of migrants killed by Saudi border guards – report
The transfer of more than 1 million barrels of oil from an ageing tanker moored off the coast of war-torn Yemen has been completed, avoiding an environmental disaster, the UN has said. In a statement on Friday, Farhan Haq, the deputy spokesperson for UN secretary general António Guterres, said the operation had prevented a “monumental environmental and… Read More Yemen: UN removes 1m barrels of oil from tanker to avert environmental catastrophe
The deadly effects of ideological extremism in the Middle East for the past few decades have caused governments and journalists to focus on it. The Arabic word is al-taṭarruf. I was interested, however, to see the word put to a different purpose in a Sky News Arabia article , where it is used to refer to extremely high… Read More Climate Change: the New Mideast Extremism / Severe Consequences of new Oil, Gas and Coal Production
By Orla Guerin If suffering had an address, it might be al-Rasheed Street, in Taiz, a Yemeni city ringed by mountains and rebel Houthi fighters. On this narrow street of rough-hewn homes, the young can’t escape a grinding conflict the world tends to forget. Bader lost part of his right leg after being hit by… Read More Yemen: The children of a forgotten war
